‘A support crew supports, remember?’
Edge pulled himself up onto one elbow and held an arm in the air.
‘Go, girls, go!’ he yelled pathetically.
Simmo would’ve been better leaving him where he was.
None of them were exactly surprised when the announcer read out the scores. ‘Anna Peterson – five. Jade Mason – 6.5, Emily Cameron – 6.5, Perri Lawe – eight.’
Fly watched Perri moving in through the white water. She punched the air when she heard the result. Perri had no problem winning. Why should she? She was through to the finals. She’d worked for it and she deserved her moment in the sun … even though her team-mate was out of the race? It made Fly feel uncomfortable. Was it okay to celebrate when other people were feeling like losers? She saw Perri reach for Anna’s hand.
‘Hey, bad luck,’ she said.
Simmo was supportive too. He gave Perri a pat on the back but he walked most of the way up the beach with Anna. He told her she’d done what counted. She’d surfed one hundred per cent even though it wasn’t one of her better days. Fly hoped it wasn’t going to be one of her off days too. If her performance in front of the mike was anything to go by, she had reason to worry.
‘Bec Sanderson, Corin Hardy, Stacey Jervis and Fiona Watson to the marshalling area,’ the announcer called.
After her last pre-emptive move Fly ran through the names again in her head. Yep, one of them was definitely hers this time. All thoughts about media performance got bumped right out of town the moment Fly saw Stacey in the judging tent. If anything, Stacey was more pumped than last time they’d met. Maybe she’d spent all her spare time lifting weights, preparing for exactly what she would do to Fly next time their paths crossed.
Even if Corin and Stacey weren’t friends, they’d clearly had enough of a pre-heat chat to put them together as allies against Fly and Bec. Corin shouldered her way past Bec as they headed out of the tent.
‘You Solar Blue girls are going down,’ Corin snarled.
‘Yeah? We’ll see,’ Bec snarled back.
Fly was glad the comment had been directed at Bec. If it had come at her, her answer probably would have been ‘Um, I, um.’
The starter hooter blasted out across the sand and Bec, Fly, Corin and Stacey took off for the water. It was a serious paddle battle for first place in the line-up. Bec won it. She could be an animal out there. Fly didn’t blame her, she just felt relieved one of them was trying to make Simmo proud. She watched Bec make the wave, and then make a meal of it. She saw the rest of the crew on the beach with their arms in the air.
When Fly looked around it was just her and Stacey. Corin had paddled out wide, hunting for a less crowded take-off spot.
‘Enjoying life at the academy, are you?’ Stacey asked.
She didn’t seem too interested in the answer. She kept her eyes behind Fly, watching and waiting, watching and waiting, until it was time. Stacey turned sharply and started paddling like crazy. Fly looked behind her and saw the wave of the day powering its way towards them. It was huge. And Stacey was doing all the right things to make it hers. Fly took off after her.
Fly paddled like mental. She dug down deep into the water, scooping huge handfuls of water and flinging them behind her. Somehow she managed to paddle herself right around Stacey and into critical position. Deb must’ve been right with her capacity theory. All this training had snuck up and increased Fly’s capacity enough to make a serious difference. Back at the beginning of the year they’d been neck and neck for paddling strength but today she’d outpaddled Stacey with ease.
Stacey clearly wasn’t expecting to be outpaddled because it took her by surprise too. She watched as the wave heaved up, lip forming, with Fly in the perfect position to make it. There was only one thing to do.
Fly paddled for take-off, the sun glistening so hard off the top of the wave she could hardly see … and then something went wrong. She felt an almighty yank. It stopped her dead in her tracks. She turned to see Stacey with her leg-rope in her hand.
‘What are you doing?!’
Suddenly Fly went from centre stage to front row seats as Stacey used Fly’s leg-rope to launch herself forward onto the wave Fly had earned. Fly sat there watching as Stacey carved her way to shore. It shook her, no question about it. It spooked her even. There was no other reason to explain why, for the rest of the heat, she was waiting and hesitating, picking off the second-rate waves like they were crumbs at the royal table. She didn’t look to the beach. She knew what they’d be thinking, but every time she went to step up for one of the strong waves of the set, Stacey was there, rubbing Fly’s face in her own kind and gentle nature.
Fly couldn’t wait for the hooter to signal the end of the heat. She had watched Bec do well and she hoped that would keep Simmo happy. She was struggling in through the white wash as the announcer called out the scores.
‘Stacey Jervis – 7.5, Corin Hardy – 7.2, Bec Sanderson – nine, Fiona Watson – six.’
She hung her head as Stacey moved past with Corin, her face a picture of scorn.
‘Can’t believe they let her into the academy,’ Corin said. She obviously knew the story. The whole beach probably knew.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Stacey. ‘She’s still hopeless.’
Fly didn’t have time to dwell on it for long, because suddenly Simmo was storming down towards her. Even at ten paces Fly could see Simmo’s eyes were blazing in a way she’d never seen before.
‘What the hell happened?’
Fly shrugged. ‘It was pretty aggro out there.’
‘This is a regional competition, Fly! Of course it’s aggro. You have to find a way to deal with it.’
She nodded. She knew. But that didn’t mean she had the answers. Simmo was still standing there dumbfounded, hoping for more of an explanation. But the only one she had, the one about the leg-rope incident, made her too embarrassed about not being able to handle herself. So she opted for silence.
‘I don’t know how, but somehow you still managed to qualify for tomorrow. Don’t blow it.’
That would be Simmo really angry, she guessed.
Chapter 23
Fly stewed on the ride back to camp. But something had changed in her. It was a different kind of stewing. Today’s pot of stew was not the kind of dish she’d cooked up all those months ago when she’d first encountered Stacey Jervis. Today’s pot was hot and boiling and it wasn’t flavoured with all kinds of excuses for other people’s behaviour. Today’s pot was angry. Fly was angry with Stacey, and she was angry with herself for taking it.
The others must’ve sensed Fly was in an altered state because they let her have first turn in the solar shower Simmo had set up and they made sure she was the first they called when the boys brought home takeaway pizza. Jilly would not have been pleased. But Jilly wasn’t the official support crew, so what Jilly thought, according to the boys, didn’t count.
As they quickly munched their way around the pizza circles, Matt and Heath decided they had put enough distance between themselves and the ‘pilchards in Edge’s sleeping bag’ incident to start hassling him again. They thought it was the greatest joke of all time that they’d got Edge and he hadn’t been able to come up with anything to get them back.
Edge boiled. If Fly had needed any lessons in boiling an angry pot she should’ve just gone straight to Edge. He was an expert. Fly knew it because she watched Edge. She didn’t write him off as an angry young rabbit like the rest of them. She’d watched him deliberately make himself something of a loner amongst the boys. He reckoned they goofed off too much and he didn’t need them dragging him down, but Fly thought there was something else going on. She saw the way Heath and Matt had paired up, right from the start. And for all Edge’s aggro, she saw his shyness and she could understand how it would look to him – Heath and Matt were peas in a pod, there wasn’t room for him, so why not pretend you wouldn’t be part of their team even if they’d asked you? Which they hadn’t.
Just between the edge of the camp and the sand there were a couple of gnarled logs. She picked the one with the natural dip in it and parked her butt. It didn’t take Heath long to join her. They sat together for a long time, watching the sun burn its way towards the edge of the earth.
‘She leg-roped me,’ Fly said finally.
‘Why didn’t you tell someone? You could have lodged a protest.’
‘What am I going to do? Protest every time someone calls me a name, looks at me the wrong way?’
Heath was confused. ‘She didn’t call you a name. She leg-roped you, and that’s out of order.’
‘I know. But I didn’t handle it and I should be able to, that’s the point. I let it get to me, Heath. I caved in.’
Heath could see that she didn’t really want an argument here. She needed to be right. And that was cool.
‘Okay, you caved. You’re a wimp. Anything else you want me to confirm for you?’
‘Where’s Simmo?’ she said.
Simmo was sweating. He had wrestled that old thunder-box into position over a deep hole and he was banging star posts into a circle around it. There was a large roll of hessian lying on the ground nearby which would serve as their privacy screen.
Fly stopped short five metres before she reached him. The smell was truly spectacular. Simmo looked up.
‘Bit rank, isn’t it? Don’t think last year’s pit has fully composted yet.’
He let her stand there a while, banging away at more pickets.
‘So what’s happening, Fly? You been having dangerous thoughts?’
How did he know?
‘I want to win,’ she said.
Simmo nodded, not even pretending to be surprised. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Yeah. Why?’ He banged a couple more times.
Fly wasn’t sure what he wanted her to say. ‘Because I know I can.’
Simmo gave her a look – it wasn’t enough, it was one of those textbook answers and he wanted more. ‘And?’
‘And because …’ she had no idea where she was going here, and maybe that was a good thing. ‘Because I let people hassle me out of things. I’m too polite. I want to be tougher.’
Simmo didn’t look up. ‘You need to connect with your inner mongrel.’
‘My what?’
‘Meet me at the beach at five. I’ll introduce you.’
It’s not light at five in the morning in spring. Fly had set the alarm on her watch. The other girls had groaned and rolled over but by the time Fly snuck out of the tent she could hear them already breathing their way back into dreams. Simmo was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d forgotten? There was no sign of life in the caravan and without the sun it was still less than ten degrees. It would have been so easy for Fly to assume Simmo had forgotten and slip back into that warm sleeping bag. But Simmo had promised her a date with her inner mongrel. It was too tempting to resist.
The sand was still cold with the night air as Fly skipped across the beach. The sun was coming, it had cast its rays forward, but it hadn’t yet shown its face. Fly scanned left and right along the beach, looking for some sign of life, for someone huddled on the sand, waiting for her. She finally looked to the water, and that’s where she found him. Simmo was standing waist-deep, his board floating under one hand at his side, his eyes closed, his body gently swaying back and forth with the pull of the ocean. It was Simmo, but she’d never seen him like this before. It was almost like he was meditating. She knew the Simmo who played the game and acted the goose, but this was different, this was just him and the water, soaking up a quiet, sacred moment with the ocean.
She felt a sudden desire to sneak back up the beach, to let him have this moment to himself, but maybe that was just more of the same. Fly putting everyone else first. Why was it so hard to think that he’d planned to meet her, and because he was early he was having a tiny patch of stillness before she got there? Maybe she’d just cough and see what happened …
Simmo opened his eyes and waved her on in. If she’d known what he had planned for her she wouldn’t have coughed, she would’ve bounded in there and gone for his throat.
But before they got to it, Simmo made Fly stand beside him. He made her watch the waves for a full half-hour. He pointed out the main break. He told her where he wanted her to sit.
‘But that’s where I sat yesterday, and I got pushed out,’ she protested.
‘That’s a choice, Fly,’ he said. ‘And I want you to convince me you’re ready to make a different choice.’
He fell forward onto his board and started paddling hard. He yelled back over his shoulder, ‘This is a heat, Fly. You’re competing against me.’ He kept paddling away from her. ‘I want to see your inner mongrel, Fly, I want to see its teeth!’
And for the next two hours, while the sun inched its way above the horizon, Simmo gave her his worst. He paddled so close she could feel his breath on her shoulder. He flicked water in her face. He called her the kind of names she never wanted to be called again in her whole life. As she paddled for take-off he pushed the side of her rail down causing her to dig down to the left, veering completely off course. By seven, as a perfect right-hander was forming up behind them, she defiantly pushed him back and got onto the sweetest ride of her life. Simmo watched her all the way to shore, and he smiled nearly as broadly as she did.
Back at camp everyone was dying to know what they’d been up to. They both looked way too happy for people who’d been up since five o’clock. Fly kept her distance during breakfast. Simmo had warned her that she needed to keep her inner mongrel on a tight leash. He didn’t want it bounding into camp, licking everyone on the face and flopping down on its back so it could have a good old tummy scratching. Simmo was dead serious about the whole inner mongrel thing. He made her pick a dog and see herself sprouting its fur, taking on its run, pulling her lips back to reveal its teeth. He didn’t make her do it there and then on the beach, but he wanted her to know how it growled. The minute Stacey even blinked the wrong way at her, he wanted Fly to send her that growl. It didn’t have to be a big, hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck, howl-at-the-moon kind of job – just a low, warning snarl, just enough to tell her to back right off. If he were her he’d snarl out loud, but that was a matter for Fly. Some people were happier growling in front of strangers than others.
On the walk back up the sand Fly had imagined her inner mongrel padding along beside her. When Simmo first asked her to think of a dog she’d thought about her dog at home. She was a kelpie cross, runt of the litter, but more than capable of holding her own in a stoush. But her name was Crunchie, and it just didn’t feel tough enough. So she thought some more, and in the end she settled on Twinkie – okay, so the name wasn’t any better, and then there was also the fact that she was a chihuahua, but Twinkie was the most terrifying and psychotic dog Fly had ever encountered.
Twinkie lived three doors up from Fly’s old high school. Twinkie hated kids. She belonged to a grumpy old guy called Harvey. Not that Harvey was grumpy to Twinkie – he didn’t beat her or anything – they just sat together on the porch not talking, day after day after day. But something had clearly happened in that little pooch’s life to make her very angry. Every day was a nerve-shredding dash past Twinkie’s house. Fly could still see her now, leaping off the old wicker lounge on Harvey’s front verandah and launching herself head first at the front fence with enough force to knock most dogs out cold. But not Twinkie. All the tan and white hair on her body would be standing straight out and the skin over her snout was pulled so far back it almost hit her eyelids. She bit the fence, she snarled frantically from the base of her belly and she did not draw breath until the hurrying schoolkid was almost at the school gate. Then she’d turn a
nd snort her way back to the wicker two-seater, happy that she’d shown them what for. Fly wasn’t going to go the whole fence-biting routine, but there was something about that ferocious little growl boiling forth from such a tiny body that appealed to Fly. Twinkie the inner mongrel it was.
As she watched Perri getting ready for her final, Fly wondered what kind of inner mongrel her friend might have. She thought it would be something sleek and beautiful … maybe a Doberman pinscher, they could still go you if push came to shove. But Perri’s inner Doberman must’ve been sleeping off a big night out on the prowl because as she pushed up onto her first wave of the heat she slipped straight down onto the board and copped the full force of the wave right in the back of her head.
There were frowns all round on the beach, most furrowed from Matt – this was not Perri’s form. What was going on? But today Perri just couldn’t stay on a wave. She slipped and slid all over the shop, until finally they saw her turn and paddle for shore. Fly could see Edge starting to panic.
‘Where’s your board, Matt?’ he asked.
‘Back at camp,’ Matt said.
‘So why is your board cover here?’ Edge’s voice had gone all tight.
‘Perri’s cover had a rip in it, so I lent her mine for the day.’
Perri puffed her way up to them. ‘There’s something wrong with my board. I need to borrow someone’s.’
Bec was already reaching for hers. As Perri bolted back to the water Simmo ran his fingers across the surface of Perri’s board. His face went very red. Fly was sure Simmo’s inner mongrel was one of those Brazilian fighting dogs, a street Rottweiler. It might not get let out of its cage very often – but there was a reason for that.
‘Someone want to tell me how come Perri’s board is covered in soap?’
Edge was already green around the gills.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘It was in Matt’s board bag. I thought it was his board.’
Blue Water High Page 20
