The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  He ate carefully, food someone else had provided for him, someone else had cooked for him, while he lay there, a prostrate and useless liability. Hunger made him humble. Something his father used to say, jubilant at making his son admit he was wrong. Time to eat crow, he would say, pointing an unerring finger. Time to eat crow.

  Twenty-Four

  Ian hadn’t been the first to sight the walker, back there on Mount Ossa. One of the SES volunteers had shouted to him, cupping his hands around his mouth from the other side of an outcrop of boulders, striated and fissured like icebergs made of stone. The snow had started to melt on the ground then, but there were still fingers of it, long and perfect, crisscrossing the rock. He’d known, as soon as he heard the tone of the call, the defeat in it. He’d scrambled up and across the saddle, seen the boy sitting against the rock wall, tucked so poignantly into the shelter of a crevice, useless high-tech boots out straight, his head fallen onto his chest. Like he’d just dozed off, in the face of all that rugged grandeur, just closed his eyes against the overwhelming enormity of the view and fallen calmly asleep. Part of Ian’s brain registered that, to remember to tell the boy’s mother, how calm he looked. Then without thinking he put his palm on that dark curly head, seeing the fleece beanie clasped loosely in the hand fallen in the lap, and crouched down. All spark gone now, all of it extinguished. Just that hat in hand, like a last gesture of salute, or deference, or respect. Head bowed in submission. Ian paused in the huge thawing stillness on the mountain, then got up, heart heavy as a lead sinker.

  He’d glanced back up to the summit, gauging it. The boy had been just four hundred metres from his pack.

  ‘You right, Ian?’ Tim was holding out a helmet to him.

  ‘Good as gold.’

  ‘Want to check the headset mics?’

  ‘Sure. Fire away.’

  He put his on and flipped the switch, waited. Tim’s voice, close and calm in his ear.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  He gave the thumbs-up. ‘Loud and clear.’

  ‘It was minus seven that night, mate. Nothing like this, and nothing anybody could have done. They’re alright. You wait and see.’

  Vitreous light, cold thin air, pure and empty. Rich had got up and staggered outside, lay now with his head resting on his jacket. Thoughts unspooling into slackness, his breathing slowing, Rich could see ground developing slowly in front of him, stunted, snowline bushes and tufts of grass. The same ground he’d raked his eyes over, searching for signs of wear, for a human track or sign. Wait though — not here. Staring in the safelight’s redness at the sharp dark details appearing in the wash, his memory tipping that tray back and forth.

  Not Tasmania, that other hillside, in Langmusi.

  The name dropping dense and compact, like a stone in a pond.

  Langmusi. Yes.

  The other tourists gone; the red-robed monks gone too. Just him, watching the vultures with their bald heads scarlet and shining with gore, their weird hunchbacked movements. Dizzy as he stood there, his feet treading uneasily beneath him taking him closer for a better shot. Watching the birds swallow and duck their necks to glare back at him. Then he’d looked down at his feet. Rich blinked now, remembering it, swallowing the same metallic saliva.

  At his feet, shredded scraps of cloth, black clumps of hair stuck to dessicated strips of scalp. He was standing on them — the picked-over pieces of forgotten people trampled like litter amongst the tussocks of grass and exposed rock.

  That would be him. Two red holes in his face — ragged sockets — where the ravens had been. Those crows. That’s if they found him, of course; otherwise he’d be blackened and shrivelled like fucking Peat Man.

  He closed his eyes against the acidic, dazzling light. Light like lemon juice, like fixative. You need a fast exposure for it, or you’d bleed out all your details: people’s faces death-masks of pure white, hard black holes for eye sockets because of the shadows.

  That’s how the tiger was going to look in his photos, a silhouetted blur against grainy rushing dark, a nebula of bone-white light. He’d fought against how savage that light was every time he’d ever taken a shot in outback Australia in daylight. Light that sucks the moisture out of you, turns you into dried-out compost. That’s all you are. Just hair and teeth and scraps of leathery skin trodden under.

  Then his face is in the shade and squinting with confusion he can make out a figure hovering above him, a boot rasping on the rock next to his head.

  Something brushing him like feathers.

  Sophie.

  There’s nothing he could do now that would humiliate him any further, so he’ll tell her. Tell her sorry, ask her to forgive him. He licks his lips. A croak comes out. A caw.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ is what he hears himself say. Jesus, is there no end to his cowardice?

  She pushes something into his mouth, onto his tongue. It’s a coin. It’s a stone. He moves his tongue and it slides against the roof of his mouth, melting.

  ‘You’re not going to die,’ she says.

  Feels the thick buttery slip of it, hears I’m a sucker for chocolate, actually, but only the really good, pure, dark organic stuff, that rich bittersweet melt of it granular and smooth at the same time liquefying in his mouth, filling it, impossibly, with chocolate, dense as compacted earth dissolving into sweet smoothness, and he blinks, certain he’s hallucinating the taste, confusing it with water she’s giving him, the cold lichen-flavoured rock-filtered water of the landscape they’re in now, the freezing nerve-exposed hurt of it to your teeth. He gasps again. It must be said.

  ‘You. I mean you. I don’t want you to die.’

  There’s a pitiless, efficient beak burying itself in his throat and pulling something free, some bloody and vital internal organ he can’t breathe without. An awful animal smell of oily feathers is threatening to gag him and that’s the price it will be for saying it, for committing it to the air.

  ‘Not going to happen,’ her voice says.

  He sees her break off another corner and feed it to him, peeling off the gold paper.

  ‘I was saving it,’ he hears her say, and the thought of her sheltering such an innocent and hopeful secret — paying attention to his pronouncement in the shop in Hobart, in that other universe, wanting to buy him a gift, the stranger who’d given her nothing, ever, the thought of her believing there would be a time to present it to him — all this melts into him as exquisitely as the fragments of chocolate.

  Nothing left to humiliate. He wonders why, of everything, her tenderness is the very worst thing, and he unclenches his aching teeth, his mouth crammed with sweetness, and cries like a baby.

  Sandy smoothed her hand over Sophie’s bed. She didn’t want to change those sheets. She could bury her head in that pillow and, faintly, smell her daughter still, and she was hanging on to that. The mobile phone was heavy in the breast pocket of her shirt, and part of her was attuned, constantly, for its ring; she could feel a whole dimension of her attention focused there. Nobody else would call. Not any of her friends — she’d told them to leave her alone today.

  ‘I need a break,’ she’d said yesterday, lamely, and Margot had said, ‘Sandy, when this is sorted out, don’t worry, I’m going to organise for all of us to go down to my sister’s beach house.’ She’d looked at them, all gazing at her like a Greek chorus, ready to narrate her life, and heard herself say from a calm distance of disbelief, ‘No, I mean a break from you.’

  And there was no Janet, either, clicking through the house making her feel inadequate, no insistent voice drowning out her own. Janet seemed to have left the building. Sandy kept catching herself stunned at how quiet the house was, or how long since it had seemed this still.

  Still with emptiness. With nothing but her in it. It wasn’t to be endured, the thought of the life gone out of this house, this bed made and tucked like a shrine, the day’s useless light shifting across an unused room.

  Unthinkable, but she had to countenance it, so
oner or later, the possibility. Had to steel herself and touch it quickly, like a red-hot stove, press down on it like a spinning metal lathe and let it wound her, feel the unbearable hidden bite of it. You’re meant to get something, she thought savagely, for pain like this. Some kind of homeopathic insight which inures you to horror of it; something that hardens you, immunises you.

  Or the enlightenment everyone talked about descending on you like a thunderbolt, letting you feel the oneness in all things etcetera. You’re meant to get something back.

  She stood in the doorway of Sophie’s room gazing in, that raw and newly attentive part of her brain registering something discordant. She let her eyes travel slowly over the room, noting its details. And why not? She had the time. She had the whole day.

  Everything seemed so ... picked out, so crammed with minutiae: the pinboard of photos and quotations sharply in relief now, against the white particle board, the thin, precise shadow each piece of paper threw as it curled away. Sophie’s desk with its novels stacked against the wall, authors Sandy had never heard of. A row of Easter eggs, untouched in their lurid foil — why hadn’t she noticed Sophie had never eaten those eggs? What had been wrong with her? — the quilt Sophie had bought for herself last year. She remembered criticising that quilt, impatient and damning. Sighing gustily in this same doorway. ‘Do you think you could buy just one thing for yourself sometime that isn’t black?’ she’d said. ‘Honestly, anyone would think you were in mourning your whole life.’

  She gripped her hands together remembering that now, the wringing ache in her chest unbearable, emptied of tears. The only sound her own breathing, doggedly in and out, her eyes vacant as she stood wondering what was keeping her there, her attention snagged on something under the surface. Eyes settling, finally, back on the quilt.

  It wasn’t black, she saw now, it was a deep, rich purple, dark as the skin of a plum.

  That was what was different. Everything in the room was lit up, the gloom cut through with light that illuminated every floating dust mote.

  Her dawning realisation, when it came to her, didn’t hit with some transcendent epiphany, the way she’d always secretly hoped.

  She just saw what was there: bright mid-morning sunlight coming through her daughter’s bedroom window now that the tree outside, with its canopy of heavy foliage, was gone. That’s all it was.

  When he sat up again he saw she’d been collecting wood, and was busy shaving flakes of wood from a branch she’d pulled from the gnarled and stunted trees. Pencil pines, by the looks of them.

  Too wet and green to burn, too big. He watched with the pinpoint detachment his fever gave him, hardly caring. She’d waste their last few damp matches trying to light that sappy bark, and he’d lie here watching her, and that fog would come down again and they’d freeze to death inside that one damp sleeping bag, which might be better than starving. Hypothermia, the easy death. The dulled, grateful sleep.

  Then she slid her hand into the front pocket of her pack and took out a brochure, the useless one he’d picked up instead of paying for a map at the information office. She screwed it up carefully and made a little pyramid of it and the green pine chips. Opened the pocket knife and sawed off a lock of her hair like it meant nothing to her and sprinkled that on too. Spent, he watched her like she was a movie, like he was viewing a stray bit of footage he lacked the energy to edit anymore.

  Not going to work. Nothing there going to combust. He’d just watch this and then he could sleep.

  She put her hand down the side of her pack again and felt around. She caught his eye but her expression moved over him as if he was a bush or a rock, something inanimate she barely registered. She pulled out four or five little curled pieces of something and pushed two into the bottom of the pile, took a match.

  Never, he thought, feeling his own treasonous body, despite everything, aching for a possibility still. There was a fizzing crackle and he saw a flame, a steady flame. It caught. The brochure went up fast, the dyes in it flaring blue and green and then the page quickly curling to ash as he stared mesmerised, watching the flame disappear. Gone. Over. Then Sophie bending her head calmly and breathing life into it somehow, the curled little chips crackling and popping like oil, the woodchips snapping now as it began to burn. He waited, incredulity leeching into his dullness, until she’d nursed the fire into something that would keep going, until he smelled the pine resin in the smoke and knew it wouldn’t go out. She would keep feeding it with wood until it warmed them and made a plume of smoke someone in a plane overhead would see, and this was what she had been waiting for, he could see that now — a clear sky finally, and his relief was so humiliating that he slumped down again and let his face press against the ground, smelling rot and water, ice-melt and earth.

  ‘OK,’ he said at last, like a man trumped fair and square. ‘OK.’ His mouth hard against the dirt beneath him so that he heard his own muffled voice, the ground soaking it up, listening and expectant and waiting for him to yield.

  He turned his head, then, to face her. ‘What was it?’

  She glanced up at him, eyes hooded with exhaustion. A tired parent.

  ‘Orange peel. Dried over the stove. Back at the Windy Ridge Hut.’

  He nodded, waved his hand vaguely to her in a defeated, sweeping salute.

  ‘Where did you learn that?’ he said, and she raised her eyebrows as if the question surprised her.

  ‘Russell showed me,’ she said. A log fell from the fire and she pushed it back, holding her power so lightly and easily, so thoughtlessly, that even that gesture took his breath away, it was so full of grace.

  What Ian Millard saw as the chopper banked across the striated dolorite surfaces of the Du Cane Range was the ridge of mountain like a knuckled pair of fists before they dipped into the rocky cradle of the Labyrinth. Mammoth glacial boulders lay stacked and strewn as though someone had tipped a boxful looking for something. He’d been up here several times, then last year, after they’d found the body and after he’d said no thanks to the counselling, he’d made himself come back with a couple of colleagues one long weekend. It had been middle of summer and they’d still frozen their arses off in a surprise snap hailstorm, and they’d kept this part for a day walk and headed back to the coal fire in the hut at night. Plenty of water, lots of overhanging outcrops and shelter if you were using your head and got in somewhere down out of the wind.

  The helicopter cast a shadow that stretched an elongated distortion of itself into the fissures and tussocks of cushion plants, the spreading fingers of coniferous heath. It was early enough to see the surface of the shaded rocks and vegetation dusted with dawn frost, which would melt by mid-morning. One time he’d been up here when the ground had melted and thawed over and over and it shone like caramelised sugar, a dazzle too bright to see when the sun bounced off it and into your eyes. Even now, the moisture on the rock surfaces across the range made the contrasting colours of the lichen patches shine against the smoothness; the exposed rocks dark as giant Christmas puddings studded with fruit and mixed peel, the deep corners and crevices frosted with sugary white. Good visibility today. He was letting himself hope. They had water, they had all their gear as far as anyone knew, it was only day four and there was no reason to think — if they hadn’t fallen or lost their clothing and sleeping bags — that they wouldn’t be alive.

  ‘See that?’ said the pilot through the headset.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I saw some smoke. Just a haze of it. Pity the wind won’t drop.’

  ‘Go there anyway.’

  They were over Hyperion now, banking across the flash of Lake Helios and up above the tree line, the scoparia massing here and there against the rolling alpine pasture and heath. Ian watched shadow and rock and grey-green vegetation and their own gliding shadow. In and out of the dips, stretching and shrinking.

  Then, suddenly, a colour that didn’t fit. Three orderly lines of orange and red. He blinked a couple of times. Stark against the
muddy khaki on a high flat expanse of grass, it looked like scarification, like a fresh series of scratches in skin, pinpoints of bright blood welling up.

  Three lines in a row — that had to be them. He signalled to the pilot to go down, grabbing his binoculars. It was heaped fagus leaves. That would be the girl, he suddenly knew instinctively. So she was mobile, at least. Still thinking. OK. He told the pilot to find a place to put down safely, and reached to flip on the radio switch. Now to see, he thought. To try to read the situation. Just take it slowly.

  Back in the tent, he was dreaming of a time he’d blown a tyre on the van, the whomp, whomp, whomp juddering that filled the cabin as he’d slewed and braked, eyeing the gravel desperate for a wide place to fishtail to a stop. The tyre kicked and shredded itself to pieces and he was suddenly on the rim. He plunged his foot onto a phantom brake pedal and pain drove a nail deep into his foot, one confident heedless whack with a hammer. Then as he writhed the zip shot up and Sophie’s head appeared through the fly.

  ‘They’re here,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hear that?’ She motioned for him to hand her his folded jacket. ‘I’m going to make sure they’ve seen us.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The police, the rangers, whoever it is,’ she said impatiently. ‘Pass us your jacket — it’s orange.’

  He pulled it, rustling, from the daypack. Feeling the camera bag secure inside its wrapped nest of t-shirts, incubating there precious and fragile as an egg.

  ‘Sophie ...’ he began, his voice a croak still. A helpless hoarse whisper. A loser voice, wheedling and weak.

  ‘You wait here,’ was all she said.

  Now here was the girl, thank God, alive and standing, looking thin as a whippet but OK, waving an orange jacket at them. Ian could see her bright windburned cheeks and nose, stark against the paleness of her face as she tilted it up towards them as morning sun bounced and dazzled off the windscreen.