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CHAPTER 1
It was the broken-resolution end of January already, and Sandy was sitting in the kitchen drinking decaffeinated coffee with her oven's green, digital-clock display panel flashing, if you could believe it, HELP HELP HELP instead of the time. Last night, full of the beady-eyed purpose a late-night joint always gave her, she'd stood there trying to reprogram it to bring the clock back without making the bloody oven alarm go off, pressing and fiddling and relighting the stub of her roach, until finally she'd sworn at it and given up.
So now it was signalling her for help. Her oven, for crying out loud. An appliance.
And even though she couldn't fix the timer, the clock still ran with a snickering whirr, a nasty little calibrated sound of time mouse-wheeling itself determinedly away, even if she was sitting here marooned in the long slack middle of the afternoon, picking hard candle wax off the tablecloth and waiting for the caffeine rush that would never come.
Sandy raised the mug awkwardly in her left hand and took another sip. She was right-handed but her friend Alison had made these mugs on her new pottery wheel a few years back and Sandy had loyally bought them, and there were fragments of grit embedded in a dribble of glaze on the other side, just at the point where you sipped. Just one little gravelly flake of grit, but enough to drive you nuts. It was hard enough picking the things up with the lumpy handles Alison had stuck on. Proletariat cups, Sandy would think as she washed them roughly in the sink, hoping to break one so that she could justifiably throw it out. Nothing would kill them. They were made to withstand a revolution.
She'd recognised the handwriting as soon as she'd fished the envelope out of the mailbox, felt that little twisting jump of tension. No return address, of course. And inside, just a postcard, one of those free ones you get in coffee shops, with his message scribbled on the back.
Would like to ring Sophie for her fifteenth birthday. Please let her know. I'll call around 6.30 your time. Hope life is treating you well. And a mobile number. That was all. As if he was paying by the bloody word.
Was life treating her well? Sandy frowned, lifted a splatter of candle wax with her fingernail from the batik cloth. Everybody seemed finally to have accepted resignedly that this was the state of play, she thought: you let life happen to you. In it came like a party-crasher, ignoring any plans you might have had for yourself, and treated you to whatever it had in mind.
And you just sat there and took it. Nobody ever said, for example, how have you been treating your life? which made you sound a bit less passive, at least. Maybe that could be the start of an article, something she could write for the community-centre newsletter, or even the local paper.
Did he really have to be so terse, even in a postcard? Not that his brusqueness surprised her — that was Richard all over, exactly as she remembered. Hope life is treating you well would be just what she would have expected — one of a couple of careless, studiously distant sentences as if he'd spoken to her last month instead of about five years ago.
Sandy, in uncharitable moments — and OK, these surfaced occasionally, she was the first to admit — believed that Rich did this on purpose. Whatever he was doing now, and God knows he was evasive enough about that, he made a point of being somewhere exotic around Christmas and Sophie's birthday, just so he could write things like Greetings from Dharamsala! or Not sure if this will get to you, boat's not docking in Borneo till next week.
Like this one: 6.30 your time. Please. As if he had to calculate time zones. Like he was going to call from bloody Bhutan.
She hoped the romance was a deliberate, manufactured illusion, hoped he was, in reality, writing from his dead-end job or cramped bedsit. She should have paid attention to the postmarks over the years, except that sometimes Sophie made a point of casually collecting the mail around her birthday and Christmas before she did, so she didn't have a chance.
She'd laid the whole thing on the line for Sophie, early on.
'He walked out on us when you were just a tiny baby. So don't go expecting anything from him. Put him out of your life, like I have.'
And for years Sophie had given her that inscrutable child's look and shrugged, even though Sandy was sure she kept all those cards, with their pathetically non-committal messages, hidden away somewhere. Hanging onto something. Some possibility. And then last year, when Sophie had been turning a scary fourteen, she'd stunned her by saying, 'If you've put him out of your life, why are you always talking about him?'
She had felt herself blustering, hot suddenly. 'I don't.'
'Yes, you do.'
'No, I don't.'
'You do. When all your friends are here. You're all shouting to get a word in about who's got the worst ex.'
Just doing her obstinate best to get under her skin about something that was patently untrue. She imagined all those cards somewhere, wrapped up in a box under a journal, maybe. Although Sophie had become so coolly cynical this last year it was hard to imagine any shred of sentiment surviving; it would be hanging on like a tiny gasping plant, clinging by its roots to a crack in the barren rock face of withering teenage contempt. Maybe she'd thrown away the lot. Maybe she'd incorporated them into some weird art installation at school, lying slyly in wait for Sandy to come across at the next parent–teacher night.
And she would have to smile brightly, her face stiff with mortification, and pretend she knew all about it. She was still getting over innocently strolling into the IT lab last term and having the teacher enthusiastically show her the website Sophie ran from her school computer ... no, not website, one of those blog things: BigPage, or MyFace, or whatever it was called.
A wildly popular site, apparently. A cluster of teachers had stood around her, enthusing.
'She's brilliant, really,' the headmaster had said excitedly, clicking away with the mouse. 'Such a thinker, and such a subversive sense of humour, wouldn't you say?', and he'd brought up Sophie's blog. And smiling, still wondering what, exactly, he meant by subversive, Sandy saw that it was called My Crap Life.
'This has had thousands of hits,' the headmaster was saying. 'Even the staff read it each week. And the goth twist is what makes the whole thing so exceptional.'
'Emo goth,' corrected the IT teacher, mystifyingly, leaning proprietarily over the back of the ergonomic chair.
Sandy nodded, grimly trying to memorise the web address.
'She's certainly full of surprises,' she said faintly. There was Sophie's face on the screen, indisputably hers, glowering out from under a curtain of black fringe, so it must have been true. Fourteen years old, and this other life going on, a secret parallel universe served up here now in a fait accompli, something for Sandy to accidentally stumble across when it was all too late.
Like that tattoo. Sandy remembered the shock of first glimpsing it, the sensation of the rug being smartly whipped out from under her. Not even a nice tattoo either, the sort that she herself had contemplated — those cute butterflies in the small of the back, say, or a Celtic band honouring your cultural heritage or some small, significant endangered flower on the ankle.
No, Sophie's tattoo was pushing heavy metal, like an AC/DC album cover.
They'd been sitting at a barbecue, and Sandy's eyes had wandered over to her daughter's shoulders just as Sophie had leaned forward to pick up her drink. It was a hot day and she'd uncharacteristically taken off her black hoodie, leaving her bare pale neck and shoulders exposed. Sandy's heart jumped into her throat and hammered there a few times. Oh Jesus, it couldn't be permanent, could it? It was illegal to tattoo a minor, she was sure of it. Wasn't it?
'Oh my God, what's that? Sophie?'
'What's what?' Sophie turned around, her jet-black hair scraping against her singlet. What did she put in it, glue?
'You know perfectly well. That thing on your back.'
Her daughter took a swallow of Diet Coke before answering, and Sandy watched her eyes flutter closed, as she gulped, through the thick sweep of black eyeliner.
'It's only a temporary tat,' she'd said wearily.
'Thank God for that. I thought for a minute ... Sweetheart, what induced you to stick that on there? And what on earth is it? A bat?' Sophie pulled the singlet down with her black-painted fingernails. 'I'm trying out what I'm going to get when I turn eighteen, OK? So calm down. It's just a bird.'
Spread wingtip to wingtip between her shoulder blades. That pale delicate flesh that she remembered pressing her face to countless times when Sophie was a baby, inhaling that scent of innocence and ayurvedic soap, that skin she'd kept so carefully from sunburn and injury. Now her daughter was planning to scar it indelibly with a ... black carrion bird.
'You've got to be kidding. A crow? Right across your back like that, as if you're some kind of ... bikie's moll?' That slow-motion, long-suffering blink again. Where did she get that sneering contempt?
'Take a chill pill, will you? I told you I wouldn't do it permanently till I was eighteen.'
'As if those studs through your eyebrow aren't enough.'
A snort of laughter. 'Jesus, Mum, you sound like Grandma.'
That shut her up. Made her stand, suddenly, and go over to refill her wineglass at the trestle table, then wander shakily to another seat under a tree where friends were having a long and circuitous conversation about the local council. She did sound like her mother, awful to admit. More and more, when she forgot herself, that voice came rising out of her own throat, Janet even down to the querulous inflections. Please God, not that noble self-martyrdom next. Anything but that.
My Crap Life. Honestly, when had Sophie ever wanted for a single thing in her whole life? You did your best, you were everything to your kids your own parents weren't, you put them first in everything, and they still thought their lives were crap. Their lives were paradise, she thought bitterly, picking at the red wax.
Her mother's voice burbled faintly but persistently out of the ether telling her to warm up the iron and find some absorbent paper and do the job properly, and Sandy tuned her out before she could go on to add that there was still a load of wet clothes in that machine that would soon be starting to mildew and a vinegar rinse would get that smell out but why let it happen in the first place?
When are you going to shut up, Sandy whispered savagely to the hovering apparition of her mother standing in the doorway delivering this litany, and just leave me alone? The apparition turned stiffly on its orthopedic heel with the outraged offence that would take months to repair, if this was real life.
Here she was, an intelligent woman with a daughter almost fifteen and she still felt — with that small, landslide jolt of shock when she glimpsed herself in the mirror sometimes — that she hadn't yet quite gotten her own life started. As if she was still waiting here in Ayresville, her foot patiently hovering on the accelerator, for her chance to get going. She'd do it soon, though. She'd enrol in something, once Soph had finished school, and didn't need her there every day. Something that would bring all her short courses together, all her skills areas. Alternative medicine, maybe. Or comparative philosophies.
For goodness sake, snapped the spectre of her mother impatiently, as it clicked out of the house in its sensible shoes, stop your moping around and get up and do something; it's disgraceful.
Sandy turned Alison's mug again, took another unsatisfying sip. No, it would be get up off your fat behind and do something. Never arse, or even backside. And Janet, her mother, never mentioned Sandy's weight unless it was in mean little parting asides like this one, designed to both deny her the right of reply and to leave her with the unpleasant lingering impression that the reason nobody mentioned it otherwise was that they were all too polite to bring it up.
Not that overweight, she thought defensively. Five or six kilos at the most. All she had to do was cut out the wine and it would melt off her.
What had possessed her, all those years ago, to drop out of her Arts degree?
Rich, probably. He could talk her into anything, back then. She'd find out how much of her old degree she could get credits for, anyway, and start to focus on herself for a change. Become a practitioner of some kind, or a consultant. Then, finally, all the pieces, all the little things here and there she'd done — which her mother insisted on calling dabbling, as if she was a bloody duck or something — all of it would make sense as elements of the wisdom she'd gathered on the journey. Diverse fragments of a whole. Healing insights.
She brushed the pieces of wax into her hand and tipped them into the bin, then drifted back to the couch and unfolded the local paper. Still three-quarters of an hour to go before Sophie came home.
An auspicious day Wednesday for Aquarians, her stars said. Watch for a sign that will signal your way forward through a doorway you weren't expecting. Lucky number eight, lucky colour orange.
She considered what had come in the mailbox that morning. Rich's postcard and a brochure, from her belly-dancing mailing list, inviting her to a week-long residential workshop to reclaim her Inner Goddess.
Isn't it time you allowed nature and tranquillity to nurture you at Mandala Holistic Wellness Centre? the brochure had asked, and she had thought, with a small grim smile, you bet your arse it is. She scrutinised the photos with longing — women doing yoga on a hillside in the sunset, women laughing around a table at a candlelit dinner, looking scrubbed and pampered and serene. Yes, please. Slap bang in the middle of the school holidays, needless to say, the hardest time to try to get away. Was a mailbox like a doorway? It would be the right omen, an invitation like that; a sign for the path ahead. Belly dancing was tonight; she might just ask around to see if anyone else was thinking of going.
Maybe she could convince Sophie to spend a few days at her grandmother's. Sophie could use the time to reconnect with Janet, build some bridges after last year's disastrous Christmas lunch at that golf club, where she'd hardly spoken all day. God knows Sophie and Janet were both difficult, but it would be nourishing for them both, she was sure of it, to take the time to explore a little intergenerational common ground.
Just before seven o'clock, she heard her daughter tugging open the screen door at the back of the house and the sound of her school bag dropping to the floor. Sophie came into the room like she always did, as if everything exhausted her, pulling off her jacket as she entered.
'Hi!' Sandy said. Her daughter's eyes gave her a brief, heavy-lidded acknowledgement, a muttered hello. She went straight to the fridge for a can of that horrible zero-calorie cola.
Mere months ago, it seemed to Sandy, her little girl used to come running in with her face alight with news, holding a painting she'd done or some story she'd written to show her. Only five years ago! Well, seven, max. Didn't kids realise that was barely a blip on the radar? You blinked your eyes and suddenly you went from being the centre of the universe to someone over there on the sofa.
'There's some of that chickpea casserole in the fridge,' she said.
'Thanks. I'll have it later.'
'Aren't you hungry?'
Sophie shook her head, screwing up her nose. 'I had something at Tegan's.'
Sandy watched the fine column of her throat, the can raised to her lips as she drank. So beautiful, her daughter, with those huge dark eyes — if only she didn't rim them in racoon black eyeliner like that. If only she wore some jeans with a waistband, instead of those black stovepipes that left her whole midriff exposed.
'You shouldn't just have that, though. That stuff's not good for you.'
Sophie swallowed, then gestured languidly to Sandy's wineglass on the table. 'Look who's talking.'
'Two glasses of wine. Two.'
'And you smoke dope.'
She bridled. 'Once in a blue moon! And never in front of you.' That sounded lame, even to her. 'Anyway, that's not the same. It isn't full of caffeine and carcinogenic artificial sweeteners.'
Sandy's friends had almost talked her out of her bad-mother paranoia over the occasional joint. It was healthy, they said with conviction, for your teenagers to see that it could be no big deal, just something adults did occasionally. It went with the theory that you took the illicit thrill out of something if your kids saw you doing it yourself. Like getting your own navel pierced. Roll up a joint at home, and it would work like reverse psychology. Sort of.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The World Beneath"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Cate Kennedy.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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