The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘Well, yeah. I mean ...’ She let him trail off, she let him feel the full fumbling, incapacitated blankness in his head. Then she sat up and pulled off the sleeping bag.

  ‘I don’t care if it’s freezing out there, I’m going outside. I’d rather get frostbite than listen to this.’

  Jesus, the dark recess of exposed nerve in the cold. The thought of the decay in there, the unspeakable craving to have it cauterised, and gone.

  The house seemed stuffed with things, suddenly. Crammed with them. Jugs and cushions and old magazines and worn throw rugs, candles and vinyl records and tea canisters and lamps. Sandy walked around looking at it, feeling listless and unsettled. She wandered from point to point, brushing her hand along things that used to give her comfort; all these objects imbued with her stories and memories.

  A memory rose unbidden of the nuns at her school, who’d all been old women by the time Sandy was a teenager, old relics in their habits who’d walked around the chapel reciting the rosary, stopping and kneeling at the Stations of the Cross. Fingering their beads and murmuring through the litany of prayers, she remembered, a repetitive chant you could lose yourself in. And that big basalt slab set into the floor at the chapel’s entrance where years and years of feet had turned and shuffled; a step worn slightly concave, and burnished with use, testament to years of the pious footsteps of the faithful and the reluctant, dragging steps of generations of bored schoolgirls. Sandy walked slowly around the living room, her hand touching everything she’d collected. Remembering that step, worn smooth and polished and treacherous.

  She’d always liked to think of herself as a collector. A great bargain hunter at op shops. A keen-eyed clearing sale afficionado. That’s where most of this stuff had come from anyway. She never bought anything new. Now she thought of the crowd following the auctioneer along at clearing sales, along the rows and rows of unwanted stuff up for bids. Sundries, that’s what she had always looked for. Item 46: box of miscellaneous sundries. Sometimes the sundries were poignant: bundles of old postcards and carefully annotated photo albums — these especially plucked at Sandy’s heart — half-finished knitting projects, collections of ceramic animals, someone else’s life up for grabs. And sometimes the box contained things so worthless they failed to attract a single bid, and the auctioneer would cast his eye over the blank, unmoving sea of bidders, and he’d call, with a sort of ruthless cheerfulness: Put it aside.

  That’s it, she thought. It was other people’s cast-offs, things already worn out, the virtuous feeling of taking something unwanted and fashioning a home out of it. She’d done it too. She’d pulled it all together, scraped by on nothing.

  But in the end this was all it was, just this grab bag of accumulated sundries. Put it aside. Get a box, and clear it away. Put your hand out, without even thinking, and sweep it clear.

  When she crawled back into the tent he was glowing with heat again. ‘Do you want to get up and walk around for a while?’ she said. ‘It’s really stuffy in here. And it stinks.’ No point mincing words.

  ‘Can’t really walk,’ he said. Much worse. Shrunken, somehow.

  ‘Well, have some water.’ She gave him her water bottle. She’d fill them both up again later, when the fog lifted and she could see all the way to the little lake.

  ‘A strut,’ he said out of nowhere, and laughed. A chugging sound, like sobs.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what we used to call a walk in the bush, during the campaign.’

  ‘The Blockade.’

  ‘Yeah. We used to go on these struts, checking out the HEC transect lines, imagining we’d find something massively important. Spying, documenting it all. Hoping they’d find us, so we’d get an adrenaline hit hiding in the bush. Strutting. It’s funny, isn’t it? Going for a strut. A quick strut around the moral high ground.’ He laughed again, his eyes glazed and dark with something she couldn’t see. Sweat was dripping off his neck.

  ‘What day is it again?’ he said.

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘Right. And what’s the time?’ he said after a while.

  ‘Four o’clock.’ She checked the clock on her mobile.

  ‘Really? Be dark again soon.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m not good here, Sophie. I’m struggling.’

  She tucked her knees closer to her chest. She didn’t want him to touch her, couldn’t deal with him getting all clingy and pathetic now. So useless and needy and diminished, eroding her resolve. ‘I think you should have one of my electrolyte drinks.’

  ‘That’s your secret formula, is it?’ He was raving, damp with sweat.

  ‘Yeah. I think you should have one.’

  ‘Sophie’ — he was reaching for his pack now, fishing for the tupperware container he’d brought his food in and pulling the last sachet out — ‘I’ve got one more Creamy Fettuccine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He reached for her hand, and put the packet in it. Closed her fingers round it.

  She could feel it, the ocean of unsayable things between them.

  ‘I’ll do you a deal,’ he said.

  Too much pain to sleep, the skin around the wound violet now. Like something ready for a graft. She’d given him a Panadol and he was cooler and clearer and he forced his thoughts into order.

  She was fifteen, for crying out loud. She was furious now, paranoid and tired, but she’d come around, once the story broke and some women’s magazine was ringing her asking her for an exclusive. She’d get some perspective then, and regret the way she’d misjudged him. That was all he wanted, to be granted a chance like that, and OK you can’t just win someone’s respect, you have to earn it, yada yada. He didn’t expect her to hero-worship him or anything, but surely she could see how totally different things were now.

  ‘Are you still awake, Sophie?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Hear that wind? That probably means the fog will start lifting tomorrow and someone will come looking for us.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘What’s bothering you, then?’

  He heard her exhale slowly. A tired sigh.

  ‘What do you reckon? Once someone finds us, and you tell them your fabulous news, the hunt’s going to be on, isn’t it? You were right — this whole place will be under siege.’

  ‘You can’t blame people for wanting to come to beautiful spots.’

  ‘I wish I’d never come. We shouldn’t even be here; nobody should.’

  ‘That’s a hopelessly idealised attitude, I’m sorry to say.’ He couldn’t marshal an argument, couldn’t pick up his scattered thoughts.

  ‘Whatever wild places are left on the planet, we should just lock them up and throw away the key, keep people out of them. We wreck everything we touch.’

  ‘Mmm, I used to think like that ...’

  ‘No, you didn’t. Just don’t even ...’

  ‘Look, you can’t change reality. You have to work with it, not against it.’

  ‘You told me,’ she said venomously, ‘you told me it was worth saving, and you put yourself on the line to keep it untouched.’

  ‘Look.’ He sighed, rubbed at his mouth. ‘Say people see those photos ...’

  ‘I’m telling you. It was a dog.’

  ‘It wasn’t a dog. You’ll see what it was when I develop that film. See how that’s going to be a good thing, a fantastic thing, for the wilderness? Once the world realises that the tiger is still out there, of course people are going to want to come here. There’ll be scientists and documentary-makers and photographers and a whole lot of ecologists and conservationists, they’re all going to make their way here and explore this habitat and learn about it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It won’t be ten thousand guys like Russell. It’ll be ten thousand guys like you.’

  She was lost to him now, he could see that. Hear it in her voice. He’d phone her and she’d hang up. Return his letters unopened, vanish out of his life, leave him with this new i
ntolerable blank emptiness. He’d almost managed it, but she’d slipped from him.

  ‘This could actually be a great thing for the thylacine,’ he said after a while, cautiously. ‘Imagine the new respect it’s going to create for the species, surviving all this time against the odds. It’ll be such a perfect symbol of how threatened the wilderness is, and see, we can use that — make all those forests World Heritage areas, exert global pressure to stop logging here. Teach people how to be tourists in a whole new enlightened way. A sustainable way.’

  His throat was parched, and he swallowed into the silence.

  He heard her laugh softly, an exhalation in the darkness. He could have understood contempt in that laugh, or unforgiving recrimination, but not what he heard, not wise and terrible sadness.

  ‘Soar with the vultures, Rich,’ she said.

  ‘Ian? It’s Mal. It’s clearing, by the looks of it.’

  ‘So we’re rolling?’

  ‘Just gotta clear the paperwork and call the pilots in. I’m phoning Western District S and R now.’

  ‘See you then.’ Ian hung up and thought: due to walk out on Monday, a couple of days’ extra food maybe, and today’s Friday. The Swiss guy had been gone for four days, but that was in the snow and without his gear. Ian had thought for a long time about the way that pack had been placed carefully against the rock. As though it had been abandoned. He’d been twenty-five, that boy. Just finished university, letter to his girlfriend in his diary. Travelling alone. Ian had been in the group that had found him, trekking up on foot to the summit and circling back down again. Not the time to think about that now.

  Ian kissed his wife, still in bed.

  ‘Was that work?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You’re going out there?’

  ‘Yep. It’s on. I’ll call you later.’

  He tossed yesterday’s unread paper into the recycling as he went out to the carport. His guttering was choked with early autumn leaves. The dawn cloud swirled around Mount Wellington like a wedding dress.

  Twenty-Three

  Sophie stood on top of the outcrop at last, scrambling up the last incline and panting as she wrapped the green garbage bag more tightly around her waist.

  The wind caught it and whipped it around. It was keeping her surprisingly dry, she thought, and even a bit warmer, like a perfectly functional piece of clothing with the holes for her head and arms, but God, imagine wearing it anywhere but out here.

  She’d woken at dawn and seen the light outside the tent, realised the fog had lifted, and climbed the nearest peak. Now she paused, catching her breath as she felt the heat of the climb tingle in her cheeks against the sting of cold here at the summit. She gulped air so cold it ached in her throat and lungs, concentrating on the mobile phone she held at arm’s length. The flashing low-battery symbol pulsed on the tiny screen as she turned slowly on a full axis, willing a bar of reception to register.

  She faced all cardinal points, carefully raising the phone in the air before her like a dowsing rod. Wind blustered in her ears. She blinked away cold tears as she turned gradually and pointed the phone to each direction on the horizon. There had to be something.

  But the screen was uselessly blank, filmed only with beading mist, and as she rubbed it dry on her sleeve the flashing orange battery image faded completely. OK. OK then. So that was that.

  Sophie raised her face into the headwind, feeling as bleak and empty as that dead, grey screen. She’d never been out of range in her life. It was like being on a distant abandoned planet. Far away on a home star, a giant comforting network of a billion reassuring conversations murmured in the dark, forgetting all about her. Passing her over.

  She slipped the dead phone into her pocket under the garbage bag, and rubbed her other hand across her eyes, her vision blurred with focusing on the phone, unable to adjust to the stretching distances all around her. Her feet kept shuffling her in a sleepwalking small circle, 360 degrees around.

  She was a speck, she saw again. Impossible, out here, not to be aware of that; just a tiny wobbling figure surrounded by the rumpled, jagged vistas in all directions; the mountain contours in the distance softened like some massive bolt of rough fabric. Closer, they sharpened into shadowed focus, revealing flinty plunges and ice-split rocks and tough vegetation that crept across the scattered subsoils, and her in the middle of it up here above the tree line, a soft-bodied scrap of warmth, cradling herself inside a plastic bag.

  If she could just drag some dry wood up here somehow, find a sheltered spot, pray that the wind dropped, she could light a fire. Send up a column of smoke like in the movies and someone would come and rescue them. Rich was down there, at their camp. She’d spoken to him, told him she was walking up to the summit to see if she could get reception before her phone battery finally went dead, and he’d just nodded vacantly, given a little twirling wave as if he couldn’t care less.

  He’d lie there and starve to death clutching that camera to his chest, and when searchers finally found him months or years into the future they would develop that film and find it, the animal they’d both seen. There would be a TV special with those photos shown over and over, and this place, so unmarked by humans, would be overrun. Besieged. With rubberneckers and eco-tourists and tiger hunters. People wanting to glimpse it, people wanting to microchip it, people wanting to commune with it and everybody wanting to be the one and only.

  A big dog, she thought for the thousandth time. Brindle, like that Staffordshire bull-terrier a friend at school had, like those Great Danes crossed with mastiffs people bred. Someone’s hunting dog escaped and gone feral, that was all it was, wasted with hunger and its poor knuckled spine curving, its ribs pushing through the fur. That’s what had made the shadows like stripes in Rich’s flash.

  But people looked at something like that, and saw what they wanted to, or needed to. She could almost understand it, the way you wanted something so much it warped what you saw, distorting and blurring what was there. Just look at the image she’d held in her mind of her father for all those years. Two old, discoloured snapshots, just a momentary arrangement of light and shadow, nothing to do with Rich himself. Something to pore over and fantasise about. People would come here with a craving that took them over, an irrational belief that they were seeing one thing when another thing was staring them in the face, and yes, if she were honest, she could understand that too. They’d turn the place upside-down, blindly pulling it apart, corner to corner. And what if. What if.

  She heard the chipping scatter of pebbles to her left and jerked her head to see a black glossy shape bob behind an outcrop. The crow bounced to the rocky point with an ungainly flap, tightened its claws and looked at her.

  ‘Hello you,’ she said. It found a better grip against the pour of wind and lowered its head to whet its beak energetically against the stone, turning into the slipstream.

  She thought of the dark gleaming rocks pictured in her mother’s gemstone book. Anthracite. Obsidian. She moved closer, a patch of spongy vegetation cushioning her steps for a few metres before the soles of her boots hit rock again. The crow observed her shrewdly, its head and body a wedge of perfect streamlined design, its eye bright with some private joke.

  Sophie remembered a biology project from school, the breakthrough discovery a few years back of the Wollemi pines scientists had thought were extinct. The way they’d gone to such lengths to keep the location a secret, to barricade it against a barrage of the curious. There was no way they could hide this location though. She tried to imagine this whole summit fenced off, lined with gravel walkways.

  Or concrete paths, probably. The whole of the park ending up like the orientation centre. Thousands of tourists getting out of tour buses with faces like the ones who came on daytrips to Ayresville, demanding hot chips and public toilets and promised mysteries, demanding a bang for their buck. They’d want an interpretive centre and a kiosk and a night-time full-moon Tiger Vigil tour, and of course they’d want the real thing
. In a cage, like that one in the museum, just an eco-cage this time. Blinded by a strobe of digital flashes as it turned its black bottomless eyes towards them. The world was so horrible, and so messed up, you couldn’t stand it.

  Sophie peered over the rocky outcrop where the crow had disappeared and stretched out her hand to clamber closer, the other hand going absently to her face to wipe her streaming nose, when suddenly her boot lost traction. Rock edge jutting into space, a grunt of pain as her hip hit stone, a second of scrambling, tilting disbelief, and she fell.

  Rich’s head was full of stars. He felt pummelled by clenched and knuckled hands, twisting around him, refusing to disentangle and let him drop. Sophie was gone again. Couldn’t stand even being near him now. He got up, steadying himself against the boulders. His head was a balloon, floating metres above his body, bobbing above his shoulders as he tottered over the stones and hoisted himself painfully across tussocks in the early light. Both boots off now, his limp giving him a rolling gait. A barefoot man wandering on the spongy pastures of the new, uninhabited earth. Far below, the soles of his feet registered the textures of the ground beneath him, the prickly moist give of grasses, the hard, stippled bones of rock underneath. One foot fine, the other hardly his; hot and puffy, so tightly swollen with pus he could feel it quiver with each step. The weakly lit world was monochromatic, fabulously detailed and every molecule of it in minute focus like an acid trip, pressing in upon his burning consciousness as startling and ephemeral as a single snowflake. As he limped forward the landscape swam in and out of his vision like something through a viewfinder and he admired the metallic sheen of a tarn, true deep blacks he could make out in the shadows before him, the myriad greys. See, this was why he used film, with its perfect possibilities for those tender highlights instead of the loss of dynamic range you got with digital. He could have stood and looked at this framed black-and-white textured world all day, thinking about agitating the film in the developing tank, timing it, then holding up a slippery strip of negatives and seeing the images there, ready for him. The calm, inexpressible comfort of sliding exposed paper into the fixing bath and tilting it back and forth, rinsing away the unused silver halide, that moment he loved.