The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  She felt it like a tremor underfoot, as she gazed at the image of her daughter, a time-and-place stumble as if she’d been startled awake, sitting here propped, unaccountably, in a chair. Like a sleepwalker, blinking and bewildered, who’d been asleep for a long, long time.

  Twenty

  It was incredible, Sophie thought, how suddenly everything had disappeared, the way it had rolled out like a special effect. On the plane she’d wondered how it would feel to slip down into the thick piled meringue of clouds below them; well, now she knew. In Ayresville they sometimes had foggy mornings, but you could feel it start thinning when the sun got stronger and the vapour would rise and tear and you’d see the familiar landmarks again — the cars on the street, rooflines of houses, trees appearing slowly out of the whiteness, all gathering detail and colour and a reassuring density.

  Not here. Nothing moved, no sun burned through, although it wasn’t cold, exactly. When you breathed in you could taste the cloud itself, tainted like old ice-blocks out of the freezer. She knew she was keeping her brain busy with trivia — thinking about fog, for godsakes — to keep herself calm. To not backtrack and think instead about how it had happened, the moment this afternoon when they’d both sort of stopped at a place that looked like an OK campsite, how nothing had been said but they’d both loitered there, not looking at each other.

  That was the moment, she knew, when they’d both given up. Just stopped pretending.

  They’d dropped their packs onto the ground, and set to work in silence putting up the tent and filling up their water bottles out of the little lake nearby. And thank God they did that, at least, because as soon as they’d finished cooking a starchy meal of pasta — she was almost too tired to chew — the fog had thickened around them as if some sorcerer somewhere was pouring it out of a jug.

  Until it had started closing in, she had been subconsciously running another scenario in her head, one where her mum had alerted some kind of rescue operation that’d go straight into action, and find them. That ranger Jen coming over the rise saying you’re so close, Sophie! Come on, let’s get you back in front of the fire.

  Now they wouldn’t even be looking. And Rich had just finished eating and crawled straight into the tent and curled up, shivering. Muttering to himself.

  Her father, the wilderness hero. As hopeless as every other adult she’d stupidly relied on in her life. A pseudo-adult, him. Crumpled as soon as you tried to lean on him.

  And to think she’d believed he was trustworthy. Here they were, miles from anyone else, stuck out here without a compass, without anything, and you couldn’t see fifteen metres in front of you, or even guess what time of day it was.

  She sat outside the tent, trembling, the rest of the world bleached to fogged white around her. It wasn’t cold, she wasn’t shivering because of that. It was the way it all dissolved. If you stood up and walked out there, just let yourself get a few dozen steps away you’d be gone. It would eat you up.

  She wasn’t going anywhere. Just behind that boulder and back when she needed to pee, her hand on the boulder all the time, terrified. And bushes and dead trees would swim in and out of vision like hallucinations, like the faintest pencil marks on a blank page. She’d seen another wallaby already, swerving towards her and scaring the life out of her, running headlong back into the mist.

  Dogland had made a music clip once she’d seen on MTV set in a swirling misty landscape like this, for their song ‘Erebos’. It had looked spooky to her at the time, like a real place, but it was probably just a studio with a machine making all that fog. They probably switched the lights back on when they’d finished filming, and went back to their hotel, or whatever. Faked it.

  She was trapped here with him. The longer she’d trudged behind him today, listening to him, the more she knew he was losing it.

  Wigging out, kids said at school when describing someone who’d lost the plot. That’s what was happening; and anyone could see his foot was so swollen now that he couldn’t pull his boot on to even try to get out of here anymore, so now he was totally useless.

  Well, not totally. He was so hot and clammy that if you sat near him it was like being near a radiant heater. So she guessed that was something, at least.

  In a minute, when she couldn’t stand the damp eeriness of the total silence anymore, she’d crawl in. See if he’d talked himself out yet and finally run flat, like her iPod.

  Rich woke rising through thick layers to consciousness, not knowing where he was. Inside a green cocoon, slick with sweat, a swollen ache behind his eyes thumping like a machine. He was in the tent, he told himself.

  Outside, when he put his head out dazedly to check, a low, thin twilight mist wrapped them in tissue. Underdeveloped, he thought groggily, and underexposed. Nothing coming through, no true blacks, just that grainy fog of wispy detail, those prickly trees and wet, faint rock faces. No contrast. He blinked a few times, the ache in his head stretching and shrinking as he tried to focus. Amnesia. Fatigue, irrationality, poor judgement, stupor.

  Not hypothermia, though. Must be his blister. Blood poisoning or something. And no more blue bombers — he’d taken the last of them back there at where had it been now? Couldn’t remember. But gone, anyway.

  He felt as feverish as he’d ever felt, even that time with dengue. He had to hold it together. Sophie was sitting outside the tent against a boulder, her raincoat wrapped around her shoulders, her beanie pulled low over her face. He could hear her, the giveaway congested sinuses as she sat there.

  ‘Sophie? What is it?’

  ‘What is it? What do you think? Just leave me alone.’

  ‘Are you crying?’ He got up and crawled out stiffly, dragging out his raincoat and daypack to lean against on the ground. At least they were somewhere now that wasn’t totally sodden with rain. He pulled his own hat down over his ears.

  ‘Imagine what Mum’s thinking right now. She gives in to me and lets you take me off to Tasmania and look what you do. Her worst nightmare.’

  He swallowed before he spoke, focusing with all his attention. ‘I’m sure she’s thinking it through logically. Working out we’re just a few days overdue.’ The words took enormous effort to produce.

  ‘She’ll be going ballistic.’

  He ignored the tight nausea in his throat. ‘Well, even if she is, that’s good because she’ll be notifying someone and alerting them about it, won’t she? They might send some searchers in to try and find us.’

  Sophie turned around to face him, shaking her head decisively. ‘She said to be on that plane or else.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure she’ll quickly realise that things don’t always go according to plan when you’re out in the wilderness.’ He couldn’t believe the airy idiocy of his voice, the awful way he just opened his mouth and another platitude leaped out. His brain was baking, inside the booming tightness of his skull.

  ‘She’ll phone the police.’

  He gave a small dry laugh. A gasp. ‘No, she’ll phone Search and Rescue.’

  The queasiness rippled from his throat down into his guts. Swirled and eddied there, like bitter, swallowed bile. She’d phone the police. What she’d report was an abduction. It would all fit together for her. There was probably a special department for it — insane estranged fathers disappearing without trace clutching their offspring. There’d be a special charge.

  And Sophie, this pissed-off traumatised fifteen-year-old fuming opposite him, he already knew what she thought of him. How she’d testify, given the chance.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘If I could walk properly, believe me, I’d have us out of here in a couple of hours.’

  A blank look of total disdain. ‘You are so full of shit.’

  ‘There’s no point trying to reason with you.’

  ‘Totally, totally full of shit.’

  They lapsed back into silence. The dusk was deeper now, grey and felted like damp wool, mist curling up off the ground. They heard something crashing nearby t
hrough the bushes; the panicked skittering noise of escape through that tangling prickly scoparia.

  ‘Listen to that.’

  ‘Wallabies. I saw them before. They’re spooked.’ There was a pause. Another crash.

  ‘It’s only been a couple of nights,’ he said firmly, determined to have the last word, when something loped into his feverish peripheral vision, an animal he saw duck its head and then raise it nervously, and he couldn’t help himself, even if he was imagining it; his body jerked backwards reflexively. His legs flailed and kicked suddenly like in one of those falling dreams, the ankle a single bundle of flaring molten sinew. He heard his own voice and the animal sprang forward, disoriented. Dog, his brain stuttered like morse. Wolf. Coyote. It veered close to him, he heard its claws on rock and gravel.

  His mind lay disordered and agape for a few seconds, like something ransacked.

  The animal ran past where they sat, twisting itself back again as it encountered the rock face, facing them again, almost cowering. He saw the tail, its curve and weight, and then in the cottony near-darkness, knowing he was awake, and it was real, his hand plunged reflexively for his camera, there inside its bag right next to him, his thumb flipping off the lens cap as he pulled it free.

  Stripes. He saw the stripes, patterned along that hunched muscular spine like a branching fern, and knew even as his thumb felt for and found the flash switch that there would be no more misfootings into cruel empty space; he had the camera in both hands, reflexes humming like a sharp note, and nothing was going to be the same now.

  Ian got a printout of the cold front and turned off the screen.

  ‘Aren’t you going home?’ said Tim, who’d come on shift after Mal.

  ‘I am,’ said Ian. ‘Very soon.’

  He emailed Paul at the Cradle Mountain office, giving him Sandy Reynold’s direct mobile number in case he didn’t have it, and left his notes on the desk.

  A text from his wife on his phone, asking him to pick up a carton of milk.

  ‘Just leaving now,’ he said.

  Rich pointed and pressed and saw the flash go off perfectly, burning that creature onto his 200 ASA black-and-white film, and thank you God, thank you for making me load that into the camera yesterday morning when I finished the roll of slide film, and now wind on and press again, another flash and the animal perfectly visible there crouching in the frame, then turning as he wound on again, holy fucking unbelievable a third shot as it scrambled across gravel and away.

  And he had it this time, he had the defining moment there safe in the box. Everything going quiet as he and Sophie stared at each other slack-jawed, blinking blindly in the afterburn of the flash, like they were the last two people on earth.

  ‘Did you see the stripes?’ he said. He heard himself whispering it. Had to put his camera on the ground for safety as great rolling dumpers of shock trembled down his arms. She just stared at him.

  ‘They never attacked people,’ he whispered hastily, which wasn’t even true for all he knew, but her face was paper-white, her eyes blank and uncomprehending.

  She started to stutter something, and stopped. Her teeth chattering when she unclamped her mouth. Locked her eyes on his camera.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. He needed desperately to get up and move around, the fizz of it coursing in jolts through his body, but his leg ached and throbbed and held him there. He grabbed handfuls of his hair in his hands, gasping, adrenaline splashing back and forth in him with no outlet. It was like being outside of himself, thrown through himself like a windscreen. King hit, and coming to.

  ‘A dog.’ Her voice quavering.

  ‘No, Sophie, not a dog.’

  ‘It was a dog. A wild one.’

  He shook his head convulsively. Fingertips touching the camera, back off again as if it was hot, as if it was ticking away with half-life like a Geiger counter.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ.’ He exhaled a huge shuddering breath. ‘Did you see the stripes on it?’

  ‘What if it comes back?’

  It was like remembering how to talk again. ‘Doesn’t matter if it does or it doesn’t. I’ve got three shots of it. What did that woman say? The first hard evidence in seventy years. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Hundreds of square miles of impenetrable wilderness, same ancient landscape it’s evolved in over thousands of years, no humans ...’

  He trailed off and took a gasping breath, recalling stunned witnesses he’d watched on the evening news; gabbling, words spilling, the big jerking, twitching gestures.

  She was looking at him. ‘Show me the photos you got.’

  ‘See, but I can’t. It’s not digital, remember? It’s on negative film. We have to wait till we get back.’

  ‘So it’s inside the camera there?’

  ‘Bloody oath it is. It’s just hitting me. This is it. Everyone believing it’s extinct, then I get these. A real living breathing one. People are going to go apeshit.’

  She just sat there, loose with shock, still gazing blankly at him. She’d get it soon. He’d sit up and wait for the sun to rise, if that’s what it took, to make sure they were pointing in the right direction to get out of here. He’d crawl out on his hands and knees now, if he had to. Carrying what he had there, finally, sealed in darkness. Precious as a grail.

  Sandy had gone into Sophie’s room during the night and lain down on her bed, pulling the doona over her head. She wanted to be cocooned in a dark place. Somewhere without edges or definition, or even time. When she realised it was close to dawn she’d got up feeling stiff and battered, mechanically plumped up Sophie’s pillow and remade her bed, and went outside.

  She rang the park number again and the police again and then just sat, blank and disconnected, until her friends arrived. It wasn’t like any of them to knock — they just came straight in the back door and everything about them, from the plates and bottles they carried to their determined postures, told her they were taking charge.

  ‘Crisis-management meeting,’ someone called cheerfully as they came through the door with a bakery box. It would have been wonderful except that she was suddenly struck by the dreadful thought that this was how they would be at a funeral too — in control and brooking no argument, propelling her through the room to sit on the couch and offering to be the bolster between her and the outside world. She pushed the thought firmly from her mind.

  ‘There’s no way you want to be alone, is there?’ said Margot, holding her at arms’ length, passing her to the next person for more embracing.

  She started to cry again. ‘You’re all such good friends,’ she said, sobbing. ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘You just let yourself lean on us now.’

  ‘Sandy! Wow, your front garden looks sensational! It’s all mulched!’

  ‘A guy came and trimmed the tree while I was away and made it all into chips and spread them around for me.’ Her voice sounded like something on the wrong speed.

  ‘I’ll have to get you to give me his name. It looks brilliant.’

  Normal chat, everything determinedly, decidedly normal. She could hear glasses being taken out of the cupboard in the kitchen; low, organised voices as the tap was turned on in the sink. Her great, reliable friends. Women of her generation, they’d had to create their own kinship networks. Your women friends were closer than your family. Look at them, so rock-solid, mercifully taking it all out of her hands.

  She pushed away another small but troubling awareness. There was something a little awry here. She frowned as someone solemnly handed her a small imitation velvet bag and a well-thumbed book of the I Ching. She shifted it under her arm to accept the gifts of massage oil for stress relief and juniper candles that promised clarity.

  ‘We’ll just take things one step at a time,’ someone was saying to her now, clearing a space in front of her discreetly on the coffee table in case she wanted to lay out runes or tarot cards for answers or roll up a comforting joint or perhaps, she thought, just lay her head down there and we
ep. All the usual rituals.

  ‘At this moment they’re just lost, right? Wandered off the track temporarily, out of mobile range, there could be a million explanations.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. It was Rachel talking, who’d known Rich before he left all those years ago, and Sandy was desperate enough to find a shred of absurd comfort in that. Someone else gave her a glass of white wine and she took a distracted sip and there was something wrong with that too; it tasted like white vinegar, a glass of stomach acid. She coughed and shuddered.

  ‘They were meant to walk out on Monday, right? And it’s only Wednesday, this happens all the time in bushwalking.’ Rachel again.

  ‘Has anyone ever been to Cradle Mountain?’ said Margot brightly.

  Nobody had.

  ‘I mean, is everything well signposted? All the tracks clearly marked?’

  ‘It’s just a long trail, isn’t it?’ she heard herself say. ‘Lots of school groups.’ She looked around her pleadingly. ‘Walking groups. Huts and cabins where you sleep at night.’

  ‘It’s wilderness, I thought,’ someone said hesitantly. ‘It’s hundreds of square kilometres, or something.’

  ‘Yes, but there are rangers, aren’t there? Checking who’s where, bed allocations I mean, it’s all a designated walkway, the actual track, right?’

  Someone behind her started massaging her head. Her earring snagged on her hair and she removed it impatiently. Lethargy was creeping up on her, cloudy and anaesthetising. The way they were all arranged around her, pumped with solicitous purpose, flushed with excitement. Like the Furies. Alive. That was it. She hadn’t seen them so shining-eyed and avidly motivated since well, since the last personal crisis they’d all rallied for.

  Galvanised with something exciting to do, determined to outshine as the best, the calmest, the most supportive, the most enlightened, the bloody wisest. Then they would turn around if things got worse and vie to be the most outspoken, the most vengeful, the most impassioned. She shook her head to clear it.