The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  The bassline of the Dogland track started through her earpieces. ‘Katabasis’ — the best song on the album Elysian Eclipse, her absolute all-time favourite. She liked Nosferatu too, their first CD, and she’d heard the new one Vermin Kiss was fantastic — she still had to download that one. She wanted the whole collection, so she would have been happy to buy the CD, but Dogland wasn’t the kind of band a music shop in a town like Ayresville just carried automatically. Which went to show how woefully wrong they were about nearly every teenager in town. It was just like the chemist shop not stocking black nail polish.

  ‘Oh,’ Sophie sang along softly as she felt her shoulder blades touch the carpet again, ‘spiral down into this angelic darkness, this boundless place of my black tomb ...’ Up. Touch. Fourteen. Tonight she’d do sixty, then take a breather and do sixty more. Her mother had gone out to her belly-dancing class, swishing from the house in her embroidered orange dress.

  ‘This one, or this one?’ she’d asked Sophie, bursting into the doorway to stand indecisively holding up two hangers, as Sophie sat there trying to finish her science homework. She’d held up the orange dress and another equally bad one in blue brocade with a dropped waist. Both sleeveless, both one hundred percent rayon, made in India. She had a wardrobe full of the things. And the way she scrunched up her hair into those clips then spent ages pulling out wispy tendrils so it all fell artfully down again, hair dry at the ends with that henna red colour so she looked like a sort of bedraggled mad witch. Then when she put her glasses on, a bedraggled mad librarian. Sophie had tried to tell her.

  ‘You should get your hair cut like Sal’s,’ she’d suggested one afternoon.

  ‘What, in a bob? Yuk.’

  ‘Sal’s looks good. Short like that.’

  ‘She cuts it like that because she works for council.’ Her mother’s tone joking and dismissive, not hearing her. The fake-red strands frizzing down over her shoulders.

  Tonight she’d gone out with three chopsticks stuck in her hair, the orange dress, one of those jingly belly-dancing belts with bells. Those heffalump arms. No way was that ever going to happen to Sophie. Ever.

  Twenty-two. Twenty-three. She breathed out with each lift, every tenth sit-up touching her forehead to her knees and holding it.

  Oh, sang Dogland inside her earphones, my penance must begin, and hunger, such hunger, spins my tainted requiem ...

  The burn spread, through her hips and down her thighs. A good ache. That was fat burning, she told herself, melting away into nothing but more hard muscle. Just focus on that, and a drink of cold water at the end, then spooning a hearty meal-sized portion of her mother’s curry out of the fridge and burying it in the compost heap before she came home. All done.

  Two

  Dead-end jobs, people called them. Rich just didn’t get it. More like means-to-an-end jobs. You took one on, you earned what you needed, and took off again. Perfect freedom, making the system work for you, instead of the other way round. Those jobs that locked you in for life — sucked you in, bled you dry then spat you out at the end — they were the dead ends, if you wanted his opinion. Selling you a superannuation scheme and a few miserly days of annual leave a year. Forget that.

  He liked contract work, where he could do odd shifts — starting in the dark and finishing up by lunchtime, like this one, or working through quiet Sundays. Night shifts were best. He liked being able to concentrate on his editing at the dead quiet of 2.30 in the morning with only the machines humming, no supervisor, no colleagues to annoy you except for the other graveyarders and the security guy downstairs who worked till 3 a.m., when the early news crew arrived.

  ‘I work in television,’ he told people when they asked, ‘just to support my photojournalism. I’m an editor.’ He’d leave it at that, mostly, let them think he made documentaries or 60 Minutes.

  He sat back now and viewed the tape for the Leg Magic segment, watching the girl who was going to demonstrate the machine adjust her spandex shorts and frown in concentration as if she was about to take to the balance beam at the Olympics. He fast-forwarded to the music cue, and the point where she lay back and began the repetitive knee flexes, tossing her blonde head and making a little moue of pretend effort. ‘I can really feel it working my ... thighs,’ she said, gazing meaningfully into the camera.

  Rich raised an eyebrow. He’d long since stopped being surprised at any of this stuff. It just kept managing to hit new lows, so all you did was show yourself up if you started complaining about it.

  Everybody groaned at advertorials, but say what you like, it did take talent putting them together, and nerves of steel sometimes. Like the morning show that time when they’d done the cooking segment live to air, showing off the Power Shredder Plus, and the actor doing the spot, who should have been sticking to the script and putting carrots or apples through the thing, instead picked up a big cube of rock-hard parmesan cheese and pushed it into the chute. The crappy little motor had made a sick noise and stopped with a chug just as the screen showed a close-up of the cheese jamming the blades. Rich had caught the guy’s panicked and desperate eye as he fumbled to flick the off switch with the other hand. They’d cut away to the other camera angle within two seconds, and the talent had recovered himself beautifully.

  ‘Look how easy that was,’ he’d said jovially. You had to take your hat off to him. That was the art of it, sometimes — recovering your footing and carrying it off. The art of life, really. Whatever happened, pretending you’d meant it to happen.

  Thank God they hadn’t used the morning-show host that day; a man so thick he spent the commercial breaks doing the junior crossword. Or studied his script, the poor dumb bastard, anxious not to improvise since he’d been rapped on the knuckles that time for getting carried away and responding to the talent’s excited announcement with an incredulous: ‘Wow, you’d have to be a moron to miss that offer!’ No wonder they didn’t use the hosts now for the advertorials, and no wonder nobody liked doing them live anymore.

  The morning-show host’s face unnerved Rich now, since the botox. When he turned his head to listen to something, he looked as blank and chiselled as the cyborg in Terminator, and when he laughed heartily at a guest’s lame joke there was a sudden startling rush of bleached-white canine teeth while the face itself stayed expressionless. Jesus, it was like a wolf smiling at you.

  And the way the guy was so obsessed with a few laugh lines. Men in their forties, Rich had decided, had never had it so good. Twenty years ago, sure, he’d dreaded reaching this particular decade, couldn’t imagine what he’d become or how he’d look. But who would have thought it would turn out so well and get so easy? Something had happened about ten years ago that had taken them all by surprise; the number of women looking for men seemed to have increased and with it a simultaneous spike of anxiety about missing the boat altogether, while the number of available, unscrewed-up heterosexual men seemed to have shrunk drastically. If he was ever to write his PhD, it would be on the gender-scarcity principle.

  You didn’t even have to try too hard. In fact, the opposite was true — the less you appeared to try, the more appealing you seemed, and with every passing year your appeal increased notch by notch. He would have to take the host aside one morning, and explain it to him: Mate, stop trying. You could be like one of those brown bears in Alaska. All you had to do was stand in the right spot over the river with your mouth open and a salmon would just jump in. They were hardwired for it, desperate to spawn whatever the odds. They couldn’t help themselves.

  He rolled the next package, trimmed the introduction. The woman they always used for this segment sat at a coffee table, animation leaping into her face at the floor manager’s cue, a mixture of concern and enthusiasm she could flick on like a tap.

  ‘Have you ever wondered what would happen to your family in the event of your unexpected death?’ she began. ‘With all the trauma and grief of illness or accident, the last thing they should be worrying about is whether they have enough f
unds to pay for your funeral. And those expenses can really mount up!’

  Rich edited in the cut-away: a page of figures. He could see why they kept employing her; on the other tape she didn’t even use the ten seconds to glance down at her notes, just kept looking straight to camera with that fixed expression of sincere concern. They called her the one-take wonder. Her suit was a bit loud, he thought absently. Cerise would be fine for moisturiser or appliances. Too bright for funeral insurance. The director should have picked that up.

  ‘It can all come as quite a shock,’ she said to the camera now, then her sadness suddenly turned to winsome relief, ‘but luckily help is at hand. For the price of a weekly cup of coffee, you can give yourself real peace of mind.’

  Rich checked the script against the time. Easy. He’d get this down to four minutes then he’d go across the road to the café and buy some of those gourmet cookies and a decent coffee. He just had the diet-shake promo to do and then he’d stick them in the producer’s in-tray, be finished at 11.30 and the day would be his.

  ‘That’s right,’ the talent said warmly, speaking like a nurse to a patient in shock, ‘for no more than you’d pay for a cup of coffee. And you can rest assured that your loved ones will never need to experience financial hardship to pay all the unexpected expenses associated with their loss.’

  Rich grimaced. How did the advertorial producer come up with this stuff ? Who could possibly believe it was real, this stilted, android jargon-speak?

  Macadamia and ginger, he thought idly. Or maybe choc chip. The girl who did the protein shakes had told him last week she couldn’t resist chocolate, and given him a big I-just-can’t-help-myself smile, an open invitation. A definite come-on. You’d never think she indulged in chocolate. She had abs to kill for. He’d tell her that when she came in, admiringly, just giving the loosest of impressions that he occasionally worked out. See how it went from there.

  The advertorial cut to a wide shot. Faking a casual discussion now, right down to the two prop cups of tea.

  ‘Family,’ agreed the co-host, nodding sagely from his chair, ‘there’s nothing more important.’

  Rich recognised this guy from a game show broadcast many years ago, in an era when a new washing machine and dryer were enough to whip a studio audience into a frenzy and have a lucky housewife jumping with euphoria. His mother had liked this guy. She’d watched him every afternoon. Rich remembered his big pointy collars and platform shoes, eyes twinkling like a jovial red-haired Scottish elf. He seemed wizened and browned now; a shrivelled elf, carved from an old apple.

  ‘You’re so right, Jim,’ the cerise-suit woman was saying. ‘There’s nothing more important than family. And imagine how it would be for your family if you were to pass away unexpectedly, leaving them with funeral expenses that can add up to as much as six thousand dollars!’

  The co-host looked sincerely pained. As if he’d settle for a six-thousand-dollar funeral, thought Rich. And as if he had a family, instead of living for years now with a Chinese drag queen thirty years his junior. Common industry knowledge.

  ‘Well, we’re definitely not buying that brand,’ Sandy said decisively. Sophie trailed behind, wishing she’d remembered her iPod, as her mother wheeled the shopping cart up the aisle past cereals. ‘That’s the one we’re boycotting.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘The Consumer Action Group.’

  ‘What — your book club? You think you’re going to make a multinational corporation go under because you don’t buy their muesli bars?’

  ‘You know what, back when you were about five, for your information, consumer pressure forced companies to only produce dolphin-friendly tuna.’

  Sophie stopped, looked at her. She didn’t know why she was pushing this, it just felt good, getting her mother defensive. It felt reassuring.

  ‘What do you mean? How was overfishing tuna friendly to dolphins?’

  Her mother made an impatient gesture, exhaled an irritated breath. ‘We boycotted particular brands that ... ah ... used a certain kind of drift net, which used to catch and drown dolphins.’ She moved the cart further up the aisle, towards the desserts. ‘And they bowed to consumer pressure, and stopped using the nets, and look, even now if you check on cans of tuna, you’ll see ...’

  ‘OK, OK. So the book club ...’

  ‘I wish you’d stop saying we’re just “the book club” like that, being so ... negative. We were meeting as a book club when the G8 Summit was on and that’s when we organised the train to go down to the city to the protest.’ She glanced angrily at Sophie. ‘That’s funny, is it? Protesting for social justice?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘So what are you smirking at?’

  ‘It’s just funny that you’ve gone from attacking global capitalism to boycotting muesli bars.’

  Her mother ground her teeth. ‘Well, I’m not arguing with you anymore, and I don’t appreciate your smart-arse attitude either.’

  There was a silence. Now her mother would go off on another tangent, try to change the subject. Suggest they buy something dripping with fat and sugar as though it was the biggest treat in the world and then try to cajole her, later, into eating it with her. Like they sat up, the two of them, eating gourmet ice-cream out of the carton on the couch in front of the TV together, telling secrets and gossiping like two room-mates in an American sitcom.

  ‘Hey, Soph.’ Here it was. ‘What do you say we get some of this chocolate mousse mix and make up that birthday cake recipe, see if you want it for your party?’

  As if Sophie hadn’t told her a hundred times she didn’t want a party. She pretended to look regretful but earnest as she handed back the box to her mother.

  ‘We can’t, though. Look at the ingredient list.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gelatine. That’s horses’ hooves. We’d have to have a vegan cake, wouldn’t we? So that nobody feels left out?’

  She watched her mother consider this, really seem to give it thought, with that dumb pious expression like when her group planned their agenda and spent half an hour deciding whether coffee and chocolate in themselves were oppressing Third World workers, or just certain brands. That eager, earnest light in their faces, as if they really believed they made the slightest bit of difference either way. That’s what she found most ridiculous and pathetic — the idea of her mother and her friends thinking they had some kind of power and influence. Even when the bloody ordinariness of their lives stared them in the face, they still couldn’t give up on the idea that they were special.

  ‘Do you really think that’s an issue?’ Sandy was saying cagily, toying with the box of mousse. ‘I mean, it’s not as if horses are endangered or anything, is it?’

  They made these places overwhelming on purpose, Rich knew. He’d read about it. They employed consultants to make the layout as disorienting as possible, so that when you finally got to the register you were softened up with dazed gratitude. Walking around the huge camping megastore was like tiptoeing into a hushed and vaulted space, like a cathedral, or a biosphere. Somewhere around the middle of aisle three, where earth-toned clothing was stacked head-high all around, he reached into a rack and unhooked the hanger of one of the charcoal grey t-shirts and held it up enquiringly before the sales assistant.

  ‘So this one’s got the same concealed, side security zip ...’

  ‘Yes, in the tank, not in the base-layer thermals, obviously ...’

  ‘... and it’s quick-dry and in the same colours ...’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘So what makes this one better? Why is it so much more expensive?’

  The salesman gave him a confiding smile. ‘Wicking,’ he replied.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘This one offers moisture wickability. This one is good, but it’s only a polypropylene mix, but this one is wool so it’s aquaphobic.’

  Rich picked up the t-shirt and inspected it again. ‘Sorry, what do ...?’

  ‘It wicks sweat prope
rly away from the body, so that sweat evaporates from the clothes, not the skin. So you don’t get so cold when you’re sweating.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So, for example, if you’re wearing the base-layer thermals with long sleeves, then a shirt then a windbreaker over the top, then obviously you can go for something in the microfibre in the outer layers.’

  ‘Right.’ Jesus, it was like doing an engineering degree.

  ‘Or the other thing I could suggest is these — they’re a brand new line. Anti-microbial and they impregnate the fabric with hypo-allergenic insect repellent.’

  ‘Are you serious? What happened to just spraying yourself with Aerogard?’

  ‘Well, you might be in a place, for example, where you don’t have any repellent. This is really something for your more serious hard-core experiential wilderness adventurers.’

  Rich glanced at him sharply, but he was straight-faced, reeling it off with the same unnerving sincerity as the actors that morning in the studio.

  ‘So, repellent-impregnated shirts?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And with all that technology, they can still only make them in orange check?’

  The guy shrugged. ‘Bright colours are a safety feature in the bush.’

  Rich picked up the one with the wickability. ‘You know, when I was down in Tasmania at the beginning of ’83,’ he said, smiling reminiscently, ‘we just took flannelette shirts, woollen jumpers and a japara. And jeans. A few people had those waterproof ski pants, but not many.’

  The salesman hardly hesitated. ‘There’s a sale on in those waterproof mussel pants at the moment, if you’re interested. They’re four-way stretch with welded seams and I think there’s a few left in camo as well as the black, charcoal, dark moss and maroon.’

  ‘Yeah, but the thing is, my point is, we all just got wet and cold and put up with it. There wasn’t even polar fleece.’

  The guy nodded pleasantly, his eyes shifting momentarily past him and back again.

  ‘Well that’s — what? — twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘The outdoors industry has come a long way since then.’