by Chris Vick
Not just drunk. Smashed.
He went at Jade again, this time grabbing her arm. But she slipped out of his grip, and headed for the door. Tess went nuts, barking at him.
“Don’t walk away from me, you whore!” he shouted. I heard that clearly enough. She stopped, and turned to face him. Even at that distance I could see she was all attitude and flashing eyes, ready for whatever was coming.
But what was coming wasn’t good. He marched at her, with his arm raised, moving like he was going to hit her.
“No!” I shouted.
Bob turned. Jade melted into the shadows of the doorway, and Bob – weirdly – waved at me with the hand he’d been about to hit Jade with. Like behaving normal was going to make it all okay. I didn’t wave back.
Tess was still barking madly at Bob, her hackles raised. He went into the house with Tess following, and shut the door behind him. There was an eerie silence in the air then. Just a whisper of wind, and the far-off cry of a seagull.
I didn’t think either of them would welcome me coming over and getting involved, so I just stood there, waiting.
But at the same time, I knew anything could be going on behind that door, and that wasn’t okay. Their business or not, I wasn’t going to just stand there. I ran over. I noticed the door wasn’t shut properly. It was open, a fraction. I opened it, but stayed outside. Through the hall, I could just see her dad, in the lounge, in an armchair. He was bent over, with his head in his hands. Crying.
Jade came down the stairs, and straight out the door, followed by Tess. She shut it behind her and walked past without even looking at me. I thought she’d be upset, or maybe angry. But there was nothing in her face, no emotion at all.
“You okay?” I said.
“I told you to stay put.”
I followed her to the garage. She climbed up the ladder to the den.
“Are you all right?” I said, looking up.
“Stop looking at my arse. And stay there.”
“I’m not. He called you a…” I couldn’t even say it.
Whore. Just the idea of the word was wrong. Poisonous.
“He’s just drunk,” said her voice from the den. “It is Saturday, after all.” She came back down with a tobacco pouch in her hand. “Got weed, got baccy. Best go up the tor, just in case he comes looking.” She was weirdly relaxed, like what just happened was no big deal.
“I saw him—”
“You didn’t see anything, Kook.”
She walked out, with Tess at her heel.
*
We sat on the tor, the massive flat rock at the top of the hill, looking out to sea. From up there, on top of the world, the whole sea blended into one great big glass sheet. I watched it, stroking Tess’s head, rested on my lap.
Jade skinned up, sighing and breathing deep the whole time, and focusing on the spliff like it was the most important thing in the world.
I wanted to say something to help, though I didn’t know what, and I guessed if I did, she’d be off before I’d said more than three words. So I didn’t say anything. But I felt angry. I didn’t show it; I was careful. But I hated her dad. I hated him more than I’d ever hated anyone. I didn’t care if he was sitting in a chair, crying, thinking he was sorry.
She lit the spliff and took a deep pull.
“Does he know you smoke?” I said.
“Sure.” She blew out a cloud. “He looks for it, so I hide it in the house. Not all my secret stashes are in the den. Too obvious. We play this game. He hides the bottles; I hide the weed. No one looks too hard. Difficult though. Rag’s stuff stinks.”
She took another hard drag. It was full on, how she was taking it in, getting wrecked as quick as she could.
“Does he drink a lot?” I said, trying to get her talking, thinking it was better than saying, Does he hit you, Jade?
She stared at the sky. When she answered, it was in a husky, mellow voice.
“Yeah. He drinks. Since Mum went. It’s a year ago. He’s into the Scotch a bit. Can’t say I blame him.”
“Where’s your mum now?”
“Truro, last I heard.”
“Do you still see her? Does she know… he…”
“Nosy bastard, aren’t you, Kook?” she snapped. She was like a wire, and when you touched it, you didn’t know if it was going to give you a shock or not.
“Don’t mean to be,” I said, with a shrug. She held my stare then. Her eyes were hard as ice, and that anger was back for a second, like it was always in her and it just needed to be pulled out by the wrong word or look. But, slowly, that look melted as I stared into her eyes. Pushed under the surface.
“It’s okay, Kook,” she said, gently, “you’re just being nice. That’s you. Nice all over.” She put her hand on my arm, and squeezed.
After we’d been quiet for a bit, I took a deep breath and blurted it out, before I lost the chance.
“It’s not right, Jade… if he gives you aggro like that.” I had to say it. I wasn’t going to pretend like she wanted.
She took a sharp breath, tensed, sat upright, as if she was going somewhere, then fell back, breathing out. Maybe she was so stoned storming off was just too much effort. She didn’t answer for a long time.
“He doesn’t, he just…” She sighed. “Look, our family’s messed up. You don’t know the half of it.” She was looking at me like she couldn’t figure me out; if talking to me about this was a good thing or not.
“I know what I saw,” I said.
“It’s my fault. I wind him up. I can handle him. I don’t need any help.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“He goes mental when he’s tanked, and I give him a hard time. It’s no biggy. He’s never, like, really hit me, or anything. Honest.” She handed me the spliff and lay down, putting her hands behind her head.
“He’s out of order, Jade.”
“I said I can handle him.” And there was that Jade anger back. She sat up. “How long did you do down there?”
“Down where?” I said.
“In the sea. Today.”
“About fifty seconds.” I was a bit thrown by how she just changed the subject. And how fierce she was.
“Well, that’s nothing. And I’ll bet it freaked you right out. Well, you gotta get used to it. Not mind it. Like it. Else you’ll never surf it big. You gotta conquer your fear, Kook.”
“Fear makes the wolf look bigger, right?”
“Right.”
“But fear’s a good thing.”
“Pussy!”
I cracked up. I couldn’t help it. She sounded a bit stupid, with her bring-it-on-I-can-take-it attitude. She cracked up too. She took the spliff off me before carrying on with her mission. “When you get a big wipeout, when you really get held under, it’s… the most intense, fucked-up thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“That’s good, is it?”
She smiled. “It is, if you’re ready for it. You want to go back there? Deep down. Now. Do some more training.”
“What? Back in the water? But it’s so nice here.” My whole body was melting into the stone and thin moss we were lying on. The tor had stopped being a hard rock and was now, officially, the biggest beanbag in the world. The spliff had crept up and ambushed me. I wasn’t going anywhere. I lay down, put my head back and stared at the sky.
The whole world vanished. Jade’s dad, my mum, Skip, Billy, school. All that was left was blue sky and Jade’s voice.
“If you get a big hold-down on a big wave, or you get held down by one, two, three in a row, you’re going to be down longer than a minute. It pushes you deep. Crushes you, makes you know you’re nothing. But if you’re cool with that, if you’re not afraid of it, then you’ll be a great surfer, cuz you can take it on, all of it, whatever it throws at you. And you get to be part of it.” She sounded really intense.
“Part of what?”
“It, like, the swell? I know I’m wrecked, but… when you surf big, it feels like the energy of the wave, it�
��s inside you, like you’re part of it.”
“It is. You are.”
“You wouldn’t know,” she said, scoffing.
“That’s kinetic energy. No water’s moving into shore till the wave breaks; it just goes up and down as the energy passes through it. The thing that’s moving to the shore is energy. You have that inside you when you ride a wave. Like the water does.”
Silence.
The blue sky was invaded by a giant shadow. Jade’s head. Her hair hung down and tickled my cheeks. For one second I thought she was going to kiss me.
“Kine-what? What’s that? What do you mean? The water’s not moving?”
I’d flicked some kind of switch inside her. Pressed ‘on’ by accident. I stared up at her hungry eyes.
“Ki-ne-tic. The energy of movement. When you’re surfing, you’re an object with speed and momentum. The rate of each combined can be calculated as the amount of kinetic energy you have. You absorb it, out of the wave.”
She looked at me like I was speaking an alien language.
“Absorb it? Energy? So it’s inside me?”
“Uh-huh. Part of you.”
“But we’re not energy,” she said, tapping my head. “How can it be part of me? We’re… stuff. Solid stuff.”
“You mean matter. Matter and energy are the same thing.”
“What? Straight up?” she said.
“Yup. Kind of. Well… energy is actually mass times the speed of light squared. Matter and mass aren’t the same, but anything that is matter has mass.”
“Well, that’s just fascinating,” she whispered. But it didn’t matter how sarky she tried to sound. She meant it. She was fascinated.
“Anyways, Kook, you never answered me.”
“Answered what?”
“D’you want to go back there?”
“Where?”
She took the spliff from me and put the burning end in her mouth, then grabbed me by the shoulders and moved her face towards mine, like she was going to kiss me, but she started blowing through the spliff instead, so the smoke rushed into my mouth. I inhaled. She blew hard. I sucked it in, till I coughed. I might have had a proper choking fit then, but she put one hand over my mouth and took the joint out of her own mouth with the other.
“Now hold it,” she whispered. “Hold it till you’re going to pass out.”
What?
I wasn’t going to do that. I’d hold it in a bit, then push her hand away and cough my guts up.
Ten seconds.
But then I thought… That’s what she was expecting. That I’d give in after a minute. Then she’d take a deep drag and do it for two minutes. And it would be like running on the beach. She’d push herself hard enough to almost kill herself, then get that victory look in her eyes.
Twenty seconds.
I decided I wasn’t going to let that happen. And I liked her hand on my mouth. And looking into her eyes. Eyes that were checking me out, seeing what I’d do.
Thirty seconds.
Forty.
Fifty.
I wasn’t going to give in. She saw it, and she liked it.
One minute.
It was starting to hurt now. My body was tensing up, getting tight. Tighter. And I was sinking. The sky and her face were melting.
I wasn’t. Going. To. Give. In.
I couldn’t count. The numbers weren’t…
Working.
The shape of her head, the blue sky, her breath on my face, her hand over my mouth. Not melting now, shaking. Getting…
Lost.
She took her hand off. I blew out, coughed. Gasped. Sat up. The whole world rushed back into my head. I’d almost passed out.
“Holy shit,” I said. I’d been down there all right, but now I was back, going high, right into space. Stoned out of my box.
“One fifteen,” said Jade, then took a massive hit off the joint herself and held her nose. I didn’t put my hand over her mouth.
I lay back. I didn’t even watch her. I knew she’d make my time easy, then add a few seconds on. Just to make a point.
When she was done, she stubbed the spliff out and lay back, next to me.
I turned to face her and she turned to face me. I stared into her sea blue-green eyes, looked at her plump lips and honey skin and the perfect heart shape of her face. And she stared back, not minding me looking at her. Liking it. Maybe it was the weed messing with my mind, but I thought she was just daring me with her eyes and those lips, so I went to kiss her, close enough that our lips brushed. But just as I started to press, she turned away, and stared at the sky.
“Cheeky bastard, as well as a nosy one,” she said. But she was grinning. And I was flying like a gull in the sky, burning up inside, hardly breathing. She got hold of my hand and squeezed.
“Feels like the Earth’s moving fast,” she said, “like you got to hold on, even if you’re lying down.”
“The Earth is moving. It’s flying round the sun, through space, right now.”
She turned to me, with that hunger-for-facts look back in her eyes again. “How fast?” she said, testing me.
“About eighteen miles a second.”
“Shut the front door! No. Way. How do you know all that shit?”
“You know I like physics. Space. Stars. I love all that stuff.”
“I must pay more attention in class,” she said.
“Yeah, or some attention.”
“Eighteen miles a second… We really need to hold on then,” she said, all fake serious. We both spluttered. And that was the end of any talk for a bit. We couldn’t stop laughing. By the end I was laughing at nothing. Just the sound of her giggling would set me off again. We laughed till my sides ached.
Tess got up and walked off, like she was disgusted.
I was gone. Lost. Deep in the ocean.
*
It took a long time to stop wheezing and calm down. She’d taken us somewhere else. I’d forgotten all about her dad. For a bit. But once the weed wore off a bit, what I’d seen hung between us like this unspoken thing: a nasty, hard-edged bit of reality. We’d gone down deep, but you have to come up for air sooner or later. And there it was. What I’d seen. Bob with his arm raised, about to hit her. And there was no point keeping it a secret, or ignoring it, and she knew it.
“I do things. Surf, stay out. Too much. And he acts like he cares. But he doesn’t give a shit, and it winds me up, so I act like a bitch.”
“Least you’ve got a dad,” I said. It just came out. I didn’t think about saying it; I just did. I sat up, looking at the sea. She sat up too. She cocked her head, like a dog that was curious.
“He died, didn’t he? Your mum told my dad.”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
“Don’t mind. I was only four. I never really knew him.”
“How’d he die? You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
But I think she did. It was like the science stuff; she seemed really keen.
“We don’t know exactly,” I said. “He just disappeared one day.” It came out bitter. More than I had expected.
“Well… if he disappeared, he could still be alive?” she said, confused.
“No. It happened at sea, in a storm. He must have drowned.”
“Where?” she said.
I looked at the glass sea. It was calm. So calm you couldn’t picture it ever being different. Like you couldn’t imagine the things it could do.
I pointed at the ocean.
“Out there.”
I KNEW A FEW things about Dad, but not much about how he’d died. I couldn’t ever raise it with Mum without getting her upset. Only, being here, it made me want to know. I don’t know why, exactly. I mean, it didn’t upset me, him being dead. I’d been so young. But getting to know this place, getting to know the cliffs and beaches and the sea … Suddenly I could picture it: him setting out from the shore. The waves closing over him. It made it all real. Not just a story Mum to
ld me any more.
I wanted to know what had happened.
Mum was a dead end. But I reckoned Grandma would tell me. Later that day, I cycled over to her house.
“Hello, young man,” she said, at the door. She looked behind me, checking for Mum and Tegan. “I wasn’t expecting you. You should have called.” She looked tired, smaller somehow. A grey shadow lurked beneath her tanned skin. Her eyes were watery and weak where they’d been bright and fierce before. She was wearing a scarf on her head like normal, jeans and an old shirt and sandals.
“Yeah, sorry. Is it okay?” I said.
Her smile chased away the illness, just for a few seconds.
“Of course it’s okay. Come in.”
She took me to the lounge and left me sitting on the giant leather sofa, while she went and made tea.
It struck me again how it was everything our house wasn’t. Lots of light and space. Our house was a jungle of crap Mum had bought on eBay. I wondered what this house would look like with all our junk in it. I couldn’t picture it.
When she came in with the tea, she sat in her old, worn armchair, asked me the usual stuff about school and friends. I only gave half-arsed answers. She guessed what was on my mind. She got round to talking about Dad before I did.
“So, did you want more of his things?”
“Yeah. I’d like some of his navigational equipment. It’s pretty cool. Stuff they had to use before GPS and mobile phones. I like the maps and charts… but I wanted to ask… not so much about his stuff, more about…”
“How he died?”
“How did you guess?”
“It’s a question anyone would want to know the answer to. You want to know if there is more to the story than your mother has told you.” I liked Grandma, but she couldn’t help getting a dig in at Mum, whenever she could. It was subtle, under the surface, but always there. Still, she sat upright, sipping her tea, like she was grateful for it, so maybe being angry at Mum made her feel that bit more alive too. “There’s not much I can tell you that you won’t already know.”
“He disappeared. That’s all I know. Went out on his boat one day, didn’t come back.”
She put the tea down, and sat back. She grimaced slightly, and I wondered if she was just tired, or in pain. She looked out of the window, at the sea and blue sky.