The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  When are you going to shut up, Sandy whispered savagely to the hovering apparition of her mother standing in the doorway delivering this litany, and just leave me alone? The apparition turned stiffly on its orthopedic heel with the outraged offence that would take months to repair, if this was real life.

  Here she was, an intelligent woman with a daughter almost fifteen and she still felt — with that small, landslide jolt of shock when she glimpsed herself in the mirror sometimes — that she hadn’t yet quite gotten her own life started. As if she was still waiting here in Ayresville, her foot patiently hovering on the accelerator, for her chance to get going. She’d do it soon, though. She’d enrol in something, once Soph had finished school, and didn’t need her there every day. Something that would bring all her short courses together, all her skills areas. Alternative medicine, maybe. Or comparative philosophies.

  For goodness sake, snapped the spectre of her mother impatiently, as it clicked out of the house in its sensible shoes, stop your moping around and get up and do something; it’s disgraceful.

  Sandy turned Alison’s mug again, took another unsatisfying sip. No, it would be get up off your fat behind and do something. Never arse, or even backside. And Janet, her mother, never mentioned Sandy’s weight unless it was in mean little parting asides like this one, designed to both deny her the right of reply and to leave her with the unpleasant lingering impression that the reason nobody mentioned it otherwise was that they were all too polite to bring it up.

  Not that overweight, she thought defensively. Five or six kilos at the most. All she had to do was cut out the wine and it would melt off her.

  What had possessed her, all those years ago, to drop out of her Arts degree?

  Rich, probably. He could talk her into anything, back then. She’d find out how much of her old degree she could get credits for, anyway, and start to focus on herself for a change. Become a practitioner of some kind, or a consultant. Then, finally, all the pieces, all the little things here and there she’d done — which her mother insisted on calling dabbling, as if she was a bloody duck or something — all of it would make sense as elements of the wisdom she’d gathered on the journey. Diverse fragments of a whole. Healing insights.

  She brushed the pieces of wax into her hand and tipped them into the bin, then drifted back to the couch and unfolded the local paper. Still three-quarters of an hour to go before Sophie came home.

  An auspicious day Wednesday for Aquarians, her stars said. Watch for a sign that will signal your way forward through a doorway you weren’t expecting. Lucky number eight, lucky colour orange.

  She considered what had come in the mailbox that morning. Rich’s postcard and a brochure, from her belly-dancing mailing list, inviting her to a week-long residential workshop to reclaim her Inner Goddess.

  Isn’t it time you allowed nature and tranquillity to nurture you at Mandala Holistic Wellness Centre? the brochure had asked, and she had thought, with a small grim smile, you bet your arse it is. She scrutinised the photos with longing — women doing yoga on a hillside in the sunset, women laughing around a table at a candlelit dinner, looking scrubbed and pampered and serene. Yes, please. Slap bang in the middle of the school holidays, needless to say, the hardest time to try to get away. Was a mailbox like a doorway? It would be the right omen, an invitation like that; a sign for the path ahead. Belly dancing was tonight; she might just ask around to see if anyone else was thinking of going.

  Maybe she could convince Sophie to spend a few days at her grandmother’s. Sophie could use the time to reconnect with Janet, build some bridges after last year’s disastrous Christmas lunch at that golf club, where she’d hardly spoken all day. God knows Sophie and Janet were both difficult, but it would be nourishing for them both, she was sure of it, to take the time to explore a little intergenerational common ground.

  Just before seven o’clock, she heard her daughter tugging open the screen door at the back of the house and the sound of her school bag dropping to the floor. Sophie came into the room like she always did, as if everything exhausted her, pulling off her jacket as she entered.

  ‘Hi!’ Sandy said. Her daughter’s eyes gave her a brief, heavy-lidded acknowledgement, a muttered hello. She went straight to the fridge for a can of that horrible zero-calorie cola.

  Mere months ago, it seemed to Sandy, her little girl used to come running in with her face alight with news, holding a painting she’d done or some story she’d written to show her. Only five years ago! Well, seven, max. Didn’t kids realise that was barely a blip on the radar? You blinked your eyes and suddenly you went from being the centre of the universe to someone over there on the sofa.

  ‘There’s some of that chickpea casserole in the fridge,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll have it later.’

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  Sophie shook her head, screwing up her nose. ‘I had something at Tegan’s.’

  Sandy watched the fine column of her throat, the can raised to her lips as she drank. So beautiful, her daughter, with those huge dark eyes — if only she didn’t rim them in racoon black eyeliner like that. If only she wore some jeans with a waistband, instead of those black stovepipes that left her whole midriff exposed.

  ‘You shouldn’t just have that, though. That stuff ’s not good for you.’

  Sophie swallowed, then gestured languidly to Sandy’s wineglass on the table. ‘Look who’s talking.’

  ‘Two glasses of wine. Two.’

  ‘And you smoke dope.’

  She bridled. ‘Once in a blue moon! And never in front of you.’ That sounded lame, even to her. ‘Anyway, that’s not the same. It isn’t full of caffeine and carcinogenic artificial sweeteners.’

  Sandy’s friends had almost talked her out of her bad-mother paranoia over the occasional joint. It was healthy, they said with conviction, for your teenagers to see that it could be no big deal, just something adults did occasionally. It went with the theory that you took the illicit thrill out of something if your kids saw you doing it yourself. Like getting your own navel pierced. Roll up a joint at home, and it would work like reverse psychology. Sort of.

  Now Sophie was eyeing her phone for messages, scrolling through with her thumb, not even looking at her. Sandy closed her eyes and gave a little amused chuckle. No response. She laughed again, a bit louder.

  ‘Sophie?’ She waited, smiling. ‘It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think it would be the other way round, wouldn’t you? The teenager drinking and smoking and the parent being all disapproving?’

  ‘What have I said that makes you think I’m disapproving?’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you are. That critical look on your face.’

  Sophie gave her a long, opaque look. She was a steady observer, her daughter, so steady it was as if she was watching you think. It never failed to unnerve Sandy, that feeling that everything was going in and so little was being revealed in return. No, I don’t. Yes, you do. Watching everything, waiting for her to slip up somehow.

  ‘So?’ Sophie said finally. Those eyes like two coals, and Sandy feeling the light-heartedness going out of the moment, flailing and exposed.

  ‘Well, don’t you think it’s funny?’ Floundering now. Feeling like an idiot.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sophie answered flatly. ‘Hilarious.’

  Putting her can of cola on the bench, then picking it up again to read the list of ingredients on the side. Lifting it to her lips again, gulping it down as though she’d spent the day in a desert.

  She’d tell her later about the postcard. She’d let her know it had arrived, but she wouldn’t show it to her, because there was no need for Sophie to know Rich’s mobile number. Sandy wanted him ringing on the landline, thank you very much. At a time she specified, when she could monitor the call.

  Because even though Sophie never showed it, she was still impressionable. That’s why you had to position yourself, like your instinct told you, as a buffer between your child and the absent adu
lt they might have mistakenly idealised; you had to be the protector.

  She recalled one of the phone calls from Rich, on Sophie’s seventh birthday, one she’d mentally replayed so often it was like the tape was stretched and the sound had become gluey and muted.

  ‘How is she?’ he’d said.

  ‘How is she? Great.’ Her voice too tight. ‘A beautiful carefree little girl who has everything she needs.’

  ‘Is she having a party?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Savouring the sound of him waiting, the thudding click as he inserted more money. She imagined a stack of gold coins on a phone box somewhere.

  ‘Has she still got dark curly hair?’

  Exhilarating to hear that hinted-at pain.

  ‘It’s straight now. She’s looking less and less like you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘In fact, the less she turns out like you, the happier I’ll be.’

  Click. A faint hollow creak on the line, or it could have been an indrawn breath.

  ‘OK. I’m going now.’

  ‘Yep. That’s what you’re good at.’

  She would just curl up and die, thought Sophie as she gazed at herself critically in her bedroom mirror, if she ever got that soft flabby skin under her arms that her mother had. She would absolutely die. Tuckshop arms, they called that at school, cool voices filled with contemptuous scorn. And it was like her mother didn’t even realise, or care. She just went ahead and wore those sleeveless dresses like nobody was supposed to notice all that fat vibrating every time she moved her arms. Sophie raised her own wiry arm and flexed it. She loved the way that little muscle jumped up when she squeezed her fist; the definition of her bicep sinewy and taut under the skin. She could almost do ten chin-ups on the bar now. By about seven she had to really start exerting herself, her legs pumping to kick her up, but she was getting there. Each night she put a pillow on the floor and did a hundred sit-ups, listening to her iPod thumping the first three tracks from her Dogland playlist while she alternated elbows touching on each knee, feeling the air forcing itself out of her lungs as she rose in time with the music.

  If you were hungry you could do sit-ups and it took away your appetite. It squeezed your stomach somehow. Her PE teacher said you should stop if you felt nauseous, but you just had to have a glass of water and it went away. Sophie was increasing the difficulty of the sit-ups, not by doing more but by elevating her legs against the side of the bed. You felt a whole other set of stomach muscles lock in then, and grab. A slow burning. When her mother was off on one of her rants about back when she saved the world, Sophie would run her hands slowly down her front to calm herself. Past the rock-hard muscles of her stomach and the loose line of her jeans and over the two protruding bumps of her hipbones. They soothed her, those sharp, delineated bones, the concave flesh between them tight as a drum.

  ‘See, what we were doing, even though we didn’t realise it, was paving the way for all the other protests that came after,’ Sandy would say, pummelling a cushion and tucking it under her head, gearing up for the long haul. ‘We took all those risks to save the wilderness, and we organised. God, did we organise. Meeting after meeting, they went on for hours until everybody felt they’d been heard, you know? That’s why we did the training workshops, so that every single protestor understood the power of non-violent resistance.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Then when we finally started the Blockade our solidarity was so powerful it all just came together and nothing could stop us. The whole world was watching.’

  Sandy would gaze off into the distance and Sophie would nod, her hands smoothing slowly, slowly down her front. Across the gratifying hardness of her abdominal muscles, down to those trusted, comforting pelvic bones. Back to her taut ribs and down again, keeping her face blank.

  Other kids had The Three Bears every night of their childhoods; she had the Franklin River Blockade.

  ‘What people couldn’t believe,’ Sandy would continue, as if the thought was just occurring to her for the first time, ‘was that we were prepared to put ourselves on the line for a place. For a river. That’s why we got the world spotlight.’

  Palms flat then, fingers spread against her thighs. She could have got a real tattoo, if she’d felt like it. She had a friend at school, Lucy, whose mother didn’t mind at all, who was quite happy giving her permission for a permanent one around Lucy’s ankle, didn’t see it as a problem. If you want them, she’d apparently said, you go right ahead. Just don’t get a tramp stamp, OK? No going off the deep end.

  They could have used that consent form for Sophie to get hers too. Pretended she was the daughter. Or used a fake ID. The point was, it wouldn’t have been hard to do, but she hadn’t done it. She’d just seen the way opening up, there, like a tantalising detour, something to keep secret.

  Sophie would stand there, knowing she was a substitute for want of a better audience, as Sandy picked up another familiar thread of reminiscence, and she’d start humming in her head. Humming, and watching her mother’s mouth opening and closing pointlessly, oblivious to her. It was like pressing the mute button on the TV.

  Her mother, she thought, was like one of those old jukeboxes, with the same small selection of scratched old songs, playing and replaying them as though she’d never get sick of them, everything merging into a kind of sentimental mush of karaoke. That’s why she loved meeting new people, ones who hadn’t heard her stories. She’d sit them down and you could almost see her waiting for her chance to turn the topic round, eagerly pressing the buttons that would let her slip a few old favourites into the conversation.

  She never got tired of saying the same thing over and over again to customers at her stall at the Sunday market either. As if she was reading it off cue-cards. In fact, the market was when Sandy was totally focused, laying out her necklaces and smiling her sweet earth-mother smile to the punters. ‘Go off and explore,’ she used to say to Sophie when she was smaller, giving her a few dollars, flapping her hands to shoo her and her friends away. ‘You girls can have a good look round for an hour or two, can’t you?’ Trying to get rid of them.

  And they’d wander through the market that always felt the same — her mother’s friends setting out their stripy hats and tea-cosies, unwrapping from newspaper the same old picked-over antique stuff they’d culled from clearing sales and church fetes and placing it onto their trestle tables. Sometimes the man who sold fudge gave the girls a bag of offcuts to suck on as they meandered, the cloying sweetness hitting the cavities in their teeth, puckering their throats with sugar.

  Sophie had begun to notice, lately, the people who really made money at the markets. The new people, the ones who moved with a different kind of purpose, setting out the fire irons and hall runners they knew the weekend visitors would snap up, displaying their organic bread and olive oil in regimented rows, tying on clean aprons with their business name embroidered on the front.

  Sandy, as Sophie watched her uneasily, lacked this entrepreneurial drive. She smiled too much. She took ages to arrange her jewellery on the crimson velvet cloth and pin it down, and string up the crystals, and set out her little handwritten sign that said: Shoplifting is bad karma.

  She was an amateur, Sophie could see, even after all these years. She had this too-bright attentiveness, a gratitude when someone actually bought something — it was like watching a dumb round-eyed goldfish in a piranha pool.

  And her mother’s jewellery looked weird and dated now, anyway. Hippie bling, Sophie and her friends called it privately, scornfully. Earrings and matching necklaces that looked more and more like amusing conversation pieces and less and less like anything you’d actually buy.

  For years, when Sophie was little, Sandy would take her on weekly op-shop forays to buy up old jewellery — old strings of beads and synthetic pearls, mostly — and then she’d take them home and restring them into quirkier designs. The year Sophie had started school, her mother had even had some of her jewellery featured in a
big craft magazine under the heading What’s Hot, and the page had stayed pinned to the noticeboard at home for years, slowly curling and yellowing. Sophie could still recall exactly the text underneath the photo: What’s hot are these funky pieces made from restrung beads by Ayresville resident Sandy Reynolds. Chunky and colourful, they’re bound to turn heads with Sandy’s inspired take on recycling!

  Turn heads was right. Turn your own head, when they snagged on your sweater or in your hair, earrings so heavy they dragged your earlobes down.

  ‘They make a statement,’ Sandy would say to potential customers. ‘They dress up a plain outfit and show your individuality.’ She wore them herself, of course, the earrings jangling like little chandeliers as she bobbed her head, smiling, smiling.

  Sophie hated going now, seeing Sandy there, bright and hopeful. She’d fight the urge to walk over and rip that dumb velvet cloth off the table, full of cringing irritation. Didn’t her mother see the new stallholders setting up, laying out bracelets and earrings from Bali and Africa and India? Didn’t she get it, that nobody wore this recycled shit anymore? No, she’d just stand there behind her trestle table with an invisible neon Loser sign over her head, just about, reaching out to polish a crystal now and then, still telling customers the necklaces were funky.

  Or talking to her friends in the living room, all of them rationalising and self-justifying and nodding encouragement at each other for doing nothing with their lives. Sample, her mother: ‘I really just enjoy being an artisan. And I can’t register the business because then I’d have to declare everything and it would just eat into my supporting parent’s benefit. I just like making art, that’s all.’

  Cue a careless theatrical shrug, as if she was so helpless to change anything that she was off the hook. Nods all round. Making art. What crap.

  In her room, Sophie tucked her heels into the steel base of her bed and laced her fingers behind her head. Up. The first few were always hard, till you got warmed up. Left elbow to right knee.