by Chris Vick
“Not really. Skip susses out that stuff. Is it good? Where? That’s all I need to know.”
It was that simple for Jade. She knew waves; she knew what the sea did. But not why. Maybe she didn’t care. I was different. A geek. I needed to know how things worked, to make sense of them. I knew a bit about the stars. Now I wanted to know about the sea. I also thought it might help me not kill myself. So I’d looked it all up.
“Skip checks the forecasts,” I said. “But they’re not always accurate, are they? Especially about refraction into the sheltered spots. If you understand, it’ll help you get better waves. You’re probably surfing okay waves one place when you could be surfing great ones somewhere else.”
She sat up dead straight when she heard that.
“Yeah? Prove it.”
I took her baccy pouch and hip flask and a magazine and a book and made a rough map on the floor.
“Say this is the land, and the swell’s coming from this direction…” I talked a while. About energy moving from wind to water. How the longer and harsher the wind blew, the more fetch it created, and the more likely the chance of decent swell. How it travelled across the ocean, for days, weeks; how it would travel forever if it didn’t hit land or opposing wind. How waves got organised into sets of two, three or even ten. What happened when they hit the coast and why different spots would work well in different swells.
She knew all the spots and had seen them all in different conditions. But she had no idea how a little bit of research could help her get top waves. There were at least two spots, facing north, that I reckoned would fire in a big west or south-west swell, even if the web forecasts reckoned they’d be no more than one to two feet.
“Refraction, you see. Hits the rocky bottom and slows down, but not the wave still travelling in deep water. Hence wrapping around a point.”
Jade sat, cross-legged, elbows on knees and hand holding up her chin, staring at me goggle-eyed and silent, and listening in a way I’d never seen her listen to a teacher.
I liked that.
*
Skip couldn’t make it the next day.
Jade, Big G and me stood on the shore, in our wetsuits, our clothes in bags on the sand, boards under our arms, watching lines of froth lick our toes. We’d come looking for a wave. And it wasn’t there. I was gutted.
“It’ll come on the pushing tide,” said Big G. But he didn’t sound like he believed it.
“All dressed up, no party,” said Jade. “Bugger.”
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Training games,” she said. She kept her gaze on the sea, looking serious, but Big G had a smile on his hairy face that got wider by the second.
“Yeah, right, training games,” he said, nodding.
“What kind of games?” I asked, but Jade was off, running down the beach, bouncing off the sand.
“What’s she…?” I started to ask, but Big G ran off too, following Jade’s footprints to the end of the beach, where a thin path snaked through the rocks up to the clifftop.
They leapt up the path, like they had springs in their legs. I followed, panting and stumbling, struggling not to ding my board on the rocks.
They’d run fifty yards to a rocky outcrop, sticking out of the cliff. Their surfboards and bags were stacked in the ferns nearby. I ran along the path, dumped my stuff with theirs and joined them on the rock.
“Take a look,” said Jade. I crept up to the edge. The sight of the sea came up and punched me in the gut. There was nothing below, but a long, long drop, into a purple pit of water. Twenty feet? Thirty? Either side of the deep part, below the surface, I could make out rocks, patches of yellow sand and seaweed drifting in the current. Looking at it made me feel dizzy and sick. I pulled back. But firm hands pushed me back to the edge.
“WAAAAOOH!” I shouted.
Jade and Big G had grabbed an arm each and shaken me.
“Sick bastards!” I said, putting a hand on my heart, just to stop it bursting out of my chest. Jade was almost crying, she was laughing so hard.
Big G went over to the bags and started rooting around, looking for something.
“Have a go,” said Jade, with a sly smile.
“What … you mean jump?” I looked down again. How far was it? Could I make it? Or would I get smashed on the rocks? “No way. Can’t be done.”
“Ha!” said Jade. Shaking her hair off her face, she walked back off the rock, turned, then ran straight at the edge. Fast. And jumped off. Right into nothing.
I didn’t even try and stop her. She was too quick.
She hung in the air. No more than a second, but the sight of her burned into my head. Her curved black shape in the crystal-blue sky. Her arms out, hair floating in the air. Then time started up again, and she fell like a stone. I went to the edge, almost tripping over, and watched her fall. At the last second, she drew her arms across her chest and slipped into the water. She didn’t even make much of a splash. The sea swallowed her.
I watched, waiting for her smug, smiling face to appear, waiting for her to shout at me to jump in after her.
A circle of bubbles floated up where she’d gone in.
“Big G?” I said. He was doing something on his phone. “G, she hasn’t come up.”
“She’s cool,” he said, not looking up. Long seconds passed. Tens of seconds. I looked hard, like just staring would make her appear. The circle of bubbles melted away.
Was she hiding, below the rocks where I couldn’t see? Was it a wind-up? I got down on hands and knees and leant over as far as I could, so far I felt I was going to puke. I could see right into the gully underneath. No Jade.
“She’s not hiding, G. She’s not there.” I kept looking down, then back up at Big G, waiting for him to do something. He just kept playing with his sodding phone. “She hasn’t come up!!”
“Okay. Tell me when she does.”
“Right. I’m going,” I said. I looked for a way to climb down. There wasn’t one. It was jump or nothing. Shit. I got ready to leap.
“It’s not your turn yet,” said Big G.
“Turn?”
“Well?” Jade’s voice echoed up the rocks. There she was, right where she’d gone in, treading water. I breathed out. Big G came to the edge.
“One twenty!” he shouted, pointing at the phone.
“That doesn’t count. I’m going again.” Jade slammed the water with her hand. I looked from Jade to Big G, from Big G to Jade. What was going on?
“Yeah, it does count, you cheating monkey. Go, go!” Big G shooed her. She turned and swam fiercely along the rocks to the beach. Her dark skin, wetsuited body and seal-slick hair all blended together. She was more sea creature than girl.
“Your go,” said Big G, slapping me on the back, a sick grin on his face. “Go in straight, or you’ll break your back and never walk again. Don’t let your arms flap. When you get down deep, grab a thick bit of seaweed, or a rock, and hang on as long as you can. Then swim to the beach, and run back up here. Get it?”
“Er, yeah.”
I wanted to do it; I wanted to know what it felt like. And I didn’t want to bottle it. Not in front of Jade.
But…
“Now?”
Big G rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Kook, now.”
I looked into the huge pit of nothing beyond the rock.
When Big G saw me not-jumping he said, “You just watched a girl do it. Stop being a pussy. And get a good run-up so you don’t smash your brains on the rocks in the shallows. Jump high, jump far. Simple. Go.”
Jade was running along the path; she’d be back in a second.
I couldn’t feel my legs. My arms were shaking. I took a few steps backwards to get a good run-up, took a last look at Jade to make sure she clocked me going, then ran. Totally legged it for the edge, and jumped high as I could.
“Wahoo! Koooooook!!” Jade’s shout echoed in the air. I had this plan to hold my body straight, tucking my arms in, but I flapped like a bird, suddenl
y finding I couldn’t fly. There was this moment of just being in the air, not even falling, just floating. I took it all in, the forever of the sky and the blue sea – because I felt, I mean really felt, it might be the last thing I ever saw – then the water raced up to hit me in a sickening rush. I tucked my arms in, just as my feet smashed through the surface. I felt like a bomb breaking through ice. My body was pulled apart, like my arms and legs were being torn off me.
Time slowed. My head, heart, body and bones all came together again. I had a second before I’d start floating up. I opened my eyes. Blurs of gold and blue and black danced in front of me. Rocks, sand, seaweed. I turned over, swam down and felt around, till my scrabbling hands found a thick trunk of seaweed.
I was humming with the buzz of it. I’d jumped. I’d got the seaweed. All I had to do was hold on.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. My hammering heart was growing inside me, filling my chest, my head, my ears. Even my eyes were throbbing with it.
Forty.
Fifty.
I got this tight, squeezed feeling right inside. Deep. My muscles started twitching and dancing, crying for oxygen. But the worse it got, the harder I held on to the seaweed.
It was like being under a wave. The same squeezing in my body. The same helpless panic in my head, like it was talking to me, screaming at me to let go. But this time, I was in charge, not the water. This time I had a choice.
Control it, control it, control it, I said to myself, while my body cried back:
Breathe. Escape. Now.
I closed my eyes tight shut.
Control…
Control…
Breathe…
I let go, kicked for the surface and pulled air, huge gasping lungfuls, while shakes ran through me like I was having a fit.
I heard Big G shout, “Fifty three, go!” I started swimming, hard as I could. Everything I saw and felt melted together. The cool water, the sun on my face, the light on the sand. It was a heady, rushing, spinning, dizzy, messed-up feeling, like I was still jumping, still falling, still sinking, still underwater. Like all these things were happening at once.
When I got back to Big G and Jade, I was sweating and panting. I’d done it. I’d given it all I had, and a bit more. I waited for the slap on the back, for Jade’s wide-eyed wonder. But she just smiled, like she was amused.
“Oh dear,” said Big G, sighing and shaking his head. “Got some work to do, haven’t we, Sam?” He gave Jade his phone, and jumped.
“This is nuts,” I said, gasping, leaning over, feeling sick. She looked for him in the water, then at the phone, then back at the water, her eyes and her smile calm. She was way more focused than I’d ever seen her in class.
He was down a long time. Longer.
“Come on, you git, come up!” she whispered through pinched lips. Finally, Big G surfaced.
“One ten,” she shouted. But I could see the phone over her shoulder – 1:25 was flashing on the screen. I smiled.
“What’s next?” I said, still panting.
“You need to do better, Kook. You can hold your breath a long time. Don’t fight it when you’re down there. Slow your heart down. Don’t use up your oxygen. Practise. We’ll go again. Five times each.”
“What! This is really nuts.”
“Yeah? Well one day it could save your life.”
THE SURF DIDN’T come up. We’d skunked, as Big G said. There’d be no surfing that day, no way for me to show Jade that I wasn’t that much of a kook any more. Not in the water, leastways.
But we went back to the beach and ran, and did press-ups, and swam and jumped. All of it led by Jade.
Big G was better than her at most of it (and better than me at all of it), but she could outrun him in a short sprint and she could swim better than him too. When they did stuff he was better at, she got really, really determined. I’d never seen anyone strain so much. She made herself look almost ugly, she was pushing herself so hard, and even when Big G was the way-ahead winner, she’d do anything not to lose.
She counted him doing press-ups. “Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-five, twenty-eight, ninety-four, I mean eighteen…”
He cracked up. “Pack it in!” It was hard for him to do press-ups when he was laughing.
“Ah well, better start again,” she said, and kicked one arm from under him so he fell face first into the sand.
It was fun. When we’d finished, we walked back into the dunes where we’d left our stuff. Jade had this kind of tent dress with a hood, made of towel. She called it a ‘robey’. She could put it on and fumble about underneath, getting changed, without showing an inch of flesh. It was a one girl changing room. Watching her mess around with bra straps and knickers underneath this tent was weird. Funny, clumsy and sexy, all at the same time. I tried not to look too hard. Or at least not be obvious about it.
When she eventually yanked the robey off, she was in shorts and a T. It was well into October by then, but the summer sun didn’t seem to want to finish. Warm days were still pretty normal that autumn.
As she threw the robey on the sand, we heard a whistle. Three guys were walking towards us. They had blond hair and brown skin, wearing the board shorts and hoodies that were like a uniform for a lot of surfers. But they weren’t like the Penford crew. They were older, and a whole lot neater. Their clothes had been ironed and they had hair they’d put gel in and taken time over.
The tallest one had short, spiky hair, and perfect teeth.
“Not much of a strip, Jade,” he said. She put one hand to her lips like she was about to blow him a kiss, but instead, showed him the finger.
“Screw you, Billy,” she said.
They came up to us.
“Thought we’d check it out down here. There’s nothing at Porthmeor.”
“No surf here either, so you might as well piss off back home,” said Jade. She said it in a friendly way, like she was just joking. But she wasn’t.
“Oooh, the pretty girl’s got ’tude,” said Billy. He looked at me, checked out my board and my knackered suit, which was lying on the sand like a dead seal washed up by the tide.
“Who’s this?” said Billy to G. But G just stood there with his arms folded, staring at Billy and chewing gum. He didn’t seem to have heard what Billy said.
“This is Sam. We’re teaching him,” said Jade.
“On that thing?” he waved a hand at Old Faithful.
“We all learnt on that thing. Any one of us would piss all over you, even if it was the only board we ever rode.” Jade was having a go. And G wasn’t stopping her.
“Is that right? Gavin, what do you say?” Billy said to G. Big G just shrugged like talking to Billy was beneath him. This guy was squaring up. If he had been alone, it would have been a very, very stupid thing to do. But there were three of them.
And G, and Jade, and me. My legs went cold. I was afraid. But…
“Leave it out,” I said. I don’t know where it came from. I just said it.
“What?” said Billy. He took a step towards me. Same as when I’d been surfing, like jumping off the cliff, I pushed the fear down. I didn’t step back, even though he was breathing in my face. And I told myself I wasn’t going to. My head was doing quick maths. G and two of them, me and Billy, Jade landing a few kicks. We weren’t starting anything, but we might be okay if they did. I’d done the cliff, why not this?
“Leave the kid alone,” one of his mates said, pulling Billy back. This one was older too, maybe seventeen, good looking, with an easy smile and a far away look in his green eyes. I wondered if I might look like that, if I surfed a few years, had a tan and could afford decent threads.
“Come on,” he said, pulling Billy away and pushing him towards the beach. “Sorry. He gets uptight when there’s no waves.” They walked off, but as they did he turned, smiled and said, “Hey, Jade.”
“Hey, Mick.” She smiled back at him.
My gut twisted hard, and I felt hot and angry.
“Fancy him, d
o you?” I hated myself for saying it. I wished I could turn time back just a few seconds. But there it was.
“What’s it to you, Kook?”
“Nothing.”
“No really, Sam,” she said, hands on her hips and her chin in the air, “what’s it to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Good.” Jade’s eyes were an ocean most of the time. Cool and deep. But right then they were blue-green fire. “No surf. Let’s go get wrecked. Who’s in?”
Big G had stuff to do for his dad.
It was just me and Jade.
WE CYCLED BACK to her house, and put the boards and bikes in the garage.
“Got to get weed from the house, wait here,” she said, like she was speaking to Tess, or a kid. And straight off, I thought, What doesn’t she want me to see? Or maybe it was me she didn’t want to be seen. Either way, I was dead curious.
I left it a few seconds, then went out and stood by the corner of the garage, watching her walk over the pot-holed driveway and up the garden path to the house.
I took a good look at the place. Faded white walls and flaking blue paint, with moss growing on the cracked roof tiles. It was like Rag’s house on the estate. But it wasn’t on an estate. It was on the moors, in a sea of yellow gorse and green grass. It looked beautiful in the autumn sunlight.
Her dad opened the door. Jade froze on the spot. Bob stood, leaning against the doorframe, blocking her way.
They started talking. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and it all seemed normal at first. But then their voices got loud, quick. Tess ran out of the house, sliding straight up to Jade and rubbing her body against Jade’s legs, whimpering. Jade ignored Tess and kept on at her dad, brushing her hair out of her face with one hand and pointing at him with the other. Suddenly, Bob stepped forward and lunged at Jade, trying to grab her arm. Jade was quick, and dodged out of his way. He ended up stumbling down the path. I wondered if he was okay. But as soon as I thought it, I sussed he was drunk. It was the way he was struggling to get upright, swaying and trying to point at her, like she was a moving target.