Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  In her letters back Greta urged Theo not to rush anything. Now that she was in Australia she might meet one of the young chaps from Home and Away and be asked to marry him instead. She’d want to be available if that time came! Beneath the jokes Theo sensed genuine caution; for some reason Greta wasn’t convinced about Oliver, or possibly the pairing of him with her baby sister Theo. She was probably jealous, Theo thought, and so unfamiliar with the sensation she couldn’t even recognise it. People were not usually jealous of Theo.

  In the meantime, Theo and Oliver were in preparation mode. There was so much to see, so much to do. They saw his friends sometimes, but Oliver kept different hours to most of them. Theo didn’t care. She was happy just to be with him. Happy to think about all that lay ahead of them, happy to have so much to anticipate. She often thought about those girls in the change room at the Old Baths in Manchester, her inadvertent liberators. So much had been set in motion that day. It was funny to think they had no idea what they had done for her, just by being there. One day she would do the same for someone else, Theo thought. She would be the person who opened a door that someone else had never even noticed was there.

  chapter twenty-two

  After she spoke with Alice, Beth walked back to Mary’s house but didn’t go inside. It had rained while she’d been at the lawyer’s offices and the garden was misted with water, the grass slick under her feet. Skirting the edges of the backyard and hoping none of the kids spotted her, Beth made her way to the little rusty shed that was collapsing under the weight of vines. Inside, she found an old men’s bike, exactly as she’d hoped. Beth grabbed a T-shirt from the clothes line under the awning and swapped the green lacy top for that. She pulled her hair out of its bun, wiped the makeup from her face with a tissue and set off again.

  She didn’t bother with a helmet and there was no bell on the bike, so Beth just veered around people if she wanted to pass them. She didn’t stop at lights, just dodged the traffic. When she got to Verity Beach, the next town over, Beth slowed down. At Verity, two headlands curved around the belly of the bay like a rib cage, making the water gentle and calm. Theo always scoffed and said it was just like a giant lake really. Serious swimmers, like her and the surfers, had to go around the point to Hoffman Rocks for the waves. Beth passed them, spread out across the path as though they owned the whole place, wetsuits peeled down to their waists. They reminded her of caterpillars emerging from cocoons. One of them whistled as she passed. Beth gave him the finger. The bike path along the beach was quite pretty, if she’d been in the mood for prettiness, but all Beth noticed were the circles of seagulls squawking and dipping in the sky like they were closing in on her, and the scruffy paperbark trees shedding scraps everywhere like shreds of ragged skin.

  When she got to the Verity Beach Library, Beth leant the bike against the wall outside and headed straight inside to the bank of computers down the back. This was where she came to when she wanted to use the library without Theo hovering. Some of the staff here might have known Theo from the Cardmoor Library, but, as far as Beth knew, they didn’t know who she was, or if they did they didn’t let on. It was a bit like church. Hallowed halls, quiet as the grave.

  Beth helped herself to some free coffee at the urn in the reading room. Her hand hovered over the basket of biscuits. She imagined biting into one of the biscuits, imagined the sweet powder of a Scotch Finger on her tongue, the crunch of her teeth on it. Chalk, she told herself, thinking of the fat fingers of sidewalk chalk you could buy in little buckets at the $2 shop. Eating one of those biscuits would be just like eating one of those pieces of chalk. It would not make her feel better, but worse, the chalk dust would choke her. Her stomach ached, empty and wanting, but Beth turned away with her black coffee.

  At her computer Beth typed Alice Hopkins-Bell into the search bar and watched the results fill the screen. She kept replaying things her birth mother had said, her tone of voice, the stretch of her throat. Alice, with her sweep of blonde hair and her plaintive sighs, had called her Elizabeth. Nobody else called her that. Beth wasn’t sure what she was looking for in this search. Just . . . something more.

  Images appeared on the screen, one of them several times. Beth clicked on that one. It was a large painting in what looked like oils – thick layers on the canvas. The background was greenish black, a pond with lily pads floating on the surface. The main focus of the picture was a white goose, staring out at the viewer. It had one wing extended. Tucked into the crook of the other was a hammer, claw-edged with a wooden handle. The goose looked unperturbed, its golden eyes calm. It could almost have been a photo. The next pictures looked like media ones, the sort that were published in the ‘Who’s Who’ or ‘Out and About’ sections of the newspapers. Alice posed in front of various banners, backdrops with logos and brands plastered all over them. She pressed cheeks with other women who had equally striking faces, laughed with her head thrown back, linked arms with tall men with goatees and held the stem of a champagne flute between her fingers. Sometimes her hair was in a coronet, but usually that flat gold curtain. She wore black, or deep greys and bronze sort of colours, metal tones that made Beth think of the periodic table of elements: copper, lead and chromium, the silver spill of mercury.

  She clicked on Alice’s website and found the ‘About’ section.

  Alice Hopkins-Bell is an artist who works in a variety of media, although she is most widely known for her paintings, which ‘compel the viewer to examine themselves through the lens of their own response to her arresting, often surreal subject matter’ (Sydney Review of Arts). Alice is an alumnus of the ‘Brighton school’, the celebrated group of artists who travelled around America in a convoy in the early 2000s, including fellow Australians Celia Watson and Gregory Pith. Alice describes her work as exploring the intersection of utility and form, and she cites her influences as the native landscapes of America’s Midwest and the primitive origins of human relationships.

  The website went on to detail various awards that Alice had been nominated for or received, as well as residencies, exhibitions and reviews. There wasn’t a scrap of personal information on it. So Beth still didn’t know whether Alice was married, whether she had other children. She didn’t know if she was in contact with Beth’s father. Beth might as well not have even spoken to Alice, or come here to research her, for all the good it had done. She still had nothing. She pushed her chair back with a loud screech. From the armchairs in the reference section nearby, people peered at her over the tops of their newspapers with raised eyebrows. Beth glared back.

  She had been so nervous about this morning, but Alice hadn’t even been there. Melbourne was just hours away. Was meeting your own daughter not momentous enough to get in the car for? And then the conversation they’d had, with Alexander lurking in the background, had been so strange and stilted. They hadn’t been able to discuss what had happened, or what would happen, or why. But, Beth thought, the thing that had been missing from their conversation was any acknowledgement of the gravity of them having the conversation at all. Alice could have been talking to anyone about anything. Beth’s eyes stung as she remembered what she had thought about, floating in the sea. Poor Alice, pining for her baby girl. Beth had felt so sorry for her, so furious at Theo for not letting her mother be with her daughter, for robbing them both of that. But this morning’s conversation made her wonder: had Alice actually felt robbed?

  She had come looking for Beth, though, hadn’t she? And she had gone to the police; people didn’t do that unless they felt a crime had occurred. But if Theo had abducted Beth, then why hadn’t she been arrested or charged when it had happened? Why was all of this only happening now? And exactly how long had Alice been in America for?

  Beth pushed her chair back and walked out of the library, into the windy, dull afternoon. It was beginning to rain again and storm clouds hung heavy over the cliffs, promising more. Beth jolted the kickstand so roughly that the bike fell over, and then she couldn’t manage to wrestle it upright
again for ages because the strap of her bag had caught on the chain. She knelt in the wet grass to try to work it free, and strands of hair whipped across her face. Her eyes began to fill and she shook her head. She gave the strap an almighty wrench and fell backwards, the broken ends of it in each hand. She could feel the moisture soaking through the seat of her jeans, and a stinging throb on the heels of her hands. Just get up, Beth told herself, just get up, pick up the bike and go.

  ‘Are you okay?’ a woman walking her dog called out to her from the path.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Beth called back, without looking at her. She busied herself tying the broken ends of the bag strap together again. From the corner of her eye she saw the woman hesitate and then keep walking. Beth breathed out through her nose. It was just as well she had left. If that woman was as kind to her as her voice suggested she might be, Beth wouldn’t be able to keep her tears at bay. When they came they might not stop, and there would be no need for the rain then. If Beth didn’t drown in all her own water, then she would float away upon it, carried out to the chop and curl of the sea.

  chapter twenty-three

  When she wasn’t cleaning, Theo lay in Beth’s bed. Wrapped in a blanket and wearing Beth’s old T-shirt, Theo went over and over those few moments at the top of the cliff when she’d seen Alice.

  She would begin with the moment she felt that gaze, and she would watch herself in her mind’s eye, scornful of that woman, the slow heaviness of her. Why did she not move faster? Why didn’t she pretend not to recognise Alice, or not to see her? Theo watched, as though she didn’t know what came next, as though she could go back and stop herself, walk backwards down the hill, stay at work, shelve books. She played with that alternative, taunted herself with it, what it would have been like if she had done something differently. She could have gotten a head start on the next day’s work, it wouldn’t have taken long. Twenty minutes, probably. Ten, even. The pleasing tedium of an uncomplicated but essential task, the quiet satisfaction of knowing you were doing something right. She hadn’t valued it then. It was monotonous, a chore.

  Examining the memory, Theo realised that she had felt something, a prickle of warning, something unwelcome tapping on the door to her mind, as she turned towards the tall, still woman on the other side of the crowd. In that moment there was still the possibility that it was nothing, that the woman staring at her was a stranger, or just someone with an overdue book. Someone she would not remember after they had gone their separate ways.

  Finally, she sat a while in that third moment, in the instant before she met the woman’s eyes, and tried to remember everything about it, how it felt when she still had everything. If she had known that completing a forty-five-degree turn would set in motion the end of her life as she knew it, what would Theo have done?

  Lying in the bath, staring at the beautifully clean ceiling, Theo set herself challenges. What did Beth wear to her fourth birthday party? What was the name of her best friend in grade five? What was her favourite movie when she was thirteen? Sometimes Theo thought of scenarios, tried to imagine how Beth would behave. She imagined rude customers at the restaurant, how Beth would hold her chin a little higher and press her lips together when they spoke. She imagined Beth at university, walking across the lawn in the bright sun, smiling, trying to look detached and disinterested, but with her silver donkey trotting across her fingertips like a poker player’s tell. When she got out of the bath, Theo rinsed away the suds, watching them swirl around before going down the drain. Still, a tide mark clung to the enamel of the tub. Theo got out the bleach. That passed the rest of the morning.

  On a Sunday morning about six months after their arrival in Melbourne, Theo had woken Oliver to come to the markets with her. She had been up since dawn, had already been for a swim, and wanted to be out in the world with the man she loved. He was sleepy, but smiled at her enthusiasm and got out of bed. Walking around the stalls, Theo wanted to buy everything. She felt excited, like a child before her birthday; she felt in love, with Oliver, with Australia, with possibility, with the blue sky flung out above them like a billowing bedsheet. She was hot in her jeans, so Oliver bought her a dress, green cotton and so soft she could hardly feel it against her skin.

  In the change room Theo looked at herself in the mirror and saw that something was different. She had put on weight, but only in her breasts and stomach. Everything else was the same. She tried to remember when she had last had her period, and realised it had been some time ago. Theo squeezed her eyes shut and laid her hands on her stomach. Possibility, indeed. She decided, if she could contain it, that she wouldn’t tell Oliver until she had done a pregnancy test. It could be a surprise. She could show him the test and her ripe stomach at the same time. She imagined he would lay his face against the swell of her belly, kiss it and sing to it, and cry with happiness. Of course he had said that now wasn’t the time, but the universe was clearly telling them otherwise.

  For the rest of the morning she was in a fog, smiling and floating like a sleepwalker in her green dress. They ate mangoes and ice-cream for lunch, then Oliver left to go to work. Theo caught the tram to the local shopping centre to go to the chemist. She saw the way people looked at her in her green dress, she thought she must already be glowing. She felt like she was glowing. She felt lit from within. She smiled at all the children she passed, at the babies and the mothers of the babies.

  In the shopping centre toilets, she pulled her knickers down to pee on the stick of the pregnancy test. Red splotches of blood bloomed on the gusset, and she twisted her dress and saw it had spotted the fabric there too. When she washed her hands under the fluorescent lights, she looked at her face and saw that actually she was not glowing. Actually she was as white as a ghost. A cramp twisted her midsection with such force that she had to crouch on the floor until it passed. A shopping centre cleaner found her like that and helped her hobble out to the tram stop, her dress knotted to cover the stains. That was Theo’s first miscarriage.

  Oliver came home that night, full of excitement. He told her he had finally found the perfect venue for the restaurant. He wanted to take Theo there immediately to see it, but she shook her head.

  ‘We can get a taxi, we’ll be there in fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Come on, Theo.’ He was peevish, irritated, then he noticed the hot water bottle she clutched and the empty blister pack of painkillers on the floor next to the couch. ‘Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t know. When you feel better, we’ll celebrate! It’s actually happening, Theo. My God. I’m actually going to open my own restaurant.’

  He couldn’t stand still; he paced on the rug and all the movement made Theo feel nauseous again. He thought she had her period. She closed her eyes.

  ‘I’ll let you rest,’ Oliver said.

  Theo heard him on the phone a few moments later, asking to meet the estate agent of the premises. He brought the lease agreement home for Theo to co-sign that same night.

  At first Theo didn’t tell Oliver about the miscarriage because she didn’t want to rain on his parade. He was so happy, so focused. It would be different if they had known she was pregnant earlier, she told herself. If it had been more than a few short hours – she had no right to be upset at all, really. It would have been terrible timing, with the restaurant opening so soon. There was so much to do, planning menus, designing the fit-out, hiring staff, ordering food and chairs and napkins and silverware. It was just as well the pregnancy hadn’t worked out, Theo told herself. This way she could put her energy into the restaurant and Oliver, be there for him rather than preoccupied with herself at such an important time. And she did put her energy into those things. She threw herself into it all with as much vigour and enthusiasm as Oliver himself. For the next six months they thought and talked about little else; they planned and planned. They saw some of those plans come to fruition and others fail; they worked themselves and everybody around them into the ground. They put in such long hours, Theo was exhausted, but she had never seen Oliver so energised. He
was loving every second of it.

  There never seemed to be the right moment in all of that hubbub to take Oliver aside and say, ‘By the way, I was pregnant with our child, but now I’m not.’

  Because that was the point, wasn’t it? She wasn’t pregnant. They weren’t having a baby. Why would anyone care what might have been, when what was happening right now was so exciting? She thought of her mother, what she would say when the children were little.

  ‘I’m going to be famous,’ one or another of them would say. Or, ‘I’m going to be the best first-division netballer’ or ‘the youngest chess champion in the county’.

  ‘Don’t tell me what you’re going to do,’ their mother would say. ‘Tell me when you’ve done it.’

  Theo put it aside. When she got her next period she dealt with it as minimally as possible. She avoided mirrors and did not look along her own length in the bath. With each day that passed she found herself less able to share it, this thing that had happened in her body, even if she’d wanted to. She couldn’t quite have said why. But it was something akin to a child wetting her bed and hiding the soaked sheets from her parents.