Blue (4 page)

I caught another seven or eight waves and I stayed on one too long, so that by the time I hopped off my board, I was knee-deep in whitewater slop.

I started paddling back out, but the sets were close together without much of a break and I was really getting pounded in the impact zone. A couple of times I was pinned down in the gray darkness and, even though I made myself flow not fight, it was exhausting to be shaken like that, with my lungs screaming for air.

I had a crazy ice-cream headache and my arms felt like spaghetti from all the paddling. I gave up trying to reach the line-up and bodysurfed the inside whitewater back to the beach. I padded through the pools, which felt unbelievably warm compared to the chilly sea, and sank down on the sand.

I thought I'd take a quick break to catch my breath. Killer. I let myself feel tired and that was it. I was done.

I checked my watch again and saw that we had been in the water for nearly two hours.

It was getting cold, my mouth was parched and I was starving.

I got up and walked around, searching the water for a glimpse of Zeke, when it occurred to me that I didn't have to wait for him to finish his session; I knew where he'd left his van keys,
so I could stash his board and go home, without prolonging the awkwardness any longer.

I was just sliding the board into the van, when I heard someone shouting my name.

Zeke must have been keeping an eye on me after all, because there he was behind me, looking surprised that I hadn't waited for him.

He high-fived me and said, “You scored some epic rides. That first tube? If you'd spent any longer in there you'd have had to pay rent, huh?”

I smiled.

“Everything OK?” he said.

“Long day,” I said, feeling some serious bed gravity. “A few nasty wipeouts. Swallowed a bit of water.”

“Me too.”

He didn't look like he'd swallowed a load of seawater. He looked great and he was glowing from the exertion.

“Yeah? You looked like a pro out there.”

He grimaced a bit. “I always swallow some water when I'm duck-diving.”

I nodded. It happened. Normally went up your nose.

“Deliberately. It's almost a superstition now. I figure if I get a little of the sea in me right at the start, then my body will know how to handle this stuff all around it, or something. So I drink a little before every session. For luck, I guess.”

That was crazy. There was no other way of putting it. You did not go around swallowing seawater if you could possibly help it. Seawater was horrendous on the kidneys. Even with a light surf session, I'd have to drink a ton of water afterward.

I looked at him and there was something so serious in his eyes that I didn't want to mock him. I wanted to be there with him, believing that a mouthful of saltwater could educate your body, keep you lucky.

The light was failing, the sky overhead changing from deepest blue to silver, the horizon taking on a hint of the coming sunset. The wash of the sea was loud in my ears, even with the wind that had begun to swirl across the cliffs.

“I could coach you, you know. If you like.”

I didn't know what to say to that, other than, “Why?”

“Why not? You charge real hard. You've got something.”

“Me? I only learned to surf three summers ago.”

“Seriously? I started on a stand-up when I was four.”

“Ah, so that's why you're so good,” I said, without thinking. He gave me this big smile, but I wasn't buttering him up, I was just being honest. Anyone with eyes could see he was the best surfer out there.

Zeke grabbed a towel and started stripping off. He turned toward the van, working his way out of his wetsuit and pulling on his shorts. I did the same. For a split second, as the wind caught his towel, I saw a flash of butt.

“Come on,” he said, turning back to me, “let's go grab some coffee.”

“That sounds good, but honestly, I am so exhausted.”

With the cliff wind whipping my wet hair against my neck I was also so cold that it hurt. I went to stash the wetsuit for Denny and when I got back to Zeke, I said, “It's been great tonight, but I really should get home. I have work first thing in the morning and it'll be dark in an hour.”

“We only live once, right?”

I thought about his tattoo and could feel myself wavering.

“Come on,” he said. “We need to talk about my plan to get you competing in the Wavemasters' Girls' Junior Open, which just so happens to be held in this little town in September.”

“Funny,” I said.

“I'm not kidding.”

I thought about my job selling surf clothes in the Billabong concept store on Fistral Beach, and then I thought about how amazing it would feel to stride down the beach in front of a crowd and compete in a surf contest. If there was even a 1 percent chance of that happening, it was worth a late night.

The hungover tourists wanting to buy board shorts, bikinis and strings of beads would just have to make do with the bleary-eyed version of me.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“The hottest joint in town. My house.”

“Don't you live in your van? I saw a duvet.”

Plenty of surfers did. The NO OVERNIGHT SLEEPING signs dotted along the esplanade were a total joke. Those surfers weren't necessarily slumming it either, because if they didn't like Fistral's rank public toilets, or washing with a bar of soap in the sea, they could pay forty bucks a month for gym membership of Hotel Serenity. That way, they could use the hotel's fancy gym showers and bathrooms, and get a decent workout whenever they wanted.

“I have a slightly nicer place.”

Good to know.

“I do crash out in my van sometimes though. If I'm surfing late.”

Or when a girl wants to see the sun rise over the sea, I thought.

“Well, I can't go to your house because I don't really know you and, no offense, you could be some murderous psychopath. My judgment is not the greatest when it comes to boys. Not lately anyway.”

“Where then?”

“Fistral Blu?”

“That place right at the other end of the beach, with the bartender who's like seven feet tall?”

“Yeah, Fistral Blu Beach Bar.”

“That's quite a walk.”

“So lend me your jacket.”

Surfing brings people together. No matter where you're from, no matter what your race or background, no matter what your beliefs, the waves are waiting. We are one tribe. Some of us ride ocean swells that break over beaches, headlands or reefs; others ride the wind-swells of inland lakes or the mega-waves made by collapsing glaciers. We ride on our feet, our knees, our fronts, our backs, sometimes even on our heads. We leave our land lives behind and come together in the ocean, under one big sky, to play.

Zeke was in the tribe. Always would be. I could see that from the first moment I met him. He was a surfer from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.

From his van he handed me a jacket, which had green and blue checks in the classic surf style and heavy padding. I zipped it up and it came nearly to my knees. But it was warm and soft
and the smell of it, when I nestled my nose into the collar, was pure ocean.

We never got to the bar. The surfrats of North Fistral were having a party on the beach. A few of the guys down there were backstreet surf trolls who lived out of their cars, and had only a board, wetsuit and pair of shorts to their name. Loads of car headlights from the beachside parking lot were trained on the beach, lighting up a soccer-field-sized area of sand. The blare of a dozen car stereos replaying a Radio 1 Ben Howard concert drowned out the surf, and at least fifty guys and a handful of girls were playing around on the sand, some swigging from bottles of beer but most just enjoying the music and the vibe.

Zeke's face lit up when he saw the beach ranger, but he must have been feeling the cold because he put up his hood and pulled it down tight around his face. The sun bobbed for a moment on the horizon and then disappeared.

“Should we stay here?” I said, noticing a few of the guys I knew from the line-up. Nice guys who didn't think it was OK to block girls from waves or drop in on them. Guys who realized surfer girls and water-women had as much right as boys to surf a break.

One of them, Caleb, caught my eye and waved. Caleb was a great surfer, one of the young guns who had masses of talent but none of the ego. Those guys were into saving the environment, picking up plastic bags from the beach so that they wouldn't choke out sea life and campaigning to stop the hideousness that is shark-finning, which is where millions of sharks are caught every year and get all their fins chopped off while they're still alive, before
being chucked back in the sea to die an agonizing death. All because some people like to eat bland, status-symbol shark-fin soup. Caleb and his crew didn't care about looking cool; they just wanted to drop out of mainstream values, out of capitalism and into Mother Nature.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Zeke said, smiling. He pulled out some sunglasses from his jacket pocket, which seemed like overkill. True, the sunset was still pretty dazzling on the horizon, but it was almost like Zeke didn't want to be seen or something. I really hoped that wasn't because he was worried about bumping into his surf-bunny one-night stands. Horrible thought.

Caleb came over and I introduced him to Zeke.

“Nice to meet you, man,” Zeke said, and Caleb shot him a funny look and mumbled something polite. Then he turned to me and whispered, “He's here.”

“Who?”

“Daniel.”

I hadn't noticed them, but there they were down at the water's edge, ankle-deep in the ocean. Daniel and Cass wrapped up in each other, tongues in the wrong mouths. It made me want to puke.

I took Zeke's arm and pulled him up toward the dunes where someone was spraying deodorant on to a T-shirt and trying to light it to make a fire. Zeke went over to ask if they needed help, and like a perfect boy scout he got some pieces of driftwood and kindled them until he had a real blaze going.

I just sat there, knees up to my chest, and watched him work. I did not turn to the shoreline to see Cass and Daniel. I was so sick of them and everything they stood for. Stupid sheep, the
both of them. The only person stupider than them was me, for not seeing what was going on right under my nose.

Zeke was obviously a pretty friendly dude, as guys were coming up to him and chatting away. I liked to see that. It was nice spending time with someone happy and positive, someone who liked people. I wondered if any of the guys had spotted Zeke surfing earlier. They'd want to know where his home break was, if he'd been to Indo, Java or Tahiti.

I realized then that even I didn't know where Zeke's home break was.

“Zeke,” I called out to him. “Where exactly are you from?”

“We traveled all the time. I was born in Oahu, but we followed the waves to Kauai, then Maui, then the North Shore of Oahu again. For a while we just lived off the fat of the land.”

“What, like camping out?”

“Yeah, then later in a beach hut. Climbing trees for coconuts, spear-fishing. Endless summer and all that. My folks had hardly any money at first, but they lived the dream their way.”

“Where does your mom live now?”

“All over. She spends a few months of the year in South Africa. Her boyfriend is from there. She still keeps our place in Oahu. It's this geodesic dome, just off the beach. It's so cool. But I've spent a lot of time with her in South Africa too.”

“Do you surf there?”

“Sure.”

“Don't they have white sharks there that
eat
surfers?”

“I mean, it happens, and it sucks, but it's so, so rare. And it's not the sharks' fault; they're just doing what comes natural to them: feeding when they're hungry.”

Caleb piped up with, “Sharks kill maybe five people a year. We kill eighty
million
of them. Every single year. They have way more to fear from us than we do from them.”

“I guess . . .” I said, unconvinced.

“Look, I'm in the ocean pretty much every day of my life,” Zeke said. “Yeah, I might be in the wrong place at the wrong time one day and get chewed up by a shark, but it's a risk I'm willing to take. Mostly, sharks stay offshore and give us a wide berth.”

He raised an eyebrow at me, and added, “When you make the ASP World Qualifying Series you'll have to surf super-sharky waters. And, you know, you won't even care. You'll just be like, ‘Let's go surfing already.'”

Ha. As if I would ever in a million years be good enough for the QS.

Right then, two guys came jogging through the dusk. One of them had long brown hair that was hanging around his shoulders in wet squiggles like seaweed. The other was slightly taller and had cropped white-blond hair, also wet. Something about them seemed vaguely familiar.

“Hey!” Zeke shouted. I was surprised to hear him hollering like that. As a visitor to Newquay I hadn't expected him to bump into friends of his own. As it happened, they weren't friends.

“Garrett, Wes! Dudes! Come join us!”

They came loping up, both of them smiling and looking dead pleased to have found Zeke.

“Iris, these guys are my brothers.”

Even if he hadn't told me, it would have been obvious. There were the same half-Danish, half-Hawaiian good looks, same fierce
blue eyes, same broad shoulders, same strong jaw, and something else, if it didn't sound nuts to say it: they moved in the same kind of super-relaxed way.

Zeke went over to them and they all did this forearm-to-forearm handshake, then turned to me.

“Really nice to meet you,” I said, putting out my right hand. Wes shook it very solemnly and gave Zeke a cryptic look.

Garrett was asking Zeke something, and Wes said to me, “So how do you know Zeke?”

“I literally just met him tonight during yoga class.”

“Yeah? Which class?”

“The one at Hotel Serenity.”

“Zeke goes to that?”

“Yep. Have you been? It was my first time.”

“No.”

Garrett interrupted, squeezing in front of Wes to shake my left hand and kiss it. I laughed, handed him a can of some cheapo lager from Lidl, and he said, “
Mahalo
,” which I knew was Hawaiian for thanks, and then shook and kissed my right hand too.

For a second Zeke looked mildly annoyed and then Garrett cuffed him around the head and they started a play fight, which Wes joined, and soon the three of them were wrestling and rolling around the beach like primary-school kids. I had to smile. It was cool to see a boy so happy around his family.

A group of boys had started up a game of rugby, and a second group was kicking a soccer ball around. The Fistral surfrats could be surprising like that. People expected them to be totally lazy beach bums, but to me it seemed like they all had some kind of hyperactivity disorder. They could not sit still.

Girls and some older women in their twenties were starting to trickle toward our fire from the beach bar, lured by the macho display and the hope of bagging a summer romance with a surfer on their seven-day vacation. These were the girls that went to the beach to sunbathe, and they wore wedged heels rather than flip-flops, and lipgloss that would get covered in sand with every breath of wind. You'd hear them at the water's edge, screaming when a three-inch musher washed over their ankles, because, “Omigod, I forgot about my fake tan! It'll go all streaky!”

Girls with no bottle. Girls like Cass. Some of the boys liked these ultra-wimpy girlie girls, found them cute. I didn't care about them as long as they kept out of my way and didn't decide to come swimming just when I'd taken off on a wave. The worst thing ever was when their new surfer boyfriends tried to give them surf lessons, taking them out too far and too deep, just to prove how macho and talented they themselves were. It was way dangerous, and I'd had to help out these clueless girls and their arrogant boyfriends three or four times since I'd started surfing.

Whitewater. Everyone knows that. When you start surfing, you only surf the whitewater. Straight back to shore and then repeat until you've done it hundreds, if not thousands, of times. After six months of that, maybe, just maybe, we'll talk about riding the curl of a breaking wave.

People were pulling steaming burgers off disposable barbecues and throwing them into bread rolls. Some tanorexic surf groupie in a short skirt came up and offered one to Zeke.

“There you go, babe,” she said.

“No, thanks,” he said.

“Do you want something else then? Someone's doing steaks.”

“I don't eat meat,” he said, all of a sudden very serious.

“You're one of those vegans, are you then?” she asked, like veganism was a terrible disease.

“No, I'm vegetarian.” I thought about Daniel scarfing down his three Big Macs a day, and his extreme fishing weekenders where he'd camp out on the rocks without any food and only eat if he caught, killed and gutted a fish. Daniel loved the macho bull.

“Oh,” she said. “Is that different?”

“Kinda,” Zeke said, giving her a look that said,
How stupid are you?

The girl was still clutching the burger as if she didn't know what to do with it. Eventually one of the other surfrats came over and plucked it out of her hands, and she drifted off.

Wes and Garrett rolled their eyes, although I wasn't sure if this was because they thought being vegetarian was pathetic or the burger-toting girl was.

Soon enough the sky was full of stars, and a puffed-out Zeke came and sat next to me. I could feel the warmth of him through our clothes. He yawned and, since it was dark, I snuggled next to him and put my head on his shoulder. I felt him sigh in this really nice contented way, and I realized in that moment that I was totally calm and happy.

Zeke's brothers had come over too and they were chatting. Zeke was saying something about big waves thundering along like freight trains, and Wes was pointing out that fewer people had surfed the planet's giant waves than had been to outer space. That Zeke was kind of a pioneer, if you thought about it.

So Zeke had surfed giant waves too? Had he been there with his friend at Teahupo'o in Tahiti? He hadn't said that. But if he had surfed that mega-scary reef break, then not telling me about it was freakishly modest.

Then Zeke said, “Once, during this epic storm swell at Maverick's, in California, I fell on to my board, landed on my chest and had the wind knocked out of me and I swear I thought I was dead. I had no breath. And I was so far under, just pinned down in the dark, with tons of water pushing on my back. Thought I was gonna pass out from oxygen deprivation. I could feel myself going through all the stages of hypoxia: the mental thrashing around, the throat spasming, the bright stars, and then it all went black.”

“Sounds way intense,” Garrett said.

I could hear in Garrett's voice how he felt about his little brother. It didn't seem to be an act just to do Zeke a favor with me and the other girls that were listening. Wes and Garrett actually respected him.

Then Wes said it: “We're so proud of you, bro. What you do is next-level brave.”

“I don't feel brave. When those big waves close out, they explode like bombs, bro, and when I wipe out then, I feel like I'm six inches tall. I don't think, ‘
Wow, this is the most radical wave ever
.' I think, ‘
SHIT, please don't kill me, wave.
'”

“Well, that's fair enough, brah, 'cause those bombs totally could kill you.” This was Garrett.

“They probably won't though. They'll keep kicking my ass, yeah, but I don't care. Just so long as I only get injuries I can recover from.”

“Well, I think you're a nut for riding super-heavies.”

“Yeah, sure. No doubt. But I love it. You're in the middle of a huge tornado, just chaos and heavy water all around, but in the center there's this pocket of total calm. So long as you come out clean, it's fine.”

“Why risk it?”

“Just for the smile. I always get out of the water happier than I went in. Literally always.”

“Just don't tell Mom, eh? She has no idea what you're doing out there. She still thinks you're taking on clean little five-footers. Lucky for you she doesn't have the Internet, 'cause you'd be shipped off to a psych ward. She'd think you were suicidal.”