Flash Flood
THe haunt PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
fiction by Justina Ashman
I don’t remember much about drowning, but I remember this: a deep burn in my chest, like my lungs had been stretched out past breaking point and then snapped back like a rubber band. The taste of chlorine in my mouth, the sting of it in my eyes and nose and throat. The warmth of pavement pressing against the skin of my bare arms and legs.
And the girl. Bending over me, blonde curls limned in sunlight framing her freckled face, panic bleeding into relief in her hazel eyes as I jerk forward, coughing.
The rest of it comes to me in flashes. The other swimmers crowding around me—the hem of red board shorts, pink legs smeared with sunscreen that hadn’t been fully rubbed in—and someone yelling to stand back, give her room, let her breathe. There’s a lifeguard, then paramedics, an ambulance, the hospital. Mum standing by my bed, talking in hushed Tagalog to Aunty Christina, hand trembling as she presses her phone to her ear.
I remember lying back on the crisp hospital pillows and thinking about the girl from the pool who saved my life. I remember her hand on my face, her fingers curling against my wet cheek. I remember the cool press of her lips on mine.
I remember asking—who was she? Did someone get her name?—and Mum hushing me, telling me to rest.
And then—nothing.
✷
Mum doesn’t approve of me going back to the pool, but Aunty Christina tells her it’s part of my healing, that I need to face my fear of the water.
‘So have a bath,’ Mum says, but she eventually lets me go.
I don’t actually plan on going anywhere near the water, but I don’t tell her that. The truth is it does scare me. That distinct smell of a public pool in summer—sunscreen and chlorine and salty kiosk chips—makes me feel sick, like I can’t breathe. But I have to go back. I’m looking for the girl.
No one seems to know who I’m talking about when I ask about her. The staff at the pool insist that they don’t employ any lifeguards with curly blonde hair and freckles, but I’m not certain she’s a lifeguard anyway. Mum thinks that I must have a guardian angel watching over me, but I don’t believe that. I remember her—what she looked like, what her hands felt like on my face—I know she’s real.
I walk right past the pool and lay my towel out on the grassy rise to the side, under the shade of a large tree. I sit there, scanning the crowd for that familiar head of curls, for that warm hazel gaze.
After two hours I head home, defeated. If Mum notices my hair is completely dry, she doesn’t comment on it.
✷
I find her on my fifth visit. Or rather, she finds me.
I’m sitting cross-legged in my spot under the tree with a book propped open on my knees. A drop of water lands in the centre of my page and I look up, already opening my mouth, but my words stick in my throat when I see her.
She looks like she’s just gotten out of the pool; her blonde hair is dark and heavy with water, clinging to her face and neck.
‘Sorry,’ she says cheerfully. She smiles at me, not looking even vaguely apologetic, and for some reason all I can think is oh, she has dimples.
I’ve imagined this moment a lot since getting out of hospital. I know exactly what I have to say. I take a deep, steadying breath.
‘I hope you’re not planning on drowning today,’ she says before I can speak. ‘I think there’s a kids’s lesson about to start—it’d probably traumatise them.’
‘Traumatise them? I’m the one who nearly died,’ I say, forgetting all about my prepared speech.
‘But you didn’t,’ she says, shooting me honest to God finger guns. Is she trying to flirt with me about my near-death experience? Something in my stomach flips and I try to bite back a smile.
‘Uh, yeah. Thanks, I guess. That is—I’m really grateful, you know, for the whole saving my life thing.’ The words are awkward and stilted and not at all how I’d planned to do this.
‘Anytime,’ she says and then visibly cringes. ‘Well, not that I think it’s going to happen again, or like, often or anything.’ She waves a hand in front of her face, as if batting the words away. ‘I mean—you know what I mean.’
I laugh. It’s kind of comforting to know she’s at least feeling as awkward as me. ‘This is weird right?’
She gives me a sheepish grin. ‘So weird. But in your defence, I’m the one who came up to you and put my foot in my mouth.’
I don’t tell her that I’ve been coming to the pool twice a week to look for her. That probably goes straight past weird and right into creepy.
‘I actually did want to thank you,’ I say. ‘Properly, I mean. I’ve been thinking about you a lot and just—I literally owe you my life.’
‘So,’ she says, almost too casually, ‘you’ve been thinking about me a lot, huh?’
I feel my cheeks get hot. ‘Not like that! I just meant—’
But she’s laughing now, a brash, bright sound, and I feel weirdly pleased for being the cause of it, even if it is kind of at my expense.
‘I’m actually on my way out.’ She jerks a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the exit. ‘I just recognised you and wanted to see if you were doing okay. It was nice actually talking to you though.’
‘Wait!’ I say before she can turn away. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Billie.’ She holds out a hand out to me.
‘Rosa.’ I take her hand and it feels oddly official, like we’re cementing some kind of important agreement.
‘I’ll see you around, Rosa,’ Billie says as she turns and heads towards the pool gate. By the time it occurs to me that I didn’t even ask for her number or anything I could use to actually contact her again, I’ve completely lost sight of her.
✷
I don’t need to worry though, because Billie is right. I spot her in the park the next morning when me and Mum are taking the dog for a walk. She’s feeding the ducks in the river, and I make Mum wait on the path while I run over to say hello. We make plans to go bike riding along the river the next day and I feel lighter than air as I walk back to where Mum’s waiting.
‘Who were you talking to?’ Mum says, giving me an odd look.
‘No one,’ I say quickly, ushering her further along the path.
I don’t really want to tell Mum I found Billie. I know she’d probably be just as keen to thank the person responsible for keeping me alive as I was, but a large part of me wants to keep Billie to myself.
We see each other again and again after that. Sometimes we just run into each other and get to talking, but more often we make plans to meet up. It turns out she loves photography and urban exploring, which on its own makes her pretty much the coolest person I’ve ever met. When she asks me if I want to go exploring with her some time, I don’t even try to hide my excitement.
I never realised there were so many hidden places in my little suburb, but Billie seems to know every single secret, forgotten corner. We ride around the streets on our bikes, the asphalt so hot from the sun that I start to worry it’s going to melt our tyres. We poke around old tin sheds, left to sit empty in huge overgrown lots; laneways that snake behind rows of houses, waiting to be demolished and built over; old shops, long since shut up but still filled with left over stock, gathering dust and cobwebs.
Billie brings her chunky DSLR camera everywhere we go, cradling it lovingly as she crouches in front of derelict cabinetry and broken windows, her eye pressed to the viewfinder.
‘Why don’t you just use a phone?’ I ask one day, waving mine in front of her. ‘They’re just as good.’
She scoffs. ‘Don’t listen to her, Betsy,’ she says, putting a hand over the camera lens as if that’s somehow equivalent to blocking its ears. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’
I snort. ‘You call your camera Betsy?’
Her cheeks go pink, and I laugh even louder.
It seems bizarre that for weeks I wasn’t completely sure she even really existed. Without me fully realising it was happening, my summer days have become filled with Billie—and they feel realer than anything.
✷
We’re at the creek in the conservation park behind the high school. The house we’d wanted to check out was completely overgrown with long, yellow grass and the risk of brown snakes didn’t seem worth it. It’s been a stifling forty degrees all week, so we walk along the dry creek bed, picking up smooth stones just to feel the satisfying shape of them in our palms.
We make our way back to the road just as the sun starts to fully set and the mozzies come out in force. The sky darkens, but the temperature doesn’t drop, and as the yellow streetlights flicker on, Billie turns to me and says, ‘My place isn’t far from here. You should come over.’
‘Yeah, okay,’ I say, and my stomach twists in a way that’s both painful and strangely pleasant.
Her place turns out to be a construction site for a block of tightly-packed townhouses being built on a newly subdivided block of land.
‘Uh, you live here?’
Billie gives me soft smile and for a moment she looks almost sad. ‘I didn’t say that. I just said it was my place.’
There are no walls yet, just foundations and blue steel frames marking out the skeletons of future rooms. She leads me to a house—they all look exactly the same, but there seems to be a specific one she wants to show me.
She doesn’t reach for her camera, so I figure we’re not here to take more photos. She lies down on the concrete slab, her arms stretched out to her sides like Christ crucified.
‘Do you know there’s a river under this house?’ she says. ‘It actually connects to the creek we were just at.’ She closes her eyes, her fingers pressed downwards—towards the river, I guess. There’s something otherworldly about her in the moonlight, in the way it casts her skin in a pale blue, her freckles like dark constellations against her cheeks. For a moment I can’t breathe to look at her.
She opens her eyes and catches me staring. I feel my face going hot, but she doesn’t mention it, she just pats the concrete next to her.
I lie down and copy her, spreading my arms out either side of me—reaching towards her, so that we’re joined at the fingertips.
‘You can feel it,’ she says, turning to look at me, her cheek pressed to the ground.
‘Sure.’ I look back at her, but all I can feel is the warmth of her fingers as they curl into mine. I don’t know what she sees in my expression but she smiles at me and I want to press my lips to the dimple that forms at the corner of her mouth.
‘Close your eyes,’ she says and I do. She uncurls her hand from mine and pushes my palm flat against the concrete. ‘There. Can’t you feel it?’
I try to picture my hand sinking through the newly laid foundations, through the soil and rock and into the dark damp of a forgotten tributary, running like a vein under this brand new housing development. I imagine that I can almost feel the dirt and the mud turn to ice cold water between my fingers, even as her warm hand rests atop mine.
‘Well,’ I say softly, breaking the silence, ‘these people are going to be pretty upset when it floods their fancy living room.’
She lets out a startled laugh and I open my eyes to see her grinning back at me. She takes my hand—properly this time, letting our fingers lock together—and tugs me towards her. I roll with it, leaning in, and it’s the most natural thing in the world to finally let myself press a kiss to the soft crease of her smile.
✷
Nothing changes and everything changes. I still tease her about Betsy. She still laughs at me and shows me treasures I’ve lived beside for my whole life and yet never noticed until now. We go exploring—we just hold hands a lot more, and sometimes Billie will press me up against the trunk of a eucalyptus and kiss me till I’m dizzy and we both pull apart, gasping for air.
‘I want to show you a place,’ she tells me one day. ‘It’s pretty much the coolest spot I know.’
This is how a lot of our adventures start, and I’m kind of preoccupied with how her hand is resting on my waist, so I’m not really paying attention when I say, ‘Yeah, sure.’
‘We have to go today though—it’s supposed to rain on the weekend and when the weather breaks it’ll be too dangerous.’
That gets my attention. ‘Dangerous? What kind of place is this?’
‘The best place.’ She presses a quick kiss to my lips. ‘You’ll love it. Don’t worry, it’s not supposed to rain for days.’
I look up at the blue expanse of the sky—there’s not a single cloud in sight.
✷
Billie’s latest place is a stormwater drain that’s tall enough for us to stand in but narrow enough that we’ll have to walk single file. It also smells dank and rotten, only made worse by stifling heat.
‘Eugh,’ I cover my nose and mouth with my hand. ‘It stinks.’
Billie shrugs. ‘Yeah, well, humanity you know? Always littering in waterways. Also I’m pretty sure some of these tunnels are technically sewers.’
‘Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said you’d saved the best until now.’
She flashes me a dimpled grin and takes my hand. ‘Oh, ye of little faith. Come on, Betsy. Let’s show her.’
‘You know it unnerves me when you talk to the camera like it’s people,’ I say, but I let her pull me past the mouth of the drain without any more complaints.
We walk for what seems like hours, but can’t have been more than twenty minutes if my phone is to be believed. The pinprick of light from the mouth of the tunnel finally disappears as we make our way around a bend. I turn on my phone light, but Billie pulls a torch out of her camera bag.
‘Don’t waste your battery,’ she says, so I turn it off again.
We walk in silence with just the torch light to guide us. The drains are so much more extensive and labyrinthine than I realised, but Billie walks forward with purpose, navigating the intersecting network of tunnels with ease. I’m glad at least one of us knows where we are.
There’s something eerie about being underground without any natural light; the sounds of the world are muffled, but every small noise we make—every rustle of fabric, every shaky breath—seems to echo around us, infinitely louder.
‘Are we nearly there?’ I ask nervously, and my whisper feels like a shout.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘It should be just around this corner.’
We emerge into a large chamber, tall enough for someone twice my height to stand up in comfortably. The ceiling slopes cathedral-like up toward a single, open grate that lets in just enough natural light that we can see beyond the torch’s narrow beam. We’re in what looks like a huge intersection of tunnels—about six drains all open up into this one chamber. The concrete walls are so covered in graffiti that not a single sliver of the grey cement is visible.
‘Yeah, okay,’ I say, my mouth hanging open. ‘I guess this place is pretty good.’
Billie laughs. ‘I think the words you’re looking for are “You were right Billie, how could I have ever doubted you?”, but I’ll settle for just the first bit.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it—you still made me walk through a sewer.’
Billie takes out her camera and I do a circuit of the room, studying the coloured patterns on the walls.
When we’re finally ready to leave, Billie heads to one of the openings and I pause for a second, uncertain.
‘Are you sure that’s the one we came from?’
‘One hundred percent.’
Reassured, I follow her back into the dark.
✷
We’ve been walking for maybe five minutes when Billie comes to an abrupt stop and her torch light switches off with a sudden ca-click, plunging us into pitch black.
‘Billie?’ I call softly.
‘No,’ I hear her say, but it doesn’t seem like she’s talking to me. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no. This can’t be happening.’
I’ve never seen her panic like this before, not since we first met—when she thought I was dying.
I reach into my pocket and fumble for my phone with clumsy fingers.
‘Billie, it’s okay.’ I keep my voice as steady as possible. ‘I’m going to turn on my phone light.’
‘No!’ she shouts, and the sound is absurdly loud. ‘Rosa, you can’t—you can’t. You can’t see me. I don’t want you to see me like this.’
‘Shh, it’s okay,’ I repeat uselessly. I have no idea what she’s talking about, I just know that I have to stay calm. I can do at least that much, for her.
My light flicks on, illuminating her still form. She hasn’t moved, but she’s changed somehow. Her hair is dull and matted, tangled with twigs and leaves, and her clothes hang heavily from her limbs. She’s soaking wet, water dripping steadily down her arms, off her fingertips, to the floor of the tunnel.
‘This isn’t real,’ she says, voice high and thin. ‘It can’t be. It can’t be real.’
‘Billie?’ I try to whisper, but I’m not sure I actually make a sound at all.
‘I’m sorry, Rosa,’ she says, and now her voice is calm and clear. ‘I should never have brought you here.’
She steps to the side, revealing a figure slumped against the tunnel wall—a figure with matted curls and a familiar camera clutched in bloated, pale fingers.
A loud roar fills my ears and it could be thunder or it could be the sound of the world ending. I can’t tell if my heart has stopped beating or if it’s pounding out of my chest.
I tear my eyes away from the body—Billie’s body—to look at the person standing in front of me.
Her skin is almost translucent, tinged blue in a twisted version of that night in the unfinished house. Water is sloughing off of her in earnest now; I feel it sloshing against my ankles as I take a step back.
‘I didn’t realise,’ Billie says and when she opens her mouth water pours down her chin and the sound comes out in a choked gurgle. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I turn and run—or I try to. The water is at my waist now and rising rapidly. The rushing sound is louder and coming from everywhere—not a cataclysm, but rain. A sudden downpour.
I struggle to get away, but I already know it’s impossible. Even without the rain, I don’t know the way out. The water drags me down, heavy and dark.
✷
I never could quite recall how I drowned in the pool. I know what people told me afterwards—that I disappeared under the water suddenly, like something grabbed me or like my leg had somehow gotten trapped. That the lifeguard dove in after me but, when he resurfaced, I was already lying prone by the side of the pool, a small crowd gathered around me.
I didn’t remember drowning, the first time.
I remember it this time. As if every second has been captured on film in picture perfect detail.
My chest burns and my limbs ache. When the water reaches my chin, I struggle to keep my mouth above it, kicking frantically and gasping for air. When my head goes under my body goes rigid with panic, then starts thrashing uncontrollably, my mouth opening in a silent scream as water rushes down my throat.
I can’t see anything—there’s nothing to distract me from the pain. Just when I think it can’t get worse, it does. I think I can’t possibly stay conscious for another moment, and yet I do, every muscle in my body screaming in agony.
And then, just as I finally start to slip into blissful unconsciousness, I feel something grab me around the waist and start to pull. Cold as death, but solid and real as human flesh.
✷
I open my eyes, convulsing painfully as my body forces water out of my lungs. I sit up. The pouring rain slows, the rumble of thunder grows distant and my fingers sink deep into the wet dirt. I look down as I struggle to pull air into my lungs. I’m back at opening of the tunnel, laid out on the raised, muddy banks. And there’s no head of blonde curls, no hazel eyes, no cool hand on my cheek.
There’s no one there at all.
✷✷✷
Justina Ashman is an emerging writer and editor based in Adelaide. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Kill Your Darlings, Pencilled In and InDaily. In 2015 she was awarded the Emerging Writers’ Festival Monash Undergraduate Prize for Creative Writing for her short story ‘The Space Between’.
