The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  That’s right, she thought vengefully, no dump-and-runs. She ignored her mother when she came in to drag the stereo speakers out onto the back verandah, until she waved dramatically in front of her.

  ‘What is it?’ she said sweetly, lifting out one earpiece.

  ‘You’re not really going to sit in here, are you?’

  ‘I’m studying for a test. I’m fine,’ she answered coolly. ‘Go and have your party.’

  Her mother stood staring at her for a few seconds, her face set in a struggling mask of tolerant patience. ‘I would really like you, Sophie,’ she said evenly — ah yes, ‘I’ statement time — ‘to come outside and have a good time with us, and celebrate your birthday. It would mean a lot to me.’

  ‘I’ll bring out the dip and chips in a little while,’ Sophie replied, turning a page. ‘Go on and have fun with your friends.’

  Her mother grabbed a pile of CDs and stalked outside, her jewellery jangling. She’d gone all out today; she even had ankle-chains on. And the 44-gallon drum was ready in the back garden, piled high with scrap wood for when it got dark, so the posse was obviously planning on settling in for the long haul. Sandy might have been cueing up Norah Jones now, but by 8 p.m., Sophie knew, it would be Fleetwood Mac, and they would be doing that dancing that looked like someone had put ice down their backs.

  It was just as well she hadn’t invited any of her own friends. She threw down the textbook, restless with submerged, embittered rage, and grabbed a platter of something someone had brought; a dip an unappetising shade of brown, surrounded by pita crisps. This would be bound to infuriate her mother, she knew; her acting as waitress at what was meant to be her own party. Good. And if Sandy thought she was going to eat any of this poxy junk, she was mistaken.

  There she was, sitting back in a deckchair with a tumbler of that totally disgusting wine, gossiping away with the others. Sophie caught her eye and a brief challenge passed between them.

  ‘I’ll keep the cordless phone out here with me, Sophie,’ Sandy said, holding up the handset, ‘and I’ll come and get you if there’s any birthday calls.’

  ‘Who from? Rich?’

  She saw her mother flinch, quicker than a blink, then her bright smile.

  ‘Well, yeah, Rich will be ringing you a bit later to wish you a happy birthday. And then I want you to ring Grandma to thank her for that gift voucher, alright?’

  Sophie watched her, using that loud, fake voice to tell her what to do and who she could speak to, surrounded by the armoury of her gang. Sophie savoured the moment.

  ‘Oh, I’ll ring him in a sec.’

  Sandy’s eyebrows flatlined with her smiling mouth, like a plug had been pulled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s my free hour on my mobile, so I’ll give him a call.’

  Such beautiful, pure power. Such a soothing cool thing to hold, to listen to the voices trail away and that uncomfortable silence descend. Sophie remembered how it had felt, tearing away at her nail, and how she’d just closed her eyes and ripped. Incandescent pain, blooming and sizzling. The way you could float above it.

  ‘How did you get his number, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  She caught that warning note, and volleyed back a smile.

  ‘Who — Rich’s? I’ve had it for ages.’

  ‘From where?’

  She widened her eyes, comical and patient. Listen to my stupid mother, her look said, so totally out of it.

  ‘Mu-um! Whitepages dotcom.’

  Look what I put up with, she telegraphed to the silent watching women on the grass. You think you know us, don’t you? You don’t know jack. We’re all way ahead of you.

  ‘We’ve rung each other a bunch of times,’ she said in that tolerant, slightly scolding tone. ‘We’re planning on going on a bit of a trip. To Tasmania.’

  Her mother’s mouth worked. That nerve-end pain, Sophie saw it there, the naked hurt when your unthinking fumbling hand collides with something hard. She felt a flare of vindictive pleasure, something savage with a deep, bitter quick. That would have been enough, just that moment. She would have left it there, except that Sandy recovered herself, rallying in front of her friends.

  ‘You’re certainly not going anywhere with Richard. I can tell you that right now.’

  She wouldn’t like that, Sophie thought with glee, not the sound of her own prim surly mother-witch voice betraying her in front of them. The mothers who pretended they never shouted, who said they talked with their kids like real friends, who knew how to communicate so there didn’t need to be conflict. Using those phrases they got out of books from the library. They were witnessing this now, their faces still and avid, and Sophie felt invincible.

  ‘Anyway,’ went on Sandy, trying for a little levity and failing, ‘you can’t tell me you actually want to go on a holiday with the guy? What’s he planning?’

  ‘We’re going to walk the Overland Track. The Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair walk.’

  If Sandy had snorted with derisive laughter, trying to make a fool of her in front of everyone, it would have been better. But instead she made her face go soft and sympathetic.

  ‘Oh, Soph. Listen. You don’t really think he’s going to come through on something like that, do you?’

  ‘Well, you tell me. He’s already booked and registered our names.’

  Sophie felt the air tighten between them like a wire as her mother struggled to maintain her poise, reaching up and smoothing her hair behind her ear, that maddeningly understanding smile still playing on her lips. She didn’t think Sophie could go through with it. Couldn’t believe she wouldn’t back down. There was a grim sourness now underscoring that smile, something you wouldn’t see unless you lived with her.

  ‘You’re not seriously telling me you want to go bushwalking with a total stranger?’

  ‘Yeah. Believe it or not, I do want to.’ She couldn’t show doubt now, or pretend to change sides. ‘I’m borrowing my gear from the bushwalking club at the school. I’ve already checked it out. So, I’m gonna ring Rich back and get the dates set.’ She nearly said Dad. So nearly. That would have blown her mother out of the water, witnesses or not.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased, Mum,’ she remarked innocently. ‘You’re always talking about Tasmania and how it changed your life. Seeing the wilderness and everything. Didn’t you and Rich do that while you were down there, really appreciate the place? I mean, you saved it, didn’t you?’

  ‘We were there as part of the Blockade,’ Sandy said mechanically. ‘Not tourists.’

  I know what you’re doing, said her eyes. Don’t think this is finished with.

  ‘I think that’s a great way to get to know your father a bit better, doing a physical challenge together like that,’ piped up her mum’s friend Margot, smiling encouragingly. Margot who meant so well, who didn’t even know that her sixteen-year-old daughter had slept with just about every guy in school.

  Later that night, after everyone had gone, she came out of her room to find her mother sitting bent over her desk lamp, making earrings. Sandy’s eyes were red and smeared with crying, and as she screwed them up frowning short-sightedly for the holes drilled in the gemstones she was using, she looked old and crabby and tired. If she went on the attack, Sophie was going to say gee, thanks for a great birthday party and walk straight out again. But Sandy just glanced up at her and sighed, and fresh tears swam in her eyes. It looked as though it was going to be a crying jag punishment, not an anger one.

  ‘Why, Sophie? Why be so hostile in front of all my friends?’

  ‘I wasn’t hostile. I was just telling you I already had Rich’s number. I’m allowed to make plans without getting your permission first. Next year I’m allowed to leave home, if I want to ...’

  ‘Just don’t even start that.’ Sandy’s hands searched in one of the plastic dishes for a piece of stone, digging fretfully. The gesture reminded her so much of Grandma Janet, looking impatiently for something in her purse — her heart pills,
or her shopping list, or some improving little item she’d cut out and kept to make a point.

  ‘I don’t want you to go there with him,’ said Sandy, sniffing through her blocked sinuses. ‘I’d worry myself to death.’

  Sophie picked up pliers and tigertail wire and an earring hook, and threaded a piece of amethyst on. ‘It’s only seven days. I want to meet him. It’ll be good.’

  She looked down at the tray of stones. Rose quartz, maybe. She wasn’t going to weaken, no matter what Sandy did or said. No matter how much she cried or tried to make her feel guilty. She kept her head down, sensing her mother wiping her eyes.

  ‘Fifteen,’ Sandy said, her voice high and strained with more tears. ‘I can’t believe it. Soon you’ll just turn around and walk out of here.’

  ‘No, I won’t. What do you think: rose quartz or a seed pearl?’

  ‘You can’t use the seed pearls, they’re too expensive. Or just use one, then pile on a few of those glass ones.’

  Sophie threaded them on, and waited.

  ‘How does he seem, to you?’ said Sandy.

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Did he bother to ask how I was?’

  ‘Sure. He said he’s going to call you to talk about all this.’

  ‘So he bloody should.’ Sandy sniffed again, put down what she was working on and put her head in her hands. ‘I must be insane to even be considering it,’ she muttered. ‘Absolutely insane. Everyone’s been telling me all afternoon I have to try and be rational about it because he’s still your father — someone even quoted some bloody UN declaration. As if the UN could care less that I’ve raised you alone without help from anyone. And what’s he ever done for you? Nothing.’

  ‘There’ll be hundreds of people walking along with us.’ Sophie wasn’t sure of this, but it sounded right. ‘I’ll meet people from all over the world. And Mr Boyd at school said I could count it as my Community Challenge unit, if I went.’

  ‘Did he? You’ve really thought this through, have you?’

  She nodded. She picked up a piece of tourmaline and found the hole drilled through it, pushed the wire inside. Her mother was gazing at her now, her hands flat against each temple, holding her hair out of her face.

  ‘You know what? I was going to call you Melantha,’ she said wistfully. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t. I had it all planned.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t.’

  ‘It means “deep purple lily”.’

  ‘It sounds like medicine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know — Mylanta. That stuff you take for your stomach that tastes like chalk.’

  Their two heads bowed over the light, choosing gemstones, Sophie permitting herself a secret smile as she heard Sandy laughing dryly in spite of herself.

  ‘You could go on your Goddess workshop,’ she said, still not looking up. ‘It’s on at just the same time.’ Placing the idea there like a small shining stone in her mother’s path. Setting it all in motion as she held her breath, sensing Sandy glance up sharply, a half-finished necklace cupped in her waiting hand.

  Six

  Sunday evening, Rich was walking along the street with Genevieve, the protein-shake girl. Make them laugh, Rich had found, and you were home and hosed.

  ‘It’s no ordinary duster, though,’ he was saying. ‘It’s the magic duster.’

  ‘Yeah, magic’s a word they use a lot, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a world of magic. Magical solutions to everything. This one, you put a battery in the handle, and so the duster spins round.’

  ‘Fabulous! Where’s the Nobel Prize for that man?’ She had a great laugh. And a body as finely muscled as a deer, strolling along easily in her cotton sweatpants with that fit little bounce in her step.

  ‘Yep, you press the button and it spins. Good for startling animals. So if you were to combine that, say, with the Magic Swivel Sweeper, which spins itself around corners and has a light so you can dust in the dark, well, then you’d have yourself a product.’

  ‘Would it have to be made of plastic?’

  ‘Genevieve, you’ve seen the things. They’re all made of plastic.’

  ‘So they break in three weeks.’

  ‘Why do you think they always give you two for the price of one?’

  They got to the Thai restaurant and stopped outside.

  ‘Is this the one?’ she asked.

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘Looks busy, for a Sunday night.’

  ‘We could just get takeaway. I only live round the corner.’

  He felt the unsaid thing enter the space between them; something speculative and knowing in her raised-eyebrow smile.

  ‘Have you got a magic swivel sweeper with the dust-at-night feature?’

  ‘What have you got in mind?’

  Janet. Another unwavering stress in her life. Another judgemental, negative millstone, her own lifelong personal Mother Superior. No wonder she needed to go on a retreat.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ her mother said when Sandy told her about the Tasmania trip. ‘You haven’t seen Richard in — how many years? — and now you’re suddenly sending Sophie off on a holiday with him.’

  Sandy took the cordless phone and walked out onto the front verandah.

  ‘It’s not like that. He invited her, she wanted to go. What would I have achieved by saying no, really, Mum?’ She kicked crossly at the litter of gumnuts and leaves on the porch timbers with the side of her shoe.

  She could hear her mother exhale with exasperation on the other end of the phone. ‘Sandy, I really can’t understand how you make these decisions. Honestly, it just seems so arbitrary.’

  ‘Well ...’

  ‘So spur of the moment. You were never even married to the man, after all. I always warned you he’d only stick around as long as it suited him. And surely it’s going to be disruptive for Sophie, at a time when she should be concentrating on her studies.’

  Concentrating on her studies. That had always been Janet’s favourite mantra. We don’t think you should even think about going out with boys, Sandra, while you’re still at school and concentrating on your studies. Sandy could remember her, hovering pointedly in the kitchen as Sandy tried to talk privately to some boy on the phone, some innocent, normal phone call made agonising by Janet’s cold glances of disapproval. And Sandy’s throat seizing up with self-consciousness, every word she uttered listened to and judged.

  Concentrating on her studies, because her mother kept telling her how much the school fees were costing and what a sacrifice they’d made sending her and her sister to private school, even though the schools were only ordinary Catholic secondary colleges. It wasn’t until Sandy got to university that she realised just how cripplingly bad an education it had actually been. How warped and limited and hopelessly timid she was now in practically everything important about life.

  She’d never even told her parents she was going to the Blockade. How could she, when she went home from student residences on the weekend to eat chops and three veg in front of her parents’ television? Just the veggies for me, if that’s OK, Sandy would say, and her mother would sigh and roll her eyes, and her father, curling his lip at the Wilderness Society rallies on the evening news would grunt and say: Look at them. Bloody rent-a-crowd.

  She’d told them she was going on a bushwalking trip with the walking club at uni. The Catholic walking club, she’d said in a flash of inspiration, as if such a thing existed. By the time she’d come back for the new term in March, transformed into a different person, the whole thing had clearly passed them by. They didn’t see the change in her, either, even though Sandy felt it must have been shining out of her face, freshly minted. There was no need even for the elaborate lies she’d prepared about the trip. That had been a big lesson to her, she reflected; how much time she’d wasted worrying that they’d suspect something when they never even noticed. She’d been free, then, to reinvent herself behind their backs.

  Nobody had paid uni fees in those day
s, she remembered, it had all been free, but her mother still referred frequently and fretfully to how much Sandy was costing everyone. Even now, years later, she still brought up the school fees every chance she got. It was a permanent, outstanding account, forever in the red.

  She felt she’d been paying back those fees, really, ever since. Paying them back in assiduous stiff-faced gratitude every time her own education was mentioned — which was still often, since Sandy insisted on sending Sophie to the local public school and Janet never shut up about it — and in her silent, fuming stoicism in the face of criticism, which was the only real skill the school had taught her. None of it did any good. Her mother, she was convinced, still believed she’d frittered all of it away. Janet was still waiting, somehow, for a return on her investment. You’re so casual about work, she’d say wonderingly, as if she’d spent her own life holding down a full-time job. Mum, Sandy would say, I’m passionate about ideas, and Janet would roll her eyes with derisive, long-suffering weariness.

  ‘Sandy?’

  ‘I’m here. She’s doing fine at school, Mum.’

  ‘Be honest now, Sandy, you hardly know what she’s up to, do you? Getting around looking like a vampire, out with the children of all those hippies. And I’m sure she’s not well — she looked like death warmed up last time I saw her.’

  ‘She’s fitter than you and me put together, Mum.’ Sandy went down the verandah steps and kicked with her shoe at a nettle she noticed growing out of the path. She could just see her mother, sitting on that fat re-upholstered couch gazing out at the manicured courtyard of her townhouse, not a thing in the world to worry about but how to interfere in her life.

  ‘It just seems so lax, Sandy, and haphazard. She hardly knows him.’

  ‘Well, this might be her chance, now that she’s old enough to judge for herself.’