I didn’t answer her.
“I could get you a drink?” I said when we got there. “I’ve got some cups somewhere.”
They looked at each other then the man spoke. “Would you mind just telling us about the man in the photograph. Do you recognise him?” He had a much deeper voice than I’d expected. I was trying to work out who he was, where he fitted into all this.
“Do you recognise the man in the photograph?” he was saying again.
“Alright alright.”
“Alright you do recognise him?” she said. She was staring right at me, so close I could have reached out and touched her.
I stalled. “Let me see it again.”
She handed me the photograph but they were both still standing up and the kitchen isn’t very big so I told them to sit down and made a point of not looking at the photograph until they did so. Eventually they gave in and sat.
“Jim Harrison you said?”
“That’s right. Do you know anything about him?”
This was it, my last opportunity to say no. But I knew now I wasn’t going to.
“Jim,” I said, watching her reaction to the name. “Well I know something about him.”
She jumped as I said it. Actually bounced on the chair it was such a shock to her. Then she stared at me for ages, right into my eyes, and in the end I had to look away.
“What do you know?” She was calm but her voice was icy.
The man stood up again. He was a bit shorter than me, and he stood up real straight like he didn’t want me to notice. “I think you’d better start talking right now,” he said. And that pissed me off, you know, taking that tone in my kitchen.
“Look do you want that tea?” I replied, I was speaking to her. I wondered if he might hit me, but I figured she’d stop him if he did, since she wanted to know so much. “It’s a long story. You might want some tea.”
After a while she nodded and then he sat down again while I got the mugs out of the cupboard and set the kettle to boil. I could tell they were both staring at me but I didn’t care. It gave me a bit of time to think.
I kept stalling because I needed time to get it all straight in my mind, how I was going to tell them, so I made sure they were the best cups of tea they’d had in a long time. I washed up the mugs and then warmed them with some hot water and while that was happening I asked them about how strong they liked it, whether they wanted milk and sugar, even if they preferred white or brown sugar. I didn’t really hear what they said though because I was thinking so hard, so it took a long time, but eventually I put a steaming mug in front of them both and waited until they’d both taken a sip and told me it was ok. And then I began.
I told them everything, and I mean everything. It felt like I was unburdening myself. It all just flowed out.
By the time I actually got to the part about the man, those teas were long cold, but by then they’d stopped interrupting me and just sat there listening. It was almost like I was someone important making a speech or something, like what I was saying really mattered. So even though John had made me promise never to tell about what happened, never tell anybody about that day, I found the words were flowing out of my mouth and I just couldn’t stop them.
“It was a Saturday, I told them. A Saturday in November. We were sixteen years old…”
thirty-one
I NOTICED HIM right away. I mean I noticed he was a surfer. I was serving in the little campsite shop. I still had to on Saturdays, but I’d negotiated with Mum that I’d open from seven in the morning till ten only. If people wanted something after that they could go over to the village.
Me serving in the shop meant I’d sit behind the till with my head buried in a magazine. I’d only put it down if the customer was a pretty girl, or if it was someone who looked like they might be into shoplifting. This guy maybe looked a little like that. He was much older than me, but still a young guy. He had sharp eyes, they didn’t look like they missed much.
“You’re a surfer right?” He’d picked up a tin of beans and some bread and presented them to me. We didn’t have a scanner or anything fancy, I had to add things up on my pad.
“Yeah,” I saw he was looking at the magazine article I’d been reading, all turquoise waves and palm trees. “Maybe.”
“I saw you in the water yesterday. You’re good.”
“Thanks.” I replied as sarcastically as I could. I knew I was good, didn’t need this guy telling me.
He shrugged as if it hadn’t been a compliment, just an observation of fact.
“You got a forecast?”
I always had a forecast. All of us made sure we caught the end of the news on TV, hoping to glimpse tightly-packed rings of isobars mid-Atlantic, which was usually behind the presenter’s arses while they went on about weather for ducks or some other irrelevant shite. The rings were how the charts showed Atlantic depressions, the weather systems that sent us waves.
“I don’t have a TV see, I’m camping,” he explained. He gave me a smile that matched my sarcasm.
“It’s doesn’t look good,” I told him. There was something about the way the guy was staring at me that I didn’t like. It was like he knew my secret and was testing me. “There might be a little wave later. Maybe waist high.”
His eyebrows went up in surprise. “That all?” he asked. “I thought it’d be bigger.”
This time I shrugged. “The headland blocks the swell.” I meant it as a way to end the conversation. It wasn’t that I was always a miserable sod with the campers, but we had a rule to be as rude as we could to visiting surfers. John called it the ‘Badlands Rule’. But it wasn’t the brightest thing to say in this case.
“Yeah I noticed that. Say, you’re not from round here are you?”
“That’s one pound forty nine.”
He ignored my outstretched hand at first, but then stuck his hand into his jeans to get his wallet.
“Here you go,” he handed me a ten pound note. He was one of the day’s first customers and I didn’t have much change.
“Got anything smaller?”
He shook his head. “Australia right?” He smiled thoughtfully. “The accent. I was trying to place it. Guess you’re used to better waves than here eh?” He dipped his head in the direction of Town Beach. “Sorry kid, that’s all I got.”
I let out a long sigh even though I didn’t have to go far to get change, since Mum was counting cash for the bank in the kitchen.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said getting up.
“Hey don’t worry, I’ll get something else.” He turned around and grabbed a couple of packet rice meals and a bottle of Coke, then plucked a postcard at random from the rack.
“Say, you don’t have maps do you?”
I’d been adding up the new items but stopped as I heard the words.
“Maybe,” I replied slowly. “Where do you want to go?”
“It sounds a bit small for a surf. I thought maybe I’d take a walk, see what’s around the headland,” he indicated the one to the south of the bay with a twist of his head. I don’t know how he knew, but I really got the sense he was testing me now.
“You can’t go that way,” I said. “It’s all private property. The best walks are over the river, north of the bay.”
“Yeah I heard that.” I didn’t know if he meant he’d heard where the better walks were, or if he knew the headland to the south was all private.
“There’s big signs and everything,” I said, and immediately regretted it.
“Big signs huh?” he said. “I wouldn’t want to mess with big signs.” The sarcasm bubbled a bit closer to the surface. “You got that map then?”
We sold maps every day, but something made me not want to give this guy a map. I considered telling him we’d sold out, but realised he’d only have to stroll over to the village shop to get one, and we sold them for a quid more, so it would be a victory of sorts. I pulled open the drawer and handed one over.
“Thanks kid.”
With the other items I had enough change, and I handed it over. He gave me a sarcastic smile while balancing his food on the map and clutching it to his chest. I hadn’t offered him a bag.
“I’ll see you in the water, kid,” he said, pushing open the door with his free hand.
I watched from the window what tent the guy went back to, he was pitched up by the shower block, a red Nissan parked along side it with the white curve of a surfboard just visible inside. I knew cars by then, I’d been driving Mum’s around the campsite for years and was counting the days till I was old enough to take my test. To put a surfboard in a car that small you had to wind down the passenger seat and push it in through the boot. There was only room for one driver. It meant the guy was here on his own. I don’t know why I noticed this at the time, maybe just the fewer surfers around the better.
I don’t know what it was, a premonition maybe, but I felt uncomfortable for the rest of the morning. I was planning to head straight down to Hanging Rock once I’d closed for the day. My comment about the headland blocking the swell probably came out because I’d been thinking about that. That day there was the sort of smallish swell that didn’t get into Town Beach, but would be working nicely at the Rock. Darren and John would be there already, but it should be best that afternoon on the pushing tide, so I wasn’t really going to miss anything.
I tried to remember how long the tent had been there, but I hadn’t noticed it before. I guess that meant not long. His car was parked parallel to me so I couldn’t see the number plate and check in the book. But I didn’t want to go out and look, because I still felt as though the guy was somehow watching me. A while later once I’d become distracted by some other customers, I saw the car had gone.
We were going to spend that night at the Rock. I’d told Mum I’d be staying at John’s, while him and Darren told their parents they might stay over in one of the caravans with me. We always did this really vaguely so there was less chance of getting caught out. We thought we’d probably surf Saturday afternoon’s high tide, get in again early on the Sunday and then a late afternoon session before coming back to real life Sunday night. That meant I had to fill a backpack with quite a bit of gear, wetsuit, food and water. So it was near midday by the time I was hiking out on the road past John’s house. It didn’t matter if anyone saw me since I just looked like a normal hiker making the detour around the private estate. You saw people doing it all the time. So I wasn’t paying much attention, even when I heard the noise of a car behind me. But it slowed down instead of overtaking, and I decided to stand back on the verge and wave it past me. I thought it was probably some old dear from the village who was too old to drive properly. But when I turned around I saw the flash of red from the bonnet and was too slow to drop my head or look away. The guy from the shop was in the driver’s seat, a pair of dark glasses over his eyes. It felt like he hesitated for a moment before driving past, and I could feel his eyes on me in the rear view mirror as he continued down the road.
thirty-two
IT FREAKED ME out a bit, but even so I’d almost forgotten by the time I got down to Hanging Rock. I could see right away I was wrong about the morning not being that good. There were long lines of swell stretching far out to sea and inshore it was peeling so well there were sometimes two or three waves breaking down the reef at the same time, each following the same line as the first. They shimmered in the sunlight and it looked almost like Oz, the sea was so blue and the sky so clear. Darren was out there, he’d just paddled back into position as I walked clear of the undergrowth. I couldn’t see John anywhere but I stopped to watch Darren get a wave. I guessed he’d been in a while because his paddling was slow and tired, but he made the take off and I had to smile, even though we knew the place so well by then, sometimes you still just had to stop and smile at how good it was.
I wasn’t sure now if the afternoon would really be better. But I quite liked that Darren and John would be surfed out from the morning, while I’d be fresh. We maybe didn’t talk about it that much, but we were pretty competitive about who was best.
By the time I got to the Hanging Rock itself there was a bit of a lull in the swell so I set down my bag and got my wetsuit out to dry it. I laid it out on a rock and as I did so I saw John picking his way up from the beach by the stream, his board under his arm. He must have ridden a wave in just before I got there. We had these really comfy chairs there by then made from driftwood - old pallets mostly - and I stretched out on one, waiting with my arms behind my head, trying to decide whether I should get in now for a quick surf or wait with the others.
“You should get in there,” John said when he got there too. He’d stripped off the top half of his wetsuit and his blond hair was dripping water down his chest. You could see he was breathing hard from the exercise. “It’s pretty decent.”
“You going in again?”
“Yeah, in a bit. You got any food?”
I pointed at my backpack. “Help yourself.” Then I pointed out at the waves, a new set was coming in now. Together we watched Darren paddle out through them, not turning around to catch any. “What’s up with Darren? Why’s he wasting waves?”
“Cos he’s a pussy.” John grinned at me. “Actually we’ve been in all morning, and he’s surfing pretty good. He got this barrel earlier for maybe four seconds. Bet you he tells you about it first thing he sees you.” As he was speaking John had torn a chunk from a loaf of bread and was busy fitting the key to a tin of ham, the type where you have to wind it around to remove the top. Normally he was pretty good with those, but maybe his arms were still tired because the key snapped off halfway around.
“Fucking hell,” he said and I watched him digging around in his pile of clothes for his hunting knife. He slipped it out of the sheath and prised the tin open with the thick blade. Then he cut a big slice of the pink meat and held it against the side of the knife, eating it carefully right off the blade.
Out on the reef the last wave in the set was lining up to roll down the point, and Darren turned around to take it. You could see his little arms digging deep and his feet thrashing around. He nearly missed it, it looked like it was going to roll right underneath him, but just at the last moment it steepened enough that his board began to accelerate and he sprang up, one hand keeping hold of the board’s rail. It always looked so beautiful from up by the Rock, you could see the whole wave stretched out, you could see exactly where it was going to go hollow enough to ride the tube and where it slowed a little to leave a steep wall for throwing in some turns. It was much easier to imagine yourself riding the wave well from up there, than it was when you were actually on it, all the noise and buffeting from the whitewater chasing you down the reef.
“Come on Darren, pull in, pull the fuck in,” John had turned to look too. It was obvious that Darren was too far from the breaking part of the wave which was setting up to throw a big, easy tube, he needed to stall the board and kill a bit of speed to let the best part of the wave catch him up. Darren did, a little, but we both saw he could have been deeper. Instead of disappearing from view behind the curtain of falling water, we could see him the whole time on the flatter part of the wave, doing some nice Darren turns, as we called them on account of how he held his arms out like he was pretending to be an aeroplane. But just before the wave finished, we both saw something that meant we stopped looking at Darren. No, not something, someone.
“What the fuck’s that?” John said. I don’t think I ever heard his voice like that. It had shock and anger and fear and panic all rolled up together in it, and I knew right away there was going to be trouble.
The man was right by the water’s edge, about fifty metres away from us. He was wearing a wetsuit and holding a white surfboard, a little shortboard thruster just like ours. He was turned towards the sea, watching the wave that Darren was surfing, and once Darren dropped back into the water the man moved again, walking below us, out towards the point. He must have thought he was going to have the surf of hi
s life.
“There’s some fucking guy there,” John said. Not to me, it was like he was telling another part of himself.
I hadn’t said anything so John turned to look at me. “You see that? There’s some fucking guy thinks he’s gonna surf our break. Hey!” He shouted the last word, not so loud at first but then he stood right up and shouted it loud. He wasn’t thinking, he was just acting.
“Hey! Who the fuck are you?” Christ he sounded so angry.
The man stopped and turned, I don’t think he’d seen us before then. He seemed to hesitate for a moment but then he carried on walking the way he’d been going, stepping carefully from one rock to the next.
“Come on Jesse,” John said to me already setting off. “Come with me.”
I was thinking about the way this guy was in the shop. I’d already seen he had this attitude. I was thinking how this was going to be messy. I just didn’t want to even be there.
“What are you gonna do?” I said.
“Fucking come with me and you’ll see,” and he turned and went. When John spoke like that, you didn’t argue. You just didn’t.
I could hardly have kept up with John if I tried, and I wasn’t trying too hard. He practically ran down the rocks, his wetsuit arms still flapping around his waist. The guy had stopped again, he must have seen John coming by now and knew he was going to have to talk to him at least. John shouted at him again when he was maybe five metres away, way too loud.
The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller Page 19