About Deeper than the Sea
Beth had known there were secrets folded inside Theo.
But she didn’t know they were secrets about her.
It’s always been just Beth and her mother Theo. Until Beth is sixteen years old, and a stranger arrives in their small coastal town – a stranger with a claim that rips apart all Beth knows.
And what do you do when everything you thought you knew about yourself is based on a lie?
In a deeply affecting story that challenges our notions of maternal love, Nelika McDonald examines the myriad ways that love is forged and tempered over years and how fiercely it is defended.
Contents
Cover
About Deeper than the Sea
Dedication
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
Acknowledgements
About Nelika McDonald
Also by Nelika McDonald
Copyright page
For my family, who made spaces for me to write in.
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
e e cummings
chapter one
On her way home from work, the same way she walked each night, Theo rounded the curve of the cliff path that led to the lookout in just enough time to see the feet of the woman in the blue pants leave the ground.
She saw, she bore witness to, the few mesmerising moments after the woman stepped into the air, when she soared, a weightless feather aloft on the breeze, before she disappeared from view.
Theo dropped her backpack and ran to the fence, leaning over as far as she could. She could see only a mesh of scrub and rock, nothing else visible through it. No trace of the woman in the blue pants. She scanned the water and rocks directly below the lookout, and again saw nothing. She looked around her, but nobody else was there.
‘Hello? Are you okay?’ she shouted down the cliff, and then cursed herself for asking such a silly question – could the woman be considered okay in any sense of the word at this moment? There was no reply. Theo’s heart jutted against her rib cage like the heel of a palm. What now? The bush was thick and she could see no way into it; she could climb over the fence herself, but then what? She was not the right person for this, she was not the sort of person who knew what to do in times of crisis. She looked around for help again; she didn’t carry a phone, and it occurred to her that this was that time people had warned her about, when they said, ‘One day you will be sorry you don’t have a mobile yourself.’
‘Fuck.’ Theo started to run down the path and collided with an older couple, a man and woman in exercise gear with a terrier straining at his leash. She grabbed the man’s forearm and pointed back up the cliff. ‘Please, help me, I think someone just jumped from there.’
The couple stared at her and Theo waved her arms. ‘Please, I saw her, she jumped. I saw her . . .’
She could see them recoil. No, not us, don’t bring us into this, you crazy woman. Get away from us. She became aware of her appearance, dishevelled after being on the floor with the children at work, her cheeks flushed, glasses smudged. She panted, trying to catch her breath. They seemed to decide to believe her anyway, and all three of them rushed up the hill and over to the fence. They peered down into the scrub, the thick thatches of bush with grey boulders jutting out through it, and at the water at the base of the cliff. The waves were playful, darting up to lick at the rocks, then retreating as if coy.
‘I saw her,’ Theo said again, both to herself and the couple.
The man nodded and said, ‘Okay, okay, now,’ as though to placate her, as though she was the one about to jump. The woman made a sympathetic sound and went to touch Theo on the arm. Theo stepped back. Someone else had arrived now too, a man in lycra with a bicycle, and he seemed to understand what was happening very quickly.
‘Is someone down there?’
The others nodded. ‘Yes, yes! A woman.’
He dropped his bike and came to the edge of the fence too, bending over it to look down. The wind whipped and plucked at all their clothes and hair, and the seagrass bobbed and waved. A family with a small boy arrived. The boy had a toy car and kept pressing buttons that emitted a series of staccato beeps. The cyclist got his phone out and Theo felt absurdly grateful that he had believed her, he had chosen to trust her, and that now he was taking over.
Three young women jogged into the clearing. The father of the small boy put one leg over the fence and his wife made careful noises and they all held their breath as they watched him and someone was crying, the little boy, and he said, ‘Daddy, home time.’ The toy car blipped and beeped, and the wind picked up again, dragging their hair across their faces. The cyclist shouted into his phone and the mother pulled her son close, holding him against her to shield him from the gusts.
‘Lifeguards!’ said one of the jogging women. ‘I’ll find the lifeguards.’ She ran back the way she had come. The other two huddled together. Theo wished that she had someone to huddle in with. Better yet, she wished that Beth was here so she could hold her close to her side like the woman with the small boy.
‘I can’t see,’ the father said, ‘I can’t see anything, but I think I can hear her,’ and just then they all heard her – a low moan when the wind abated, a sound that was unmistakably pain, an awful, raw, wrenching sound. The mother’s face crumpled then, and the father stumbled a little, a fountain of rocks sliding under his shoe. The little boy screamed.
‘Hello, I’m coming, just stay there, I’m coming,’ the father called, but he wasn’t, he couldn’t. There was no respo
nse.
More people appeared. Where were you all when I needed you, Theo thought.
‘What’s wrong, what’s happened, is someone hurt?’
‘Have you called an ambulance?’
‘Has someone rung for help?’
The cyclist flapped his hand at them for quiet and pointed at his phone. Theo could feel him looking at her from behind his sunglasses, the type that wrapped all the way around to his temples. She wondered what the operator was saying to him.
People were still asking questions, but Theo didn’t answer them.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Is the boy hurt, why is he crying?’
‘There’s a woman down there. She jumped.’
The older woman with the terrier started to cry too, a soft keening, pulling at the collar of her shirt. Her husband didn’t step towards her, but away, and Theo felt bad for her, so she moved in a little closer, but not too close.
‘How awful, just awful,’ the woman whispered. Theo nodded, and felt the thinning of the air, the strange and horrible excitement of it all; the dog was barking and everyone was talking at once. Two men were talking about rope, in the car, and one of them came back with it and tied it to his belt and the fence post. Then, he slid on his bottom down the side of the cliff. He yelled something back and they all shook their heads. A fishing knife was passed to the front, and Theo watched as the man cut away at the bushes. Then, she saw it, a glimpse of blue, and she said, ‘There!’ but nobody heard her, they had all seen it at the same time, and they gasped and swore at the sight of the body, one leg thrown sideways over the other.
The woman’s torso was twisted and pointing downhill, her head to the side and back, hair threaded though the dirt and pale throat exposed. No human limbs should look like that, the configuration was all wrong, Theo thought. The woman’s shirt rode up over her stomach, pale and soft-looking, and the bottom of her bra was visible, lace against the white flesh. Theo thought of pantyhose, compacts with scented powder, silk scarves and negligees, rosewater in a cutglass bottle on a dressing table. Intimacies. That lace and flesh belonged to more purposefully intimate settings than this. She wanted to go and pull the woman’s shirt down, wanted to cover her with a blanket.
The woman was not moving.
‘The police and ambulance are on their way,’ the cyclist called. People moved closer together, patted their pockets for things that might help, came up empty. In front of them all the ocean loomed and then receded, scraps of white curling along the tops of waves.
‘Is she . . .’ one of the jogging girls started to ask, then trailed off.
Above her, the lights of the path flickered on, and Theo was suddenly aware of time passing. How long had she been here? Ten minutes? An hour? The sky had ruptured and pink and orange streaks drained into the water. It grew dark quickly at the beach. Theo had always thought it was because they had room to see it here, not like the artificial light of the city, streetlights on a timer. Here it was just a smudging. The horizon grew blurrier until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t there any more. Theo made a point of not thinking about that too much, because then it felt like the world didn’t have edges and anyone could just fall right off the planet, where the sea bled into sky that bled into land.
Theo kept her mouth closed but could feel the stinging pinch of sand in the wind against her face. The wife of the man with the terrier was still crying. She clawed at Theo’s shoulder, but Theo backed away until she was at the fringe of the crowd, standing where she had been when she saw the woman jump. She retrieved her backpack from where she had dropped it. Just a few weeks earlier there had been whales in the ocean in front of the jetty and crowds had gathered in this exact spot to watch the shimmering hulks appear and then disappear under the cloak of water.
Theo shivered and pulled the thin sleeves of her shirt down; she hadn’t been expecting to be outside when it grew cold. She hoped Beth had her jumper with her.
‘Here they come,’ someone said, and she heard the sirens.
Theo wondered if she could leave now, she wanted to go home and close all the doors and windows. She wanted Beth to be at home with her, both of them in front of the telly with dinner plates on their laps, inside in the lamplight while this wind thrashed and tore around the trees outside. It could rain, that would be nice; to be safe and dry in their house with Beth while everything was being washed clean outside. Theo would be able to glance over from her chair at her girl every now and then, at her dark hair funnelled into a ponytail at her neck, the span of her shoulders, the spritz of freckles on her nose. She would be fiddling with her necklace, a little silver donkey charm on a thin chain. She loved donkeys, she thought someone had to because they were a bit stupid and they weren’t as pretty as horses, so they needed champions for their cause. Beth wasn’t often an underdog herself, but she was drawn to them. Beth thought she could solve anyone’s problems. Theo thought she probably could, too.
When she was anxious or concentrating hard on something, the show they were watching or a book she was reading, Beth slipped the donkey between her lips and tapped his tiny hooves against her teeth. At her last visit the dentist had said she was wearing the enamel away and Beth had said, ‘Well I’ll wear falsies, then I can drink loads of Coke and coffee and shovel loads of sugar into my Weet-Bix in the mornings.’
She had arched an eyebrow at Theo, and Theo had said, ‘Tasteful.’ The dentist had shaken his head and Beth had laughed at them both. She had a good laugh.
Sirens cut the air and a few people ran down the path on the other side, waving and calling to the police. Theo wrapped her arms around herself and watched them. Surely she could leave, now? These other people had things under control. She knew the police might want to talk to her, but what would Theo say, apart from, yes, she had seen her jump? Seen her feet pedal frantically in the air, seen her dull brown hair fan out like a riflebird’s wings. Heard the flour-sack thud of her collision with the earth. Had she even heard bones cracking and splintering? Theo thought she probably had, and the shock and disappointment of the cry the woman had uttered, the pain in that register that Theo recognised in a primal way, from one animal to another: I am very badly hurt.
Beth had broken her arm once, showing off on the monkey bars at the park after school. Theo had been in the toilet block nearby, washing her hands, sticky with dust and ice-cream, when she heard her surprised, gunshot crack yelp of pain and shock. Theo had known that sound and known it was Beth who made it, the sort of sound you heard not with your ears but with your gut. Theo had known the magnitude of that sound and the moment that followed that wail was one of the worst Theo had ever lived through, the moment where she knew Beth was hurt, badly, but not how badly, and not why. It was just a broken arm, but it could have been anything, it could have been the moment Beth was taken from her.
Theo felt eyes on her, from the other side of the lookout, where any moment now the policemen and paramedics would appear, with their uniforms and equipment and calm, sensible voices. She thought it might be the cyclist looking at her from behind his sunglasses again, sizing up her swimmer’s shoulders and cropped hair, but no. He was on his phone again, one hand rubbing at his forehead as though it ached. Theo scanned the crowd. She definitely felt watched, like someone might be trying to get her attention.
And there she was. Standing perfectly still, the only stationary object in the flustered, pulsing crowd. Theo knew who was watching her before she saw their face. She knew in the way she would know her own sister, in the way your internal organs hum in recognition when you see an ex-lover again. She knew, too, that once her eyes met those of the woman who stared at her, it would all be over. There would be recognition. But it was already too late, her body was going ahead without her, caught in the momentum of the turn, and in a fraction of a taut, vibrating second they locked eyes. Theo could not turn away, some compulsion or shock or the throb of nausea in her gut or the eerie colour of the crowd under the yellow light and dark blue sky or ju
st disbelief made her look, and look, and look at that face.
That face.
She had been trying to forget that face, the owner of that face, for sixteen years. And now here she was, on a Friday evening, at the Gipps Point lookout in Cardmoor, standing at the top of a cliff that a woman in blue pants had just jumped off.
Theo had been found.
The woman started to walk towards her, keeping her eyes fixed on Theo’s. The wind dropped and people shifted almost imperceptibly to move out of her path. Theo stood there, transfixed.
‘I need to speak with you,’ she said to Theo.
Her voice was just the same, and it made something in Theo’s stomach wrench and twist. She had to concentrate to keep herself breathing. She couldn’t have a conversation with this woman, she couldn’t even stand here with her. Theo took a step backwards, keeping her eyes on the other woman’s feet. They didn’t move. Theo scooped up her bag, turned and pushed herself into the cluster of people. When she’d made her way through to the cliff path, she began to run.
chapter two
Beth was lying on the bed in the spare room when she heard her mum get home, the grind of her key in the lock and the thump of her bag landing on the hallstand. Vinnie the cat’s bell tinkled as he ran down the hallway to greet Theo and Beth got up and went into the bathroom to shower before her mother could ‘pop her head in,’ as she called it. Beth was sleeping in the spare room for a few nights while the first coat of green paint dried on the walls of her bedroom. The spare room was right next to Theo’s room. Too close for comfort, at the moment.
She and Theo had painted Beth’s bedroom yesterday, and they would do another coat on the weekend. Beth didn’t actually mind the smell of the paint, but Theo said it would make her sick, inhaling toxic particles in the air. Sometimes Theo said things that sounded made up. As though Beth was just a child and would believe whatever she was told about anything, even though Beth was the scientist and often knew the facts when Theo didn’t. Sometimes it seemed as though Theo looked at her and still saw a little girl. But Beth could drive. She didn’t bite her nails any more. She would have to do a tax return this year. She knew that people lied and cheated, she had decided she didn’t believe in God, and she had a bank account. She could cook dinner. Not just a passable dinner, a good one. In just one short year she would begin studying Applied Science at university.
Deeper than the Sea Page 1
