Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘Caleb.’ She came up beside him and put her hand on his arm.

  ‘Bethie!’ He grabbed her around the waist and swung her into his side, planting a wet kiss on her lips. ‘Nice dress.’

  The other guys smirked into their beers.

  ‘Thanks.’ Beth wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Could I talk to you for a sec?’

  ‘Yeah, what’s up?

  ‘Over here.’ Caleb let Beth pull him away until they were out of earshot.

  ‘I’m so glad I found you.’

  ‘I’m glad you did, too.’ Caleb reached out to put his arms around her, but Beth wasn’t ready and stepped back, batting him away so that he almost burnt her with the tip of his cigarette.

  ‘Shit, sorry.’ He widened his eyes.

  ‘It’s fine. I’m a little jumpy, is all. I just had a sort of weird encounter with Jason at Sabre’s caravan.’

  ‘Jason? What was he doing in Sabre’s caravan? I thought she was here already.’

  ‘She probably is. I went there looking for her, but Jason found me. He wouldn’t let me leave.’

  Caleb pulled back to look at her. ‘What?’

  ‘He scared me, Caleb. He grabbed my arm and said to tell you that he thought I was pretty.’ Beth looked over her shoulder. Had Jason followed her? Would he try to talk to her again?

  Caleb stared at her.

  ‘Caleb? I don’t understand. Why would he do that?’

  Caleb swung around, scanning the crowd. ‘Where the fuck is he?’

  ‘I don’t know, Caleb, I don’t know!’ Beth tugged at the hem of her dress and pulled on Caleb’s arm, trying to get him to look at her, talk to her properly. People moved in and out of the light, calling to each other, sound bouncing around in the dunes. Beth gave Caleb’s arm a final yank and he turned back to her, cupping her face in his hands.

  ‘He’s mad. He wants to start something with me. That’s all, Bethie.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why would he want to start something with you?’ She put her hands over his, so they would stay there, so she could keep him focussed.

  ‘Ah, he’s just being greedy. I keep saying the place is big enough for both of us.’

  Beth shook her head, confused. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Caleb looked over her shoulder. ‘You don’t need to. The less you know, the better.’

  Beth shook her head. She had never liked being told that there were things she couldn’t know. She wanted to know everything, she always did.

  Caleb laughed at her. ‘You know what I think? I think this shit with Theo makes you think everyone is lying to you. You don’t know who to trust. I get that. Believe me, I get it. But I’m not lying when I say I’d never let anything bad happen to you.’

  It already has, Beth thought, but Caleb was waiting for a different answer.

  ‘I know you wouldn’t,’ she said and he smiled and nodded at her, pleased, like he’d explained something complicated and understanding had finally dawned on her. He’s not that smart, Beth realised. He knows a lot less than he thinks he does. Around them, the party pulsed on and Caleb took Beth’s hand and led her over to the fire.

  chapter thirty-five

  Theo vomited up the painkillers that David had brought her, and the cup of tea she had drunk with them. Then she drank a full bottle of water, trying to lubricate her throat, but she threw that up too. She should have eaten something before she took the tablets. The sweet relief that had brought her sleep was gone. Theo lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles against her cheek, waiting for it to be over. At least her floor was clean, she thought. Everything was very clean.

  ‘Thank goodness for small mercies,’ her mother used to say.

  Theo couldn’t imagine what her mother would say if she could see her now.

  Maybe it was a small mercy that she couldn’t.

  At some point, she dragged herself off the bathroom floor and hobbled down the hallway to let the cat in. It had been scratching at the square of cardboard Theo had taped over the missing glass pane in the verandah door, mewling for food and a warm place to sleep.

  Even though it was dark outside, the hallway was aglow. When Theo got to the doors she turned her face to the sky and saw the moon, huge and round, the source of the light. She let the cat in, locked the door behind her and pulled the curtain across to block out the blaze of the moon. Then she went back to bed to try to remember the days when she felt so tall and strong that she might have reached up and plucked it out of the sky.

  When Theo tried to think back to those first few weeks with Elizabeth, she could hardly remember them. Even in the midst of them she could hardly remember them. Nothing she had seen or done or felt in her life had prepared her for it. The only thing that even came close was the beginning of her relationship with Oliver. Those weeks and months when they were first together. The intensity, the feeling of being consumed by your attention to someone else – her early days with Elizabeth had those hallmarks too.

  Theo’s whole world had shapeshifted when Elizabeth arrived. And so had she, internally. Her shell remained the same, she was still walking around in the same skin, with a mosquito bite behind her left ear and muesli compacted in her left molars. But she’d also been emptied of everything she had been and filled back up with what she was now. If she’d had to explain it, the shock of finding herself suddenly, completely and solely responsible for a baby, Theo would have said it was like being very, very sick. She knew she was still herself, but she didn’t feel like it, in a very fundamental way.

  Mostly, it was the tiredness.

  Elizabeth wanted to be held and walked, and categorically would not sleep if she wasn’t held or walked. Sometimes she wouldn’t sleep even when she was held or walked. Sometimes it seemed like there was nothing Theo could do that would comfort her. Sometimes, Elizabeth slept in thirty-minute snatches all night, with stretches of fretful wailing between, or just wakefulness. There was no respite, nobody to take over when her shift was done. There were no scheduled breaks, or colleagues to pick up the slack. Oliver slept on in the spare room, feverish and greyish-white.

  Theo was terrified that something terrible might happen if she wasn’t watching the baby every moment. What if she choked on her vomit or a thread worked itself loose from her blanket and wrapped around her tiny throat? The things to be worried about seemed limitless. Theo had asked Ethan to buy her a book on babies. He had bought four and they seemed to all offer conflicting advice. Swaddle the baby, don’t swaddle the baby; give her a dummy, a different type of bottle, no bottle for two hours. More than once, Theo cried along with Elizabeth. She felt too young, too silly, too hopeless to be tasked with such an enormous responsibility. She just wasn’t qualified. Especially without nine months to prepare for it. She rang Greta repeatedly, heedless of the time difference, and held the phone up to Elizabeth’s wailing mouth.

  ‘Is this a tired cry or a hungry cry? How am I supposed to tell?’

  ‘Have you eaten today?’ Greta would ask, and Theo would try to remember. She couldn’t remember when she had last showered either. Her hips began to stiffen and throb again, her whole body thirsty for immersion in a body of water, somewhere, anywhere. Theo told Greta that earlier that morning or late the night before she had actually begged Elizabeth to stop crying and sleep. Theo was so emotional and fatigued that she hallucinated, the furniture in the room danced and shivered before her. She wondered why this was happening to her. She thought, every day, every hour, about leaving.

  But, if Theo left, she would be giving up. If Theo gave up, she would be showing Oliver and Alice and anyone else who might be watching that they had gotten the better of her. They had brought her to her knees. A baby could break her, break this relationship that she had worked so hard to hold on to, despite everything. Despite this. With the magpies cawing in the trees outside and the possums scrabbling on the roof at dusk, Theo was reminded anew each day how far she had come since overhearing the girls talking in the change rooms at the baths,
since that day she had begun on her own path.

  Anyway, she was too tired to leave. She was too tired to do anything other than survive. She was too tired to feel anger or hurt. Besides, baby Elizabeth didn’t care if Theo was hurting. She had no understanding of the nuances of the situation, the delicate threads of betrayal and loss. She simply wanted, and needed, and wanted and needed now, sooner than now.

  The speed with which Theo’s new life overrode her old was astounding.

  Elizabeth was so tiny; seeing her covering not even half the mattress in a basket hardly bigger than a washing basket, Theo was stunned and stunned again. Theo thought of Elizabeth as a tiny animal, like a puppy, or something more marsupial, a possum. Nocturnal and clinging, motivated by hunger, comfort, sleep. She looked at Theo with her dark eyes, a shifting landscape of blue, grey and brown, and Theo wondered what she thought. She hoped it was good things about her.

  At first Theo just kept going, attending to the baby, leaving Oliver in Ethan’s hands, and telling herself that was all anyone could ask of her. In a way it was. It took just about all Theo had to do that, to keep going despite everything. The relentlessness of the task staggered her.

  After almost three weeks, Oliver was feeling better.

  In those weeks Theo felt like she had gotten to know Elizabeth a little. She had learnt a few small things about what she liked or didn’t like, how to hold her, burp her and change her efficiently. She tried to tell Oliver about what she’d found out. She’d been looking forward to telling him and she thought he’d be pleased. But Oliver didn’t seem pleased.

  Before she’d even finished speaking, Oliver interrupted Theo to suggest that she write it all down instead of telling him. That would be helpful, he said, because he was returning to work tomorrow and would be employing a nanny then. It was the sort of information she would need to know. They would have to clean out the sunroom, he said. That would be the nanny’s bedroom, for the next few weeks, until Alice returned.

  Theo frowned at him. ‘A nanny? What nanny?’

  ‘Adelaide, I think her name is,’ Oliver said.

  ‘Adelaide.’

  ‘Ethan said she prefers Addy.’

  ‘Ethan?’

  ‘He hired her. The Sydney restaurant opens next week, so it had to be taken care of.’

  ‘Oliver. You’re not serious. You’re not going to Sydney.’ Theo stood, unable to move, Elizabeth in her arms, stranded in the middle of the kitchen.

  ‘Theo, I have to. It’s my restaurant. What would it look like? Oliver Watts opening in Sydney and Oliver Watts doesn’t even show up?’

  ‘But everyone has emergencies, people would understand.’

  ‘Theo, this isn’t an emergency. It’s not even a problem. I’ve hired a nanny – it’s all been taken care of.’

  Taken care of. It was the sort of language you would use to describe a banking error that had been rectified. A double booking on a Saturday night, rescheduled to the satisfaction of all parties involved. Theo thought about being here, while Oliver was away, with Elizabeth and a stranger. A stranger that Ethan, of all people, had hired. What did he know about looking after children? How would he know what to look for in a nanny? Theo would have to stand back and watch, even though this woman didn’t even know Elizabeth, wouldn’t even set eyes on her until she arrived to live in this house. Elizabeth would be disconnected from everyone who knew her and Theo would be worse than redundant, she would be an annoyance, in her very own home.

  ‘I have a better idea,’ she said to Oliver.

  When Greta flew in to Melbourne, everything got a little better. Once she’d finished complaining about the ordeal it had been to drop everything at work, how she’d been forced pass an important case on to a colleague so she could come to her sister’s aid, Greta hugged Theo tighter than she’d ever been hugged.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ she said, into Theo’s hair.

  ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to see you, too,’ Theo answered.

  Greta showed Theo so many things, the minutiae of baby-whispering that helped smooth out all the wrinkles in the day. Greta had four children of her own by then, so babies had been an intrinsic part of her life for a solid decade already. None of this fazed her. She hauled Elizabeth around like a sack of grain and used a firm, no-nonsense tone to speak to her. In the shower Theo practised speaking like her sister and found that it helped. ‘Hush, now, sweet. You’re ready for a sleep.’ She rested her head against the glass of the shower door and thought that she could fall asleep right there, the droplets of water running over her back, the soothing fog of the steam, the feeling of being clean, alone, relaxed.

  She knew Greta was waiting for her. Elizabeth was waiting. So Theo got out, took the baby from her sister and held her firmly against her chest, heart to heart as she’d been shown.

  ‘Hush now, sweet. You’re ready for a sleep,’ she said.

  She walked the length of the hallway, up and down, up and down. Elizabeth went to sleep. It convinced them both, the voice of Greta. Greta took the baby and sent Theo to bed. When she woke up, the bathroom was clean and Greta had made lasagne. She wasn’t fazed by Oliver’s fancy kitchen either.

  Greta made Theo take the baby out every day. To the shops, for coffee, to the art gallery. Greta walked her around the gardens while Theo swam at the aquatic centre. In the cinema, Elizabeth, Theo and Greta all fell sound asleep within ten minutes of the opening credits. Greta pointed out little things to Theo, like when Elizabeth learnt to smile. Actually smile, not just grimace as she passed wind. Or how she cocked her head at the sound of the dog next door barking at the postman.

  When it was time for Greta to leave, Theo clutched at her sturdy arm over the railing in the departures lounge. Greta shook her off gently.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said.

  Theo breathed through her mouth, trying not to cry as she watched her sister roll her eyes at the security guard who asked her to remove her chunky gold bracelets to go through the metal detector. Not long after Theo got home, Oliver returned from Sydney. He was jubilant, on a high; the opening had gone well and bookings were strong, months in advance. The Melbourne restaurant had an upswing too. Ethan said it was reflected glory which they should milk for all it was worth. It was a perfect time to launch their new menu. Theo sat with Elizabeth in the rocking chair by the window and listened to Oliver talk. He had a lot to say before he asked about Elizabeth. There was one week left until Alice was due back.

  chapter thirty-six

  It was crowded around the fire, but Beth and Caleb found a log and made themselves comfortable. Sabre handed her a drink, rum and Coke, black and sticky in a white plastic cup. Beth drank half of it in one mouthful and Sabre laughed. ‘Bottoms up,’ she said.

  In front of them, the fire burnt high, stoked by kindling collected from the gums that dotted the caravan park. The sand around the fire pit was streaked with dirt and ash from previous nights. Beth knew that in daylight it was a grubby grey colour. In daylight, too, you could see all the litter that had accumulated at the edges of the clearing, cigarette packets, brown sacks from fast-food restaurants, bottles and cans and glow-sticks split open dribbling fluorescent liquid onto the ground. But tonight it only looked pretty. Everything and everyone was soaked in the warm orange glow of the fire and the moon hung like a silver bauble high in the sky.

  Beth’s skin still burned where Jason had rubbed his finger across her arm. When she closed her eyes she saw his pupils like pebbles, full-moon whites, the veins standing out on his forehead. She took another long drink and curved her hand over Caleb’s thigh, leaning into him. She stretched out her legs in front of her and felt Caleb run his eyes over them. She felt powerful, as though she could pull his gaze anywhere she chose, move him like a puppet. She dropped her hand to his hip and reached into his pocket.

  Caleb held his breath.

  Beth drew out a wad of cash and smiled.

  Caleb smiled back. ‘That’s all you were after then?
’

  ‘Yep.’

  They laughed, and Caleb pushed it back into his pocket. Beth put Jason from her mind. She couldn’t see him here, and even if he did turn up, so what? She wasn’t alone any more, she was surrounded by friends. They wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

  People wandered back and forth from the beach and caravan park, and over to the children’s paddling pool, which was tucked in the long grass before the dunes and had been filled with ice and cans of beer. Beth wanted to go and see the ocean soon, she knew it would look pretty on a night like this, and there’d be others down there, dancing on the sand. But for now she was happy at the fire, watching the cinders bounce and spark, and watching the people sparking off each other too, Caleb by her side, singing to the music blasting from one of the caravans. It was a song that had been popular that whole year, and everyone seemed to know it, shouting out the chorus.

  We’re all going to die

  someday

  So we might as well live

  today

  In every way we can

  running straight into the sun . . .

  It wasn’t the sort of music Beth normally liked, but she didn’t mind it tonight, she sang it too, and felt the warmth of the rum and Coke spreading though her belly. She had everything she needed right here. Mothers, false mothers, real mothers, no mothers. It didn’t matter tonight. Tonight she was just going to drink and dance on the beach under the full moon and let the events of the last few weeks roll right off her. Beth was going to let that big white orb in the sky make all her decisions for her, she was going to give in to that tidal pull and go where it carried her, floating like a buoy.