Beneath the Surface Page 3

  ‘Jesus! And you haven’t tried looking for them?’

  ‘No, and that’s why I don’t talk about it. So I need you to drop this now. Please.’

  ‘Of course, Abs, of course,’ you murmured, and you wrapped yourself tighter around me like you would never let me go.

  *****

  ‘He sounds like a wonderful man, Abi. You obviously loved him very much,’ Maggie said to me. ‘I can see your eyes sparkle when you talk about him.’

  ‘He was the only person who ever let me be who I was and who didn’t push me into anything I wasn’t ready for.’

  *****

  After I told you about my mother you didn’t press me into telling you more. You had heard the worst and were still with me.

  You made me feel safe again and I promised myself you were one person I would never let go. But then I didn’t manage that either, did I?

  Since what happened with us I started getting moments when I couldn’t shake the past from my head. I had spent years burying memories deep within, but all of a sudden they were looming up inside me again.

  The first time was one of those early spring days when the sun catches you out and it’s warmer than you think it’s going to be. I had wandered out to buy a paper and a coffee and sat outside on a bench in the park. Two teenage girls walked past me, arms linked together, their heads pressed in to each other as they giggled over something one of them said. I couldn’t take my eyes off them – for all I knew, they could have been Hannah and Lauren.

  I never have to work out how old the girls are. I’ve always known exactly what their ages are at any given time over the last fourteen years. Now they are sixteen, soon to be seventeen. The same age I imagined these girls in the park were. Usually when I think of Hannah and Lauren, I quickly picture the happy scene I’ve drawn for them – the house in the country, the swings in the back garden, a dog by the fire … Always they are laughing and teasing each other, and they are always, always both in the picture together. Then as soon as I have seen them clearly in my mind I can close the image down, knowing they are safe and happy, and then I forget about it again: it is the only way I keep going.

  But on that day in the park I wasn’t able to get them out of my head. I had conjured up my scene, thrown in some extras like the new outfits they were wearing, but then try as I might, I could not close down the image. I even tried mentally clicking the red cross in the corner of the picture to shut the file down, but still it kept springing back up. And every time it did so it taunted me with something that wasn’t quite right. The swing was broken, swaying loosely by one rope. One of the girls was crying. Hannah was hiding behind a tree and when she appeared, her face was bruised and she didn’t look like I thought she should. I was watching a thriller that my own warped mind was creating, but I couldn’t stop it from playing.

  This last year, every time I remember I’ve wanted to pick up a bottle again and get through it like I did when they left. I wanted to fill my head with alcohol or drugs until I forgot, but somehow I didn’t. There are some days when it becomes almost too hard to bear, though, because a clear mind is a playground for the thoughts and memories you cannot control.

  It was about six weeks after they left that I decided I wouldn’t ever look for the girls. After all I had my reasons for believing they would be better off without me. I told myself they were fine. They were happy and oblivious so what did it matter what was happening to me? They were what mattered.

  My own life was spiralling out of control and I didn’t know what to do about it. I had all these questions about what had happened and how my mother could leave me. But I never got the answers I believed, and part of me didn’t think I wanted them anyway. I decided the best way to cope was to forget – bury the layers of guilt, anger, sadness and fear deep down so I didn’t have to face them.

  Then along you came, and bit by bit I started to open my eyes to how I really felt and I realised I should never have let them go without looking for them. What if they weren’t OK? I shouldn’t have left them with her, plus I deserve to understand why she left me, don’t I?

  So after what happened with you and me I decided to look for Hannah and Lauren. I need to know what happened, Adam. I have to know why they left me, because something made my mother go, and it can’t have been me.

  – Four –

  Hannah threw her bag onto the sand and used both hands to pull at one of the doors to open the hut. She knew it was most probably the heavy rain they’d had that spring making it stick. The same thing had happened the year before when Morrie had explained to her that dampness made the doors swell. Perhaps she shouldn’t pull so hard, but it wouldn’t open any other way. Morrie would be at the fishing sheds later. She could drop in on her way home and ask him to take a look before they got any worse.

  Once the hut was finally open and the doors tied back with string Hannah turned to look for her sister. ‘Come on,’ she called, laughing as Lauren stumbled onto the sand at the bottom of the steps. ‘What’s taking you so long?’

  Lauren scowled in response and held her arms up, shaking two carrier bags. ‘Someone had to get the lunch as well, you know,’ she muttered when she reached the hut. Neither of them ever wanted to do the food run – both avoided the corner store as much as they could. Once Theresa saw either of them coming into her shop, she clapped her hands with glee and started gabbling away about school, always dropping in how well her Maria was doing. Everyone knew her daughter was the brightest girl in the school but she was also the dullest.

  ‘Fifteen minutes she held me there,’ Lauren sighed, throwing the bags onto the decking. ‘What a waste of my life!’

  Hannah rummaged through the shopping, pulling out a box of tea bags and packets of biscuits, which she stacked on the small shelves in the corner of the hut.

  ‘Doesn’t look like we need to go back any time soon, at least,’ she observed.

  ‘Thank God! She tried to offer me a dinghy on my way out. Can you believe it? It had a head the shape of a crocodile.’

  Hannah laughed. ‘You should have taken it, it could have been fun.’

  ‘I wanted to say, how old do you think we are?’

  ‘She probably doesn’t have a clue what normal girls our age are doing. Maria’s most likely in the library all weekend swotting up on insects or whatever she’s lately obsessed with.’

  Hannah opened a packet of crisps and waved them in front of her sister.

  ‘I’d better only have one,’ Lauren said, peering into the bag and taking one out.

  Hannah rolled her eyes and went back to unloading the food.

  *****

  It was the first hot weekend of the year. Already late June and they hadn’t used the beach for sunbathing since last summer, but every spare moment she had Hannah went to the hut, unlike her sister, who didn’t see the point of spending time on the beach if the sun wasn’t shining. Lauren was like a weather vane. As soon as the sun came out, she popped up outside the hut in her bikini. But it didn’t matter if it was sunny or not, Hannah was there all year round.

  There were a dozen beach huts nestled amongst the dunes of the bay. When they were young, Hannah and Lauren loved running amongst the huts and hiding behind them. It always frightened their mum when she couldn’t see them but it was never long before one of them shrieked with laughter and then she knew the other girl would be close by.

  The best view of the huts was from the top of the cliff. Each one was painted in a different colour. It was an unwritten rule that no one should change the colour of their hut, but the girls were happy with theirs anyway – a cobalt blue. The nearer you got, the more apparent it was how shabby they were. Weathered by the salty air, only a few had been religiously repainted every year. But Hannah and Lauren loved them, and had thought themselves the luckiest girls alive when they finally had one of their own. It happened the summer they were eleven. For years their mum had been promising them that one day they would have one, but deep down they knew there was lit
tle she could do about it. If you owned one of Mull Bay’s precious huts there was no way you gave it up easily. Owners kept hold of them for years and would nearly always pass them on to the next generation.

  But one hot day that summer, the girls came home from the shops with their mum to find Morrie waiting for them on the doorstep. He had a huge smile on his face and was waving a rusty old key in the air. As soon as the girls saw it they both screamed with delight, knowing immediately what it meant. Earlier that year Mrs Partridge had died. Her death left a hole in the village community – most of the Bay’s residents had known her all their lives, and the girls adored her. But after a couple of months people starting speculating about the hut. ‘What do you think will happen to it now that she’s gone?’ they murmured. ‘Of course, she has no family so there’s no one to pass it on to.’

  A meeting was called and it was decided the fairest way to determine the beach hut’s fate was to put each family’s name into a box and pull one out at random. Morrie had responsibility for the draw.

  ‘We’ve got it?’ they both shouted, jumping up at Morrie, who was laughing as he held the key just out of their reach.

  ‘Mummy, look, we’ve got the hut!’ Lauren shouted, turning to see Kathryn, who was smiling at them.

  ‘I can’t believe it, Morrie,’ said Kathryn. ‘Is it really ours?’

  Morrie winked at Kathryn. ‘It’s yours all right,’ he told her.

  Lauren hadn’t seen the wink – she was still looking at her mother – but Hannah had, and often asked Morrie if the beach hut was fairly theirs. If it wasn’t, he never let on, although Hannah wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t had a hand in it. Morrie was a good friend to all of them. He was older than Kathryn, although the girls didn’t know how old exactly. His face was weathered by the sea, which could have aged him but didn’t. Morrie had always looked out for the girls and they loved him like an uncle.

  The beach was paradise to Hannah. It formed a perfect semicircle around the sea and was the heart of Mull Bay, the picture postcard fishing village where they had grown up in the North East of England. The girls had moved to the Bay when they were very young. They knew nowhere else and as children they had always thought there was nowhere else they would rather be. ‘Who wouldn’t want to live in a place like this?’ their mother had drummed into them. ‘It’s beautiful. You’re lucky to live here, there’s no need for you to go anywhere else.’

  Hannah had always agreed with her mother when she was young, when there was nothing better in life than swimming in the sea and playing on the sand. But in her teenage years she wasn’t so sure. She still loved the beach, and spent most of her time there, but she no longer believed there was no point in seeing anywhere else. Of course there was. Hannah wanted to see the world. She’d made a long list of where she intended to go. Africa – where she would spend nights sleeping outdoors, listening to the sound of wild animals. The Pyramids; swimming in the Indian Ocean, where the sea was clear turquoise. And America, the bright lights of Vegas and the golden sands of California … But right now she would be happy seeing London for the very first time.

  Nowadays, her mother’s words felt less like the wisdom she had always thought them to be and more of a noose around her neck.

  Many of Mull Bay’s inhabitants had lived there all their lives, rarely venturing outside its confines. Hannah knew it imprisoned them with its beauty but in turn it made them ignorant too. They were so sure the Bay was the most wonderful place to live that they didn’t have the foresight to prove themselves right by going anywhere else. And it was making her feel trapped, an invisible prison. The other night they had watched The Truman Show on TV and it had left Hannah wondering if she flew high enough, could she touch the dome bubble encircling them?

  As the kids of the Bay grew up, they divided into two camps. There were those who were desperate to leave as soon as they could, and the others who would happily stay for the rest of their lives. That year, twelve students were leaving Mull Bay Upper School. Nine had places at universities around the country, most of them in big cities they had only dreamt of visiting. The other three were boys who came from long lines of fishermen and didn’t have the drive to think of other possibilities. That year was exceptional – there were normally much fewer leaving the Bay.

  Hannah already knew which camp she fell into: she needed to get out. But she also knew there were two things standing in her way. First, her sister, who was less enthusiastic – in fact Lauren was so laid-back, Hannah already feared she would happily stay in the Bay for ever and doing anything without her sister didn’t seem like an option. Second, a much greater obstruction was their mum. Hannah couldn’t understand Kathryn’s reasons, but whatever they were, she seemed hell bent on preventing the girls from having a life outside of Mull Bay. Hannah still remembered the first time she had asked to go out with friends in the evening after school. She was thirteen, nearly fourteen, and a group had arranged to go to the cinema. But Kathryn froze at the question. ‘No,’ she told her quickly, ‘absolutely not.’

  ‘But why not? We’re all together, and the others are allowed to go and we won’t be late—’

  ‘It’s not safe,’ Kathryn said, her face drained of colour. ‘Anyway, you’re far too young.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mum, this is so unfair!’

  ‘It’s not unfair, it’s completely reasonable and don’t start arguing with me. I can’t take it when you argue back.’ Kathryn waved a hand in the air to stop the conversation and seemed shaken as she pulled out a chair to sit in.

  As far as Hannah was concerned it was a ridiculous overreaction, but it wasn’t all that uncommon. Often their mum would get flustered, panicked when she thought she was losing control.

  ‘She’s just concerned something’s going to happen to you,’ Morrie had explained to Hannah the next day. ‘To her you’re the most important thing in the world. I think she’s just scared stiff something’s going to go wrong.’

  But to Hannah her mother’s concern was smothering them. To her, Kathryn was so wrapped up in the two girls it was as if she wanted to live out the rest of their lives for them.

  *****

  Hannah glanced over at Lauren, sitting on a towel with its edges carefully smoothed out so the sand couldn’t encroach on it.

  ‘Are you painting your toenails different colours?’ she asked.

  ‘Yep, I’m seeing which one suits me best.’

  ‘Do you seriously have nothing better to do with your time?’

  ‘Not today,’ she replied. ‘Why, what are you doing, little sis?’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ Hannah grinned.

  There was a five-minute gap between them, their mum was always telling them, but it was enough to give Lauren the licence to consider herself the older sister, although most people often thought it was the other way round.

  ‘You can borrow a magazine if you’re bored,’ Lauren said, nodded towards the pile stacked up on her towel. ‘I have Heat, Grazia, Now and More. There’s everything you ever need to know about who’s getting too fat or too thin, and who might only be getting fat because they’re pregnant.’

  ‘And you actually find that interesting?’ Hannah shook her head. ‘I worry about you. Anyway, I’m not bored. I’m thinking.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About a number of things. I’m planning something, although I’m not sure you’ll be too keen.’

  ‘What?’ Lauren looked up and eyed Hannah cautiously, carefully unscrewing the top from a bottle of pink nail varnish.

  ‘Well, I’m fed up with Mum saying we can’t go away. She’s using money as an excuse but I don’t buy it. And so I’m thinking that some way or other we should try and go away on our own this summer.’

  ‘Er, yeah, like she would say yes to that.’

  ‘Well, obviously she’s not going to be happy, but we should just do it. At least get some passports. We must be the only sixteen-year-olds who’ve never had one.’

  ‘You’re digging yoursel
f a grave.’ Lauren sighed.

  ‘Maybe. But it’s ridiculous. The others are all going away over the holidays. Sophie’s going to Turkey again.’

  ‘She’s going with her parents, not on her own. And anyway, what’s there in Turkey? It’s too hot. Mum says sometimes it’s over 40ºC and I couldn’t stand that.’

  ‘What would Mum know? I doubt she’s been anywhere near Turkey.’

  ‘Talking of Mum, she wants us to go and see Grandma this weekend.’ Lauren turned to Hannah, pulling a face.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! We only went two weeks ago.’

  Hannah’s heart sank at the thought of going back to the home again so soon. She had always hated visiting their grandmother, but over the last year it had been even worse.

  ‘It’s her birthday,’ Lauren reminded her. ‘I don’t think we have a choice.’

  ‘Why can’t she go on her own, why does she keep dragging us along, too?’

  Lauren shrugged, ‘I don’t know. But it’s something we’ve got to do, I guess.’

  ‘Seriously, let’s just tell her we aren’t going this time.’

  ‘Hannah, grow up! You know Mum will never let you do that. Just face it, we’re going, whether we like it or not.’

  Hannah stood up, pulling her T-shirt over her head to reveal her bikini top underneath. ‘I’m going for a swim,’ she told her sister, and walked away without asking if she wanted to join her. It made Hannah so angry that these visits were still dictated to them, as if they had nothing better to do with their time than look at the woman who barely spoke to them, and if she did say something it was rarely nice, or relevant. She would make a stand, she decided. That weekend she would refuse. Lauren could go if she wanted to be compliant, but Hannah wouldn’t. She didn’t care whether her mum liked it or not; she wasn’t going to waste another day visiting Eleanor at that home.