Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  Oliver Watts opened for business in June of 1997. Thursday the third. Three was Oliver’s lucky number. His parents came over from Perth for the opening night. Standing out the front of the restaurant, Oliver’s father looked at the sign and nodded to himself.

  ‘That’s all he’s ever wanted, right there.’ He nudged his wife.

  ‘Ha! His name up in lights.’ Oliver’s mother looked at Theo out of the corner of her eye. ‘It’s always about Oliver, isn’t it?’

  Theo laughed, but Mrs Watts persisted. ‘Even when he was a little boy. Thought he was above us, even then.’ Her voice wasn’t bitter, just matter-of-fact.

  Mr Watts nodded, silent and calm.

  ‘He’s very talented.’ Theo’s own voice stretched thin.

  ‘Is he? That’s good, love.’

  Mr and Mrs Watts retired to their hotel at nine pm. They wanted to rest for the flight back to Perth, they told Theo.

  She met Oliver’s Aunt Ginny and adored her. Rudi couldn’t come, so she brought a well-known French-Croat theatre actor as her date. He wore a cravat and didn’t look silly but made every other man look silly for not wearing one. He told Theo that Ginny had paid him to come, because then the press would come too.

  ‘So I’m sort of a prostitute, I suppose!’ he said. ‘But I would have done whatever Ginny asked, even if she didn’t give me a cent.’

  Theo led Oliver away to the storeroom and kissed him, just as he had kissed her at the Egg and Spoon after the Telegraph review.

  ‘I’m so happy,’ he said to her, pressing his forehead against hers.

  ‘So am I,’ Theo said.

  Oliver looped his arms around her waist. ‘I just can’t believe how lucky I am.’

  Theo looked down at her stomach, pressed against his. She pictured it as an empty bowl, scraped clean and waiting to be filled. She thought about luck and the absence of luck. She thought about all she had ever wanted, but it wasn’t fair to think of that tonight.

  ‘Enjoy it. You’ve worked so hard.’

  She straightened the lapels on Oliver’s jacket and sent him back into the restaurant, where people waited to gather around him, congratulate him and bask in his success, like sunflowers turning their faces up to the light. Theo stayed in the storeroom a little while longer, then collected herself and went back out to the party.

  chapter twenty-four

  Eventually Beth got herself onto the bike and headed back to Cardmoor. She rode straight down to the caravan park to find Caleb. Almost as soon as she arrived, the rain came down in earnest and then the hail began, the stones pelting her flesh like tiny glass marbles. She dragged the bike to the toilet block to wait it out, but she was already soaked by the time she got there. Beth leant the bike against the wall and caught her breath, watching the water fall. She picked up some hailstones from the ground and held them in the palm of her hand. The ice began to sting after a while, but Beth clenched her teeth together and kept holding it. The wind picked up and whipped her wet hair around her face. Chip packets and empty cans rolled across the ground, flotsam and jetsam. Her stomach twisted, wanting, and she was cold down to her bones.

  There might be hand dryers in the toilets, she thought, imagining the warmth. She might be able to dry her shirt a bit, too. She went in, trying not to breathe in the smell of urine and cigarette smoke, so strong it ought to have been visible. Two girls sat on a bench facing away from her, and Beth could see shoes beneath one of the doors, and ankles with silver anklets. The toilet flushed and the third girl came out. She smiled at Beth as though it was the most natural thing in the world to see her here, in these toilets. Beth recognised her as one of the girls who were used as an example to others at school. The girls whose names filled in the blank when someone said, ‘You don’t want to end up like . . .’ They were the girls who had dropped out of school, or been expelled, the girls Beth had always looked at with disdain and pity. She had thought girls like these were not as smart as her, or they were lazy, or both. But this girl smiled so freely, and Beth smiled back. She was here, just as they were. Who knew why things had gone the way they had for these girls? Who knew that they were even unhappy with the way they were? Who knew why some people got blessed lives, and other people got the rug pulled out from under them?

  Beth slipped into a cubicle.

  ‘Beth, isn’t it?’ the girl called out. She could barely hear the girl over the rain drumming on the roof of the toilet block.

  ‘Um, yes,’ Beth called back.

  She flushed the toilet, waited a few moments, then went out.

  The three girls were standing at the sinks. One of them was smoking a cigarette, blowing rings up to the ceiling, and another one was fiddling with her hair at the mirror.

  ‘You’re Caleb’s girlfriend, aren’t you?’ the girl with the anklets said.

  Beth opened her mouth and closed it again. They all looked so pretty with their short cotton dresses over bikinis, their eyes smudged with liner.

  ‘Sort of. Not really,’ Beth said. She felt herself blush.

  ‘Ahh,’ said one of the girls. ‘I have a “sort-of-not-really” boyfriend too.’

  ‘It’s not Caleb, is it?’ Beth asked, alarmed. What had she walked into? All three of the girls burst out laughing, but it wasn’t unkind.

  ‘No, don’t worry! Definitely not Caleb.’

  ‘Been there, done that,’ her friend joked, and they all started laughing again.

  ‘Oh, haha! Well then! Okay,’ Beth babbled. She looked down at her sodden jeans and Tom’s old T-shirt, her stringy hair clumped around her shoulders. She made a show of washing her hands, to give them a chance to leave. When she finished, they were still standing there.

  ‘I’m Sabre,’ the girl with the anklets said. ‘That’s Mia, and Caitlin.’

  ‘Sorry, right. I’m Beth,’ Beth said. Her hand hovered in the air for a moment. Did they shake hands? Was that what happened? Sabre reached out and took her hand, then gently pulled her in closer. She flipped Beth’s hand over, palm up.

  ‘Wow, you’ve got a really interesting lifeline,’ she said, turning her gaze on Beth. Her eyes were a deep greenish blue, and she had a tiny star tattooed on her own hand, on the side of her index finger.

  ‘You should let Sabre read your cards,’ Caitlin said. ‘She’s amazing.’

  Sabre laughed. ‘I just translate,’ she said.

  Beth nodded, trying to look like she understood. Tarot cards, was that what they were talking about? Not something she had covered in science.

  ‘You should come hang out with us tonight, Beth.’ Sabre smiled generously.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the other girls said, as though Beth was an old dear friend they had run into here in the toilet block at the caravan park. ‘That would be amazing!’

  ‘Amazing,’ Beth echoed.

  ‘Just come now,’ Sabre said. ‘Caleb will probably be there.’

  Mia raised one eyebrow at her, and they all jostled and giggled.

  ‘Okay,’ Beth said. These girls were nice. So what if they had left school? Maybe school hadn’t done what it should have for them. Maybe other people had let them down, the people who were supposed to be holding them up. Maybe you could never know which constellations of tragedy and disaster and disease and heartache and loss and betrayal people operated in, until you asked them. They might have been flying too close to the sun but maybe they were just standing still and the sun had come spinning towards them.

  chapter twenty-five

  David didn’t come in the afternoon, either.

  Theo scrubbed the paving stones out the back until her knuckles bled. Beth used to play hopscotch on them. Theo could almost see her, a memory so vivid she could sit inside it, watching from the doorway as Beth counted out loud; she had just learnt her numbers. Two feet, then one foot, then two again, in her sneakers with the sparkly laces. There was a dress she used to wear back then, old-fashioned, with embroidered flowers across the bodice and flocked stitching in the palest yellow cotton. Wha
t had happened to that dress? Theo abandoned the pavers and ransacked the linen closet and the storeroom, the camphor chest, the boxes up the top of her wardrobe. She couldn’t find it anywhere.

  Eventually Theo went back and finished the pavers, then returned to searching for the dress. If she could just find it, Theo felt like something might be fixed, something might be better, she might find some solace in that flocked stitching, the little puffed sleeves. And if she had thrown the dress out, then Theo deserved every iota of pain she was feeling. She deserved to be punished.

  She didn’t find it.

  Early in the morning, Theo fell asleep at the kitchen table, waiting for David. He came at his usual time and half walked, half carried her over to the couch. He probably thought she was drunk, Theo thought, but it was fatigue and her grinding hips that made her hobble and weave. She was too tired and sore and wrecked to care what he thought anyway. David put a blanket over her, and Theo almost asked him to get Beth’s T-shirt from under her pillow so she could put it on, but stopped herself. She had laid herself bare enough already.

  Theo thought about her own mother a lot. She wondered if her mother was still alive. And, if her mother was alive, Theo wondered if she knew, in some part of herself, that Theo was in trouble. If, however she felt about her youngest daughter, her biology had triumphed and she had stayed connected to her, despite herself. Maternal instinct surpassed any other Theo had ever known. Perhaps that was why she was so flummoxed by the way her own body failed her. She had always assumed she would conceive as easily as her sisters did, had believed she would become a mother as soon as it was time. In hindsight that seemed silly. She had never been able to do any of the other things they could do. Why on earth had she expected falling pregnant to be the exception?

  It was a strange thing, to be betrayed by your own flesh. There was no getting away from it. Your body’s ineptitude followed you wherever you went. Not being especially slender or beautiful, and having gone through years of chronic pain, Theo’s relationship with her own body was already tumultuous. But now all she could see was what it was lacking.

  The second time, she knew she was pregnant. It was as though she felt something shift, felt the earliest rearranging of her cells to accommodate the prospect of housing a small being. That’s how she thought of it at the time, as though her body was building a house for a baby. Laying a slab for the foundation, then as weeks passed, adding bricks, insulation, plumbing.

  She knew it when the baby died, as well. She was seven weeks pregnant, by her own calculations, and sitting at the table in the sunroom, paying invoices for the restaurant. All those sorts of things had become Theo’s job. She was the one who filled in when anyone was sick. She was waitress and kitchen hand, cleaner and hostess. She did all the unglamorous things, the dirty, unrecognised grunt work of running a restaurant. She dealt with health and safety regulations and tradespeople and marketing and staff. She found the right sort of chairs and painted the hallway to the toilets and called the plumber when the toilets were blocked. She decanted bulk tubs of home-brand liquid soap into expensive dispensers in those toilets.

  That day, Theo was bookkeeper. Oliver was at the restaurant, meeting potential investors. They had been open for less than a year and he was already planning an expansion. Theo thought it was a mistake. It seemed greedy somehow, or like they were tempting fate. It had all gone so well so far. Theo thought they ought to just be grateful for that. But Oliver didn’t seem satisfied. As soon as they started to fill the tables, he wanted to put more in, see if they could fill them too. The bar got higher, and higher again.

  Theo had almost finished her work when she shifted in her seat and felt a dampness on the chair. She stood and her midsection lit up with pain. No, she thought to herself. Please, not this. Her legs folded and she slumped on the floor. Already, this time was much worse than the last. On her hands and knees, Theo crawled down the hallway, sweating so profusely with the effort that her hair felt wet, as though she had showered, by the time she made it to the telephone. She pulled a blue and white chequered tea towel down from where it was draped over the handle of the fridge door and tucked it between her legs. The white parts of the tea towel turned red, and the blue, black. She rang for a taxi and asked the driver to take her to Emergency.

  At the hospital the doctor and the nurses said Theo had lost her baby. The language bothered Theo. ‘Lost’ implied carelessness, a mistake. Absent-mindedness. On morphine, her mind latched onto this, the words. She turned them over and over again, thinking in fragments.

  Theodora Abrams, you seem to have lost your baby.

  Did you look in the last place you saw it?

  You’ve misplaced it.

  Miscarried it.

  So now you will never carry

  Your baby

  Plump in the hammock of your arms.

  Theo, you did it wrong.

  She checked herself out. She told Oliver she had a virus and that she was anaemic and needed to eat more red meat. Leafy greens, for the iron. She didn’t look too carefully at the fact that she had not, once again, told him that she was pregnant. In some part of herself she knew he would not feel the way she did about it. She had tried to forget how he had said he didn’t like children, but it nagged at her, hovering in the back of her mind. In any case, he certainly didn’t want children at Oliver Watts.

  A review had described the restaurant as a ‘promising newcomer on the family dining scene’ and Oliver had been incensed.

  ‘But it gives us four stars,’ Theo had said.

  ‘It’s an insult,’ Oliver replied. ‘It’s how the critic suggests that Oliver Watts is not in the same league as other fine-dining restaurants. He’s saying it’s unsophisticated.’

  ‘What is so insulting about being a family restaurant? Children eat.’

  ‘They eat sandwiches and chips. I don’t want to cook chips. They can go to McDonald’s.’

  ‘So what are you saying? Kick out the children?’ Theo was smarting, she had to be careful, keep herself in check. Oliver nodded. That was exactly what he was saying.

  Furthermore, he decided that they would no longer be open at lunch. The bar was extended, the lighting lowered, and no table accommodated parties of any more than four guests.

  ‘I want it to be intimate,’ Oliver said.

  Theo had laughed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, we can’t afford not to have larger parties.’

  ‘Four maximum.’

  ‘So if a group of seven comes in, dripping in jewels, already a bit pissed, wanting to flash some cash to business associates, what do I do, turn them away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He had been right, of course. They loved it, the critics, the diners, everyone. Loved to hate it, loved to smirk at the ridiculousness of it, the snobbish exclusivity. Loved to eat there, while deriding all those things. Within months they had a full house and waiting list every night. They had one table available for the winner of the ballot in the queue outside. People queued even in the rain. Theo wanted to tell them not to bother, it wasn’t that good.

  Oliver Watts had only four wines on the list, and no beer. One dessert was served each night. They did not serve hot chocolate, or bread, or mineral water, or have salt and pepper on the tables.

  ‘If someone finds my food unacceptably seasoned, they can go somewhere else,’ Oliver said.

  ‘Yes, with more than three of their friends,’ Theo replied.

  He didn’t bother to respond to that. It was his vision. So that was that.

  Theo worked at the restaurant as well in that first year. But Oliver didn’t like it, he said it didn’t look good, having his partner on the floor, as though he couldn’t afford to hire staff. So he eased her out. There was a sommelier now, and he worked with Oliver on the menu. That part hurt more than Theo could acknowledge.

  ‘You need to get well,’ he told her. ‘You’re always so tired.’

  She had been pleading tiredness to get out of all the functions Oliver wanted
her to attend. Charity balls (she thought of her mother, how vindicated she would have been that Theo was finally emulating her), black-tie dinners, openings of hospital wings, motorway extensions. Other restaurants. Theo didn’t understand why all the gallivanting around town was necessary and she told Oliver so.

  ‘Well, why do you think everyone else is there?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t know, networking, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, because they’re businessmen. Like me. This is my business.’

  ‘I thought food was your business.’

  ‘If that was all there was to it, then I’d just cook food and serve it and leave it at that. Anyone can do that. That’s all I did for years.’ She could tell Oliver was trying not to raise his voice, they were in the bar and the staff were setting up for the night’s service. The cutlery Theo had chosen was being laid next to the wineglasses she had also chosen.

  ‘So you want more, I get it. But what is it you want? An Oliver Watts in London, Hong Kong? One in every world capital?’

  Oliver looked at her. ‘Well, maybe, yes. Maybe I do want that. Would that be so bad?’

  Theo didn’t know where to begin. ‘What about us? What about our future? Aren’t we going to settle down soon? Maybe start a family? How are we going to do that with you building your empire in the four corners of the world?’

  Oliver was the first to look away. ‘I’m enjoying myself, Theo. I worked so hard for this. Can’t I just enjoy it for a while?’

  ‘Going out, you mean? All the events, you enjoy them?’

  ‘Yes. I do. It’s exciting. I know they’re not your thing.’

  ‘Or I’m not theirs.’

  He didn’t disagree. The green dress that Oliver had bought for her at the markets was one of only three that Theo owned. She did not wear heels, or makeup, or jewellery. She had thought Oliver liked that about her, that she was ready to muck in and work, that she wasn’t worried about breaking a nail. Theo had no desire to paint and preen herself, to parade and schmooze. Besides all of that, she found the functions silly and dull. The air-kissing and the fawning over one another, it was all just a sport for the wealthy or those who desperately wanted to be. Her mother would have loved it. Theo hated it.