The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  She picked up the phone again to double-check the dial tone. Placed her mobile more squarely on the bench.

  It was still only 4.30 in the afternoon, here in this parallel world she’d been shoved into. He was the one who’d forced her here. Rich. Showing her how he could still take away, in a moment, everything she cared about. She should have listened to her instincts, and kept him away, stepped in front of Sophie like a shield, opened her mouth and breathed fire in his path.

  She gazed out the kitchen window, trying to keep her breathing slow and regular. There it was — her domain, her garden. She could hardly stand the sight of it now, so overgrown with weeds she hadn’t dealt with. When you had an organic garden you had to get out there and pull up every one of those weeds by hand, and she’d let it slide. You could hardly see the raised beds at all. It just looked like ... (don’t say cemetery, don’t think it) ... an abandoned lot. In summer the ground had been too hard and now autumn had brought some rain and the couch grass had colonised everything, rampant and triumphant. She stood there with her hands on the edge of the sink, blinking at the sight. She’d tried. She really had. She’d spent hours on her hands and knees, digging it up with the garden fork, scrabbling in the dirt for the runners, trying to curb it before it took off. Every year was the same, she thought with a sudden flaming sensation of futility; trying to clear the garden bed, heaping it painstakingly with her special compost, making hillocks like they suggested in the magazine, based on what the Hopi Indians did, or the Mayans or whatever. Planting everything out, weeding with all that resolve, putting out beer traps for slugs, avoiding using even pellets. And then you turned your back, you got caught up in other things, and when you glanced around again, look where you were. Up to your knees again in couch grass. Choking everything else, the whole garden bed just a thick green joke of suffocating weeds.

  She stood there hating the couch, glad of the diversion. She thought of the way it insinuated itself along, under the ground, the tendrils settling themselves like a web, just waiting for rain. The way it effortlessly strangled all her good intentions. It wasn’t as though she was a maniacal zealot about self-sufficiency or permaculture, she didn’t pretend that. She just wanted to look out at her garden and see something there that she’d planted and tended, not this, staring her in the face.

  And all these years she’d gritted her teeth and gone for the wheelbarrow and the fork again, breaking her back. People drove past, she thought, and sneered at the disaster she’d made of it, her feeble pathetic attempts to get it under control. Well, stuff it. She pulled the plug in the sink, picked up her mobile, found her car keys and drove, steaming with revenge, to the garden centre.

  She’d thought she’d just buy a bottle of weedkiller concentrate, not the backpack and the wand. She couldn’t stoop to that kind of destruction, could she? But the kit was on special and once she’d decided to make a stand, why not go all the way?

  And it was so easy, just wading through in your gumboots, pumping the mixture onto the clumps of couch, and the towering stalks of marshmallow weed, seeing the poison drift and bead like dew. She’d raze it all and start again, without the seeds lurking under the surface, ready to thwart her. You needed to fight fire with fire, Sandy thought savagely.

  She’d found some goggles in the shed and tied her scarf up over her mouth and nose. Coldly, efficiently, she wielded the wand to direct the spray exactly where she wanted it to go, right at the base of the plants. Not that she had to stick to that plan. She was the one with the Round-up, she could kill whatever she liked. Just had to point and pump, like a gun. Once she started in on this track of payback, she couldn’t stop herself. There was no bottom to her vengeance; she wanted to kill it all. What had she ever managed to grow, anyway? A few stunted snowpeas and misshapen zucchinis. She’d always been ready, if anyone asked, to explain that this garden bed was totally organic and had never been touched with even a quick sprinkling of chemical fertiliser, far less weedkiller. But nobody had ever asked. Nobody. Who cared?

  Well, she was dealing with it now, once and for all. She pumped another mist of Round-up, laying waste to it all, and marvelling at what an idiot she’d been, always trying to do things the hard way. Let it all die, she chanted, swinging with a wild napalming fury, let it soak into the ground and poison it, let it all burn and choke and wither away.

  ‘Ms Reynolds?’

  She nearly jumped out of her skin at the voice, staggering a little as she swung around. That ‘Ms’ — who called anyone ‘Ms’ anymore? A policeman and a policewoman stood there enquiringly, their shadows throwing elongated shapes up her brick pathway. Sandy knew she’d called them, knew she’d been the one to instigate this, but the thick navy polyester of their uniforms, the businesslike spick’n’span-ness of them, somehow, released a little extra surge of panic in her. The way their hips were hung with equipment, the shiny streamlined late-model squad car in the drive, made everything suddenly, soberly real.

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ she shouted through the muffled layers of scarf, hastily unwinding it from her face. Her hands trembled. She was confused too, when she took off the goggles and felt a little suck of pressure as they adhered to her face, and the surprising wetness that trickled down her cheeks.

  ‘You called about your daughter going missing?’

  ‘Yes, I did. Come in.’

  She put her thumbs in under the shoulder straps and unhooked the backpack of weedkiller from her back.

  ‘Wasn’t sure you’d heard us there. We heard you ... ah, singing, and thought you might have had your iPod on.’

  ‘No, no.’ She was blushing to the roots of her hair, she could feel it. She pulled off her gumboots and led them into the house.

  Whenever strangers came to her house like this, she was suddenly aware of how it smelled, as if she was entering it herself for the first time. It never happened otherwise, the house smelled of nothing. But now she could detect the sticky, sugary scent of the oil burner, the ground-in dust of the rugs, long-ago incense, burned toast.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘Sit down. Would you like tea?’

  ‘Do you have ordinary tea?’ asked the policewoman. ‘Just teabag tea?’

  ‘Sure.’

  They were so young. The guy like he was just out of school, the way he laboriously printed something at the top of the page in his notebook.

  ‘So just to get this clear,’ he said. ‘Your daughter’s gone away with her father?’

  ‘Yes. But she’s hardly seen him her whole life. I mean, this was meant to be, you know ...’ She stopped. She hadn’t thought this through.

  ‘How overdue are they?’

  ‘They should have finished a bushwalk yesterday and caught the plane this morning.’

  ‘Was there a custodial dispute?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that. He’s estranged from us. He rang and wanted to take her on this walk and she agreed. And she’s fifteen now, and I didn’t see ... I didn’t want ...’

  There was something tightly acrid in her throat, like she’d breathed in that weedkiller after all. She should have bought one of those masks. She took a breath and it snagged and hooked in her chest, noisy and gasping.

  ‘We need to be clear,’ the policeman was saying. ‘Do you have reason to fear an abduction?’

  She heard the kettle reach boiling point and click itself off. Her hands danced across the bench, jerking like something escaped, and now that the word was spoken, hanging in the air between them, she couldn’t stop her mind from skittering either, ricocheting through the stories of fathers driving their kids off bridges into rivers, shooting them all in the head on weekend access visits, berserk fathers parking the car and sticking a hose through the window as they all sat eating their takeaways, trusting him, and the noise was unsticking from her throat and keening through her mouth now, a toxic mist of it expelled with each racking gasp. The two cops sitting there waiting, embarrassed and solemn as the fear pumped and pumped out of her chest, buck
ling her like she was retching.

  ‘I’m not a bad person,’ she heard herself say, the voice like something on helium, squeezing through a tiny crevice in her locked throat. ‘I don’t know what he’s done. But he’s taken her.’

  ‘You sit down, Ms Reynolds,’ said the policeman, rising. ‘I’ll make the tea.’ It almost brought her undone, that ‘Ms’ again. Just that respect.

  Ian Millard looked at the satellite images on the meteorological website, grimacing.

  ‘Check out that cloud cover,’ he said to Mal.

  ‘It’s always the way, isn’t it. How bad, do you reckon?’

  ‘Probably heading towards total white-out.’

  ‘So we can’t go?’

  ‘We’ll have to sit tight. Same as the ground crew.’

  ‘But all hands on deck tomorrow just in case?’

  ‘Mate, it’s Cradle Mountain, who’s to know? We could get half a metre of snow yet. We’ve got Buckley’s.’

  Mal finished his coffee, scratched his clippered head. ‘Well, bags I not tell the mother that. She thinks we’re rolling out the whole circus.’

  ‘The thing is, they might be absolutely fine, that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to her. They’re barely overdue. Left Pine Valley Hut on Sunday, according to the log, still with tents and sleeping bags and food. Could have made it to Narcissus and forgotten to deregister, could have decided to sit out that storm. So say the meter’s on and we’ve got the chopper out and we’re running round like blue-arsed flies tomorrow, they’re liable to just walk out of there saying, “What’s the story? Can’t we spend an extra night or two without you guys having a hissy fit?”’

  ‘I love the way,’ said Mal, ‘they try to ring up on their mobiles demanding instant assistance because they’ve climbed up the side of a cliff somewhere. I mean, I imagine them, you know, hanging on with one hand, texting with the other.’

  Ian flipped through the ranger’s report. ‘The ranger headed in to Pine Valley Hut and spoke with a few of the walkers there,’ he said, reading. ‘In fact, it was a couple they’d met and been talking to who raised the alarm — said this guy told them he’d be spending one night in the Labyrinth and would see them at Narcissus the next day. Says that the girl was emphatic that they had to catch a plane Tuesday. So these two hung around at Narcissus — waited till the ferry left actually — then they walked back to Pine Valley, read the logbook, saw they hadn’t come through and notified the ranger.’

  ‘They walked all the way back? That’s the kind of citizen we need.’

  ‘The woman said the girl was doing her first big bushwalk.’

  ‘Aren’t they all.’

  ‘The guy said her father seemed pretty confident and had told him he was tired of how crowded the track was and was heading up into the Labyrinth.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. I reckon they’re not even lost, and we shouldn’t be busting our arses. Give ’em another day.’

  ‘The ranger says here he’ll try to go in this arvo, just a small ground team.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘That guy Paul Colegate? Used to be up at Mole Creek?’

  ‘Yep. Good bloke.’

  Ian looked at the weather pattern again, the cold front stirring in the south-west. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling, though. I reckon this is going to settle in.’

  Sandy hadn’t had tea with two sugars since before she gave it up for Lent when she was fourteen, but it was exactly what she needed.

  ‘Things may not be as bad as they seem,’ the policewoman was saying. ‘After all, they’re on a wilderness walk, and they’re only a day overdue, right? You’d be amazed how many people lose track of the time, then we all go into panic mode and they just walk calmly out the next day, can’t believe all the fuss.’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ she muttered. ‘Sorry, but there’s something else going on here. We there’s still a lot of conflict between us, over this. Him just stepping in now, trying to muscle in after ignoring Sophie her whole life.’

  The male cop was in the kitchen filling the kettle again, his face unreadable. As she watched he reached up and touched one of the bunches of herbs she had hanging in the window. They looked a bit faded and desiccated now. He picked thoughtfully at something in the dried stalks of oregano. A cobweb. She could see it from here. But hadn’t ever noticed it until this moment.

  ‘Did he make any threats to you? Even, you know, guarded comments?’

  ‘No. He was trying to keep it all pleasant for Sophie.’ Remembering herself at the airport, reaching up and hissing into his ear. His recoil.

  ‘And he’s an OK bloke, is he? I mean, I realise you’re not friendly, obviously, but he’s got his life in order, has he?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. According to him, anyway. He’s a legend in his own mind.’ She heard the sourness in her voice. It wouldn’t do to sound petty. Or bitter. ‘We’ve been perfectly happy without him in our lives,’ she added. ‘He just walked out on us. Sophie wasn’t even one year old. So you can see why I’d be a bit ...’

  She trailed off, making a complicit ironic grin and a circling gesture, but they just kept watching her, expressionless and polite.

  ‘A bit anti,’ she finished.

  A beam of sun hit the crystal in the living-room window and a prism of rainbow jittered across the tabletop. Awkward with the silence, she reached out and took the tiny bottle of Rescue Remedy from beside the fruit bowl and shook four drops onto her tongue. The young policewoman looked interested.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Rescue Remedy,’ she explained, relieved to change the subject. ‘It’s what I take instead of having to use paracetamol or ... well, any medication, really. It’s an all-natural calmative and stress reliever?’ She heard the rising inflection in her voice, placatory and eager. ‘For shock and emotional upset,’ she added, more firmly, ‘like now.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘Well, it’s flower essences. Distilled to their, um, essences.’

  The policeman came back over to the table, picked up the bottle and read the label.

  ‘So it’s — what? — in an alcohol base?’

  Sandy sipped her tea and felt that infuriating piece of grit lodged in the glaze on the mug drag on the inside of her upper lip.

  ‘You just take four drops. It gives you centering energy.’ She glanced at their faces. ‘Nobody’s really sure how it works. But it sure is better than taking some drug full of, you know, chemicals, made by some big pharmaceutical company ...’ She was losing them, she could tell by their polite attentiveness.

  ‘And that cures a headache, does it?’

  ‘Not a headache, no,’ she answered. ‘Symptoms of shock.’

  ‘But how, exactly? If you don’t mind me asking.’ He placed the bottle back on the table and she picked it up again.

  ‘It’s flowers,’ she said again, brandishing it, feeling annoyed. ‘Homeopathics.’

  There was a short silence. She’d ring her friends and break the news as soon as the police left, she told herself. Brace herself and ring her mother too.

  ‘Ms Reynolds ...’ said the woman, a bit more briskly.

  ‘Sandy.’

  ‘Sandy, do you have a recent photo of Sophie we could take to make up a bulletin for the police in Tassie? I’m thinking, he could have walked out of the national park with her, caught the ferry from the lake at the end of the track and be somewhere else by now. If the ferry operator can ID them, that helps us focus our search away from the park itself. I mean, then we’d know they weren’t just temporarily disoriented.’

  She didn’t want to open the drawer to the phone table. Inside that drawer was the carved elephant box and last time she’d rolled a joint (which was months ago, Christmas, at least) she couldn’t remember if she’d left some in the bag and just shoved it back into this drawer or closed it safely into the elephant box. And in that drawer, she was almost certain, was Sophie’s last set of school photos.

  ‘Hang on,’ s
he said, and rose. She steeled herself and went into Sophie’s room, just trying to keep her mind blank and calm, and retrieved a photo from the pin-board over the desk — Sophie and two friends on the jetty by the dam at Rachel’s place just a couple of months ago. She passed it to the policewoman.

  ‘Which one is she?’

  ‘The one in the black t-shirt. Her hair’s not really that dark. She dyes it.’

  ‘And how tall is she?’ The policewoman put the photo down on the table, glanced up at her with a frown.

  ‘Ah — five foot eight, I think. Whatever that is in metric — I can never get my head around it. A hundred and ... something.’ She shrugged with an apologetic smile, her eyes on the photo. The three pale teenage bodies looked so etoliated from this angle, angular and shadowed in the sun glaring off the water.

  ‘What does she weigh, Sandy?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have a clue. Sorry.’

  And the woman was looking up at her again now, with an expression that made Sandy stop.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Well, she looks pretty thin. Has she recently been sick? In this photo, I mean.’

  ‘What?’ Sandy said again. A flash of light from the crystal slid across the woman’s face on the other side of the table. The expression concerned, tactful.

  No, that wasn’t it. Sympathetic. Grave.

  Sandy’s hand reached for the drawer handle on the phone table, and jerked it open heedlessly, fingers scrabbling for the plastic bag with the school photos inside, the head-and-shoulders shots of Sophie, the ones she’d complained about buying, saying can’t you smile in these? They cost me twenty-seven bucks…

  The policewoman tapped the other photo again. ‘Sandy?’

  I am not a bad person, she repeated to herself, eyes back on the dam photo now, feeling something shiver and cave a little, something ahead of her under the surface she couldn’t see. ‘What do you mean?’