by Chris Vick
“You wouldn’t listen, Jade. I told you, and you wouldn’t bloody listen.”
I remembered seeing her standing, naked, right where I was now. I’d been half blind, half crazy. But I had seen her.
And I remembered her right in front of me, out there, in the water, going for that wave, fighting me off, so she could go.
“You wouldn’t listen. I warned you. And now you’re gone… You stupid bitch. Why? For fuck’s sake, why …?”
I looked at the sea. Looked into it, like I was looking into Jade’s sea-coloured eyes. I looked so hard I felt dizzy, staring into the depths, trying to see beyond the chop of the waves. The light refracting, sparkling. Thousands and thousands of shapes of light and dark, sun and sea.
She was in there somewhere. If all someone is is energy and matter then that energy was in there, gone from her body and mind like a wave that’s made its journey through the ocean and finally broken on the beach.
The geek in me thought about that.
The universe is chaos. But there are patterns in thatchaos. Stars, waves. Energy and matter. And that’s all that we are.
I was crying then. Feeling her, really feeling her, but knowing that ‘she’ was no longer here. And I couldn’t put those two things together. I turned to Skip, still standing, watching me, wary, like I was a nutter.
“I can’t make sense of it, Skip. I can’t…”
He came up, looked me square in the eyes. “I reckon no one can, Sam. No matter what they say.”
I nodded, still fighting back the tears. Skip walked off, giving me some space.
I looked to the sea.
She was there. Somewhere. Nowhere too. In my memories. In the sea.
With Dad.
And all those thousands of sailors, surfers, divers, fishermen.
*
I stood there a long time. Not thinking any more. Exhausted by thinking. Strung out with it. But getting calmer by the second. Hypnotised by the water.
Hypnotised. And feeling okay.
Because understanding things didn’t matter any more. Skip was right. Trying to make sense of it was a waste of time.
I had known her. For that brief time. I had known her. Maybe better than anyone. And she’d known me better than anyone ever had too. That was what mattered. That was all that mattered. Jade didn’t understand things. She didn’t need to. She didn’t try to make sense of things. She just did them.
We’re here for a while, to ride a wave. And we’re lucky. The chances of any one of us even existing is billions and gazillions to one. Like winning the lottery thousands of times in a row. Impossible, but here we are. And we just get to be that wave, to burn our energy for a bit. And maybe there’s no God to look after us. And maybe when we’re gone, we’re gone. But we still lived, didn’t we? In what we did and in the memories of people. Eventually all those memories go too. Stars turned to sand and washed away. That’s all. And that’s enough.
I was there a long time. Holding on to that stone in my pocket, staring at the sea.
I walked down to the cliff edge. I saw Tess nosing at something down in the rocks below. Whatever it was, it sparkled in the sun.
I climbed down. And I knew. I don’t know how. I just did.
The camera.
It was wedged in a crevice, among limpets and seaweed. I got a hold, it was held tight, but with a strong tug I pulled it out.
I pushed the buttons. The battery was dead. The casing was scratched. But apart from that, it was okay.
“Hey,” I shouted. I clambered back up, waved and shouted to the others. “Hey! Look what I found.” They all came running.
“What the fuck?” said Big G, taking it off me, holding it up to the light, examining it. We passed it round, like a piece of treasure we’d found. Which, I guess, it was.
“Do you reckon…?” I started.
“Yeah, I don’t see why not,” said Skip. “The footage will be in there.”
My heart started hammering. Did I want to see it? Jade getting that wave. Jade dying.
“I don’t know about this,” said Rag, grabbing the camera off Big G, shaking his head. “Maybe we should just chuck it in the sea.”
“What would Jade want?” said Skip.
I knew. Like she was there, like she’d whispered it in my ear.
I took the camera off Rag and put it in my pocket. “She’d want it on every website and mag cover we can get it on.”
The others nodded. Smiled. Laughed.
“She’ll haunt us pretty bad if we don’t,” said Big G.
“Right,” said Rag. He pulled a bottle of rum from his bag. Of course he did. Rag. Powders, herbs and potions for every occasion. Medicine man. He had little tin cups too. He handed them out, and poured some for each of us.
“I wanted to say… well what did that vicar say about Jade?” he said. “Said she was a star, that burned quick and bright.”
“Like a shooting star…” said Skip. “What is a shooting star, Sam?”
“It’s not a star at all,” I said. “It’s something no bigger than a grain of sand, burning through the atmosphere. All its matter is used up as it burns into energy.”
“But it burns hard and quick,” said Skip. “I’ve seen them. Bright as anything. And that’s what Jade was.”
I looked into the deep blue and green, and smiled. There were no more words to say. Not to the others anyway.
“Libations,” said G. He poured a drop on the rocks and held his tin cup to the sky.
“Libations,” I said. The others too. We poured some of our drinks on the ground, clinked, and drank. Rag poured some more.
I walked off, nearer the cliff.
“And yeah, Jade,” I said, eventually, surprised by my own words, “In case you didn’t know … I loved you.”
And I felt calm.
I imagined her there, stood beside me, so close, like I could feel her breath in my ears as she spoke, like I could feel her hair brushing against my cheek.
“Talking to yourself, Sam?” said Rag, walking up and pouring me another.
“Jade,” I said, holding my cup up, for us to clink.
“Jade,” he said.
Then we got drunk.
Really, really drunk.
WE MET IN THE Old Chapel cafe the next day. Skip had a laptop and leads.
My heart punched in my chest while we waited for the camera to wake up and start downloading.
The footage wasn’t great. It was shot a long way off; there were drops of sea spray on the lens. But you could see, just…
A black figure, against a grey-blue sea.
Jade, tiny, tiny, against the wall of darkness behind her.
She got the wave. She carved a line. A V of white trailing behind her. Down the face, into the pit, back up.
The wave walled up. An avalanche of white, churning water. Sea horses galloping. Hundreds of them. Chasing her down the wave. She couldn’t outrun them.
The wave caught her. She disappeared.
They’d reckoned at the inquest she probably would have been knocked unconscious immediately, just from the force. She wouldn’t have known anything.
I hope so. I hope her last thought was, I did it.
After that, I thought we’d talk about the Devil’s Horns. But we didn’t. We remembered Jade instead. All the surfing, the laughs. Singing MGMT’s ‘Kids’ in the back of the bus.
Stuffing our faces with after-surf chips.
A time when we’d gone in, when it had been so stormy we’d paddled for half an hour, then looked back at the shore and seen we hadn’t even gone twenty yards.
Jade dancing like a loon at the rave.
Jade at school, staring out of the window.
The others talked about when they learned, when they were younger. How Jade was fierce and determined. How she was always first in and last out of the water. How she stole their waves and gave them the finger mid-ride. A lot of stuff I didn’t know too. Stuff I hope Skip will tell me more about.
It was good to talk it through. They were the only ones who knew what it was like. No one else understood, no one else had a clue.
*
We did give the footage to a surf mag.
They put it on their website and cover. They put that ancient pic of the Horns on too, and a frame of Jade, riding the wave, and next to it:
It was as big a wave as someone her size could paddle into. Bigger. They reckoned it was technically impossible for her to catch that wave. But she had.
It was the biggest wave ever ridden by a female surfer in the UK.
I didn’t know how I felt about all of it. I still don’t. I couldn’t connect the footage with Jade, or being out there when it happened. It didn’t feel like a film of that moment, even though it was.
Still, once it was up online I must have watched it a thousand times, and each time rewinding all the events leading up to that point in my head.
How dumb were we? How stupid had we been? There was no point saying that to myself over and over. But I did.
I do know giving the footage to the mag was exactly what Jade would have wanted though. We did the right thing.
Lots of the mags and websites wanted to interview us too. We said no to all of them. We didn’t want to make it about us, only about her, and the fact that she’d ridden the wave.
I HAD GOOD reason to be afraid of the sea. Good reason to be afraid of the wolf. It had killed my dad. It had killed Jade. It had almost killed me.
That’s the sea.
So you wouldn’t blame me if I never went near it again.
And you’d think I’d never surf again.
But you’d be wrong.
Fear makes the wolf look bigger. And I knew if I didn’t face up to it, that wolf would follow me everywhere. It’d howl outside my window in the middle of the night. It’d sit under my desk at school. If I didn’t get back in the water, I’d be afraid of it my whole life.
And what would Jade think about that, stood in her wetsuit, arms folded, eyebrow cocked, with a twisted smile?
“Pussy,” she’d say. Sly, quiet, smiling.
*
Winter days passed. Then weeks.
When I was ‘better’, I went back to school.
I saw the others, and sometimes we talked about Jade, and sometimes about the Devil’s Horns. They were the only people I could talk to. The only people I could relate to in any way.
But I knew, somewhere deep inside, that it wasn’t good to just talk it over and over, so mostly I kept to myself.
It was the same at home. I needed to be alone. I had to get away from Mum and Grandma and their kindness. I was drowning in it.
I couldn’t get back in the water right then, not even if I’d wanted. It wasn’t an option, because of my ribs. So on weekends I just got on the bike, or put my boots on and went wandering.
*
There’s this place I found. No one told me about it. I just went off cycling one cold, sunny day and came across it. Tess was with me. She loved running, following the bike. Something she’d done with Jade a thousand times.
The coast road had this little lane off it that ended by an old church. I dumped the bike by the graves and followed a path cut through brush trees like an avenue. Then along the cliff, and then down some rocks. I climbed and jumped till I got to the end, expecting a drop straight into the water. I had been doing that a lot – climbing as far as I could over rocks, then sitting, looking down at the sea.
But down at the end of these rocks there was a beach. Mostly it was rocks and boulders, but it was low tide, and beyond the rocks there was a large bank of sand.
I didn’t think there’d been a beach there before, else I’d have known about the place. The storm must have stripped rocks and sand off the high tide, making a beach at low.
There were waves too. Shore dumpers that thumped on the sand. No good for surfing. But good for watching, good for just sitting and staring. I’d sit on this one boulder, close as I could to the sea, for as long as I could before the tide came up, staring into the blue, feeling the spray wash over me.
It wasn’t just me that liked the place. There was a seal that was always there too. A cheeky young thing that’d come right in close, pop his head up and stare at Tess. Tess’d bark at it like crazy. But she’d never have the nerve to get in the water. And the seal knew it.
Gulls dived in the shallows, getting fish.
Twice I saw the grey arching backs of dolphins, making their steady way across the bay.
There was a rhythm to the place. The waves, the birds, the seal. The tide coming and going. And over the years, the beach coming, disappearing, showing again. Appearing, disappearing.
One day I was at this place, some weeks after I found it, watching the sea at low tide. I saw this wave break, far out. A proper wave, out of nowhere. Wrapping round the headland and sweeping towards the beach. It looked surfable. I guess the tides had done something to the sand since I’d first found the place. Levelled it out maybe, then created sand bars.
Then another wave broke, a right-hander, about shoulder-high, peeling smoothly round the headland and into the bay.
I got a real itch. Right there, right then. Because I could picture me on that wave, ripping it up.
A new, secret spot. Virgin. Unsurfed.
And what would Jade say?
“I can’t surf, can I, Sammy boy? But you can. If you spend your whole life out of the water, if you use me as an excuse not to surf… well that’s just a waste. That’s taking the piss.”
I watched the waves for five minutes more, just to make sure they weren’t freak happenings; to make sure they’d be good for a while. Then I went and got the bike and cycled home fast as I could without losing Tess.
I grabbed the knackered old wetsuit Rag had given me – Mum hadn’t chucked my surf gear after all – a thermal rash vest, boots, Old Faithful and a towel. I went straight back to the secret beach. Mum, Grandma and Teg never even saw me.
It was a sunny spring day. Summer in the sky, winter in the water. The sea was bone-chilling. When I half duck dived, my head sang with pain for a few seconds after. But I didn’t mind it. It just made me paddle that bit faster.
My arms were weak, my body was stiff. I messed up a few, but got one eventually, bumbling unsteadily to my feet then cruising down the line.
I got more after that, and all the time I could imagine Jade on the shore, laughing when I fell, and shouting, “Kook!” and punching the air and whooping when I got a good one.
*
I got to surf the place a lot. It got better every time. I was like a beginner all over again, I was so mad for it. There was no dissing small waves, no being pissed off when it was wind blown. I just rode every wave I could, whenever I could.
Of course, having it all to myself couldn’t last. One day I was cycling, Tess behind me, board under my arm, just like Jade had showed me. A car went by, and Rag was in the back, his nose pressed up to the glass, staring at me. Confusion was written all over his face, because I was nowhere near Whitesands or Tin-mines or any of the usual spots.
He texted me, “Where were you off to?”
I didn’t reply.
On the weekend, a good size swell came in. The place was going to be cranking.
I cycled down there early Saturday morning. As I was getting changed, three surfers turned up, in wetties, boards under their arms.
Rag, Skip, Big G.
“Kook,” said Rag, “great to see you, mate. Thanks for telling us about this break.”
I felt like a dog caught with its nose in the biscuit tin.
“I needed to get a few myself… I was going to tell you…” I started saying, trying not to smile.
“Bollocks,” said Big G.
We all cracked up.
“Well, I was… honest… I just needed a bit of time. D’you know what I mean?”
Big G nodded. So did the others. We stood, quiet for a bit, not knowing what to say. We’d done talking about the Horn
s by then.
“This is a really fun chat,” said G, looking out to sea, “but I’m wasting time standing around with yous lot when I could be out there.” He ran to the water.
We all did.
After a few weeks, a big spring storm kicked off in the Atlantic, sending a powerful, long-range swell. Big waves, brushed to perfection by light easterlies.
I was game for that. I was casual about it. Compared to the Devil’s Horns, it’d be nothing.
It was easy at first. I had no fear. I got into every wave, even ones that looked like they might close out. I just went for it. And every time I got one, it was a super-fast, powerful, rush.
About an hour into the session, I was paddling back out after a mind-meltingly good wave when I saw a real mother of a set sweeping round the headland.
I paddled right out and round the break point, into the deep, over the waves and just in time, span around, and went for the last wave of the set.
I got up, turned …
…too fast. It caught me. My fins snagged. The wave turned me sideways.
I got thumped.
I was churned bad and I went deep. I thought, Just hold on. Count. You know what to do.
One.
Two.
Three.
Panic got a grip. It rose up from nowhere. Overwhelmed me. Because right there, right then, I was back in that place. Smack bang down deep, in the silence, like I’d never been away. Like everything between then and now had just been a dream. I was there.
I did everything wrong. Everything I knew not to do. I spun my arms round, trying to find space, trying to swim up. I tried to tell myself to ride it out, but my body didn’t listen. I tried to breathe. I got a lung full of water. When I hit the surface, I was breathing hard, gasping and spluttering. I thought I was going to die. I got on the board and paddled like crazy for the shore.
I sat on the beach, shaking. The others came in, looked after me. I couldn’t speak for ages. I sat there a long, long time, clinging to Tess.
So that’s that.
No more big wave surfing. Not till I’m ready, anyhow. That might be a few months off. It might be years. Or never. I don’t give a shit. I don’t have anything to prove. Not any more.