The World Beneath

Cate Kennedy

• Publisher: Black Cat
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802170712
• eBook ISBN: 9780802195913
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

This prize-winning debut novel from the author of Like a House on Fire is "reminiscent of Hornby . . . Well-observed and thoughtfully funny" ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
 
Fifteen years after their breakup, Rich and Sandy have both settled into the unfulfilling compromises of middle age: he's a late-night infomercial editor with photojournalism aspirations; she makes hippie jewelry for a local market and struggles to maintain a New Age lifestyle that fails to provide the answers she seeks. To distract themselves from their inadequacies, Rich and Sandy cling to the shining moment of their youth, when they met as environmental activists as part of a world-famous blockade to save Tasmania's Franklin River.
 
Their daughter, Sophie, has always remained skeptical of this ecological fairytale, but when Rich invites her on a backpacking trip through Tasmania for her fifteenth birthday, Sophie sees it as a way to bond with a father she's never known. As they progress further into the wilderness, the spell of Rich's worldly charm soon gives way to suspicion and fear as his overconfidence sets off a chain of events that no one could have predicted.
 
"Kennedy evokes a more lyrical version of Jodi Picoult . . . hitting the reader with raw, heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious prose." — Library Journal
 
"In elegant, fluidly written prose, Kennedy not only delivers scathing portraits of the ineffectual adults and the times that shaped them, but also makes the epic wilderness another vividly rendered character in the story." — Booklist (starred review)
 
"Kennedy writes like an Antipodean Anne Tyler, wryly aware of the heart's internal contradictions yet slow to judge." — Financial Times

Nine

She knew what the problem was. She never responded well to pressure, and being told to choose a Goddess card on the spot like that had thrown her.

‘Cast your eye over the cards,’ the instructor had said to the workshop participants, ‘and select one you feel drawn to, and that Goddess will act as your guide to reconnect you to the archetypes within you during the guided meditation.’

All very well, but how did you know? She’d wanted to choose Isis — her picture on the card showed a willowy woman lifting a beautiful jug of some sort, a woman with just the sort of hair Sandy wanted: thick and coiled up in a braid with a few careless curls framing her face. Mermaid hair. But some other woman had swooped down and picked up Isis, and Sandy had been frozen with indecision. It was really important to get it right. ‘Choose a card that intuitively appeals to you,’ the instructor had added serenely, and at that everyone else had snatched up cards like seagulls grabbing bloody chips.

And so she, Sandy, was left with the dregs, as usual. She’d grabbed Hera, checked the back of the card quickly to scan through the personality features and dropped it horrified — that Goddess was her mother to a T, down to the imperious pointed finger. Finally she’d settled for some Goddess she’d never heard of. She wasn’t even sure how to pronounce her name, so how on earth could she commune spiritually with her and ask her to enter her life and awaken the Divine Feminine within her? Sandy sneaked another look at her card. Demeter. Sounded like something the mechanic tells you has gone wrong with your car. Sorry, love, the timing chain and the demeter both need replacing.

And she looked much more crone than maiden, if you wanted the truth. Not the person you’d want along with you on a guided initiation journey. Even a car journey would probably really start to grate.

By rights, she should have been led to Athena, warrior woman. Extroverted, practical, intelligent. Or Artemis, who shuns the busy city in favour of wild and natural places, Athena’s closest sister on the Goddess Wheel, protectress of flora and fauna. But she hadn’t been assertive enough, she’d let others reach in before her and pick up something that was rightfully hers, and that was going to change everything.

Some participants, the leaflet explaining this particular session had said, experience past-life memories of when the Goddess was dominant in their spiritual lives.

Of everything Sandy wanted now, she wanted some past-life memory to resurface. Wanted that sudden swooning rush of whatever it was that let the woman to her left slump to the ground and have the nurturing arm of one of the facilitators support her as she remembered. If she could just let go of these vestiges of doubt and actually get a glimpse into one of her past lives, she’d be totally committed, she’d give it her all.

God, though, her legs were aching. And only the half-lotus too. She needed to do more yoga, make an everyday practice of it. Clear her mind of the small, distracting anxieties niggling at her now. What was irritating her at this moment, for example, was the smug smile on the face of that thin woman in the front row, twisted calmly like it didn’t hurt, her expression like one of the prefects at Sandy’s high school, the ones the nuns were always nodding their approval at. Those sugary beatific smiles, hitching up the sides of their mouths with that fake simpering piety like the plaster statues of the Madonna herself. Then out to the quadrangle during recess to make everyone’s life a misery again.

That’s the kind of smile this woman had, with her green leggings and wispy purple top. Thin as a rake. Probably a vegan too. Probably made a point of asking the staff here to buy in her macrobiotic soy milk specially.

But if she could just turn off this distraction, if she could only shut up and concentrate, she could surrender herself to the interior question of this moment and have a past-life memory and reconnect with the Goddess like she was supposed to. Otherwise she’d get behind. It was just that every time she tried, Sandy felt her mind slip, like a screw with no thread. She remembered that time she did the Women’s DIY class at the community centre, and they’d all had a go at sharpening tools on a grinder, and every time she’d lowered the chisel onto that spinning wheel, it had kicked back with a vengeance and jarred her wrist.

‘Press down with a bit more force,’ the teacher had said. ‘You need to make sparks fly!’ But she couldn’t press down, it intimidated her too much, and that’s all there was to it, sparks or not.

‘I honour, heal and forgive my past,’ said the workshop leader in a voice just like those nuns reading morning prayers.

Focus, Sandy admonished herself. You’re paying for this. Bloody hell, she’d been thrown so far off-kilter over the last few weeks, she was all over the place. She had to focus on what it was that had made her feel intimidated in the past, and own and reclaim that thing, then rejoice in her awakened power over it. Her Goddess Power. Otherwise she’d feel like an idiot when they started the chanting and dancing, and they’d all moved forward in the cleansing and reclaiming except her. It was hard to fake something like that. Sandy closed her eyes, and repeated, ‘Honour, heal and forgive.’

‘I release old patterns that no longer serve me, and awaken to the new liberated self beneath,’ said the leader in her serene monotone.

Old patterns, thought Sandy. Yes. They were there alright, spinning away under the surface, kicking back at you when you least expected it. A new liberated self beneath? There was a universe under there. An entire lived existence.

She wondered how much credit she had left on her Mastercard. She could buy a piece of the gemstone she’d seen in the giftshop, called Angelite. The note on it said it opened the lines of communication to your angels and guides. And that drum for sale in the foyer, outside the room where they did the Circle of Welcome, she could just imagine that in the corner of the lounge room.

‘We’re going via the freeway, so you can’t actually see it,’ Rich said on the coach the next morning. ‘But just there, across the water — that’s where the jail is.’

He pointed over the bay, and Sophie ducked her head to catch a glimpse through the window.

‘I thought we might have been able to at least see the watchtowers from here,’ Rich went on, ‘but never mind. The Pink Palace, it got nicknamed. They must have thought painting it pink would have a calming effect on the prisoners. First they took us to the holding cells at Queenstown then brought us here to go before the magistrate. Some protesters had been in prison for Christmas. Some of them hadn’t even told their folks where they were. Or else they were here on holidays, saw that the Blockade was planned, and just got swept up in it.’

Tassie had been a different state then, he remembered. The butt of uneasy mainland jokes about inbreeding and hillbillies, a wild, insular place ruled over by the state Hydro-Electric Commission. He recalled the wharf at Strahan, that smell of fish and diesel, and the stiff-faced locals muttering abuse to them in the streets when they’d turned up. Protestors sitting at Greenie Acres, relating their reasons for coming, some of them saying they’d been spat at, and some tearful and scared. That was a ‘sharing’. And when other people comforted them, putting their arms around them, that was a ‘caring’. Caring and sharing, he thought idly — both used as nouns, strangely, while they used the word ‘consensed’ as a verb. Jargon took off like a virus, first chance it got. And if he told Sophie about it he knew ‘caring and sharing’ would sound like the worst kind of Hallmark card cliché, and yet somehow, then, it had all seemed authentic and energised.

‘Have you ever done one of those ice-breaking games,’ he said instead, ‘where you stand in the middle of a circle of people, close your eyes and just fall back, and they catch you?’

She nodded. ‘In drama class.’

‘Yeah, well. We did those, when we did the non-violence training.’

Total strangers promising they wouldn’t let you fall. And that jokey game where the whole group wrapped hands and tried to disentangle themselves without letting go. And again, at the time, it had felt purely fun. It wasn’t until later that he thought about them and speculated that they were things designed to make you look foolish in the presence of others doing the same thing, to forge a bond.

‘Mum says what she remembers is the meetings.’

‘Oh, yeah. We loved our meetings. It was very important that we all felt a sense of consensus.’

His euphoria hadn’t lasted long; he’d soon begun to feel an undercurrent of doubt he’d had to stay vigilant about pushing away, so that he didn’t let it show. All he wanted was to be arrested, like they planned. Instead there were meetings about meetings about meetings. Meetings while the forest was getting hacked away, meetings that went on until people agreed to strategies, it seemed to Rich, out of sheer exhaustion. Sitting talking until the reason for the meeting was overtaken by actual events, so that another meeting had to be convened. Tactics briefings, role-plays where they practised getting arrested.

We’re wedded to the principles of non-violent action, the facilitators kept saying. Welded to it, more like. And all the secrecy and dramatics, that’s what had started to get under his skin. Calling a car a ‘surveillance vehicle’, the earnest whisperings over the secret radio transmissions sent from the Info Centre into camp. Even the constant hugs were starting to wear him down at the end. He was just impatient, he told himself, to get upriver and actually do something, rather than just talking about it.

‘We all formed ourselves into affinity groups,’ he said to Sophie. ‘You had to decide what kind of action you’d do — how you’d be arrested, when the group would act. That decision to be arrested, it was seen as the ultimate sacrifice because it meant you’d be removed from the river. The HEC, the Hydro-Electric Commission, they sent their first huge dozer on a barge up the river to start destroying the forest. Protesters were out trying to blockade the river on rubber dinghies, just small inflatable duckies, and the boat and barge just went straight through them. It was a miracle nobody drowned.’

She’d been looking vaguely out the window as he spoke, but she turned to glance at him now.

‘Were you there, then?’

‘In the flotilla? No, I was upriver, in the forest.’

‘How long had you been there?’

He’d spent two days there. Thirty-eight hours. He shrugged casually. ‘Oh, you know, a week or so.’

Getting ready up there at Warner’s Landing, waiting for the bulldozer to arrive. Although he hadn’t believed it would, really. He’d been certain protesters in Strahan would have stopped the barge somehow from leaving the wharf, surely all the people still at Greenie Acres would have raced down to block it by clambering aboard, or something. That’s what he’d imagined. An action, after all that interminable preparation. But they’d just stood there and let it leave, he heard later, as paralysed with indecision as he’d been when he’d seen it arrive.

‘I saw photos later of the barge, though. Just ploughing through the duckies as if they weren’t even there. Then it got up to Warner’s Landing and they unloaded the bulldozer onto the site.’

It had roared into the mud-slicked rainforest, saplings cracking beneath it. NO DOZER IN NATIONAL PARKS one of the banners had read, and yet here it was, with a police escort in life-jackets, and suddenly that banner had seemed a puny, foolish thing, a misjudgement, a frail little nuisance.

‘We stood there and we heard the police PA system calling: “Clear the water. The barge will not stop.” We believed them too — we knew they wouldn’t. And then up the river came this ... cavalcade. All the protestors still in their boats.’

They’d been paddling, holding their oars aloft, chanting. Like a ragtag tribe, singing and shouting.

He remembered how cowed he’d felt, flushed and trembling and overwhelmed, by the sheer purposeful roaring force of the bulldozer. He’d been holding someone’s hand, he realised. Gripping it.

‘We saw that flotilla of rubber rafts coming, and we all moved together. Well, anyway, that’s where I got arrested. We were totally non-violent — they arrested us for trespass, which is like a technicality.’

‘Did they just, like, take you away then and there?’

‘Yep. We’d planned for it to happen that way, so I’d already packed up my tent. The cops stuck us on the foredeck of their boat and I heard the bulldozer start up again as we pulled away.’

‘How many of you?’

‘Over forty.’

Still singing. Like a tree that’s standing by the waterside, we shall not be moved.

Except that they were being moved, of course, and the trees weren’t standing, they were falling, you could hear them cracking and pitching. Then being herded into the bow with the others, all of them realising it had actually happened and they’d finally done it. Pumped with adrenaline, hugging. He’d stood a little apart from the singing, wishing they’d chosen some other song, and tried to feel the momentous triumph of the occasion, something of the exhilaration of the whooping people on the banks and the camp boats cheering them on, all that holy zeal. Telling himself it was a victory. Nothing. Numb.

She was watching him, eyebrows raised expectantly. He couldn’t tell her that.

‘It was the most overwhelming moment of my life,’ he said instead, and she nodded. ‘You know what — I turned around and there was just a single person in a duckie left on the river. He was standing upright in it, saluting us, as we went around the bend. And then when we got back to Strahan, all the other blockaders were there cheering us as well, clapping as the police escorted us off the wharf and into the vans. We were singing all the way. Singing until we ran out of songs.’

The others had been singing, not him. He’d watched, cut off, unable for even a moment to step back into himself and the moment. Her eyes slid away from him now, looking back out the window, veiled with private thoughts.

‘The thing is,’ he said, on safer ground now, ‘those locals, the ones who spat at us and demonstrated against us, saying we were taking away their livelihoods, I’d just love to find a few of them now. Strahan gets 200,000 visitors a year these days — they’d all be rolling in dough. Every tourist wants to go there. So sometimes, you know, I wonder what they’d have to say, meeting one of the Greenies who saved their cash cow for them when all they wanted to do was hound us out and destroy it forever.’

She nodded again.

‘A real peak time, that was,’ he said finally. ‘You had to be there, I guess.’

She gave a short laugh. ‘That’s what Mum says.’

He sat back against his seat. Twenty-five years ago, if you could believe that kind of time, he’d been travelling along this road in the other direction, shivering and wet, eyes aching, wretched with confusion.

And those games. Stupid, but they’d stayed with him, locked away and crystalline....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Nineteen
• Twenty
• Twenty-One
• Twenty-Two
• Twenty-Three
• Twenty-Four
• Twenty-Five
• Acknowledgements