‘Well. I just felt bad. We have this awesome bonfire, you know, and I just thought I should share it. For people who couldn’t make it.’
He turned to her and smiled, but his eyes slid away. His knee jiggled up and down and he was chewing the inside of his cheek again. He flicked his head as if to shoo away a hovering insect.
‘Oh,’ Beth said. She didn’t know what he was talking about. She watched him carefully, trying to gauge his mood. He seemed volatile, like he was about to bust out of his skin.
Caleb leant over and took her hand. He’s trying to reassure me, Beth thought, when he gave her hand a squeeze. I’m being paranoid. He turned her hand over so her palm was facing up, then let go. Beth looked in her hand and the little white pill was there. Caleb winked at her and opened his mouth. The other pill was on his tongue. He nodded at Beth, and smiled.
Someone turned the music up. Someone else threw something into the fire and plumes shot up into the sky. Everyone cheered.
‘Here we go!’ Caleb grinned and elbowed Beth in the ribs. ‘Now the party’s really starting.’ He looked at her, expectantly.
Beth put her hand to her mouth and swallowed the pill.
‘Yeeeeeeew!’ Caleb whooped.
She kept smiling after he’d turned away again. If she smiled hard enough, she thought, she might even be able to quash the unsettled feeling she had. About that lingering smell of petrol on Caleb’s clothes. About Jason and what he had said to her. About what particular chemical compound she, a scientist, had just swallowed without question.
chapter thirty-nine
The grass was scorched and shorn in a round patch. It made Theo think of crop circles, and funeral pyres. She hugged her dressing gown around her shoulders and swayed where she stood, the grass dampening her bare feet. Her stomach still hurt, and the cold air made her hips ache. David walked around the perimeter of the yard with a torch, checking that there were no more surprises in store. Eventually he returned, empty-handed.
‘There’s nothing else here.’
Theo nodded, and David tilted his head at her. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Not at all, not at all.’ She folded herself down into a squat on the ground. Down there, it smelt like charred earth and wet grass. Not unpleasant, but not as it should be.
‘Let’s get you inside.’ David laid a hand on her arm.
‘I can’t.’ Theo covered her face with her hands. She breathed through her mouth, trying to stay as still as she could to get her balance back.
‘What do you mean? We can go inside, now, the fire is out. There’s nothing else here.’
Theo uncovered her face and the yard swam in front of her eyes. In her head, she could still see the fire, long fingers reaching up for her. When she’d smelt the smoke, Theo’s nervous system had been given an electric shock, and her basest instincts had come forward to direct her. Like any creature, she had thought of her pack, her brood. Beth, her body had shouted. Where is Beth? Then, when she’d resolved that, she’d arrived at that most primal of decisions about how she would address this threat: fight or flight. And now, down here on the grass, she felt shame. When it came down to it, she hadn’t fought, she hadn’t even tried. Actually, she hadn’t for a long time.
Theo had let David put out the fire while she cowered in her shelter. She had let David call the police to ask them how long she would be banished to her own home for, David had researched other cases and tried to frame her defence before she’d even been charged. Mary was looking after Beth, inasmuch as she could. Theo could have done all those things; she should have done all those things. She might be weak in body right now, but there was nothing wrong with her mind. Yet all she had done was mope and scrub.
Why had she been so disgustingly passive for so very long?
She had been here before, at this very same juncture, Theo thought. That time, she had chosen to get on a train with her daughter and get them both to a place where they were safe and away from those who were hurting them. So, what was stopping her now? An arbitrary ruling on the distance required between her and Beth? A fictional divide; an unreasonable decree from a man with a shiny badge who knew nothing about her or about her daughter?
Why was Theo heeding such nonsense?
‘I’ve got to find Beth,’ she said to David. ‘I have to go and find her, now.’
David knelt down next to her, both of them crouched in the dimness of the yard. ‘You think this was her? You think Beth lit the fire?’
‘No. But I think someone did it for her. That scares me. I could have died. If you weren’t here, I might not have been able to put it out. Beth is probably with the person who lit this fire, right now. Who knows what he’ll do next? What if she gets hurt?’
‘He? Who? Who is he?’ David gripped her wrists.
Theo took a deep breath. ‘I think it’s Caleb Sutton.’
‘Bloody hell, who’s Caleb Sutton?’
‘He’s one of the boys who hangs around the caravan park. He and Beth were starting something, before . . . David. I think she’s in trouble.’
David stood up. ‘Let’s go, then.’
The time came for Elizabeth’s six-month check-up with the paediatrician. The hospital had organised it, and sent Oliver a letter in the mail with the appointment time. When she arrived, the receptionist at the doctor’s surgery assumed that Theo was Elizabeth’s mother, and Theo didn’t correct him. It would have been too complicated, and besides, the space for a signature said Parent or Guardian. She was one of them. Theo signed her own name.
Elizabeth was doing brilliantly, the doctor said. He measured her head and her length and her weight, tugged on her legs to check that her hips were aligned.
‘No family history of joint problems?’ he asked. Theo thought of her own hips, decay creeping in from beneath the bones like a fungus.
‘No.’
‘Well. Congratulations! I always tell parents they deserve a medal at this point. It’s the hardest job in the world. You’ve done well.’
Theo had to bite her lip to stop from laughing or crying, or exploding with pride.
She decided to stop by Oliver’s office on the way home from the doctor’s appointment. He had started renting some studio space over the road from the restaurant, so he and Ethan had somewhere to do paperwork, have meetings, and so on. Theo wanted to tell Oliver the good news, whether or not he cared. She had to tell someone. Not only had she kept a baby alive, but the baby had thrived under her care. Blossomed, even. Theo did feel like she’d won a medal. Her very first.
When she got to the studio, Theo pressed the buzzer that said Oliver Watts and Co. Nobody answered, so she went around the back. She saw Ethan’s car in the alleyway and gave it a wide berth with the pram. Heaven forbid she scratch his precious Lexus. Oliver’s car was there, too, and another she didn’t recognise, parked so close to the doorway that Theo had to squeeze past to get in, and momentarily caught the pram liner on the corner of the numberplate as she angled it past. Elizabeth stayed soundly asleep. When she eventually opened the door into a dark hallway, Theo couldn’t see anyone at first.
‘Hello?’ She didn’t call too loudly, so as not to wake Elizabeth.
From somewhere, Theo heard a scuffling sound and something else, a huffing, like an animal of some sort. There was a square of light where the door was open at the end of the hallway, and Theo walked towards it. She saw Oliver’s bare back first, on the couch that was pushed up against the far wall. His jeans were shucked down. Shoes and a bra and other items of clothing were strewn on the floor. Theo must have made an involuntary sound of some sort because Oliver turned his head, and beneath him she saw the torso of a woman, her breasts and collarbones, long brown hair around her shoulders.
‘Theo, fuck,’ Oliver said, veins standing out in his forehead. ‘Theo, what are you doing here?’
The woman swore and pushed Oliver away from her, and Oliver said something else, shaking his head. Theo heard her name again. Move, she thought, move, leave, but
she couldn’t move. Oliver had one foot on the floor while he tried to pull his jeans back up and the woman had wrapped one arm over her breasts and was pointing at the door while shouting at Theo, ‘Get the fuck out of here, why are you still standing there, are you –’
‘Shut up, shut up!’ that was Oliver. While they were yelling at each other Theo managed to unstick her feet from the floor and start moving backwards, trying to close the door with one arm and manoeuvre the pram with the other. Oliver came towards her and took her arm and kept talking, kept shaking his head, but she pushed him off and kept moving, and the last thing she saw was the woman pulling her dress over her head. Her face, when it emerged through the neckline, her lips swollen and her cheeks flushed, was not one that Theo recognised, but the expression was one she’d definitely seen before, most recently from Oliver himself when he watched her with Elizabeth. Disgust, and pity.
Oliver’s expression, when he followed her into the hallway, looked more like a puppy that had been rapped over the nose and was waiting to be allowed to jump back up onto the couch again. Chastened. Which was different to sorry, Theo thought. Sorry he had been caught. She wanted never to see that look again. Actually, she wanted never to see his face again.
There would be no more pitying Theo.
She wasn’t careful about the cars in the alleyway on her way out, she jolted the pram over the cobblestones and walked so fast she was almost at a run, all the way through that alleyway, down the next one and out onto the main street. Get away. Keep moving, get away, get away, she thought. It was all she could think. Oliver hadn’t followed her. Elizabeth slept on and Theo walked all the way home without really registering it, she just moved.
When she got there, she pulled her backpack out from the laundry cupboard. It still had the tags on it from when they had arrived from England. They hadn’t really been anywhere since then, Theo realised, apart from Sydney, and that was only to see the restaurant, of all things. She remembered how Oliver had promised to show her the desert, when he had first told her about Australia.
One day I’ll take you there.
He’d been breaking promises long before he began sleeping with Alice, Theo realised. For whatever reason, Oliver could not or would not be truthful with Theo, and possibly never had been. Maybe he wasn’t truthful with anyone. Maybe he loved her, in his way. But it didn’t matter any more. The only thing Theo knew with any certainty was that she could not stay here with him. Being lied to was corrosive. She had to get out, while there was still something left of her.
She didn’t pack much, just clothes for both of them, Elizabeth’s paperwork, birth certificate and health record, and her own passport. Inside the cover of the passport, a young Theo smiled out, all teeth with a blazing pimple between her eyebrows. That girl was so excited, so hopeful, so young. She didn’t know any better. She should be forgiven for that.
Theo left the house she had lived in with Oliver. She followed the surge of people heading to the train station for their peak-hour trip home. She let that crowd propel her into the main concourse of the station like a current. Staring at the route map on the wall, she traced her finger to the furthest stop on the line that travelled along the coast. Cardmoor. Theo bought herself a ticket and waited on the platform with the commuters in their power suits. Around them, skyscrapers jutted into the sky, and people rushed back and forth like worker ants carrying crumbs. Theo watched them carefully, to see if they watched her. She looked for signs of suspicion, for people who looked at her like she was an imposter. What if someone could tell what Theo was doing here? What would they do?
The baby woke with a whimper and Theo picked her up for a cuddle. A woman nearby smiled at them, and, after a moment, Theo smiled back. She just looked like a mother with her child, she realised. Secretly she had thought of the baby as Beth for a long time now. Elizabeth had always seemed too long and grand a name for this little mite. It was that part of her mind that Theo moved to occupy then, the part where she had already begun to call this baby Beth. Beth rubbed at her nose with a balled fist and Theo leant down to adjust her hat, which had slipped down over one eye. The baby smiled, and it may have been at the tickle of the wool on her forehead but Theo believed the smile was for her.
The train came, and Theo and Beth got on.
chapter forty
Beth was having a wonderful time.
She had become only her senses, the hot, salt smell of fish and chips and the fire and the pocket of warmth in her lap when the parcel of food was passed to her. She even ate some. The white pill was magic, it hummed in her stomach and lit her up from the inside, fireflies in her veins. She wanted to go down on the beach. Caleb didn’t want to go, but Beth didn’t really care. Maybe he would come later and maybe he wouldn’t. She stood and walked, and she moved like Sabre, languid like a snake, like oil. She felt people watching her, and she liked being watched, she liked how it made her feel. She was aware that she felt different to how she used to, and she felt sad for that girl, she was so sharp, so vigilant. Prickly like a porcupine. Tonight she was only instinct and sensation, and it was wonderful.
She saw Jason, splitting wood on the beach with an axe. He didn’t see her, and Beth just moved so she could no longer see him. It was as simple as that. Problem solved. Further down the beach people were fire-twirling and Beth was transfixed. The way the fire arced and spun, how had she never noticed how beautiful it was? The people doing the twirling were beautiful, too, the music from the guitar was perfect. Beth could understand it, she could hear exactly what the man playing it wanted her to hear, not what he was doing but what his intentions were. She had been so wrong about these people at the caravan park, she was wrong about everything, they were all just water and how could she feel anything bad about water? She was a scientist, and that was a scientific fact – they were all water, over half water.
The moon went behind a cloud and then reappeared, casting a silver net over the water. Beth decided that she needed to dance in that net, that shimmering veil, she wanted to wrap it around herself. It would be the softest thing, that silver silk; the water would be cool and it would hold her gently like she was no heavier than a feather, just a girl-shaped vessel of skin and bones bathing in the moonlight.
She took off Mary’s nightgown and folded it carefully. She didn’t want any drag, any excess weight. Next, she removed her bra and knickers and folded them, too. She arranged them in a beautiful parcel on the sand, then took her hair out of its elastic and shook it free. She placed the hairband on the parcel of clothes, making sure it was in the exact middle of the bundle. She arranged the ribbons of the nightgown straps in a pretty coil around the hairband and placed her donkey necklace inside it. When she was finished, she stood up, naked, and turned to face the fire and the people around it, glowing bright. She lifted her arm and waved at them, waved at the fire, then turned back to the sea.
chapter forty-one
When they got to the caravan park, David walked through the entrance and turned left, not looking around him, head down and purposeful. Theo followed behind, trying to keep up. Her stomach ached and her head throbbed and her hips glowed with sharp thrumming pain. If she thought about the pain, she felt like she might pass out, so she didn’t.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asked, and David glanced over his shoulder at her without stopping. Gravel crunched under their feet and the caravans they passed glowed from within like candles in lanterns.
‘I’ve worked with some of the residents here. We’ll go see the caretaker, Jason. He usually knows who’s on site.’
They seemed to be walking further and further in. Theo had no idea the caravan park went this far back, a village unto itself. They passed a skinny woman with bleached hair arranged like a fountain on top of her head and deeply tanned skin, sitting and smoking outside a caravan. She nodded at David and he nodded back. Another man passed and lifted his hand in a wave, a toiletries bag and towel tucked under his arm. Theo felt strange, like she was
intruding on something private, here. Set at the very edge of the park where it bled into the bushland behind was a cluster of caravans with green stripes around them. David stopped. All of the caravans were dark inside. Beer cans littered the ground and a shopping trolley full of rubbish was jammed up against the fence. A cattle dog was tied up outside the farthest caravan, so thin that Theo could see his ribcage beneath his patchy coat. He raised his head as David came close, then whimpered and dropped it again. David rapped on the door of the caravan.
‘Jason? Are you in there? It’s David Hartnett, mate, I just need a quick word,’ he called.
Theo stood under a streetlight, gritting her teeth against the pain in her hips. You’re here to find Beth, you’re here to find Beth, she chanted, shut up about your pain. What’s a bit of pain? Isn’t she worth a bit of pain? Imagine telling her, Beth, I knew you needed me but I didn’t come. My hips were too sore.
‘He’s not there,’ a voice called from the caravan nearer to Theo. ‘I saw him leave.’ A man in a pyjama shirt and shorts stood in the doorway, squinting.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you. Any idea where I can find Jason? Sorry to bother you, but it’s urgent.’ David came a bit closer and the man took a step back, then frowned and shook his head.
‘Nah. I don’t know where he is.’
Theo bit her lip. Come on, come on, she thought. Anything, something, just give me something.
‘What about Caleb,’ she said. ‘Caleb Sutton?’
The man shook his head again. Was that a no to knowing where Caleb was or just a no to Caleb? Theo shook her own head at David, impatient.
‘All right, then.’ David passed a hand over his eyes. Theo looked hard at the man, and he shuffled back into the darkness of his caravan and closed the door.
‘Where now? Is there someone else who might know –’ Theo broke off when the man opened his door again. Under the harshness of the fluorescent light outside, he looked about as tired as Theo felt.
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