The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  That magnificent, untouched river. Sandy was in it, floating effortlessly, connected forever to that promise of change, alive in a beautiful current where she reached out and grabbed Rich’s hand, beaming, thinking they were swimming together.

  They’d moved into a share house together in the city and traces of that blessed drug, something eager and vestigial and amenable, meant there was no talk then about needing privacy or other people driving you nuts. They had a food kitty and a weekly meeting where they amicably worked out the housework roster and everyone had been the best of friends, staying up late and smoking joints and laughing themselves sick telling stories. Rich and her, happy just to have their own bedroom which seemed big enough then for two people and all their belongings, with the poster of Gandhi looking a little reproachfully from the wall (no matter how many material goods you tried to relinquish, it was never enough for that guy) and being so busy with all those groups — the Environmental Collective and the Rage for the Forests and the student magazine collective (whatever happened to collectives?) — and she and Rich finally agreeing, when they bought the VW Kombivan to travel up the coast, that it wasn’t necessary to actually relinquish material goods, just not care about them unduly.

  They’d fended off the itching, flat sense of anticlimax for months. Whenever they could they got together with other Franklin Blockaders and discussed over long, reminiscent dinners how it had all happened and ways to incorporate their nonviolence training into further activism. What they might do next.

  But the slow and subtle withdrawal pangs had crept up slowly, the fended-off realisation that nothing was ever going to be that good again.

  She remembered when the US invaded Grenada — October, it would have been, just as she was starting to question her whole degree course at uni and whether it was worth continuing. She could still see the spark of excitement alight on her housemate’s face as he’d run in to tell her about the invasion, how everyone was assembling for a demo in the city and how they needed to paint a banner right away. She had jumped up to find a bedsheet, pulling open the hall cupboard, thinking guiltily that she wasn’t even sure where Grenada was. She hated the glimpse she got, as she searched for an old sheet to paint on, of her eager, hot craving for that old exhilaration, the need to taste, again, a pure and qualm-free certainty. She hated the way that craven need made her feel — pressed airless beneath the surface of her life, utterly unmissed, while it rushed on, churning and oblivious, over her head.

  There was a girl in Sophie’s basketball team at school who walked like Rich did: stiffly but quickly, as if she had something to prove. She’d walk back to her position when the other team had the advantage with the same agitated, no-nonsense pace. There was no pleasure in it. The basketball coach sometimes made them do exercises called ‘Californians’ for training, a combination of running and stooping to touch the floor, a quick test to see who was fit and who wasn’t. Watching Rich, she thought he could probably handle about twenty Californians. But he’d never let a stitch show. He was like her; he’d walk it off, say nothing. Her pack hung off her like a big sweaty unconscious child, an unyielding weight cutting into her shoulders.

  He must know best, waving away the maps like that at the information centre, whispering to her what a rip-off they were. Then he’d taken her into the wilderness photo gallery, full of hushed people gazing at big landscape photographs that made everything look mysterious and majestic. He’d walked around with her, making suppressed noises of irritation and disbelief.

  ‘Look at this — this is meant to be the showcase of Australian contemporary photographic artists — but see that? They’ve Photoshopped that, I bet you a hundred bucks. Whoever’s running this place wouldn’t know a good photo if it bit them on the arse.’

  She’d watched him stride around the gallery, his arms folded. He knew about tons of things, she could tell. Like the way he’d shown that card to the woman at the gallery in Hobart and she’d taken them to that special vault. Not open to the public. He’d just spoken to her for a few minutes and she’d given them a private tour.

  Now he was walking as though she was just a friend he had with him, not continually asking her if she was alright, which she liked. Not ignoring her, but just letting her find her own pace and not expecting to keep talking endlessly all the time. It was hard, climbing these long, steep inclines with a pack on, into the wind — a lot harder than she’d thought when she’d packed it and tried it on in her bedroom before she’d left. It had felt, then, like something she could heft easily, but now, especially when they’d had to slog up the mountain out of the valley to Crater Lake, it seemed full of bricks.

  It was funny thinking she was carrying everything she needed on her back, that she could put up her tent and crawl in and be warm inside her sleeping bag.

  It was better now they were higher, and the track had flattened out; she could catch her breath and concentrate on her walking.

  She looked up at the track ahead, and the brightly clad walkers strung out along it, all of them made tiny by the hugeness of the landscape around them. Sophie had never seen anything like it. It was just hugely, gobsmackingly vast. No point holding up your phone to get a picture, the place overwhelmed that tiny screen. You couldn’t capture even a fragment of its detail. Up at the lookout, grateful along with everyone else to let her pack slip to the ground for a break, she’d gazed out over the vista rolling into its vanishing point and the lake far below them, and felt dizzy. The sky seemed to press down and the ground seemed to press up, jamming her in the middle like a tiny speck, like something tossed by a huge frozen wave. One step off that fragmented rock edge and you’d bounce like a speck too, all the way down to infinity.

  She’d felt a weird momentary sensation of wanting to. The sloping distance below her tilting up in sly magnetic invitation, reaching up to pull her over and down. How would it feel? Not clean like a building or a bridge, swan-diving through empty air. You’d connect, over and over, breaking with each impact, the agony real and unstoppable, and you would have gone into that voluntarily, that’s what would stun your friends and family, you’d have had the unflinching courage to step off. Down just once and down to stay, through the door that opens just one way. She loved that song. ‘Persephone.’ Thought the title rhymed with ‘bone’ when she saw it listed, then heard the singer’s voice whisper it and realised she had it wrong. Inside the earth I feel no pain and I’m never going home again.

  Sophie ran her thumb under the aching shoulder strap of her pack, easing its bite for a second. Wads of drifting cloud slid across the sky like shorn fleece; chopped, ribboning white tinged with dirty grey. And it was like there was nothing in any direction, apart from that jagged-edged mountain in the distance like a fairytale giant sleeping on its back, the undulating stands of pencil pines, the other mountains rising and falling all the way to the horizon, their windswept peaks bare of vegetation.

  All of it empty; just this little track winding through it, puny as a dropped piece of cotton thread on a gigantic rumpled picnic rug. And the humans in their fluorescent hiking jackets tramping along its rucked-up surface, like ants at that picnic.

  Sophie thought about Ayresville, where nature was kept curbed and human-scaled. The recreational walk around the lake was paved, with a track set aside for mountain bikes, and at the end was a café and wrought-iron park benches. When you reached a steep section of hill on the Heritage Walk, council had installed handrails and there was gravel spread diligently on the muddy parts. Even the trees had signs.

  Here, she felt as though she was in that show Walking with Dinosaurs, like a pterodactyl was going to suddenly wheel overhead, and the plunging ridge itself like some worn prehistoric spine, scaled with rock and sprouting sparse, prickly hair. Her pack was sunk hard into her shoulders, catching at her hair when she turned her head, until she reached up and pushed it in under her hat. There was no one there she knew to see her, so it didn’t matter how lame it looked.

  They stopp
ed for lunch at an old hut that had a toilet behind it, and just beyond it she could see the track started to divide, with a smaller trail heading up the mountain. Quite a few walkers who’d stopped to eat were getting ready to ascend the mountain as a sidetrip. She caught Rich’s eye.

  ‘You don’t want to slog straight up Cradle Mountain to the summit, do you?’ he said. ‘You’re not a peak-bagger, are you?’

  ‘No way,’ she replied, staggering to a sheltered spot and dropping her pack. She lay there for a while, breath burning, getting her energy back. When she shut her eyes sparks tumbled behind her lids, and she could feel the blood sucking back and forth in her trembling legs like a tide.

  ‘It takes hours,’ a woman near her said, also lying on her back with her eyes closed. ‘It’s the hardest kilometre you’ll ever walk, believe me.’

  ‘Zero interest,’ she replied, and the woman laughed.

  ‘You did really well on the way up to Marion’s Lookout,’ she said. ‘That’s a pretty tough ascent, especially for walkers on their first day, if they’re not prepared for what’s coming.’

  ‘It’s like a week’s worth of workouts.’

  In a minute, Sophie thought, she’d unzip her backpack and take out the container of PowerBars, and she’d have one and a half. The berry and guarana ones with extra protein.

  ‘Would you like a piece of fruitcake?’ the woman said. And before she could stop herself she’d said, ‘God, yes please’, and reached out for a slice.

  ‘I’m Libby,’ said the woman.

  ‘I’m Sophie.’

  ‘Are you walking with your dad over there?’

  ‘What? Oh. Yeah.’

  Her mouth was full of sultanas, but it was OK because dried fruit was good; you were allowed dried fruit to replenish energy. And she had some rice cakes in her pack too, which were bulky even though they weighed nothing, so the sooner she ate those, the better, really.

  ‘Have another piece,’ said Libby.

  ‘No. Thanks all the same. That’s really good cake.’

  ‘Aren’t we lucky to get this bit of sunshine?’

  ‘I guess. Is the wind always this cold though?’

  ‘This is nothing! Did you see that old hut we passed just back there? That’s an emergency shelter on the walk and it’s got a door set two metres from the ground, in case the snow gets that high.’

  ‘Jeez.’ She could see Rich sawing away at some cheese and tomato with his Swiss Army knife on a rock, balancing some slices of rye bread. Making enough for her, expecting she’d be having something with him. Assuming the responsibility of getting her lunch, like that was something they could both take for granted. Dad, she thought. Experimentally, cautiously, then dropping the thought hastily like something hot. She felt her hand reaching automatically for her phone, and remembered she was out of range.

  ‘This is my first real bushwalk,’ she confided to Libby.

  ‘Is that right? Well, you seem really fit, I must say.’

  She felt a small, warm rush of pleasure.

  ‘It’s always the way, I find,’ Libby continued. ‘The ones built like greyhounds are the ones who turn out to have the real stamina. I mean, look at you, you’ve got an athlete’s physique. My dad used to say you can’t fatten a thoroughbred. But Russell always says I’ve proved him wrong!’ Libby smiled and gave her thigh a resounding slap. Sophie winced. The way the woman owned that solid flesh, like she claimed it and didn’t care.

  ‘Hey,’ Libby went on after a pause, ‘I hope you don’t mind me interfering, but I couldn’t help noticing your pack looked a bit awkward before, when you were walking.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s OK. Just feels a whole lot heavier than I thought.’

  ‘See, I can see the marks on your shoulders where it’s going to start chafing you soon. Has anyone adjusted it for you?’

  ‘Adjusted it? No. I borrowed it from the school.’

  ‘Well, listen, stick it on for a sec. I’ll show you.’

  She stood up and pulled her pack off the ground, feeling her back protest when she slid it over her arms. The woman, Libby, stood her up straight and pulled the straps tighter at her chest.

  ‘I’ll just shorten these, and then we’ll see if it’s better when you adjust the hip belt too. That’s really where you want to carry the weight, so it fits your individual back length, here across the hipbones. Especially for us women. Otherwise if you’re carrying it all in your shoulders ... See, is that better?’

  It was. She felt the load of the pack shift a little, off the aching tendons of her neck.

  ‘Thanks a lot. I didn’t even think I needed to adjust anything.’

  ‘That’s OK. It’s a good pack, but even the good ones can sit wrongly and make you fatigued early.’

  ‘Hey, thanks.’ She slid the pack off again, gratified and surprised. ‘Um, would you like a rice cracker?’

  Libby blinked at her and laughed.

  ‘Thanks, Sophie, but no. Eating those things, it’s like chewing on a piece of polystyrene. I’ll stick with the cake. Hey Russell,’ she called to a guy setting up a fuel stove, ‘come and meet Sophie.’ He stood up and came over to them just as Rich approached her holding out a sandwich.

  She didn’t want to do introductions, so she let them all say hi to each other, and it was easier just to take the sandwich with a smile, and wrap it in a plastic bag when she dug in her pack for the rice cakes. Pretend to brush crumbs off her lap if anyone looked her way, like she’d already eaten it. One-and-a-half PowerBars, then when they got to the hut for the night she’d reward herself with some two-minute noodles. Reload just enough carbohydrate. And no trail mix, since she’d already eaten that fruitcake. An athlete’s physique. She felt for her phone and remembered again; a stumble of automatic reflex. Then she just lay there on the grass, gazing at the shifting acres of dark shadow that crawled restlessly over the mountain ranges all around them as the clouds scudded across the enormous sky allowing intermittent sun. The massive stony peaks stood bone-bare, like eroded islands left after some monumental flood had advanced and retreated, leaving only the hardest parts behind.

  She let Rich go first again as they came down the track from Cradle Cirque into Waterfall Valley — all of them descending now, thank God, so much easier — and he slowed down so that most of the other walkers disappeared ahead of them. He was talking to her about photography and how he’d got into it when he stopped a little way in front of her and lifted his hands into a frame in front of his face.

  ‘What?’ she said, halting behind him.

  ‘Just check that out, for instance. What a classic panorama shot,’ he replied, indicating the vista ahead of them. She looked. It reminded her of a couple of the photos she’d seen in the Photography Gallery that morning — wide and empty, the duckboard track winding down into the far windswept distance.

  ‘Just run past me again what I’m supposed to be looking at?’

  He grinned easily. ‘Just all that wilderness — the cushion plants either side of the track, the dead trees, that huge blank sky. Can you wait for a sec while I get out my wide-angle lens?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  She watched him. How certain his hands were, screwing and unscrewing, twisting dials, drawing lenses out of bags. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen her mother so ... intently focused on something, so confident in her movements. The beads, maybe, choosing stuff for necklaces. But the beads didn’t count; they weren’t like this.

  ‘See, this lens will accentuate the sense of space, it’ll stretch the horizontals and make you look really small in the landscape.’

  ‘Me?’ she said, blinking, feeling instantly flattered.

  ‘Sure. If you wouldn’t mind walking on ahead and I’ll take it when you get to a good distance. Let’s try it before someone else comes along and wrecks the shot.’

  She hesitated. ‘Are you sure you want me to be in it?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. You’ll look perfect. And I’ll send you a copy
too. It might even be in an exhibition, or in a magazine.’

  ‘Wow. OK.’ She started walking, then turned to glance doubtfully back at him. ‘It’ll just be my back, right?’

  He grinned again, made a gesture of submission.

  ‘Just your back. Nobody will know who you are,’ he promised.

  Thrilled, she tried to walk normally down the duckboard, waiting to be captured as the single human being in that landscape, walking steadily straight into it. From behind her came his voice, low with concentration.

  ‘Except me,’ she heard. ‘I’ll know it’s you.’

  Already special, to him. She could hear it. Her heart jumped nervous and slippery as a fish and she heard the shutter snap once, twice; sealing her there.

  Russell and Libby were already at Waterfall Valley Hut when they arrived.

  ‘We thought we’d try the luxury of a night in the hut,’ Russell said with a grin. Sophie took a quick look inside and wondered if he was joking. About twenty people seemed to be crammed in there, and the ceiling was hung with damp jackets and leggings like colourful piñatas at a party. Everybody was cooking on the tabletops, yakking away with each other, rolling out their sleeping bags on the bunks. But they weren’t bunks, really, she saw with dismay. There were no mattresses, even. They were just wooden platforms. Like sleeping on a storage shelf.

  And there were boots everywhere. Scanning the room, she sensed an unexpected atmosphere like a classroom before an exam; nervousness amongst all the camaraderie. People were a bit too loud, a bit too animated, or else they sat looking drawn and shocked, just gathering their composure and resting. They all must have felt the way she did, even the loud jovial ones, cracking jokes like they wanted to break the tension. They must have been conscious of the molten burning in their leg muscles, tightening and aching. Wondering uneasily about the next day, and what they’d got themselves into.