The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  He realised he was standing at the bank of the tarn. He’d walked here to get to the water, driven by the thought of lowering his foot into the clean coldness of it. He sat down awkwardly, pulling his jeans and thermals above his knees. The extent of the infection, the huge pulpy rawness of his heel, made him blink, certain for a second he could see the bone beneath the flesh, just white then black again, positive then negative, a flash from bone to blood. Then he lowered the foot into the freezing water and his breath stuttered into his chest with the sensation; not really pain, beyond pain now, more a memory of numbness. A novocaine shot in a dream.

  He looked down at the foot floating under the water, a few bubbles on the ghostly skin. His skin. He’d walked a very long way on these feet. He’d always liked seeing the journey as a road, a lifelong trip to the somewhere up ahead it was always going to be worth getting to, if he could just outpace life and stride into that perfect place. But it wasn’t a road. There was no trail.

  He looked at the back of his hands, laced them together. When you looked honestly at a photo you saw its flaws, you needed to manipulate it to make it as perfect as your vision had been. Parts that needed more detail — you had to burn them in. Dodging, it was called. Just you, standing alone there in a darkroom with that single light pouring down, light that had the power to turn everything to black, trying to cup your hands and fingers as the timer whirred, trying to make light fall on the burning-in spot. So easy to ruin it, and turn all that hard-won detail to blackness.

  He’d travelled, yes, but so rarely on actual roads. His feet, instead, had taken him hurriedly out of rooms, backing out making excuses and calling goodbyes, then into airports, in and out of train stations, looking for the minibus outside to carry him to the hostel, anxious to sling his backpack in someone’s boot rather than heft it himself. Then looking for a way to write up the journey so that it seemed he walked every step like a pilgrim, like some mystic. Dodging. Carrying with him all his negligent, slipshod leave-takings, all of them hidden in a light-sensitive box over his shoulder, ready to be developed and scrutinised in secret later.

  He gazed at the bubbles forming on his submerged skin, felt the exquisite relief of the cold water on his wounded flesh. And if he could just climb that range there he’d see vista after vista to vanishing point, and the rainwater that had poured onto them during the storm would now be trickling into rivers and tributaries and creeks, downhill all the way, across some imaginary borderline from here into the Franklin–Gordon Wild Rivers National Park to the south, churning into those empty, forbidding places, right down to the deep, protected-forever Franklin, where he’d plunged his foot in another time, another place. And onwards down to the sea.

  Here he was, finally, back in one of the last of the earth’s immaculate and undespoiled places, desperate for just a shadow of that certainty he’d felt back then, and he was barefoot, crippled, outgunned. Instant karma’s gonna get you, he thought dully, the line ribboning through his mind, dredging blue round glasses and poor John dead at forty.

  He sat there, retrieving thought after thought like detritus on a beach as his brain frothed shallowly with fever, his head swayed there on its invisible string, light as air.

  He feared for himself. Feared standing up, and turning, and not seeing the way back to their camp. All these tarns and boulders and dead ghost gums staring back, implacable. And that vast sky, washed depthless, the lakes below mirroring the endless vault of clearing air, the white mist drawing backwards like a caul — all of it filled him with terror.

  It was like discovering a world beneath the other world, holding you carelessly in its inconceivable fist. A world which showed you the underneath of everything with such supreme indifference that it squeezed the breath out of you. Where a wind or tide would turn, and disorientation and urgency would come pouring back into you like the heaviest weight you could endure.

  Over the edge. Rock freezing, slippery as glass with algae and moss. Her fingers clutching nothing, her knee folding and hitting the sloping rock. The garbage bag crackling as she rolled, wrenching itself up under her armpits. She was dimly aware of the crow flapping into the air above her with an alarmed caw. No freefall, no clear air. She was scrabbling, her spine and elbows scraping the boulders going down, the rock nipping at her with flinty, jagged teeth.

  In four snapping seconds she’d gone from glancing carelessly at the view to pitching over the edge of a freezing, windswept mountain, and now she was going to just disappear, and nothing in this place could care less or even notice. It would dust her with snow like icing sugar, leave her blue-lipped and stiff, jammed down a crevice somewhere.

  She heard a sound she hardly recognised escaping from her. It wasn’t a cry of fear, but a long open-mouthed yell of frustration, of fury. She was going to die here and she had never even learned to surf or had sex with a boy, she’d hardly started her life and yet the world was going to allow this; here was where it was going to end, bundled dead in a plastic bag like rubbish.

  Then her head snapped back and her teeth jabbed sharply into her lip, drawing rusty blood. Her knees and arms struck a sharp, whipping tangle of branches. She grabbed blindly at them, conscious of how spindly they seemed, how silent things were now. And how loud her breathing was, she noticed with an odd detachment, how single-minded, the desire to haul that oxygen in and out of her lungs, to claw inelegantly at every precarious twig. Holding on for dear life, people said; lives they held dear, lives that were costly. She’d crash through in a second. She would be like a body in that show where forensic investigators reconstructed the accident scene, showing where she’d slipped and plunged to her death; the snapped twigs, the sheared-off moss. She’d seen a frozen body on CSI, purple-faced and staring, lying on the slab while the investigators joked to the morgue guy, the old one ...

  But still, she hung there, suspended by a mass of branches, of wiry, entangling limbs. She opened her eyes and saw she wasn’t clinging onto the edge of a cliff.

  No sheer precipice. No cinematic heart-stopper. Nothing as dramatic as that. She was bruised and shaken but there were two ways she could be saved, either by sliding down to sit on the ledge or simply dropping to the wide shelf of ground which lay, with an anticlimax that was almost insulting, less than three metres below.

  She took a deep shaking breath. Waited to cry in earnest, to be engulfed by the aftermath wave of shock. But instead she clung there, dazed and blinking at what lay below her. The colour was wrong, the register turned up to the wrong saturation, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the grey-greens of lichen and bog and cushiongrass, and it took her a while to work out what it was.

  The BCG effect, she thought finally, twisting her boots free of a branch cleft and getting a good handhold to swing herself down into it, the thicket bending and springing to accommodate her, to deliver her, slithering, to the ground. She dropped gingerly into that deep unlikely carpet of orange and russet and yellow leaves.

  Deciduous beech. Fagus.

  Rich staggered back to the beacon, the safe haven, of the green tent. He collapsed onto his sleeping mat, groggy and dazed.

  She was right — he was weak as piss. Weak as a kitten. Weak as water. All these years priding himself on staying unencumbered and now he had shed it all and was just this, his own pared-down and insubstantial self.

  Still doubled over, though. Staggering under the weight of all the clanking paraphernalia and accessories of this guy on his back, kicking him on. No need to look behind at that face.

  His brain swam in lush heat, tracking down corridors and trying the handles of doors. Searching for something forgivable. But instead he opens the door of the room at the nursing home. Not this. Christ.

  His mother in the single bed. She turns to him as he comes into the room, seeing her dressed in some nondescript synthetic dress and cardigan like all of them, clothes she would have absolutely hated, and he’s certain that she knows who he is, despite what his father kept telling him.

 
; ‘It’s Rich, Mum,’ he says, just to be on the safe side, his smile feeling held open with fishhooks.

  ‘I can see it’s you,’ she says distractedly, patting the small quilt she holds on her lap — a crocheted afghan, something they’d clearly fished out of the communal box.

  ‘Close your eyes now,’ she says, startling him, then he sees she’s not talking to him, but a doll she holds wrapped in the quilt.

  It doesn’t help that its cheap nylon hair stands up in a quiff like a fright wig, or that one eye stays wide open while the other is half-closed. Like someone with Bell’s Palsy, he thinks, his heart jumping with horror at the sight. No, that’s not it. And not a horror movie. Something else. One eye open and the other half-closed. A memory stirs in him.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ she says again tenderly, pressing down on the black glued eyelashes with gentle fingers. The plastic eye, the good one, springs open again to stare balefully up at the ceiling.

  ‘She can’t sleep,’ his mother confides ruefully to him, and he feels a thrill of fear ripple down his arms. He holds on to the tubular bedrail, the smile aching on his face.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ she goes on hoarsely, patting the quilt.

  ‘Of course.’ He’s going to add ‘anything’ but is so afraid she’s going to ask him to take her home. To save her. He imagines his father’s uncomprehending face, slowly growing slack with utter disgust, gazing at him from the recliner rocker as he enters the lounge room with his mother and her suitcase. They said I could bring her home, he imagines himself saying, like she’s been asking for every day since we stuck her there. And he sees, clearly, the three of them, propped there in the room unable to move, both his father and himself as vacant and hesitant and stupefied as his mother, unable to act, their instincts deadened by the long medication of denial.

  He feels the cold steel of the bedrail, smooth and beige and glossy. His moment missed again, the quick suppressed bloom of shame.

  ‘Will you give my baby a bath?’ says his mother. He feels it flicker in him.

  ‘Of course,’ he says.

  ‘You’ll need my special soap. The Yardley. It’s in my drawer there.’

  He opens the drawer next to her bed and feels a stinging pressure in his throat at every humble, abject thing hidden there inside it. At the back, the brown purse he remembers from years ago.

  ‘There’s no money in there,’ she says without looking up, her eyes on the wrapped doll.

  ‘I’m not looking for money, Mum. I’m looking for your soap.’

  But his hand reaches in and picks up the purse. He thinks of all the times he slid his fingers inside its side pockets years ago, hunting for fifty-cent pieces, gathering coins from the pockets of her coat and down the back of chairs, him and his sister taking the money to buy Coke and hot chips at the takeaway, and eating them without speaking to each other down at the football oval as his father stayed at work for as long as he could and his mother lay watching television, a bottle on the floor beside her, with one eye open and one eye half-closed.

  He feels inside the pocket now. A wrapped half-page, carefully clipped, is hoarded in there, with something inside it. He hesitates, but it’s as if his mother has forgotten he’s there. He unfolds the limp, soft paper and scans it. Some Sunday supplement or magazine page from years ago. What’s hot are these funky pieces made from restrung beads by Ayresville resident Sandy Reynolds, he reads. Chunky and colourful, they’re bound to turn heads with Sandy’s inspired take on recycling.

  Two small stiff squares lie against the page, and he turns them over. A photo of Sophie at two, the emulsion faded, all blue and green tones now; and the school photo he’d sent his mother in a card that time, Sophie at eight, her sweet gappy smile looking out at him trustingly, levelly. His beautiful abandoned girl.

  ‘Wash her hair, won’t you?’ his mother says, her fingers still stroking, rearranging the wrap around the doll she cradles. ‘You have to support her head. You’d know that, though, if you’re a nurse.’

  Where has this tightening come from, this awful constriction up inside his jaw and behind his eyes?

  ‘I’m Rich, Mum,’ he says, and the words seem dry as sawdust. She raises her eyes and meets his, leaving him in no doubt.

  ‘I know who you are,’ she says, and lifts the doll into his arms.

  She walked down the mountain, residual adrenaline still sending a shake through her; exultant trembling in her knees and thighs and a fluid lightness in each step. The knotted garbage bag, full of leaves now, bouncing against her calves weighing nothing, the blood from her cut lip salty and mineral on her tongue. When I had you, she remembered her mother saying to her once, they put you on my chest and you started to crawl upwards, I couldn’t believe the strength in you. Just born, and your arms and legs so full of power, like you’d been designed just for this.

  She was striding now with a bird’s hollow-boned energy, light- headed and impatient, effortlessly closing the gap.

  They had to take you so I could have some stitches, Sandy had said, and my arms ached for you. They ached.

  Rich looked really sick now, feverishly clammy, rapid-eye movement behind his lids. She crouched at the tent fly, studying him. He had a few days’ stubble and it was silvery grey, which explained why he didn’t have a beard. And he smelled bad. Not just sweaty and dirty. Something else.

  ‘Rich,’ she said, ‘I’m going to crush up a couple of panadol for you.’

  She went to her pack and felt down inside, past her book and the tangle of her MP3 player cable, the rolled-up dirty clothes she’d put back on again later. Methodically, she went through each zippered side pocket looking for the foil of tablets, and maybe she should make him take it with another electrolyte drink too — she still had two packets left. Put some more Betadine on that ankle.

  Her fingers found an internal Velcro flap in the lining and tore it open, and she touched a stack of something like thick pages, and pulled it out.

  She looked blankly at what lay in her hand as she crouched there. Five sachets wrapped together with an elastic band — dehydrated potato, dried peas and corn mix, and three others, thicker foil packets, stamped Hiker’s Pantry Gourmet Trail Food. She sat back on her heels, mystified. Hiker’s Pantry? She hadn’t packed these. She’d never seen them before in her life. But Vegetarian Mushroom Risotto — who else but her mother, she thought, her lip quivering, would choose vegetarian? She would have had to order it especially, probably, from the guy in the health-food shop in Ayresville. She would have slipped them in here, and hugged the secret to herself, like the way she believed in random acts of kindness, like her foolish, harmless faith in miracles.

  She glanced up to tell Rich, and was shocked to see his shuttered face wet with tears.

  ‘Rich,’ she said. ‘Wake up. I’m going to get you those panadol, OK?’

  He looked like some old vagrant lying there, she thought, repelled by his grey stubble and creased, bleary face, the unkempt hair on end.

  He opened his eyes and blinked at her, but she didn’t think he was really seeing her.

  ‘Both photos,’ she heard him say, his voice cracking. ‘Both of them, all that time.’

  Her heart hardened a little then. Sure he was weak and sick and probably a bit delirious, but you’d think he could stop obsessing about those bloody pictures in his camera just for a few minutes.

  ‘They’re safe in your pack,’ she muttered, turning away. He reached out a haphazard hand and patted his pack, nodding. She told herself she’d get him the panadol in a second, once she worked out how much fresh water she’d need to rehydrate the risotto. She read the instructions, swallowing saliva, almost grinning at herself: 150 grams of dried rice, dehydrated mushrooms and powdered flavouring, pretty much, she thought, and look at her; here she was, starving for it. Absolutely starving.

  Someone was touching his shoulder. That police officer, doing everything by the book, just stepping up to each of them in turn, grasping their shoulders.
‘You’re arrested,’ he’d said, looking Rich gravely in the eye. ‘OK. Good,’ he remembered answering.

  This hand now. Smaller. Giving him a quick shake, so that he opened his eyes and it was his daughter. He’d done all wrong by her. Bringing her out here, revealing himself as the mediocre shit that he was.

  ‘Sit up and eat,’ she was saying to him. ‘Mushroom risotto.’

  He squinted at her in the dim light of the tent. She was unrecognisable now as the girl he’d been dazzled by at the airport, all anarchic vampire black and ugly sweeps of eyeliner. This Sophie had short stringy hair tucked hastily behind her ears, and her eyes, without their flamboyant camouflage, no longer shocked you with the artifice of glittering, defiant challenge. They were ordinary eyes now; plain and appraising and exposed, along with the chapped lips and reddened nose, in a face made sallow by the beige poloneck she was wearing. He still flinched beneath her gaze, though, as he took the plate from her. She was suffused with something. An iron will made incandescent, something he could see around her like an edge of light, as if she were drawing strength from his own debility, breathing in his stale, used air and breathing out cool blue oxygen. It took all his concentration to get the spoon loaded and wavering between his lips.

  ‘You been saving this?’ he said finally after he’d swallowed a mouthful. He had to enunciate carefully. He wasn’t sure what might come flying out of his mouth.

  ‘It’s from Mum,’ she said. ‘Not me.’

  Yes, he thought, swallowing. Here thanks to him, fed and alive thanks to her.

  His skin throbbed tightly, as though he was encased in a carapace. Some scuttling bloody bottom feeder, invertebrate and unevolved. Every joint aching and seized. You’re arrested. He was. It was true. Detained, blocked, undeveloped, arrested. The hand on the shoulder, sombrely delivering him the bad news like a final, honest verdict.