‘What am I supposed to do while you’re out enjoying yourself then?’ Theo tried not to sound like she was whingeing, but didn’t quite get the tone right.
‘I don’t know, Theo, whatever you want. But isn’t that wonderful? You can do whatever you want with your time. That’s what all this is for. So we can be free. Gone are those twelve-hour shifts. You won’t miss those, will you?’
‘No.’ That was a lie. She would miss them. She would miss the company, the work and the rush. She would miss feeling so useful, so necessary, even. She would miss the other staff. She would miss seeing people delighting in the food that Oliver made. And she would miss Oliver – the chef, not the businessman – just one of the team, laughing and sweating and singing and loving it, loving the pressure, the results, the compliments and satisfaction. Loving her there with him. That was what Theo would miss.
chapter twenty-six
Dragging her bike behind her, Beth tagged along with the girls, expecting to go to one of their houses. But they just headed further into the caravan park, chatting and laughing. They got to a caravan set at right angles to its neighbour, with garden beds dug out in front of each, pansies planted along them in colourful clumps.
‘Just a sec,’ Sabre said, over her shoulder. Mia and Caitlin wandered over to a sweeping silvery gum, the trunk covered with etchings of names and declarations of love.
Sabre trotted up the steps to the caravan and pulled some keys from her bag. She slipped her sandals off, leaving them on the step before she went in. She lives there, Beth thought with surprise. She was ashamed at the pity that came with that thought. Sabre returned a few moments later in a different dress.
‘Will this do?’ she called out from the steps.
‘Gorgeous,’ Caitlin said. Mia wolf-whistled and grinned, leaning against the tree.
Beth gave her a thumbs-up and then felt stupid, but Sabre just smiled. She locked the door behind her and slipped her shoes back on. On her way back over to them, she plucked a few dead flowers from amongst the pansies and threw them in the wheelie bin. Beth noticed how tidy the area was around those two caravans. The next few slumped, rusted and faded, in plots of overgrown grass. Flies hovered in a blur around something discarded in a paper bag on the path and empty beer cans gathered, floating on the scummy rainwater in the gutters.
The girls continued on until they got to what must have been the back row of caravans, where the park trailed off into scrub. It was beginning to get dark and the floodlights over the path flickered on. A group of people sat in plastic garden chairs out the front of a caravan that had smaller caravans on either side. The caravans were all painted with a green stripe like a belt around their waists. There was loud music playing and everyone was drinking beers out of squat brown bottles pulled from an esky at their feet. Everything was still sodden, the grass marshy and squelching under their feet.
‘Bethie!’ Caleb spotted her. He was shirtless and sweating, and his eyes were bright and bloodshot, but he looked happy to see Beth. He pressed a drink into her hand and kissed her on the neck. ‘You’re here.’
‘I’m here.’ Beth smiled at him. He made her feel like there was nobody else he would rather see. Just as Sabre hadn’t seemed surprised to see her in the toilet block, Caleb didn’t seem surprised to see her here. Their reactions made Beth feel good, as though she could just move seamlessly into all these different spaces, different places, shapeshifting. Maybe she was exactly where she should be. Maybe she had become a person who belonged here, or she could become one, soon.
A whooping and whistling chorus went up as someone pulled up on the road in a purple Valiant. A low techno throb came from the speakers. Caleb lit a joint and passed it to her. Beth held it for a moment, unsure what to do. Sabre jokingly threw herself across the hood of the car, reclining like a pin-up model, and everyone cheered.
‘Me, me.’ Caitlin came up beside Beth and puckered her lips. Beth slipped the joint between them and Caitlin drew deeply on it, throwing her head back as she exhaled.
‘Ahhhhhhh,’ she murmured, and passed it to Mia. Mia took her turn.
‘Ahhhhhhh,’ she repeated, and they both burst into giggles. Caitlin tied Beth’s shirt up in a knot, just beneath the line of her bra.
‘That’s better,’ she said, and winked. Long feather earrings swept her bare shoulders. Beth felt strange with her stomach exposed, but good. The song changed and Caitlin shimmied away, her arms up in the air and her crochet dress swinging. Beth slipped her hand into Caleb’s. She didn’t know anyone else here, but they all smiled or nodded at her, like it didn’t matter. Caleb slid an arm around her waist, pulling her into him. She felt his hand travel over her bare back and drop to the waistband of her shorts.
‘Let’s find you a drink,’ Caleb said. They smiled at each other.
Yes, Beth thought. Alcohol would be fine. Alcohol wasn’t heavy, in fact many alcohols had a low molecular weight and could easily dissolve in water. Alcohol was clean, it wouldn’t make her feel dirty – sometimes it was even used as an antiseptic or to sterilise things. Maybe a little antiseptic might even help cure the pain of her empty hollow stomach, and her empty hollow heart. Beth had been drunk before and hadn’t liked it, but that was the old Beth. She hadn’t liked feeling out of control then, out of her own body and mind. Tonight, that was all she wanted.
As the night went on, Beth felt herself get looser. She liked how warm and slow the alcohol made her feel, how porous; nothing could hurt you if you were made of nothing much at all. She spoke to various people throughout the night, and they were all friendly. Nobody asked her who she was or why she was here. They all just were. At one point, Beth remembered Mary’s dinnertime curfew and felt guilty, but someone pressed another drink into her hand and she soon forgot.
Caleb took Beth over to a lawn chair in the darkness under the trees near the fence and kissed her until her lips felt bruised. He undid the knot in her shirt to slip his hand under, and Beth imagined tracks across her body where his hands travelled, the fingerprints you would see on her skin under ultra-violet light. She liked the feeling of being marked by Caleb; it was like being claimed.
Later, back at the party, Caitlin and Sabre pulled Beth up to dance with them. They swung their hair and themselves around, someone grabbed Beth’s hands and spun her in circles and they giggled like little girls. They linked arms and walked back to the chairs. They passed cigarettes and vodka between them, and Caleb changed the music. Something psychedelic and frenetic. Nobody seemed to mind. Nobody seemed to mind anything much. Beth thought of all the nights she hadn’t been here. She thought of Alice and her sheet of golden hair, and Erin in her room at Mary’s, and it was like remembering a dream, or something that had happened a long time ago. Everyone kept talking about the bonfire tomorrow night. Beth smiled, like she knew all about it. Definitely, she agreed. The bonfire would be amazing.
Eventually they all ended up down on the beach, sitting in the dark with blankets and bottles and the burning tips of cigarettes shining through the dark like little beacons in their fingers. Someone played guitar and Sabre danced on the sand in front of them, looping her body around like she was being pulled here and there by invisible hands. She wore a white cheesecloth dress, her arms and shoulders brown against the light fabric. Beth watched Caleb watching Sabre dancing, his eyes half closed. Sabre danced like she knew he was watching, Beth thought, but the thought didn’t bother her, she only felt pleased that she could see it. She felt serene and wise, like she knew something the others didn’t. After the guitar stopped, Sabre turned around so she was facing away from them and pulled her dress up over her head. She had on only bikini bottoms on underneath. Caleb inhaled, just loud enough for Beth to hear.
‘Who’s coming in?’ Sabre shouted, and started to walk down to the water.
Mia and a few other girls got up, stripped down to their underwear and followed her, holding hands and giggling. Caitlin held her hand out to Beth. She took it and stood up.
&nbs
p; ‘It’ll be cold, Beth,’ said Caleb.
Beth shrugged. She wouldn’t feel it. She heard Theo’s voice in her head. ‘The water gives and the water takes away.’ Beth tasted dirt. Caitlin let go of Beth’s hand, and headed to the shore.
Theo swam in the sea every day, but she would never go in at night. Beth supposed the ocean would seem frightening to someone when they first came to Australia, all the warning signs and lifeguards and flags on the beach to show you where you were least likely to drown if you went in. The sea had even swallowed Australia’s prime minister once. He went in for a dip and didn’t ever come out.
Theo had said, ‘When the winds get to forty knots or more, nobody is strong enough.’ However many years she had been in Australia, Theo never acclimatised to the point that she swam without thinking carefully about it first. She watched the weather like a bride. Beth had teased her about being scared. Theo just said, ‘A little bit of fear is smart. It’s what keeps you alive.’
Beth couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know how to swim. Maybe there wasn’t one. In biology they had learnt about the bradycardic response, when you put an infant in water and they instinctively moved their arms and legs as though swimming. They opened their eyes, held their breath, and their heart rates slowed to conserve oxygen. At every fancy-dress party throughout her school years, Beth had dressed as a mermaid.
She watched the smoke from Caleb’s cigarette eddying around his bent head. She knew he didn’t like the water. He’d told her his father used to dunk his head in a bucket of water when he misbehaved. At first she’d thought he just meant a dip. That would have been awful enough. But it wasn’t just a dip. His father held his head under water until Caleb’s legs gave out beneath him.
‘Want some more?’ Caleb tapped Beth on her thigh with the neck of a bottle. Beth could hear the other girls in the water and see occasional glimpses of them, illuminated in a shaft of moonlight, amphibious-looking in the silver glow. Beth sat down next to Caleb again. The moment had passed and she’d lost her nerve.
On the way down to the beach, Beth had felt eyes on her. Up ahead a little she’d seen the man who had been gutting fish outside his caravan the first time she had come to the park. He’d had the same black toolbox at his feet, and he had nudged it shut with his foot when he saw them. Again he’d looked directly at Beth as they’d neared. Instead of looking away, she’d looked right back. He’d pursed his lips and spat a gob of phlegm on the ground, still without taking his eyes off her. She hadn’t blinked. They’d passed right in front of him and Beth had made sure to walk normally. Adaptation, that’s what this was. She was an organism changing to better fit in her environment. Like a thicker coat for warmth or a longer neck to reach fruit on high branches, animals did what was necessary to survive.
She was learning how to not feel a thing.
chapter twenty-seven
That night, Theo dreamt that the woman from the lookout came to see her. She sat at the end of Theo’s bed.
‘How are you feeling?’ Theo asked politely. Even in her dream she worried about whether she was saying the right thing. The woman shrugged, her hands outspread. Theo waited. She decided the woman had a message from her babies, the ones she miscarried. She must have seen them. Maybe this woman had babies there too. Maybe they all lay together on a marshmallow puff of cloud, cooing and kicking their tiny feet up in the air.
‘What have you got to tell me?’ Theo asked the woman. ‘Are you my guardian angel?’
The woman smiled, then stood up, her hands branched out in the small of her back as though it ached. She turned to face Theo and then raised her leg, kicking her orthopaedically shod toe into Theo’s face, cracking her jaw. Theo’s head snapped to one side, her teeth slit through her tongue and she was flung backwards against the wall, blood arcing out of her mouth like water spouting from the blowhole of a whale.
Theo woke, her body clenched with pain, and her hand went to her face. But the pain wasn’t there. It was just in her hips. Later, she hobbled outside to check the letterbox, hoping the movement would help. She opened it and then took a step backwards, covering her mouth and nose with her hand. Shit. There was actual shit in her letterbox. Dog shit, she presumed. On the footpath outside the gate, her mail had been strewn across the ground, and yellow liquid decorated the white envelopes. Someone had urinated on it. Theo cleaned it all up before anyone saw it. This wasn’t Beth, she thought, as she stuffed the garbage bag into her bin. Beth wasn’t this vulgar, she refused to even clean out the cat’s litter tray. This was something else, someone else. Odd that this felt more violent than the brick through the door, Theo thought. She stripped off her clothes at the back door and headed for the shower. She was almost there when she reconsidered, returning to lock the door and put the catch on. At the back door, a pair of Beth’s sneakers lay abandoned on the floor. Her favourite costume was pegged up above the laundry tub. Had they both been there yesterday? Theo wasn’t sure. She reached out a hand and touched the costume. It was dry. She knelt on the floor and picked up the one of the shoes. It was dry, too, no dewy morning grass caked to the sole, no sand. Maybe the brick hadn’t been Beth either, Theo thought, with a prickle of guilt. But even if it wasn’t Beth doing these things, Theo was pretty sure she was the reason for them. Nothing like this had ever happened to Theo before this mess with Alice. But it was too juvenile to be Alice’s doing. And two incidents wasn’t just random, wasn’t just kids mucking around. The two incidents directed at Theo were deliberate, targeted; intended to scare and upset her.
It had worked, too. She was scared.
It was important to her at the time, she remembered, to know when the first time had been. Where had Theo been while Oliver had first had sex with Alice? Had she been swimming? Pushing her trolley in the supermarket? Washing Oliver’s chef’s whites and monogrammed aprons? Oliver said he wasn’t sure when it had first happened. That was a turn of the knife in itself. His first instance of committing infidelity hadn’t even been important enough to retain in his memory. Ergo, Theo was not important enough to betray with any sense of occasion.
Oliver had started a competition amongst the wait staff, she remembered that. The waiter or waitress who commanded the biggest tip from a Saturday night service won the prize of accompanying Oliver to a movie premiere. The restaurant had a publicist now, a young, chatty man named Ethan, and attending the premiere was his idea.
Theo had asked him the day they’d met if it was his real name. Something about the way he had said it hadn’t rung true.
He’d blushed. ‘It is now. It used to be Gary.’
Probably unfairly, Theo had mistrusted him from then on.
Ethan was focused on creating a buzz around Oliver Watts, both the man and the restaurant. He said the two secrets to success were staying visible, being the name on the tips of people’s tongues, and momentum, being seen to evolve. Gone were the charity fundraisers, now Oliver only went to Ethan’s curated list of parties and premieres, fashion shows and gallery openings. Ethan made sure he got to them, a little late, well dressed and with a pretty girl on his arm. It was about creating associations, Ethan said. Oliver Watts was about the new and modern, Oliver Watts was not of the establishment, but fresh and exciting. Oliver Watts was where you would take your mistress, not your wife, Ethan said.
The irony wasn’t lost on Theo, later.
Nobody mentioned her part in this, what she was supposed to do. Not Oliver, and not Ethan, who seemed to hardly notice her. Theo wondered if Oliver had told him that there wouldn’t even be a restaurant if it wasn’t for her, then chided herself for being so petty. She remembered Oliver’s parents at the opening, what they had said. He needed the spotlight. And Theo decided she could step aside with grace and let him have it. She could do that for him, because that was love. Nobody else loved him the way she did.
The winner of that staff competition and Oliver’s date to a movie premiere at the Chevron Theatre was Alice Hopkins-Bell, a tall and striking gir
l with long blonde hair which she wrapped around her head in braids. Theo had hired Alice herself and she’d been with them since Oliver Watts opened. She was a fine waitress, though Theo had to ask her to tone down her efforts to sell her artwork to patrons. She was a painter, and a good one. One of her paintings hung behind the bar in the restaurant, an unsettling portrait of a woman, naked, bent backwards over a wooden chair. Ethan said it was confrontational. Theo’s mother would have called it vulgar. Alice said she didn’t care what people thought of it, so long as they did think of it. Oliver said he understood that sentiment well.
Alice, though more handsome than either of them, reminded Theo of the girls in the change room at the Old Baths in Manchester, the ease with which she moved and stood, swinging her hips as she wove around the tables. Alice was thrilled that she got to go with Oliver to the movie premiere. It wasn’t an art house film, or foreign, or even hotly anticipated, but exposure was exposure for a young artist, she said. If the mainstream press published a photo of her with Oliver on the red carpet, who knew who might see it?
‘I hope people aren’t too distracted by the creepiness of a thirty-three-year-old man with an eighteen-year-old girl on his arm,’ he’d joked.
Alice turned her wide eyes to him. ‘I don’t think it’s creepy.’
Oliver smiled briefly and turned away. ‘I think it’s just skating the line to creepiness,’ Ethan said. ‘So it’s perfect.’
Alice got her wish, one of the national newspapers did publish a photo of her with Oliver, the day after the premiere. Coming back from her swim, Theo saw the front page of the newspaper in a wire stand outside the newsagent’s. In the bottom left-hand corner Oliver posed, Alice on one side and another girl Theo didn’t recognise on the other. ‘WATT GOOD TASTE’, the picture was captioned. ‘Oliver Watts steps out with artist Alice Hopkins-Bell, left. Actress Angela Montaigne, right.’ Theo, still dripping in her shorts, T-shirt and thongs, her hair scraped back in a bun, felt a strange sensation in her stomach, the bottom-dropping-out feeling that she sometimes got in a lift that went down several levels quickly. She patted her pockets to see if she had any money to buy the newspaper for Oliver. She did, but when she was holding it in her hand, Theo changed her mind. Actually, she didn’t want the paper in her house. She didn’t want to have to look at it any more at all. She dropped it back on the shelf and left.
Deeper than the Sea Page 16
