The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘Well, this whole area’s less than ten k’s long, believe it or not. So as long as we don’t do anything stupid like climb over a whole mountain range, we can’t really go wrong.’

  ‘Yeah, but where, exactly?’

  He bent forward to unlace his boots. Tried his never-fail smile. ‘Not entirely sure.’

  ‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’

  ‘Well ...’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘I’m not lost,’ he said, trying and failing to laugh. ‘I’m geographically embarrassed.’ It was something he’d seen the other day on a t-shirt, and sneered at, never dreaming it would return to sabotage him like this. The laugh came out like a dry heave, as though a bone caught in his throat, and his rictus smile died as she looked steadily at him, something draining away from her face until it contained nothing, finally, but emptied-out disenchantment, like he’d gone the way of Santa, and the Easter Bunny, and whatever tender credulity it was that allowed childhood in the first place.

  Then she turned away from him and straightened out her sleeping bag, digging for her iPod and untangling the cables.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I’ll boil up some pasta, set up the stove in the vestibule, OK?’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ she said flatly, rolling some clothes into a pillow.

  ‘Well, I want you to have something,’ he said. ‘What about just some noodles?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘OK. No problem.’ As if being obliging was going to change anything now.

  ‘We’re meant to be in Launceston, ready to get to the airport to fly back to Melbourne and meet Mum in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But we ran into some bad weather, and that’s the way it goes. We got delayed.’

  ‘She’ll be there waiting and we can’t even contact her.’

  ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  She hugged her knees and hunched away from him. ‘What’s stopping you setting up your own tent, anyway? I want some privacy.’

  He licked his lips. ‘The storm wrecked my tent. I only have the fly left, and it’s sheltering both of us now.’

  She was silent, digesting this. ‘So you’re sleeping in here, with me.’

  ‘No other choice, I’m afraid.’

  She gave him a look to curdle milk and climbed into her sleeping bag, curling up and closing her eyes. He crouched in the vestibule and made enough continental rice for two, using the water out of his drinking bottle. He had three packs of instant meals left — he wasn’t sure about her. And some porridge and dried milk. Jesus. Don’t think. The pattering in his throat squeezed and slackened, thick with smothered, acidic dread.

  He spooned her share of rice into a plastic container and went through the motions of eating a meal, taking a leak outside, even brushing his teeth to keep the sense of normalcy going. He eased his boot finally off his throbbing foot and saw the dark spread of the bloodstain on his sock in the torchlight. When he peeled the layers of sock away, hissing a breath of pain through his teeth, he saw the shiny raw patch beneath and the strange pink hue of the skin around it, like plastic.

  The painkillers had worn off and a hot wire of pain was jiggling up his calf, like some glinting lure with a wicked disguised hook at the end, biting and snagging, holding. With every heartbeat he felt it throb, metronome-like. He spread out his mat and sleeping bag, holding his jaw clenched, he realised, to stop his teeth from chattering.

  He wouldn’t think about the next day. He’d just get to sleep, and deal with it when it came. He could tell Sophie wasn’t asleep, there in the confined chilly dome of the tent. After a while, helplessly, he put his hand on her shoulder, and felt her stiffen.

  He’d had no cause really to touch her till now, not really; the time he’d touched her face earlier today had been accidental, he had no right to expect any physical contact from her, or affection.

  As his palm rested on her shoulder he felt, even through the layers of clothes, the curving bone of her shoulder blade move beneath his arm. They might freeze here, he thought, the claims of the Odyssey Pathfinder could be bullshit, never designed to be tested. Dead of exposure in their thin tent, like Hall and Oates.

  No, you dickhead. Scott and Oates. Hypothermia, thought Rich, what were the symptoms of that? Amnesia, for starters. Stumbling, slowness, irrationality, walking around in a stupor ... tick all of the above, for about the last twenty-four hours. Tick the last twenty-four years, actually.

  The cold seeming to hold him and rattle him, like a coin in a cup. He had the better sleeping bag, he reminded himself, the one with the superior loft.

  ‘I know you’re awake,’ he said softly, ‘but please don’t worry, everything’s fine.’

  He heard her take a shuddering indrawn breath, as though she’d been silently crying all this time, and he hadn’t even noticed. He would have noticed, though. He was sure he would have.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t care if you hate me, I want you to get into this sleeping bag and get warm. No point dying of cold.’ Without speaking, to his amazement, she wriggled in. He unzipped hers and laid it over them, then lay back down and tucked his arms around her. Christ, there was nothing to her, it was like hugging a bird. Bones light as air, coathanger collarbones and those sharp shoulders pressed into his chest, and it suddenly hit him what he’d stunningly, obliviously, failed to notice. What had he actually seen her eating, since he’d met her? Two-minute noodles and half-plates of pasta and those health-food bars, stuff she’d hoarded in the bottom of her pack, nothing you could call a meal really, not the five food groups for a balanced diet, or whatever it was. He felt a thump of blinding, painful illumination. What if she had that thing? Not the one where you made yourself throw up. The other one.

  Was it possible that he’d been so obtuse? He’d just thought she was fashionably skinny, the way they all were, with their waistless jeans hanging off those boyish hips, revealing their stomachs concave and mushroom white, and the inevitable navel piercing. She’d seemed just like a clone of all the other teenage girls who shouldered past him on the train and dully scanned the codes on his DVDs as he waited at the video store. So how had she found the energy to doggedly tramp down those trails after him, never asking for a break? It was anger, then, that ferocity to prove herself. The energy of anger, the fuel of it. There was probably a self-help book out there called Tapping into the Energy of Anger. Some theory he hadn’t caught up with yet. One of Sandy’s little volumes. Higher-Plane Anger. Angry Like the Wolf. The Anger Journey.

  As he finally began to approach sleep, something from the non-violence workshop all those years ago came back to him, teasing at the frayed edge of his consciousness, circling and disappearing. What had they called it, after they did the roleplay about confrontation, with half the group taking on the roles of people they’d be likely to encounter in a real blockade? He remembered drowsily the police officers and angry workers played with hopelessly nice passivity by sheepish protestors. If real tensions rose to the surface during the role-play and people found it hard to de-role ( Jesus! That jargon again!) they’d have to embrace each other afterwards. What had been the term for that?

  He felt his daughter’s sharp unforgiving elbows relax by tiny increments against him as her shivering abated. Warmth — that was what he could give her. He could feel it starting now they were sharing the one bag, making him almost comfortable; his clenched limbs relaxing after being braced stiffly for so long.

  The energy of warmth.

  Sandy had inoculated Sophie against him. There was no other word for it. Like the other day, telling him what her mother called him, when she referred to him at all. ‘A waste of space,’ she’d said coolly. ‘She reckons that’s all you are.’

  Well, he wasn’t wasting any space now. He was closing the space, tucking his frame around her, finding a spot to rest his hands protectively around her elbows. He opened his eyes and saw the nape of her neck before him faintly in the darkness, fragile as a
tulip stem, pale as a bird’s egg.

  What had they called it, that day, the tension breaker they had devised? They’d all been strangers and it had felt awkward, to him, a kind of sickly Woodstock feeling of instant reconstituted intimacy he mistrusted. Sandy had been there. That’s where he’d met her again, after pretending to be an antagonistic bulldozer driver in the game. The feel of her flannelette shirt, the smell of her perfume as they hugged self-consciously.

  He fitted his knees into the backs of Sophie’s. He had a sudden mental image of her practising handstands and cartwheels on those long legs on a stretch of sand somewhere as a child, and felt a wash of grinding remorse. He’d never seen that happen. That, and everything else he’d missed because he’d been scared he was going to miss something somewhere else.

  Now she was a fifteen-year-old girl exercising her dominion over her one thin and furious arena of control. She’d freeze to death before she admitted she was cold. But they were both warm now, inside his expensive sleeping bag; she felt relaxed and solid and he could tell she’d fallen asleep. He lay there with his arms wrapped around her. It was bigger than remorse or guilt, the loss he felt. It was more a piercing grief.

  She wasn’t a millstone. He’d been an imbecile to feel that, those wasted nights resentfully rocking her pram. More like ballast. Something with its own counterweight, solid against his unaccountable absences and abdications, something that might have actually anchored him.

  Hugging the Enemy, he thought hazily as, despite everything, he slept. That had been it.

  Early on the final morning, and it was all winding up. Sandy did a circuit of the circle in the final sharing session, embracing everyone in turn, like a new-age barn dance. She hugged each of the other women with genuine affection today — even the ones who’d annoyed her a little at first. She was leaving in half an hour and she could afford to feel magnanimous, soon she’d be cruising down the freeway and then home, replenished.

  ‘All of you in your own ways,’ said the workshop leader, ‘are set afresh on your individual journeys, sheltering in the light of your own Inner Goddesses to step now into the sunlight.’

  She’s got that straight out of a book, muttered Janet, tapping her foot at the door. Lighten up, Mum, Sandy thought. She was feeling great. I’ve worked through a lot of issues, she wrote on the evaluation form, so thanks! I’ll be back!

  Ask the universe, and you shall receive in abundance, she thought, discovering just how opportune it was to have a handy elastic strap tying down the car boot, because now she could use it to secure the lid of the boot over her new drum, wedged safe and secure against the spare tyre. Everything aligned, everything fitting together perfectly. Meant to be.

  No matter what he tried to pull over her eyes, Sophie thought darkly, she wasn’t an idiot. Couldn’t stop thinking, now, about how clear-cut the planned route had been at first, the standard walk, nothing risky, everything in place. And yes, she’d agreed with him, more or less, about coming here to camp for a night instead of that hut. Hadn’t she? He could make you feel great when he wanted to; maybe he’d just talked her into it, charming her until she’d said yes. Sure, it might have been different if the storm hadn’t happened, there was no way he could have planned for that. But still. Still. This, of everything in the world, was the thing that would totally make her mother freak. If that was what he wanted, to really do her head in, he’d chosen the perfect thing.

  The more she thought about it, as they shook out the tent the next morning and tried to wring it out before rolling it up, the more possible it seemed. Now when she looked at his face more closely, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before; the set of the mouth, the bad-actor lines of concern between his eyes. And that calculating wink he’d given her as they passed that sign, put there to warn them.

  She felt a cold creep of devious possibility, of trickery. He’d used her. She’d been sucked in.

  She stood up slowly from the tent roll, more and more details occurring to her now, watching him as he stood there pretending to study that brochure again, with the map that didn’t tell them anything.

  ‘All going according to plan?’ she said softly. His eyes slid to her first, creepily, then he turned his whole head, and she saw a flash of fear there.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You did this on purpose, didn’t you?’ She thought she could tell a liar. She watched his face cloud with affront, his mouth going slack.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Dragging us out here. Showing off. You wanted us to get lost, didn’t you?’

  ‘Come on now. Just think for a second. I mean, I know you’re upset, but think.’

  She could see it in his face clearly now, the whole bag of tricks he had in his repertoire ready to bring out. The reasonable calm, the funny charisma, the pleasant smile. She’d watched him turn it on at the museum that day, and then on this walk too, whenever he wanted something from someone. That’s what he could do, so he did it. Like now, the way he tried to touch her arm, get to her that way.

  ‘Fuck off, you total loser,’ she spat, shoving him away.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, WHOA!’

  She jumped up and walked away, pacing — nowhere to go, no door to slam.

  ‘Give me a single reason why I’d actually try to get us lost.’

  ‘So you could impress me. So you could pretend to be a big hero. To get back at Mum.’

  As soon as the words were out she could feel she’d hit a nerve. He stepped backwards as if she’d shoved him in the chest, his arms raised in defence.

  ‘You’re stressed out and not thinking clearly. That’s just ... crazy.’

  ‘You don’t know,’ Sophie muttered, teeth gritted. ‘You have no idea how much the idea of me even coming away with you went against all her instincts.’

  She sat down on her pack and straightened out her legs, trembling. ‘See, she knew. Better than I did, obviously. Knew what kind of a dick you were.’

  ‘Look, I know Sandy’s got her own take on me. But if you think I’m trying to prove something to you by bringing you here, not being one hundred percent sure where we are, well, you’re insane. And I told you, there’s nothing to worry about. This is what camping’s all about. Or used to be all about, anyway, before they turned it into the bloody package tour they’re trying to sell us out there now. You went into the wilderness and just found your way, pitched your tent in spots you chose, stayed warm by lighting a fire, obeying the rules of nature and keeping in touch with the elements. When we camped on the Franklin ...’

  She dug her hands into her hair and pulled, groaning in frustration. ‘Will you Just. Stop. Talking about the fucking Franklin.’

  There was a silence, then he flared at her. ‘You have no idea, you know that? We put ourselves on the line out there, nothing but mud and rain and freezing cold, but we were determined to see it out. We stopped the dozers.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  He faltered, mouth open as he stared. ‘What?’

  ‘You think I haven’t been listening to this stuff for my whole life? Mum’s got all the books, a bunch of photos and news clippings, everything. She’s been shovelling it down my throat since the day I was born — I’ve done bloody school projects on it. You didn’t stop one bulldozer getting in there and ripping up the forest.’

  ‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. We stopped the dam. We saved a pristine wilderness.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘The election’s what stopped the dam. You guys were really just a nuisance that held the HEC up for a while, weren’t you? You make yourself sound like a big hero, but really, what did you do?’

  ‘Sorry? I thought I’d just told you.’

  ‘You just showed up, when it comes down to it. Someone had to organise everything and have the idea for it, someone had to plan it all out, but it wasn’t you. You showed up, someone drove you there, someone told you where to camp, someone fed you. And then someone boated you up the river and th
en someone else arrested you. Chauffeured all the way, really. What’s so heroic about that? Why don’t you get over yourself ?’

  ‘I went to jail protesting to save that river.’

  ‘Yeah, for what — two days? Listen to you, trying to make it sound like Guantanamo Bay.’

  He wanted to start giving her a lecture, she could tell by the way he pointed a finger at her. But his eyes followed hers to the outstretched finger, to the way it waved there pointlessly, shaking. My God. He was crying.

  Rich shoved his hands onto his hips. He couldn’t believe this, it had to be the tablets, to have him so strung out like this, stretching him to snapping point. A wetness in his eyes. Losing it. Crumbling.

  ‘Hey, they didn’t make any allowances for us in prison. We should have been put into remand, sure, but there were so many of us they put us into high security with all these hardened criminals.’ He hated the querulous defensive pitch to his voice, the tightening in his throat. And Sophie staring at him shocked, with some little trace of pity for him, under her needling sneer. He felt, with dread, all of it coming on now; the temperature dropping on him, the seconds pouring away fast, and he was naked in this cold, flayed and exposed with even his own voice betraying him.

  ‘They tortured you, did they?’ That cold, unrelenting gaze pinning him to the spot. ‘Beat you up? Starved you?’

  ‘Someone I know was put into solitary confinement.’

  ‘For managing to be an even bigger pain in the arse? Give me a break. There wasn’t a moment when you didn’t know you were going to get out of there in a few days, was there? Just time to write a few prison blues songs and tell everyone you knew how it felt to be ...’ she hesitated dramatically, mockingly ‘... incarcerated?’

  He threw up his hands. ‘Jesus, for someone who’s walked around like a deaf mute for most of this trip, suddenly you’ve got a lot to say for yourself.’

  ‘That’s ’cos it’s true, and I’m sick of listening to you. You and Mum, you’re both exactly the same. Sitting back admiring yourselves for turning up to be part of one big thing twenty-five years ago, doing nothing since. Nothing. So just shut up about it.’