Deb and Simmo decided they would do the scoring up on the lawn, reckoning that everyone had had enough of a wind blast by the time they were done. They all sat on the grass, waiting for Simmo to wheel out the whiteboard. They were sure it was his favourite part of his job. They were also sure he enjoyed it so much because it was the only time he ever had to pick up a pen.
‘Okay, everyone – showtime. Deb and I have gone through and checked all the score sheets.’
‘Interestingly, it seems you’ve all ended up with the same score.’ Deb seemed very bright.
Fly caught a few furtive looks pass between the group.
‘So I guess,’ said Simmo, ‘you’d better take a look at your results.’
He pulled back the white page which sat over the top of the scores and they scanned their way along the weekly scores to the latest results. Against every name except Fly’s was a zero. Fly could feel the wave of revolt rising. Deb stepped in before it took voice.
‘That’s right – you all scored zero. All except one, that is.’
Simmo took up his texta again and scribbled a number next to Fly’s name. The number was 0.5. ‘Well done, Fly,’ he said. ‘Half a point. Not exactly world-beating but at least you’ve actually scored something.’
‘I don’t get it.’ Matt was the only one brave enough to speak. ‘What’s with the zeros?’
Deb stared at him hard. ‘You almost got away with it, guys. In fact, until the end, Simmo and I have to admit that we actually bought it. And then along came the last surf of the day.’
Heath squirmed uncomfortably.
‘I hate to say it, mate,’ Simmo weighed in, ‘but that was about the worst bit of surfing I’ve ever seen in a competition. It was so bad, it was outstanding.’
Fly didn’t think she’d ever felt such stillness in all her life.
‘But there’s only so much you can fake, isn’t there, Fly?’ said Deb. ‘That’s why you gave him a two.’
That stillness suddenly evaporated as every head in the group corkscrewed around at her in astonishment.
‘You gave me a two?!’ Heath demanded.
Fly wasn’t sure if she knew this was what it would be like when she’d scribbled down that two. She knew there’d be no hiding it, but maybe she hadn’t quite thought through the full impact. She looked around the faces, but the questions, the disappointments were too much. She hung her head.
‘Sorry, guys.’
‘Before you all hammer her, it wasn’t Fly who gave the game away.’ Deb looked at Anna, Perri and Bec. ‘If you three had given him a low score too, Simmo and I would’ve gone with everything else. But you were all locked into your little plan and couldn’t get out, could you?’
No-one spoke up in their own defence; there was no defence to be made.
‘Right then, we’re going to rerun this competition next weekend. Can I suggest that this time we do it properly?’
No-one argued.
It was a very subdued dinner table that night. Fly couldn’t be sure whether no-one was talking to her in particular, or whether no-one was talking to anyone. And honestly, she was too tired to care either way. What she wanted was to go to bed, have a long, dreamless sleep, and forget that she’d ever even heard of a judging manual. The other thing she wanted to forget was the niggling little question in her brain about why she had done what she’d done. The way Deb told it, Fly was too honest to go through with their plan, but was that really true? Fly didn’t know. She didn’t know whether there wasn’t some little leftover of the Heath/Jane thing, some little splinter of pain which meant that she was ready to give Heath a low score. There was no question; if he’d surfed well she would’ve given him a six – not an eight, but a six. Was there some little river of satisfaction in the fact that it was just not possible?
Fly had clearly been praying to the right gods because she climbed into bed that night and slept like she’d been run over by a road train. She closed her eyes and the next thing she knew Anna was shaking her awake, grumbling, as she did every day lately, that no-one in their right mind got up at five am in the middle of winter. It was nothing short of sheer lunacy.
Fly had seen a lot of religious movies when she was growing up. It wasn’t planned that way, but the Watson farm was so far from the nearest satellite dish that the only station they could get clearly was an American cable channel devoted to the devoted. There were religious movies, religious sermons, religious shopping programs – now that she thought about it, that Deportment and Grooming woman had had a distinctly religious air about her. Anyway, she’d seen enough religious movies to know about doing penance, about paying the price, about cleansing the spirit through sometimes painful pursuits.
That morning, Fly had to agree. The rain came at them like knives. It was sheeting in at right angles to the beach and for at least half their run, they were heading straight into it. Somehow it made Fly feel good, enduring this physical test. It was washing her clean. And even if it wasn’t doing that, it was making talk impossible, and after yesterday’s debacle, she was all up for that. The rest of them seemed up for it too.
The school day passed in a daze. At lunch everyone seemed to be more interested in their food than usual. Fly felt for Matt the most. It had been his grand plan and she was sure he was feeling most of the grand displeasure. Heath might as well have been the mastermind for all his joylessness. It almost made her cross. Where did he get off sulking? Really, he had no right, no right at all.
The timetabled habit of Monday afternoons was double maths. They really knew how to end things with a bang, those old timetablers. You were just back from the weekend, inching through the hardest day of the week, and they give you a good solid dose of Pythagoras to finish up with. Mr Savin was doing his best to keep them awake. Every now and then he would clap three times loudly from the front and then, when the class looked up, he would smile and say, ‘Everyone having fun yet?’
As annoying as that might sound, he was actually the best teacher they had. He did own a spectacularly large collection of brown cardigans but aside from that he was pretty cool. It was like somewhere deep in the memory bank, he did actually remember what it was like to be younger than forty. Fly liked him most for the way he handled Heath. There were lots of teachers not to like for the way they handled Heath, but Mr Savin wasn’t one of them. Maybe he had been a Heath in his younger days, before the brown cardigan disease got him by the throat, but whatever Heath threw at him, Mr Savin seemed ready for.
Heath was his own worst enemy at school. He stared at the blackboard vaguely and he’d suddenly be laughing like a maniac at something no-one else could see. Or he’d lean so far back in his chair, craning to get a peek at the surf, that he’d overbalance. He often arrived late bearing a backpack full of impossible excuses – he’d seen some very suspicious lights out at sea and he’d popped in to report them to the CSIRO and it just took forever! All this said with a straight face and a huge piece of seaweed sticking out of his hair.
As the year ground down Mr Savin was starting to get slightly more hardcore with Heath; he knew Heath needed to pass if he was even going to qualify for a crack at the final Solar Blue comp, and today was going to be one of those days where he came down like a hammer.
When the bell finally rang and Fly started packing up her work she sensed a shadow fall across their desk. She and Heath had always sat together in maths and, despite the Jane incident, it just seemed too weird to change. Mr Savin perched on the seat in front and looked at Heath.
‘Hello, Heath,’ he said.
‘Hello, Mr Savin,’ Heath answered back with a cheery smile.
‘Wondered if you’re up for a little chat.’
Heath thought on it a moment. ‘That’s not really a question, is it?’
Mr Savin shook his head – no it was not.
Heath looked up at Fly. ‘Can you hang back and wait for me? There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.’
If Heath was dreading what he knew was c
oming in his little chat with Mr Savin, then Fly had a similar dread of what she knew Heath wanted to talk to her about. As she headed towards the door she started going through the options – he was sick of her being a psycho, he thought it might be better if they just stopped talking to each other for a while, Jane had complained that Fly was having dreams about her all the time and it was starting to get up her nose … Oh, well. She would just nod and listen, and agree to whatever he thought was best.
Mr Savin started his little chat before Fly actually got out of the classroom.
‘So, Heath, just wondering how things are going?’
‘Yeah, they’re definitely going along. Zooming along, really.’
‘Yeah?’ Mr Savin wasn’t buying it for a second. ‘I thought there might’ve been something up because it’s getting close to the wire, mate. And you’re not getting it together. At this rate you’re headed for failure.’
These were the last words Fly heard as she closed the door behind her. Heath could fail? He really might not make the finals? It just didn’t seem fair. Every tiny little niggly-gnarly thought Fly had ever had about him suddenly disappeared. She paced back and forth near the door making a plan – if they really got into it, if they got Matt to map out a full-on study plan and they all helped him, maybe they could turn this around.
And then Fly realised she could still hear what was going on inside. The maths labs had long, wide windows along the top of the corridor. And they were wide open, sending through the voices from inside as clearly as if they were speaking into a microphone. Fly froze – this was ear-wigging of the highest order, no question, but if she was going to really help Heath, maybe she needed to know just how bad things were.
‘In my experience there are two reasons people fail,’ said Mr Savin. ‘There are kids who fail because they’re too busy messing about – playing class clown, wagging, generally goofing off …’
Fly’s dad loved that phrase. He reckoned two-thirds of the world’s population were full-time employees of the Goofing Off Corporation.
‘And then there are kids,’ Mr Savin went on, ‘who goof off because they’re failing. Because it kind of gives them an excuse for why they’re doing so badly.’
This was Heath alright – he was a category two goofer.
‘And maybe they’re struggling and they’re too embarrassed to ask for help so they balls things up deliberately instead.’
Fly heard Heath clear his throat. This was a bad sign. Heath always cleared his throat before he came up with a corker.
‘No offence, Mr Savin,’ he started, ‘but in the version of this I’d imagined, Michelle Pfeiffer played the crusading teacher.’
There was a long silence and then Fly heard Heath’s chair being pushed back. Suddenly he was there in the doorway, his face like thunder. It shocked Fly. Heath was such a happy camper most of the time you just forgot that he was allowed to go dark on the world occasionally too. He didn’t seem surprised to see her.
‘Thanks for waiting.’
She just stood there. Was he going to launch his attack now, fully fuelled up on a big dose of humiliation?
‘I need to eat something.’
Sure you do, thought Fly, nothing like a good old scare to get those stomach juices really pumping.
‘You coming?’
The fish and chip shop on the promenade was one of the only shops which hadn’t been ‘tastefully renovated’. There were no chrome chairs and tables, no Balinese-style floor cushions, no aromatherapy candles in the window, no would-be models working behind the counter. It was cheap and greasy and it made the largest hamburgers Fly had ever seen. It was run by a friendly old Vietnamese couple. She watched them flipping patties and frying Pluto Pups and wondered what they must think about the people weird enough to eat this kind of rot. Traditional Vietnamese music tinkled out of a cassette player on the counter and an ultraviolet fly zapper exploded above the deep fryer every two or three seconds, almost keeping time to the music.
Heath downed his hamburger in under two minutes. Fly was sure that was a record, and from the way the Vietnamese woman was staring at him, Fly guessed she probably thought so too. He sat back frowning and rubbed at his stomach.
‘Ate too fast.’
No kidding, Fly wanted to say. There were a billion things she wanted to say, but she just didn’t know where things were at. It was like the ground had disappeared beneath them and neither of them were sure if they took a step forward that there’d actually be anything under their feet. The fly zapper exploded once, twice, three times and when Fly looked up she saw that a dragonfly had managed to slip through the bars. It was fighting that light, its tail arching backwards, writhing to get away. She couldn’t keep her eyes off it, willing it to buck free. After one more zap it went still and fell to the bottom of the tray.
‘I’m sorry about how I’ve been about the Jane thing,’ Heath said.
This was the last thing Fly was expecting. She was so relieved she jumped right on in without waiting for him to explain.
‘No, I’m sorry about how I’ve been about the Jane thing. I’ve been a total schizo.’
‘Shhhh!’ Heath held a finger up to his lips. ‘Your number hasn’t been called yet.’
Fly nodded. Oh-kay.
‘And I think what you did yesterday was really gutsy.’
‘You do?’
Heath nodded. Then he seemed to daze off. Fly didn’t know whether he’d finished or whether all the blood in his brain had gone to his stomach to try to dismantle that hamburger.
‘Is it my turn now?’ she said finally.
Heath waved her through.
‘I just wanted to say sorry for acting so weird … I don’t know, I just thought – we’re supposed to be friends and then you couldn’t tell me the truth about her. And I thought, that’s not really what friends do.’
Heath nodded. ‘You’re right. And it won’t happen again. Anything you want to know, I will give you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me Gloria.’
Fly sat there a moment wondering what she wanted to know. It had all been guesswork up till now. Maybe it’d be good just to get it right from the horse’s mouth.
‘Is she nice?’ she asked softly.
Heath nodded. ‘She is.’
It stung a little. Fly wasn’t sure why. She wouldn’t want Heath to hang out with someone who wasn’t nice, but it still stung. Anyone in their right mind would have left it there, but Fly couldn’t help herself; she wanted to touch the hotplate again.
‘And you like her a lot?’
Heath thought about it a long while. ‘I thought I did.’
Fly frowned. What was with the past tense all of a sudden?
‘Her boyfriend likes her a lot too.’
Her boyfriend?
‘You see,’ Heath explained, ‘he’s been overseas for a couple of weeks. Got back on Sunday. Jane brought him down to the beach to meet this great new friend she’d made at school.’
Fly was starting to wonder if she’d gotten the wrong end of the stick entirely. If Jane had a boyfriend, why was Heath lying to Fly about spending time with her? Heath could see her confusion.
‘She was feeling a bit lost. New school, didn’t know anyone. She thought I was just being friendly and I was too dumb to ask if she was already hooked up.’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘Nope. Not until Sunday.’
That’s why he’d surfed so appallingly. He’d just had his heart smashed.
‘Oh,’ said Fly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I’m not. ’Cause at some point on Sunday night I worked out that I was only trying to distract myself anyway.’
‘Like you need any more distractions in your life. You’ve got a heap of catching up to do at school, and things are only going to get more full-on with training and –’
‘Fly!’ Heath cut her off. ‘You didn’t hear me. Go back to the last sentence.’
Fly
tried to run it back in her head, but she couldn’t get there.
Heath pressed an imaginary button on the side of his jaw and made a garbled rewinding sound. ‘The third sentence was: ’Cause at some point on Sunday night I worked out that I was only trying to distract myself anyway.’
Fly stared, her eyebrows furrowed. She could sense a shift. Heath was staring at her intently and she couldn’t hear the fly zapper explosions anymore.
Heath said impatiently, ‘Now you say, Distract yourself from what, Heath?’
Fly just nodded.
‘And then I say …’ said Heath, drawing it out, hoping she might join the party at some point, but Fly was frozen solid. He was going to have to do all the work here. ‘And then I say, Distract myself from you, Fly.’
There, it was out.
Fly could feel the maple syrup creeping up her legs. Heath was watching, waiting for a reaction. But Fly’s mind was racing back through the past few days, through the board auction and the sunscreen session and the whole Hinemoa and Tutanekai fiasco. How was it possible that she’d missed it so badly? And when she thought about it, she’d missed it by about twenty-five seconds.
‘That is too weird,’ she said at last. ‘You know how I wanted to talk to you on Friday afternoon? I was about to make a speech and in that second, just before I said it, that’s when you saw Jane. If I’d been twenty-five seconds earlier none of this would’ve happened.’
‘What speech?’ Heath asked.
Fly stared. She might’ve been ready for it then, but now, just on the spot, she was so not ready.
‘Oh, just – you know. Just what you said. You know, that maybe there was no need for you to be … distracted anymore.’
Heath’s eyes narrowed. ‘That was your speech?’
‘Well … no, not really. I mean, I didn’t even know about the distraction, but you know what I mean.’
‘So what were you going to say?’
Fly could feel herself blushing, but it was a light pink one. Just good healthy ‘rose in the cheeks’ style.
Blue Water High Page 18
