A Short History of Richard Kline (3 page)

This was the pattern of my being. I had always oscillated between feelings of grandiosity (I deserved better) and phases of dejection (I deserved nothing) but now, in my late twenties, the periods of brooding grew longer. In combative moods I told myself that it was life that was inadequate, not me. It was life that was never quite good enough.

And then one day I had a seminal experience.

The company I worked for was one of the earliest to pick up on the faddish new corporate training methods, a whole lot of slick guff about team-building. Suddenly there was money for the new psychology and everybody was out to gain an edge.

It was nine-thirty on a wet Wednesday morning. Outside, the late summer rain was being blown onto the smoky glass windows of our company conference room, while inside, the members of my section were being solemnly addressed by a smooth young motivation counsellor called Drake.

Drake was not much older than me but full of a kind of bland certainty, worn like a sheer outer skin. He was so neat, so finely pressed, that it was hard to take him seriously; he looked like one of those square-jawed men in a David Jones catalogue, whose affectedly casual demeanour only makes them look studied and unnatural. And while he talked constantly of dynamism, everything about him suggested a stiff calculation, not least his repetition of the phrase ‘in my humble opinion'. There were the usual accoutrements of the lecture: a whiteboard, a thick purple marker, a litany of trite phrases intoned as if they were the Book of Revelation revised.

In the
global
era, Drake announced, the old hierarchies would no longer apply. Management styles must change, but first there must be openness and trust. In order to develop openness and trust, team members must find a way to bond. In order to bond, they needed to put their lives in each other's hands. They needed to put sinew and bone and muscle
on the line
.

On the line? On what line? Well, on a line of thin nylon cord, as it turned out. At the end of the morning session Drake announced that phase two of the program was a day-long jag of abseiling.

Strictly voluntary, of course.

It was just after four on a Sunday afternoon in late March when the minibus delivered us to the door of our hotel in the Blue Mountains, a rambling colonial summer home with long enclosed verandahs that suggested secretiveness and a lazy, rich seclusion. In the evening, before dinner, we gathered in the bar, a narrow room lined with red velvet, and there, cossetted by the warmth of an open fire, we drank and joked about sudden death.

‘It's the one thing that even serious rock-climbers fear,' said Greg, an earnest member of my own project team, ‘because you are totally dependent on the rope. When death occurs on a climb, it's almost always in the abseiling phase.'

‘Yeah, but abseiling conditions on a rock climb are totally different from what we're going to do,' said Karen. ‘Greg is just trying to scare the shit out of us.'

One of the group, Phil, had done it before.

‘What's it like?' Melanie asked him. Melanie was one of the company's auditors. She had been reluctant to come in the first place but had allowed herself to be teased into it by her supervisor.

‘The further down you go,' Phil remarked, taciturnly, ‘the thinner the rope looks.'

After the meal, half-tanked and heavy-lidded, we were ushered into a small seminar room. Here we were addressed by a guy called Dave, abseiling expert and leader of the team of handlers who were to take us over the drop the next day. Dave and his crew were all hardened climbers, a kind of outdoor priesthood for whom this kind of corporate play was their bread and butter. They might not believe in it for a minute but it paid them enough to spend half their year on the slopes of the Himalayas, or scaling some forbidden mountain in the Javanese archipelago. And I wondered why they were drawn to extreme risk. Were they nerveless optimists who knew no fear, or was it fear itself that drove them on in meaningless conquest?

Dave was in his mid-thirties, raw-boned with a shaved head and an earring. He had that taut, wiry look that outdoor types seemed to develop, but he was an appealing character, quiet and low-key.

Unlike Drake, he had a way of talking that was surprisingly poetic; even now I can recall some of Dave's talk. ‘You have to remember that the body doesn't expect to be standing on the edge of a deep ravine looking down into space,' he said. ‘The body expects to feel solid earth under its feet, because that's what Nature intended. The body has its comfort zone and it doesn't always like to have it tested.'

And we all sat there, like novice altar boys, and soaked it up.

The following morning was warm and the late autumn sun shone through the windows of the dining room. At least, we told ourselves, we would not have to deal with discouraging weather. At breakfast there were some who tried to keep up the sardonic banter of the evening before but by the time we boarded the minibus and were halfway to our destination the tension had begun to have a dull, flattening effect.

The bus delivered us to the foot of a cliff, where one of the trainers, Julian, was waiting to escort us up a rocky track. It was a long and tiring walk, and it gave us even more time to contemplate what we were about to do.

‘Why do we have to walk up first?' asked Angus, overweight and puffing. ‘Why couldn't we just drive to the top?'

‘So they can scare the living daylights out of us,' said Ivo, another member of my project team. ‘They have to get some fun out of this too.'

By the time we arrived at the cliff-top, Dave and another of the handlers, Ingrid, were waiting for us on a narrow ledge of rock that jutted out over the canyon below. I remember the brightness of the light, so bright the scene looked almost two-dimensional, as if painted on canvas, and I recall even now how the rock ledge was bare, save for a stunted, wind-blasted banksia, a kind of bush bonsai, its foliage bent permanently to one side.

Ingrid and Julian stood about in artificially languid poses while Dave explained the drill. It soon became clear that the only on-site preparation we were to get was a five-minute talk by Dave in which he explained the harness, how the ropes were secured and the essentials of the technique that would, if followed correctly, get us to the bottom without turning upside down, or have us spinning hopelessly in midair, not to mention swinging face-first into a wall of yellow rock.

Phil was the first to go down, because he'd done it before, and his descent went without mishap. Then Melanie stepped forward nervously and I observed the subtle change in Dave's demeanour, the way in which, while adjusting Melanie's harness and explaining how the rope worked, he stood directly between her and the edge so that she was unable to look down over the drop. But at the point where he eased her backwards and positioned her so that her heels hung over the ledge, Melanie threw an untimely glance over her left shoulder at the yawning chasm now only inches from her expensive new walking boots, and her body froze. Suddenly she was hyperventilating, and – jerking forward – she bolted like an agitated puppet towards the scrub, the rope trailing behind her in an abject tail until she reached the first line of heath. There she stopped, chest heaving, and vomited into a bush.

Dave moved across to comfort her, indicating with a nod of the head that Julian should take over at the edge.

Julian set about the work of rigging up a second harness. ‘Who's next?' he asked, and I stepped forward.

The preliminaries were methodical, almost monosyllabic, and as I went about the business of fastening my helmet and adjusting a harness which dug uncomfortably into my crotch, I felt surprisingly calm. At what point, I wondered, would the adrenaline kick in? There was no time to offer a word or even a grimace of commiseration to Melanie as I stood taking in Julian's instructions, nodding and repeating the key phrases of Julian's drill, especially the bit about keeping your legs straight as you made your descent, otherwise you would fly-face first into the rock wall of the cliff.

Finally, I was set, heels hanging over the edge.

‘Are you right?' asked Julian.

I nodded.

‘Are you okay now? Are you ready?'

I nodded again.

‘Go.'

The descent might almost have been routine, had it not been for my epiphany. Not that it was a true epiphany, more like the photographic negative of one, and it was this. Halfway down, hanging from a fine nylon cable, I realised that I was bored. This was such a surprising thought that I froze, legs braced against the ochre rock.

After some time – it couldn't have been long – Julian leaned over the edge, his hands cupped over his mouth, and shouted, ‘Are you okay?'

Yes, I was okay, whatever that meant (but then again, maybe I wasn't, though not for any reason Julian might imagine). How tedious all this was. Yes, I was
okay
, I knew I was not making a fool of myself, but so what? That was the question:
so what
? Here I was, swinging over one of the great escarpments of one of the great mountain ranges in the southern hemisphere, and realising, with the acid clarity that only crystalline sunlight and a perfect blue sky could induce, that I was, at that moment,
bored
.

How could this possibly be? I could hear someone shouting at me from above, a column of words cascading down into the canyon, but I was too distracted to take it in, too absorbed in the revelation of the moment. There was something wrong here. Clearly I should be having one of two reactions. Either I should be consumed by excitement, the sheer thrill of it, or I should be terrified, all sweaty palms and a desperate anxiety to feel my feet on solid earth. Either way, I should be pumping adrenaline at a million miles a minute. But no, here I was, a young man, reasonably fit, with a mild hangover and a shocking indifference.

And then I saw myself, as if from a great height, legs braced against the cliff-face, and the thought came to me: I am a pendulum, a stuck pendulum. And with that, I pushed off again from the rock.

On the ride back to the lodge I sat next to Melanie, by now calm but morose about her failure to make the descent. Making as light of it as I could, I attempted to console her. It was all a silly game and meant nothing. She was one of the best people I had worked with in an office: constructive, diplomatic, quietly efficient and an A-grade team worker (all of which was true). Being able to abseil meant you had a head for heights, that's all, and the rest was mumbo-jumbo. These consultants were making a small fortune coming up with new gimmicks that were just glorified kids' games.

‘You're so calm, Rick,' she kept saying, ‘you're so good under pressure.'

No, I'm not, I thought. There's something wrong with me. It's just that I know how to hide it.

Back at the lodge we trooped upstairs to shower and change for dinner. In my room I went robotically through the motions and stood for a long time under the shower, resting my forehead against its opaque Perspex enclosure. Spacey. Light-headed. I knew the others would begin to assemble soon in the bar downstairs, and right now I couldn't face it, all that alcoholic banter, the way everything had to be made into a joke.

It was just after six when I emerged into the front garden with the intention of going for a walk. Beside the hotel was a narrow bush track that, according to the signpost, led to a lookout over the Jamison Valley. It was only a short distance through a thicket of banksias and within minutes I was on a precipitous rock platform, leaning against a steel fence at waist height and looking out over the great purple maze of ridges and canyons. At dusk the grandeur of it was somehow soothing, the way it fell down into infinity below. All around me the yellow line of sandstone cliffs caught the fire of the setting sun so that they shone with a soft orange gold, and for a few minutes I stood, breathing deeply, inhaling the smell of eucalypts and the spicy scent of the bush. The shadows were deepening and the air had the first hint of chill. I thought of how easy it would be to jump. If you were going to kill yourself, this was the place to come; you would fall through the muted glow of sunset, your body absorbed secretively into the dense rainforest below. It would be a more poetic death than most, and to those left behind, morally inconclusive, since they could never be sure that you hadn't blacked out or, in a moment of absentmindedness, slipped into the drop.

For a long time I stood there, gazing down into the blurred blue haze of eucalypt and mountain ash, and then I heard a dry,
quarking
sound above my head.
Quark, quark, quark
, it went, sly and insistent. I looked up, expecting to see crows, but there over the darkening escarpment were two cockatoos, soaring high above the canyon, their wings fully extended, two fluid white forms outlined against the charcoal sky.

And then suddenly it was dark, and I turned back.

In the dining room the others were in the early stages of an elaborate banquet. All through dinner they traded rowdy stories of their bravado, and teased Melanie, who by now was sheepish but cheerful. Some went to bed early, exhausted. The stayers returned to the red-velvet womb of the bar and drank themselves into a stupor.