Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  Beth heard a voice behind her. The police officer had followed her outside.

  ‘You can’t leave,’ he said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I can’t let you leave right now, you’re going to have to come back inside.’ He pointed at the door as if Beth wouldn’t know what ‘inside’ meant. ‘The social worker is coming now. She’ll explain everything.’

  He glanced back and Beth took a few steps down the path. A social worker?

  ‘I don’t need to see a social worker, I need to see my mother,’ she said.

  ‘You can talk about that with the social worker.’ He reached for her arm and Beth yanked it away.

  A blonde woman came out through the doors and walked towards them. She stretched her lips out in a smile at Beth, but there was something about her expression that Beth didn’t like. She wore a pink blouse with black poodles on it, and glasses with a beaded chain. That’s a silly top, Beth thought.

  ‘Hi there, Beth,’ she said, as though Beth was a small child.

  Beth didn’t answer.

  ‘My name’s Angela. I’m a social worker with the police. I know you’re worried about your mum and that’s why I’m here, okay?’

  Beth frowned. ‘I don’t understand. What’s going on?’

  ‘Come inside and we can talk about it, okay?’

  Beth didn’t answer. It wasn’t okay, if she was really asking. Not at all.

  ‘Beth, is there another adult you’d like to be here with you?’ asked the police officer. They manoeuvred her back into the station and the doors whirred shut behind them.

  ‘Why would I need another adult?’ Beth could feel the tears rising again. This was bad, whatever it was. They wouldn’t have gotten a social worker if Theo just had a few unpaid parking fines.

  ‘Well, we’ve got some things to discuss and they could be a bit upsetting for you. You might need someone with you when we talk.’

  Beth thought about it. She didn’t ‘need’ anyone with her, and that made her want to say no. But would she like someone there? Yes, she would.

  ‘Mary,’ she said, and Angela smiled like she’d done something clever.

  ‘Good girl.’

  Beth gave Mary’s phone number to the police officer. In less than half an hour, she was there. Beth didn’t often see Mary without her children hanging off her. She looked strange without them, like she’d changed her hair really drastically or lost a lot of weight. She pulled Beth in for a hug. The police officer waited at the entrance to the hallway, a radio on his belt crackling with static.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Mary whispered into Beth’s hair.

  ‘No,’ said Beth. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘Me neither. Should we go and find out?’

  Beth nodded.

  The police officer led them into a small room that had a table and chairs in the middle and a basket of tired-looking toys in one corner on the floor. A trio of faded yellow smiley face stickers clung resolutely to a window pane, though their edges had lifted like the crusts of bread going stale. The small airless room smelt of crayons and disinfectant.

  Detective Verten opened the folder in front of him and began. ‘Beth, we’ve received some information from a member of the public that led to us bring Theo into the station for questioning. This person, a woman, made a very serious allegation. What she said was that Theo was not your adoptive mother, nor your legally appointed guardian. This woman claimed that Theo has been deceiving everyone by saying that she adopted you, when in fact she has no rights to you. There was no adoption.’

  Beth breathed out. Well, that just wasn’t true. So the police must have made a mistake. A simple misunderstanding, that was why they had brought Theo in, and that was what they were all doing here. Whoever it was that had said all this, they’d just gotten the wrong end of the stick. Thank goodness, Beth thought. They just needed to prove to them that Theo had adopted her. She was baby Elizabeth with her little green hat and booties. Once she told them, then they could all go home. Beth thought of her bedroom, the sage green walls. Laying her head on her pillow, in her own bed. Mary made a strange sound, like she had swallowed too much air.

  The detective glanced at her before going on.

  ‘Beth, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, but the allegation is that Theo effectively stole you. I know this must come as a huge shock. I’m very sorry. But we’re now investigating this allegation. If we find evidence to support those claims, Theo may be charged with child abduction.’

  ‘Beth, do you understand what the detective has said to you?’ asked Angela. She looked worried.

  Beth smiled at her. There was no need to worry. Stupid social worker in her stupid poodle top.

  ‘Yes, I understand what he said, but he’s wrong,’ she said to Angela. She made her voice kind and patient.

  The social worker and detective looked at each other.

  Beth felt Mary’s hand find hers under the table and squeeze it.

  ‘Beth, I’m sorry. I know it’s hard to believe,’ Angela said.

  ‘That’s because it isn’t true.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Mary asked. ‘Who said those things?’

  ‘Her name is Alice Hopkins-Bell.’

  Mary stopped moving.

  ‘What? Who is that?’ Beth asked.

  Mary spoke so quietly that Beth almost didn’t hear her.

  ‘Alice is your birth mother’s name.’

  chapter nine

  After what seemed like at least a couple more hours, Theo was instructed to stand and wait in a hallway with a different uniformed policeman. She thought about leaving. She wasn’t legally obliged to be here. Then she thought about the social worker in her poodle top, her lips stretched in a grimace, the policemen with their appraising stares and cowboy swaggers down the hall. There would be a price to pay for leaving, she was sure.

  So, her mind flitted over logistics, the arrangements of the everyday. Would the library allow her to work while she was the subject of a police investigation? How would she pay her bills if she couldn’t? What had Beth been told? How did she look when she was told, what did she say? Was she angry? Did she cry? Did anyone take her in their arms? Where was she going to go? Who would she be with? Not Alice, surely? Surely?

  ‘Please, can someone tell me if Beth is okay? I know I can’t see her, I just want to know she’s okay,’ Theo said to the policeman who stood with her while they waited. She tried to sound calm, reasonable.

  ‘I’m just the chaperone,’ the policeman said. ‘I don’t know anything about any Beth.’

  ‘But can you find out?’ Theo persisted.

  The policeman turned away. ‘I’m just the chaperone.’

  Theo didn’t know what she was waiting for in that hallway. There were two other women there, in handcuffs. They all looked and then didn’t look at each other. Theo thought they probably all believed they were the one who didn’t deserve to be here. One of the women hummed, and Theo tried to work out what key the humming was in. She had known music at one time, played the piano. Had she played it well? Not likely. She couldn’t really remember. But she certainly hadn’t excelled. She knew that because she hadn’t excelled at anything. Unbidden, a line of music rose in her mind, and she tapped out the keys with her fingers, where they hung at her thigh, trying to distract herself. So much piano practice as a child, but she never really got any better.

  Theo knew why the woman was humming; it was something they couldn’t take from her. It was something she still owned, the vibration of sound in her voice box, her personal frequency pinging out into the air.

  ‘What are you humming?’ she asked the woman, just to hear her own voice.

  The woman stopped. She didn’t say anything.

  The policeman looked at Theo, daring her.

  ‘It’s a very nice tune,’ Theo said, loudly.

  Everyone looked away.

  In that hallway there was a window, high up on the wall. Theo peered out at
the bits of building and the trees and sky she could see through the glass and tried to orient herself, but she didn’t know which side of the building they were on any more. Through the window, Theo could see the corner of something that might be the pergola outside the Asian grocer, but she wasn’t sure. Theo felt like the more she looked, the less distinct the things on the other side of the glass became; maybe they weren’t buildings and trees, maybe that wasn’t even a window. Maybe it was a painting, maybe this whole hallway was a painting and Theo was inside it and the paint was in her ears and in her nose, filling up her throat, and she was suffocating.

  She asked to use the toilet and a female police officer came to escort her to the cubicle. As Theo was closing the door, the police officer wedged her boot between it and the frame.

  ‘Don’t lock it,’ she said.

  Theo stared at her. She held her arms out for the woman to see. ‘No tracks,’ she said. ‘And I’m not a prisoner.’ Not yet.

  ‘Don’t lock the door,’ the police officer replied.

  Theo sat on the toilet and cried, her shirt balled into her mouth, her eyes on the black boots under the door. The police officer’s radio burbled and she gave the door a sharp rap.

  ‘Finished?’

  Theo flushed the toilet and wiped her face with her shirt. She felt dirty, and tired, and as though she’d been flayed, layers of her skin peeled back like an onion. She had listened to the things the detectives had said about her, and heard the way they had been said. She stole a child, they said. She was a baby-thief, a kidnapper. Theo had seen the expression on their faces when they’d looked at her and understood that she had been recast. She was no longer the same person. They might even be at her house right now looking for evidence.

  They might have sat at her kitchen table and looked out her window and opened her bathroom cupboard and her kitchen cupboard and her bedside drawers, felt the cotton of her nightshirt between their fingers, pushed a hand into the dent in the pillow where she used to lay her head each night, opened her book to the page she was up to. Walked past Beth, if Beth was there, around Beth, who would know how much it would upset Theo to have them there, who would be trying to stop them, tiny Beth squaring up to big brutish oafs. Theo knew she would give them hell if that happened. Imagining the scene, she felt proud of her, and wanted to get her out of there, wanted them to be nowhere near her, both at once. That was often how Theo felt about Beth. Marvelling at her, at her self-possession, this formidable being she had raised, this determined, stubborn, forthright young woman, and also forever wanting to hide her away, cloister her, and not share her.

  The detective, Verten, came down the hallway, a clutch of papers at his chest. Theo caught his eye.

  ‘Why am I still here?’ she asked.

  He paused. ‘Because a very serious allegation has been made about you.’

  ‘But you haven’t charged me with anything.’

  ‘Would you like us to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ He walked away and Theo fumed, silent as the grave.

  She thought about her older sisters.

  If she could be with anyone, apart from Beth, Theo would have chosen her sisters, at the kitchen table of their family home. She didn’t even know if they were all still alive, she didn’t know if they would come if she called. But that was what she would do. When she had lived at home she was scornful of her sisters and their gossip and frocks and magazines and ointments and creams and strident opinions. She’d hated that house, with the long dining table and the blue mixing bowl full of vegetable scraps in the sink, and the wood smoke and wet dog and gravy smells of the ground floor. She’d hated all the silent formal rooms and the noisy informal rooms that felt like they grew larger whenever Theo walked into them, so that she was always insignificant. She’d hated the sight of her shoes and coat on the hallstand, so much smaller than anyone else’s. But now she would have given anything for her sisters, for home, for them to be near her, to be able to talk.

  For someone to tell her how to be in this day.

  As a child, the youngest of six, she had thought her sisters foolish, obsessed with frippery and the minutiae of primping and preening, and she hadn’t really known many of them, not really. Greta was an ally, but Greta was an ally to everyone. How Theo would have loved to speak to Greta now, right now. She was the next youngest, and already ten when Theo was born. Marjorie, the eldest, was fifteen. The other three fell between them, twin boys, and Edie, who was thirteen. It was quite clear to everyone, including Theo, that she had been an accident. Having been born such a long time after the others, she seemed to be an afterthought in the family – unnecessary, and more of the same. Her parents had thought they were finished with having small children around the place. Their lives had moved on, into the era of difficult homework and sports practice and recitals and being able to have breakable things about. And there their lives stayed when Theo arrived. The nannies of the older children were long gone by then and they never got around to finding a new one when Theo showed up. So she was expected to amuse herself while the others were at school and fend for herself generally. It was almost as though her parents had forgotten a child had to be raised before she got to the point of independence.

  Her brothers and sisters had each other, but Theo was too young and small to keep up with or be interesting to them. And she was too solemn and watchful to be a cute pet. Their parents, ambitious for their children, had fostered a healthy sense of competition amongst the older sisters, and as a result they were all overachievers. Marjorie was a violin virtuoso, Edie would go on to become a paediatrician, and Greta a lawyer. Her brothers weren’t as smart as her sisters but they were skilled athletes and devastatingly handsome. Theo felt as though everything had been used up by the time she was born, all the beauty and brawn and brains had been dished out and divvied up between the others; she was the watered-down leftovers.

  In a family of exceptional children, Theo was unequivocally average. Her mother took her to the doctor when she was a baby because she didn’t cry much, even when her sisters tipped her out of the cradle and into a basket of clean laundry for a game.

  ‘Is it her voice box?’ Theo’s mother asked the doctor.

  ‘No, Mrs Abrams,’ the doctor said. He put away his stethoscope. ‘She’s just quiet is all.’ With his hands under Theo’s knees, he bent and flexed her legs, and she whimpered.

  ‘I’m a little concerned about these hips, though.’

  It turned out that the discomfort the doctor detected in her hips as a baby was a chronic condition that never left Theo, just gave her varying degrees of pain. Like arthritis, but not arthritis. The best way that Theo could describe the sensation was that her hips were like doors that didn’t fit their frames. With each step she took, the bones seemed to collide and then scrape past each other with difficulty. She didn’t walk so much as grind her way from A to B.

  ‘Just needs some WD-40,’ her father said, cuffing her over the ear and winking. He always seemed surprised to see his youngest daughter. They all did.

  Theo spent a lot of time indoors because of her hips, and not a lot at school. The whole family went to church every Sunday, and often that was the only outing Theo had in the week. God didn’t care about the pain of her hips on those hard wooden pews. When she did eventually start school full time, she was befuddled by the whole place and system. The other children seemed to know what to do and where to go at certain times of the day. It was a bit of a relief to be instructed, but Theo also found she quite resented it. It was a stark contrast to home. There, Theo mostly just tried not to ‘get underfoot’. She read and drew and roamed the house. Her mother was studying Theology, History and the Classics via correspondence. She’d waited a long time, until her first crop of children was grown, to go back to studying, and a superfluous child wasn’t going to interrupt her plans.

  In her childhood home, Theo knew the contents of every drawer and cupboard. She knew every nook for reading
, every interesting ornament, collection of papers or chest of old belongings. She examined the intriguing hiding places of her brothers and sisters, read their diaries, ran her small fingers over their special things, looked into their mirrors and slid her feet into their shoes. To stave off the boredom and for company, Theo read, all the time. Enid Blyton, Joyce Lankester Brisley, Louisa May Alcott and L. M. Montgomery, then her father’s books, J. D. Salinger and George Orwell and Steinbeck. Sometimes she didn’t understand what she read, but it didn’t deter her. She read at the breakfast table, walking to school, even in the shower. She scrubbed with one hand, holding the book out of the spray with the other.

  Her brothers and sisters being home didn’t make Theo feel any less lonely. Listening to them speak, she felt as though she was watching a television show. They were all so loud and confident, and the jostle and hustle and hum of them filled every corner of the room they were in.

  ‘Pass the tea, Marjorie, and give me some of that cake, you’ve already eaten half of it!’

  ‘I never have, Tobias ate that whole corner in one mouthful.’

  ‘I need fuel for my game tonight, don’t I?’

  ‘Idiot. It’s Wednesday, the game’s tomorrow!’

  ‘You’re all idiots, I need it, I’ve got community visits tonight, God help me.’

  ‘Extra credit swot, who’d want you to visit?’

  ‘They love me at the old folks’ home, they say I’m a breath of fresh air.’

  ‘Poor old things.’

  ‘“A tear is the dew of compassion!”’

  ‘Erm . . . Byron?’

  ‘Twenty points.’

  ‘Old fag.’

  When she could be flagged down, Greta would keep Theo company for a while, but she was busy, they all were. And she didn’t want to be a nuisance, as her mother reminded her often. Her brothers and sisters were in high school and it was an important time, they all had Bible study and other extracurricular activities, and there were often awards, certificates and medals left casually on the kitchen table. Theo had never gotten a medal for anything, but then she had rarely been in a position where medals were in the offing. So she just kept quiet and lingered on the periphery. She was good at being inconspicuous. She made a sport of it, not sticking out, not being any trouble. A chameleon.