by Des Hunt
Without reducing speed, we powered over the edge and down the steep slope, travelling much faster than I’d intended. Luckily, small shrubs of manuka regrowth got in the way and slowed us a bit. If I’d hit the brakes, we’d probably have slewed sideways and rolled.
I had the steering wheel to hold onto; however, Stephanie had only a small handle. Her body was bouncing up and down like a bull rider at a rodeo. She was screaming—not from excitement, but from terror. I felt like screaming, too: screaming in anger, screaming at my dad, screaming at the world, screaming at everyone who was messing with my life.
When we hit the stream at the bottom, I turned so that we were bumping along in the water. At times the jeep completely left the ground as it bucked and kicked along the rugged streambed.
After a couple of minutes, I got bored of that and turned to climb up the other side which towered above us like a wall.
‘No!’ cried Stephanie. ‘Don’t! Please don’t!’ I ignored her and headed up the slope.
Soon it was obvious that the jeep wasn’t going to make it: the hill was so steep we were almost tipping over backwards. I turned so that we were running parallel to the stream, yet that didn’t work either, so I spun the wheel until we were heading back down.
That was a mistake. This side had no manuka to slow us down, and the jeep began to accelerate. I could no longer drive the thing: the brakes wouldn’t hold and the steering wheel had no effect. We were hurtling out of control towards the stream.
We probably would have made it safely if there hadn’t been an old log in our way. But there was, and we hit it at speed, launching the jeep into space. When it landed, the nose dug into the ground, pitching me forward against the steering wheel. My head smashed into the top of the windscreen, blinding me for a moment.
Still the jeep kept on, racing down the hill. My sight returned just as the jeep ploughed into the stream, where it stopped so suddenly that once again my head hit the windscreen. And this time I passed out.
I woke, and for a moment didn’t have a clue where I was. I was in some land where everything was just shapes, shrouded in mist. Then the hissing of the engine helped bring me to my senses. The mist was steam coming from under the dashboard, and the shapes were boulders and manuka trees. I was on the farm and I had just done something incredibly stupid.
Slowly, I pieced together what had happened. That’s when I remembered that I shouldn’t be alone: I’d had a girl with me before, but she was no longer in the jeep. I swivelled around and looked back up the hill. Stephanie was lying just below the log where she must have landed after being thrown out. There was no sign of any movement. She was lying there; dead still.
I stared at her, willing her to move. ‘Come on,’ I said, beginning to shake. ‘Move! You’ve got to move.’
It took a while, but eventually it worked. An arm lifted, and then her head. Soon she was sitting up and looking down at me. I climbed out of the jeep and went up to help her. As I got closer, however, she started scrambling up the hill to get away from me. She was crying hysterically.
I stopped moving and so did she. ‘It’s all right,’ I called. ‘I just want to help you back to the jeep.’
No reaction.
‘We’ve got to get back.’
Still no reaction.
I decided to give her a chance to recover. Returning to the jeep, I started it up and tried to back it out of the stream. It took several goes of rocking backwards and forwards before it was finally on the grassy bank. I looked up to Stephanie and saw that she was now on her feet and struggling to climb down the hill. Her wonky legs seemed worse than before. I got out of the jeep to go and help her, but she stopped and looked at me with such revulsion that I climbed back in again and waited.
When she eventually made it to the jeep, she got in and sat as far away from me as possible. She was still crying uncontrollably.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
She simply stared at me.
I put the jeep into gear and moved gently forward, hoping that if I behaved myself she would get over it before we got back home. If I brought her back in her current state, I was certain to be in deep trouble. If she got over her crying, then I might be all right.
She didn’t get over it, and I was in deep trouble, although not immediately.
I took a roundabout, easy way home to give her plenty of time. It didn’t work. As soon as I stopped at the gate, she climbed out, opened it, and ran off as best she could, towards the house.
It took some time to park the jeep and then remove all evidence of the accident. I was still hoping to make out that she’d got upset over nothing. It was half an hour later when I arrived at the house and entered through the front door so that I could slip into my room unnoticed. After closing the door, I lay on my bed, and straight away I heard the sound of weeping from Stephanie’s room. Her mother must have been in there with her, for every now and again there were soothing sounds.
I still felt funny from the bang on the head, and it wasn’t long before I’d drifted into sleep.
A couple of hours later, I was woken by a soft knocking on my door.
‘Jake? Are you OK?’ It was Vicky.
‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘I’m all right.’
‘May I come in?’
She sounded sympathetic—maybe I was going to get away with it. ‘Yes, come in.’
As the door opened, I slid my body up until I was sitting.
She closed the door and looked at me, concern beginning to show on her face. ‘You’ve hurt yourself.’
I put my hand up to my forehead and found I had a lump as big as a lemon. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
‘Let me be the judge of that.’ She sat on the edge of the bed in order to examine the bump. Then she laid her hand on my neck as if taking my temperature. Next she studied my eyes, and finally she took my pulse. It was strange having a woman touching my body. I couldn’t remember it ever happening before.
‘You’ll live,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘You might have a touch of concussion, but you should be OK in a couple of days.’
I nodded. ‘How’s Stephanie?’
It was a moment before Vicky answered. ‘She’s not hurt. Just extremely disturbed.’ Another pause. ‘I don’t know what happened this afternoon, but I gather screaming around dangerously in a motor vehicle was part of it.’
I kept absolutely still, not wanting to show any sign of agreeing with her.
After a time, she continued. ‘There’s something you need to know about our family, Jake. Something that might help you to understand Steph.’
I relaxed a little. Maybe there wasn’t going to be any telling-off.
‘Just on eighteen months ago, Steph and her father, Mike, drove to Feilding for a swimming competition. Back then, Steph was a very good swimmer. She was one of the top swimmers in her age group for the whole of New Zealand.’
Vicky stared at the wall for a while, before sighing and continuing. ‘It was dark by the time they headed back home. The road between Feilding and Palmerston North is mostly straight and cars travel very fast along it. Mike was travelling over the speed limit, but not a lot. He probably would have travelled more slowly if he’d known there was a teenager driving towards him at close to a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. The boy was only fourteen, and he’d stolen his father’s car, picked up some mates, and taken off on a crazy joyride.’
She stopped, and for some time the only sound in the room was her breathing deeply as she tried to control her emotions. I was beginning to struggle with mine as well.
‘Mike was killed instantly,’ she continued in a broken voice. ‘The only one killed. The boys in the other car were hardly hurt at all. Our car flipped and landed on a fence post, crushing Steph’s legs and pelvis. She almost died.’
Again, silence: the magnitude of what I’d done was beginning to sink in.
‘It was very tough for the first couple of months, especially when Steph realized that she’d never s
wim again. She had a total of six operations. She wanted to give up—she just wanted to die. That really shocked me. After talking to her doctor, I contacted a psychologist, who suggested that music might help. So I bought a disc player and some CDs, and took them to the hospital. One of the albums was by Milton Summer, and one song in particular—‘Laughter in the air’—really helped her. She would play it over and over. That’s when the fascination began—I suppose you could call it a crush. I encouraged it, because it stopped her thinking about her troubles and she began to get better. Two months later, she came home; physically OK, but still with lots of scars in her mind. She kept having visions of the crash. I don’t know how accurate they were, but she would see the boys’ faces just before the crash, and they were always laughing at her.’
By then I couldn’t look at Vicky any more. I tried to remember if I’d laughed at Stephanie at any stage. I hoped not.
‘Slowly the bad dreams came less often, but she still wasn’t the happy girl she once was. Then I met Alan at the reunion. For me it was wonderful time. I told Steph about it, and when she found out that he lived near Milton Summer she was ecstatic. For the past four months she’s been preparing for this visit. I supported her because I could see she was becoming her normal, old self again. Today was going to be one of the highlights of her life. And I think it was, until…
She didn’t have to finish the sentence, for I’d already finished it in my mind: until I almost finished what that other stupid teenager had started. I felt so bad I wanted the bed to open up and swallow me.
Vicky could see my distress and put her hand on my arm. ‘I don’t blame you, Jake. I learnt when Mike was killed that blaming people doesn’t change things, it only makes you bitter. I think it would have been better if Alan had told you about us a long time ago. He only told you last night, didn’t he?’
I nodded.
She nodded back. ‘Yes, he could have handled that better. But we can’t go back and change things. That’s something else I know only too well.’ She sighed deeply. ‘We can only try and put things right. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. At this moment Steph wants to get as far away from this place as possible and never come back. Maybe that’s what will happen. She’s got a rough time ahead of her, which means I have, too. But I’d like to think that we could still make this work. That the four of us could join together and form a family.’ She looked directly into my eyes. ‘Maybe you’re the one who can make it happen. Give it some thought, Jake, and see if you can think of something.’
She squeezed my arm for a moment, before standing and moving to the door. ‘Bye, Jake. Take care. And I really do hope that we’ll meet again sometime.’
In the morning when I got up, they’d gone.
Chapter 5
Life around Hauruanui moved on. For most of the residents, the visit of Vicky and Stephanie caused little change, although I’m sure they noticed that things weren’t quite the same at Wrightson’s garage. Those who called in for fuel or repairs must have noticed that Dad no longer joked with them or strung them along with outlandish quotes for minor repairs. All the sparkle had gone out of him. The most obvious change was that he stopped going to the pub on a Saturday night. When they asked about it, he said he’d too much work to do. Yet I knew that wasn’t true: we had less work than ever, mainly because Dad had stopped updating the website.
I was in my last term at primary school, and, if I had my way, it would be my last term at school ever, as I intended to do high school by correspondence. It should have been a fun time for me, but the events of that weekend were always in the back of my mind. I didn’t mope around the place the way Dad did, but almost every day I’d get a twinge of conscience, especially when I went in the workshop and saw the jeep sitting there unused.
We never talked about that weekend. Maybe we should have. Maybe we should have had a shouting match and got it out of our systems. Instead, we hardly talked to each other; and when we were working together, we communicated using little more than grunts.
Then Milton Summer arrived. I didn’t see his plane fly in, but I soon heard about it—the media was full of it. Summer’s Here said the headline in the paper. Below was a report on his news conference in Wellington. It seemed that the journalists had pestered him over and over, trying to find out why he’d broken up with Regaia Camp. Were they incompatible? Was she playing around? Was he playing around? Had he come here to get over it?
Milton replied that he and Regaia were both busy people and it just hadn’t worked out for them; no one was to blame. He said that he would be spending the summer at Tarquins by himself; it was a time to relax between movies; he hoped that everyone would respect his privacy. The article finished with a photo of him taking off from Wellington Airport in his small plane.
Of course, his arrival made me think of how Stephanie would react to the news: was she still a fan, or was she trying to block all things to do with Hauruanui out of her mind? Dad might have known, for I was sure he was getting emails from Vicky; he spent so much time on the computer he had to be doing something. He certainly wasn’t working on our website.
The news about Milton could have been the catalyst for a discussion about our problem, yet neither of us made the first move. It was as if we had to keep punishing each other, so that we felt better about our own role in the matter.
However, as they say, time does heal, and by mid-November I was feeling good enough to go back to surfing. The evenings were longer, the winter storms had passed, the sea temperature was rising, and there was nothing to keep me hanging around home.
‘I’m going surfing,’ I said to Dad one afternoon as soon as I got off the school bus.
‘Whale Pot Bay?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘You taking the jeep?’
‘Yeah,’ I replied, as if it was no big deal.
He looked at me without speaking.
‘What?’ I asked when the silence became deafening.
‘You better drive it a whole lot better than you did last time.’
‘I will, Dad,’ I said, quietly. Then, after a moment’s pause I added, ‘I don’t plan to do anything that stupid again.’
He nodded. ‘Good.’ Then he touched me on the shoulder. ‘Enjoy yourself. I’ll hold dinner in the oven.’
That was all that was said, but it was enough. From then on we started having conversations again. While it didn’t stop Dad moping around the place all day, things between us felt more normal again.
Most surfers probably wouldn’t think much of Whale Pot Bay: either the waves have multiple breaks or they’re too small for any excitement. Yet they’re perfect for me. That’s because I’m just a learner and I fall off a lot. Lots of the other surf beaches around the Wairarapa have rocks—I prefer to crash onto sand.
The day I returned to surfing, I parked the jeep in the same place as on that horrible day, four weeks before. Things weren’t greatly different, except the Union Jack was now flying from the top of Tarquins.
I hauled the surfboard out of the jeep and headed down the track. It’s a tricky track because it’s carved out of mudstone, and if you’re not careful you end up sliding down on your backside.
Arriving at the bottom without mishap, I made my way around the U of the beach. That took me past the whale graveyard to where Milton’s elevator meets the sand. The rock there is hard sandstone, which is why it hasn’t been worn away by the sea.
Beyond the elevator, the cliff meets the sea in a pile of rocks. That’s the best place to get into the water, as you don’t have to do so much paddling to get out to the waves.
The surf at Whale Pot Bay is a left-hand point break, with the point being the rocks at the bottom of the cliff below Milton’s house. Most of the swells actually meet the coast from the southeast and have to bend a bit to get into the bay. That’s what makes them smaller than on an exposed beach.
I surfed for a couple of hours before I tired of it. In that time I must have got up on the boa
rd nine or ten times. I suppose the longest ride was about ten seconds, but it seemed much longer than that while it was happening.
I’d been so intent on watching the waves that I didn’t notice my audience until I finally went to the shore. Milton Summer had come down to sit on the sand and watch. As I walked out of the water, he stood and moved towards me.
At first I thought he was going to have a go at me for trespassing, and I hesitated, wondering if I should head in the other direction. Yet he looked friendly enough, so I kept moving towards him.
‘Hello there,’ he said in his posh English voice. ‘That looks like fun.’
‘Yeah,’ I half-mumbled, surprised that there were butterflies fluttering away in my stomach.
He reached out his hand. ‘I’m Milton Summer.’
The surfboard was under my right arm, which meant I had to juggle it to the other side, and in my nervousness I fumbled and dropped it. He bent over and helped me pick it up.
‘I’m Jake Wrightson,’ I said when I could finally grip his hand.
‘Yes, that’s what I was told. Your father is the mechanic. I believe that’s his boat next to mine. And you own that land up there.’
The fact that he knew something about us caused me to relax a little. ‘My grandad owns the land, but he leases it to you at the moment.’
He laughed. ‘I suppose I should know that. Unfortunately, I’ve still got a lot to learn. I’m just the city boy who owns the place. My manager does all the farming.’
‘He’s good at it,’ I said, repeating something that Dad had said. ‘One of the best around.’
‘Yes. That’s why I contracted him. He’s slowly teaching me the things I should know.’ He reached out and touched my board. ‘Surfing,’ he said. ‘That’s another thing I want to know about. You’re good at it. How did you learn?’
I gave a little nervous giggle. ‘My dad taught me, but he doesn’t think I’m much good. Not yet anyway.’
