The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘It sure does!’

  Bastard, bastard, bastard.

  He was limping worse now, she could see. Trying to hide it, but it kept making him drop back. Only three hours today, if you just went up and over Pelion Gap. He’d shaken his head dismissively at the idea of climbing Mount Ossa.

  ‘Too cloudy,’ he’d said. ‘If you’re so determined to keep going, there’s no point flogging yourself up a mountain as well. Won’t get much of a view from the summit on a day like today.’

  He was still angry with her, for wrecking his plan. Still sulking, thought Sophie wonderingly, like a little kid. She slowed down to let him catch up, watching him toiling along the valley track through stands of spindly eucalypts shining with moisture after the rain, pinnacles and cliffs of rock rising from the scrub in mammoth vertical slabs. You could hardly believe your eyes, it was so beautiful.

  ‘I’m just taking my time today,’ he said when he came abreast of her. ‘Just thinking about making some photos, you know, resisting the need to rush ahead.’

  He hadn’t mentioned the leeches, or what had happened when she’d fallen on the track. Sure they’d all laughed about it later, but she hadn’t forgotten how he’d stood, undecided, as someone else had stepped down and helped her up. As though he couldn’t make up his mind if he should intervene or not, as if she was some stranger on the street who’d tripped.

  Well, she was a stranger, really. She still knew nothing about him.

  ‘How did you meet Mum?’ she said after a while. He glanced at her with an ironic, preoccupied smile. She could hear how he had to catch his breath, before answering.

  ‘She’s never told you?’

  ‘She said you just hung around till you moved in.’

  ‘What a total crock.’

  ‘Hey, I’m just kidding. She said you met up by coincidence after the Blockade and you moved into the share house she lived in.’

  He sniffed and nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s right. We’d got together briefly in Strahan and then caught up by chance later.’

  ‘She says it was this great communal house and you were all activists.’

  ‘Well, I guess that about sums it up. Then we moved up to the country. Ayresville was a pretty quiet old town back then.’ He paused, concentrated on the track for a moment. ‘My father always tells me we could have made a packet in real estate if we’d seen the writing on the wall. But I never wanted to buy into any of that stuff. Something in me just needed to keep on the road.’

  She waited for him to go on. She wanted to hear him say: I never wanted to leave, or if I had my time over again I’d do it differently. Anything. But he just walked a little faster as they reached a section of duckboard, stepping ahead of her with that twitchy limp so she couldn’t see his face, presenting her with nothing but his blank, uncommunicative back.

  She was going to ask him about his mother, Rich thought with heavy, dread- filled certainty as he moved ahead of her, hoping to put her off. That’s what she’d slowed down for; to interrogate him, blast him with uncomfortable questions. He could feel the silence building, and wondered how to deflect the question when it came.

  Sure enough, it was as if he’d willed it. ‘What about your mum?’ Her voice hesitant but determined behind him.

  ‘Oh, she’s still alive,’ he said neutrally. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just wondering. She is sort of my other grandmother, after all.’

  ‘Apart from Janet, you mean? How is old Janet?’

  He heard her short humourless laugh as their feet clopped along the duckboards. ‘Old,’ she said.

  ‘Still going strong?’

  ‘She’s only seventy-three. She runs her local U3A group.’

  ‘Oh, I bet she does. I bet she runs it like Colonel Klink.’

  ‘She drives Mum mad.’

  ‘Still? Then again, if she didn’t try to run Sandy’s life, she’d have nothing to live for, would she? U3A must come a distant second.’

  He started to tell her about how Janet used to come to visit them at Ayresville and insist upon staying at the local motel rather than in their spare room. ‘Like we had bedbugs or something. And before you were born, Holy God. You should have heard her when we said we wanted a home birth.’

  She didn’t say anything for a while and he was hoping she’d forgotten her original question. Then he heard her say, almost conversationally, ‘Mum says you didn’t support her in having a home birth.’

  ‘What? She said what?’ He turned his head so sharply he felt something in his neck pop.

  ‘No, wait. She said you didn’t have the strength to offer her the support she needed.’

  ‘Now hold on a fricking minute there. I can’t believe she’d spin that kind of holier-than-thou crap to you. Well, actually I can. That’d be bloody typical.’

  He was hammering along now, his blood pressure mysteriously up, fighting the urge to wheel around and grab her by the shoulders, make her see how it had been for him.

  ‘She’s the one who couldn’t go through with it, Sophie. She was all so gung-ho for it, and I was behind her one hundred percent, believe me, but the first sign of a contraction and she was screaming, yelling at me to get her to the hospital.’

  He wasn’t embellishing it at all, he remembered it vividly. She’d dropped the idea of a home birth as if it was radioactive.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Sophie said, her face pinched. ‘I’m just telling you what she said.’

  ‘I’m not putting your mother down,’ he said, sounding as calm and reasonable as he could in spite of his indignation, ‘but she ... how can I put this? She liked the idea of being an earth mother better than she liked the actual process. I mean, it sounds good, doesn’t it? A drug-free birth? Until you’re actually in it.’

  ‘She tried, though. To do the right thing.’

  Strange, these little flashes of defensiveness from her, that stalwart loyalty.

  ‘Of course she did,’ he agreed at once. ‘I’m not saying that.’

  She’d set him off now, remembering all of Sandy’s exasperating contradictions. He walked along for a while, weighing up Sophie’s allegiances.

  ‘She was always starting great schemes,’ he said finally. ‘Making soap. Spinning, that was a big one. Homemade candles. One time she started researching how to build a geodesic dome in the backyard. She’d seen one somewhere. So she started making one out of — I don’t know — bamboo or something.’

  This time he heard a snort of laughter, and he turned to see her grinning, eyes on her feet, but smiling.

  ‘Well, it’s still there,’ she said.

  See, it wasn’t so hard. He just had to coax out her soft spots, and keep it light. Win her over that way.

  He clomped along, smouldering a bit still, taking the odd swig of water, the pain on his rubbed-raw heel mercifully buffered. They were the business alright, those painkillers. Keeping everything a little spacey. If he could only take a couple before bed he’d sleep like a dead man. But he should save them, with two solid days of walking still to go. Ration himself.

  So. Sandy had blamed him for the caesarean as well as everything else.

  He should have seen the warning signs, probably, the inevitable sappy clichés; Sandy talking about how children were the glue that held communities together, offering to babysit for friends, fervently telling them that it took a village to raise a child. Then starting to go quiet when he talked about them selling the house and heading off to live somewhere else for a few years — the South Pacific, he remembered suggesting, or Kerala.

  She’d taken the decision out of his hands in the end, of course. Not long after she’d turned thirty; 1993. Ended nearly a decade of easy harmony and tacit understanding on a whim, on something that looked a lot to him like peer-group pressure, dragged him along for the ride.

  ‘No more joints for a while,’ she’d said one night, and he’d said distractedly, ‘Really? How long?’, and she’d given him a nervous smile and said ‘Nine months’, and he’d fe
lt his stomach drop through the floor like an elevator with a snapped cable.

  You could profess yourself delighted, feel in fact a surging kick of fleeting paternal pride, but there was no hiding that initial stomach-plummet he could recall now, the wave of panic-stricken nausea reaching towards his throat with its sticky, enmeshing fingers.

  He’d felt protective, at first, after he’d got over the initial shock. Keen to give it all a go, willing to constantly give Sandy the reassurance she needed, and allay the naked fears she confided to him in their bed in the dark. He couldn’t believe how quickly she could go from her blithe serene confidence in front of their friends during the last months of her pregnancy to blind, gabbling panic once they’d left.

  ‘We’re having it here at home,’ she’d insist to their friends. They’d turn to glance at him for confirmation.

  ‘Right here on the living-room floor,’ he remembered echoing brightly, spreading his hands in an encompassing gesture that took in the rug and the throw cushions.

  ‘Maybe starting off in the bath,’ Sandy had continued. ‘We’ve got pregnancy bath oil. Lavender.’ Her face, when he sneaked a glance at her, was a calm oval of anticipation. ‘The midwife’s coming over, the one I met at the prenatal yoga.’

  ‘You seem incredibly centred,’ friends would murmur.

  ‘Well, it’s not as if birth’s a medical procedure. It’s just the patriarchy that’s told us that.’

  Then after they’d gone, she’d lie panting, trying to wriggle herself into a curled position.

  ‘Rich, Rich, I can’t sleep.’

  ‘Is the baby kicking?’

  ‘Sometimes he kicks all night, sometimes he doesn’t, then I’m so scared his heart’s stopped. I just lie there praying and trying not to cry, for hours. What if his heart’s stopped beating?’

  ‘Maybe he’s just sleeping.’

  ‘Put your hand here. Feel that? That’s his head. Jesus, I’m crazy. I have to push that out. It’s going to bloody rip me in two, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, it won’t. Women since the beginning of time have given birth the way you want to.’

  ‘What do you mean, the way I want to?’

  He hesitated. It sounded terribly like a trick question. ‘Like ... well, like you just said tonight. Not controlled by the patriarchy. Drawing on your own ... empowerment. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘You think it’s going to be fine, you fucking give birth then, you arsehole.’ Gah, she was like Sally Field playing Sybil.

  ‘Whoa, whoa. Calm down, and don’t worry. You’re just nervous. Anyone would be nervous. It’s a huge thing.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me. Just leave me alone.’

  He’d talk her back into it. Cajole her with images of the two of them, birthing their child together, the baby born into candlelight and lavender, the warm bath and her own endorphins providing natural pain relief — he’d recite it all back to her like a litany. After a while she’d relax and sleep the sleep of the dead for the rest of the night. And he’d listen to her softly snoring and the thought would skitter around in his mind like the panic-stricken moth at a window bashing itself to death trying to get out: this is my life now. He’d lie there listening to it blundering again and again into the glass, not getting it.

  My. Bam. Life. Bam. Now.

  He watched his legs pace one in front of the other across the duckboard. Heard the rhythmic swish of Russell’s gaiters with each step. It was like marching, the mindlessness of it making things come into your head unbidden. Sophie didn’t say anything else, and after a while, when he raised his head, he realised she’d passed him once they’d reached Kia Ora creek, and had gone on ahead. It must have been when he’d stopped to take his time soaking his foot in the cold shallow water, rewrapping it with clenched teeth, pushing it, excruciatingly, back into his boot.

  Sandy shouldn’t have built it up like that, the birth. All their friends were expecting something remarkable by the time Sandy finally went into labour. They’d all talk about it and he would feel a queasy, apologetic sort of smile stretching across his face, as if he was suddenly cast in a play and the director had told him to look joyful. It was too much of a burden. After all, he’d totally come around to it, cleared his head of the thought that they should have been spending that cot money on tickets to India. He’d been as wholehearted about it as he’d been about anything in his life. But even after quelling all those creeping doubts, he’d still spent months fighting off Sandy’s insane control freak of a mother, defending principles that felt stale before he’d even started arguing them.

  ‘You can’t be serious about this home-birth nonsense,’ Janet would say by way of greeting when she rang. ‘I mean, Richard, being all green and political is one thing, but the day comes when you have to behave like adults.’

  ‘Hello, Janet. We’re both well, thanks for asking.’ He’d glance across at Sandy, who’d be on the couch with a pillow over her head when she realised who it was on the phone.

  ‘Is it money, is that it? I realise people like you wouldn’t bother to have health insurance, but if it’s a question of not being able to pay for private care ...’

  ‘Janet, it’s nothing about private or public hospitals. It’s hospitals per se. It’s the way they make birth a medical procedure, like a disease.’

  He’d listen to himself dredging up, again, words that sounded false and flimsy even as he spoke them, anxious to get her off the phone and out of their hair, but everything he said seemed to galvanise her with more energy.

  ‘I have to say, Richard, that attitude is totally ridiculous, and I’d like to speak with Sandra right now.’

  ‘She’s asleep right now, Janet.’

  ‘Well, go and wake her up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said go and wake her up. This thing has gone far enough. I won’t have it.’

  He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. Imagined Sandy as a teenager, trying to do normal teenage things with Janet suffocating every move from on high, Janet not having it at every turn.

  ‘You want me to go and wake her up? Well, I’ll try, but it might take a while. Hang on.’ And he’d put the phone down and go and sit outside and read the paper, fuming. If Sandy wanted to pick up the phone, she could.

  Being all green and political. Where did she get off, the arrogant self-righteous bitch? Trying to make the Franklin Blockade experience into something trivial. They’d captured worldwide attention with that protest — they’d forced a change of government by standing up for what they believed in, and Janet didn’t even get it. The old conservative middle-class vanguard, the postwar boomers, with their desperate, scrabbling attempts to stay in power — they were pathetic. Still exerting their atrophying dominion wherever they could. Hoarding it all up.

  Sandy still hadn’t told her mother she’d been arrested, even ten years later, long after all charges were overturned and their records were expunged. Rich was so determined to make Janet eat her words about the birth that he began to look forward to the due date with a kind of grim pleasure. He’d send her a card with a photo and the caption: Our Green and Political Birth. Or maybe: People Like Us have had a baby. Pretentious domineering old cow.

  So when Sandy stood up one afternoon — heaving herself off the futon in three lumbering stages that were awkward just to watch — and a gush of fluid puddled on the rattan matting, their eyes locked with the same dogged, glittering gleam of resolve.

  ‘Now just stay calm, OK?’ he said, thinking: Perfect, you’re already sounding like a Yank sitcom. ‘Where’s the birth plan?’

  ‘In the bathroom. But let’s not rush into anything. This part takes hours. The book says it might be another whole day. So I don’t want to ring the midwife. I want to light the fire and put on the first-stage cassette.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ They’d made a mix tape, painstakingly, over a week. The first song was one Sandy had chosen, something off a Wyndham Hill collection, and as the opening piano riffs came through the speakers
he thought uneasily that there was something a little manic in the way she was tearing up raspberry leaves into a teapot in the kitchen, something beady-eyed and grim, as if she was preparing for a nuclear attack.

  ‘Just slow down, Sandy. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘And don’t ring my mother, alright? Even if I die, I don’t want her to know till afterwards. Because I swear, if she comes over here, I’m going to have to hit her over the head with the axe.’ She poured boiling water on the leaves, groped for a cup in the cupboard.

  ‘Shouldn’t you wait till that steeps?’ They both stared stupidly at the teapot.

  ‘Should I? Jesus, I don’t know. How will I know when I go into labour?’

  ‘What did your guide say?’

  ‘That everyone experiences it differently, but the more centred and focused the labouring mother ... Holy shit!’ She broke off and staggered into the living room, wild-eyed and clutching her back, lunging for her birth book. He, marooned in the middle of the room, felt that ludicrous apologetic smile paste itself back onto his face.

  She was going to buckle, he could tell. He was already cast as the stupid fall guy who was going to get screamed at the moment he suggested running the lavender bath. Screamed at, or punched in the head. He watched her fold herself over on the floor, swan-diving onto the rug groaning, riffling with one desperate hand through the pages in the birth book she knew by heart. She would buckle, he knew with a sweet sad certainty, and he would take the rap.

  It took less than an hour, he recalled now, looking up from his throbbing feet to squint at some alpine gums and wonder if they were worth a photo. Well, half an hour, really; then they’d had to roll-start the car, that rust-bucket blue Corolla that of course, of course, chose that moment to refuse to start. He remembered pushing it down the incline of their street, running to jump into the driver’s seat as Sandy lay writhing in the back. Clenching his jaw in silent prayer as he judged the moment and took his foot off the clutch.

  When he looked back on the day Sophie was born, he didn’t think of the moment she drew her first shuddering breath, lifted aloft like a bloodied seal from the green surgical drapes after the caesarean. He remembered, instead, the thumping jerk as something in the engine grabbed and chugged, and him stepping on the accelerator and clutch together with everything he had, heart hammering with stress. The moment he’d lurched ignominiously back and forth in the car like a crash-test dummy, double-clutching, jamming the terrifying future into gear.