The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  Just being conscious of your posture can really disguise a few extra pounds, said Janet’s cool hard voice. Sandy scrabbled in her bag for the parking docket as she ran, fishing for coins for the machine. 1.37. Sandy, she heard, don’t take this the wrong way, but is that a properly fitted bra? She felt some scattered two-dollar coins along the seam and shook it on a tilt to find them all. 1.39, and there were already two people standing at the cashier’s machine getting their exit tickets, and she was puffing and flushed and blinking away tears now. She wasn’t going to make it. She slowed down, feeling herself give up.

  Sandy, you wouldn’t look so disorganised if you kept your coins in a purse.

  OK. Thanks very much, great advice, yes.

  No point hurrying now. Seeing she was already charged for the next hour, she spent some minutes, her tongue between her teeth, composing a carefully light-hearted goodbye text message to Sophie and writing the return flight details in both her diary and address book before feeding her money into the machine and leaving.

  The wellness retreat was an hour away on the southbound freeway and during the entire journey she concentrated on her breathing. On being centred and driving out this creeping, panicked paranoia. She was a powerful being with a limitless capacity for seeing the divine in herself and others, and she’d better banish this negative shit and get into the right headspace if she wanted to harness that properly over the next seven days.

  When she drove through the gates, finally, of Mandala and heard the bellbird CD in the reception area, she made a conscious effort to stay tranquil and devote herself to being in the moment. Accept that both your struggle and your quest to heal has brought you here, said a sign on the desk, before which burned some top-quality sandalwood incense in a to-die-for metal brazier. After she registered and was shown her room, she breathed in the cedar smell of the ceiling beams and touched the single gardenia in a vase before the small, polished Buddha on her study table, and knew it was going to be just what she needed. Maybe that Chinese herbalist she’d talked to was right, and she had some heavy qi energy on her spleen. Something that would explain this sensation of being weighted down in her internal organs, something that she could renegotiate up to the top of her head, and release out of the crown chakra. Or whatever.

  In Hobart, Rich took Sophie up from the wharves into the museum. Something normal and neutral to do with her, till they both got to know each other a little better. They both halted at the same place, staring at the video loop running over and over.

  Thylacine, said the placard. Tasmanian Tiger. The scratchy old film footage showed a tiger, pacing its cage in 1936, waiting only for the oblivion that would come when the keeper forgot to open the door to its enclosure on a night when temperatures dropped below zero. Trapped without shelter outside, it had frozen to death. This was the last tiger to die in captivity, read the caption. Nobody knew when the last one had died in the wild. On the piece of footage, the animal opened its extraordinary jaws, shook its head. You saw someone’s hand tease it outside the wire, and it sat back on its haunches and powerful tail like any other marsupial, the stripes on its back delicate and uniform. Then it turned to the camera and gazed directly at him with black, uncomprehending eyes. After a few unnerving seconds it turned again to pace with the same panicky misery at the wire.

  The grainy footage of the thylacine restarted, and the animal again turned its heavy head to look at them with that sunken, fathomless stare.

  ‘It’s like it’s saying Why?’ he said finally, breaking the silence.

  ‘No, it’s like it’s saying I don’t get it,’ Sophie replied.

  ‘Get what, though?’

  She paused, looking past the video at the stuffed tiger exhibit in the glass case behind, those shadowed eyes removed and replaced with fake yellow glass ones like marbles.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she muttered. She shook her head and moved away from the diorama, hunching her shoulders defensively. ‘This whole place is a bit lame.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? Not even any interactive displays. I went to this museum once, must have been San Francisco, you could stand in this replica room and feel what an earthquake feels like. Right through the floor.’

  He was losing her, he could tell. He couldn’t afford to lose her.

  ‘Wait here a sec,’ he said, and went and had a word with the lady on the front desk, who fetched one of the curators for him. He gave her his best smile and a story of a documentary he was making, flashing her his television station ID and his card which he’d had printed describing himself as a freelance photographer, here coincidentally with his daughter, wondering about the possibility of any other special materials not on exhibit, for research purposes.

  He turned on all the charm he could muster, apologising for not contacting her in writing in advance, and finally she checked her watch, smiling, and agreed to let them view the thylacine remains they kept locked away.

  ‘You can see why, can’t you?’ she said, hurrying them down a corridor. ‘I’d have every man and his dog in here wanting to look at them, and really when you think about it they’re amongst the most precious remains we have on the planet.’

  ‘Still a lot of interest in them, is there?’ he said, buoyant with gaining special access, with Sophie’s surprised, impressed eyes on him.

  ‘I would say, of the requests I get about the museum, ninety-five percent of them are about the Tasmanian tiger,’ she answered, inserting keys into a lock of a vault. ‘The international interest is overwhelming. We get letters from people all over the world, wanting to know if they can be part of search expeditions, asking about the reward money.’

  ‘What, there’s a prize if someone finds one?’ he asked, and the curator nodded sadly.

  ‘Oh, yeah. A few years back, someone offered a million dollars for evidence of one, and that really stirred up the interest again. It’s like it taps into something for people. And that offer’s still standing, I guess.’

  She snapped on a dim fluorescent light as the cool air in the vault hit them with a blast of formaldehyde, old fur, neglect. In a case to their right were two more taxidermied thylacines; before them on a bench were stacked several large flat boxes.

  ‘These are the pelts,’ said the curator, pulling on some cotton gloves and opening a box. ‘You can look at them, but please don’t touch them.’

  The faint sharp smell of something wild. Dark brown stripes, as delicate and precise as if they’d been painted on with a Chinese brush, dark sable on sandy fur. The marble eyes of the stuffed animal beside him stared like the deadest, coldest thing on earth. Rich suppressed a shudder. You could see the bare skin on the forelegs where it must have rubbed itself raw in a wire snare. On a shelf was a box with Thylacine bits and pieces written on it in felt pen. He felt an overwhelming sadness dissolve into his limbs, a terrible sinking heaviness. He wanted to get out of there, now.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said to the curator. ‘You’ve been very generous with your time, having us turn up out of the blue like this.’

  ‘Oh, that’s alright. What about the documentary? Will you be approaching the museum to make another appointment to interview anyone, or do you want to see these?’

  She indicated a box and opened it.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Oh, various testimonials.’

  The sheaf of papers was hundreds of pages thick. As she flipped through them Rich saw fountain pen, ballpoint, typescript — then computer-printed pages. A sedimentary layer of the twentieth century.

  ‘The more promising sightings were pretty much all before the end of the 1950s,’ she said, thumbing back through the pages. ‘There’s some evidence there were probably still thylacines in the wild, surviving, until then. They even developed a kit, you know, something for rangers to take out with them, some plaster of Paris to get paw-print mouldings, bags to collect scats, that kind of thing.’

  She patted a cardboard box. To Rich, it looked wildly naïve and optimistic,
something the scouts might put together, with its assortment of bags and wooden sticks and little packets of plaster. Something you’d give an eleven-year-old boy for Christmas. He could sense Sophie backed up against the door. Watching him.

  ‘So, nothing hopeful, then?’ he said.

  The curator hesitated. ‘Well, you can see the attraction, can’t you? Up in the Tarkine, on the north coast; that’s 3800 square kilometres of wilderness. Imagine that.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And 2000 square kilometres of it’s rainforest. Lot of people point to that and say a population could still be surviving there, and it’s so remote we’d never know. They hold onto that.’

  She dropped the papers back into the box with a sigh. ‘And there’s plenty of sightings, still,’ she said dryly. ‘Thousands. Especially on the tourist trails. There’s lots of feral dogs now, in Tasmania. Lots of feral everything, really.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He felt Sophie move impatiently. He didn’t blame her. This cold little room like a mausoleum. Like a morgue.

  ‘Everyone wants to see one,’ the curator went on. ‘Or join an expedition, like I said. Or clone the poor buggers from the DNA inside those preserved foetuses upstairs. Nobody wants to believe they’re really extinct. They want to believe that somewhere out there in all that wilderness, they’re still managing to hang on.’

  ‘But you think they’re gone?’

  She hesitated, weighing her words. ‘Nothing would make me more excited than someone finding real hard evidence of one. But for me, I have to say they’re gone.’

  He was glad to get out of the building, relieved to be back in the warm air and surge of life, the reassuring sunshine.

  ‘They knew,’ Sophie said suddenly and passionately as they stood waiting for a break in the traffic. ‘They must have known, and they still let that one freeze to death. Let it have that horrible death, something as unique and precious as that.’

  What could you say to that?

  ‘You’re right,’ he answered. ‘People are idiots. The more valuable and irreplaceable the thing, the more careless they are with it. I’ll show you photos of Lake Pedder one day, before they dammed it. You should see what it was like. A paradise. And all under water now.’

  He hesitated as the traffic moved in a flank before them.

  ‘That’s what started the whole movement to save the Franklin — just the idiocy of people who had the power to make decisions for everybody else.’

  He was having to raise his voice now to be heard, turning his face away from an approaching truck and the noise it made changing gears. It was a logging truck, an eighteen-wheeler carving its way through the city on the way to the wharf to unload its timbers, and they both glanced up as it roared past them with its chained-on cargo of huge felled trees, some trunks still covered in shreds of moss and bark.

  A pocket of cool air seemed to hit Rich as the logs flashed past his eyes, the momentary smell of damp, silent forest. There was a whole world of memories, he knew, still embedded intact in some fold of his brain. Then, as he turned his head sharply to watch the truck coast down the hill away from them, all he could see were the pale, efficiently sliced cross-sections of the stacked trunks — Christ! The size of them! — still breathing out woody moisture, the exposed concentric age-rings jolting away like an ebbing, barely noticed reproach.

  ‘There’s nothing you need? No last-minute supplies?’ Rich asked her as they wandered through the pedestrian mall up to their hotel. She liked the way he didn’t mind if she walked along without saying much. Her mother could never do that. Always talking, no matter how inane the topic.

  ‘No, I’ve got everything. My teacher at school, he belongs to a bushwalking club, and he helped me list all the stuff I’d need. Just need to buy fuel for the stove once we get there.’

  ‘Those boots going to make it OK?’

  She looked down at her Timberlands. ‘Yeah, I’ve had them for a while, they’re really good.’

  She wondered if he was gearing up to ask her about her clothes and hair, or comment on the studs. Sophie thought her look was pretty understated, but adults, especially shopkeepers, eyed her sometimes as though she was going to stab them.

  Her grandmother Janet always looked in pain when she visited.

  ‘Is it the Addams Family?’ she’d say. ‘Is that the fashion?’

  And she had a way of undercutting you, even if you were prepared for her.

  ‘It’s not hairspray, is it, Sophie, it’s something else — gel or wax, isn’t it?’ she’d add, touching Sophie’s fringe carefully, like it was upholstery. ‘Because that would explain, darling, why your skin’s broken out on your forehead like that. Not to mention all that foundation you’ve slapped over it. Soap and water and a few bobby pins is what you need, sweetheart.’

  Darling, sweetheart, while she stood there giving you a look that told you there was no way you were up to scratch.

  Sophie dug her hands into her pockets. She couldn’t stop thinking about those tigers. She’d bought some postcards in the museum shop. One was a reproduction of a sepia photo; a man in a hat and old-fashioned checked jacket and waistcoat, sitting with a gun and gazing at what he’d shot — the dead thylacine hanging upside-down beside him, strung up by the back legs. Its long strong body stretched in dead defeat from the rope, the powerful tail curved back towards the floor, the forelegs reaching down through the air, never to touch ground and run again.

  Native Tiger of Tasmania shot by Weaver, 1869, said the caption. Mr Weaver looked lifeless too, stuffed and vacant. He was staring sideways past the thylacine, preserving a profile rather than looking at the camera, as though his lofty thoughts were elsewhere already. Staring right through the thing he’d killed.

  The other postcard showed a thylacine-skin rug, four sets of the chocolatey stripes making a wavy pattern. Like ripples of sand after the tide’s gone out, thought Sophie. Or those ridges of shadow the wind blows sand into, in an empty desert. Beautiful, really, until you remembered what it was.

  Now on either side of them, along the mall, stood souvenir shops and gift emporiums, their stands pushed onto the pavement. And on every stand hung tiger key rings and tiger t-shirts and beer holders and baseball caps, tiger stuffed toys and fridge magnets; everywhere, all anybody seemed to be flogging were mementos of an extinct animal. Tigers that looked cute and harmless as teddies, tigers stylised like cartoon characters. Their image was on every numberplate; beer ads on billboards showed two tigers in an unspoiled, idyllic jungle by a waterfall, something you might stumble across anytime. Everywhere you looked, that foxy face and striped fur.

  Sophie shuddered, a familiar tremor of panicky horror. This was what lay ahead, and she’d be alive for it, probably. All of it. The last panda. The last polar bears. All those poor orangutans poached in Borneo. She could almost see how it would go: the display of solemn public regret as the last ones died, those awful bits of footage of polar bears floundering and drowning across melting ice floes, starving to death, that bloody Enya music as a soundtrack. Then this would come, for all of them — a boom in snowdomes and key rings and drinks coasters, a million toy versions made in Chinese sweatshops. Nylon fur. The real thing gone forever.

  Terrible, wrecked world, she thought. All of it sinking and melting and going under, the patches of green turning brown. Nothing good left, everything torn up and eaten and destroyed, everything dumped in the next generation’s lap.

  ‘How about a coffee?’ said Rich. ‘Or a juice or something?’

  ‘I’m OK. Thanks.’

  He stepped into a confectionery shop. ‘Come and check this out.’

  She took a deep breath, and saliva sprang into her mouth — oh, the sneaky betrayal of a watering mouth! — as she smelled licorice and butterscotch, musk-sticks and milk bottles and jelly raspberries, all the soft sugary things of her childhood she’d cram her mouth with and let slowly dissolve. She and Tegan, friends even back then, sitting idly on the swings in the park eating their way sl
owly through bags of caramels and lurid jelly snakes, so different in flavour from the all-natural fruit juice ones her mum bought her. Here, the chocolate was arranged in big seductive slabs behind the glass counter, ranging in colour from pale coffee brown to almost black, so rich its sheen looked almost buttery. She pointed to it and smiled, her finger tapping the glass accusingly.

  ‘Look at that. That’s the hardest thing to resist, chocolate.’

  Out of the blue. She couldn’t believe she’d said it. She pulled her hand back, shut her mouth and swallowed. A single strong peppermint, that’s what she needed. Or a no-sugar chewing gum, with that foamy bitter aftertaste of the artificial sweetener killing your appetite.

  He was looking into the display case, counting out some coins.

  ‘I like it too,’ he said, glancing across at her. ‘I’m a sucker for chocolate, actually, but only the really good, pure, dark organic stuff.’ He smiled. ‘It’s full of antioxidants.’

  ‘That’s what they say. Just an excuse to let you weaken and stuff yourself with it.’ She blinked, shocked again at this dangerous urge to mindlessly blurt something, confide something. She’d have to watch herself.

  ‘I’m surprised you can’t get a chocolate Tasmanian tiger,’ she said disparagingly, to change the subject.

  ‘Yeah, they sure are keen to milk that for all it’s worth, aren’t they?’ He bought some chocolate-coated coffee beans and when he went out she lingered, and then hurriedly bought an expensive thin bar of seventy percent cacao dark chocolate and slipped it into her bag. She’d give it to him later, when he wasn’t expecting it. All this time in her life, she thought, fifteen years of wondering, and this was the first time she actually knew something he liked.

  Back at the hotel, Rich lay on one of the beds and flipped through the black hospitality folder. God, what a relief to take off his walking boots, still stiff with newness. They were the only footwear he’d brought, which was probably an oversight. His feet felt weak and tingling, as though they’d been squeezed out of shape.