Deb was still angry in the office, but she was trying to be soft about it. She wanted to know why Fly was being so stubborn. What could be so bad about doing the assignment that Fly would voluntarily throw points away? Fly could feel the answers bouncing about in her head, but they all seemed to lead to the truth, and the truth was the very thing she was trying to avoid. She mumbled that she didn’t know, but she just didn’t want to do it.
‘If there’s something there, Fly, something you’re so scared of that you won’t even talk about it, then I guarantee you’re doing yourself out of any chance of winning this thing.’
Fly shrugged. She knew that.
In the end Deb gave up. She told Fly she was giving her another chance.
‘I want something Monday, Fly. Then the messing about stops. I’m taking fifteen points off.’
Fly gulped. Fifteen points was massive – it was half of the work she’d already done. And there was no coming back from it.
Deb got up and opened the door, nodding for Fly to go. As she headed out, Deb stared hard at her. ‘I’m serious, Fly. This program is the way it is for a reason. You don’t get to decide which events on the pro circuit you’re going to enter based on whether you feel like doing them or not.’
Fly could feel Perri, Anna, Matt and Edge staring at her as she emerged from Deb’s office. She knew they were curious about what had happened in there, but she wasn’t up for talking about just how weirdly she was acting right now. She gave them a quick smile and trudged past.
Fly found her way to the far end of the front lawn and sat down on the grass. It was far enough away from the house that the others couldn’t see her, but it was in view of the beach, where Heath was fooling about, watching the choppers doing long sweeps of the coast looking for the shark. Even if she didn’t quite admit it to herself, she was waiting for Heath to look up and see her. She was waiting for him to wander up and plonk down beside her, to whack her over the head with a pillow and tell her to stop being such a noodle. That’s what she needed right now.
She was pretty sure that Heath looked up and saw her … but he didn’t come over. Who could blame him? She’d as good as told him not to come, hadn’t she? She sat there watching the chopper making its low sweeps and then she took a deep breath. She was way behind with her board design and, if she wasn’t careful, maybe she’d lose points on that one too.
As Fly pushed into the shed, Bec was carefully manoeuvring her finished board into place. She carefully adjusted the sheet so her masterpiece would stay a surprise. She gave Fly a stern look.
‘What have you done with my friend?’
‘What are talking about?’ said Fly.
‘Well I’m guessing this is one of those kidnapped-by-aliens kind of stories, and you’re looking for some incredible ransom before you’ll give us the real Fly back.’
Fly smiled. Bec didn’t – she was being serious.
‘You’ve never dug your heels in about something?’ Fly asked.
‘My heels are always dug in, Fly. They’re hardly ever out of the dug position. But I’m not you. And something extraordinarily bizarre must be going on for you to come over all heel-digging.’
‘I don’t really want to talk about it,’ Fly said.
‘Yep. Got that bit – which is cool. Just letting you know you can if you want to.’
Fly nodded her appreciation of the offer, then moved off to get her own board. As she did, her foot got tangled in the edge of the sheet covering Bec’s board. The sheet came down like they were at the Grand Unveiling.
Fly stared at the board. ‘It’s brilliant, Bec.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘The likeness is amazing.’
Bec froze. ‘What likeness?’
‘Of Edge.’
Fly could see Bec starting to panic.
‘It’s not Edge.’
Fly raised her eyebrows. If the guy crouched along the tube on Bec’s board wasn’t Edge, she was Porky Pig.
‘It’s not a problem. It’s really flattering. You even gave him slightly bigger muscles.’
Bec’s hand went up to her face – this was clearly a disaster.
Simmo appeared in the doorway. It was time for Bec’s private session. Every second week they had a one-on-one debrief with Simmo. He would use the video camera to film their surfing and then they’d sit down and pick it to pieces. Lots of fun.
‘Can we skip it today, Simmo?’ she begged. ‘I’ve got to make some changes to my board design.’
What was she going to do? Glasses and a moustache?
Simmo pretended to think about it for all of two seconds. ‘Um … nope.’
Bec turned and stared at Fly. ‘This is a nightmare.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in the morning before it goes to be glassed.’
Bec went off with Simmo, leaving Fly staring at the big empty space on the board in front of her. She had always been good at drawing, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal. This was something she could do. So why was she still standing there two hours later with nothing to show for herself?
She grabbed for a pen and, without even thinking about what she was going to do, let her hand go. It swept out wide and high in a huge arc. It danced at the top making a violent frill of water. As she came back down she drew jagged edges, almost like the rows of Great White teeth they were all so scared of, but these teeth weren’t made of bone, they were made of water. Fly was drawing the wave at Cowaramup, the wave that had lived in the milk can for so long.
Matt came to the door. ‘You eating tonight?’
Fly shrugged. ‘It’s eat or draw and I don’t think I get any points for eating.’
‘But I don’t think you lose any points for not drawing either.’
‘I want to finish. I think I’ve pushed the disobedience meter high enough for one day,’ she said.
Instead of heading back inside to eat with the others, Matt came into the shed and pulled a stool up to the bench next to Fly. He took in what she’d drawn so far.
‘Evil wave,’ he said.
Fly just nodded.
They sat in silence for a long time. Matt was good with silence. It didn’t freak him out – which tended to freak a lot of other people out. But it was one of the things Fly liked most about him; he was great not to talk to. It probably didn’t sound like a compliment, but it was. Matt just sat there fiddling with the wax scrapers and old tools sitting on the bench, turning them over, working out what they might’ve been used for.
At some point Fly realised the shed had become very dark. Dinner had probably been scoffed, and still Matt sat with her.
‘Should we turn on a light?’ she asked.
‘Probably easier to draw with one on,’ he said. ‘But it’s up to you.’
Fly pulled the long string which turned on the overhead fluoro then plonked back down beside Matt.
‘Why aren’t you scared of sharks?’ she asked.
‘I could be. But I decided not to be. I was when I was a kid, definitely after I saw Jaws, but fear is the strongest perfume on the planet. There’s a whole heap of stuff your body does when you let yourself get scared. And sharks respond to changes in electrical impulses. You get scared, you’re just making yourself a bigger target.’
Fly just stared at him.
‘I still get scared. But I try to work it out and talk myself out of it. I tell my heart to calm down, ’cause I know the harder it beats the more fear hormones I’m going to make – they turn nutrients in my body into energy for fight or flight. I tell my skin not to go clammy ’cause I don’t need all the blood to be sent to my muscles. I tell my mouth not to go dry. My limbs not to tremble.’
‘Do you know heaps of stuff about everything, or just about watery stuff?’
Matt was desperate to be a marine biologist. Almost as desperate as he was to get onto the World Circuit. Fly knew he’d already applied to a uni in Melbourne which accepted young and brainy students as a plan B in case he didn’t get one of the
spots.
‘But most of all, I don’t think about the shark. I think about making it to shore in one piece.’
Fly had heard all this positive visualisation stuff before. And sometimes it just sounded like poofle to her.
‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you see in your mind when I say, “Don’t leave your board outside because someone might steal it.”’
Fly thought about it. She saw her board out there on the grass, she saw the sunset making way for darkness, she saw someone creeping up and stealing her board.
‘Now,’ said Matt, ‘tell me what you see when I say, “Make sure you remember to bring your board into the shed to keep it safe.”’
Fly thought again. This time she saw herself bringing her board into the shed and putting it up into one of the board racks.
‘If you focus on trying to stop something happening, you end up filling your mind with images of that thing happening. So you have to make a different picture.’ Matt shrugged off the heaviness of the conversation. ‘I don’t know whether it makes any difference to what really happens. But it means you don’t spend all your time hanging out with ugly thoughts.’
They sat in silence for a while. And then Matt’s stomach started seriously growling. ‘You sure you’re not gonna come in and eat?’
Fly shook her head. ‘I just worked out how to finish the drawing.’
Matt went back inside. Fly stayed. She scratched away at that wave for the next three hours, making sure it was evil and angry enough to scare the daylights out of anyone who’d even thought about sticking a board under their arm. By the time she finished she reckoned even Laird Hamilton would be tying his board back onto the roof-racks and burning rubber out of the car park.
At 11.30 she yawned so hard she almost dislocated her jaw. But she didn’t care. She didn’t think she’d had such a good reason to be tired since … since that day at Cowaramup. By one am, she felt like she’d let her pencil say what needed to be said.
Chapter 18
Someone else was still up in the house. If Matt had a marine biology plan B then Heath had his own plan B too. Heath lay awake some nights imagining that one big moment when Solar Blue announced the winners of the competition, and somehow it was just never him, it was always Matt or Edge. Fly remembered him telling her this one afternoon as they sat on the headland, an afternoon before the caravan. She told him she had the same kind of thoughts but he had reckoned her thoughts weren’t as serious as his. Typical Heath. He was an excellent dramatist. Fly’s mother would’ve disliked him immensely. When Heath had those awful sessions with careers counsellors and they looked at his results, there was usually a lot of silence and clearing of throats and talk about whether working in a nursery or doing roadwork appealed to him. Heath was as smart as they came, but he just didn’t get the words and numbers thing. When Heath wanted to work something out, he took it apart and looked at the mechanism then put it back together and got on with it. He jokingly blamed the alternative schools his mum had sent him to. He reckoned at his schools, you tied together two sticks and called it an assignment. Here he struggled hard, and it made him realise if he didn’t get a genuine crack at surfing his options weren’t that varied.
Fly didn’t think they looked so limited from where she stood. Heath was a genius with anything which had buttons. He was a techno wizard. The problem with getting a job in techno-wizardry was that they usually liked a piece of paper to say you could do it – or that at least you’d turned up enough days to mean you probably should be able to do it. Maybe that’s why Heath focused so much on photography. It involved lots of buttons, you didn’t need a piece of paper, and there was a spectacularly cool surfing angle to be had. Heath had flipped enough surfing magazines to realise if he didn’t make it as a competitor, there was a very nice life to be had out of photographing those who had made it. He had warned them at the beginning of the year he was making a video doco of what went down, but no-one was quite prepared for how thorough Heath was going to be. If the time they spent in the bathroom was a factor in who was going to win, Heath would’ve been camped outside the bathroom, making sure he got the goods.
As Fly headed into the house, he was camped inside the bathroom. The girls’ bathroom. She banged on the door, thinking it was Perri or Bec and they might’ve fallen asleep on the toot.
‘Yeah, gimme a minute, will you?’ Heath called from inside.
Fly could hear rustling about inside, and bottles banging together.
‘It’s me, Heath. I need to use the bathroom.’
‘Yeah, it’s just that I’m using it right now.’
‘Why can’t you use the boys’ bathroom?’
‘Have you smelled the boys’ bathroom?’
It was a good point. Jilly had taken a stand and declared that bathroom cleaning was not on her ‘to do’ list. The boys had failed to pick up the slack and even walking past the door reminded Fly of the dreaded portaloo experience.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
There was more rustling from inside and Fly noticed a dim red glow creeping under the door. He could’ve been cooking up a Frankenstein in there for all she knew. And then it hit her – red light, photography … Heath had gone all sentimental in the last couple of weeks. He’d waxed lyrical about the joys of the photographic process before digital came along and made it possible for every mum and dad on the planet to take a decent photo. He’d traded one of his old boards for a second-hand 35-millimetre camera and had been burning himself on processing chemicals ever since. Tonight he’d decided that, while the girls slept, their bathroom would become his makeshift darkroom. Unfortunately, not all of the girls were asleep, and this girl needed to pee fairly urgently.
‘Heath,’ she called, ‘I really, really need to go.’
Heath ripped the door open, a dripping photograph caught between a pair of small tongs in his hand.
‘I have taken the most incredible picture of my life.’
He scanned the hallways.
‘I can’t believe no-one is up to see this.’
‘I’m up,’ said Fly.
And even as she said it she realised he was looking for someone else, someone who wasn’t her. Standing in that dim red light, she knew that she wasn’t being paranoid; Heath was still upset with her.
He gave her a fake smile and held out the photograph. There, in black and white, through a thin veil of wave, just behind the tiny form of an unknown surfer, was the undeniable shape of a very, very large shark.
Fly swallowed hard. She thought about them all being out there that same day, but more than that, she thought about Matt and about what he’d said. While he was performing his tactical response on his fear system, there really was a shark out there. Did that make him wise or mental? She ran through what he’d said, all the stuff about not drawing what you fear to you … and she felt, somewhere in the pit of her stomach, that what he’d said was right. Even though there was a shark, even though intense stuff might come at him, he was making sure he didn’t stick up the sign saying PICK ME.
She was so busy with her own thoughts that she failed to give Heath the kind of reaction he was looking for.
‘That’s amazing,’ she said.
Heath was clearly after a bit more. ‘Yep. And I know who is going to think it’s more than amazing. Dean Edgley.’
Fly walked a couple of steps after Heath towards the boys’ bedroom door. She watched him sneak in and place the still-moist photograph just near Edge’s pillow. He stood back, happy with his work, and then he realised Fly was still in the doorway.
‘Just leave that stuff where it is. I’ll clean it up in the morning.’
Fly nodded. She’d been dismissed.
At breakfast, Edge delivered exactly the kind of reaction Heath had been hoping for. He was over the moon! He grinned and strutted around the kitchen like a prize rooster, waving the photo around for all to see.
‘I’ll be taking apologies this morning. So if you want to form a qu
eue …’
Matt studied the photograph the longest. He knew he was the instigator of the doubt, and he didn’t have the kind of rampaging ego that needed to be right all the time.
‘I’m very sorry for doubting you, Edge. I still don’t understand why the fish were so chilled.’
‘Forget the fish, just stick with the sorry bit,’ said Edge.
Low rampaging ego aside, Matt also had a limited tolerance for Edge’s carry on. He looked to Heath. ‘Why did you have to develop that film?’ Then he said to Fly, ‘Lucky I was practising what I preach, hey?’
No-one else knew what he was talking about, but Fly did.
‘Fly!’
Fly looked up and saw Bec standing in the doorway.
‘Can you …? I need you for a second.’
Fly followed Bec out to the board shed.
‘Look!’ Bec demanded.
What Fly saw was an empty space. An empty space where the seven board blanks used to be. Someone had already taken them to the glasser.
‘Oh dear.’
‘Oh dear? Is that all you can come up with?’ Bec said.
Fly hunted for something that sounded more concerned, but she couldn’t come up with anything. ‘Maybe no-one else will pick the likeness.’
‘I feel sick,’ said Bec.
Fly reached out and touched Bec’s forehead. ‘You don’t have a temperature.’
Bec glared at her. ‘I’m telling you, I’m too sick to go to the auction.’
Fly pulled out a stool and sat down. She looked at Bec seriously. ‘Why don’t we swap?’
Bec’s head shot up. ‘What did you draw?’
‘Just a …’ Fly had no idea how to describe what she’d really drawn. ‘Me on a big wave. But you could say you’d drawn me.’
‘What? And you’re going to say you’ve drawn Edge?’
Blue Water High Page 13