Theo felt sick at the sight of Alice and knew it must have shown on her face. Alice kept her expression perfectly neutral, like a mask. She seemed even taller than Theo remembered from when she’d seen her on the clifftop, and more beautiful and more terrible. Instead of looking washed-out and sickly under the fluorescent lights, like a normal person, Alice looked even more enchanting. Theo felt a flood of feeling: the inadequacy she’d always felt when Alice was around, like she was a lesser being, grossly humble in her earthly peasant’s body. Alice had a way of tilting her chin and regarding people from up there. She still did that, Theo saw. Looked down her nose like it was the barrel of a gun.
‘We’ll give you two some privacy,’ Verten said, and he towed Mary away by the elbow. David squeezed Theo’s shoulder and followed them. They clustered at the entrance to the hospital garden with Verten’s other cronies, pretending not to watch Theo and Alice. Goddamn you all, Theo thought. This was a setup and it felt like it, children being shoved together to sort out their differences and learn to play nice while their mothers watched on. What did they think they were doing? What the hell was the point of this little exercise?
‘Who’s with Beth?’ Theo asked Alice. She sent her voice out like an arrow, trying to hit the bullseye of Alice’s ear. Don’t let her see you’re intimidated, she schooled herself. She will bulldoze you and have contempt for you. Neither will help you here.
‘Her boyfriend, Callum, is with her,’ Alice said.
‘Caleb is not her boyfriend,’ Theo answered, quickly.
‘Are we going to begin this by you trying to prove that you know Beth’s life better than I possibly can? No need, I understand that, thank you,’ Alice said, tossing her head. Haughty as a queen, Theo thought.
‘Good,’ she replied. She could feel all eyes upon them, and it made her nervous. She couldn’t collect her thoughts with all of that scrutiny.
‘Can we go and sit down?’ Theo pointed at a metal table and chairs under a shelter another twenty or so metres up the path, out towards the road.
Alice looked around quickly, before nodding. She was checking we’d still be visible, Theo thought, in surprise. Perhaps Alice was nervous, too. Theo led the way. I’m walking up the path with Alice, she told herself. She wondered what Alice was thinking as she walked behind Theo and her broad swimmer’s shoulders, her buzzed head shining in the light. Theo sat down on one side of the table, and Alice sat on the other. They stared at each other, and Alice broke first. She turned to dig in her handbag, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ She flicked her eyes to Theo, briefly.
‘No.’ Give me one too, Theo thought, but Alice didn’t offer. She put the cigarette in her mouth and Theo looked at the insides of her wrists as she lit it. Alice’s skin looked as thin as tissue, veins likes vines growing beneath. She is blood and bone like you, Theo told herself.
When Alice had taken a long draw on her cigarette, Theo spoke.
‘What is it that you wanted to speak to me about, Alice?’
Alice snorted, and blew the smoke into the air above them. ‘That’s a bit disingenuous, don’t you think?’
Theo shrugged and folded her arms across her chest.
‘I rang Oliver’s lawyers,’ Alice said. ‘I thought he might want to . . . come here. But he’s overseas. A restaurant opening in London.’
Theo shrugged again. She couldn’t care less about Oliver.
‘Thank you for getting Elizabeth out of the water,’ Alice said, lifting her chin and looking down at Theo.
‘I didn’t do it for you,’ Theo answered, bristling. Alice didn’t get to thank her, that wasn’t how it worked.
‘I’m aware of that. Could you just stop with this hostility for a minute?’ Alice snapped. A strand of hair had worked herself loose from the rope at her back. It blew across her face, and Alice set her cigarette down carefully on the edge of the table to tuck it back in. Her hands were shaking, Theo noticed. She was wearing a big silver ring with a four-leaf clover on her thumb. Beth would like that ring, Theo thought. But what did Alice need luck for?
She didn’t answer.
‘I knew this would happen. I told that detective that I’d already tried to talk to you, I followed you up onto that cliff to talk to you, and you looked at me like I was dirt,’ Alice said.
‘I looked at you like you were dirt? I just didn’t want to speak to you, I still don’t. You’re trying to take my daughter away from me, why would I want to pass the time of day with you?’ Theo tried to stop her voice from rising, without success. Under the table, she counted the fingers and the thumb of her left hand, over and over.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was the one allowed to sit in that hospital room with Elizabeth while you carried on your vigil out here in the carpark,’ Alice said. ‘They let me in there because I am her mother.’
‘You gave birth to her, that’s it. You’ve no more mothered her than you’ve mothered that . . . that man over there,’ Theo spat, pointing to an elderly man shuffling past them with an IV drip on a frame. He didn’t look up.
‘Yes, yes, we all know you’ve done the mothering. Did you enjoy rubbing it in my face, all those little notes you sent, her measurements and milestones that I wasn’t there to see?’
‘Alice, I thought you’d want to know. They’re the sort of thing mothers are interested in.’
‘Bullshit! You did it to prove to me that you were looking after her better than I could! You were right, of course.’ Alice stubbed her cigarette out on the ground and lit another.
Theo stared at her, disarmed. ‘Give me one of them.’
Alice flicked the pack across the table. Theo stuck a cigarette in her mouth, but couldn’t light it, her own hands were shaking now.
‘Give me that.’ Alice reached over, took the cigarette back from Theo, stuck it between her own lips, lit it and passed it back. Both of them smoked in silence for a while. A hundred different thoughts swirled around in Theo’s head. She didn’t know where to start, how to untangle them.
‘I would have been a terrible mother to Elizabeth back then,’ Alice said, quietly. She gazed out across the carpark like it was a beautiful landscape, her eyes clouding over. ‘I was barely older than she is now.’
Theo thought of Beth with a baby, a baby with a tiny rosebud mouth. Then she thought of Beth in a hospital bed now, a heart rate monitor flashing green lightning bolts on a screen to let them know she was still there. Was she still there? No, Mary and David had said. Don’t allow that thought to come.
‘So, why have her, then?’ she asked Alice.
‘I couldn’t have an abortion. My parents would have disowned me. They essentially disowned me anyway. We’ve only recently started speaking again.’
I don’t care, Theo wanted to tell her. I don’t care about you and your parents. I don’t have mine either, because of what you did. Mine didn’t disown me, but only because I didn’t give them the chance. Headed that one off at the pass.
‘So you were too young to be a mother, I get it. But what made you think Oliver would be a decent father? Why leave Elizabeth with him?’
‘I didn’t leave Elizabeth with him. I left her with you.’ Alice looked Theo right in the eye.
Theo rubbed her temples. This was the longest night known to man, she thought. Above them, a fluoro tube hummed. Theo heard crickets pause in their incessant chirping and then start again. She remembered arriving in Australia, how noisy they had seemed. She rarely noticed them, now.
‘Why would you leave her with me?’ It was like Alice was talking in riddles.
‘Because I knew you’d look after her, I knew you’d know how. You seemed to know everything else. Clever, capable Theo. Everyone knew Oliver was this . . . useless pretty boy, all he could do was cook a nice meal. You were the brains behind everything. You made the restaurant what it was.’
‘Nobody thought that. I was silly old Theo, his pathetic sidekick, like a faithful puppy dog. Coming
back for more even when I knew he was screwing everything with a pulse.’
Alice raised her eyebrows. ‘Does that self-pity get boring after a while?’
‘I don’t know, you tell me, Alice.’ Theo slapped both hands down on the table and leant back. ‘Isn’t that why you’re here? Because you felt sorry for yourself? The poor teen mother who didn’t know any better? Tell me, why did you go to the police and say I’d kidnapped your baby if I was the one you wanted to look after her, anyway?’
‘You weren’t supposed to leave! I never said you could leave with her. Do you know what that felt like? Coming back here after all these years and she wasn’t there? I pictured her, every night, in that bedroom of the house you and Oliver lived in. I would look at other little girls on the street and try and think of what she would look like then, I drew her over and over and over again. And when I got here, she was gone. You were both gone.’ Alice gritted her teeth, she was furious, Theo realised with incredulity. God. Was she so unaccustomed to the world not serving her purposes? Alice was still young, Theo thought, thirty-five. She could have babies now, if she wanted to. She could begin again.
‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Alice said, ‘because you haven’t had children of your own.’
In goes the knife and now we twist. Theo thought of her dream, her babies.
‘It’s as though the umbilical cord that joined us was never really severed. From a mother to her child, there’s this . . . connection,’ Alice went on, and Theo sat on her hands to stop them reaching out and wrapping Alice’s long blonde plait around her slender white throat.
‘I felt her calling me back, so I came,’ Alice said, leaning forward. ‘I’m ready, and I can be a good mother, now. I have money, I have my own house. I want Beth to give me a chance.’
‘Oh, you’re ready now, are you?’ Theo shook her head. Slow down, slow down, you’re going to blow, she thought, but couldn’t stop herself. She knew her voice was loud enough for Verten and Mary and David to hear, but she didn’t care, couldn’t stop, it bubbled out of her and she let it.
‘Who gives a shit that you’ve decided you’re finally ready to be a mother?’ Theo stood up and leant forward herself, so Alice had no choice but to look at her, see her and hear her, every last word.
‘Beth’s not a fucking doll, Alice. You can’t just put her down somewhere and expect her to stay put for sixteen years while you gallivant around with your pencil and paper. She’s a person. She’s a real, live human, and so am I, we’re not your puppets, and I’m not your babysitter. You left, and you made your choice. She became mine when you did that. The fact is, Alice, you’re just too fucking late.’
Alice didn’t say anything for a moment. She gathered her cigarettes and lighter, slid them into her handbag, and zipped it up. She smoothed her hair back from her face and stood, Queen Alice again, regal and composed, preparing to leave court.
‘We’ll see,’ she said to Theo, and picked up her bag and walked down the path, back into the hospital where Beth lay, somewhere between awake and asleep.
chapter forty-eight
Beth opened her eyes, and the light was violent in its brightness. Everything she could see was white or metallic, silver. A unit of measurement for light was called a lux, she remembered. That was how you measured luminosity. Beth wondered if the nurse who stood with her back to her at the end of the bed knew that. She wondered if she should tell her. She might find it interesting, working in an environment that was arguably dense in lux. Beth’s mouth was full of something like sawdust, and she felt a sudden panic about whether she could move her legs.
Tubes snaked in and out from her, like tentacles. Beth stared hard at her right foot. Up, she thought. Her toes wriggled in response. The nurse turned around.
‘Can I have some water?’ Beth asked her, her voice stretched and cracked.
‘I would have thought you’d had enough of that,’ the nurse said, but her voice was kind, and she was already filling a white plastic cup. Beth looked at the cup of water and remembered holding a cup like that, filled with syrupy rum and Coke. She remembered the pills nestled in Caleb’s palm. She remembered the terrible whites of Jason’s eyes shining in the dim caravan, and the moonlight on the water.
After that she remembered only slices, like a roll of film with some panels completely blackened. The sirens and the lights. Beth looked around the room for a clock, but there wasn’t one. She looked down at her own body, in a hospital gown. Her fingers went to her neck but her donkey necklace wasn’t there. She recognised nothing, not even on herself. She didn’t remember hurting herself, but she knew she must have. Why else would she be in hospital? And she did hurt, all over. She’d gone into the water. Swimming at night, just as Theo had always warned against.
Theo.
Beth felt the same thing she had when Theo had caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to as a child. Shame, and the awful weight of disappointing her. Of failing to be who Theo thought she was. Of failing to be the girl Theo loved. I’m sorry, Theo, she thought. I’m so sorry.
The nurse returned, with Mary behind her. Mary went over to Beth and took her face in her hands, squeezing it. Her own cheeks were wet and her hands shook against Beth’s jaw.
‘I know I don’t need to say anything about how silly you were. I know you know that already. You will punish yourself, worse than anyone else could. Oh Beth, I’m just so glad you’re okay.’
Beth had almost drowned, they said. In Beth’s head, all was mud; murky and thick. Mary held Beth’s hand and Beth let her head fall back into the pillows. After a while Caleb came into the room. Mary stood up to leave, and Beth watched Caleb avoid Mary’s eyes as she passed him on her way out. He was so pale. Beth wanted to tell the nurses to hook him up to an IV too, give him some nourishment because, look at him, he needed it desperately.
Caleb sat on the plastic chair beside her bed and cried.
‘I thought you were going to die,’ he said. ‘I thought it was my fault.’ He smelt like alcohol, and the smoke from the bonfire, and underneath that Caleb’s own scent that repelled Beth right now, made her want to push him away from her.
Mary came back in and asked how Beth felt.
‘I’m tired,’ Beth answered. She was in pain, but the tiredness was the overwhelming thing, and something else, an absence that she couldn’t pinpoint. She wanted these people to leave her alone. Whatever she needed, it wasn’t these people, not Mary and not Caleb.
She felt like the water had taken something from her. It took her energy, her fight and her anger. It drained her, if it was possible that while drowning, while taking on so much water, you could simultaneously be emptied. Beth pressed the button the nurse had shown her, to make the morphine come. There was a ridge along her brow bone that seared, a hot metal bar behind her eyes. She closed them.
‘You know those things don’t work,’ Caleb said. He came up next to her and his voice had an edge. Beth looked into his eyes. They flitted like insects, here and there. He chewed the inside of his cheek and rubbed his hands together. His face swam back and forth in front of her.
‘I know,’ Beth whispered.
‘It doesn’t do anything when you press the button. It’s just a placebo, you know, to make you think you’re getting pain relief.’ He leant right down to speak into her ear. ‘But it won’t work. Because you know it’s a lie.’
‘I know that, Caleb. I know.’
You lied to me, Beth thought. You said you would stay with me. But where were you when I walked into the water? She wouldn’t go to a bonfire with him again. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him again at all. There, in those sterile white hospital halls, in her bed with the sheets folded into hospital corners and the white blanket with the blue stripe across her legs, Beth didn’t want him any more. He didn’t belong here. Here, everything was clean but Caleb was dirty. He should’ve come in the water with her, Beth thought fuzzily. Should have got himself washed and emptied, like her.
&n
bsp; ‘I need to sleep,’ she said, and between one word and the next, Caleb was gone.
When Beth opened her eyes again, a woman was sitting beside the bed, smiling at her. She had her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes were bright. Her hair was blonde and her smile beatific. Beth wondered if she was an angel. But she was too familiar, Beth knew she’d seen her somewhere before, she just couldn’t place her right now. No matter, she would remember later. This woman might still be able to help her now. Beth had figured it out, what it was that she needed. She had woken with it singing a sharp high note, right in the centre of her mind. She just had to ask. With all her might, Beth pushed herself over on the mattress so that she was closer to the woman, who stood and came over to the bed. She bent down, and took Beth’s hand.
‘What is it?’ she asked, and her voice was vaguely familiar, too. ‘What did you want to say to me?’
Beth opened her mouth and spoke loudly to make sure she was understood.
‘I want my mother. Please, can you get her for me?’
chapter forty-nine
Theo sat in the car with the door open, her foot hooked over the window frame. She watched the sun slink up over the dashboard. She was almost asleep, but couldn’t quite get there. Her fingers itched. She thought about cleaning out David’s car while he was inside, if only she had something to clean it with. She saw David come through the doors down at the hospital, and sat up a little straighter. He was running.
He saw her and waved, and shouted as he ran towards her. ‘Theo! She’s awake! She’s awake, she’s okay. Beth’s awake, she’s going to be fine.’ He arrived at the car and stood, panting and grinning. ‘Beth’s going to be fine, Theo. Mary just told me. She just woke up.’
Theo covered her face with her hands. ‘Really?’
David nodded, and Theo choked. David put his arms around her and Theo saw that his face was wet and he seemed to not know whether he could smile or not. She started to laugh, he looked so strange, like his face was being pulled by the wind.
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