Beneath the Surface Read Online Free Page A

back onto the sofa and we sat for a while in silence, your arms wrapped around me. It took me back to a time, so long ago, when I was only little. I was riding my bike along a promenade and fell over, badly grazing my knee. The skin stung like someone had cut through it with a knife. My daddy picked me up and we sat on the beach, him holding me tightly until I could no longer feel any pain.
    ‘It hurts,’ I said. ‘Some things hurt so much I choose not to talk about them.’
    ‘Just try, Abs.’
    You looked at me with eyes pleading me to open up to you.
    So I took a deep breath and said, ‘My mother disappeared one day. I came home from school when I was seventeen and she was gone.’
    ‘Oh, my God!’
    Your face told me it was the last thing you expected to hear. I knew you were probably thinking the worst, that she had been abducted, maybe found dead. Sometimes I told people that because I thought it’s what they wanted to hear – besides, it was better than the truth.
    ‘It’s not what you’re thinking. She planned to go.’
    ‘What?’ I could hear the shock in your voice.
    That’s why I didn’t usually tell people, because then they started to wonder what I’d done to make my mother leave me. ‘The truth is I still don’t know why. Fourteen years later I have no idea why she went or where. And that’s not all of it. She took my sisters with her. They were only two.’
    The word ‘sisters’ choked in my throat. I didn’t talk about the girls. Ever. I couldn’t, it wasn’t possible to get through life if I let them into my world again.
    ‘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