Beneath the Surface Read Online Free Page B

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