The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘Exactly the same,’ she added, and twisted the strands and locks of hair together in her hand. A helix.

  ‘It’s like a nest,’ she said. ‘I might leave it here.’

  ‘Why not?’ He was standing with his hand shading his eyes now, scanning the rocks on the horizon. They hadn’t seen a cairn for a while.

  ‘Wild birds might use it.’

  ‘They might, yeah.’

  All the hills looking the same now.

  She curled the hair into a sheltered hollow on the rock. After a minute she reached up to her eyebrow and found the screw for the stud there, unscrewed it and took it out. She remembered the expression on Sandy’s face when she’d come home with it, the way she’d bitten her lip. It was annoying her anyway, rubbing against the snug fit of her hat on her forehead. She laid it down on top of the hair. How dead and black hers looked, actually, dulled with chemicals.

  She shook her head experimentally, surprised by the absence of hair scratchily slipping across her shoulders and neck. Its weightiness was gone. She pushed the fringe away from its customary spot resting against her cheekbone, and it was like lifting a blind, not having a familiar dark lock of it to curtain her right eye.

  She looked up to see Rich watching her, his face unreadable, before he smiled brightly.

  ‘Let’s find a good spot to get the tents up, and get one of the stoves on and cook up some dinner,’ he said. ‘Before it gets dark. Because I guarantee it’s going to be black as Hades up here, once that light fades.’

  He woke at 5 a.m., lightheaded with anxiety. The best thing to do would be pack up and leave as early as possible to retrace their steps, reorient themselves by yesterday’s lake and make it that way back to Pine Valley Hut. Then rejoin the trail, and follow it down to Narcissus, and they’d be out of there. Safe on the afternoon ferry, then a bus up to Launceston, airport in the morning, and Rich would take out a lottery ticket and light a candle to the patron saint of narrow escapes, whoever he was. All normalised, all managed and pretending you meant it. He just had to concentrate, now. Swallow two of the last few precious blue tablets to take his mind off his foot, which felt, after yesterday’s extra climbing, as though someone had taken to it with a hacksaw in the night. Forget the roiling bilge of bile he was denying in his gut.

  They were moving by 7.30, traversing a low, sinewy forest of some flowering scrub plant, peppery with fresh scent, and then walked up another incline across boulders and cushion grasses. The ground was dotted with little pockets of water, the wind changing direction and blowing them along now, rippling the surface sporadically of the tarns they passed.

  That stand of dead white trees clumped with the heath rising behind them.

  Another tarn.

  Another one.

  Pale cloud, a flat fillet of it, obscuring the horizon to the north and east. Wait, no. Think. The west and south.

  East and south, yes, but the wind had shifted around again and was edging them along the exposed headland towards another stand of bent white trees rising out of the thigh-high scrub of heath and bushes. Then an empty patch.

  A profusion of more cushion grass and bare rock.

  Another tarn.

  ‘We’ve been here.’ Sophie’s voice. He’d been waiting for it. His skin prickled.

  ‘Yeah, I know. We just lost our bearings for a minute there. This is better though. There’ll be another cairn soon to show us we’re on the right track.’

  There was something appalling about the trusting way she was following him, putting it all into his hands like this. Her footfalls behind him, with their faith in him, the way she wasn’t watching that smear of cloud blotting itself around three horizons now, cloud that curled itself up into a heavy diffuse blankness so that he gave up wondering which direction the Acropolis was in, and those tarns, all identical, silvery like they were filled with mercury, the surfaces wrinkling and flattening in the intermittent wind.

  Thousands of tarns, literally. The New Zealanders had told him that. But here, this basin of the Labyrinth itself, he was certain they’d told him it was only eight kilometres long, and dozens of walkers a day set off on this track. Dozens, easy. They’d be surrounding them soon enough. That guy Paul, probably, striding around with his digital camera. He craned ahead, his eyes trying to pick out the brightness of a Goretex jacket or the fluoro glow of a distant tent.

  ‘We just have to get back to that lake, where we stopped first yesterday, then it’ll be clear all the way out. We’ve still got plenty of time.’

  ‘OK,’ she said doubtfully. But trusting him. Not scared, because she thought he’d take care of her. Believed him. He heard her give a little cough, then sniff, her nose running with the chill air, and it gave him almost a physical stab of anxiety to step back from this and picture them both, him leading her across this vast landscape of repeated landmarks duplicating themselves slyly in every direction into infinity, dampness beginning to settle and everything around them so huge and ancient and merciless, and here was his girl following him, cold and tired, trudging after him believing he’d make her safe.

  Sandy heard birdsong and burbling water, soothing sounds of the rainforest.

  ‘Welcome,’ said the masseuse, beaming at her.

  ‘Gosh, it’s so warm in here.’

  ‘Too warm? I can just turn down the thermostat.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ She smiled brightly. These young girls with their thin thighs and lycra tops, didn’t they realise how it felt to be stripping off in your mid-forties?

  ‘You’re here for the full holistic bodywork rejuvenation, aren’t you, Sandy?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Feeling absurdly guilty now. Vain and silly.

  ‘A total body pamper. Wonderful. Well, first we have a full-body exfoliation scrub with pure marine salts, cold-pressed grapeseed oil, lime, ginger and lemongrass. That prepares the body to detox.’

  ‘OK. Great.’ Sounded more like something you marinated a fish in.

  ‘Pop up on the table for me, Cindy.’

  ‘It’s Sandy.’

  ‘Oh, right. Sorry. Heated towel?’

  They were high now, buffeted with blustery cold wind, views in all directions of dolorite, silvery trees, anonymous summits. If we just stay here, he thought with that same smothered, fluttering panic, someone’s sure to come along. A view like this. But when he glanced reflexively to the horizon he saw a new line of cloud lying swollen and dark as dirty wet newsprint, the charcoal grey soaking through like running ink. Wind licked along the exposed surface they stood on, heavy with moisture, scudding and rippling like waves.

  The clouds were moving too, with a speed that made his jaw drop. He swore to himself. It was changing before their eyes, closing in, coming down on them like early darkness. The gunmetal cold, pressing the air flat, and the two of them vulnerable as insects on this huge cold-cracked surface.

  Sophie oblivious, crouching looking at something on a rock, for godsakes, still thinking he had things under control. Rich shuddered, fumbling hastily for the straps of his pack. Just couldn’t be countenanced now, the knowledge that they’d never make Narcissus in time even if by some miracle he could get his bearings again, and every step after that going awry, the ferry and the bus and the shuttle and the plane all pulling away without them, like shunting cars slamming one after another in a train wreck, and, Jesus, you couldn’t do a damn thing without having it all blow up in your face, couldn’t even calm down and think because you were so hamstrung by other people and their demands on you.

  And then he stopped worrying about those missed connections. Why was he even wasting time berating himself with them, he thought, when he could see what was right there on the horizon boiling towards him? Because, Christ, he could smell that wind and what was in it: frozen sleet and melted icecaps and dank crystallised bog, ready to saturate them, and here it came like a black iceberg, a great gout of bruise-coloured cloud, pulled by some relentless winching tide straight into his path. Then Sophie was grabbing
his arm, shouting in the wind, her eyes wide.

  ‘Holy crap!’

  ‘We have to get down into some shelter, OK? We’re totally exposed up here,’ he yelled back as he pointed down through the boulders. ‘We’ll get off this rise and find a place to get a tent up, stay sheltered. See how fast it’s moving? It might even be snow.’

  ‘This time of year?’

  ‘Yep, bloody oath. Let’s get going.’

  She slid her arms hastily through the straps of her pack, heaved it up and settled it on her hips, her face incredulous. Together they began to clamber downhill, keeping their footing by grabbing rocks and setting their skidding boots sideways into the descent, gravel and stones tipping and rolling down with them. His ankle humming one pure note of pain, and every plunging step sending his heart into his throat.

  She felt the frigid wind lessen as they scrambled down the cliff, but she could hear it shaking the trees behind and above them, its hissing voice. She put out her hands and swung herself between two crooked trees that flexed with her weight, thought suddenly about the whole tough and stunted landscape here battening down the hatches ready for the next onslaught, tightening its grip and hanging on, growing a tenacious inch a year. She was slipping and scrambling, her chin tucked in hard and knees jarring all the way down, and she thought of how she’d turned her nose up at the hard bunk-bed platforms in the huts, and the coal and gas fires that had been burning, and the meals she’d left half finished.

  Then they were down, lurching over shale and tussocks, and Rich was pulling her into a rocky spot sheltered by mean little shrubs — impossible, really, to imagine how these stalky, scratchy little bushes would ever protect them from anything — and there was nothing for it but to push her icicle fingers inside her clothes, in under her arms, to try to warm them enough to fumble open the zips and fasteners on her pack. In there was nothing but a few laughable folded layers of coated plastic that somehow were meant to shelter them from this storm, rolling in to drown them.

  ‘Get your tent out,’ Rich shouted. ‘I’ll set up mine as an extra roof ’, and she heard how much he had to raise his voice against the rising wind and saw him pause uncertainly then start hauling some stones into a circle, pushing them into place with his boot as if he was going to make a fire in contravention of all the park bylaws. Then he stopped that too and began unzipping his pack, digging down the side and tugging out his waterproof jacket which billowed as he shook it out, gesturing for her to grab hers and do the same. Then she came out of her trance as the same gust of wind caught the tent fly she was unrolling and snapped it hard as a whip into her chest and the first hard pellets of hail struck her naked neck, stinging the skin like a needle stippling a design.

  ‘We believe in letting the earth’s natural powers do the work of opening the energy centres of the body,’ murmured the masseuse. ‘The scrub works to slough away the dead cells, extracting toxins and impurities. Assisting in the release of chronic pain and stress and realigning mind, body and soul.’

  ‘Great.’ Brochure-talk, thought Sandy. She began to fight against a deep tranquil doze as the massage began. She really should stay awake and respond. But the disembodied voice began to fragment as she let her concentration dissolve, until it sounded like a waitress reciting the menu at a dreamlike restaurant.

  Wildflower essence therapeutic oils. Pure shea nut butter. Ginger and apricot kernel. A wrap of Dead Sea rich mineral clay blended with wild Canadian seaweed extracts and hemp oil. And to finish, a wattle husk body polish.

  ‘You must feel like an entirely new woman,’ the smiling masseuse said to her as she left, wobbly with pampering. Why not? she thought, feeling her skin tight and tingling all over. Experts say we replace every cell in a seven-year cycle, so we weren’t the same physical person at all we’d been before. Why shouldn’t that process be hastened by holistic rejuvenation, so that an entirely new skin could be revealed? Replenished. Recreated. Reinvented. Starting afresh, and sloughing off the old cells. She’d always wondered how to pronounce that word.

  Seventeen

  When he felt the initial fury of the rain easing he crawled out of Sophie’s sagging tent and scouted around the base of the outcrop for dry wood. He wanted it to get cold; cold was good, because that might clear the cloud and then in the morning he could try to reorient himself from the mountain ranges again and at least know what direction they were facing. If he could just look at the sun, and watch its path across the sky, he told himself, he’d be able to sort it out. But then his eye was caught by something that hung shredded on some brambly shrub nearby. Some fabric, zippered, flapping thing — torn to pieces. His tent, or what was left of it.

  Impossible. He’d opened the bag and got the tent-fly out, the string, the bloody extra bits of string. There’d been a wind howling that knocked your thoughts straight out of your head. He’d stuffed the tent back into his pack, he was sure he had. He’d tucked it hastily in there, conscious of keeping it dry. He would swear on a stack of bibles. But here it was, buggered completely, hanging off a tree like a wrecked kite.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  It was drizzling with steady rain now, the dim sky still crammed with serrated banks of white like the flesh of a fish, like smeared, dense forkfuls of mashed potato, and the ground all around him was fading from its orange-brown hues into monochrome. There was wood he could have dragged back, but it was saturated, glistening with moisture. He should have thought of wood first, when he’d seen the storm coming, just grabbed whatever he could find and shoved it somewhere sheltered. Or at least collected some armfuls of dry kindling together as a first priority. But then that rain, like a typhoon, had bucketed down; he’d never seen anything like it. Like being in a black hole under a waterfall, and he’d run to help Sophie, hammering in tent pegs with a stone, desperately hoping to keep sheltered if they pressed themselves in under the rocky overhang above them.

  He’d got her tent up, billowing and ballooning as if it was about to take off, and tied his own fly as best he could, corner to corner, over the top. And he’d got her safe inside, pushed the packs in after her into the vestibule. Finally he’d crawled in too, pulling dry clothes out of the packs, paranoid about taking out the sleeping bags in case they got saturated. He didn’t want to think about what they’d do if that happened. Just reassured Sophie, tried to keep it light.

  He couldn’t believe the turn things had taken.

  But now here he was, the light fading so fast he actually felt scared, no dry wood anywhere, and the ferry would probably be pulling up to the dock now and from every moment here on, he was accountable, he was in overtime and would be called to explain. Had to find the track out tomorrow. Get to a phone.

  And about five kilometres away, it couldn’t be more — this was the irony that really killed him — the next wave of walkers would have the stove going in the Pine Valley Hut and he could’ve been unrolling his sleeping mat out on one of those bunk beds right now. Borrowing a book, even.

  His boots were heavy as hooves. When he stopped and inspected them he saw they were huge with clinging, compacted mud. He stopped to kick each heel hard against some rock to dislodge it, and felt a spasm of excruciating heat jolt up his calf when he knocked his blister. It had almost kept him company, that raw, throbbing heel. He’d felt every heartbeat echoed in it, hammering rhythmically with tightly stretched pain, a pulsing SOS. It had looked a bit better, back at Windy Ridge, but it was a lot worse now.

  He limped back to the tent. It was dry inside and holding out OK, and she was in her sleeping bag, sitting staring out at the drenched, glistening valley even though it was almost too dark to see it now, hugging her knees.

  He switched on his torch and unfolded the brochure from his pocket, taking a deep breath.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That took us a bit by surprise, didn’t it?’

  How ridiculous he sounded, like a moronic officer jumping back down into the trenches, full of fake bonhomie. And she gave him a look too, just like
those shell-shocked tommies must have to their commanding officer.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘all I need to do is reorient myself by the peaks of the Acropolis and the Parthenon — these two mountains on the map — and we can start walking out through this valley, and look, the Pine Valley Hut is right there.’ His finger traced a thin line on the tourist map, a sketchy mark fine as a thread.

  ‘I can’t believe this is the only map we’ve got,’ she said, her voice tight now.

  ‘Yeah, in retrospect we probably should have picked up another one. Paid the ten bucks.’ He tried for a rueful grin, but she gave him that withering look again. He tried harder.

  ‘You know, what we should have bought is a pack of cards. You know that joke, about the cards? In an emergency all you have to do is start laying out a hand of patience, and within five minutes no matter how many thousands of miles you are from civilisation someone will be leaning over your shoulder pointing and saying, “Red nine on black ten!”’

  The forced levity was almost evaporated in him, shrivelled into something wooden and hard that knocked in his throat.

  She shut her eyes and laid her head on her knees.

  ‘This is where that walker went missing,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘That young woman — did you see that plaque in the Pine Valley Hut? They’ve never found her body. She just vanished off the face of the earth. Out here, exactly where we’re lost now.’

  He sat back, stretching his aching leg in front of him, mustering energy. ‘Nothing to panic about. Nobody can help a storm, it makes everyone change their plans. It rains seven days out of ten here, Russell told me. We’ll just be a day late. Everyone will be. There’ll be another ferry.’

  She would see it in a second, he thought desperately, the anxiety soaking through him, the brittle confidence. See straight through him.

  And here came her voice.

  ‘So where exactly are we, on this map?’

  He took his time, moving the flashlight’s beam over the page, letting his finger hover.