Air

by Lisa Glass

  “I will.”

  At the water’s edge I waded into the shallows, shuffling my feet to ward off any stingrays lying in wait. The wind was warm and I took off my cap and felt my hair swish out behind me.

  “It’s not like I’m here alone. I’m here with Zeke.”

  “You are indeed. The only word I’ll say on the subject is ‘butterflies.’”

  We’d first had the butterflies conversation a week before I left Newquay. She was worried I couldn’t count on Zeke, thought his free-spiritedness made him unreliable.

  “He’s looking out for me. Actually, we’re looking out for each other. Stop worrying. He’s not a bloody butterfly.”

  I kicked at the water and sent an arc of spray through the air, marveling for a moment at micro-rainbows.

  “Are you surfing today?”

  “Maybe, but there’s only a couple of feet of swell.”

  “Do keep a weather eye open for bull sharks. They have more testosterone than a charging bull elephant.”

  “Mum! Stop worrying!”

  “I’m just saying. Anything with that level of testosterone needs to keep away from my daughter.”

  I heard the faint ring of the doorbell and my mum shuffling across the room. She was probably still wearing her knackered raccoon slippers a Mother’s Day present from my sister, Lily. I pictured her twitching the net curtain to peer out of the living room window, and I couldn’t help smiling.

  “Must dash. Renie’s waiting.”

  Kelly’s mum did not seem like the pub-quiz type.

  “Why is Renie—”

  “I’m setting her up with a new member.”

  When it came to boyfriends, Renie was the opposite of my mother; she liked to have at least one on the go at all times. Said being single felt like going to work without lippy.

  “Are you now?”

  “Of the Historical Society. You get that filthy mind from your father.”

  “Bye, Mum.”

  I walked back to Zeke, who was still lying in the fetal position, sound asleep.

  I read two pages of my book and, as a reward, logged on to Facebook. Some of my mates back in the UK were gearing up for a night out on the town and had tagged me in their selfies. Kelly pouted in electric-blue lipstick, our friends since primary school Rae and Maisie on either side of her; all three looking glam in slinky club outfits.

  Cass, I noted with relief, was nowhere to be seen. But then, she was probably busy with my ex-boyfriend Daniel.

  I wrote a few “Wish I was there with you lot” comments and loaded up Spotify. I whacked up the volume and went back to sunbathing, but I couldn’t get comfortable. The sweat from my face was running past my ears, pooling at the back of my neck and dripping on to my towel.

  How was Zeke still out for the count? It wasn’t like we’d had some rager the night before.

  I sat up and stroked a tiny scar on his forehead, and thought about the other scars that littered his body; painful wounds delivered by unseen rocks, heads of coral, the needle-nose of high-performance surfboards. The knife of my ex-boyfriend.

  “Zeke,” I said.

  He didn’t stir.

  “Zeke.”

  I felt panic rise and shook his arm.

  Nothing.

  I shook it again, more violently this time.

  Still he slept.

  “Zeke.”

  “Zeke.”

  “ZEKE!”

  chapter two

  I slapped him across the side of the face and finally he moved, opened his eyes, looked up at me and said, “Whoa, that hurt!”

  “Jesus bloody Christ, Zeke, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

  “Huh? What’s happening? You OK?”

  “I was calling you and shaking you and you wouldn’t open your eyes.”

  He sat up, stretched his arms above his head and yawned. “So I napped for a minute. Geez. I thought you were doing the yoga?”

  A quarter-mile down the beach, a hundred people were engaged in a mass yoga class that had been going on for an hour already. The teacher was an elderly Californian guru, with gray hair down to his bum and pink tie-dyed shorts. He hadn’t bothered with a shirt, and every time I looked at him all I saw was huge, hair-ringed nipples.

  “Couldn’t be bothered.”

  “You said you wanted to be loose for the contest. There’s not much time left to train.”

  “I already did the tai chi and Pilates taster classes this morning. Plus my knees are killing from the capoeira. Whereas you’ve done precisely zero, you lazy sod.”

  “Sod? Like, a pile of dirt? Besides, it’s different for me: my next contest isn’t for three weeks. Yours is in five days.”

  Our New Smyrna contest had been arranged last-minute, to tie in with the Florida media launch. It was a two-day event just for the girls on my tour and would probably be ignored by the surf community, as so many of our other contests had been. I suspected that Billabong was getting a bit panicky, since their shiny new competition was failing to generate excitement or make any noticeable impact at all.

  “Blah, blah, nag, nag.”

  “OK, I get it. Your contest, your decision.” He yawned again.

  “Did you take a sleeping tablet?”

  “I was beat.” He touched his cheek, where red welts were already rising. “I feel like I have finger marks on my face.”

  “Sorry. Overreaction, in hindsight.” There were times, and this was one of them, where I was sure Zeke suspected I was ever-so-slightly unhinged. Slapping him while he was dozing on a beach didn’t exactly do much to dispute that theory.

  “I always was a deep sleeper. I once sleepwalked out of the house and woke up in a pineapple field with a bunch of new mosquito bites. My mom was sipping her coffee on the lanai when she saw me racing down the trail. You shoulda seen her face. I think she thought I’d escaped a kidnapper.”

  Zeke’s mum, Sephy, was one of the kindest, most laidback women I’d ever met, but raising three boys alone must have caused her a fair bit of worry.

  “I shook you really hard, Zeke.”

  “Would you quit wigging out already? I was just sleeping.”

  He picked up a handful of sand and let it fall through his fingers. I had watched him do this on every single beach we’d visited on our travels. For him, this pleasure never got old.

  I noticed some sand sticking to the damp skin of his chest and I brushed it off, which he seemed to find amusing.

  “My mum called,” I said.

  “What’s new in the quay? Catch me up.”

  “Not much. She’s off to some pub quiz with Kelly’s mum.”

  “Bar trivia?”

  “Yeah, and there’s a meat raffle.”

  “That doesn’t sound so sanitary.”

  Zeke couldn’t bear the thought of dead animals, so a meat raffle was probably his idea of a horror show.

  “Oh, and she wants me to visit home.”

  Zeke met my eyes and I detected a guilty expression.

  “You should go then,” he said.

  “So should you. We should go together.”

  Zeke sighed, in an exaggerated way, as if the suggestion that he go and visit his two brothers, his mum and his stepdad who were all currently residing in my home town was utterly ludicrous.

  “Soon as we get a minute, we will,” he said, with absolutely no conviction in his voice. “Anyways, you were the one who said you didn’t want to go visit until you were doing better in the rankings. We could have gone home for Christmas but you didn’t want that, remember?”

  “I know, but it’s been months.”

  He threw his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in close to kiss me. The sort of kiss that I still found completely thrilling and disorienting, even after all this time. There was just something about his mouth, his warmth, his scent even, that made any sense in my head disappear.

  Eventually, when the sun was significantly lower in the sky, we pulled apart and he looked at me a long time and my
brain recoiled a little at the beauty of him, all high cheekbones, disheveled hair and blue eyes. How? it seemed to ask. How is that your boyfriend?

  I looked at his hair, which had grown longer too long. A strand of it had fallen over his face and he batted it away from his eye.

  “Do you want to borrow a hair elastic?” I asked, completely seriously. “Stop it getting in your face?”

  “A hair-what now?”

  “You never tied your hair back?”

  “Nope. What would I even use? It’s not like I have a stash of hair accessories.”

  In the list of stashes that Zeke had once possessed, I couldn’t imagine hair bands among them. Weed stash: definitely. Meth stash: apparently. Pills? More than likely. But all that was in the past. On each of his competition surfboards he now had a sticker with the letters DFS: Drug-Free Surfer.

  I slipped one of the beige hair elastics off my hairbrush and handed it to him.

  He wound it in his fingers and said, “So . . . what exactly am I doing with this hair tie?”

  “Give it here,” I said impatiently. “And sit down.”

  He sat patiently at my feet like a little boy, even though he was nineteen and about a foot taller than me, and I looked at the top of his head, dotted with golden flecks of sand.

  “Do you want a high ponytail or a low one?”

  “Whatever you think will look good. Or maybe least bad.”

  “Your head your call,” I said firmly.

  “You know how Owen Wright does the Samurai topknot thing for contests? Can I have that?”

  Owen Wright was one of the best surfers on the World Championship Tour and built like a Greek god. A six-foot-three Aussie with shoulders almost as wide, he was one of the nicest blokes in surfing and I knew he was one of Zeke’s idols. If a Samurai topknot was good enough for Owen Wright, it was good enough for anyone.

  I hooked the elastic on to my fingers, scooped all of Zeke’s hair up on to his head and then wound it into a tiny blond bun.

  It looked hilarious, but Zeke didn’t care. I watched him turn his head from side to side, testing it out and reveling in the freedom. “OK, so this is awesome,” he said, jumping to his feet. “Thanks.”

  “If your hair annoys you so much, maybe you should do something about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like get a haircut?”

  “Naw, man, screw that.”

  “Why not?” Zeke didn’t seem like the vain type, but maybe he was secretly proud of his mop.

  “It’s not just one haircut. It’s never just one. What you’re signing up for right there is a commitment. Get it done once and then you have to find someone to do it again, the next month. Shoot, I wish I had that kinda time.”

  “Zeke, you spend six hours a day surfing, but you can’t spare thirty minutes once a month for a trim?”

  “My office is the ocean.”

  “Someone must be cutting your hair, even if it is once a year.”

  “Uh-huh. Me. I get scissors, grab some hair, take off a little, bam, done.”

  I stared at him. I wasn’t at all into the salon experience, but even I got someone to cut my hair for me.

  “Do your modeling sponsors know you do that?”

  He shrugged, like that wasn’t a factor worth considering, and pulled on a gray T-shirt that had the words “Eat, Sleep, Surf, Repeat” printed on it in three-inch lettering.

  Suddenly his phone started vibrating in the pocket of his board shorts.

  “Hey, Anders.”

  I groaned.

  Anders was the surf agent who represented both of us. In his better moments he was sort of OK, but his anxiety level was always set to max, and he was totally paranoid about us getting disqualified.

  My last argument with him had started when he’d insisted the new breed of sponsors were going to clean up surfing get rid of the uke-strumming, van-living, pothead image and rebrand it as a serious sport watched by the masses, like football. Anders got offended when I told him to dream on. But I couldn’t help it; the idea of surfing going mainstream just seemed laughable to me. Zeke and I took our fitness and training seriously, but we knew there was no way the general public would ever consider surfing a sport.

  “What?” Zeke said. “No, nothing. Iris, can you check Surfing magazine on your phone? Something’s happened to Arron.”

  I loaded up the page and there, at the top of the news section, was a slow-motion video of a surfer wiping out on a giant wave. The surfer in question was one of Zeke’s best surfer buddies, Arron Burns, otherwise known as Micro, as he was only five foot three. Micro was filming a segment of his latest webisode for Epic TV. Little had he known the footage would end up in every surf e-zine and beyond.

  “Oh, man,” Zeke said, when he saw his friend free-falling, hitting his head on his surfboard and disappearing into the thick lip of the wave. The last few frames showed Arron’s body floating face down in the whitewash, with a rescue jet ski bombing toward him.

  “I’m gonna put you on speaker. Iris is here. Yeah, just Iris.”

  “Hi, Anders. Christ, that looked terrible. How’s he doing?”

  “We’re waiting to hear. He was pulled from the water unconscious. I mean, looking at the video, he’s hurting or gone.”

  “Jesus,” I said, fingers of cold fear closing around my heart. “Who got him out?”

  I could see the moment through the rescuer’s eyes. I knew exactly how it felt to pull a person who seemed dead from the water; remembered the horror, the powerlessness.

  “It was a right balls-up. Kalani was on one of the jet skis, but when he went to grab him, he timed it wrong and the next wave munched him up and spat out the ski. Kalani had to swim for it and Butler got them both before the fourth wave broke. They’re bloody lucky they’re not all dead.”

  “Thank God Butler was there,” I said. I looked at Zeke, who was gripping his phone so tightly his fingertips had turned white.

  “I’m gonna see if I can get hold of Burnsy’s manager now,” Anders said. “I’ll let you know when I hear more. Say your prayers.”

  “We sure will,” Zeke said. He ended the call, sat down on the sand and his put his hands together.

  “Zeke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you actually going to—”

  “I need a minute.”

  He closed his eyes, bowed his head and started murmuring something.

  After a few minutes he opened his eyes and looked up at me.

  I didn’t know what to say. As far as I knew, Zeke wasn’t at all religious. In the time we’d spent together, I’d never known him to go to church, pray or even talk about religious belief.

  “So, are . . . ?” he said, looking at me expectantly.

  It was tempting to follow suit, to get on my knees and pray as hard as I could, but something stopped me; my sense of hypocrisy maybe.

  “I would, Zeke, honestly I would, but I’m not totally sure there’s . . . anyone listening.”

  “You don’t believe in God? For real?”

  I shrugged.

  “How can you surf a wave and not believe in God?”

  “I don’t really understand what you mean.”

  Zeke stared at me wide-eyed. “OK, my girlfriend’s an atheist.”

  “I never said that. I don’t know what I am.”

  “Wow, I guess you learn something new about a person every day.”

  I tried to change the subject, get him talking about anything else, but he didn’t seem to want to talk anymore. Instead he sat with his knees close to his chest and his eyes on the horizon. It didn’t occur to me until afterward that he could’ve been thinking of his own near-drowning at the Cribbar, wondering if I’d prayed for him.

  After ten minutes of this excruciating silence, Zeke said, “I sure could use a cigarette now.”

  “Hey. You’re doing so well with the quitting don’t throw it all away. I reckon Burnsy will be OK. He’s one of the toughest blokes I ever met.”


  Burnsy competed in Ironman contests, and his party trick, after about eight pints of lager, was one-armed press-ups, performed on his fingertips.

  “He was held down too long,” Zeke said, “and the wipeout from that wave looked super-violent. Even if he does survive, he’ll be busted up. I mean, it’s clear he hit his board. His spine, or his skull, could be broke.”

  “He’ll be all right,” I said, and it sounded so lame, so unconvincing, that I wished I’d said nothing at all. We sat in silence and I thought again about Zeke at the Cribbar, pulled lifeless on to the rocks. How cold he’d been. How heavy.

  chapter three

  Half an hour later, Anders called. “Panic over. He’s gonna make it. Puked up a whole lot of blood from ruptured capillaries in his lungs, poor git, thanks to some extreme breath-holding, but apart from a bust knee and a couple ribs ripped off his spine, the lad’s right as rain.”

  Zeke exhaled, thanked Anders for letting us know, whooped and did an actual somersault. Then he did another one.

  When he’d returned to standing, and I’d gone from being elated that Burnsy was going to pull through, to amused that Zeke had apparently been hiding secret gymnastic abilities, I said, “Thank God he’s all right.”

  Zeke raised his eyebrows and replied, “Yeah, you said it.”

  There was an awkward moment, where I knew I was being reproached. Zeke seemed to be waiting for me to say something more, so I went with, “Since when can you do a backflip?”

  “Since always, I guess. The airs I pull on waves the big alley oops and rodeo flips? Basically the same thing, except there’s a board under my feet.”

  Zeke’s aerial surf maneuvers were legendary. Somehow he’d find the right ramp of white water, take off and, hallelujah, he’d spin through a big rotation and land it. It was beautiful to watch, that moment when he’d hang in the air, tail high, and then stomp it on the face of the wave without falling. It was like watching a snowboarder. Or a skater in the half-pipe.

  “Well, now you’re just showing off.”

  I still hadn’t got the hang of airs. Barrels, cutbacks, carving hacks, snaps off the lip and big tail throws weren’t a problem, but airs I had not mastered. If I managed to stick one, it was generally a fluke; most of the time my board shot out from under me and I ended up getting worked. The problem was partly timing, but also my survival instinct. Airs can mess you up. All the air-game surfers I knew, including Zeke, were really susceptible to injury in the lower extremities, often seriously damaging their knees, hips and ankles. Which explained why a lot of older surfers in their forties had replacement knees they’d totally battered their shock absorbers. One of the things I’d discovered on my travels was that my body was really reluctant to get hurt, and launching airs felt too much like asking for trouble, like picking a fight with fate, so at the last second I hesitated. Game Over.