Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘And if you don’t? What would happen if you just refused?’

  Oliver spread out his hands.

  ‘I don’t know, Theo. I don’t know what would happen. She might go anyway. And she might not take the baby with her.’

  chapter thirty-two

  Beth could smell something sharp and chemical on the man’s hand. Beyond that, alcohol and rancid sweat.

  ‘Are you going to scream? I’ll let go if you tell me you won’t scream.’

  Beth shook her head, her eyes flicking around Sabre’s caravan. A knife, a rock, a razor, she thought, something, there must be something here. She felt like she was going to wet herself, or vomit, or both. A gun? She guessed it was possible, but not likely. Still, Sabre might have a gun here. Where would you keep a gun? Under the mattress?

  The man let her go of her and took his hand off her mouth. Beth wiped at it and pulled away so no parts of them were touching. He motioned to her to stay where she was.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  Beth nodded. Even in the dimness, she could tell it was the man she had seen outside the caravan marked Enquiries.

  ‘You’re the owner of the caravan park,’ she said, her voice hardly above a whisper.

  The man scoffed. ‘Ha! The owner doesn’t live here. I’m the caretaker. I take care, you see. I take a lot of care.’

  Still squatting, Beth lowered onto her bottom and inched away incrementally, without taking her eyes off him. He saw what she was doing and his face hardened, his eyes flinty and shining. He sank down to a sitting position too.

  ‘Are you scared of me?’

  ‘Should I be scared of you?’ Beth wasn’t sure what he wanted her to say.

  ‘You should be scared of everyone here. That would be smart. Are you smart?’

  Beth nodded again.

  He laughed, high and loosely, his head rolling back and his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. Something disturbed her about the way he laughed, the fevered eruption of it. And how completely joyless it sounded.

  ‘I didn’t come here for you,’ he said, and the laughing stopped as quickly as it had begun. ‘Sabre has something of mine and I want it back.’

  Beth waited, trying to breathe normally. Every muscle in her was tensed, like a racehorse waiting for the crack of the starting pistol.

  ‘Maybe I can help you look for it?’ she said.

  He shuffled a little closer to her. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not what I want.’ He laughed again.

  Beth tried to make herself as still and quiet as she could, as if maybe he would forget about her, or decide she was too small, too insignificant to bother with. Her back was pressed up against a small cabinet and the corner of the bed. To get out of the room she would have to get around him somehow.

  The man saw her looking towards the door and smiled. He smiled as though he had only watched people do it in movies and had never actually tried it out in real life before.

  ‘Stay a while,’ he said. ‘It’s Beth, isn’t it? I’m Jason, Beth. You can call me Jase.’

  ‘Jase,’ she repeated, trying to say it nicely, tying to pretend it didn’t make her want to retch. ‘How did you know my name, Jase?’

  ‘I know everyone here. I make sure I know everyone. And they know me. Caleb knows me, did he tell you that? Caleb has known me for a long time.’ He shook his head. His hair hung in oily strings around his face. He was thin but had jowls, sagging pouches of skin either side of his chin. His eyes were small and dull, as though the shine had been buffed off them, with greyish shadows underneath. A wolf, Beth thought, when she looked at his face. A wolf or a mangy old dog, starving and diseased.

  ‘He didn’t say, I don’t think, or maybe he did and I didn’t remember,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t remember?’ Jason raised his eyebrows.

  Beth backpedalled. ‘No, I would have remembered if he’d said he knew you. Of course I would’ve. I definitely would have.’

  ‘Yeah? You like me, Beth? You think I’m memorable?’ Jason watched her, his head on one side. Beth couldn’t read him at all, he seemed to cycle through moods in seconds. He was unbalanced, she could see that. Jason leant back against the wall of the cabinet and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Not supposed to smoke in these caravans,’ he said. ‘The number of ’em I’ve seen go up in flames over the years. Cigarettes in ashtrays, sometimes still in people’s fingers when they nod off. Boom!’ He mimed an explosion, throwing his hands up in the air like a child. He widened his eyes so more of the whites were exposed. It made him look rabid and terrible. Beth smiled and nodded, watching his face, calculating. She could ask him if she could leave. But maybe asking would give him ideas about stopping her? She could give him money? How much? She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, that detached anatomical analysis he had performed the first time he saw her. Hair, ears, fingers, toes.

  She had to get out of here.

  Beth got to her feet and Jason frowned. He stood up too.

  ‘I’m asthmatic,’ she said, apologetic. ‘I’m sorry, I really need some air.’

  She tried to walk past him but he stepped in her path, then smiled. ‘Just joking, Beth,’ he said, and moved aside. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Jason.’ She smiled, but kept moving to the door, almost there, just two more steps. He grabbed her arm, just above the elbow, and pulled her in close. They both watched as he slid one finger under the strap of her dress. He moved it back and forth over the skin there.

  ‘Jase, I said. Remember? I said that you could call me Jase.’

  Beth’s arm shook under his hand. ‘Jase. I’m sorry. Jase.’

  ‘Tell Caleb I think you’re pretty, hey Beth? You’re a pretty little thing. You tell him I said so.’

  His finger kept moving. Then all of a sudden he let go, and Beth ran, almost falling down the steps from the door, down the path and out onto the road, her chest heaving, her legs burning, but she didn’t dare stop, didn’t look behind her, just ran and ran.

  chapter thirty-three

  Since she had begun her life with Beth, Theo had prided herself on her independence. She read about Janet Frame, how she lived as a recluse, and understood. Theo could have lived on a desert island, she’d told Beth, as long as Beth came with her. What a thing to say to a child, Theo thought now, furious at herself. No wonder Beth was pulling away – Theo had been drinking her dry. Besides, it wasn’t true anyway, Theo realised. She had never been alone. There was Greta and Tania, and Oliver and then Mary, and now David. She’d been kidding herself all these years. Theo needed people, and she had them. The woman from the cliff would have laughed in her face.

  A couple of hours after she spoke to Mary, the pain in Theo’s hips got so bad that she rang David and asked him to buy painkillers for her and bring them back. He shook his head when he saw her, knotted up in the sheets, arching her back and grinding her teeth. Theo wondered how she would bear this pain in jail. She wondered how she would bear jail.

  ‘You should have called me earlier,’ David said, reproachful.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Theo said.

  ‘Oh, Theo.’

  ‘Please, just bring me the tablets.’

  And then, finally, Theo slept.

  Alice brought Elizabeth over on the day she left for America. When she knocked on the door, Theo answered it with guns blazing. She was going to tell Alice what a difficult position she was putting her in. She was going to tell her that it was simply unacceptable. But then, when she saw Alice holding the baby, wearing too much makeup and carting an old school backpack full of Elizabeth’s things, those words wouldn’t come. She stood aside for Alice to enter, silent.

  All Oliver said was, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  Alice turned to him then, and it was like seeing Oliver reflected in female form. Even in posture, Alice mirrored him, shoulders back and chin lifted high. As regal and poised as a queen, Alice said, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, too, Oliver.
’

  Though Theo was still in shock, another part of her almost admired Alice. How easily she believed in her own righteousness. How secure she was, in the passage she took. And why shouldn’t Oliver, as the infant’s father, be expected to reciprocate the burden of care that she herself had shouldered in these past six weeks? Wasn’t he just as beholden, just as responsible for Elizabeth, as Alice was?

  ‘I’ll be back in six weeks,’ Alice said, looking not at Oliver or Theo, but at Elizabeth. She bent down, kissed the baby’s head and smoothed her hair down, tucking the blankets around her shoulders. She bit her lip. Oliver glanced at Theo, and his expression was one of utter helplessness and defeat. He was cowed. Theo felt an urge to spit at him, to spit at Alice, at the two of them, even though she’d never spat at anyone in her life.

  Alice left, her keys jangling as she walked down the path. A bird alighted on the branch of the neighbour’s tree and she paused, briefly, to look at it. Some sort of seed grew on that tree and the rainbow lorikeets loved it, flocking in their technicolour by the dozen. Theo thought of cuckoos, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests.

  And Alice was gone.

  In the days that followed, Theo wondered whether baby Elizabeth was distressed because she missed her mother, or whether this crying, squalling, wakeful creature was just an ordinary infant. She didn’t seem to sleep much, whatever Oliver did. Theo watched as he tried different things, lying her in her bassinet, on their bed, in a drawer lined with a warm towel. He jiggled her and rocked her and patted her and then stopped jiggling and rocking and patting, but nothing seemed to work. Theo shut herself in her workshop out the back, but she could hear the wailing wherever she was. Oliver didn’t ask her for help and Theo didn’t offer it, though the impulse was there. She went out when she could. She put one foot in front of the other, she made one bowl and then another. Oliver had three days off in a row. Theo couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.

  Then, one night, the third or fourth, he came into their bedroom holding the baby slightly away from his body, like a bag of potatoes. The baby was making short, muffled whimperings, not urgent, but Theo knew she needed something. She wasn’t sure what, but the need was definitely there. Theo had been around enough babies to know that something wasn’t okay with this one. For that matter, something wasn’t okay with Oliver either.

  ‘Theo,’ Oliver said, and she could tell from his voice that he was sick, genuinely ill. ‘I’m so sorry, Theo. Please, can you take her, just for a moment? I’m dizzy and I might drop her. Please.’

  He was handing her the bundle before Theo had even fully woken, and she knew, before Elizabeth was in her arms, what she would feel like, the smell and softness and warm weight of her. Despite herself, she reached for her, and put her to her chest. She was just a baby who needed to be held.

  Oliver lay on the bed, his lips cracked and purple, his face pale, shivering and sweating at the same time. Theo had never seen him like that.

  ‘Flu or something,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Okay,’ Theo said. ‘Does the baby need feeding? Is that what I should do now?’

  ‘I think so. It’s all in the kitchen.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Theo, we can hire a babysitter. You don’t have to do this. I’ll call someone, I’ll pay for them to come.’ Oliver could hardly lift his head from the pillow.

  ‘Do you know any babysitters?’

  ‘Maybe one of the waitresses at the restaurant?’

  Theo raised her eyebrows. Oliver must have been delirious, she thought. Those girls were teenagers, younger even than Alice, some of them. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. They would be in nightclubs, at parties, if they weren’t at work at the restaurant itself.

  ‘And when she’s had her bottle?’ she asked Oliver.

  ‘Put her back to sleep,’ he said. Theo looked at him. He was in no fit state to care for a child. And there was nobody else here. Fine, then. Even if she didn’t feel like she had a clue what she was doing, she wasn’t stupid, Theo gave herself that. Plenty of people stupider than her had looked after children and not damaged them irreparably. Anyway, what was the alternative? Leave Oliver, ill as he was, to care for her? Theo wasn’t made of stone. What else could she do but begin?

  ‘I’ll look after the baby tonight,’ she said. ‘We’ll figure something else out tomorrow.’

  Oliver fell into sleep the way a man took water after days of thirst: desperately. He still sweated and shook, even asleep. Theo took Elizabeth into the kitchen and tried to figure out what to do next. Elizabeth spluttered and mewled like a kitten. Theo read the instructions on the tin of formula and made a bottle with one hand, holding Elizabeth against her with the other, the baby’s head on her shoulder. Once or twice Elizabeth reared her head back and Theo panicked and stopped what she was doing to secure her.

  She held her as she might hold a sheet of glass as thin as paper. The baby seemed so fragile, fine-boned and flimsy. Theo finished making the bottle and gave it to her. Elizabeth fell asleep halfway through, roused to finish it, and slept again for a little while. Then Theo felt a bubbling from her bottom and realised that she needed her nappy changed. She found the contents of Alice’s backpack spread on a chair in the sunroom, a change station, after a fashion. She changed the baby’s nappy but then she spat up on her romper, so that needed to be changed too. It took a while to find a clean one, and then once she had wrangled it on, buttoning it up took another age. By that time Elizabeth was crying again, so Theo gave her another bottle. The rest of the night passed in that way.

  It felt to Theo as though caring for the baby was just a constant cycle of addressing needs. As soon as one cycle had ended, another would begin, with barely a pause. Elizabeth seemed content if she was being held, but the minute Theo tried to put her down she screamed, a sound like a car alarm, a bleating wail. During that night, Theo didn’t think about Oliver and Alice being Elizabeth’s parents, and how that felt. She didn’t have time to.

  Eventually she fell asleep, with Elizabeth in her arms, in the armchair by the window in the sunroom. At dawn, sun streamed in and birds began to sing, and Theo woke, confused and disoriented. She looked down at Elizabeth, her tiny mouth sucking in air and one of her legs cycling gently in her sleep. They’d done it. The night was over. Theo had looked after a baby alone for the best part of a night, and both of them had survived intact. She would have been quite pleased with herself if she hadn’t been so thoroughly exhausted.

  That day, it was a public holiday. Theo rang an after-hours doctor to visit Oliver at home, and then Ethan to bring supplies from the chemist and reassure Oliver that the restaurant was still functioning without him. She got out the phone book and began searching for nannying agencies. In the ads, beautiful women smiled benevolently down at doll-like babies.

  ‘I hope you’re better in time for the opening,’ Theo heard Ethan say to Oliver on his way out.

  ‘I’ll come on a stretcher if I have to,’ Oliver said. In the hallway, Theo slammed the sunroom door. The restaurant. Always the fucking restaurant.

  Theo rang Greta, and Greta said exactly what Theo wanted her to, at first.

  ‘That’s outrageous! How can they ask you to do that? Have the child in your home and look after her yourself? Theo, that’s just shameless.’

  ‘I know. I’m going to call a nanny,’ Theo said.

  ‘Oh?’ Greta sounded doubtful.

  ‘You don’t think I should? You just said it was outrageous that I should have to look after the baby. Now you don’t think I should find someone else to do it?’

  ‘Well, who do you mean? A stranger?’

  ‘Greta. Yes, a stranger.’ Theo held Elizabeth while she spoke on the phone. Elizabeth seemed to watch her face and Theo did funny expressions, raising her eyebrows up as high as she could, wrinkling her nose up and sticking out her tongue.

  ‘It’s just that she’s so tiny, to be palmed off to an outsider .
. .’

  ‘Greta, I am an outsider.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Someone who doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t care about her.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what you mean! I’m thinking of a professional, not just a teenager or something. They will care, because they’re paid to care.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Theo exhaled. Surely Greta wasn’t going to guilt-trip her about this. Theo couldn’t be expected to care for Elizabeth herself, not under the circumstances. A nanny would be fine. Theo thought of the photogenic women in the ads, the babies clasped to their substantial bosoms. Is that what professional nannies looked like?

  ‘What’s she like then?’ Greta asked. ‘Is she very difficult? Too much for you to manage on your own? Marjorie’s Ellen was like that. Colic, she had. I suppose you best get some help, then.’

  Theo let that last bit slide. ‘I don’t know if she’s difficult. I haven’t looked after a baby for this long before.’

  ‘Well, what’s been happening, then?’

  Theo told Greta about the night that had passed. Greta laughed.

  ‘Theo, that is a perfectly average, normal baby. You’ll be fine. I’m here if you need me,’ Greta said. ‘And if you can’t get her to sleep, take her for a walk. All babies like to be walked. It reminds them of being in their mother’s belly, when she walked around and they felt the motion from inside.’

  Theo didn’t answer. Elizabeth reached out a forefinger and pointed at her. Her tiny finger wavered there, and it probably wasn’t longer than a few seconds but her eyes were fixed on Theo’s for the whole time. Tomorrow, if Oliver isn’t better, I’m calling you a nanny, Theo thought.

  ‘Theo, are you there? Take her for a walk, I said.’

  ‘Yes, Greta. I’ll take her for a walk.’

  chapter thirty-four

  Beth couldn’t find Caleb at the bonfire site or on the beach. There were people everywhere, knots of children moving in clumps like tumbleweeds. Some were people she recognised from the party the other night, who smiled or nodded vaguely at her. There were people Beth had never seen before, too. Eventually she found Caleb, standing with a group of guys outside a caravan, tins in their hands, talking and laughing. Her heart was still hammering in her chest and her palms were slick with sweat. She was so relieved to see Caleb that it made her feel unsteady, like she might tip over if she didn’t concentrate.