Grey Skies, Green Waves

by Tom Anderson

  'Oh, so they do recognise it as an "incident" now, eh?' I spat.

  Herbi just grinned, blew a smoke ring, and handed me the thin piece of paper.

  'They must like you,' he joked. 'Once the tide went out they collected the bits of your board. We're gonna nail it to the shop wall over there.' He pointed to a patch of wall above the surfboard rack.

  I didn't like the sound of this.

  'You can't do that,' I protested. 'My dad didn't know I was surfing.'

  'We can. Tough shit. I'm sure he'll understand.'

  As it happened, the old man did understand, and agreed to relay the story to my mother on my behalf. 'Then once she's calmed down I'll try and see if she'll still let you go to the Welsh tomorrow.'

  This, of course, would have been the punishment to end all punishments – and not even my mother was cruel enough to risk that. She knew it would have consequences far outweighing the benefits – such as me running away, perhaps.

  The main remaining problem was that my beloved board was no more – and I didn't have the money to buy another one. And even if I did, the time wouldn't exist to get used to it.

  This was where Herbi came to the rescue.

  'There's a piece-of-shit board out back, used to belong to Spud, which you can have for seventy quid,' he muttered.

  'Spud? No way!' I almost jumped for joy. Spud was Matt Stephen, one of the best surfers in the country at the time – so to a kid my age the prospect of riding his old board in a surf contest was instantly enough to make me forget all the troubles of the day so far.

  'Best of all,' Herbi continued, grinning at my dad and winking, 'I can arrange something for young Tom to do to get the money, once the exams are done.' That 'something', I learned months later – when the whole thing was but a memory and I'd fluked my way onto the Portugal trip with Spud's board – was whitewashing a roof for two pounds an hour. But that didn't matter. Again it was surely good for me in the grand scheme of things.

  Promising never to take for granted how understanding people had been about this whole blunder, I accepted Herbi's terms and went home to pack for the Nationals trip, which hours before had seemed only possible in fantasy land. (This, by the way, was back when I used to get my – or rather my parents' – money's worth out of the event by actually making it past the first round.)

  As I packed to leave for Pembrokeshire in the morning, my dad sat me down and requested that I made one promise. There were no negotiations on offer here. I had to agree to this or it was all off, and a weekend of revision would lie ahead.

  'Sure. What is it?' I asked, tentatively.

  'Promise me you'll never again try to get into the water at the Point by jumping off the rocks.'

  Trying to hide my astonishment at how simple these terms were, I bit his hand off. Of course he had a deal.

  And that is why this Point local will still never attempt the jump. To this day, I'll do it anywhere else on earth, but not at home.

  Every time I'm running late to get in there I just remind myself of that fax, which stayed pinned to the notice board at Black Rock Surf Shop for years to follow – a reminder to look before you leap or, in my case, not to leap at all.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE GOLDIE LOOKIN' ISLAND

  'Right then boys, which way now? Beauly, Dochgarroch and Drumnadrochit, or Dingwall and Strathpeffer? This road's going to the Muir of Ord…'

  OK, I take it back. Cornish place names have nothing on these. A month after mine and Rich's 'Chasing Bill' adventure, bombing up the A9 towards Ullapool, I promised never to forget that this is always the point at which a trip to Scotland really gets underway: when you start having to decipher place names even us Welsh can't pronounce.

  'Er… that way, I think…'

  It can be a pretty gruelling journey, with the passing of Glasgow, Edinburgh and eventually Inverness lulling you into a false sense of security that you're nearing the surf. But it's not the case; the true cream of Scotland's waves are hours away from any of the cities – miles from the last outposts of mainstream life and off towards the upper extremes of weather, landscape and dialect. This land can both soothe you and drive you crazy at the same time – if the actual journey doesn't finish you off first.

  This time though, my stoke was maintained by the fact that this was a journey I hadn't taken before. This time the call had come from Luke, and it wasn't to alert me to a Thurso swell. Our destination now was Ullapool and a ferry to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

  We had decided to try and learn from experience as far as that initial leg was concerned – taking the easy option of a flight up to Edinburgh, and hiring the most bling of people carriers: a gold eight-seater behemoth, labelled by Luke as the 'Goldie Lookin' Wagon' – until his mate and driver elect, a surfer from Sennen known as 'Triton', nearly killed us several times with his interpretation of night-time traffic dodging. From that moment on, Luke abandoned any loyalty to his music tastes and opted to label the KIA Sedona the 'Widow Maker' instead.

  'Bloody hell, man! Can't you wait until after we've scored to kill us?' Luke yelled, as Glasgow Road finally fed us on to the M90 and a long, monotonous red-eyed drive towards our dawn sailing.

  Along with Triton, Luke had brought along a professional surfer from Western Australia called Jason (who was staying in Devon to test-ride some of Luke's boards). Ever aware of walking the fine line between upping the numbers enough to make the rental cheaper and not wanting to turn us into 'rent-a-crowd', I'd given Math a last-minute call, rounding us off at five. Usually a team this size would make you the most unwelcome surf-trip crew on earth – but this was barely earth. We were heading to some of the least-populated surf locales yet discovered.

  The finishing touches were put to the trip midway through the sickening sea-crossing to Stornoway, when another contact of Luke's rang to confirm he'd be showing us around – none other than the legendary Scottish surf explorer known as 'Dakker'. It seemed there wasn't a soul involved in British surfing that Luke didn't know. He'd pulled this trip together on word of an extraordinarily ferocious swell spinning down from the Arctic, and had put everything in place to score. One thing was clear – I had gotten myself on to a meticulously organised surf trip, on the tail of some of the heaviest waves in the country. The likelihood of this getting ugly was very high. And this time I had no excuse at all.

  'So, spa, got a big-wave board then?' Luke jibed, nudging me as we sat on deck watching Math and Triton spew over a handrail and into the raging, green sea below.

  'Yep. I've got a six-eight.'

  'Safe! You're gonna be surfing hellman waves by the time the day's out.'

  'That's what I was worried you'd say.'

  'Worried? Good shit. Everyone's worried – that's fine. No one cares whether you're afraid. It's just whether you've got the guts to override the fear that matters.' He laughed and then turned to Jason. 'Duffy, you're afraid aren't you?'

  Jason turned from looking pensively out to sea, his woolly hood moving an inch behind his neck so as to keep half of his tanned face hidden from view. 'Sorry mate. What's that?'

  'Just telling Tom you're afraid of the surf out here. That it's normal, like.'

  Jason smirked, his half-visible face not willing to reveal if he was joking or not. 'Speak for yourself, mate. I'm all over it.'

  Luke laughed again. 'Fair enough. We're doomed with Duff on this trip. He'll be dragging us out to death bombs all week. Maybe Triton should have wrapped the Widow Maker into one of those lorries.'

  Alarmingly, this trip had actually begun with a death.

  In recent months I'd been earning a few quid by 'process serving'. Basically, via a mate of mine who'd got himself involved in freelance detective work, I'd been couriering legal papers to people. However, as you'd imagine, all the jargony law terms were horridly euphemistic in conveying the actual nature of this kind of work. A lot of the nastier court papers need to be 'served' on someone – namely the person who is 'subject' to whatever orde
r had been issued by the grand, wig-wearing one. And a lot of people in their right mind don't like being served.

  'Serving' involves confirming a person's identity, then informing them of the contents of the bundle of paper you're carrying, before leaving the documents in their presence. It's an adrenaline-filled job and the surf opportunities are immense. You'd go to county court, get the details of your next assignment, find the recipient, serve them and then, as most of my 'subjects' tended to be in the Vale of Glamorgan or West Wales, go surfing wherever you ended up. On occasions I'd turned serving missions into pleasant days out – dropping dreadful news into people's laps before going for a meal somewhere with Breige. Someone would always need an injunction served in Cardiff on a Friday night and, as long as you found your man quickly (injunction recipients are almost always men), the rest of the evening was free to have a beer and some food or catch a film.

  But one case, about a fortnight after the Severn Bore run, ended up a little more complicated. One evening I was called to urgently trace and serve a wealthy businessman who had tried to murder his wife on a weekend away. He'd bottled it at the last minute – and she'd woken up to find him standing over her, Macbeth-style, with a knife in his hands and a panicked look of indecision in his eyes. Understandably, while the Italian police (as the incident occurred in Milan) were deciding whether or not to send a fax to the local constabulary telling them to nick him, the wife decided an injunction might be an idea.

  I'd been told by an ex-copper that if you accused someone of murder and they went nuts and tried to bop you, then it was usually an innocent person. The guilty tended to remain calm, but looked seedily anxious.

  This man looked seedily anxious when I found him at home. There was no mistaking it whatsoever. He asked me where his wife was and I said I had no idea (she was at her brother's). He then thanked me and shook my hand. I could still feel the cold, clammy sweat of his palm as I was making the day's surfing plans the following morning – he'd obviously done exactly what she'd accused him of.

  It was a sunny morning. The summer was hanging on, and a clean swell had given me and another supposed co-worker, 'Paparazzi Pete' (because he tried to freelance as a pap when he wasn't serving people), the idea of trying to score an off-limits beach break.

  From Newport docks to Milford Haven's natural gas refinery, South Wales has always been proud of its heritage as an industrial coastline. The protected cliff walks of the Vale, Gower and south Pembroke are home to all sorts of secluded reef breaks fringed by gorgeous hills and muddy valleys, but once you've lived along the M4 corridor long enough, or have seen the factory plains by night, there's a beauty to be seen in some of these landscapes too. One of my favourite secret surf spots involved sneaking into one of these factory areas. This is another one I can't give you a location for, as the gang that surfs there regularly would slit my tyres and wax my windscreen. But I will say that the iron-ore pebbles and concrete platforms slowly being reclaimed by the sea, along with the backdrop of smoke and steam stacks, chimneys, floodlights, scaffolding and rising coal conveyor belts, always added a touch of the exotic to surfing so close to home. It was something different – and a deep-water pass behind the shoreline gave the waves some added power too. Rumour also had it that the impurities in the water kept it warm!

  Getting access was always a hoot, and Pete was the best at it. As usual he took to the wheel up front, cramming me, Breige, the Bentley brothers (two local grommets from Porthcawl) and our boards in the back of his long wheelbase van. Pete stuck a hard hat and high-vis tabard on and got ready to spout his best bullshit. At the entrance to the works, known as 'Checkpoint Charlie' to surfers, we were approached by a guard.

  'Heads down, boys,' Pete whispered.

  'All right mate, what's your business?'

  'Morrisons Builders, come to fill in one of the cracked ramps. Sand's got under it again. Whoever does your foundations over there is a bloody idiot,' Pete bluffed.

  'I see. Morrisons. Hang on a minute…' The guard walked slowly around the van before pacing back towards Pete's lowered window. 'Nothing flammable inside?'

  The groms were trembling in their attempts to restrain themselves from laughing. I mimed slitting my throat to them and put my finger to my lips in a silent 'Shh'.

  'And who are you then?' the guard carried on.

  'Me?' Pete looked astonished.

  'Yeah. You.'

  'Well I'm Jim Morrison, int I!'

  One of the Bentleys yelped and, for a moment, I was worried the guard had heard it. He hadn't, though. After a pause he waved us through, saying 'Sorry Mr Morrison – we have to ask. These surfin' types keep trying to get up to the beach behind the furnaces, see. You been on 'oliday lately, like?'

  'I have as a matter of fact. Crete with the kids.' This was getting difficult even for me now.

  'Aye – that explains it. Got a crackin' tan, you have, see. That's why I thought surfer for a second.'

  'No. Sorry to disappoint.'

  'No problem. Hope you can sort that concrete out. Ta da now.'

  We were in.

  'Jim Morrison' stuck the van out of sight behind a heap of rubble on the shoreline, which was essentially being used as a dumping ground for aggregate and slag. The light-hearted mood continued on to the sand as we readied to devour clean, late summer peaks with not another surfer in sight for miles in each direction. It was the first solid swell of September, and proof autumn would soon be blowing in some serious waves.

  After two sessions, each a couple of hours long, broken by a sandwich in Pete's van, we were readying to leave, when I got the call.

  'Mr Anderson? It's Sergeant Nicholas from South Wales Police here. Did you serve papers on a Mr — late last night? An injunction with power of arrest.'

  'I did. Any problems?'

  'You could say that.'

  'Really? Is he OK?'

  'Well, not really. He hanged himself about fifteen hours ago. Looks like you were the last person to see him alive. Do you, er, often have that effect on people?'

  The day's surfing was forgotten immediately. Daily business to a senior copper maybe, but for me this was a heavy thing to be told so light-heartedly over the phone as I towelled sea water out of my hair.

  The next day, when I walked in to the offices of the guy who'd been organising the work for me, it was to an apologetic look from his secretary.

  'He says he's sorry,' she said, pursing her lips and arching her eyebrows matter-of-factly. 'Knows you like a trip away, though. Says take a few days off – he'll refund you if you want to go away somewhere – within reason, obviously. Tough luck, that was. Shouldn't have given a case like that to someone just getting into the job.'

  This seemed a reasonable suggestion, given that the last thing I felt like doing was trying to serve someone else that afternoon. And I'd seen the charts lately too – a huge swell was on its way. Yet again, opportunity was knocking.

  The eerie sense of providence was compounded when I called Luke the same afternoon to suggest driving back down to South Devon for the swell.

  'Bad idea, clart. I won't be here. But why not come to the Hebs with me?'

  And that was that. The next episode had begun. Cornwall and Devon, the Severn Bore, Checkpoint Charlie – all part of a late summer push. But now it was time to embrace the cold again. My thoughts were turning back north, to a trip that had the potential to become the most intense I'd ever been on in the UK – if not ever.

  We were now in high seas between Ullapool and Stornoway and the magnitude of the swell was really starting to show. A crashing reverberated through the ship as it dropped off the tip of a gargantuan breaker, only to wallop the next one head-on. A yell back in the galley preceded what sounded like the entire stock of plates and glasses falling to the floor and smashing to pieces.

  The tone of excitement with which we'd laughed off Triton's driving had now been replaced with nervous expectation, and sombre dread.

  'When we get to land we're all
gonna have sea legs, probably too much to surf,' Luke warned.

  This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because the first part of the new swell had arrived in the form of near gale force winds and sheets of sharp rain. As we drove off the ferry, the windscreen of the Widow Maker looked like some kind of fancy, permanent water feature, with a flow of rain run-off still overwhelming Triton's vision despite the wipers going at full speed.

  When we arrived where we were going to stay – which was about 300 yards from the boat, although it took ten minutes to drive – Luke jumped out to knock on the door to 'Fair Haven', the place Dakker owned.

  A few moments later he came back to the car to confirm that Dakker was waiting to show us in to a dorm room.

  As I lugged my board bag through the corridor and upstairs, past walls of signed and snapped surfboards, a slim-built man with a boxer's nose and shoulder-length brown hair came up to me.