Excerpt of The World Beneath by Cate Kennedy
(Page 3 of 4)
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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.
Excerpted from The World Beneath
by Cate Kennedy. Copyright © 2011 by Cate Kennedy.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
