Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘So, will they be telling me where Beth is, then? So I can make sure I stay away?’ Theo asked David. What would they do, fit Beth with a traceable microchip like a dog from the pound?

  ‘No. It’s false freedom, they know that and we know that. But if you breach the 200-metre boundary, even inadvertently, it’s a criminal offence and they can and will charge you.’

  ‘So I can’t actually leave.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  Theo drank her wine, and smoked her cigarette. It made her nostalgic for that alleyway behind the pub, all of them sitting on crates and smoking after service, bone-tired and full of possibility. For the first time in a long time Theo wondered what Oliver would look like now, what he’d make of her now. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin as if he could see her. The smoke from her cigarette swirled and ebbed out the door, disappearing into the night. A fruit bat swung from a branch of the mango tree, showing off to his comrades. In the distance Theo could see squares of light from other houses, a checkerboard in the sky. Was Beth in one of those squares of light? Which one? With whom?

  Theo stubbed out her cigarette and went inside to call Mary.

  ‘How are you getting on with David?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Fine, I suppose. He’s very diligent. He brings coffee.’

  ‘Legal aid lawyers don’t generally bring coffees for their clients,’ Mary said. ‘The budget probably doesn’t even stretch to coffees for themselves too often.’

  ‘He seems good at what he does.’

  ‘Actually, he’s the best. He could work for any firm in the country,’ Mary said. ‘But he stays at legal aid. Crusading champion of the people and all.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Theo didn’t really have a frame of reference for how lawyers were supposed to behave. Thankfully she’d never needed one before this.

  ‘Actually, I spoke to David last night. He said you look like a ghost,’ Mary said. ‘Have you even been outside lately? And there’s probably about as much to you as a ghost as well. Is this where Beth gets the not-eating thing from? You’re as bad as she is.’

  ‘What do you mean, the not-eating thing? Hasn’t Beth been eating?’

  ‘Well . . . Not a lot, no, but maybe she’s just not eating at our house.’

  ‘Mary. Does she look like she’s been eating somewhere else?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Theo. I’m trying, I really am.’

  ‘Oh, Mary. I know.’ Theo decided not to tell Mary about the brick. She changed the subject.

  ‘I don’t think David is very optimistic about my case.’

  Mary paused. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Just that it was complicated and I should prepare myself for either outcome.’

  ‘Either outcome? What does that mean?’ Mary sounded shrill.

  Theo reached out and laid the flat of her hand against the brick. ‘Jail, is what it means, I think. He means that one possibility is being charged with the abduction of Beth and sentenced to a term in jail. The other outcome is not going to jail.’ And getting Beth back, or not. But she couldn’t even say that out loud.

  ‘Of course you won’t go to jail.’

  Theo didn’t answer. In the background, she heard children’s voices, getting louder.

  ‘I should let you go,’ she said to Mary.

  Mary sighed. ‘I’ll tell Beth you called.’

  When Oliver said that he was ready to return to Australia, Theo wasn’t surprised. The Egg and Spoon was no longer adequate for the scale of his vision, he said. Theo agreed. He had transcended the quaint little pub.

  Thinking back, she couldn’t remember who suggested that Theo should ask her parents for money to fund the restaurant. Perhaps Tania had. It just seemed like it was an idea that was raised somehow, by everyone, or no one. At first Oliver had said he didn’t want her to. He’d never even met her parents, and he couldn’t take their money.

  ‘But I could,’ Theo said. ‘I could, for us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I could open it with you. As a partner. Your investor.’

  ‘Your sugar mama.’ Tania grinned.

  ‘You’d do that?’ Oliver frowned, but his mouth twitched.

  Theo had been genuinely surprised by the question. ‘Oliver! Of course I would.’

  Later, Theo wondered if he’d envisaged her coming with him to Australia before she suggested their partnership. She wondered if he’d wanted her to. But she didn’t think of it then, or didn’t let herself think of it. They’d never had that conversation before she suggested the partnership.

  Already, Theo couldn’t imagine being without Oliver. She thought of herself as part-muse, part-agent, part-lover and part-cheerleader to him. Each of those things made her more than she was before him. He loved her too, she believed. She felt it in the way he looked at her, the fondness she saw when his eyes settled on her, like the point of a compass swinging back to north. It was different to how she loved him, though. He seemed to be able to control it, like water flowing from a tap that he could adjust at will. He didn’t come to her bed every night. Sometimes he went out and she didn’t know where he was. He always knew where she was, everyone did, she was a creature of habit. And, despite herself, she was always there. Right where he left her.

  Loving him like a tap that couldn’t be turned off.

  Theo went home to ask her parents for the money. Her father was out, so she and her mother sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea.

  ‘Did you tell Father I was coming?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘Yes,’ her mother said. She frowned into her teacup, like something in it disappointed her. Theo felt so many different and competing things in that kitchen that she’d eaten a third of a packet of digestives before the tea had even brewed.

  ‘There’s still time to go back to university. I could write to the dean and tell him you made a grievous error, but that you no longer want to throw your life away.’ Her mother spoke to Theo as though she was a little girl who had been disobedient.

  ‘Why would the dean care what I do with my life?’

  ‘He’s a friend of your father’s. He will care if we tell him to care.’ Her mother lifted her teacup to her lips and blew.

  ‘Mother. Did you have to ask him to let me into that course?’ Theo paused, a biscuit halfway to her mouth.

  ‘Of course we did. And you would be a teacher by now if you’d stuck it out.’ Her mother reached over and plucked the biscuit from between Theo’s fingers, setting it down on her saucer. They gave her the money, as Theo had known they would. Partly out of guilt for not loving her more, partly out of surprise that she had asked. Partly because they probably did love her, in their way.

  Greta came to the airport to say goodbye, heavily pregnant and highly emotional. She and Tania clutched each other and sobbed as Theo and Oliver waved from the other side of the glass. Theo cried a little, but it was soon replaced by jangled and terrifying flying nerves. A kindly older woman with a stole around her shoulders, Theo suspected it was actual fox fur, handed Theo half a Valium when she noticed Theo’s white knuckles on the armrest.

  Theo took it and woke one hour before the plane landed for their stopover in Hong Kong; enough time to drink and then vomit up a glass of white wine before passing out again. Oliver thought it was hilarious. The woman in the fox-fur stole snored and dribbled from the corner of her mouth, her hands folded in her lap. Oliver thought that was hilarious, too. They slept in a hotel at the airport in Hong Kong for a few hours and then Theo and her gracious friend repeated the exact same procedure.

  The first few months in Melbourne were hard. Theo felt like it was her first day of school all over again. Everyone rushed about with purpose while she fumbled with everything, and she was acutely aware of any differences in her haircut and clothes and speech. It was summer and the heat almost knocked her to her knees. There were crickets at night, and she couldn’t sleep for the noise of them, not
for days, it felt like. The sun was so bright, and the people were bright too, glistening with sweat. Everyone had a sheen on them and soon Theo realised that the dampness in the small of her back and the prickle of moisture at her hairline would not go away. She was flushed red all the time, people made jokes about her ‘Irish complexion’ and at first Theo told them she was actually English but then she realised nobody cared. It was about the joke, it was almost always about the joke.

  Even strangers did it, there was a gentle ribbing familiarity in the way everyone spoke to each other. When she realised that they were not in fact all friends or neighbours, and some of these people insulting each other good-naturedly had never met before in their lives, Theo decided it was like a sort of Stockholm syndrome. They were all marooned here on this island that must, surely, be only mere kilometres from the surface of the sun. The conditions were so ridiculous, the environment so inhospitable, that all they could do was laugh and joke in that unhinged, exhausted sort of way.

  Oliver didn’t really understand how she felt, but of course Oliver wouldn’t. Oliver never seemed to feel out of place wherever he was. He didn’t know how to help Theo feel welcome in Australia, although he tried. She had to give him that. He did try, at first.

  ‘I don’t understand how anything works!’ Theo had cried to him at the end of their first week, upending her bag of pamphlets and tickets and maps onto the table of the flat they had sublet from someone in St Kilda.

  Oliver picked up one of the pamphlets and tried not to laugh. ‘Theo, this is about the zoo. Do you want to go to the zoo?’

  ‘Not especially, but I might one day! And I want to know where it is and how to get there, and what it costs to get in if I do decide I want to go.’

  ‘Eighteen dollars, it says.’

  ‘Eighteen dollars! That’s expensive, isn’t it? What’s that in pounds? Anyway, it’s far too much to pay to go and stare at some poor animals in cages. They shouldn’t be in cages anyway.’ Theo started to cry, and Oliver pulled her onto his lap and let her snuffle into his chest.

  ‘It’s not expensive. I’ll take you to the zoo. I’ll take you, and we’ll steal the keys from the zookeeper and open all the cages and set the animals free, would you like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We will liberate them. We will be heroes. And then we will run for our lives so they don’t eat us.’

  ‘Okay.’

  It was the accumulation of lots of small things that befuddled her. How did you know when to get off the tram, how did you pay for electricity, what hours were supermarkets open, what was the common sentiment about this or that? In England, Theo knew what people thought about things, in general. She understood the tide of public opinion, where most people sat on their collective moral continuum. She didn’t always agree with it, but she knew what it was. This particular problem was one she couldn’t even describe, for instance the panic she had felt at witnessing a man drag a screaming child by the wrist into a car, then shove him in, lock the door and stand outside having a cigarette while the whole carpark listened to the little boy hammering at the window. Was that okay? Was that something she should have said or done anything about? Did people intervene here? Or did they even think it was wrong, what she had seen?

  Of course this passed and Theo became more and more familiar with the status quo in Australia. She learnt when people were joking (usually), what were good topics of conversation at barbecues (real estate, the weather), and she learnt that religion, a mainstay of her own childhood and that of just about everyone she knew, didn’t feature strongly, at least not amongst the people Oliver introduced her to. When she mentioned it, he laughed. ‘We’re a godless bunch,’ he said. ‘Heathens, the lot of us!’

  Eventually Theo let go of some of the things she had been holding out for. She let go of hearing accents that sounded like her own. She let go of finding her favourite brands in the supermarket. She let go of trying to make people understand her frame of reference, the music and television and rhythms of her English childhood. It helped, to no longer ask for impossible things. Still, sometimes she missed England in a way that she would not have thought likely before she left it. A few months after their arrival, Greta posted her a videotape of her littlest one walking, and the light was so soft and the colours so right, and in the background was the nightly news, the introduction so achingly familiar that Theo cried and cried when she heard it.

  But there were good things about Australia, and Australia was Oliver’s country, so she was determined to love it, for him. There was the ocean, for starters. The ocean, she loved. But not without caution. Over the years swimming had morphed and fluctuated for Theo. It could be a meditation, a soothing ritual, a cleanse, a balm and a flirtation. She swam when she was happy and when she was sad, tired, overwrought, nervous and peaceful. She thought she knew water and water knew her. But in the ocean, Theo had had to renegotiate their relationship. The ocean here was a different creature to the one she was used to from the lap pools and town baths and gentle seasides of England. It was a roaring beast with currents in its belly, a beast that could pick her up and throw her to the floor on a whim. It felt like her opponent at first, unlike the pool which had felt like a welcoming host with arms open wide. It seemed like every week there were stories of people drowning or boats capsizing. Some days the beach was even closed to stop people going in. Theo took the train to Torquay or Anglesea at least once every few weeks, and ventured out a little further each time she went in. She loved it, but on several occasions she found herself with burning lungs from the saltwater and a battered body from being swept up against rocks or pressed into the ocean floor. She took these as warning signs from the ocean to her – stay vigilant and we’ll get along fine.

  Theo learnt to read the water conditions, standing on the headland with the surfers at five in the morning, all of them bathed in luminescent peachy pink light of the rising sun, all of them with eyes trained on the waves. They calibrated themselves to the ocean’s rhythms each day, and paid their respects before entering it. It was a new kind of worship for Theo. In Australia she fell in love with the sea. In time the sea made her fall in love with Australia.

  Oliver was working in the city’s best restaurants, planning, dreaming and scouting for locations for his own. When he came home, he cooked and Theo tasted his food, they discussed it, he modified it and they discussed it again. She loved the way he watched her when he put a plate of food in front of her. When Theo lifted a forkful of food to her mouth, Oliver’s lips would part, too, and his eyes would widen while he waited for her to nod or frown. Together, they drew up a shortlist for the first menu at their restaurant. They stuck it on the fridge, and Theo drew a big heart at the top. This was their heart’s work. The rest of the time, Theo waitressed, swam at the aquatic centre when she couldn’t make the trip to the beach, ate tropical fruit and wrote letters to Greta. It was a test for them, moving over here together, she wrote, but Theo believed they had made the right decision.

  Oliver saw a consultant to draw up a five-year business plan for the restaurant. He came home and showed Theo the finished product with the pride of a child presenting their glitter- and glue-smothered collage to their parent after kindergarten.

  ‘Impressive,’ she said, bored silly by the showy graphs and columns of figures.

  ‘It is, isn’t it? I think it’s good to have an idea of this sort of thing, be future-oriented.’

  ‘Future-oriented?’

  ‘That’s what the consultant said. Success comes from planning.’

  ‘And executing, I should think.’ Catchphrases like ‘be future-oriented’ irritated Theo immensely.

  ‘Anyway, speaking of the future,’ Oliver began, and Theo leapt at it.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking we should talk about that as well.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Biological clock ticking, and so on!’

  Oliver looked perplexed.

  Theo considered him. ‘Wh
at were you going to say?’

  ‘Loan repayments. A schedule, for the loan from your parents. I want to pay it off as soon as I can.’

  ‘Oh, that. Nobody’s worried about that, Oliver.’

  ‘I am. I don’t like being in debt.’

  ‘But it’s just to me. My family.’ Theo hoped she didn’t sound wounded. She didn’t like him feeling indebted, like he owed her anything.

  ‘Still.’ Oliver got up and went into the adjoining kitchen, and called to her from there. ‘What were you going to say?’

  Theo laughed, trying to lighten the mood a bit. ‘Well, you know. We should discuss whether or not we want children, when we would have them, that sort of thing. Where does that go in the five-year plan?’

  Oliver stuck his head around the doorway and scratched his chin. ‘Well, obviously it isn’t something we want for a long time, is it. We’ll be so busy when the restaurant’s up and running.’

  ‘That’s true. But, you know, I think it’s probably one of those things that you never feel like it’s the perfect time for. Everyone is nervous about what they’ll be like as parents.’

  ‘Huh. Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘Oliver! Of course I am. You’ll be a wonderful father.’

  He didn’t look convinced, but he smiled at Theo in a way she couldn’t quite decipher.

  ‘If that’s what you want, Theo.’ He retreated back into the kitchen.

  Poor Oliver, Theo wrote to Greta, he just hadn’t had very good role models. His parents were more like grandparents. But they didn’t have to be like that. They could travel, take the kids all over the world. They had money, thanks to her parents, and Oliver had skills – they didn’t have to live some dreary suburban existence if they didn’t want to. Probably, when he thought about having children, Oliver thought about what he had worked so hard to get away from. That was why he wasn’t very enthusiastic. But people always said that you changed once you had your own. That when you looked into their eyes everything else just fell away. She pictured Oliver, bare-chested, holding their baby, singing softly. It would bring out the tender side of him, she believed. Babies had a way of doing that. Her prescription for the contraceptive pill ran out and Theo didn’t get another one.