‘Ha! See what you can do to me now!’ He looked at Fly. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and put the doona into place.
‘I got what you wanted,’ she said.
Heath looked totally bamboozled. ‘Sorry?’
Fly held up the novel.
‘I wanted that?’ Heath said.
Fly could feel her insides starting to knot. ‘Isn’t that what you went back to school for?’
Heath went very still for a moment. Fly imagined his brain going onto lie alert. It would be sending scrambled messages left, right and centre, sending him signals about which way to go without landing himself completely in the poop.
‘Oh that! Yeah. Right. Pride and Prejudice. Cool.’
That was the best he could come up with?
He reached for the book but Fly held it just out of his reach. ‘I put it in the laundry to dry out. Did you forget?’
‘Um, yeah. Must have blanked it out.’
Blanked it out. Keep right on digging, Heath, you’re sure to strike oil sooner or later.
The two of them stared at each other a long moment, and Fly suddenly had access to a part of her brain she didn’t know existed – the part that played the angles.
‘I love this book,’ she said. ‘All the stuff about pride. About how it means you’re so stubborn you stop listening to others. You stop seeing things clearly.’
Heath’s eyebrows furrowed. He had no idea what she was going on about.
‘Yep, she was a ripper old …’ He peered at the cover to check the author’s name. ‘Old Jane.’
Fly saw him suddenly turn into a marshmallow, just saying the name, the same name as the brown-haired girl. She dumped the book on the cupboard, flashed him a spectacularly fake smile, and left the room.
They were halfway through the Scrabble game when Simmo sidled into the room and perched on the arm of one of the lounges. Heath had just laid down a word and there was a storm of protest. Matt, natural-born taker of the prize, was protesting loudest.
‘Shaboogle is not a word!’
‘Get off the grass, Matt. Of course it is. The whole kit and shaboogle.’
‘Caboodle is the word I think you’re looking for,’ offered Simmo.
Heath stared at Simmo and slowly picked up each of his pieces and put them back into the centre.
‘What are you doing?’ Perri asked.
‘I just can’t play with people who have no creative spirit.’
Fly knew this was another lie. Heath couldn’t play because he couldn’t keep his brain off Jane. When she’d gone to the fridge to get more drinks she’d passed by his shoulder and seen him playing with the little beige tiles. He’d made her name. J.A.N.E. And then, because he also had another A, a T, an R, and a Z, he had rearranged the letters to spell T.A.R.Z.A.N. She wished she had a nice strong piece of jungle vine right now. She knew exactly what she’d do with it.
Fly’s letters led her down an altogether different path. At any one point in the game she could spell the word G.R.E.E.N. Usually she liked the word. Heaps of her favourite things were green. Trees, frogs, grass, pythons, tubes … But tonight she couldn’t stand the sight of it, and no matter what she did, she just kept picking up letter after letter which allowed her to make the word no matter how quickly she tried to get rid of them. At one point she thought she should just put the green word out there, but she was getting paranoid. She thought Heath might see right through it and look up, pointing the finger at her – the green-eyed monster! Fly just couldn’t work out whether the whole of her was meant to turn green or just her eyes.
She was grateful you didn’t get more letters in Scrabble, then Heath might’ve spelt Hinemoa or Tutanekai. And that would’ve hurt too much, that realisation that she wasn’t Hinemoa after all. She hadn’t set eyes on Heath and fallen madly in love with him. She wasn’t sitting there on the rock, night after night listening to sad flute music floating across the water. She wasn’t stealing calabashes from the kitchen to make primitive water wings so she could follow the song across to her true love. What were calabashes anyway? It didn’t really matter, since she didn’t have them.
Simmo took advantage of the break in proceedings to deliver his message. He handed out copies of a judging manual as he spoke. ‘I know it’s the weekend, but we’ve got a full program on Monday, and it goes something like this. On Sunday we’ll be having a standard best-of-four event with the usual time limits. Girls’ and boys’ heats.’
‘What about us men?’
Simmo ignored Edge. ‘But this time we’ll have a special set of judges.’
‘Who?’ asked Anna.
‘You.’
They stared at each other.
‘You’re kidding, right?’ said Bec.
‘The girls will be judging the boys and vice versa.’
‘Is there a reason for this?’ asked Matt.
‘There’s a very good reason. When you’re competing you need to know what the judges are looking for. The best way to learn that is to do some judging yourselves.’
‘Cool,’ said Edge. ‘Just as long as we don’t have to take it seriously.’
Simmo got up off the lounge. ‘You have to take it very seriously. This comp will be the real thing. It counts towards your wildcard tallies. Read the judging manuals. They’ll tell you which moves score what points, degrees of difficulty, the works. Learn them inside out.’
Bec summed up the feelings of all of them. ‘There goes the weekend.’
Simmo hesitated when he got to the door. ‘And just so you can plan your time, Deb has organised for us to all go bowling tomorrow night. A bonding exercise.’
Fly stared down at the papers in her hand. Brilliant. Judging manuals and bowling. Did it get any better than this?
Chapter 20
In her dreams that night, Fly saw the dreaded brown-haired Jane floating down the face of a perfectly formed wave. The Solar Blue crew sat on the sand watching her, their judging manuals open in front of them. As Jane glided back and forth across the emerald-coloured wave they gave her scores. For form, they all gave her nine out of ten. Fly wasn’t sure if they were talking about wave form or Jane’s body – she scribbled down a seven just to be safe. For deportment and grooming, she scored an 8.5 from the team. Fly looked down at the manual. Deportment and grooming? What was that all about? She flicked through the pages looking for … and yep, there it was, instructions for how to score the contestant on the basis of appearance, tidiness and style. For scintillating conversation skills they gave her another nine. As Jane flicked off the wave and started paddling for shore Fly could see that something about her was changing. Her school uniform – why she was surfing in her uniform in the first place Fly had no idea – slowly changed into a primitive bikini top and woven skirt. A ring of frangipanis appeared around Jane’s neck and when she lifted her arms to wipe a strand of hair from her eyes Fly saw a pair of water wings unfurl and stretch out, glistening in the sun. Jane was Heath’s Hinemoa. She was his love at first sight. Fly sat there in her dream taking this new piece of information in, letting it sink through the pores of her skin. And then she sneezed hard and a torrent of goop blasted down all over the pages of her judging manual.
Fly fought with that dream so much during the night that by morning her blankets lay in a crumpled knot on the floor. Fly sneezed herself awake to find that winter had crept under the doors and whistled in through the edges of the windows and camped inside the house like a frosty squatter. The room was freezing! She dragged the blankets up onto the bed, but they were almost solid with the chill and did nothing to stop the sneezing.
Fly sneezed her way through her shower, the hot stream of water slowly defrosting her limbs, and she sneezed her way into the lounge room, a bowl of cereal in one hand; she didn’t want to share the germs. If she was being honest, she also needed a bit of time alone to make sense of the Heath and Hinemoa thing. She searched her hard drive for some kind of ‘let’s be reasonable’ program and tried to download some saner thoughts t
han she’d been having. Okay, so it appeared that Heath had lied to her, but who knew with Heath? And even if he had, maybe it was because he sensed that she might feel weird about him going completely gaga over someone else. Maybe it was him being sensitive, in a funny kind of way?
She could hear Matt moving through the house calling a house meeting. There was urgency in his tone. Deb and Simmo had gone out for half an hour and Jilly was at the supermarket. This house meeting was clearly one he was hoping to keep between themselves. Everyone slowly made their way to the lounge room. So much for a bit of time alone. Matt wanted to talk about Simmo’s latest judging assignment. While Fly had been dreaming herself into a frenzy, Matt had been cooking up a plan. He waited for them all to settle.
‘We’re all competing against each other, right?’ he said. ‘And at the end of the year, the competition could be very close. Well I don’t want to be responsible for being the difference between someone winning or losing at the end of the year.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ asked Perri.
‘I think we should all agree to give each other the same marks.’
‘Won’t Deb and Simmo spot it straight off?’
‘Not if we organise it so our individual marks are different but the total points for each competitor is the same.’
There was a lot of awkward shuffling, eyes turning away, a clear sense of discomfort. No-one was quite sure what to do here.
‘The thing is,’ said Matt, ‘if we do it, we all have to do it. If one person opts out, it won’t work.’
There was more silence as they considered his proposal.
‘I can’t understand the stupid manual anyway.’ Heath stood up. ‘At least this way I can go for a wave instead of spending my whole weekend with my head in a book.’
But Heath was about to become more bookish than he had been in all his life.
A pale and sickly sun managed to sling a few rays through the growing blanket of cloud. The temperature might’ve touched twenty degrees, if it was lucky. It was wetsuit weather; if not the whole steamer, then definitely a spring suit. Fly wriggled into her short-sleeved wettie. Wetsuits were always a struggle, that was kind of their job, but this time it seemed impossible. Fly tugged and pulled and pleaded with the legs, she stretched and kneaded and pleaded with the arms. The edges of the bottom pinched at her thighs and the armholes chewed into her underarms. By the time she reached backwards and found the long string to tug the zipper all the way up her spine she was sweating like a sumo wrestler and she felt like her head was about to pop off. Was it possible she’d grown this much since last winter? Or put on weight? Fly never worried about her body, and she definitely wasn’t up for having some kind of fat attack today. She had enough on her mind already.
She picked up her board and waddled off down towards the beach. And that’s when she saw them – Tutanekai and Hinemoa sitting together on the sand. Heath’s board sat unused beside them and, get this, Heath was reading aloud from Jane’s copy of Pride and Prejudice, while she slathered sunscreen over her arms and legs. Heath reading aloud? Jane in a bikini? In this weather? Where was she from – Antarctica? – to think of this as a balmy, bikini-wearing kind of day?
And it only got worse. Jane twisted around trying to cover her back with cream. Heath held out a corner of towel for her to wipe her hands on then he passed her the book so she could take over reading while he did the sunscreen honours on her back. Fly could feel her temperature on the rise, but with that wetsuit superglued to her body there was nowhere for the steam to escape. She suddenly felt like she might explode.
Then she sneezed and a bucket of slime landed on the sand between her feet. Maybe she was getting sick, maybe she had a temperature and that’s why she was feeling like she’d been invaded by someone who thought about smashing things all the time. She took one last look at Heath and Jane, like sticking a hand back in the fire to be sure it’s hot, and headed back up to the house.
She crawled into bed with her judging manual for company. She was smart enough to know that lying there without some distraction was complete madness. As she nestled in she thought she was right about getting sick. That was it; she’d let herself get too cold last night and what she needed to do now was take it easy. Think about something else. She went to open the book, half expecting the bucket of snot she’d unloaded onto it last night in her dream to have glued the pages together. But it was fresh and clean, and crammed with the technical details of surf comps. Lots to take her mind off ‘things’.
Two hours later Matt walked past her doorway. ‘You coming, Fly?’
Who would’ve thought that the judging manual would be so fascinating that Fly had almost forgotten their meeting? For all that Heath had jumped to the decision that cheating was the way to go, the others hadn’t got there so quickly. They’d talked through the pros and cons until Deb and Simmo had pulled back into the driveway and they were still no closer to an answer. It clearly needed more discussion and so they’d agreed to meet at a cafe called the Purple Iguana on the promenade that afternoon.
Saturdays at Blue Water Beach were always jam-packed. Even in winter. People came to walk their dogs along the promenade. They roller-bladed and pushed prams and licked four-flavoured ice-creams from the gelato bar across the road. When the police didn’t move them along, people busked and juggled and twirled the odd firestick. It was impossible not to feel good down there and that was why Fly ended up getting out of bed and leaving the house; it wasn’t because she wanted to meet the others, and it definitely wasn’t because she was convinced that cheating was the way to go. Besides, the Purple Iguana made the best hot chocolate on the planet. It was as thick and smooth as treacle and just sweet enough that it didn’t push it over the edge when they plonked three fat white marshmallows on top.
While the others talked over the cheating proposal, Fly soaked up the friendliness of the hot chocolate. She must’ve needed it because she was onto her third before Matt was even halfway through the details of the plan.
‘It’d go like this,’ Matt explained. ‘The four girls are judging Edge, for example, right? So Fly and Anna give him a seven, Bec gives him six and Perri an eight. An average of seven.’
‘And how will you guys judge us?’ Perri wanted to know.
‘Simple. I give you seven, Heath six and Edge eight. We just rotate the numbers around between us.’
‘And we all end up with a score of seven,’ said Bec. ‘But what if someone does something spectacular? We’d have to give it a higher mark.’
At this stage Edge piped up; he was becoming Matt’s second-in-command on the plan.
‘That’s the other part of the equation,’ he said. ‘Just good, solid riding. Nothing cute.’
‘And if it starts getting too good, we just wipe out,’ added Matt. ‘That’s the deal.’
Bec looked across to Perri. ‘What do you think?’
Perri shrugged. ‘I haven’t got any better ideas.’
Matt and Edge stared at Anna.
‘Guess so.’
And then it was all eyes on Fly. She was too busy making a whirlpool in her hot chocolate to notice.
‘Fly?’
She looked up suddenly. If they’d asked her to give a summary of the plan she’d have been totally stumped, but the bits of it she did hear, she didn’t like.
‘I think the whole thing sucks.’
Everyone stared.
‘I’m just – it’s shifty and it makes us all into liars, and I’m just sick of it.’
What she was sick of was feeling like Heath was a liar and that people couldn’t be trusted. She looked around the group. No-one quite knew how to counter the argument.
At this point a waiter glided up to the table. ‘Anybody want anything else?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Fly. ‘I’ll have a double helping of honesty with some telling the truth on the side.’
The waiter’s eyebrows twitched.
Perri gave him a smile, pushing her hand onto Fl
y’s forehead. ‘Don’t mind her, she’s a bit off colour today.’
Fly let her head rest on the table. At least that was the truth – she was off colour today; green wasn’t her natural hue. They needed Fly in or it wasn’t going to work, but they could see she needed a bit of time. They decided she had until ten o’clock that night to make a call.
Fly went back to bed as soon as she got home. Jilly came and sat with her and asked her to describe her symptoms, but Fly couldn’t put her finger on the weird twitchiness which seemed to have invaded her body. She felt kind of sick, kind of numb, kind of heavy in the heart. Jilly took her temperature, had a long, hard look at her and declared her fit as a fiddle. Physically. Jilly was smart enough to know the pain was on the inside. Fly’s heart had been, if not broken, sprained. As the others tumbled down the stairs for dinner, Jilly lingered. She was cool enough not to make a big speech about it, but kind enough to let Fly know it would pass.
Deb’s grand bonding session began with takeaway pizza at home before bowling. The minute the doorbell rang they all floated out of their rooms, lured down the stairs by wafting ham and pineapple, by pepperoni and mozzarella. This wasn’t the kind of food they were usually allowed. Even though they were in charge of the cooking, Jilly was in charge of the shopping, and it was hard to make a pizza out of brown rice and broccoli no matter how Jamie Oliver you were feeling.
Fly couldn’t eat. Now she thought about it, beside those three Purple Iguana hot chocolates she’d hardly eaten at all since yesterday morning – since she’d been so full of other feelings. Ones that had lifted her high in the air and tickled the inside of her ribcage and made her twitch all over. And now, thirty-six hours later, she was suffering from the ones which tugged down the edges of her mouth, the ones which pulled the plug on her sense of humour and snarled as it went down the drain. She could feel herself on the verge of being dramatic and she knew what her mum would say about that, but she couldn’t help it, she felt dramatic.
Blue Water High Page 16