Beneath the Surface

The sun hung low in the sky, shooting gleaming golden rays through gaps in the city’s array of skyscrapers. The evening air was alive with flies and mosquitoes, drawn to the humidity that hung like thick clouds over my head. The horizon was dark, on the brink of night, but pink clouds were strewn around the aurous glow of the sun. A man perched on the opposite edge of the bus stop seat coughed, and I flinched. Nicotine stains tainted his fingers and a trail of smoke expelled from his nostrils, a cigarette jammed between his lips. I shivered, slowly edging away from him like he had the plague. It was the sort of disgust I couldn’t trace to an origin, it was just something I found myself avoiding as much as I could –not just the smoke, but the person, too. I eventually settled with accounting it to my prospective medical career, and the dangers I knew it carried.

‘Hello,’ someone said in front of me, and I inhaled a sharp breath at the shock. A woman, barely a few years older than me was standing with her arm through the loop of a velvety bag and her other hand in the pocket of a long coat, despite the heat.

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘can I help you?’ Her eyes flicked over my messily thrown together outfit –an oversized t-shirt with sweat stains in the armpits, over a pair of grey-brown tracksuit pants, that I was convinced were once white. It had been a long and exhausting day –university had fried my brain and work experience my body, my own job as a waitress on top of that leaving me like a walking corpse by the end of it.

‘Are you Hailey Morrison?’ The woman asked, and I paused, my lip finding its way between my teeth. That wasn’t often good news.

‘Yes, that’s me. Can I help you?’ I repeated, an air of cautiousness to the question. She had hazel eyes and long, dark eyelashes, a gap between her front teeth that seemed familiar but I couldn’t seem to tie them to a person I knew.

The woman slid onto the bench beside me, creating a barrier between me and the smoking man, though uncomfortably close so our thighs were almost touching.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ she said, in a way that could be gentle as much as it could be foreboding.

‘I’m sorry. Do I know you?’ I asked hesitantly. The woman’s lips pursed, and she swallowed.

‘I was hoping you would.’ She said. ‘I guess I’ll have to remind you. It’s me, Hailey. It’s Erika.’ She paused, perhaps waiting for some form of recognition to flicker over my face. It didn’t. ‘Your sister. Do you remember me?’

My pulse spiked, my heart suddenly in my throat. Memories resurfaced, emotions crawling like back towards me, infesting my heart and making goosebumps ripple across my skin. The smoking man’s cigarette smoke burned my nostrils, just like the cigarettes had my skin. I had tried to supress the memories for so long, they felt faded and murky, mingling together, finding their origins like untangling a knotted ball of string.

‘I -I remember…’ I stammered, realising I was shaking and covered in a cold sweat. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. My childhood, so far in the distant past the memories had buried themselves deep in a forgotten corner of my mind, resurfacing in fragmented shards in dreams, nightmares.

Erika squeezed my hand. ‘I’m glad.’ She paused. ‘I’m so, so sorry for everything that happened back then.’ The back then hit me hard. I had been alive back then. My childhood was viewed through the eyes of someone else, the years merging together, like a cutscene in a movie.

I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.’ I remembered our mother, a kind-hearted woman, only ever living in my mind as a sickly skeleton, a bandanna permanently secured over her bald head. Until she was gone, and then I remembered our father. I remembered how he changed.

‘I promised I’d come back for you. I promised I’d rescue you. But by the time I could, you were already gone. I couldn’t find you. You had just vanished. Where did you go?’ She asked, her eyes seeming far away, like she was rewinding time in her mind.

‘I –I left. I ran away. I couldn’t take it, after you left. I ran.’ Like a coward, I wanted to add, but I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself. hadn’t thought about it in a long time, and the memories felt hazier and more subdued than how I knew it happened. Like an old video tape that grew grainier with each viewing, now so fuzzy it was hard to see the original picture.

I was only ten when my mum died. I didn’t remember what my dad was like before that, but after, he withdrew. He got fired from his job and drowned himself in alcohol. He picked up smoking again –a habit he had dropped for our mum’s benefit. I couldn’t imagine how things could get worse. Until they did.

He started to yell. Drunken slurs at the beginning, but the progressed to something more. Threats. Raising of his hand or the beer bottle over his head. A shoe flung across the room as I scrambled to escape. Cigarette burns on my arms from where he extinguished the flame, and I grew to despise the smell. A black eye from when he brought his boot down on my face, a broken nose from the same experience, only another time. Fearing for my life as a shattered beer bottle was brought to my neck, serrated edges tracing lines over my soft skin. Eliza ran away when she was fifteen, old enough to get a job, when I was barely twelve. From then, his wrath was entirely directed on me.

‘I’ll kill you one of these days,’ he growled at me once, and it didn’t take me long to realise that his threat wasn’t empty.

‘Hailey?’ I glanced up. Erika had said something, but I didn’t hear.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘Where did you go?’

 I wasn’t old enough to get a job. I was fourteen, no one was willing to open their home to me. I was too old to be cute, too young to work.

‘I went in homeless shelters,’ I said, my eyes suddenly hazy. I was looking back at another decade, another time. Another life. ‘I’d eat at soup kitchens and raid dumpsters out the back of supermarkets. I showered at school and stole clothes from donation bins. Anything to get away from him.’ I shuddered.

‘I’m sorry I never came back,’ Erica said softly. The bus had arrived, but I hadn’t noticed. It was my ride home. Ten years ago I would have had no other choice other than walking or public transport. Now, I had the money to call a taxi if I needed. A mere dream by my younger self’s standards. ‘You must have waited so long.’

She had promised she’d return after she left. She’d save me. And I did wait, for a while. Until the hope ran out and I accepted that she was never coming back.

‘Not too long,’ I lied. ‘Where would I go, anyway? I was in primary school when you left. It wasn’t long until I left too.’

There was a brief silence.

‘What did you do after that?’ Erika asked slowly. My memories with her from our childhood could be counted on one hand, still fleeting, as the time had flashed by.

It was a splitting agony, as the words flowed from my mouth. Like a raw wound I had never dressed.

‘I got a job,’ I said, clearing the lump in my throat. ‘I worked through high school. Took a gap year afterwards to work three jobs, get enough money to try and put myself through university.’ The story ended because I was up to the present day. I was still working. I certainly wasn’t rich, but I got by. Maybe there wasn’t as much gap between me and the girl I used to be after all.

There was a silence. ‘Why are you here now?’ I asked. ‘Why now, after all these years?’

‘He’s gone, Hailey,’ Erika said. ‘He’s gone. I got invited to his funeral, and I thought of you.’

‘What?’

Erika huffed. ‘Yeah, liver failure. He was told to stop drinking but he couldn’t, and I guess it all caught up with him.’

Something inside me slowed, like cogs that had been working overtime finally caught up. The knot in my stomach loosened, and I felt the girl inside me talking to me. Thank you, I said to her. Thank you for getting me out of there. He was gone, and it was like a weighted blanket was lifted off my memories, exposing them to long-awaited light.

All the years that had passed, yet the girl who ran away was still me. And I felt her glow with pride at what she had become. At what I had become.

At the bravery she showed, and the hard work that had led me to where I ended up.

‘Guess it did.’