The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘We know he’s a bastard, Sandy,’ Annie said. ‘The question is, is he an evil bastard or just a stupid bastard?’

  She stared. ‘You can’t ask me that.’

  ‘Come out and sit on the verandah,’ said Margot, ‘in the fresh air and the sunshine. Do some deep breathing.’

  ‘I don’t mean evil,’ Annie amended hastily. ‘I mean, has he got something to prove? To you? To Sophie? Or would he just have sincerely lost his way?’

  They were standing her up, and picking up their drinks and trailing together out onto the porch chairs, hustling her along with caring pats; a phalanx of bodyguards taking the star from the stage. What was it they coveted? Why were they here?

  ‘I think I really just want a cup of tea,’ she said, and they jumped to the task.

  She closed her eyes on the old busted-up couch against the morning sun so her vision was bathed in red, and tried to picture Sophie, walking now with other bushwalkers along some well- defined track, laughing about accidentally leaving it. She could visualise it clearly. The bushwalkers would be teachers, reliable and fit, good in emergencies, dressed in khaki shorts and smelling of sunblock. There would be a ranger at the hut. Or experienced guides. Or would there be tracks for four-wheel drive vehicles, even, for people who wanted to get out of there, tracks leading to a sealed road? What had she been thinking, not even researching this?

  Annie was holding something out to her and she dazedly opened her palm.

  Two coins.

  Something, she thought, recoiling, for putting over the eyes of the dead. Or for playing two-up. These ones had holes in the middle.

  ‘Close your eyes and focus for a moment and hold in your mind the question you want to ask,’ Annie said, sitting down opposite her and smoothing her skirt. ‘Then throw the coins and we can establish the hexagram.’

  Something prickly and constraining seemed to be lowering itself over her shoulders, tucking itself across her chest. Someone’s pashmina, adjusted with invisible, swaddling hands. God, they were all patting her, competing for a piece of her, plucking at her for attention. At the same moment Margot handed her a mug of tea. That damn mug of Alison’s with the wonky handle you could only fit two fingers inside, the lopsided lip with that embedded grit. Was it the only bloody cup they could find in the house?

  ‘Six throws altogether,’ Annie said, and Sandy threw the cup, a sudden and impatient toss, off the verandah and onto the brick path, where it broke at long last. A slosh of chamomile tea arced out into the overgrown grass, and she felt jaw-aching hysteria spill from her in the shocked silence. She rocked with speechless laughter, impatiently shrugging off the shawl and gasping for breath, gesturing for fresh air. Holding the coins aloft in the other hand, with every question she had crowding unbidden and unanswered into her mind at once.

  Twenty-One

  Fog. The only thing that was stopping him.

  He couldn’t believe it. Seriously, it was like God sat down at his desk and devised this every morning, how to torture him. He’d crawled out of the tent this morning and wanted to pound the sky with his fists.

  He just needed one decent look at this landscape for what it really was. All those tarns glittering, the whole landscape as monochrome-metallic as black-and-white film, just glistening, huge 360-degree sweeps of emptiness. And from above no doubt, on a clear day, any fool could see a track out of here, twisting like a ribbon, scuffed bare by earnest tramping feet.

  He would be alright if he could just rise above it, float up there like a wheeling zopilote and get some perspective. It would all look ridiculously benign then.

  Slog it out for a few kilometres, then duckboards leading straight down to the ferry and then onwards out of it all to safety and warmth.

  He’d strayed, that’s all. A temporary disorientation had become a major loss of position. There’d be people just an hour or two in some obvious direction, people with first-aid kits and top-of-the-range thermal clothing, with food dehydrated using NASA technology that reconstituted into green chicken curry and beef bourguignon, the whole global village there on your packaway plate. They’d have gourmet dried-fruit trail mix and emergency rehydration powdered drinks and superstrength paracetamol and sleeping bags designed for the conquering of Everest.

  Such serious dedication to the task of placing yourself at risk. Such expense, shoring up your own puny little carcass against the elements, against the hostile wilderness you’d chosen to enter. They’d all be bolstered and barricaded against it with Goretex and optimum loft and hundred-mile stares like soldiers on a mission. Like he thought he’d been.

  The skin around the scarlet raw patch on his heel had tightened and seemed to shrink, the way tree bark swells and shrinks around the weeping lopped bough. Proud flesh. Throbbing like he was still striding along, beside all those marching boots massed down the road certain of their purpose, prepared to walk anywhere, holding their invisible banners proudly aloft.

  The heat swam up his leg thick as syrup, staining the skin on his calf with infection, notching up his temperature again until he was starting to see things in his peripheral vision; figures and creatures that shifted jumpily out of sight, bushes that glowed with the aura of revelation.

  He’d seen it, though. Looked into its eyes. He had it in the camera. Bigger than Rock Island Bend, more momentous. He squeezed his arms around himself with exhilaration. The shot of the century, without doubt.

  And here was God’s little extra: he was no more than twenty kilometres from Narcissus Bay and then, ludicrously, it was just a leisurely ferry ride to a sealed car park at the end full of air-conditioned buses.

  His memory rocked, skewed a little in the ticking heat of his head. He’d got off that boat and stepped onto the jetty and the police were waiting but other people there too, ready to applaud him, and it was, he knew, a far, far better thing he did that day than he had ever done. It would be like that again, and this time all the evidence he needed was in the camera; proof that he’d been to some deep, deep place of hardship for the good of mankind. Humankind. Into the divvy van and on to the lock-up.

  Not this time. No. He’d get off the ferry and there’d be hot coffee, and a phone. A gold phone at the kiosk, or someone’s mobile, and the connection would smoothly click into place and set it all square again, tip it back on its wheels. And he could be there, composing himself to utter those magic words, smoothing down his matted hair with his hand as he explained what he had. Why he’d done what he’d done.

  ‘You know what bothers me?’ said Ian Millard, ‘just the one thing?’ He was talking to Paul Colegate on the phone, doodling on the corner of the report.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘This guy you’ve been talking to, Russell Cameron. Says that the father had a bad blister, had walked on it for almost the whole track. Wouldn’t you think, if that was you, that you’d be heading for Narcissus from Windy Ridge as fast as you could, with no side-trips? Just the easy flat three hours?’

  ‘You would think that, yes.’

  ‘But not only does this guy do the extra unnecessary kilometres to Pine Valley Hut, then he slogs another two hours up into the Labyrinth. So he goes — what? — four or five hours of hard walking out of his way, into some of the most impenetrable country in the park.’

  ‘And back out again, in theory, so add another five hours.’

  ‘With a blister, some kind of infection. And now — surprise surprise — they’ve vanished.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And now the mother’s telling us the guy’s got an axe to grind.’

  He heard Paul suck in his breath.

  ‘Mate,’ he said softly, ‘not the best choice of words.’

  The phone tugged Sandy up to panic, breaking the surface of consciousness gasping for air, brain fumbling for reconnection.

  Her girl was still out there, and the best-case scenario, the best, was that she was uncomfortable, cold and tired. Imagine if it were her now, borrowing some ranger’s mobile, br
eathless with relief. Sandy’s mobile ringtone was high and bell-like, the one that most resembled a real phone. Jump and pick up that phone. Just collect your thoughts and remember where it is, and put your hand on it. Bright, insistent ring. Never lasted for long enough, never gave you enough time to remember where you’d left it, but surely this was it in her pocket, ready and waiting. Getting her fingers round it, desperately imagining Sophie somewhere warm, some park ranger’s jeep, or office, listening to that ring, waiting for her to pick up. Mum, she’d say. Stop worrying. It’s all good.

  ‘What on earth is going on with your landline?’ said Janet’s voice with irritated relief as soon as Sandy answered. ‘Your phone’s been engaged four times this afternoon when I’ve tried to call. You really should be leaving the line open, Sandy; you could get news at any moment, you’ve got to be ready to jump if you need to.’

  ‘Mum.’ The disappointment was something palpable, something she could taste. She cupped the mobile against her ear and slid into the desk chair, weak with need for the sound of her daughter’s voice, which was evaporating now, dreamlike.

  ‘What’s the news, darling? What’s happening?’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything. I’m just waiting. They’re going to mount a search with a helicopter, down there at the park.’

  ‘Oh my God, you’ll be costing the taxpayers a fortune.’

  Sandy’s free hand closed on the mouse, clicked on the dial-up internet icon. She’d been checking the weather website, on and off, all day.

  ‘They must think it’s serious, then?’

  ‘It’s what they do when someone’s lost.’ She watched the computer think about connecting her, the way it always did. Sophie had begged and begged her to get broadband. She’d resisted as though it was something to be proud of, like a social virtue. Pointless bloody nonsense.

  ‘Really? Even if it’s just a couple of days?’

  She moved the cursor, clicked on the Google icon. Her mother’s voice sounded wary with doubt.

  ‘Can’t they just send a search party of rangers down the track, or something? Or use their mobile phones and tell people where they are?’

  ‘Hang on, hang on. There’s no phone reception down there, and there’s been a storm, the ranger says, which has stranded lots of walkers, but no, they’re not there just sitting in a hut somewhere, Mum; they’re missing.’

  ‘When were you meant to meet them?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ she said, and couldn’t believe it as she said it, couldn’t take in that only a day had passed. There was a short incredulous silence, then she heard Janet sigh. Such a familiar sound, that exhalation, that genteel annoyance.

  ‘Yesterday? My God, you sounded so frantic on your phone message, I assumed ...’

  ‘I am frantic, Mum. I’m totally beside myself. How did you think I’d be? They were meant to finish the walk by Monday morning and catch the flight from Launceston on Tuesday.’

  ‘Well, to be perfectly honest, if you thought it was that serious I imagined you’d have flown down there by now.’

  ‘To Tasmania? Where would I fly to? Why would that make things any different? The police say the best thing to do is just sit tight ...’

  ‘You’re not telling me you’ve gotten the police involved?’ Her mother’s voice went up a notch now, exasperated and horrified at the same time.

  ‘Of course I have. The police co-ordinate the search and rescue down there. I thought it would be Parks and Wildlife, but it’s not.’

  She typed with one finger into the search engine: rescue remedy. How automatic it was now, this deferring of attention to her mother, this placating and relinquishing. Today she hardly had the energy to care. She hit ‘Search’.

  ‘Did the police tell you you’d been very foolish, letting her go off with a complete stranger?’

  Ah yes, Janet’s world, where she imagined everyone in authority behaved just like her. Where she believed implacably that she was, in fact, the sole true authority.

  ‘Mum. He’s her father. There’s nothing I can do to change that. Or you, for that matter.’

  Here was the website. She scrolled down for a list of ingredients. Five flower essences, she read. She felt deadened with lassitude now, too drained to rise to Janet’s bait or even to try justifying herself. It was like trying to cry more when you’d already cried yourself out.

  ‘Sandy, what were you thinking? What on earth were you thinking?’ It sounded as though her mother was weeping now, furious and impotent.

  Here were the flowers, little botanical drawings and what each was for, each essence as outlined by Doctor Bach.

  ‘Mum, can you come up and stay with me? I’m going mad here in the house by myself. And I know you’re upset. But please, there’s nothing we can do but wait. So can you?’

  She’d never heard herself making such a bald and blatant request. And to Janet, of all people. Her mother had never known how to comfort her or her sister, never been someone you could confide in or hope for a sympathetic ear from. She was too eager to make sure you’d learnt the lesson she’d warned you about first.

  Sandy had had counselling for quite a few years and knew how it stood now, had reconciled herself to it. The withholding mother. It wasn’t as if it was rare or anything. It was a generational thing. You had to accept it and learn to break the cycle, become the warm parent yourself, give the love you were never given. But this was Sophie. This would crash through those traces, surely. Janet would come up to stay, she thought, and they would share this pain together, it would pull them closer. They would confide. And that was what the workshop had been for, she suddenly saw with a start of possibility. An exercise in opening her up and making her doubt. Being made to open up and doubt; that was good, that was part of it. Even a beautiful karmic plan, to heal those past unresolved rifts and buried, simmering, unspoken grudges. She’d look back and see it then — a pattern that made sense. The Universe answering.

  And as she waited, certain of this, she heard the faint, familiar sound of her mother’s sigh again. Then the rustle of paper. Listening, she knew exactly what she was hearing. A page of her mother’s diary being turned. Her mother was standing there scanning her desk diary, annoyed that her schedule might be disrupted.

  For trauma and numbness, she read next to the first flower. Then: For inattentiveness. And on down the list. For panic or terror. For irritability and impatience. To prevent anger.

  As if flowers, she thought wonderingly, could hold so much power over human emotions, as if they contained the essence of all our frailties. As if we could be rescued.

  ‘Sandy? Hello?’ She tuned in again to Janet, heard the exasperation dampened down to appeasement, a kind of courteous distance. ‘I couldn’t come till Saturday, darling, I really couldn’t, and I’m sure it will have all blown over by then. I just can’t get away; this really couldn’t have come at a worse time.’

  She blinked, taking in the words. A memory rose clear and unbidden in her mind of the time she’d been to a chiropractor, that time she’d hurt her neck painting the ceiling. He hadn’t even touched her neck. He’d put the heel of one hand into her lower back and confidently pressed the fingertips and thumb of the other at some point between her shoulderblades. Sandy had felt a strange glutinous shifting ascend up her spine; not a cracking or jarring, but a realignment. She’d heard cartilage pop, distantly, inside her ears.

  Sitting there now, cradling her mobile and staring blindly at the screen, she felt it again, the sensation of something clicking into joint. She let her shoulders drop, remembering how it had felt. The spreading dissolving warmth, the feel of something loosening.

  ‘I understand completely, Mum,’ she said evenly. ‘No need to come. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.’

  The word ‘mum’ felt awkward in her mouth, like an unwanted spoonful of something. A counterfeit word. She thought of herself lying on the examination table that day, absorbing the idea of all the hidden dislocations the body could secretly c
arry. Astonished, that after an anticipated build-up of such dread, it could turn out to hurt so little.

  He had the camera protected in a tight nest of clothing, inside its case and cushioned with socks, zipped inside the camera bag, safe inside the daypack.

  He had to keep resisting the urge to cover it with his body.

  She eyed him, expressionless.

  ‘Why don’t you show me how to adjust it,’ she said finally, ‘so that once the sky starts to clear we could set it up so that the flash keeps going off, and point it upwards, so that anyone searching for us in a plane or something will see it.’

  He blinked, trying to clear his head to take in what she was saying, then shook it decisively. His arm stretched over the pack protectively. He imagined the Olympus fumbled out of her hand as she stepped over a fissure in rock, her grabbing for it, the lens snapping off, the hinge breaking and the back flying open. Everything exposed and ruined. He couldn’t afford to risk it. Not now.

  In his brief, rational moments of lucidity he knew he should unwind the roll of film from the camera itself and store it somewhere, inside a plastic container, wedged safe into a side pocket, but he couldn’t stand to touch it. He couldn’t even trust himself now, a risk like that. Anyway he had to think about the value of the rest of the roll as a documentary record of this event — proof of sequence, the shots after the thylacine, the terrain they were in, evidence of them both here, setting up this camp, Sophie in them, alive and well ...

  Evidence, yes, in black and white, that his intentions had been purely honourable.

  ‘I’m not sure the flash would have the power, during the day,’ he said, thinking on his feet, his tongue too thick in his mouth. ‘Night would be better, but I bet they don’t search from the air at night. You know what we’d be better off doing? Waiting till this fog clears then climbing up the nearest peak and seeing if there’s mobile reception. I should have thought of that straight away.’

  ‘The battery’s nearly dead,’ she answered, her voice expressionless.