Surface Tension Read Online Free

about that.
    I was sure I could remember.

four
    On the way the signs were so weathered I could hardly read them. Rust had eaten tiny holes in the metal so it looked like someone had shot them over and over with a pellet gun.
    That didn’t matter. I knew what they said.
    No Entry. Trespassers Prosecuted.
    That one was on the barrier just off the main road, the barrier I could easily lift my bike up and over onto the overgrown track that led up the hill.
    Authorised Persons Only. Access Prohibited.
    That one was right up the top, hanging loosely from the padlocked gate of the wire mesh fence.
    The gate sat at the end of an old 4WD track, a dirt road that wound its way round and round the hill, occasionally crossing the steep track I had taken. I supposed authorised persons needed to come up here sometimes, although I wasn’t sure what for. Maybe just to check if there were any trespassers who needed prosecuting. The 4WD track was completely overgrown too. Elijah and I had never seen anyone up here and it didn’t look like that had changed.
    I pushed my bike through the undergrowth, hunting for the break in the fence, the panel of loose wire you could peel back and slip quietly inside. Elijah and I found it together years ago, by accident. We were walking around the lake from the swimming area, talking and skipping stones and letting our feet carry us along the shoreline. At some point we looked back at the tiny figures swimming and jumping and picnicking on the grass, and realised that without meaning to, we had come almost halfway round. Halfway from the Point, halfway to … where? And we realised, then, that there
was
a somewhere else, that you could just keep going through the trees and the scrub and past the invisible line of the
No Swimming
pole and find yourself somewhere that might even be worth going to.
    That’s how we found this place, on the other side of where we were supposed to be, a secret shore all our own.
    I was worried about being here at first, worried that we would get into trouble. I pointed out that we had crossed the invisible line.
    But Elijah just shrugged and said, “So what?” Even when we found the fence through the trees, the concealed track leading down the hill, the signs that yelled at you to stay away.
    “People shouldn’t worry about fences and signs,” he said. If you let a see-through fence stop you, you mustn’t have cared much in the first place.
    After that day, whenever he jumped on his bike, his towel stuffed away in his backpack, and asked if I wanted to come “for a ride” with him, I always said yes.
    It was nicer around this side. It was still and quiet. You didn’t have to watch out for jet skis or speedboats. There was no one to tell you to wait thirty minutes before going in the water because you had eaten a single slice of apple.
    But there was something else too.
    There was Old Lower Grange.
    The swimming area was over the outskirts of the old town, over paddocks and bush and the occasional shed. But here you were closer to the town itself, to the buildings and the roads and the houses where people had lived, where they had got married and pushed children on swings and tormented each other with gobs of flying mashed potato.
    It was all out there somewhere. I watched the way the ground sloped down to the water’s edge and beyond, and thought about it all there, underwater.
    We swam along the shoreline, Elijah setting the pace, his long, measured strokes between me and the deep.
    We floated on our backs, looking up at the cloudless sky, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were things down below, things I shouldn’t turn my back on.
    Sometimes we stood in the shallows, skipping stones out across the water, seeing how many skips we could get until they sank out of sight. Then we’d guess where they’d landed – the town square, the school, our very own drowned tree house?
    Sometimes we found things that might have washed up from the old town – a plank