The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘How can the battery be nearly dead? You haven’t been able to use it since we started on the walk. The ranger told us there was no reception. Surely you haven’t had it switched on.’

  She muttered something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Intermittent. He said reception was intermittent and unreliable. So I’ve been checking now and then. A few times a day, just to see. Sometimes you can send texts even if you can’t actually talk, if you get into range. Anyway, it’s nearly flat.’

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, sucking dry instant noodles.

  ‘We should have got one of those beacons,’ Sophie said. ‘For a satellite to locate us.’

  ‘They cost hundreds of dollars.’

  ‘You could hire them. From the Parks Service. I saw them — they only cost $30 for a week. EPIRBs.’

  ‘I know what they are. Emergency Personal ...’ He hesitated. ‘... Ah ... International ... Ranger Beacons.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s right.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that’s what it is.’ God, his father’s savage know-all tone.

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s something else.’ She reached over to her pack and dug in the side pocket, pulled out a glossy brochure. He spluttered with impatience.

  ‘What does it matter exactly what it is? I mean ...’

  ‘Electronic Position Indicating Radio Beacon,’ she read.

  He reached over, snatched it. ‘Let me see that.’

  He glanced at the brochure, rolled his eyes and thrust it back to her.

  ‘Must be nice knowing everything,’ he muttered.

  She crunched noodles, scowling. ‘You can’t just make shit up,’ she said. ‘That’s what landed us in this. You. Thinking you knew everything.’

  ‘Didn’t I say there was no reason to be really worried? A few hundred walkers a week, turning down the track there and wandering here in the ranges, searching for a secluded spot? Someone’s going to stumble across our campsite any minute. We can walk out with them.’

  She shook her head scornfully. ‘You’re doing it again,’ she said. ‘Talking yourself into the same bullshit story. Give me the camera, and we’ll try the flash idea.’

  ‘You’re not touching that camera,’ he heard himself bark. ‘It’s staying right where it is. That’s worth a million bucks, what’s in there. Nobody’s going anywhere near it.’ He was stretched thin, he could hear it. Worked and worked like cheap metal, pushed beyond endurance, about to snap. But she didn’t back down. She just looked at him, her lip curling.

  ‘And you think you’re going to walk out of here? Look at yourself. I mean it. You’re weak as piss.’

  He laughed hollowly, mopping at the sweat where his hair had stuck to his head.

  ‘You know what, I think I liked it better when you had all those questions,’ he said.

  ‘Did you?’ Her mouth turned up, crooked and sour, at the corner. ‘So why didn’t you answer any of them, then?’

  ‘Ms Reynolds?’

  She gripped the door handle. The young cop again. As the first shivering flush coursed through her she understood, completely and suddenly, how people could suddenly piss themselves with fear. It was like snapping on a current.

  Oh please, please, please, no, please ...

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not ...’

  He wasn’t experienced at this either she could tell, this shocking job of being the policeman on the doorstep watching people’s lives end, the belief in anything extinguishing itself in their eyes at your words and it would be like a spell, where you’d speak the words and then watch them suddenly age away in front of you, decades of life draining from them, hanging onto the door like this and turning eighty then ninety then a hundred ...

  ‘We’ve heard from the ranger, some news from some other walkers who’ve come out of the area,’ he said. ‘We haven’t found them yet, but they did come across some signs that they’d been there in the last few days, so that’s a good ... Do you need to sit down, Ms Reynolds?’

  ‘Sandy.’ Marionette voice, jaw opening on a hinge; a marionette hand jerking up to make him continue.

  ‘They’ve struck a bit of bad weather down there so the ranger’s been waiting to take out a search party, but now they’ve found this they’ll be able to focus the search, so that’s a very positive thing ...’

  ‘What? Found what?’

  She imagined a dead fire, flattened grass where a tent had been, a dropped glove, a splash of blood. The floor pitched like a boat and she clung to the door handle.

  ‘It’s a bit strange, so I was wondering if you could throw some light ... ’

  ‘What? For godsakes, what?’

  ‘Well, they found some hair. You told us, didn’t you, that Sophie had dyed black hair? And your ex-husband’s is a dark brown?’

  She felt the dragging current again, drenching over her face and neck and down to heave her stomach sideways; a cramping blow down into the pelvis, the dentist’s probing torture instrument touching a nerve end: If you harm one hair on her head, believe me, you will pay, you will pay, you will pay ...

  Hair. She’d spoken the word aloud, because he nodded bemusedly, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘A pile of hair. Cut off and scattered around some rocks. Now’ — he was raising his hand calmly to her, warding off her horror with a gesture — ‘I don’t think you should be unduly worried Ms Reynolds, because there might be a perfectly logical explanation for this ...’

  ‘Oh Jesus. Oh my God.’

  ‘Like, I don’t know, their hair might have become tangled up or started to annoy them, caught up under their backpacks, or something quite rational, I mean ... ’

  ‘Oh God, God, God,’ she chanted, her voice cracking into dry sobs. Her hands were on her face now, she realised, fingers digging into her eye sockets. ‘What has he done to her?’

  ‘We can’t ascertain that yet until we hear more from the Search and Rescue team, obviously, but this is good news for them because they can direct their search into this area. They have a lot of experience, those guys. They know what they’re doing.’

  ‘What area are you talking about?’

  He checked his notebook. ‘It’s called the Labyrinth.’

  ‘How far off the track?’ she said, not bothering to correct his pronunciation.

  ‘Well, it can’t be more than two days worth of walking, can it? No matter how fit they are. But it’s a big area. Easy to get lost in, apparently. The landscape all looks much the same so people don’t realise they’ve become disoriented. That’s what the ranger tells me, anyway.’ He glanced up at her. ‘You’ve spoken with the park rangers already, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I did, I rang them first. When Sophie and Rich didn’t show at the airport. They said there’s hardly any mobile phone reception anywhere around Cradle Mountain.’

  ‘Yeah. You need all that satellite-navigation gear, now, if you’re walking. But I can’t imagine they’ll be walking too far. Much more likely they’ll be holed up somewhere, staying out of the weather, doing their best to stay visible.’

  She gave him a look. ‘Don’t you get it? He doesn’t want to be found. He’s hiding. Cutting her hair off — Jesus Christ, does he have to spell it out to you? He’s done it on purpose. It’s some kind of threat or warning.’

  ‘I did ask you this the other day, Ms Reynolds. If you’re serious in these allegations, there’ll be charges to be made once they’re found. Obviously your daughter’s testimony is going to be the one which really clears up what’s happened. We’ll alert the rescue teams to all this. But you have to rest assured we’re doing everything we can. It’s a complicated operation and for the moment we have to assume they’ve just innocently become lost.’

  ‘What if I press charges now?’

  He raised his eyebrows again, gave a dry humourless laugh. ‘They’re flat out doing their best — that won’t make them look any harder.’

  ‘If he’s cut off her hair,’ she said, her voic
e shaking, ‘that means he has a knife.’

  ‘Ms Reynolds,’ said the policeman flatly, ‘he’d be a fool to go bushwalking without a knife.’

  ‘This is my daughter we’re talking about,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘That’s what you don’t seem to understand. She’s out there with him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the policeman reasonably, ‘but think about it: if he was going to abduct her, why do it like this and make things so bloody hard on himself ? I might be speaking out of turn here, but why not head straight to Queensland and hide out in a caravan park somewhere? He didn’t come and take her by force, after all, so what would it be aggravated by? I mean, you agreed to this, didn’t you, at the time?’

  She swallowed. Powdered glass. Sandpaper. Four drops to cure inattentiveness.

  ‘I did,’ she said. ‘Like a fool.’

  She could smell the laundry powder in his clean-pressed blue shirt as he put his hat back on. Someone’s ironed that, she thought dully, with Fabulon.

  ‘You’ve got my details, anyway, if you have any questions at this point?’

  She wondered at this new formality, his just-acquired distance. No coming in for a cup of tea this time.

  ‘Do you think I should fly down there? To Tasmania?’ she blurted as he was turning on his heel. He paused at the step.

  ‘I think you should stay here and try not to worry unduly,’ he replied. ‘Don’t try to read too much into things at this stage.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. You don’t know him.’

  He didn’t answer. Just turned around again and left her here to cope with everything on her own, the way blokes always did when things got too hard for them. Her women friends, naturally, had formed a hurried roster between themselves to come and wait with her and support her, but nobody would be here till eleven today. She sat on the back porch again, stunned at how totally without purpose she felt. Nothing whatever to do. No reason for anything.

  It was one thing to ask questions of the universe, she thought; it was something else to listen to what the universe had to say in reply. Nothing. A disconnected line, a blank silence.

  She sat staring at the couch grass and wondering if she could already see it yellowing, that irreversible, invisible damage done.

  Twenty-Two

  They sat in the tent, surrounded, still, by vaporous white. She had all her layers on now — both Libby’s thermal tops, her leggings under her spare tracksuit pants, two pairs of socks.

  ‘Got to get my head straight,’ Rich said for about the twentieth time. ‘Got to get some perspective on what this is going to mean. It’s going to hit the news like a bombshell.’

  Lying there holding his camera bag to his chest, wrapped in his sleeping bag, staring off into space. Like a dead pharaoh, clutching his bloody treasure.

  She could see a muscle jumping in his jaw, creasing at the corner of his mouth. It had been like this all morning — sometimes he made sense, sometimes she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He’d blink too much and start to mumble away like he was having an argument. Then there’d be moments like this, when he became agitated thinking about his photos again — much more agitated than he’d been when he’d first got them lost. Which showed what he really cared about. He looked over at her.

  ‘They’ll want to interview you too,’ he said. ‘Are you ready to be a celebrity?’

  She wondered if she could sit outside. Put on her hat and jacket, maybe, just sit nearby where she could see the tent. She’d told him over and over it was a dog.

  ‘They have to find us first,’ she said finally, when she realised his sly glassy-eyed grin meant he was waiting for her to answer.

  ‘Imagine what it’s going to do to this place! Tasmanian Tiger still alive! Boy, if they think they’re inundated with tourists now, imagine how it’s going to be when they find out it’s still here. There’s going to be ten thousand Russells swarming over the place! Danish tour groups scouring the hills!’

  That cracked smile again.

  ‘That’s the thing about nature, isn’t it, Sophie? It always turns round to surprise us. Keeping its deepest secrets from us, nurtured here in the wilderness.’

  He was planning his media interview, she could tell. Rehearsing his alibi. She had to stay on her guard, and not believe a word he told her.

  ‘Funny how you’re so gung-ho to get out of this and be famous now but you didn’t give a shit when it was just me.’

  ‘Not true. We got disoriented in that storm. Who on earth’s going to think otherwise?’

  He didn’t care about anything but himself. Liar. She thought of Sandy’s voice at the party when she’d boasted about Rich. Oh, Soph. Listen ... The pity in it. Maybe not fake pity, after all.

  ‘Mum will. She’ll ... she’ll press charges.’ Hating the falter in her voice, giving her away.

  ‘What — you can be charged with accidentally getting lost now, can you? Who do you think’s going to listen to Sandy’s crackpot theories? It’ll be her word against mine.’ God, the arrogance in his voice.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Your word against mine.’

  Paying out on him, and why shouldn’t she? He deserved it. There was a silence, and she saw his fingers shift suddenly, grip the camera case.

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Yeah. I do. That’s what it bloody looks like to me.’

  ‘You can see I’ve just about killed myself trying to get us out of here. Anyone could. Haven’t I?’ He raised himself on an elbow, glared at her. ‘Haven’t I? Sophie?’

  There was nowhere to go.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You’re pissed off,’ he said eventually, ‘that you wanted everyone to think I was this malicious bastard, dragging you off into the wilderness, and now all they’re going to be thinking about is that I’m the one lucky photographer who got to see a real, living, breathing myth, who proved it’s still there. Don’t you get it, yet? That photo’s going to make history. Nobody’s going to care about anything else. It’s going to change everything.’

  Sophie thought of the photos in the envelope. A polar man, she thought. A cold man looking away from you, in a white, empty world. Yes.

  ‘Listen to you,’ she said flatly. ‘Mr Weaver, bagging his tiger.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  Sandy called Search and Rescue again.

  ‘Yes, Ms Reynolds. Hello.’

  ‘I need to know what’s happening.’ She was pacing up and down the room as she spoke, tracking back and forth in a room cleaned and tidied by all her friends, fresh oil in the burner and a huge bunch of flowers on the table.

  ‘Well, at the moment we couldn’t send in the helicopter no matter what the circumstances — it’s a total white-out over the area at present. There’s so little visibility it would be useless. And looking at the state of things on the map it would be too dangerous to send in a ground search crew either. They’d be lost themselves, probably, within minutes. The ranger knows that region like the back of his hand but he’s not prepared to risk it with anyone else. It’s not called the Labyrinth for nothing.’

  So reasonable and calm, that voice. Weighing up everything rationally.

  ‘The police told me about the hair,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s odd, but it means they were definitely there. So it’s good in a way. We have to sit tight now though, Ms Reynolds, wait for this weather to lift then go in the first chance we get.’

  Sandy walked back down the room again. It all looked so dull and used-up — the old lounge suite with the batik throws, the rice-paper lamps. Exhausted. She stopped and blew out the candle under the oil burner.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s really nothing we can do now except wait it out,’ the guy said.

  She thought of the meditation session at the retreat, where the woman running it had said let us sit now and simply be attentive to everything we cannot change so that we learn to sit with powerlessness and she had nodded impatiently to
herself, waiting for the little Tibetan gong that meant they could all stand and stretch and smile smugly at each other before breaking for lunch.

  An intervention order. That’s what Sandy would do, Rich thought, feeling a tremor jerking in his face. Keep Sophie away. Charge him with negligence, at least, or breach of trust, or something.

  But those pictures would vindicate him. Everything else would be forgotten in a flurry of amazement and publicity. He’d insist on being in the darkroom himself, whatever happened. The need in him, to see those stripes form slowly in the developer bath and look around triumphantly at the astonished faces in the red light, pressed on a nerve somewhere. Need that was like a cavity in a tooth, probed with his tongue over and over, unbearable.

  He’d get up tomorrow, when this fog lifted, and he’d build a huge fire somehow, or climb the nearest mountain and get his bearings again. He wanted to walk out, limping but holding the camera aloft, holding Sophie’s hand. Didn’t want to sit like a useless urban loser and be rescued. He wished he’d twisted his ankle now, or sprained it. Something more like a real injury — broken collarbone or wrist. Head wound. Not a bloody blister, for godsakes, the foolish injury of the greenhorn, the woman, the dilettante.

  It didn’t matter, though. The photos were going to sweep all that away in any case. Front-page news. You only got one moment really, he thought, and it would come at you just like it had for him, out of your darkest hour, just when you’d almost given up. Your test.

  He was so thirsty. Getting warmer all the time. Just rest here, wait till night fell, then get through the night, and it would be morning. If he kept his eyes closed he could be here and not here at the same time, ride it out that way.

  ‘They’ll try to capture it now, won’t they?’ Sophie’s voice.

  ‘Probably. They’ll want to microchip it, track its movements, that kind of thing. We don’t even know how many there are. There’s so much science still has to find out.’

  ‘They’d never just leave it alone, would they?’

  ‘What would that achieve?’

  A long pause. ‘What would it achieve?’ He heard the measured tone in her voice that let him know he’d reached a new low in her estimation. She said it louder, full of smothered rage. ‘What would it achieve, did you say?’