The Tunnel
Make me continue my casual hospitality job after graduating from a four-year Arts degree with advanced studies and honours. But never, ever make me walk through The Tunnel.
Image Credit: April Keogh
Make me line-up at Courtyard at 12:30pm on a Wednesday and tell me there are no more chicken parmis. Make me run into my ex-boyfriend on a deserted Manning Road and force a smile. Hell, make me continue my casual hospitality job after graduating from a four-year Arts degree with advanced studies and honours. But never, ever make me walk through The Tunnel. Not after everything I’ve seen.
For those who were not born and bred in the Inner West, the Haberfield-Leichhardt Tunnel may seem unimportant, or even non-existent. I envy you. Leering at the innocent traveller from underneath the Hawthorne and Marion light rail stations, the Tunnel is a puncture in the brick wall of my otherwise unshakable nerves. It is lodged deep in the overgrown marshes of the dog park and the swamps of Hawthorne Canal. It constructs a cruel journey for those of us who can only travel between the two suburbs on-foot. The Tunnel is, in many ways, a necessary evil. Or a trench. Or a dungeon.
My first journey was on a mild Sunday afternoon in 2014. I was 12 years old, on my way to Leichhardt Marketplace to buy as many finger buns from Bakers Delight as I could with a 20-dollar bill. The sun warmed my face as I skipped through the netball courts, all to the tune of Little Mix’s ‘Black Magic’ on my iPhone 5. Suddenly, I felt the cold hands of a day suddenly turned to night on the back of my neck and a muddy dampness creeping into my shoes. The Tunnel loomed over my small body, its concrete gums and gravel tongue waiting to swallow me. I realised this was a matter of life and death: either I would run away from the mountains of sugary bread I had been promised, or I would not. With my heart beating in my throat and begging me to turn around, I moved forward.
Shades of white, red, and black oozed from the walls, spelling out expletives I did not know and resembling a massacre I hoped was not real. I took small and tentative steps, dodging puddles of putrefied water stagnating in the middle of my path. I tried to look back at the distance I had my back towards, but my vision was blurred by the curving path and a fluorescent purple light flickering overhead. I felt something brush past me, a ball of fur and flesh swiping at my leg as I reached the other end of The Tunnel. I was almost eaten alive.
But it got worse: I had to go home. Night was falling, shrouding every park bench refuge and secure cast iron fence in shadow. However, the cavernous chasm looked clear — so I legged it. Shopping bags weighed my arms down, my cap was pulled down low on my face, my Nikes slapped the ground harder than at cross-country in Timbrell Park a few weeks earlier. It took me a total of eleven seconds to send it, and 72 more to regain my breath. But six years on, I still have not fully recovered.