The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  Thirteen

  Questioning your spirit guide, read Sandy. Greet your guide with whatever greeting you choose. Telepathic communication with spirit is known as clairaudience. When you receive an answer, you may feel a physical sensation such as pressure on the top of your head. This is the opening of the crown chakra. Ask your question, then pause. Listen to your thoughts. Connect with the answer. Imagine your frequency connecting with spirit. There is no hurry! Spirit has no timetable.

  She put her finger on the page and closed the book on her lap. What questions did she want to ask? She’d snuck a glance at some following pages and thought she might skip the metaphysical existence questions, but nevertheless what she’d skimmed still nagged her, raising more confusion in her mind than anything. Was her spirit guide only with her in this incarnation? What was their connection? And, perhaps more confusingly, had she ever been the spirit guide’s spirit guide while it lived on the earth plane?

  No, keep it simple. Personal spiritual questions.

  ‘Is my karma to be just a parental caretaker?’ she thought. She paused. No answer. Well, obviously it wasn’t going to be as simple as that — it wasn’t like making a bloody phone call; you’d need to learn how to listen for that inner voice. She struggled again to empty her mind of expectation, of outcome, of second-guessing a desired response. ‘Do I owe anybody a karmic debt?’

  It wasn’t her tentative expectation scaring away her spirit guide, she thought impatiently. It was the spectre of Janet, hovering there on the edge of her consciousness like a disapproving, silver-haired bouncer, her arms folded and her expression that of a woman whose patience has been tried beyond endurance. Her mother, sticking her insistent foot in the door of everything she tried to do. Now that vision unfolded her arms and shook her head sorrowfully. Sandy, she said, far be it from me to interfere, but do you think your father and I scrimped and saved to put you through private school for this?

  ‘That’s it?’ the American woman said doubtfully, looking bemused. ‘That’s the tree we’ve been hearing so much about?’

  A knot of people stood around the sparse little stand of myrtle beech, with its small pleated leaves turning yellow. Rich had heard that particular tone of voice so many times on so many trips; its polite disappointment, condescendingly concealed but not quite enough.

  ‘I mean, it’s pretty and everything, I guess,’ she went on, unscrewing her water bottle. ‘But hey, the way everyone’s been carrying on I was expecting ... I don’t know, a beech forest or something, colours like in fall. This one’s, well, it’s like a bonsai, or something. I have to admit, I’m a little underwhelmed.’

  There was a short pause as they gazed at the tree, wondering if it was worth a photo. Wondering, he thought, if there was a better thicket up ahead, something more in keeping with their expectations. The tree did look pretty spindly, he had to admit. But her whiny voice, as if they all owed her an apology!

  ‘What’s the proper name for it again?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Fagus. And it goes red, eventually,’ someone else said.

  ‘It’s not the size of it. It’s the fact that it’s the only naturally occurring deciduous tree that’s found here. It’s not as spectacular as all those maple and oak forests in North America.’ That was Russell, of course, the insufferable voice of reason. ‘But further up, into the Du Cane Ranges, it’s amazing when you come across forests of it, cloaking all the hills as far as you can see.’

  The woman looked doubtful, like he was a spruiker trying to sell her something.

  Rich remembered standing in front of the Mona Lisa once in the Louvre, and hearing that exact same tone — one tourist turning to her friend, away from the crowd clustered permanently around the painting, and whispering in a disgruntled hiss, ‘Well, I don’t think she’s very attractive.’

  ‘It actually grows in thickets,’ Russell was saying, ‘and it’s incredibly strong and wiry so it can bear the weight of a really heavy snowfall without snapping. The boughs just bend and the snow slides off …’

  Rich tuned him out, remembering another time, the crowd around the newly arrived pandas at a zoo, everyone clutching their souvenir toy pandas and panda key rings and panda baseball caps, and when the real animal came shuffling out into the enclosure, someone near him said with doubtful distaste, ‘It’s kind of dirty, isn’t it?’

  And then last night, one of the German tourists had said confidingly to him, with that same tone of aggrieved disappointment, that he didn’t see why there couldn’t be a permanent hut warden stationed at each hut, keeping the stove stoked up for walkers and ready to go out looking for people who didn’t return from their daytrips at the time they’d estimated. Staff, Rich thought disgustedly. That’s what they want — staff on hand to ensure their every need is met, pull them out of any potential scrape as they play at roughing it, having their wilderness experience, floodlights and gravel paths guiding the way to each tent. Pandas washed and brushed clean like big cuddly toys. Trees that guaranteed to impress even the most jaded Bostonian. Sherpas bringing you a morning latte on the slopes of Everest.

  ‘I think it’s magnificent,’ he said in a low voice to the Americans, moving behind them. ‘It demands we experience the landscape on its own terms, not with our own competitive, mine’s-bigger Western mindset. It’s a Zen thing.’

  That, he was pleased to note, put a flicker of doubt on their faces. That’s all it needed, he thought with savage amusement; lodging the idea in there that maybe they’d failed, maybe they’d missed the point, maybe the problem was them.

  How can I rekindle my passion?

  Well. Now she was at the pointy end of it, alright. Not romantic passion, she had sort of given up hope of that. But her old self, the one who had cared so passionately. The ferocious way things seemed to matter, and her brimming, certain heart, capable of containing it all. Is that what she’d lost? She stood up and went outside, sitting on a bench by the water feature, telling herself she just needed some fresh air. A nudge at her knee made her open her eyes to see a proffered box of tissues.

  ‘Thanks. Sorry.’ She kept trying to straighten her back, like those ramrod women in the front row, who must have done yoga every day, but she slumped instead, sighing.

  ‘If we didn’t feel pain we wouldn’t notice life passing,’ said the facilitator.

  Sandy blew her nose. ‘I know that. I just want to know where it’s all gone. All that love and certainty, you know what I mean?’

  She stole a glance at the facilitator as she spoke, who nodded. Sandy didn’t believe her, though. She’d be, what? Thirty-three? What would she know about losing anything?

  ‘The time I’m thinking about,’ she went on, wiping her eyes, ‘we all sang together, all held hands, it was like the strongest bond imaginable, like our hearts were going to burst with it.’

  ‘The human will is full of the richness of existence, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. What do you do, when you’ve experienced that? What do you do for the rest of your life?’

  The facilitator tilted her chin pensively. She looked, Sandy thought, like one of those prefects at school, about to win a spelling bee.

  ‘Well, we use it as spiritual insight. We gather it to us as our enlightenment.’

  Sandy sniffed, studied the balled-up tissue in her hands. ‘Enlightenment? See, I’ve always thought that when you used that term, I mean, in a Buddhist sense, you’re talking about nirvana, stepping off the wheel of existence onto another plane.’

  ‘No, I’m talking about personal, day-to-day enlightenment.’

  Everything got so watered down here, she thought with a sudden flash of clear-eyed melancholy, everything refashioned from ancient traditions into an opportunity for personal development.

  ‘How are you progressing with your spirit guide?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘What about visualising your totem animal?’

  Sandy gave a bleak, watery smile. ‘Well, I’ve been trying.�
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  ‘Because that may help. It may help to understand that you have a companion totem guide with you now, and that it’s always been there, assisting you.’

  ‘Yes, I bought the medicine tarot cards; I did read about it. But I sort of wish I’d signed up just for the workshops with the Goddess study, because I’d only just begun to make progress there I think, just scratching the surface. There’s just so much to absorb and try to understand in a few short days.’

  The facilitator smiled encouragingly at her. ‘It’s many paths all to the same well of wisdom, whatever tools we use on our quest.’ Her long elegant hands described a sinuous path in the air.

  ‘Yes, that’s a lovely idea.’ What was she doing, sucking up to this woman?

  ‘After all, that’s why we’re called Mandala, because that’s what a mandala is — the Sanskrit word contains meanings for both circle and completion — a microcosm of the divine power of oneness in the universe.’

  ‘Yeah, um ... thanks. I did read that. It’s just that my questions all seem to be about loss, and ageing, and trying to find that passion again. I don’t mean falling in love, necessarily, but ...’

  The facilitator took Sandy’s hand in both of hers. ‘Wait till the sweat-lodge ceremony. A lot of seekers find it’s almost like a vision quest, doing that ceremony, and those missing answers appear to them out of the blue. As if the discipline needed to seek and go on seeking is the test itself.’

  Sandy pushed the ball of tissues into her pocket and tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘OK,’ she said, doubtfully.

  The facilitator smiled, nodding her head. ‘Now back to that cushion,’ she said earnestly, pointing into the meditation hall, ‘and back to work.’

  That’s not work, Sandy heard Janet’s voice mutter as she stood up. That’s sitting on your behind on a cushion.

  There was plenty of fagus now, enough to satisfy every tourist, Rich thought. All you had to do was walk down from the hut to the cascading creek and there it was, stretching away up the valley, some of it red as a spray of arterial blood. He’d taken some good shots of the Alpine Yellow gum trees on the way, then dumped his stuff in the hut, which was already like a sauna redolent with the smell of kerosene, wet wool and socks. He’d put his tent up later — he wanted some more shots.

  Sophie had come down with him, and was watching him. Good. He liked the thought of her seeing him doing something he knew he was absolutely competent at. Letting her see that getting something right takes time. He looked through the viewfinder — the shining pebbles were all good, the exposure was perfect. If he could just wait until this gust of wind shifted the cloud cover and gave him that great silvery light on their wet surfaces again, he’d have the shot in the bag, but it was missing something. He needed a tiny focus in the middle, that’s what Dombrovskis’s pictures always had, that special little something that lifted them out of the ordinary. A pebble covered with red lichen, for example, or a little orange leaf caught on a twig amongst all that shining grey and white. He had often wondered if such a perfect composition could have been totally natural. It must have been. He just couldn’t picture the great man stomping down the beach, looking for a scarlet starfish to place just so, or splashing an alpine gum with water out of his drinking bottle to make those colours more intense.

  The depth of field he wanted, you just couldn’t get that with these new digital cameras, he was convinced. They were for happy snappers, really. Dombrovskis had used his huge-format camera, lugging it with his tripod through days of wilderness, and you could tell. Those frosty leaves, the focus going on forever, those beads of dew and granules of sand and ice. He’d spent many hours studying those photos. Well, you couldn’t help it — they got jammed into your field of vision every direction you looked — every souvenir shop and wilderness shop and bookshop and market stall had them reproduced on racks in all their glory. Nobody else came close.

  ‘What are you taking?’ Sophie’s voice, clear over the sound of the water.

  ‘Just some leaves. Some studies in contrast and colour.’

  He’d so nearly got it, that time. On the river.

  Didn’t want to think about it. Unbearable to think about it.

  Stop. But it was as if some unseen force, sensing weakness, rolled the footage before him; its grainy, damning evidence.

  The morning at Warner’s Landing when he and his affinity group had been arrested, Rich had got up early. Once they were arrested, that would be it. Back to Hobart, probably, and no more chances here on the river, unless they defied their bail conditions and risked a heavier sentence. Today if the bulldozer arrived it would be the moment they’d been preparing for during all those training workshops.

  He’d bush-bashed his way carefully down to the bank with his camera, and had seen the shot of his life. You only got one or two chances like that in your career as a photographer, Rich believed, and you had to be ready there and then in that instant: correct aperture, correct focus, tripod at hand if you needed it, the certainty of your instinct getting everything right.

  That morning on the banks of the Franklin, Rich felt his defining moment arrive like machinery clicking smoothly into place. Strung over the bank from some flowering dogwood was a spiderweb and through its sparkling chains of dew the river spilled dreamily, purling the surface, morning mist rising from it. He saw the frame, how it had to be, snapped open the camera case and grabbed the camera. He sank down on one knee, never taking his eyes off that web. The light struck the water at just the angle he needed to see the sepia tint of submerged logs under there, and the spectrum of greens that striped through his viewfinder when he raised the camera to his face made him see even how he would mount this, the gloss of the card. Dombrovskis had taken a photo a year or two before that had been reproduced a million times, at least, on the No Dams campaign. It showed Rock Island Bend, and he’d kept the aperture open so that the water streaming around the rocks took on the texture of cloud swirling through an Arcadia, and wherever Rich went he saw that image, on posters, on placards, in mail-outs and on postcards. That image was going to win them the election, win them the whole fight.

  Well, here was another Rock Island Bend, he was certain. Same iconic essence of everything they were trying to save.

  He focused, keeping his hands still, breathing deeply at the rippling perfection of it, and his finger pressed down and he knew he had it. He had it, but he couldn’t leave it, he’d heard too many stories about that kind of overconfidence, now was the time to stay calm, wind on, and take another one, just to be sure. Sunlight touched the fronds of tree ferns, that primordial light filtered and shifted, and Rich stood to take one last shot and the edge of his boot skidded off a moss-slimed tree root and juddered six inches down the muddy incline. His foot hung over space, over water, over nothing. Suspended.

  The gulping jolt of it lasted forever, as something in him made him save himself, and instinctively lurch one way instead of another into caving wet ferns, staggering against them in an ungainly, outstretched sprawl.

  Had he let himself fall into the river, he might have been able to keep his arms raised and his camera dry. Instead, he clung to the bank, grabbing at grass with his free hand, clawing it with blind self-preservation, and his hand holding the camera arched backwards out over the water. The camera had fallen sideways from his fingers. And then, Jesus, that knifing sound of it hitting the surface, like a fish escaping a hook and dropping back into the deep. A kind of whimper had come out of him as he gathered the strap around his wrist and jerked it free.

  That was the moment that never left him, seeing the camera coming up dripping out of the water. His old Olympus, which had taken him faithfully through a hundred rolls of film in Nepal, Tibet and India, beaded with icy river water in South-West Tasmania, totally ruined, and nausea squeezing behind his ribs so he just wanted to kneel there and vomit.

  No other picture he’d ever taken mattered compared to the one he’d just lost.

  His own Rock Island Be
nd, the one that could have been the cover of Nature, his own little precious, unrepeatable negative that would make his name. And only he had seen it. Only him. The proof of his talent, his vision, and the loss of it something he’d have to carry now forever, his own private little scarred burden.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ She was still sitting on a rock nearby, swinging her long legs, oblivious. He had to hold the breath in his throat to keep his voice light, lift his sunken head. The painkiller moved like sludge in his veins.

  ‘Oh, just for the cloud cover to move. Pick out these shadows.’

  His chest. He remembered how it had felt full of curing, hardening cement as he took off the bayonet lens and saw moisture already beading behind the glass. The river condensing inside his camera, like it got inside everything, curling the pages of your diary with furry damp, rotting your shoes, peeling the skin between your toes, slicking the tent with wetness, till you were practically growing mould out here, the whole riverbank swollen with rot and mist and black clammy coldness like a bloody grave. It had to own everything, it couldn’t leave anything alone.

  He’d climbed back to his tent, laid the camera lens and body carefully on his towel in some wild unlikely hope it would be alright, and instead of lying there howling, which was how he felt, he’d numbly forced himself to get dressed ready for the action. It was only 7 a.m., and someone in charge of radio communications was going to give them the word if the dozer actually docked at Warner’s Landing and he’d have to have all his stuff packed ready for someone else to take it out for him by then. He listened to the camp stirring around him, getting breakfast, talking in low voices, checking he was awake, while all the time he couldn’t drag his eyes from his camera, imagining the wrecked roll in there, glutted and sticking to itself, destroyed. Once he pressed the shutter and heard a sluggish calibration, and when he applied tentative pressure on the arm turning the rewind spool it sounded like teeth breaking on stones in there. The failure burning him like a coal.