The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  That was after Rich had left, thank God. She would never have been able to afford to buy him out now. Not that she’d bought him out — he’d just left. And then her father had died and in a gesture that denied a lifetime of aloofness, left her that money just exactly when she needed it, like a sign, to pay out a chunk of the mortgage. It was her house, anyway. Her energy, her vision, her impetus. Rich had just come along for the ride.

  She was sure the thought of the house’s value gave Rich pause as he was walking out, but equally, she’d been standing on that verandah, which Daniel had finally finished, holding a wailing Sophie in her arms, and perhaps to Rich in that moment it had seemed a fair-enough bargain. Sophie, red-faced and black-haired like a foundling child, something left by the fairies, her tiny Sherpa hat tied securely onto her head and her handspun jumper chafing at her drooly chin, bundled up ready for a day at the market. She had wanted to scream too — had in fact done quite a bit of screaming the night before as they’d fought for hours, which really went against her principles — but she’d kept her temper and spoken firmly and quietly. The one who raises their voice loses the argument; she remembered that from the non-violence workshops at the Blockade.

  And to tell the truth, she had been stunned beyond belief. How had it gone so absolutely pear-shaped — the ten years of cohabiting happiness, all those years of carefree unencumbered adventuring, the understanding that didn’t need a marriage licence, the whole shebang — how had it become such a skidding wreck once the baby was born?

  Because Sandy couldn’t remember changing. That was the thing. She’d stayed the same person, so it had to be Sophie — and the idea of Sophie — that had made him bolt. That’s what she couldn’t forgive, ever. She’d stood there holding her baby, appalled with the indignation of it, and every second that passed seemed to make Sophie infallibly more hers, and less his, as if their true colours were at last being revealed now that push had finally come to shove. As if she was growing roots now, down from her feet placed squarely there, revealed as the solid one.

  He’d packed a few boxes of gear, grim-faced, into the Kombi (‘and take that guitar you never play,’ she’d called to him, emboldened and powerful ... Why couldn’t she feel a surge of that righteous energy now?) and reversed the old van expertly out of the driveway. That was one thing that remained as a lasting impression, she thought stonily; his expertise in backing out of things.

  The baby had squirmed in her arms to be let down and she, dazed, had let her crawl haphazardly across the verandah, where she’d screamed again as a wood splinter stuck itself into the heel of her little hand. Sandy had broken down and wept then, after all, seeing with sudden clarity the position she was in — left alone with a baby and no support except from the government and that which might come from useless, dithering, drug-frazzled friends like Daniel, who couldn’t even sand and finish off a deck properly.

  And yes, she’d called out something vicious and hurtful as he’d started up the van, it was true. It was one of those things you shout when you’re furious and desperate, when someone’s leaving you, unbelievably, in the lurch. Something about him never seeing Sophie again. Not a threat, though. Just to try to remind him that he was the one walking out on all his responsibilities, and that kind of breach didn’t mend just like that.

  She’d meant it as a wake-up call. A warning. She couldn’t have predicted the expression of baleful coldness falling over his face like darkness, like a door slamming and locking. Never. She shouldn’t have said never.

  But once she had, there was no going back.

  At home, Rich read that his new sleeping bag had a curved trapezoid baffle which optimised loft. Loft — another one of those co-opted words — was calculated by measuring the volume an ounce of down occupied in a climate-controlled test cylinder, and his model provided an optimum baffle-wall angle. Well, thank God for that. And sure it cost a week’s pay, but he’d been well overdue for a new one anyway. A good sleeping bag was still an asset to pack sometimes if you were heading for somewhere remote. Last time he’d been in Turkey he’d just about frozen to death one night under a miserly cotton blanket, even though he’d been in a three-star guesthouse. He’d heard it was cold in Afghanistan at night, and that’s where he was thinking about travelling next. He’d seen The Kite Runner. The country would be perfect for a series of photos. Handsome people, the Afghanis. All those good-looking sad-eyed kids, playing in monochromatic stony streets. He’d go and see Andrew at the café, where he’d hung his Brazilian series, and see if he was interested. Really, the sleeping bag was an investment.

  Why was he even justifying it? He hadn’t bought a new one for probably thirty years — his old one was shoved in the back of the hall cupboard behind the spare pillows. It could go down to the op shop now, to be piled with all the other last-century paraphernalia. He found it — so ludicrously, shamefully bulky! — and unrolled it. Faded khaki green on the outside, tartan brushed cotton over lumpy dacron inside, and a trapped scent that came billowing up at him of wood smoke and damp mist and bracken.

  God, the way a smell could bloom like a blown ember in your brain, fresh and sharp as turning over a log to expose all the dark life that swarmed beneath it. Sight and sound had nothing on smell. You unzipped your old sleeping bag, opened an old book, lit a mosquito coil, and it was like stepping on a mine. It made you realise everything was stored, nothing was forgotten, just waiting for the saturation of memory to overspill and flick some switch.

  He must have used this since 1983. Must have pulled it out to throw over visitors staying the night on his couch, or loaned it to someone, sometime, so why did it still smell, so precisely, of the river?

  Rich took the lumpy end again in both hands and began to reroll it, resisting doing the thing he most longed to, which was lower his head onto the tartan fabric and inhale slowly and deeply, with his eyes closed. He had a new sleeping bag now in breathable, water-resistant windproof nylon taffeta that smelled of chemicals and money, and he was lucky he hadn’t got hypothermia trying to brave Tasmania’s cold in this sorry half-arsed excuse for a bag which was probably older than him. But still, his head sank weakly towards it, like a supplicant. He rested his forehead on the soft material and inhaled a great savouring gasp of it. Breathed in fog and smoke, sweat and mud and ylang-ylang.

  That was it. The scent that would always, always come around to snag him. In behind her neck, at her warm hairline, when they did the group hug. Such an intimate thing to smell on a stranger. She’d been in one of those Nepalese sweaters with the patterns across the front that prickled you like a hair shirt here in the Australian heat. You needed the icy winds of the Himalayas for those sweaters; snow-capped peaks and sub-zero gales. Yak wool, or something. He’d hugged her, felt her fine and fluid shoulder blades moving under his hands as he released her. Regretfully, it had to be said. Nothing wrong with being enveloped in a soft and fervent female embrace at 9.30 on a sunny morning, breathing in a sweet gust of ylang-ylang. Oh, it wasn’t just Sandy, he knew that. He wasn’t making that mistake. It was Sandy in that place, at that time. The click and the fit.

  That’s what he’d felt when he’d first shown up; the sense he was in the right place at the right time. They’d surprised him. He’d expected a disorganised shambles, couldn’t believe it when he’d stepped into the Info Centre and been asked to register, the businesslike focus of the people there. It had sobered him up, that and the mainstream journalists and photographers queued up respectfully, ready to go upriver. He remembered filling out his details as if he was signing up for the army, that prehistoric telex machine humming in the background, the sense of serious battle being waged. And then setting up his tent at Greenie Acres, where they had to do the training if they wanted to go up the river to be arrested. The whole atmosphere of the place, the banter as they dished up meals in the food tent while he stood in line, like it was an episode of M*A*S*H.

  At the workshop Sandy had patted him lightly on the back as their hug ended
, smiling. You could never read those sorts of invitations then, not reliably. They were in the 1980s, and men were learning to walk on eggshells. Women he’d met actually liked that reticence, he was coming to realise; they seemed to warm to a certain lack of confidence and hesitation, as if it suggested the man hadn’t yet been irredeemably warped by the patriarchy.

  ‘How about a break?’ the facilitator had called, and Rich could have hugged him too, for his sense of timing, as though the music had ended in a progressive dance just when he was face to face with the right person.

  ‘Coffee?’ he said to her, and she screwed up her nose.

  ‘Caffeine’s the last thing I need. Dandelion coffee for me. Or herbal tea if there’s any there.’

  He poured them both a yellow tea, smelling its aroma of hot wet peppermint, dank as hay. He would have to be dying of thirst, he thought, before he drank another dandelion coffee; it tasted like it was made with burnt potting mix.

  Beautiful skin, she had; freckles across her nose and the beginnings of lines that showed she had a sense of humour.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Melbourne.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Bit different, isn’t it?’ She blew on her tea, sipped it.

  ‘It’s great. And important to be here, obviously.’ God, what a pompous idiot he sounded.

  She nodded. ‘Oh, absolutely.’

  He took a swallow of tea. How did she drink the stuff ? Even instant coffee, even the big tin of caterer’s blend there on the trestle, would be better than this.

  ‘I’ve just finished first-year Arts at uni. A bunch of us have been watching the campaign progress and came down to be part of the protest,’ she said. ‘Are you studying?’

  ‘Well, sort of. I’m starting this year, if I get accepted. I just applied before I came down here,’ he answered, then hesitated. ‘Just after I got back.’

  Her eyebrows rose enquiringly. ‘Back from where?’

  ‘Nepal.’

  ‘Oh, wow. I’d love to go to Nepal. It sounds like such a spiritual place.’

  ‘Yes, it is. Very much so.’

  He waited again, wanting her to ask him more. He had a copy of the magazine that had accepted his photo, back in his tent, and if she asked he could offer to show it to her later, and he had a Dolphin torch and a bottle of port in there too. Not that he’d been planning anything.

  ‘Were you just travelling, then?’

  ‘Not exactly. Doing some backpacking, yes, but I was really working on a photographic essay.’

  ‘Wow. Was that for your uni course?’

  ‘No, no. I’ll be studying forestry. But I’m also a freelancer.’

  ‘A photographer? Really? So you get to travel around and take photos?’

  He smiled, swigged a bit more tea. ‘Yeah, but you know, I’m starting to prefer to say make photos rather than take them. Because —’ Then the facilitator’s voice was braying at them to come back to the circle and reconvene. Share any new insights, reach consensus. He was already pinning a piece of butcher’s paper to the A-frame board, Rich remembered with a grimace, ready to write up keywords, draw some arrows, make circles in a different colour, come up with some obscure sense of achievement, it seemed to him, before they broke for lunch.

  Sandy had finished her tea, and touched his arm. ‘I’m Sandy, by the way.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember from the introductions. I’m Richard. And look, I’ve actually got a travel magazine with me, if you’re interested in seeing some of my photos. I had one of the Nepalese ones published, so —’

  ‘Let’s refocus, everyone,’ called the facilitator, clapping, and Rich could have drowned him in a bucket of cold peppermint tea. But Sandy looked pleased, her attention still with him, and nodded eagerly. Always eager for something. The next thing, the new thing.

  ‘I’d love to. I’ll catch you later, then.’

  ‘OK. Great.’

  ‘And you should take some photos of the Blockade, don’t you reckon? They’re going to be such an important part of everybody’s shared histories.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she added with a smile as she moved back to the workshop, ‘make them, I mean. Document what’s happening.’

  And she pulled off her hot woollen sweater, crackling with static, to reveal a blue t-shirt underneath. He loved that easy, single, graceful motion. He’d appreciate it all over again in the darkness of his tent a few nights later, when she’d kneel, the sleeping bag falling away from her, this very sleeping bag. She’d pulled her cotton shirt over her head with the same careless certainty, the pale fabric glowing a little and her hair sliding back off her face to reveal her eyes watching him, her faint smile. It was a guilty pleasure, watching her undress, and worth hearing the photography magazine crumple and crease and finally rip under her knee. His hands went to rescue it, but reached for her instead.

  Ylang-ylang. She never wore it much later, but that didn’t matter, it still managed to hook him long after they’d separated. Years later, absently sniffing bars of homemade soap at a craft market, he’d caught the scent again and, in a sudden floundering clench, memory had reached up and grabbed at his throat in a tight and unexpected grip, and to his astonished horror he’d almost sobbed.

  It irritated him no end, the lurking residual power of it. Between that and the nag champa incense no share house was complete without, the world now was an obstacle course booby-trapped with nostalgia scent-bombs. You could still buy nag champa, he’d noticed, in exactly the same red, blue and white box. Health-food shops still reeked of it. Put your nose to any outsized batik cushion and catch a whiff of it ingrained there like ancient dust. Archaeologists of the future, Rich thought, would be able to do nag-champa counts like they did pollen counts now. And ylang-ylang, more flowery, more heady than patchouli, still there at the Body Shop and in the occasional redolent miasma around a dreamy teenage girl he passed on the street. He even smelt it wafting off the aromatherapy candles so many women he met seemed to keep on their bedside table, in preparation for a long and exhausting session of extended foreplay, occasions that would leave Rich jittery and vagued-out the next day, as if sex was a plane trip somewhere, crossing some crucial dateline, and you always got jetlag.

  Rich slept now, inhaling and exhaling evenly, sunlight shifting inexorably across the floor, another afternoon closing down.

  Four

  ‘Mum, I really, really don’t want a party.’ She tucked her fingers into her fists, and pressed. The pain throbbed in her fingertips, on her chewed hangnails, the raw swollen ridge on her middle finger where she’d torn the nail down to the nerve bed. Why had she done that? She’d just started gnawing at it and somehow couldn’t stop. She’d gone to pick up the soap the next day in the shower and knocked her outstretched hand against the tiles, and the blinding flare of pain in her raw bitten fingers was like when you hit yourself hammering something.

  ‘But, Soph, you’re fifteen. Let me do something special for you.’

  It was always like this. Couldn’t just leave her alone or do what she asked. Couldn’t listen. She’d made the mistake of having three friends round for a sleepover when she turned twelve. Her mother had taken over then too. Getting stuff out of her wardrobe and asking Sophie’s friends did they want to try anything on, pretending she liked thrash metal, and then finally giving them a big, earnest lecture when they got Nightmare on Elm Street out of the video shop. Wrecking everything.

  And each year since she’d lost this argument, so why should turning fifteen be any different? On Saturday afternoon over they would all come for a party — her mother’s friends, not hers — the gang of eight women she socialised with. Her tribe, her posse, her pride. They did everything together, never moving until they’d checked with the others, more obsessive about it than the girls at school, even. They’d sit outside and drink cheap champagne and start talking like they’d been apart for months. They would talk like they’d invented it, like
it was an Olympic event.

  When she was a bit younger Sophie had called them Aunty for a while, but now she wasn’t expected to, thank God. They’d bring their younger kids if they had them and expect her and whoever of her friends had turned up to babysit them; a whole swarming gang of hyped-up feral kids who’d never heard the word ‘no’, putting nits all over her pillow, probably, when they jumped screaming on her bed.

  She was totally over it. She picked at the side of her thumbnail with her teeth, fuming inwardly, as her mother tried to get her to contribute to the list of party food she was writing.

  ‘Tabouli?’ Sandy said hopefully.

  Sophie held a shred of nail in her teeth and began to pull her thumb away slowly from her mouth. The pain as the hangnail stretched and tore was drenching, exquisite. She tasted the coppery flavour of blood mixed with her saliva.

  ‘Roast pumpkin salad,’ Sandy said, scribbling it down.

  Sophie sucked her thumb, feeling the raw spot with her tongue, searching for a new ragged corner of nail. Saying nothing.

  ‘Houmous,’ said Sandy thoughtfully, and Sophie felt her throat tighten with a suppressed retch of nausea. She could just see them, her mother and her friends on the night, gobbling down dip and crusty bread and all that fattening soft cheese, shrieking with laughter and calling each other girlfriend like they thought they were Beyoncé or something. It was too pathetic.

  Just three more years, she thought grimly as she bit a tiny clear edge of fingernail and eased it sideways, straight into the cuticle, the nerves popping like an electric shock. Three more years and she could be out of here for good and go to the city and have her own life at last and never have to look at another bowl of burghal ever, ever again.

  Saturday, that was the day to ring her, he thought as he leafed through a script. Five more days. He avoided checking in his diary for the spurt of nervousness it gave him. No, not nervousness — why should he be nervous? It was the strangeness of the situation, the formal awkwardness.