Aftershock by Alison Taylor

Author:Alison Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2020-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Pool.

I’m breathing underwater, currents slide along my skin and map out the murk around me, rocks and coral and darting, synchronized fish. Beside me, a pod of dolphins plays in the waves, swimming up to kiss the surface, their mighty thrashing tails sending them arcing, splashing. One of the young leaves the group, its belly upturning as it floats towards me, its skin greying and wrinkling, shrivelling and shrinking, and the surface of the water glares above me, unreachable.

I woke up with a gasp, sat up in my bunk and concentrated on breathing evenly. Low-angled moonlight cut bent squares across the dark dorm. The four bunks I could see held bodies, the mattress above me sagged with a fifth. Lee’s bed was at right angles to mine, our heads almost meeting in the corner. Her legs shifted and her face moved into a panel of light. She reached a hand out between our bunks to mine and I lay back down and took it, grateful not to be awake alone.

You okay? she whispered, and I nodded. Lee closed her eyes but didn’t let go. I lay for a while watching a few breathy clouds cut across a spotlight of moon, and listened to the crashing midnight surf. Until I fell asleep in a smooth dive, still holding on to Lee’s hand, its warm grip guiding me safely under.

MY STITCHES HAD healed, but I was still getting daily ice-pick headaches, and my memories took on the quality of stand-alone episodes, narratively disconnected. The doctor said this might go on for months, especially since it was my third concussion (because hockey).

Lee started surfing every morning with the Australian women, and I spent long hours watching from a beach towel. Off-hours, when the tide wasn’t right, surfers would crowd into the TV room or around someone’s laptop to watch surf videos, but I still didn’t enjoy screens, so I sat on the porch and watched the ocean, or went for walks on the beach with Lee.

I realized my world, in the few weeks since my concussion, had become very small. I was beginning to feel restless.

WE WERE PLAYING pool late one afternoon when Jansen, a South African guy who’d arrived the day before, came in and said he was going to hitchhike up north, and as someone had told him Lee and I were also travelling north, he wondered if we wanted to travel together.

No, thanks, Lee said, at the same time that I said, Sure.

He spun us a sad tale: He’d been robbed a couple days before, in a tourist town in the south. He’d gone to the bathroom while he was checking out of his hostel, left his pack by the front desk, and when he came back, it was gone. So now he had no passport, no phone, no credit cards, only the clothes he’d been wearing and the cash in his pocket. Nothing else. No witnesses: the guy on the desk had stepped away, just for a moment, but that was all it took.

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