Ethan was thrilled, he said it made Oliver look like a charming rogue, exactly what they wanted. Because none of them smiled in the photo, it wasn’t cheeky, or silly, but sexy, he said. Alice went to another premiere with Oliver the very next night. Ethan begged a sample dress off a designer friend for her, bought Oliver a new suit and off they went, arm in arm. And so it began.
‘Is Alice paid for her time with you at these events?’ Theo asked Oliver after they had been to what felt like quite a few different functions. She tried to sound light, interested. She had bitten the inside of her cheek to shreds, working up to this.
‘Paid? She’d pay me to come. She has a ball.’ Oliver didn’t look up from the television.
‘And you? Do you have . . . a ball?’ Theo asked. She moved across his line of sight and pretended to be looking for something on the hallstand.
Oliver yawned and rolled onto his side. ‘Theo. If you don’t want me to go to these things with Alice, just say so.’
‘Why wouldn’t I want you to go?’ Theo started straightening the lounge room around him, plumping cushions and lining up books on the coffee table. Say it, she dared him in her mind. Say that I’m jealous.
‘I don’t know. But you’ve been acting strange ever since I started doing it. Actually, you’ve been acting strange for longer than that.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
Oliver turned off the television and patted the couch next to him. Theo sat and curled her face into the corner of his neck and shoulder, breathing him in. He smelt different to how she remembered.
‘What’s wrong, Theo? Are you not happy that you don’t have to work? The restaurant is doing so well, I thought you’d be pleased,’ Oliver said.
Theo closed her eyes. The restaurant was the third party in their relationship. It featured in every discussion they had.
‘I think I’m just bored,’ she said. ‘I’ve got nothing to do.’
‘What about a class of some sort?’
‘Ugh, that’s exactly what Greta said. I hate classes. I’m never any good at anything.’
Oliver pulled away so she had to look at him. ‘Why don’t you try something you’ve never done before? Something creative?’
Theo felt the muscles in her neck and shoulders tighten. ‘Like painting, you mean?’ Like Alice?
‘What? No, I wasn’t really thinking of painting. I was thinking of something more like pottery. Something where you could make something, have something useful at the end of it. I think you’d get bored if it didn’t have a purpose, whatever you do.’
Theo smiled. Being known so well was lovely sometimes. He was exactly right. Art for art’s sake, that wasn’t Theo, she would be impatient and wouldn’t keep it up. But if she could make something functional, that would be better. Maybe plates for the restaurant, Theo thought. Beautiful, unique plates. That was how she started her pottery.
She had known for sure at the Christmas party, the way the other staff looked at her, the way Ethan didn’t, or couldn’t, look at her. Alice stayed clear of her, but Theo kept trying to trap her in conversation, popping up behind her at the bar and waiting for her in the hallway outside the toilets. She couldn’t help it. She wanted Alice to look at her, look right in her eyes, she wanted to see Alice squirm. But Alice was slippery.
Alice knew she was being tailed, though. She went over to Oliver and whispered something to him, smirking. Just for a moment, she laid her hand at his waist, brushed her fingers over his ribs. Oliver pushed her hand away, but Theo had already seen; she’d been supposed to see. They gave out awards to the staff, silly things, prizes for service and punctuality and a prize for ‘Landing the Biggest Fish’, which went to someone who had convinced the diners at their table to order $500 magnums of champagne, not just for the table but for each person sitting at it. Theo laughed and cheered and drank, and as the night wore on she smiled harder and laughed and cheered more. She was the loudest and most enthusiastic, to show she was a good sport. To show she was one of them still, despite not having worked a day since February. Valentine’s Day had been her last shift, funnily enough.
There was a photo of her in the series that someone had put together of the year, pinned up on a noticeboard on an easel at the front of the room. Theo looked so happy in the photo, holding up a review, four and a half stars in the Good Taste Annual, the industry bible at that time. She wondered if Alice had taken that photo. They had sometimes worked together back then. She wondered if Alice had been sleeping with Oliver already when she took it, if the only way she could look at Theo was through a lens. She wondered if Alice was picturing Oliver undressing Theo the way he undressed her when her finger pressed the shutter button.
The awards went on, and Theo drank so much she threw up, but not until she had danced and laughed and thrown her arms around anyone who crossed her path. She felt Oliver watching her, felt his annoyance, his embarrassment, but she didn’t care, it just made her drink more. She was caught in a weird vortex of shame and anger and a desire to goad him, to taunt him with how unmanageable she was, make him see her, make him pay attention to her. She wanted to rub her presence in his face. She wanted him to react, but of course he didn’t. That wasn’t Oliver Watts’s style. Or maybe he just didn’t care enough.
Theo passed out in a corner somewhere while the party continued and woke in her own bed, the sun gushing through the window after days of rain, traitorous and cruel on her throbbing head. Oliver was in the lounge, asleep on the couch. She stood over him, watching him sleep, his eyelids quivering and left brow twitching, a tiny, jerky dance upon his face. Theo said his name, not loudly, but he woke and looked at her, and she looked back at him, and many things passed between them in those moments, but in the end she just asked, ‘Will you stop, now? Will you end it with Alice?’
Oliver nodded, taking both of her hands between his own, still warm from sleep. He brought her hands to his face and pressed her fingers to his lips, closed his eyes and kissed her fingers, over and over. Theo pulled one hand free and slapped him so hard that she thought she’d cracked his cheekbone. She imagined that the bone was made of glass and had now shattered, and tiny grounds were spiralling down through his throat and into his stomach, where they drifted like tiny icebergs, waiting to cause shipwrecks for Oliver Watts. At that moment, Theo couldn’t have said whether she would have saved him from dying like that if she could.
chapter twenty-eight
Beth was still at the beach when the sun began to rise. It was strange, seeing the expanse of ocean, the stretch of the sand and the cut of the horizon emerging again. Light leaked from the sun in a slow drip, bathing everything in brighter and brighter washes of colour. People huddled in clumps on the sand, empty bottles and jumpers and shoes scattered around them, as if they’d all washed up with the tide. Sabre and Mia were asleep on a blanket under the trees, nestled together like puppies. Sabre had one arm thrown over Mia, her fingers bent up on the other girl’s stomach like she was playing the piano. Beth must have fallen asleep for a bit, too, she realised. Sand crusted the side of her face and hair. The inside of her mouth felt coated in glue and her skull ached like it had been squashed into a too-small head. She sat up and watched the sun finish levering itself into the sky.
Caleb came across the dunes from the caravan park. Just when I needed him to, thought Beth. She smiled at him, and smiled at Sabre and Mia, too, feeling a surge of affection for them and their sleep-soft faces. Friends could be your family, too. She knelt to brush Sabre’s hair off her face.
‘Where did you go?’ Beth asked him. ‘I don’t remember you leaving.’
‘You were putting it away, Bethie,’ Caleb said, grinning at her. ‘I’m not surprised you can’t remember much.’
Beth smiled, proud.
‘Come on, I’ll walk you home,’ Caleb said, and held a hand out to her. Beth remembered all the times he had walked her home from work, before all of this. It felt like a decade ago. She put her hand in his and they wandered out through t
he park together. It was quiet and cool at that hour, and neither of them spoke much. Beth wished she had her sunglasses. The glare off the water made her eyes sting and electric fingers of colour waved behind her eyelids when she closed them.
They stopped to retrieve Tom’s bike on their way out. A couple of streets past the entrance to the caravan park, they saw Caitlin getting into a small black car on the street outside, a nice one. She drove past them without slowing. The windows of the car were tinted so Beth couldn’t see Caitlin’s face. She waved anyway, then let go of Caleb’s hand to tie her top back into the knot that Caitlin had put it in the night before. The air lapped at her bare stomach. In the trees above them, cockatoos chattered and scratched at the bark. It was hot already, the air thick with it.
‘She could have offered me a lift,’ Caleb grumbled. ‘She’s only a few houses over from mine.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ Beth thought of Caitlin in the toilet block, barefoot and wet from the rain, the smoke from her cigarette drifting around her head like a halo.
‘She was the one who bought all the booze last night. Nobody else at the park has that sort of money.’
Except you, Beth wanted to say, but didn’t. Caleb never brought up his own money, or flashed it around, but he always had it. Maybe he just didn’t think about it, Beth speculated. Maybe that was the difference between people who had money and those who didn’t – thinking about it was a choice. She had seen money changing hands, though, when he drifted away from her to confer and laugh with various people, slapping hands, slapping backs. She thought of his hollow white house, the vast stretches of empty space up to the high ceilings, the walls of glacial glass, vacant seats, sharp steel corners at every turn. Even if she had money, Beth would still want a house like Mary’s, she thought, laden with the detritus of a chaotic family life: fingerprints, sandy feet, and the layer cake of noise that a houseful of people made.
Caleb walked with her most of the way there, then carried on to his own house, up in the hills. Beth wheeled the bike through the backyard, conscious of the dark slicks the tyres made in the dewy grass. In the dusk and must of the shed, she stood still for a moment. It smelt like motor oil and sawdust, and grass clippings from the lawn mower. Tools hung on nails along the wall, with ghostly shapes marked in pen where missing pieces were supposed to be. Beth thought of the man with his long black toolbox at the caravan park.
Beth knew she probably smelt of alcohol. Her hair was greasy and she could feel the grit of sand on her scalp from when she’d fallen asleep. Her lips felt tender from kissing. She smiled to herself, running her fingers over them. She had never stayed out all night before. She would quite like to do it again. Why not, anyway? What difference did it make, what you did in which hours? Night and day was really just a matter of light and dark. Which was a silly thing to be constrained by, when you thought about it.
The universe tended towards disorder. It was the second law of thermodynamics, the natural way of things. Who was she to fight it? Before Alice had shown up, Beth had spent so long trying to impose order on her life. Trying to do the right thing, be the right thing, get good marks, work long hours; think of her future. Be responsible. What a strange sort of relief it was, to stop trying.
It was the bonfire tonight. Tonight Beth would see the full moon glow. Science had disproved the theory that the full moon brought out the wildness in people, Beth knew. The moon just brought out the people, back when they lived by its phases and light. More people meant more trouble, the moon was neither here nor there. And yet, Beth didn’t feel like it would be just an ordinary night. Maybe it was just the arrival of something she had wanted for a very long time.
She headed back across the lawn to the house. She would slip in the side door, she thought, and tiptoe down the hallway, straight into the guest room. In a few hours, she could emerge, bleary-eyed and dazed as though she had just slept in. But she was too late. Mary was up with the baby pressed to her breast, anchored with her arm like a protective wing. The radio was on low, and Tom dozed beside her. Beth stood in the doorway, wondering if she could just stroll past them like nothing had happened.
Mary pointed at her. ‘Come here.’
Tom sat up and rubbed at his eyes. ‘Beth, are you only just getting in now? Where the bloody hell have you been?’ His voice was loud in the hushed house and the baby let out a murmur of protest. Down the hallway, one of the kids coughed.
‘Tom, go back to bed,’ Mary said, in a stage whisper. ‘And check on the others.’
‘I might just go to bed, too,’ Beth said. She made a motion as if to leave.
‘Like hell you will. Come here, I said.’ Mary threw her words out like a lasso.
Tom picked up the baby and put her on his shoulder. ‘We’d like you to stay here tonight,’ he said to Beth, on his way out. ‘We can all have dinner together.’
‘But it’s bonfire night!’ The words slipped out before Beth could stop them. She pressed her lips together. Now she’d shown her hand.
‘Bonfire night? Even more reason to stay in. Drunk people and fire, not a good mix.’ Tom’s voice had turned hard. He walked off down the hallway. Over his shoulder, the baby gazed at Beth with her big dark eyes, ink pools. Was I her age when Theo stole me from my mother, Beth thought. She slumped down on the couch, picked up one of the kids’ books that was tucked between the cushions and began flipping through it.
‘Do you know how worried we’ve been?’ Mary’s voice was low.
‘Here we go. I’m fine, aren’t I?’ Beth didn’t look up.
‘I don’t know how you are, that’s the problem,’ Mary said. ‘I don’t know because you’re never here. I asked you to be back here for dinner last night. It’s breakfast time. Where were you?’
Beth let the book fall shut. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’ She yawned, her mouth opening as wide as it would go.
Mary stared at her. ‘Beth, stop. Why are you being like this? I’m on your side.’
‘My side? How can you be? You’re Theo’s best friend, Mary. You’re on her side.’
Mary shook her head. ‘My job is to look after you.’
‘Look after me? Does that mean trying to get me to talk about Theo? That’s all you want to do. I’ve already told you, I don’t want to talk about her.’
‘What are you going to do, pretend she never existed?’
‘I wish I could. She stole me! Who would do something like that? She’s a criminal.’ Beth was nearly shouting now but she didn’t care, didn’t care if she woke the whole household, all the precious children could go back to sleep later. Lay their heads on their own pillows in their own beds, whenever they needed to.
‘But you don’t even know why she did it.’ Mary looked close to tears.
‘And I don’t care.’ Go on, cry, Beth thought, cry for poor Theo, the baby thief. What bullshit. Theo didn’t deserve anyone’s tears. If Mary or Beth did cry, it should be over their own stupidity, Beth thought. They had both been suckered in by Theo, and both of them had loved her. That was something to cry about.
‘She would have had her reasons,’ Mary said, leaning forward, her head tilted, pleading, appealing to Beth. ‘It’s never as simple as it sounds.’
‘Maybe it’s just as simple as it sounds, Mary. How do you know?’
‘I know you’re angry, Beth.’ Mary reached out a hand and Beth stood up.
‘You know nothing.’
They stared at each other, silent. Mary shook her head. She whipped her hair off her face and began plumping the cushions on the couch, snatching up toys and straightening the rug.
‘You know what? I’m not going to try and talk to you about this right now, Beth. But Tom is right, you’re not going anywhere tonight. Not to the bonfire, not anywhere. And I’m not going to talk to you about that either.’
chapter twenty-nine
‘David,’ Theo said. ‘Can you find something out for me?’
They were sitting at her kitchen table once again. Theo wa
s sick of the sound of her own voice, sick of the effort it took to recall everything she had buried for so long. David looked up from his pile of documents.
‘I can try.’
‘The night I saw Alice on the cliff, a woman had just jumped.’
‘Yes, I heard about that. Did you know her?’
‘No. But I saw it and I’ve been thinking about her a lot.’ Theo toyed with the teapot, turning it in circles. Her mother used to do that too, to brew it. It was funny how habits could be passed on without anyone noticing. She wondered what Beth had picked up from her.
‘What would you like me to find out?’
‘I don’t know. Just more about her, who she was. There was a small mention of it in the paper a few days ago, but nothing else since then. She died.’
David nodded, on his face was an expression that Theo couldn’t read. ‘Okay.’
He had listened to her talk for hours. He was building a case to defend her, and it hadn’t cost her a cent. He had kept her pantry stocked and brought her coffee and liaised with the police. A man she had known for less than a week had done more for her than anyone else had in quite some time, apart from Mary. Maybe this is what the woman in her dream had been trying to tell her: Your guardian angel is already here.
When Oliver said he would stop sleeping with Alice, Theo believed him. In some part of herself, the part that remembered the man she had fallen in love with in Manchester, who remembered the two of them crowded into the narrow bed in her tiny room, Theo thought Oliver could change back to how he used to be, back to when it was Theo he wanted. She wanted to believe this behaviour was an aberration, an irregularity. Greta would have shaken her head. The kernel of the man is the same. This is who he always was, he just didn’t show you.
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