by Kirsty Eagar
This guy can surf, but he’s really pushy. He snakes me almost immediately, which pisses me off. One of the crows, a shortboarder with long sideburns and a penchant for lurid board shorts, turns around and hollers at him: ‘Faark off, mate! Show her a bit of faarkin’ respect.’
Surprised, I look at him, and he gives me a nod.
The newbie must be stupid though, because he paddles straight back to the inside, which is just plain rude. This time the crow drops in on him and does a cutback so he’s heading straight towards him, screaming, ‘Faark off! Git gone, mate.’
I get my first wave. Oh God, it’s great today. The waves have got a real thrumming beat to them, a speed about the way they peel that gets your blood pumping. I zing along, smacking out a hat-trick of top turns and finishing with something I hope resembles a foam floater. Guys paddling back out give me an Eeeeeurgh! Sometimes with surfing it’s just on and you lift up a level.
More men arrive, none of them regulars. Although small, it’s good here today, and the south facing breaks will be flat. The crows take umbrage. All I can hear is a cacophony of Faark offs.
Someone paddles up beside me and I turn around to find it’s that Danny kid, the one who sees colours. He stares at me for a second, as if checking something, then seems to relax.
‘Hey, Danny,’ I say with a big smile which surprises even me.
‘Have you seen that Blue Horizon movie?’
‘Ah … no.’ I wait for an explanation but there is none. ‘I’m good, thanks. How’ve you been?’
‘Yeah, good. My mum gave it to me. For my birthday. It’s about Andy Irons and Dave Rastovich – Rasta – you know that free surfer?’
‘Happy birthday. When was it?’
‘Today.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Guess.’
‘Forty-two.’
A smile twists his mouth sideways. ‘No, I’m fifteen.’
‘You’re just a baby.’
‘No, I’m not.’ He flips himself over and lies on his back. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve.’
He grins, showing his even white teeth. I’m struck by how clean he looks: thick black hair, smooth skin, slanted eyes. Today his eyes look hazel.
‘How old are you really?’ he asks.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Huh.’ He considers that for a while, his mouth open. ‘That’s old. That’s four years older than me.’
‘All right, all right.’
‘That’s like half a decade older than me. A third of my life.’
I splash water at him. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’
‘Because it’s my birthday. Mum said I could have the day off because we’re not doing anything anyway. We finish up next week. Christmas holidays. What’s your last name?’
‘Lee.’
‘What was school like back in the day, Mrs Lee?’ Then he collapses into giggles, going floppy the way little kids do when they laugh too much. When he finishes, he gives a big sigh and sits up. ‘You know how it’s my birthday? You can give me a present if you want.’
‘Geez, you’re not short on confidence are you? What can I give you?’
‘You know how you said you work in a kitchen? Do you reckon you could get me a job there?’
‘What, like part-time?’
‘Yeah. I want a job for the holidays.’
‘Is this part of your condition – you know, the colours thing – you ask total strangers for jobs?’
‘It’s called synaesthesia. Synaesthesia. And it’s not a condition, like a disease or something, it’s a good thing. Some people call it a gift.’ He says all this with his face stuck up in the air, looking serious and snooty. ‘And you’re not a stranger, I’ve talked to you.’
‘You’ve talked to me once.’
‘You’re not a stranger because I get stuff from you. So I knew you even before I talked to you. That’s rare, by the way – to get colours from people. Really rare. Not many people have that type of synaesthesia.’
‘Oh really? And what do I give off?’
He starts to fiddle with the pocket on his board shorts.
‘Is it the good stuff, the honey stuff?’
‘No.’ He turns and paddles for the next wave.
When he comes back, he sits up on his board and his hands start pecking at each other. ‘What about the job?’
I feel bad for teasing him. ‘I don’t know, Danny. It’s not very nice work. I’ll talk to my boss, see what I can do. He might want to talk to your mum.’
‘I’m not a baby.’
‘I know.’ I gasp, widening my eyes. ‘You’re fifteen.’
He grins. ‘Shut up. What’s the place called, where you work?’
‘Café Parisienne. It’s in Manly, but I s’pose you could get a bus there if you had to.’
‘Can’t I get a lift with you?’
‘Well, yeah … but it depends if we’re on the same shift.’ I’m feeling slightly panicked by just how quickly Danny has attached himself to my life.
‘What time do shifts end at night?’
I shrug. ‘Twelve, usually.’
‘Well, then I’ll have to get a lift with you. I can’t get the bus.’
‘Is that right, Princess?’
‘No, it’s not like that. Mum doesn’t like me coming home by myself late at night. And I don’t want her picking me up. That’d be distressing.’
‘Distressing? That’s a big word for a fifteen year old.’
‘You know, majorly embarrassing.’
I nod. ‘All right then, because it’s so distressing, when I talk to my boss I’ll say you need the same shifts as me. Happy?’
‘Yeah, good.’
There’s a right breaking further over and I paddle for it. It shuts down quicker than my last wave but I still get two turns in. When I rejoin Danny he appears to be deep in thought, hands worrying away at each other.
‘This movie, Blue Horizon,’ he says.
‘What about it?’
‘It’s like Rasta porn.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Every time they show Rasta, they’ve got him in slow-mo. Like, him swimming underwater with mermaids and shit. Making a lot out of the fact he’s a free surfer. It’s stupid. And then when they show Andy Irons they make him out to be a money-hungry pig. But Rasta’s sponsored, too.’
I nod, surprised by his astuteness. ‘Fair enough.’
‘What’s your favourite surf movie?’ he asks.
I give it some thought. ‘I don’t know. Probably old stuff, videos I used to watch when I first started. Endless Summer Two –’
‘Seen it. Sucks. Too much story and not enough surfing.’
‘– and Kelly Slater in Black and White.’
He looks more interested. ‘Can I borrow it?’
‘Oh. The tape’s wrecked, sorry. I kept rewinding and watching the same part over and over and it broke.’
Danny laughs. ‘That is like porn.’
‘You’re fifteen, how much do you know about porn?’
He shrugs. ‘Not much. Hey, what’s the time?’
I glance at my watch. ‘Ten thirty.’
‘I’ve got to go. I’ll drop some Rasta porn off for you.’
‘What?’
He’s flattened out, paddling hard to catch the next line of swell coming through. ‘Blue Horizon. I’ll drop it off at your place. See ya.’
Drop it off at my place? How the hell does he know where my place is?
10
bitter stings
On Friday I wake up with a nagging feeling that I’m supposed to be somewhere. There’s a strong wind blowing something around on the side of the house and it keeps making a knocking noise. At first I think it’s someone knocking on my door, which would really freak me out, and even after I realise it’s just the wind I still feel hounded. By eight o’clock I can’t stand my hallucinations any more and I give up and stagger out of bed feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck. The m
uscles in my back and legs have seized up from surfing and work, and if I turn my head a blue line of pain shoots down the back of my neck.
I hate the wind. It makes everything depressing. I remember my mother going on once about a woman who took to her bed for six months. One of the mothers from school whose husband had left her. I mean she only gets out to drop the kids off and pick them up again. Doesn’t even bother to change out of her nightie! I can see how things could get that bad. Sometimes it’s all you can do to get up in the morning. Sometimes staying in bed isn’t as scary as getting out of it. If I didn’t have surfing to get me out of bed I don’t know what I’d do.
I sit down at my laptop, which is set up amongst the clutter covering the square breakfast table in the living area, and I pull up the surf report, but before I get around to reading it I’m up out of my seat again, looking for my mobile. Mum rang last night when I was at work. I noticed the missed call when I got back to my car but I didn’t listen to her message. I was in a good mood and I didn’t want to wreck it. Instead I drove home with the radio blaring and the windows rolled down.
But this morning has changed all that. It’s a morning without hope. The sky is bleak and grey and the wind just won’t let up. A never-ending grind of traffic passes outside, people who have somewhere to go and somewhere to return to. I find my mobile on the kitchen bench, dial up my message service and then press the phone hard to my ear as though my mother’s voice will be the last voice I hear on earth. Something hard and painful has lodged in my throat. I feel so alone. I want to go home. Anything is better than this.
Hello Carla. It’s your mother here …
And her tone is set, pressed and firm. Freshly ironed. This is a duty call. Because, after all, I am her daughter. Even if I’m not the one she would have chosen for herself.
… Your brother’s unit settles next weekend. He’s thinking of getting a flatmate because he’ll be away for work so much and it’ll help with the mortgage …
She gives me the family run-down, and then moves on to household maintenance.
… which was very disappointing. So your father told them we weren’t prepared to pay for it unless they fixed it up. The whole thing was disgusting. I don’t know how people like that stay in business …
And then she gets to the thing that’s been scratching her, the reason for her call, even if she doesn’t know it herself. I know it because her voice changes, discontent bittering up her mouth.
And what else? Maddie leaves for Fiji next week. Auntie Yvonne says she’s been saving up for it all year – you know how she had that part-time job at the newsagent’s? Good to see that. As your father said, she had a goal and she’s seen it through to the end. Of course Yvonne and Robert will help her out a bit, but still, Maddie’s always had her head screwed on right. She’s going with a couple of her friends. Sarah is one of them – remember her from Maddie’s eighteenth? Lovely girl. They wanted to do something special to mark the end of their high school years. Something nice.
The disapproval in her tone isn’t for my cousin, Madeleine. It’s for me. Because I didn’t want to do anything special or nice to mark the end of my high school years. I wanted to go to the Gold Coast and get drunk like everybody else. This shouldn’t have been wrong, but for some reason my father decided it was.
I knew he would. That’s why I left it until the last minute to tell them I was going. And then he and I argued, and in the few days before I went he wouldn’t look at me when he was speaking to me, if he’d speak to me at all. I was eighteen, I could do what I wanted, but it came at a price. My father’s eyes can be the coldest place on earth.
For him, it was all about control. It was something I wanted too much. It would be good for me not to get it. But when I overheard Mum discussing me on the phone, speaking from her position on the cross, I wanted to ask her for clarification. I didn’t do drugs; I got good grades at school; my teachers liked me; I had friends, guys and girls, a group of mates to hang around with, even if I didn’t have a cloying, specially close best friend in the way of Maddie and Sarah; I wasn’t a bad person – so why, why, did she always proceed my name with a sharply exhaled breath?
Couldn’t she see that if I always did what he wanted there wouldn’t be any of me left?
Here’s the sting: if, by some strange act of God, I had been unnaturally mature and pre-empted Maddie by marking the end of my high school years with a sedate Fijian holiday in a resort empty of anybody still young enough to want to party, it wouldn’t have made Mum happy. It would have been wrong, too.
And that’s because, in the restaurant of life, my mother always wants what someone else is having. Auntie Yvonne is proud of Maddie. She just loves her. She’d be excited whether Maddie was going to Fiji or the Gold Coast or wherever.
Mum doesn’t feel that about me. So I must be the problem.
I delete her message without listening to the rest of it.
11
Collision
Coastalwatch
Swell size 1–1.5 metres – Swell direction S
The strength of yesterday’s southerly change has made for erratic climate-change–style extremes today. It’s more like winter than summer. Some solid 3–4ft waves around this morning, pushing up to 4–5ft during the day. Strong SW winds forecast to turn SE …
By the time I get down to the back car park dirty grey clouds are scudding across the sky. It’s close to low tide and the break isn’t liking the southerly swell, really sucking up on the right bank, showing a dirty underbelly of grey water pockmarked by sand. The water’s surface looks scaly in the wind.
I walk down to the break with one of the crows who was in the car park getting changed when I arrived. He’s a nice old guy who likes to talk, always as excited as a kid. One day he just started talking to me like he’d known me his whole life. I didn’t mind though. In fact, I liked it.
‘Bloody crowded,’ he says when we see the break. ‘I’ve got to get back up to Crescent Head.’
‘Crescent Head would have to be crowded too, wouldn’t it?’
‘The point break is, but the beach breaks aren’t. You can have some good surfs there all to yourself. Uncrowded.’
I’ll have to check with Hannah whether uncrowded is a real word. In surfing it is. Crowds are a major concern. I saw a photograph of Manly on one of the surf websites the other day. It showed a line of surfers, maybe four or five deep, stretching from Queenscliff down to the south end without a break. It looked like hell. Maybe it’s good that this place has got such a bad reputation.
As though he can read my mind, the old crow says, ‘Been a bit of aggro lately. Few broken boards. Bit of a biff in the car park the other day.’
I wonder how it happens, the breaking of the board. Does the aggressor wait until the person has laid it down on the bitumen and is unlocking their car, unaware? Or do they rip it out of the person’s arms and break it across their knee?
I start unwinding my leg rope from around my board.
‘That little Shane bastard has got a lot to do with it,’ the old guy says, nodding his head at a surfer making his way across on a right.
I stare out at ‘Shane’ and see the flash of colour on his forearms, which are covered in tatts. Just looking at him gives me a bad feeling.
‘He’s always stirring things up that one. Got a mouth on ’im, that kid.’
Because the swell is from the south it’s breaking over at Carparks – in line with the top car park – and peeling right. Most of the guys are clumped over there, constantly trying to make the inside. I stick to the Alley, paddling against the sweep to hold my position. There’s a bad feeling about the place today and I don’t want to be around the hassling. But that Shane guy comes for me anyway. He catches a wave in and paddles out so he’s right behind me, singing to himself – these boots are made for walkin’ … nah nah nah-nah nah nah … gonna walk all over you. I glance around at him and his eyes are glassy, not looking at me, but even so he’s making some so
rt of point. A hand squeezes my stomach. He’s lean and wiry, with cropped blond hair. The tattoos on his forearms are lurid swirls of red and green like decaying Christmas decorations. His face is sharp, so beautiful it cuts, and there’s something erotic and poisonous about him.
He stops just on my inside and stares back at the beach, raising his right arm in the air. There are two guys walking towards the Alley, boards under their arms. One of them waves in return.
In a lull between sets, he turns his attention to me.
‘Excuse me, young lady.’ His tone, overly polite, starts my heart thudding.
‘Yep?’
‘You wouldn’t happen to have the time on you, would you?’
I look at my watch. ‘It’s ten to nine.’
‘Nine o’clock?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Time for a fuck?’
I act like I haven’t heard him, my face frozen.
He laughs and paddles across to a guy not far from us, saying, ‘Did you hear that, mate? It’s fuck time. Fuck o’clock.’
I feel sick. Why’s he targeting me? Because I’m the only female out in the water and he wants to make something of it?
The two guys Shane waved to are paddling past me now. With shock, I realise one of them is Ryan.
He gives me a hard stare and sucks air through his teeth. ‘Gettin’ a few?’
When I don’t answer, he frowns as though he’s going to say something else, but then one of the crows calls out, ‘Hey, Rhino! Wet the bed, mate?’
And he moves on, paddling over to talk to the crow, drifting belly down beside him on his board.
Shane has paddled through the main clump of guys and continued on so he’s deep inside. I see him go on the first wave of the next set through. The wave’s massive and hollow, with a slicing lip sharp enough to take your head off. It’ll barrel, but there’s no way he’ll make it out. He takes the drop anyway and I see him driving his board forward into the pit before the shoulder of the wave blocks my view. He eventually surfaces in the sea of white water that follows, washed all the way in near the beach. He gets out in front of the car park and starts walking towards the Alley rip. Which means he’ll paddle out near me again.
