But maybe it had been selfish. Maybe it hadn’t been about Beth after all. Maybe it was about Theo, and how she would feel when she told her beautiful child the unbeautiful truth. Maybe it was silly to think she still had any power to protect Beth from anything any more. Who knew what Beth knew about the world and the things the people in it did to each other? When had that happened, anyway? When did Beth’s mind become a foreign country to Theo? Lately, Theo had felt like parenting her was like holding onto a piece of rope with Beth at the other end. If Theo gave her end a little tug, Beth gave hers an almighty yank, and they ended up further apart than they had been at the beginning.
Beth was on her own path, that was what growing up was. Theo trusted her, her girl was so smart. She could do anything she wanted to. It was other people that Theo couldn’t trust. She’d seen more than Beth thought she had. She knew that Erin rang and rang, and Beth didn’t call her back. And she knew about Caleb Sutton, too. She’d heard his low voice at the gate, lingering for too long when he walked Beth home from work. Infrequently, Theo wished for a ‘man around the house’ and that was one of those times. An overprotective father to scare away Caleb, or anyone else. While Theo lay in bed, straining to hear what was said outside on the dark footpath, a father could have stalked the perimeters of the property with a shotgun to protect his daughter and people would have laughed it off.
Being a librarian had given Theo a little insight into children and teenagers. In particular, Theo thought she could tell when children had stopped being children too early. There was a particular quality to those students, a flatness in their eyes and slope to their shoulders, a resignation in their movements. Caleb was one of them.
As soon as she had heard Beth mention that name, Theo had known who he was, and had known that Beth would find him appealing. Beth had outgrown this town, and someone like Caleb was her avenue to something different, like finding a secret room in your own house. He was a breath of fresh air, and that was just what Theo feared. That it was Caleb Beth would turn to now, when everything else had been upended. But Caleb couldn’t help her girl, Caleb could only bring her down with him. Through no fault of his own, he was sliding into ruination. Theo had known it as soon as she’d seen him, his accordion slink, bloodshot eyes and detached politeness. He was already half gone. Beth probably thought she could save him, like one of those makeover programs. Beth thought she could be the thing that made the ‘before’ become the ‘after’. But Beth didn’t see how far gone he already was, Theo thought.
Theo was still lying on Beth’s bed, awake, when the knocker on the door thumped. She wrapped her robe around herself and padded down the hallway, trying not to make a noise. That detective, she thought. Was there a law against refusing police entry to your home? Add it to her charge sheet, then. Detective Verten would not be crossing her threshold. But it wasn’t him.
A different man stood there, looking ill at ease. He was carrying a backpack and a bicycle helmet. Through the spyhole Theo watched as a bird crowed from a nearby tree, and he turned to see it. She opened the door.
‘Hello. I’m David, David Hartnett,’ he said, and put out his hand for Theo to shake.
‘Okay.’ She took it, briefly.
‘I’m a friend of Mary’s,’ he said. ‘Mary Darcelle. She rang and left a message, asking me to get in touch with you.’
They stood and looked at each other for a moment, then David cleared his throat and hefted his backpack on his shoulder.
‘It’s Theo, isn’t it? Mary mentioned that you might need some legal assistance.’
Theo hesitated. There was no question about that. But was this man with his backpack and his bike helmet an actual lawyer? It wasn’t as though they all wore suits, Theo knew that, but the fellow on her doorstep smiled at her patiently, more like an eager puppy than a shark.
‘I was rather caught up,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to get here.’
Rather, Theo repeated in her head. It reminded her of England. She sized up this man on her doorstep. His beard was dark brown and speckled with grey and his expression was placid and even a little amused. It irked her.
‘I don’t have any money to pay you,’ she said. Her voice was abrasive, even to her.
‘You don’t need any money.’
‘Well then.’
‘Well then. Shall we get started?’
Theo would have trusted anyone Mary recommended, but David didn’t endear himself immediately. He seemed to know what he was talking about, but Theo couldn’t imagine him addressing a court with conviction. He was too quiet. Not meek, necessarily. Understated. Well, people might have said the same about her. They sat down at the table, across from each other. She saw David’s eyes skate over the bottle of wine. He would probably suspect she had a drinking problem, Theo thought. Would it help matters to say she had just left it out in case she needed it? Did Theo even have to impress this man? Would that matter?
‘I’ve read through the notes from your interview with the police,’ David said, ‘and I have a few questions. You indicated to the detectives who interviewed you that you would plead “not guilty” to any charges relating to having Beth in your care. Was that decision based on previous legal advice?’
He was a worrier, Theo could tell by the skin around his nails which had been picked at, leaving his fingers red and raw-looking. His T-shirt was navy blue. Theo tried to deduce something from that, about his character. But she came up with nothing. It was utterly generic and neutral, unobtrusive. Maybe his wife had chosen it, Theo thought. Maybe that was the whole point of it. Maybe she wanted to keep David’s character all to herself and not share it. In any case, it unnerved her.
‘My plea was based on the fact that I’m not guilty.’
He looked at her, perplexed, and she looked back, at the sparse hairs at his temples and the ski-jump quiff on top, at his big brown eyes and sharp triangle nose, his wide, white forehead. An owl, she decided. David reminded her of an owl.
‘Theo.’ He leafed through his papers. ‘It’s my duty to inform you that I think that plea is inadvisable.’
‘I think any other plea would be a lie.’
He spread his hands out and shrugged. ‘Do you want truth or freedom?’
Theo looked back at him, her teeth pressed together. She didn’t agree with the alternatives on offer.
‘Isn’t there an expression about that? Truth is freedom, or something to that effect.’
David shook his head.
‘There is.’ Theo reached into her memory, a Bible verse, long buried. ‘Then you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free.’
‘Hmm. Who said that?’
‘Jesus.’
‘Oh, him.’ David’s eyes twinkled a little.
‘Not a mate of yours, then?’
‘Jesus? Nah, seen him around, but.’ David spoke in a perfect imitation of a local teenager and Theo laughed. She could almost picture him: with a surfboard under his arm and a cigarette tucked over his ear, insolent and full of bravado.
David smiled back. It was discomfiting, the way he smiled at her. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle.
‘Theo. Do you understand how serious this is?’
Fuck you, Theo wanted to say. You’re the one joking around.
‘David. Have no fear about that. Every minute of every hour of every day that I’m not with my daughter is very serious to me.’
Theo could feel a flush of heat on her face and her neck. She would not cry. She would just keep her breath coming, one breath after the next in a conveyor belt of breath that just kept rolling on and on. She kept her hands flat on the tabletop. David made a show of looking at the papers in front of him. He moved them over and under each other and cleared his throat before he spoke.
‘You just called Beth your daughter. But you admit that the two of you have no biological connection, is that correct?’ David wouldn’t meet her eyes.
He’s trying to figure out if I’m crazy
, Theo realised. He wants to know if I think I gave birth to Beth. He was looking at the papers in front of him again. Good luck, Theo thought. You won’t find any answers in there. She waited. From the corner of her eye she could see the trees swaying in the wind outside. She wondered if Beth could feel that wind right now.
David looked up, and Theo spoke. ‘I took Beth. I took her and I brought her here to Cardmoor. There was no formal adoption. Beth and I have no biological connection. Alice Hopkins-Bell is her biological mother. But what I need you to prove, and what I want you to tell everyone else, is that I am her mother in every single other way. I have been her mother since she was a tiny baby. So Beth is my daughter.’
chapter fourteen
Beth couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so much. Her chest and throat still hurt, but her breathing was fine. When she went into the kitchen, Mary hugged her, but they barely had a chance to speak before the baby started up wailing, and one of the girls, Chloe, sent her glass of juice flying, and a crash came from the hallway. The older children were arguing about something in the toy room. Tom had already left for work and Beth knew she should try to help, but she just couldn’t. Watching Mary tend to her flock, the baby on her hip as she mopped up and consoled and mediated between her children, made Beth burn up inside. She felt like she might do something bad if she stayed here right now, and she didn’t want that. She just needed to take her burning somewhere else.
In the wardrobe of the guest room, there were clothes in a whole lot of different sizes, for boys and girls. Mary sometimes did emergency placements for foster care and those kids came with nothing. There were shoes on the floor too, lined up by size.
Beth found a T-shirt and a denim skirt that fit, though the skirt was a little too short. It would have to do anyway, the only other thing she had was her Beachcombers uniform. Beth slipped out the back door. She walked without thinking too much about what she was doing. She knew she needed to apologise to Erin. Whatever the state of their friendship, Beth had been horrible, she knew that.
When she was just a few houses away from Erin’s, Beth stopped and sat down in the bus shelter at the corner of the street. She and Erin had made this their own personal bus stop, nobody else really used it but them. They had stuck posters out of magazines on the back wall with chewed-up gum, and twisted a garland of fake flowers around the bench seat. They had each drawn a little bottom and their names on the seat. Erin’s bum goes here, and Beth’s goes here. Erin-and-Beth, people had called them. The posters had fallen down now, but some of the corners still clung to the wall, scraps of paper whitened and dried to husks.
Beth pictured Erin in her room, her little wooden desk and her bed with the constellation doona cover and glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on her ceiling. Erin loved stars, astronomy, anything to do with planets and the night sky. She and her father had even travelled to North Queensland last year to watch a lunar eclipse. Her father had built a platform outside her window for her telescope, a sort of widow’s walk. That’s where she’d be sitting now, legs hanging off the edge, half-burnt candles and incense and a teacup as an ashtray on the sill behind her.
Beth thought about what would happen when she got there, about Erin’s brothers and father and mother, how concerned they would be, the way they would look at Beth like she was a scrappy puppy someone had dumped in a skip. Erin’s mother would touch her too much; she couldn’t help it, she would come close, lean in, press her cheek to Beth’s and squeeze her hand. Erin’s father would make Beth tell him everything the police had said, they would sit at the table and hash it out like a maths problem, and he would nod his head and rap the table twice when he understood and had a solution.
But he couldn’t have a solution. There was no solution to this. They would all want to help but they couldn’t help. There was only one other person that Beth wanted to see right now.
She knew which house Caleb lived in, everyone did. From down at the beach you could see the glass wall that faced the ocean, high up on the hill. She had never been inside. There were no cars in the driveway, no sign of life anywhere. That was probably the point. Houses needed to look like fortresses if there were things inside them that were nice enough to require guarding. Beth pressed the buzzer for the intercom. She looked down the barrel of the camera lens that was pointing in her direction and tugged at the hem of her skirt.
‘Beth?’ Caleb’s voice sounded strange through the speaker box.
‘Let me in.’
When Caleb opened the door and saw her face, he looked worried. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’
‘Are your parents home?’
‘No. Nobody else is home.’ He took a step towards her and Beth didn’t move. She watched his eyes slide over her, over her face and her bare neck, her breasts beneath her thin T-shirt. He held the door open and stepped aside so she could come in. Beth turned to look behind her. Nobody was around, although it was hard to say with all the mirrored glass windows and tall hedges in this neighbourhood. She should leave, Beth thought, she shouldn’t be here alone with a boy, with this boy. But where would she go? In geography, they had learnt about refugees from countries that were disbanded then absorbed into other countries. Where were those people from, then? Where did they belong? Anywhere or nowhere? They were stateless.
Beth walked in and Caleb closed the door behind her. He led her into a lounge room with low grey couches arranged around a black coffee table. Everything was polished and clean. It felt sterile, like a museum; a space that people didn’t live in but just passed through. Caleb sat down and patted the spot beside him. He had no shirt on, just shorts, and a bruise blooming on his ribcage that made Beth bite down hard on her lip. His father, she guessed. So that was true. He pulled a cushion onto his lap and slung an arm across it with a nonchalance that seemed deliberate. His face was still creased from sleep. So, this is what it takes to see him in daylight, Beth thought.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Um, well, it’s kind of . . . intense.’ Beth tried to laugh and failed.
‘I don’t care.’ He smiled a little, encouraging.
‘Okay, then. You know I said I was adopted?’
Caleb nodded.
‘Well, Theo always told me that she didn’t know who my birth parents were.’
Caleb nodded. ‘She was lying?’
‘She was lying. How did you know?’
‘People lie all the time. All the time. Usually to protect themselves, because they’ve done something stupid or something shit, but they don’t want the fallout.’
‘Yeah, well. This woman, Alice, went to the police and told them that she’s my birth mother and Theo didn’t adopt me, she stole me from her. She wants Theo charged with abduction.’
‘Wow, heavy. That’s some serious shit.’ Caleb puffed his cheeks out and exhaled, shaking his head. Through the window across the room, Beth could see a plane passing through the sky, tracking a slow ascent to the space above the clouds. How good it would be, Beth thought, to be on a plane out of here. To be removed, physically, from all of this.
‘I didn’t know where else to go,’ she said.
‘I’m glad you came here.’
They didn’t talk for a while. Beth looked around the room they were in. There were no family pictures on the walls, just the sort of neutral art that they had in hotel lobbies or the foyers of big buildings. There were no wallets or keys or ticket stubs or receipts emptied from pockets onto the coffee table. No crumbs or coffee cup rings, or rugs on the arms of the couches, shoes or jumpers or bags abandoned on the floor. In one corner, a silver vase sat on a black plinth, with a spray of black grass foliage arranged in a meticulous fan shape. Beth imagined someone putting in each stem, then using a ruler to calculate the distance to the next. Was that Caleb’s mother’s doing? What sort of woman was she?
‘Where are your parents?’ she asked Caleb.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But I doubt they’re anywhere together.’
&n
bsp; Beth nodded. She vaguely remembered some scandal about Caleb’s father and a younger woman, when he had been running for office. She only remembered because Theo had kept talking about it, kept turning up the volume on the news when a story about him came on.
‘I don’t understand what this stuff has got to do with his job,’ Beth had said.
‘Everything,’ Theo had replied. ‘It’s what people do when they think nobody is watching that shows us who they really are.’
‘But who cares who he is? Don’t we just need him to do the job?’
‘You should care. You can vote in just a couple of years. You choose someone to represent you. Can someone like that represent people who are honest and trustworthy?’ Theo had gotten pretty worked up about it. She had been chopping vegetables and Beth had watched her hands, worried she might lose a finger. When Theo had stopped chopping, she rinsed her hands in the sink for a long time, staring out the window into the dark.
Beth got up and went over to the glass wall, the one you could see from the beach. She put the flat of her hand on the glass. The ocean stretched out below her, as though it was all her kingdom. You could be forgiven for thinking you owned even the sea, living here. Beth turned around to face Caleb. He was sitting back in an armchair, watching her. He blushed a little.
‘What a bitch,’ he said, shaking his head.
Beth frowned.
‘People think that because they’re older than you, they can just do what they like with you. Pick you up and move you around like a puppet. It’s fucked.’
‘Well, I don’t really know what happened, yet.’
‘Has Theo tried to get in touch? Did the police say she denied it?’
‘No.’
‘Then you do know, Beth.’
Beth felt her chest start to hurt again. She remembered the asthma attack, the night before last, that feeling of her throat closing over, her breath somewhere far away. It made her think of doors sliding shut, cling wrap stretched taut over a bowl. Things trapped.
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