The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘I’ve sighted the girl,’ Ian said through his headset mic. Hard not to let the exultation show in his voice. ‘She’s waving and looks fine. So could you notify her mother immediately on that direct mobile number. We’re just putting down now to assess the situation.’

  He could be gone, though, the father. Could be down a hole, off a cliff, a twisted crumple of broken bones in a crevasse. Could have done it deliberately. The helicopter landed and Ian felt the solidity of smooth rock beneath his boots as he alighted, felt the suck of the updraft and motioned to the girl to stay where she was.

  She nodded as the whipped-up air thrashed her hair around her face and tossed thousands of tiny red and orange leaves into the air.

  ‘Where’s your father?’ Ian yelled straight away. She pointed into a rocky overhang, somewhere they would have probably never seen from the air. Stunted trees bent away from it, and Ian saw the unnatural green of the tent, and smoke from a fire they’d started, gusting and thinning in the breeze. On a still day, he thought, they would have seen that first. She’d done everything right.

  ‘Are you alright?’ he yelled into the din of the rotors. She nodded firmly. He pointed to the tent with his eyebrows raised enquiringly, and she nodded again.

  ‘Both of us,’ he heard. Her next words were inaudible until he jogged closer. Her hands had dropped now, wrapping themselves around and around the crumpled orange jacket, and her black hair hung in rats’ tails from beneath her hat. Tears, he saw, were streaming down her reddened face.

  ‘Tell my mother,’ he heard. Her mouth squared into a child’s exhausted sob. ‘Tell my mum I’m alright.’

  Ian Millard, who had two girls of his own at home, knew to open his arms before he climbed back into the cabin to confirm by radio. They stood there, the two of them, the rushing pulse of air from the rotors beating on them over and over, like a heart pushing blood through veins.

  The second chopper landed on a nearby stretch of flat exposed rock, and Ian was glad to see it. Two separate helicopters back, was his gut instinct. Two separate statements.

  She was still a minor, and she wasn’t saying too much, but Ian didn’t think the girl was in shock. He thought she was fine, wrapped in her silvery blanket just staring out, as the rotors slowly revolved above, at the other search crew taking down the tent and talking to the father, not exactly getting a statement, not yet, but just sounding things out. Tim could put out the fire, follow with the father and whatever gear they’d been carrying.

  ‘You realise we’ll have a few questions for you?’ he said at one stage to the girl, and she gave a single brief nod. He poured her a hot drink out of his thermos and she sipped at it slowly, meditatively, lowering her face into the steam as if she were sitting in a café waiting for someone. Just watching her father.

  Estranged, Ian had explained to Tim over the headset earlier. One of those awkward situations, so watch your step. But as he waited, the guy looked up at the helicopter, catching the girl’s eye as the crew kept talking to him, and he moved away from them a bit, onto a flat patch of rock in his bare feet, limping and shaking off the restraining arm that tried to stop him. For all Ian knew, they were already reading him his rights, but he ignored them, pointedly.

  Then he took his camera out of its case. It was unbelievable, what some of these people did. Wanting a souvenir shot of the helicopter, or something.

  ‘Check out this guy,’ muttered Ian to the pilot. He felt the girl beside him lean forward, her body going absolutely still.

  And the guy opened the camera up and his fingers went in to the back of it — one of those old non-digital SLR cameras — and he pulled out a spool of film, an arm’s length of it, snapping and glinting transparently in the light and buffeting breeze. Then he grabbed another metre and pulled that too, arm high, rigid and outstretched like a magician pulling an impossible length of ribbon out of his sleeve. All of it, then he popped the canister and held that up to show it was finished.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ grunted the pilot, shaking his head and turning back to the instrument panel. The man stood there holding the camera in one hand and the twisting length of film aloft in the other for a long moment, his dark-shadowed eyes never leaving the girl, and then the spell was broken and Tim tapped the guy on the arm, shouting something, and he turned away.

  ‘Let’s go, eh?’ said Ian to the pilot. He felt ridiculously happy. He hoped they wouldn’t leave that film lying there, littering the place.

  The girl sat back in her seat, her face smoothly still. Both hands wrapped tight around the thermos cup, as if she feared she’d spill it. Ian motioned for her to fasten her seat belt and then stayed twisted slightly in his own seat, leaning back towards her to give her the chance to say something, to let him in on what was going on.

  Still, he wouldn’t push it. It was none of his business, what went on in families.

  Twenty-Five

  Sophie was working the comb down, methodically. Her mother sat on a chair in the garden, her chin tucked to her chest.

  ‘I’ve had it long for so many years,’ Sophie heard her say.

  ‘I know. You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘You wouldn’t rather go to a hairdresser’s?’

  ‘Of course not. You’ll do a much better job than them.’

  She ran the comb through dreamily, watching the hair drop henna-red and thin between Sandy’s shoulder-blades. How pale the back of her neck looked, so intimate and soft against the teeth of the comb. And oh, that stripe of darker colour at the roots, the grey and plain brown coming in against the red. Such valiant effort, Sophie thought, wonderingly, to hold out against time. She wanted to put her hand against the strong cords of her mother’s bowed neck, feel those vulnerable, tender vertebrae.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she said instead, ‘when you broke the lawnmower running over those forks out here?’

  ‘Spoons,’ said her mother’s voice indistinctly. ‘I forgot I’d buried them there.’

  ‘But why on earth?’

  Her mother’s hand came up and scratched vaguely at a loose lock of hair, tugged it back behind her ear, gazed at her two upturned palms as if for the first time.

  ‘I’d had an argument with the neighbour who used to live there,’ she said finally. ‘Someone told me to push a row of spoons into the ground to reflect back his bad energy. It’s a feng shui thing.’

  Sophie lifted the comb to the parting on her mother’s crown and pulled it down again meditatively. She thought she felt her mother shiver with pleasure, then realised she was laughing.

  ‘The grass grew,’ she heard, ‘and I forgot they were there.’

  Shaking with mirth now, helpless with it.

  ‘Tell me honestly,’ Sophie said, grinning, tugging through a knot, feeling the dryness of the split, sun-bleached ends. ‘Did you really expect it to work?’

  ‘Well, he moved away, didn’t he?’

  Her mother tilted her head back now, still laughing, closing her eyes in the sun, and Sophie saw the deep maze of lines at the corners, the legacy of all these years of doing just that, thousands of times, the way they fell into their delicate, accustomed tracks.

  ‘I’m laughing now,’ Sandy said, ‘but believe me, I was crying then.’

  Sophie put her hand on her mother’s head, and pushed softly until it was bowed again. Then she said, ‘I’m going down to see Rich on the long weekend.’

  She felt the stillness settle as Sandy breathed in sharply then exhaled, a faint sound of acknowledgement.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’m going with him to see his mum.’ A long silence.

  ‘Right.’

  The pale skin of her mother’s neck, the three empty holes in each earlobe, the hands resting on her knees — Sophie looked at it all in this still moment with a kind of avid intensity, as if committing it to memory. Then she gathered up hair into her fist and piled it gently in a twist on top of Sandy’s head. When she released her hand, it fell back like a
skein of wool.

  ‘Good,’ she heard Sandy say finally. ‘That’s good.’

  Her heart lurched. She could smell the cool, turned earth beside them, where the half-full wheelbarrow sat abandoned. She chewed her lip.

  ‘Another thing.’

  ‘Oh God, fire away then.’

  ‘I want to go back. Do volunteer work with the rangers in the summer holidays. I need your signed permission.’

  She could feel, under her hand, her mother’s slow, almost imperceptible nods as she absorbed this. The silence lengthened like shadows and she heard Sandy swallow, heard her breathing. She opened the scissors and aligned a cool metal blade against the delicate skin at the nape of her mother’s neck. As she brought them closed a neat length of shorn hair slithered to the ground.

  ‘You’re going to love this,’ she said. ‘Trust me.’

  Her mother raised a hand to her concealed face, fingertips against the slope of cheekbone, her head obediently still at the sound of the scissors.

  ‘You OK?’ Sophie said lightly, snipping.

  ‘Something in my eye,’ said Sandy.

  The light was too perfect to waste.

  ‘Leave that,’ she said to Sophie, impulsively putting down the trowel. ‘We’ll put them in after the sun’s gone down. That’s better for them anyway.’

  Sophie paused and glanced over at her, eyebrows raised enquiringly, still holding a punnet of basil seedlings in her hand.

  ‘I’m going to go inside and get the camera,’ Sandy said, ‘and take our photo. Then in summer when we’re eating tons of pesto and fresh tomatoes, we’ll look at it and congratulate ourselves.’

  She stood up and hurried inside. Where was that camera? She had to get back out there before that stretching, golden sunlight sank down behind the horizon and it was over. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she saw the camera on the mantelpiece, and was startled afresh. It would take some getting used to, this new hair.

  ‘OK, get ready,’ she called as she pushed the screen door open again. ‘I’m going to get one just of you then I’m going to put the self-timer on so we can both be in it.’

  She looked through the viewfinder at Sophie standing, arms folded and waiting. That resigned smile on her face, that laconic raised eyebrow as she pretended to be putting up with this with stoic forbearance.

  She was terrifying, Sandy thought. Just look at the length of her shadow. She saw the sun tipping behind her, about to melt and fade, and her daughter’s silhouette fuzzy with it, a bleeding, swimming edge of gold.

  ‘Wait,’ she called, squinting. Where on earth had she left her glasses? She’d had them earlier, she was sure, reading the planting instructions ...

  ‘They’re on your head, Mum.’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  Grinning as she lined her up in the viewfinder now. She’d be blurred, Sandy knew. Moving, shifting self-consciously. Impossible to capture. She pressed the button anyway.

  Another sixty seconds of this golden, forgiving light, if she was lucky. She adjusted the camera’s timer to automatic and set it down on the stump, bent a couple of sprays of shooting blue gum regrowth out of the way of the lens. This was it, now. You pressed that button and then you ran to get into position; this was your one small ration of time, ready or not.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ Sophie called. God, she was so composed!

  Sandy pressed the button, and ran.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Cathie Plowman, John Hale, Martin Elliot and Bill Forsythe for generously sharing their time, knowledge and memories. Thanks too to Kathryn Lomer, John Holton, Joda Plex, Alikki Vernon, Nam Le, Craig Cormick and Fleur Rendell for the right conversations at the right time.

  I’m grateful to Joe Bugden and the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, which provided time and space for writing and research in 2007; Kathryn Medlock of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; and Sarah Castleton, whose early encouraging email about this book has stayed pinned to my noticeboard for the duration.

  My biggest thanks go to my editor, Aviva Tuffield at Scribe, whose dedication and attention to detail have made me realise how important it is, when you’re driving at night, to have someone in the passenger seat, ready to hand you a coffee, change the radio station, or just pull out a map. Thanks.