Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  Beth had wanted to be a scientist for as long as she could remember, and she’d had to work pretty hard to make it happen. She got good marks, but only if she worked for them. Beth had to study and study and study, all through school. And even before she got the marks to get in, Beth had to spend her holidays working at Beachcombers, a restaurant on the foreshore, to help pay for everything once uni began. Five days a week, sometimes more, she put on her blindingly bright turquoise blouse and a black skirt and trudged down the hill to the restaurant, and smiled at children and pulled out chairs and polished silverware and poured water and wine. And at night she came home too exhausted to go to any of the house parties or barbecues or the full moon bonfires at the caravan park that everyone else went to in the holidays.

  While Beth had been showering, Theo had ironed her Beachcombers shirt and hung it on the handle of the wardrobe at the end of the bed. She had laid out her black skirt and a bra and knickers on the chair next to it. Beth’s shoes sat side by side under the chair and a pair of stockings was draped over the armrest.

  Beth went out into the hallway. She heard Theo moving about in the kitchen.

  ‘Do I not get to choose my own underwear?’ Beth yelled.

  ‘A “thank you” would suffice,’ Theo said, appearing at the doorway.

  She was framed by the light of the kitchen and Beth could see the lines on her neck and around her eyes thrown into relief. She looked older than she was this evening. She should moisturise, Beth thought. Not just sunscreen but proper moisturiser. She was terrible at things like that, she didn’t even use shampoo and conditioner or cleanser for her face, just soap. Theo got this holier-than-thou expression when Beth tried to give her suggestions about that sort of thing. As though Beth was the one being silly, using actual hair products on her hair.

  ‘Okay, darling, thanks for the tip,’ she would say. And do nothing differently.

  Beth went back into the spare room and slammed the door. Maybe they shouldn’t have bothered to paint her bedroom. Maybe she would move out. Anna Kilsythe was just in the next year and she already lived in a big share house down by the caravan park. Beth had been to a party there and gotten changed in Anna’s room. The floor was gritty with crumbs and the air smelt like cigarettes and cheap body spray. Beth could tell that every single thing in Anna’s room had been put there because she wanted it there, necklaces hanging over the edge of the mirror, a small television on a crate at the end of the bed. Photos of Anna and her friends were tucked into the wardrobe frame and a clothes rack bowed under the weight of dresses crammed onto wire coathangers. Nothing was new. Nothing was clean. The scarf slung over the lamp was probably dangerous and the door didn’t even have a handle, let alone a lock. But Beth couldn’t think of a single improvement she would make to that space. It was the room of an adult woman.

  ‘Do you want to take a sandwich for your break?’ Theo asked, holding out a foil-wrapped package as Beth passed.

  But Beth didn’t look at the food, just shook her head. She had stopped taking sandwiches to work months ago. Children ate sandwiches, cut into triangles. Bread thick like foam and Vegemite smeared in a mud slick across it. Ham and salad sweating in a lunchbox. Beth almost gagged thinking about it.

  In the doorway, she turned back to give Theo a kiss goodbye. As she moved towards her, Theo reached out and grabbed Beth, pulling her in by the shoulders. Beth put her arms around her and felt Theo’s shoulder blades like wings. Under her hands, Theo was shaking.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Beth drew back to look at Theo’s face, but Theo ducked her head and turned away.

  ‘Fine, fine. Quick, or you’ll be late.’

  There was a point on the walk to work, going down the hill, where the sea appeared between the roofs of two houses: a triangle of blue, or silvery black, depending on the time of day. It always made Beth think of Theo, seeing that sliver of water. Theo loved the water. Beth knew a lot of other things about her mother; what she liked and didn’t like to eat for breakfast and watch on telly, what would make her laugh, how she sounded on the phone, how she clapped when she was excited, how she sang softly when she was under the house with her clay and kiln and the dry dark air. But the relationship Theo had with water was more important than any of that. It was as much a part of her as the marrow in her bones, a more natural habitat for her than any on land.

  Theo was a potter. She mostly made bowls with faces on them, but not ordinary faces. She could make the bowls look wistful, or pensive, or concerned. Beth had seen other people try to copy Theo’s bowls, at stalls at the markets and in gift stores. But they were always comical; crude caricatures of expression, plump lips curled into jocular, stretched smiles and bulging eyes, or downturned mouths and eyebrows knotting together. You couldn’t look at Theo’s bowls and see what exactly made them look the way they did, it wasn’t only the mouths or eyes but the clay itself, perhaps how it was contoured, or the tiny lines that Theo made with a needle. Beth had one, but it was a joke one, sort of. Theo had cast herself in the clay, her own face looking stern. Go to bed was carved around the rim, because Beth always stayed up too late, studying or reading. The face was unmistakably her mother’s. A smile in the eyes, looking at her daughter. Beth kept pens in it so Theo wouldn’t know how much she loved it.

  Beth loved the water too, but not in the way Theo did, not like it was oxygen. She couldn’t imagine living in a city, though, small as an ant with the grey buildings like concrete blades of grass everywhere around you. How did you orientate yourself, how did you know where the edges of the land were? What about the elevation above sea level? It was spatial science. Longitude and latitude. She’d been given a compass when she was eight. A key to the universe – there was no greater gift. For several years, Beth had carried it with her at all times. Cardmoor for her was a collection of coordinates, the landmarks of her childhood in bearings.

  When Beth had asked her mother how they came to be living in Cardmoor, this particular dot on the map, Theo told her that she used to bring Beth here as a baby so she could take her paddling in the bay. Theo was a firm believer in sunshine for health, and swimming. She was evangelical about the sun and dismissive of skin cancer talk. ‘When you were a baby, we’d been to the beach one day and when I took you back to the house we lived in it was dark and cold and Oliver wasn’t home. He was never home. That’s when we broke up. I wanted to get you out of there, I wanted to get you back into the sun. I thought this was a better place for a baby. The city was nice to visit, but for a home, the beach was the best. Australia has beautiful beaches; why wouldn’t you live near one if you could?’

  Theo pulled that conversation swiftly past Oliver, every time. It seemed like it hurt her to even think of him. What could he have done to make Theo feel like that, Beth wondered. She didn’t know. But she knew she wanted nothing to do with him.

  Theo told her that she’d only been living in Australia for five years when she adopted Beth. Beth didn’t know anything about her birth parents, and Theo said she didn’t have much information either.

  ‘It was different then,’ she said. ‘You registered, they assessed you as suitable, and then you were given a baby, sometimes one that hadn’t even been named yet.’

  ‘But I had been named.’

  ‘But you had been named.’

  Elizabeth, her birth mother had called her. It was strange to think that her own name was all Beth knew of her biological mother. That, and the fact she had dressed her in a green hat and booties when she gave her up. Green was Beth’s favourite colour.

  Once, when Beth was about eight or nine, Theo had told her a bit about what she had felt when she came to Australia, how bright everything was. The rainbow of banknotes. The rainbow of people, birds, everything drenched in sun.

  ‘The colours were different here,’ Theo said. ‘Not like England at all.’

  Beth nodded, even though she didn’t know what colour England was. White for the rain and snow, she supposed, and muddy green, and fireplace orange
, and castle grey.

  ‘Have I met any of your family?’ she asked.

  ‘Greta,’ Theo said. ‘My sister Greta came over when you were tiny. She’d had three babies of her own so she wasn’t scared like I was. She carried you around in one hand. When she left, I realised I’d never even taken her to the beach, or sightseeing, not once. When I was dropping her back at the airport, I said to her, “You’ll have to come again, see the place properly,” and she just shook her head. “The people make the place,’’ she said. She loved you very much.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘Can we give her a call?’

  ‘No, love.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It’s expensive.’

  ‘I have money in my piggy bank.’

  ‘More expensive than that.’

  It had never really felt different, being adopted. Lots of people had big families who argued, and kids who had to share bedrooms, and there wasn’t enough money for proper dinners or bills or cars or anything else. Beth and Theo didn’t have any of those problems. They got along fine, the two of them. Two halves make a whole. They were a family.

  But Beth wouldn’t be around much when school finished. She already wasn’t around much and it would be even less when she had lectures to go to. She thought of Theo sitting by herself in her chair at the kitchen table, then sitting by herself in her chair in the lounge room, and lying on one side of her bed, the other side still made up perfectly. Using a single teabag instead of making a whole pot. Boiling an egg for dinner instead of cooking properly. The thing that none of Beth’s friends with partnered parents understood was that it wasn’t only the fact that they didn’t have another adult to do things with that made their children worry. It was that their children were often the thing that filled that space. Without them, their parents had nobody, and were alone. It was too much power, being the difference between alone and not. She used to love being Theo’s other person. Now it sometimes made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.

  When Beth arrived at work she went to put her bag in the office. Sergio waved from across the restaurant floor and held up a wineglass. More glasses for the bar, that meant. Beth didn’t mind doing that job. She liked opening the big dishwashers and feeling the whoosh of hot, wet air billow out around her. She liked the clean smell and the pristine glasses before they were used, while they were still perfect and untouched. Too bad they had to get used. Tying on her apron, Beth felt dizzy for a moment. Maybe her mother had been right about the paint fumes, after all. Beth rested her forehead against the wall until her vision went back to normal, then headed out into the kitchen for the glasses.

  chapter three

  When Beth had left for work, Theo sat at her kitchen table.

  Beth was rostered on until eleven and it took every ounce of self-control Theo had not to jump in her car and go get her, bundle her up and whisk her away. They could drive away, the two of them, leave it all behind. What did they have but each other, anyway? Theo did some sums in her head, wondering about money. Theo’s car was ancient and unreliable. Her friend Mary would lend Theo her car, though. She would give Theo her car, if she asked. But there was Beth. She wasn’t a child any more, she was a wilful, stubborn young woman. Beth wouldn’t want to go. She would not be ‘whisked’ anywhere. If Theo appeared at the restaurant tonight, Beth would be embarrassed. She would be upset, confused, annoyed most of all. She wouldn’t know what was going on, and she hated not knowing what was going on. Her forehead would crease, her hand would go straight to her necklace, and she would walk that tiny silver donkey back and forth over the pads of her fingers and slide it between her teeth, worrying. She would think Theo was paranoid, coming unhinged. She would refuse to come with Theo, refuse to abandon everything on her mother’s impulsive whim and Theo couldn’t make her.

  She shouldn’t make her, either. She didn’t have the right.

  That was the only thing keeping Theo from going to her right now, because God only knew every bone in her body was telling her to. Run, her body said, her hands and her heart and her legs all sang it loud, an insistent orchestra, louder than the ocean. Run, run, run. Get Beth, convince her somehow, and just go. If you stay, it will be finished. This life, as it is, will be over.

  Outside, the wind still raged on, butting at the walls and windows, and the panes of glass trembled in the frames. Theo turned the television on, something to compete with the noise in her head, and poured herself a glass of wine. Her hands shook as she unscrewed the cap. She left the bottle out, but, in a nod to restraint, moved it to the other end of the table.

  ‘Maybe nothing will come of it.’ She said it out loud, to see if she believed it. ‘Maybe she’s already left town.’ Her own voice came out strangely. She downed her drink and poured another. She sat down again and tried to breathe evenly. Work might help. Her bowls waited, lumpen, not anything yet. She put one finger on the clay and then another. It caved under her fingertip and she felt dizzy.

  Theo found her phone and called Mary. She took a big swallow of wine and felt it burn down her throat.

  ‘Hello?’ Mary sounded groggy.

  ‘Mary, I saw her. I saw Alice.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘I saw Alice. At the lookout.’ Theo closed her eyes and turned again, turned towards Alice at the top of the cliff, felt their eyes connect like puzzle pieces clicking into each other.

  ‘In Cardmoor? You saw her here?’

  ‘Yes, at Gipps Point.’

  ‘But what is she doing here?’ Mary sounded bewildered.

  ‘Mary.’ Theo breathed out. ‘How would I know what she’s doing here? I haven’t exactly been keeping tabs on her, have I?’ Her voice rose with each word, her knuckles on the phone receiver turning white.

  ‘Okay, I just – it seems . . . odd.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s thrown me a bit, I guess.’

  ‘Of course.’ Mary forgave instantly. It was one of the many things Theo loved about her.

  ‘So.’ Theo bit her lip. She watched the rain outside. The light from the television flashed on the glass doors. It was blue. Not cornflower blue, but just as bright. Theo thought of the woman lying there with her shirt ridden up and bra poking out. She thought of her head, like a dandelion on a stalk. Theo pictured the vertebrae of the woman’s spine separating one by one, like dominoes falling down in a line. She thought of the rabbit bones her brother had found at the riverbed at home when they were young, she had thought they were beautiful, picked clean and white by carrion, such a startling colour and shape amongst the green and grey, but her mother said they were dirty.

  ‘So. Are you . . . at home now?’ Mary’s voice was careful. The caution she could hear in it made Theo’s stomach clench. In her mind’s eye, the face changed, and the woman in blue pants became the other woman, the one Theo had felt looking at her, the one she had been hiding from for so long. Alice. In her head, Theo merged those two women, she warped their features and swam them back and forth into each other. She sent Alice down the cliff, kept the one in the blue pants on the right side of the fence. The woman in those pants had been wearing sensible shoes, the sort of shoes Theo had looked at in chemist’s but not bought, because to buy them would be to be old.

  ‘I’m home. Beth’s at work,’ she told Mary.

  ‘Okay. Well, do you want me to come over?’

  ‘Yes . . . No.’

  ‘I could bring the baby.’

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘Well, she is waterproof.’ Mary’s voice was light, but it was too light, buoyant. It scared Theo. She told Mary she needed to get to bed and that she would call her the next day. When she’d hung up the phone, Theo got up and locked the front door, then walked directly to the back door and locked that one too. It hadn’t been closed in a long time and she had to shove it hard to get the door into the frame. Then she walked around and closed all the windows, called Vinnie inside and went to draw the curtain
s shut over the sliding glass doors that led onto the verandah. At the doors, she looked out towards the ocean. She couldn’t see it tonight, but she knew it was there. She counted on that. She had never gotten over being able to see the sea from her own home. The lighthouse blinked on and off. Theo thought of stories about captains returning home from long voyages to spot the coloured rags hanging in the windows of these houses on the peak, yellow meant all is well at home. Red, there is illness; black, there is death. But who? Who had died? Theo wondered about those minutes between seeing a black flag in the window of your family home and arriving on shore, what thoughts went through the minds of those men. What bargains they made.

  When she closed her eyes she could still hear, above the television and the wind outside, the synthetic beeps and zips from that little boy’s toy car trilling into the cool air at the lookout earlier that evening. How cheated the woman in the blue pants must have felt, robbed of that feeling of flying that she imagined being her last sensation.

  Theo went to the linen closet. She pulled down a suitcase, carried it to the table and flipped the lid open. On the window, a blue light appeared again, but not from the television. This one was followed by a red light, and then blue, then red again. At the end of Theo’s driveway, a police car came to a stop.

  chapter four

  Beth was clearing the big table on the promenade of dirty dishes and lipstick-stained glasses when she saw an ambulance coming down from the cliff. It didn’t have its siren on but its lights corkscrewed in the gathering dusk. Tourists, runners and the hosts spruiking out the front of the other restaurants along the beach road all watched too, solemn and quiet for the half-minute it was in view. Then the chatter and music and movement swelled again and Beth went back to her work.