Surface Tension

by Meg McKinlay

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Logo

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Other Books by Meg McKinlay

  When Cassie and Liam start swimming at the lake neither of them realises the dark secrets that lie beneath.

  As summer heats up and the lake waters become lower and lower, a shocking truth is slowly uncovered.

  And soon, both their lives will change – forever.

  prologue

  The day that I was born, they drowned my town.

  The mayor flipped the lever and everybody cheered. There were streamers and balloons and a really lame brass band. The people of Old Lower Grange ate sausages and potato salad while they watched their lives sink beneath a wall of water.

  I didn’t see the town take its last gulping breath. No one in my family did.

  That was my fault of course. There was no way around it.

  I was early. That was the thing. I was eight weeks early and no one was expecting to see me that day.

  Mum and Dad were going about their business, trying to decide whether it was morbid or festive to go and watch their old lives disappear under fifty-seven metres of water, when all of a sudden I was coming.

  Mum yelled for Dad and he left the plate he was making half-done on the table, where it would later crack down the centre.

  Years later, they presented it to me on my birthday as a keepsake, the way other kids get their booties bronzed or their tiny handprints preserved in colourful plaster.

  Here, they said, have this broken plate as a symbol of your birth. It would have been better but you kind of got in the way.

  Okay, they didn’t actually say that, but I knew it’s what they were thinking.

  Because of me, while everyone else was gathering at the dam, we were busy racing in the other direction. We were speeding through New Lower Grange, which had been thrown up just six kilometres east of the lever-flipping festivities – hey, presto! – like someone had snapped open a page in a pop-up book. We were zipping past the instant lawns and the empty swimming pool and the hollow shells of buildings, out onto the highway and then all the way over to Lenton, the closest town with anything resembling a hospital, for the occasion of my inconvenient birth.

  By the time Mum and Dad brought me home, things were different. There was electricity in the supermarket and water in the pool. Below the ground’s hard surface, the lawn was sending down its tiny, invisible roots.

  It was almost like a real town.

  If she didn’t look closely, my sister Hannah could pretend this was the street where she came off her bike when she was six; my brother Elijah could tell himself the ridges in the twisty gum tree out the front were from the tyre swing he used to ride to the moon and back.

  But there was no history here, not really.

  When Mum and Dad laughed about the time Elijah threw a wad of mashed potato at Hannah, they all turned and stared at the back wall of the kitchen, then looked away again. There was supposed to be a stain on the wallpaper there, a fat circle of damp that had never quite come off.

  But all those stories were dead and drowned. The mashed potato and the green-and-orange 1960s wallpaper had been replaced by easy-clean tiles with a trendy mosaic border. Our old lives were fifty-seven metres underwater at the bottom of a lake and no one could bring themselves to care any more.

  No one except me.

  When I was little, I used to dream about our house all the way down there in the mud. I pored over the photo albums lining the bookshelves in the hall and wondered what it all looked like now – the twisty old gum tree, the hairpin bend, the tree house out the back that would have been mine.

  When I first heard the story of Atlantis, I caught my breath. I took a lump of Dad’s clay and made a model of a mermaid, only with short hair, like mine. In kindergarten, I drew pictures of us underwater. I drew all of us standing out the front of the house holding hands under a bright sun and Mrs Morganstern gave me a gold star for excellence. Then I took a thick crayon and drowned us all in blue.

  I never lived in Old Lower Grange but I felt like I had. Like I should have. Like those two things were sort of the same.

  And even though you couldn’t see the damp patches on the walls any more, I knew they were under there somewhere.

  You’d think that when you sink something under five thousand swimming pools’ worth of water it’d be drowned and gone. You’d think it would be done with. But somewhere inside me I knew – you can’t just drown a town and call it over. Eventually, things have a way of floating to the surface.

  one

  It was the seven-bandaid swim that finally sunk me.

  I could have handled four, five, even six. Six had been my record until then.

  It wasn’t a record I’d wanted to break.

  I cruised the last few metres in a slow breaststroke, keeping my head above water like a grandma, all the better not to see disgusting floating bandaids with. I reached for the wall, slapping the tiles with both hands the way I’d learned in swimming classes.

  “Exactly level,” our PE teacher always said, leaning over us with a stopwatch like we were in the Olympics or something. “Or – bam! – disqualified!”

  No one was really sure why he was teaching us this stuff. Most of us hadn’t quite mastered the frog kick yet. Max Cartwright still swallowed water when he opened his mouth to breathe.

  When we asked Mr Henshall why it mattered, he shook his head. It was just one of those rules. Don’t question – just do it. You could blitz the field, finishing half a lap ahead of second place, but if your hands weren’t level on the wall or you got out before the whistle blew, it was all over.

  I don’t know why I kept doing it. I couldn’t help myself, even when I wasn’t racing, even when I was just doing my six laps a day without fail, Cassie, okay?

  Six laps, every day over summer, up and down in my faded blue Speedos while everyone else hung out on the grass in their stripy bikinis, or dived and splashed and did bombies around me.

  That’s what the doctor said. Not the part about the bathers and the bombies. I don’t think she really thought it through that far. She just said six laps. That it would be good for me. For my lungs, which weren’t ready to be born when I was, and had never quite caught up.

  The doctor said it, so Mum said it too.

  When you feel like you can’t breathe, that’s when you dig in, Cassie. That’s when it’s doing you good.

  My own theory was that when I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I should probably stop and take it easy for a while. Luckily, Mum didn’t come to the pool with me any more; she just gave advice from a distance then went back to her marking.

  I reached behind to squeeze water from my hair and took a deep, ragged breath. Something caught in my throat and I coughed, once, then twice, then again and again in short staccato barks.

  I clamped my mouth shut and felt the coughs detonate inside, puffing out my cheeks like tiny explosions. I hooked my fingers over the edge of the pool and hunched in towards the side, hoping no one would notice.


  Yeah, this was doing me good.

  Voices yelled and feet slapped across the concrete. I lifted my head to peer over the edge. Liam Price was stumbling over himself, slipping on the wet tiles, falling towards me.

  I pushed backwards and down. I felt him land in the water above, then plunge down, one knee clipping the edge of my shoulder.

  For a few seconds, we were tangled underwater, a mess of arms and legs and frantic bubbles.

  When I broke the surface, there were faces leaning over the edge of the pool.

  Amber and Emily. Laughing.

  “Sorry,” Liam said. “They pushed me.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” Emily teased.

  “This.” Liam’s hand sliced through the water, sending up a shower of spray.

  “Hey!” Amber jumped back. She was grinning. They were just mucking around, the way kids did. At least, kids who hadn’t spent half their lives in hospital or doing laps or being told by their mothers to take a break and not get overexcited, not to push themselves too hard. Unless, of course, you were doing your six and it was time to dig in.

  Amber patted at the damp patches spreading across her hot pink bikini.

  “Oh well, I guess I’m wet now.”

  She took a step forward and dived in, arcing over my head into the water behind me. I turned to watch, the way I always did when Amber swam, when she cruised down the pool with a stroke that cut through the water like it wasn’t there, a stroke that was smooth and fast and kind of accidental, as if she wasn’t even trying.

  It wasn’t fair that someone who didn’t care at all could swim like that.

  I looked back at Liam. Then again, lots of things weren’t fair when you thought about it.

  As I turned, he headed past me towards the ladder and hauled himself out, his board shorts flapping around him.

  They were too long, those shorts. Too long to be cool, too long to be comfortable. Too long to swim in without them sucking in and sticking to his legs. He was always pulling at them, peeling the material off his wet skin with one hand, holding them up at the waist with the other.

  I heard Emily whispering about it in class one day. “His mother buys them a size too big. So they won’t show.”

  I didn’t know if that was true, but the shorts did the job, anyway. You couldn’t see Liam’s scars.

  Everyone knew they were under there, though, even if he kept them covered. Even if he had long ago found a way of walking, a jerky kind of rhythm that smoothed out his limp so it was almost invisible. It didn’t matter what any of us saw or didn’t see. Because what happened to Liam’s family was a story the whole town knew and couldn’t forget if it tried.

  Liam took a long step out of the pool, skipping the top step of the ladder. As he left the water behind, he gathered the waistband of his shorts around him, pulling the drawstring in tightly. He did this seamlessly, like he wasn’t even thinking about it, like this task, of keeping his too-large shorts up, of hiding his scars, was as natural to him as breathing.

  He shot a glance behind him as he went, back at me. To see if I was watching, maybe? To see if I cared?

  I wasn’t. I didn’t.

  I was watching the water he’d pulled himself out of, the way it surged and pooled and settled back into itself.

  I was watching the bandaid floating in his wake, coming towards me across the surface like a homing pigeon.

  Seven?

  I grandma-stroked my way to the ladder and hung off it for a minute, stretching my arms until they tingled. Then I hauled myself out, not bothering to look back.

  I wouldn’t be coming here tomorrow. I had a better idea, one that had been sitting quietly in the back of my mind for I wasn’t sure how long. Maybe always.

  I would still do my six laps, or something like it. Up at the lake, it would be harder to measure, but it would be better in so many ways.

  It would be still and peaceful.

  It would be bandaid-free.

  It would be other things, too, but I wasn’t going to think about that now.

  I wasn’t going to think about the empty streets and the broken buildings, the way they had turned themselves over to fish and weed and who knows what else. It didn’t matter what was down there below me in the quiet dark. Everyone knew that swimming was about staying on the surface.

  two

  When I got home, Dad had a finger in someone’s eye and another in their ear.

  I dropped my bag on the floor of the studio. “So, who is it this time?”

  “Guess.”

  I stared at the clay shape in front of him and shook my head. I never got it right. Then Dad got all offended, said it was a shame I couldn’t share his artistic vision, and started jabbing disturbingly at the face with his sharp little tools.

  The problem was, there didn’t seem to be anyone who shared Dad’s artistic vision, including the tourists he stopped in the main street because they had such interesting heads.

  When Dad presented them with their clay head, which always managed to look both like them but not – as if they were slightly out of focus or something – they nodded thoughtfully. They took a step back, sometimes two, and said things like Oh, how interesting! and Well, you’ve certainly put a lot of work into it! and What’s that lumpy bit on the side there? Then they checked their watches and muttered something about Not much space in the car and Wouldn’t last two minutes round the kids and No, no, you keep it and Oh, please, I insist.

  Usually, the heads ended up in our backyard, their weird angles and smashed features staring out from bushes and long grass and the forks of gum trees, like some kind of creepy zombie museum.

  I studied the misshapen lump of clay. Was it even a head yet? Maybe that bit in the middle was a nose? On the other hand, it could just be a blob Dad had left there by accident.

  I grinned and shook my head.

  Dad sat back on his stool and sighed. “I probably shouldn’t be doing this now anyway.” He motioned at the mess of half-finished work piled around us, all the pots and plates and other touristy knick-knacks he was supposed to be getting ready for the holiday season.

  He had to finish the firing and the glazing. Then he had to get it all into town, packing it carefully so it wouldn’t shatter on the way, or develop hairline cracks that would give the tourists who wandered into Country Crafts Gift Shop a reason to bargain the price down.

  Dad clapped his clay-caked hands together and stood up slowly from his stool, wincing as his knees clicked in protest. “Nearly dinner time, I reckon. I’d better wash up.”

  “Yeah.” I bent down to unzip my bag. My damp towel was balled up in there. I needed to hang it up before Mum came along to issue her gentle reminder.

  Dad glanced at me. “How was your swim?”

  “Okay.” I shrugged. “Seven.”

  “Seven?” He let out a low whistle. “Yuck.”

  “Tell me about it.” I followed him out the door and down the hall.

  In the kitchen, Mum was stirring a thick soup on the stove. “Did you do your six?”

  I slid into my chair. “Yep.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yep.”

  She turned. “Hang your towel?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.” She smiled.

  “Hey, Cass. Check this out.” Hannah was at the table, her work satchel hanging over the back of the chair.

  Her laptop sat open in front of her, precariously balanced on a pile of papers.

  She reached underneath it and pulled the top sheet from the pile. It was a newspaper article – faded and brittle-looking, as if it might flake into tiny pieces at any moment.

  I glanced down at the date. It was old. Twelve years old, in fact.

  There was a headline – WELCOME TO NEW LOWER GRANGE! – and a grainy black-and-white photo: two people holding a bundle of something.

  Two familiar people. Mum with a tired smile, Dad with a deer-in-the-headlights expression.

  A bundle of me
.

  Hannah grinned. “I was just telling Mum.” She made air quotes with her fingers. “First baby born in New Lower Grange. You’re going to be in it, Cass.”

  I stared at her. “Me?”

  I didn’t need to look at Hannah’s laptop to know what she was working on. It was the centenary book. Everyone in town knew about it. In the first place, it was that kind of town – so small everyone couldn’t help but know everyone else’s business. In the second place, this was the biggest news to hit New Lower Grange in as long as I could remember. The centenary of the town. Both towns, really.

  Twelve years here, our teacher Mrs Barber said, and eighty-eight … you know. She waved a hand towards the window in the general direction of the lake.

  They had realised kind of at the last minute – that twelve plus eighty-eight equals a hundred. That it equals a centenary and another opportunity for a bunch of ceremonial sausages and a really lame brass band. That they had only a few short months to get ready.

  A few weeks ago, Mrs Barber rushed into class with a panicked expression. She cleared her desk and wiped down the board. She told us to forget about Antarctica and penguins and global warming and the soap-making business we had been looking forward to all year, because Lower Grange was celebrating one hundred years of history and we all had to do our part. We had to do handprints and mosaics. And 800-word essays entitled “My Lower Grange” with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, which would be sealed into a time capsule and dug deep into the ground for future generations to laugh at.

  “See?” Hannah interrupted my thoughts. “It’s going to be a kind of before and after. The growth of our town and all that. You’ll be here.” She scrolled with the mouse and pointed to a double-page spread that appeared on the screen.

  Cassie, she had written, in short, hurried text. First baby etc.

  The middle. That’s where I’d be, drawing the line between before and after.

  “There’s a lot of work to do.” Hannah sighed. “But Howard says it’s coming along nicely.”

  I nodded. Howard was Howard Finkle, the mayor of Lower Grange for the last seventeen years and counting, the man who’d flipped the lever to drown the old place. Hannah worked for him down at the council, putting together brochures telling tourists about the vibrant arts culture and the laid-back country lifestyle, and writing press releases about all the fantastic things the council was doing for our community.