Blue (8 page)

Zeke took the punch like it was nothing, then slapped Daniel around the back of the head really hard, which was a move I'd seen other surfers do in the water when someone dropped in on their waves. It hurt like hell but it wasn't a real punch. It was a warning.

Daniel looked a bit stunned and then caught Zeke with a glancing blow to the jaw. Zeke spat out a bit of blood where his teeth must have snagged his tongue, and it was on. He swung back and hit Daniel square in the nose, which sprayed blood over Zeke's Hawaiian shirt. I was shouting for Daniel to stop, but it was as if he couldn't hear my voice at all, as if I didn't even exist.

Daniel went for Zeke again, but he was so drunk and giddy that he staggered to the side and his fist hit nothing but air. He tumbled on to hands and one knee and scrambled to get back to his feet.

Angry now, Zeke held Daniel down with one hand. With his other hand he hammered Daniel's head with punches.

Daniel's friend Sammy hit Zeke from behind with a beer bottle to the head, and another friend quickly kicked Zeke three or four times in the kidneys, then went for the lowest kick. Zeke doubled up and dropped to the grass, and Daniel, out of control and his face a gory pulp, just raging like a wild animal, tried to kick Zeke in the ribs, but I got in the way and Daniel ended up kicking the bench instead. He swore and swung for Zeke again, but ended up hitting too low and catching Zeke's leg.

I looked around, desperately hoping someone was coming to break up the fight, but there was no one.

Another of Daniel's friends, Matthew—who was basically the only sensible one out of the bunch of them—tried to hold Daniel back, but Daniel snaked around and punched Matthew too. Matthew retaliated, and it was a brawl between all of them. Zeke was down and not moving. I grabbed his arm, got him to his feet and began dragging him toward the double doors. Something was wrong, because Zeke wasn't saying a thing.

After a few steps Zeke seemed to revive a bit, but I could tell he was hurt by the way he was breathing. A dark patch was growing on his thigh. I put my hand to it and my fingers were bright red in seconds.

Oh my God.

Zeke was a pro-surfer with an international rep and he'd been knifed in Newquay, by my ex, right in front of me. This was breaking very, very bad.

“We're nearly there,” I said.

We got into the hotel. As I pushed open the doors with my back, I saw that Daniel had got away from his friends and was walking unsteadily after me, carrying something in his hand.

The hotel residents' bar was empty except for two old dudes sipping beers and picking at bags of chips. I heard a door slam in the wind and I pushed through another door and on to the heaving dance floor, where we stood gasping for breath.

Garrett looked across and saw us, slammed his drink back down on the bar in an eruption of froth and pushed through the crowd to reach us. Wes followed Garrett with his eyes and then saw us too. A couple of boys I didn't recognize, but who were obviously friends of theirs, were close behind.

Garrett arrived first.

He took one look, undid his shirt and used it as a tourniquet around Zeke's leg.

Something inside me had seized up and I couldn't even move my own body. I was just frozen by the sight of the blood. So much blood.

“What the hell?” Garrett said. “Would someone call a fucking ambulance?”

“Negative. Anders'll drive me. Don't need an ambulance, just a second to think. Figure out how I'm gonna explain this. Fuck. Other dude had a flick knife.”

“Yeah, brah, I see that. Don't look like he caught an artery though.” Garrett touched Zeke gingerly on the chest, and Zeke winced. “Couple ribs broken too maybe,” Garrett said, his face going tight with anger. “You k'den? Not gonna croak?”

“Not today.”

“I can leave you with Iris?”

“Don't do anything stupid,” Zeke said, trying to disguise the pain in his voice.

“You think? Those punks are dead. Where?”

“Just like three feet outside the door,” I said. And then added, “
Mahalo
.” I hoped that Garrett would kick Daniel's ass. Daniel had crossed the line, gone full-on psycho and tried to kill someone. If he wasn't put in his place now, what else could happen?

Without another word Garrett was out the door, and Wes and the others followed him.

For ten seconds, which felt like forever, I looked at Zeke and I could feel the pressure building up behind my eyes, but I couldn't cry. Not now. Now when it was all my fault.

Zeke was covered in dirt, with his shirt ripped and smeared with blood. His mouth was bleeding and he had a few nasty cuts on the back of his head where the bottle had broken. I looked down at the leg of his jeans, soaked with blood. I still couldn't believe it. Daniel had done that? He'd never carried a knife before. He'd use his own fists or nothing.

Zeke had a hand across his chest and was grimacing with the pain of breathing. I had my arm around him, trying to support his weight and keep him steady. He was much heavier than me though, and I couldn't move him.

Kelly rushed over, came out with the most colorful bunch of swear words I'd ever heard and used her weight to prop up Zeke on the other side. We limped over to a booth, where Zeke slumped down and tried to breathe.

“Get Anders,” I said to Kelly, who turned on her heel and ran.

“S'OK,” Zeke said. “Gotten better beatings off of the ocean.”

I held his hand tight and stroked it with my other hand. His gorgeous eyes had laughter in them, even then, when he was in so much pain.

Anders ran over, took one look at Zeke and made a call on his phone.

“You didn't call an ambulance, man?” Zeke said to him, through a rasping breath.

“You're damn right I did, and I'm about two seconds away from calling the fuzz.”

“You can't. If this gets out, I'll lose my sponsorship. Out in the boondocks, fighting with locals? Looks great, huh?”

“Have you taken anything?” Anders said.

“Nothin'. Come on. Don't ask me that.”

A weird question, I thought. Zeke didn't seem like the type to mess around with drugs.

“How much have you had to drink?”

“I don't know. Two beers. You can't call it in, dude. We just need to get out of here before anyone else sees me like this. If this makes the news, it's gonna be messy. Just take me to my pa's place.”

“Fuck. OK, I'm gonna cancel the ambulance, but I'm taking you to A&E under a fake name, OK?”

Zeke looked at his leg, and the blood pooling around his foot.

“OK. Guess I am gonna need some stitches. Maybe a pint of blood too.”

Anders gave me a look like he was really pissed with me, and for a moment I thought he was going to take it out on me, but Zeke shook his head and Anders stopped himself.

After everything that had happened, Zeke turned to me and said, “I'm sorry. Shoulda walked away.”

“Don't,” I said. “It's all my fault.”

“I've messed up your big chance.”

“Huh?”

“Your try-out tomorrow. I'll make it right, I promise.”

How could he even think about me having some stupid surf try-out at a time like this? If he had any serious injuries, he'd be out of the competitive surf scene for the rest of the season, if not forever. I could have ruined his whole life.

I let go of Zeke's hand, and Anders led him away. Kelly and I followed at a distance, not sure what to do or where to go. Saskia appeared out of the powder room, where she'd obviously been applying make-up with a shovel, and said, “Everything all right, girls?”

“Not exactly . . .” I replied, tailing off.

Saskia followed my eyes to Zeke who was leaning heavily on Anders as they limped out of the fire exit. “Oh my goodness!” she said, and ran after them without another word to us.

I turned to Kelly and said, “Never gonna forgive myself for this.”

“It's not your fault.”

“Never forgiving Daniel either.”

Kelly gave me a grim smile. “You will. You always do.”

“Not this time. He went totally crazy out there.”

“Have you asked yourself why?”

“Doesn't like seeing another boy with me. Probably thinks it's disrespecting his male code or something. He's crazy.”

“Yeah, for you.”

“He's with Cass.”

“Because you said no to him.”

“Hello? I was fifteen. What was I supposed to say? What did he expect?”

“He expected you to say yes. He doesn't care about Cass. He's just with her to hurt you.”

“Thank God I said no. Look what he's turned into. Just because he didn't get what he wanted from me. He could've killed Zeke out there.”

“Yeah, well, what goes around comes around. He'll get his.”

“Good.”

“He thinks you belong with him. He doesn't want to lose you to anyone else. Especially not someone like Zeke. He knows that if you hook up with Zeke you'll never come back to Newquay. That's why he's going so nuts. What is it they say? Wider horizons. If you get with Zeke, the world will be your oyster. You'll be gone.”

“You're trippin',” I said.

“No, I'm not. I get it. I don't want to lose you either. But I know you've got to do what makes
you
happy, not anyone else.”

“I'm not going anywhere. Jesus. I only met Zeke yesterday. You're all crazy.”

“OK, OK. Let's stop talking about it.”

Kelly got out her phone and called a cab. I sat down in the lobby, shaking. I'd done nothing much for three months and now it seemed like three years' worth of drama had been crammed into twenty-four hours.

I didn't speak to Kelly in the cab home. All I could focus on was getting my key in the door, getting into my bedroom and getting under the covers of my bed.

Kelly grabbed my wrist as I was getting out of the car and said, “I got Zeke's business card off Saskia. Just in case you don't have his cell phone number.”

I took the card and typed the number into my phone. I'd never thought to get his number. I don't know why. Maybe we'd both just figured that we'd keep running into each other if we were meant to. But then it dawned on me. I couldn't phone him to check how he was, because I'd dropped his phone into a hot tub.

How had it come to this? How had it all gone so wrong, so quickly?

I thought back to the previous evening. Zeke had the most gorgeous laugh; I kept noticing that. We stayed out for two hours past my curfew, before we rode our skateboards back to my house. If I hadn't liked him so much, it might have occurred to me that I could talk to him as easily as I could talk to Kelly, which was saying something, as Kelly was pretty much the only person in the world who got me. My mom had been waiting for me on the garden bench with a lecture, so I never got to find out if Zeke was going to kiss me goodnight. As soon as I spotted my mom, I handed Zeke his jacket and told him to split while he could. My mom would tell off anybody, even Zeke Francis.

I took Zeke's room key card out of my ancient Rip Curl wallet and let myself think about what might have happened if Daniel hadn't gone out for that cigarette with his friends. Would I have bottled it, or would I have ended up going back with Zeke to his room?

I didn't know. All I wanted was for Zeke to be all right again, like he was before he came to Newquay; before he met me.

I could hear my mom coming up the stairs, so I shoved the key card under my pillow and switched off my lamp so that she would think I was already asleep. I heard my door open a crack and then close again. I reached for my phone.

It rang three times before he answered.

“Didn't mean to cut him, did I? Just wanted to scare the prick,” he said.

“You're dead to me,” I said. “Don't ever contact me again.” Then I put down the phone and let out the tears that had been burning the backs of my eyes for an hour.

Monday was school. Exams were finished but we were all supposed to go in for some crappy farewell day where we'd sign everyone's shirts, write in each other's yearbooks and make a film of ourselves playing around, so that we could look back on it in the future, when we were old and past it. In the afternoon, a few of the jocks and nerds were going to get awards and the rest of us would get to sit in the sweltering assembly hall and clap. It was going to suck.

On Sunday I'd called Zeke's cell phone a bunch of times, hoping he was out of the hospital with a new iPhone, but all I got was his mailbox. I couldn't call the hospital because I didn't know what name he'd used. I was seriously considering ditching school and taking the bus to Treliske in Truro to scour the wards and see if he was there.

On the other hand, would he even want to see me? In the cold light of day, perhaps he'd come to his senses and realized that I was more trouble than I was worth. His agent would be telling him that.

I didn't particularly want to see Kelly and listen to her be nice to me, but without her I was so alone. Where was my family? There they were, their smiling faces in the huge collage of photos around my bedroom mirror.

Lily, my older sister, was at art college (my dad was so proud; my mom not so much) and she was a total scene kid. She would quite often leave the house wearing one red Converse high-top sneaker and one blue one. She had a different hair color every month, different colored contact lenses every week, and she changed her sexual orientation every couple of days. She'd called to say she was working as a stewardess at various music festivals over the summer vacations. She was a free spirit, she said, and couldn't be brought low with regular jobs, like shop work. That was aimed at me, I guessed, but my shop was three seconds from Fistral Beach, so what did I care? I could surf in my lunch hour, which was the main thing.

My sweet grandmother's face was there, smiling through her wrinkles like she knew the answers to all the questions in the universe. She had walked the continents, sailed the seas. She'd fallen in love a hundred times, with adolescents, men in their twenties, thirties, every decade up to old men in their nineties. My grandfather was lost in the war and my grandmother spent the rest of her life living it to the full, with no regrets, no guilt and no looking back. She'd rubbed shoulders, to put it politely, with millionaires, aristocrats, vicars, politicians and her own share of surfers.

I missed her so much that the pain caught in my throat like a lump of stale bread.

She would know what to say now. She would say the perfect thing to make it feel better. But she was out of my reach.

With Zeke in the hospital, I let my mind wander. It wandered back to the day Lily and her friends took me out in a twelve-foot boat; a piece of crap from the seventies that belonged to my uncle. It was supposed to be a fishing trip, we were after mackerel and bass, and I was adamant I wanted to go, even though it was before I had my sea legs and I couldn't stand the smell of fish.

But Lily did her good deed and brought me along. There was some beer drinking, some smoking of weed, a bit of serious rowing and then we got out by the Zorba reef and things got rough. Turn-your-skull-into-a-blender rough. After puking my guts out over the side of the boat, I looked up and saw this huge thing coming toward me, with its mouth open and its massive black fin shooting into the air. Cody sprayed his mouthful of beer right over Alfie's lap, and I was laughing and terrified at the same time, but Kai kicked back and said not to sweat it, it was only a basking shark. It was humongous, bigger than the boat. It could have capsized us, swallowed the five of us whole and still had room for plankton.

So many times I remembered that boiling-hot day on the sea with them. Maybe there's something about kids' brains that makes color brighter, heat hotter and smells stronger, because when I remember it, it's like spinning through some Van Gogh world.

I missed Lily and her friends. I did. If they had been at the Headland Hotel with me, Daniel and his moron friends couldn't
have done that to Zeke, because Lily and her crew would have stepped in, held Daniel's arms by his side, pushed him to the ground if he kept struggling and held him there until he calmed down.

But they were all long gone.

I got into my uniform, tied up my hair and walked to school. I passed Kelly's house and she came running out behind me. Her shirt was hanging out of her pants and she hadn't done her hair.

“Hey, how ya doing?” she said.

“I'm super. It's Zeke I'm worried about.”

“Can you wait a minute and I'll walk with you?”

“OK, whatever.”

“Come inside if you want.”

“Rather wait out here.”

I leaned against a lamppost and watched the sets roll into Fistral. Just looking at the waves made me feel calmer.

I thought back to the fork in the road. To the question that had started the madness. It was because of Daniel's insane plan.

It was too difficult to get a good enough job to pay for a house, he said, and we'd be thirty by the time we saved up a deposit. Apartments in Newquay were sky-high, way out of our league. What we had to do, he said, was simple when you thought about it.

I disagreed.

Daniel wanted us to have a baby, so that we could get a local-authority apartment.

“'Cause of these scuzzy second-homers we're not gonna be able to afford our own apartment so we'll have to live with our moms forever. No thanks, and anyway my mom's told me she's kicking me out on my eighteenth birthday. So if we can't
afford to live in Newquay, we'll have to move to Plymouth or Exeter to find some crappy job in a factory. Ten hours a day on a production line, or a life on the beach? What sounds better to you, Ris? Because I don't wanna leave Newquay for anywhere else.”

It would be paradise, he told me.

“For you,” I'd explained to him gently. “What is it for me? Knocked up, labor, childbirth, everlasting responsibility. At the age of fifteen? Uh, no thanks.”

I just couldn't seem to explain it in any way that made sense to him. Babies are cute and everything, and my cousin Cara was adorable, but there was no way I wanted to get pregnant at fifteen. Or seventeen. Or twenty, for that matter. I wanted to live a bit, see the world, and not only the places with good surf. I wanted to see it all, in my own way, on my own terms. I didn't intend to be stuck on the beach looking after babies while my boyfriend surfed for six hours a day.

Down on his knees, with a small black box in his hand containing a ring with a tiny diamond, Daniel couldn't believe that I was saying no to this glistening life that he was offering me.

“Why not though?” he said, over and over, like I was the most unreasonable person in the world.

And now look what he'd done.

But Zeke would get better. He had to. He would get back into the ocean because he was born to it. All he needed was time to heal.

I was still choked up and couldn't talk much to Kelly on the walk to school. As soon as it got to lunch, I skipped out. I ignored a dinner lady who was asking me if I had a home lunch
pass, walked through the school gates and turned left. A hundred yards down the road, I heard a noisy engine and a beep.

Pulling up on the curb beside me was Saskia, in a red convertible. She waved me over and I walked to the driver's side window.

“Zeke's asking for you.”

“How is he?”

“So-so. Get in.”

She looked over her shoulder and pulled into the road, forgetting to indicate and causing one of my teachers to swerve. I sank down a bit lower in my seat.

“I'll give it to you straight, Iris,” she said. “Zeke has a cracked rib and a deep cut in his thigh. If that knife had gone two millimeters deeper it would have caught the artery and he'd have bled to death in that lousy hotel. He is lucky to be alive.”

I felt my stomach grip with the shock of what she was saying. Lucky to be alive?

“He was in a lot of pain, but here he is today sitting up and asking to speak to the girl who some people might consider responsible for this nightmare.”

“All right, it's all my fault. Got it.”

I sat in the car, shell-shocked. Saskia glanced over at me and at my once-white shirt, which was covered in scrawls, graffiti tags and signatures: all part of the “fun” of our last day at school.

“What does that say on your arm?”

I looked down at my sleeve where one of the livelier boys from my class had written something in big red letters.

“
Suckit
.”

“Lovely.”

“Can we stop here a minute?” I said.

“Which house?”

“The one with the three palm trees.”

She pulled over outside my house and I jumped out.

“Be quick.
No
hair-straightening.”

I looked at her and managed not to give her the finger.

I was so shaky that at first I couldn't even get my front-door key in the lock. Then I kicked off my shoes and tore up the stairs and into Lily's room. I stripped off my school uniform for the last time ever, and put on a long turquoise hippie skirt and a brown sleeveless top from Lily's wardrobe. She had some nice beaded thong sandals and a chunky seashell necklace, so I borrowed those too. I was not going to visit Zeke in the hospital wearing my skanky, graffitied school uniform or any of my faded old beach stuff.

I swigged some mouthwash, spat it out in the bathroom sink and then ran down the stairs, brushing my hair. I stopped for a second to look in the hallway mirror and put on some light pink lipstick and mascara. My face looked tense; it reminded me of my mom.

I got back into the car and sat in the passenger seat next to Saskia.

“Six minutes,” she said, looking at her watch. “Not bad.”

“What name is Zeke under at the hospital?”

“Jack Johnson. Anders's idea of funny.”

Before Jack Johnson became a multimillionaire musician, he was a pro-surfer. Then he wiped out at Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu, hit the reef and cracked his head open. Right after the one hundred and fifty stitches were taken out of his
forehead, he decided to ditch pro-surfing and become a songwriter instead. I wasn't sure I got Anders's sense of humor there.

When we got to the hospital and Saskia went off to pay for parking, I slipped out of the car and went straight to reception, where I asked for Jack Johnson's ward.

I didn't want Saskia to be there when I saw Zeke. I took the elevator up, surrounded by old people dragging oxygen canisters, and I thought about how he would look. I couldn't imagine seeing him all wired up to medical equipment.

The ward was quiet. A nurse sat behind a desk reading a magazine and ignored me as I walked in.

Zeke was at the far end, asleep.

I walked over quietly and stood at the end of his bed. He was very pale, and a cut on his lip was beginning to heal, a mess of purple congealed blood.

He opened his eyes and smiled.

“Hey. Howzit, Iris? Wow, you look
hella
fly.”

“Thank you. You don't look so bad yourself, all things considered, like.”

“Caught any killer waves today?”

“Uh, no. Mom ragged on me for an hour before school this morning, so I didn't exactly get a chance to go surfing, even if I'd wanted to, which I didn't. How are you feeling?” I said, wishing I'd thought to bring him some surf magazines. But maybe that would just make him feel worse. Like rubbing salt into the wound.

He moved a game console from his lap, slid off the bed and walked to the window.

“Guess I'm not going base-jumping in Utah. Bummer. I've always wanted to see the Moab desert. It's not your fault, by the way.”

“It so is.”

“I was getting harassed by your ex all night. I thought it was funny. I should have just gone and asked him what his problem was. Worked it out like men. None of this knife bull.”

“I'm really sorry.”

“Forget it. Wasn't kidding when I said I've gotten better beatings.”

I must have looked a bit skeptical, because Zeke said, “This is nothin' compared to getting my knees dislocated, my eye socket shattered and my head split open when I wiped out in the wrong spot and got slammed all over a Tahitian coral reef. Anyways, I'm getting out of here tomorrow.”

“Yeah? Awesome.”

“But they say I won't be able to surf for a while. Maybe two or three weeks. Not until my rib's all healed up again. It's gonna take a while for my leg to feel OK again too.”

“You should press charges. Daniel deserves it. He needs to know he can't go around attempting to murder people.”

“Anders and Saskia have been telling me the same thing. I'm not pressing charges. He's just a pissed local, mad at me for coming here and taking a crack at his waves. And his girl. Besides, Garrett beat the crap out of him. Broke his face.”

“I'm not his girl, and press charges anyway.”

“The kid's nuts about you. He made a mistake. We've all done it.”

“You ever beat up someone over a girl?”

“Sure.”

“Don't believe you.”

“It happened. I was eight.”

Not exactly the same thing. I shook my head and smiled.

Saskia walked over and gave Zeke a kiss on the head. “Don't worry about a thing,” she said. “I've made all the necessary telephone calls and your schedule is wide open for the next month, so all you have to concentrate on is getting better. We'll get you back to London in the next few days and have you seen by the best physical therapists this country has to offer.”

“I'm going no place but Newquay.”

“What? Why?”

“Because my planner is blank for like the first time in two years? And I'm not going to waste my time in some city.”

“You can't surf, darling. The doctor was very clear about that.”