ShelfLife

by Barrie Seppings

  ‘Are you talking wireframes?’ Trent stared at her.

  ‘For now. But if Gavin’s last round of page designs are all correct, which they have been so far, I just need to front-end it. We could probably put it on a staging site and upload the test data.’

  ‘Jesus, Shanti, are you serious?’

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  ‘You get this close and you still want to pack it in? Go back to Opod and wait to get boxed?’ Trent put his hands on his hips.

  ‘Already happened.’ Shanti lowered her chin. ‘Those Swedes fired me. By email.’

  ‘Fuckers,’ said Trent, smiling.

  ‘That’s what I said, too,’ Gavin put his hands on hips.

  ‘Huh,’ said Trent, scratching his chin. ‘Seems like we’ve got more in common than I thought.’

  ‘You mean we’re all broke?’ asked Gavin.

  ‘No. Well, yes we are broke, but I think I can fix that,’ Trent put his hands together in front of him. ‘Look, can I just ask you two, please, to promise me that you’ll be strictly professional from now on?’

  Gavin pursed his lips and nodded. Shanti rolled her eyes.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes. Now, shall we get back to work and launch this company?’

  Gavin watched Shanti, turning her passport over. A contract cleaner pushed an industrial vacuum past them slowly.

  ‘Where?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes!’ Trent clapped his hands together and brought them up under his chin. ‘Thank you, Shanti. I promise it will be somewhere nice. Now what about you, Gav?’

  ‘You still want me around?’ Gavin looked from one to the other. ‘I mean, after what happened?’

  ‘Well I can’t design and I think Shanti already has enough to do. So, yes, we still need you around.’

  A security official paused to look Gavin up and down, frowning before he moved on. The three waited for the moment to pass.

  ‘Jesus, Trent, can we just get out of this airport before Mr Trung’s mojo wears off?’ Gavin hissed. ‘Buy some tickets to somewhere and let’s go.’

  ‘Awesome,’ Trent said quietly. ‘I need to make some calls. Why don’t you two find wi-fi and do some work while we’re waiting? I’ll come find you.’

  Shanti tapped her passport on her chin, but eventually handed it over. Gavin placed his on the stack. Trent smiled. ‘I love it when a plan comes together.’

  Shanti stopped Trent as he headed for the service desk. ‘What did you mean just then, when you said we’ve got more in common that you thought? Apart from being broke?’

  ‘It seems like none of us is needed in our old lives anymore. ShelfLife is all we’ve got.’

  ‘What happened to your cushy sales job, working for your parents?’

  Trent smiled and walked backwards, arms outstretched. ‘That was a lifetime ago.’

  I’m on a boat,

  you’re on a boat

  Andy stared at the carving knife-shaped space one last time before realising there were exactly ten good hiding places for the knife to be at this moment. Five were under the pillows of the five surfers lying in the bunks on the port side of the CrossShore; and the balance of those hiding spots were likewise under the pillows of the five surfers lying in the bunks on the starboard side. It now occurred to him that the real Marty would have seen this coming and hidden the knife under his own pillow.

  ‘You complete fucking idiot,’ Andy thought to himself. ‘You could have just stayed at home with a nice glass of pinot watching the rugby. But you had to decide you were bored with your life and try to change everything, didn’t you? And look where it got you: in the middle of the Indian Ocean on a boat full of sociopaths who want to stab each other in the face. Happy now?’

  Truthfully, he hadn’t been happy before. The pressures of the mortgage, the prying of the neighbours, the hectoring of the current affairs shows, the suffocation of the emails, the trimming of the hedges and the enforced joviality of the school fund-raisers had all conspired to drive him as close to mad as he had ever been courageous enough to admit.

  Seeking a new or, perhaps, forgotten definition of himself, he fossicked through the mementoes his life had produced. The bands that his own band had once covered in his parents’ garage were still at the top of his CD pile, underlining the fact he still had actual CDs. The football stars he had once taped to his bedroom wall as a schoolboy were now on the board of trustees of his son’s private school. He realised all his early memories were just signposts to exactly where he was now, which was the only place his life was ever going to take him. The only Kodachrome moment that hinted at a different possibility was a silhouette of himself standing on a dune, board under his arm, shielding his eyes from the dawn as he surveyed the waves. Staring at that snapshot, he wondered if that might have been the last time he truly felt like himself.

  Andy had taken his return to surfing slowly at first: a weekend session here, an after-work paddle-out there. Nothing too serious. Until the moment he caught the last wave of a mid-week dawn patrol and rode it into an altered state of self-belief. This wave ambled in from the horizon, stood up, broad shouldered and polished. It paused for a moment to collect Andy before falling elegantly over itself again and again, taking a diagonal path towards the shore. It was serene and thrilling all at once. Crucially, Andy did what he always hoped but never truly expected he would do on a wave this good: not fuck it up. The better the wave, the less the surfer has to do to ride it well, and this wave was perfect. Andy gave a slight stall on the back foot, a bit of a forward crouch to release the rocker, a shift of weight to the heel, a smooth, steady opening of the shoulders and that was it – a weightless, noiseless tube ride, followed by a clean exit and a climb to the lip before a wide, powerful cutback, spray lighting up in the warm rays of the early sun.

  Boom.

  Like an addict desperate to salvage the remains of a fading high, Andy immediately began searching for a bigger hit. In between meetings, in the lunch queue, watching junior netball, in every spare moment, he Googled opportunities to recapture that moment. The global surf travel industrial complex was mining the planet for new waves on a daily basis, and, on the internet at least, all the waves looked perfect, empty and fairly approachable. Similarly, all the fishing boats converted into mobile surf caravans looked sturdy, spacious and more or less luxurious. Andy knew this couldn’t universally be true, a fact quickly confirmed by the flaming, ranting, chest-beating, xenophobic cauldron of surf discussion forums. By the collective reckoning of the rabble the waves were hoaxes, the camps were flea-pits, the boats were death traps and, no matter where you went, there were far too many cashed-up young Brazilians with multiple ju-jitsu trophies and absolutely no surf etiquette.

  This surf trip will change your life.

  Those seven words followed Andy around the web for days, like a teenager who doesn’t want to be seen at the shopping centre with her parents but has no other way of getting home. He started seeing those seven words flashing beneath his inbox, next to his search results and alongside the tedious stream of backlit photos of his dull colleagues’ even duller offspring. It followed him into his secret browser tabs of dominant milfs, amateur creampies and interracial threeways.

  This surf trip will change your life.

  So simple, so perfect. A life-changing journey to a place where the primary activity was surfing. Andy desperately wanted to step out of the brogues and the cufflinks and the regular dental check-ups and car servicing and school reports and calendarised matrimonial sex to leap into the ocean and become, if only for a short while, the stall-to-tube-to-cutback guy. Could it be possible that these seven words held the key?

  Click.

  A small gallery of faces filled the screen. Some were standing in sleek corporate offices, dark nightclub interiors, tropical landscapes, famous cities, a stable full of horses – even what looked to be a fully-fledged BDSM dungeon. But only one tableau interested Andy, a shining square of turquoise framing a wiry, tanned twenty-some
thing man. Tongue poking out, wearing white-framed wayfarers and a green trucker’s cap, the man stared at Andy from the screen, sending all the other profile pictures to the periphery. The figure leant over the railing of a sizeable boat, his left hand making a peace symbol, the splayed fingers perfectly framing the open mouth of a wave as it barrelled past the tropical background.

  I’m Marty. How’d ya like to be me next week? read the caption.

  From a quick skim, it appeared that Marty was, in fact, offering a week-sized slice of Marty’s life, for the reasonable sum of USD2450, travel and booking fee not included.

  Click to meet Marty.

  The video loaded and a smaller, more pixelated version of Marty started to sway from the rigging of the timber boat. After a nervous sideways glance he addressed Andy directly.

  ‘Hi, I’m Marty Durant! Thanks for checking out my ShelfLife profile. I live and work on the mighty CrossShore, a deluxe sixty-three foot timber surf charter boat in the magical Mentawi Islands of Sumatra, Indonesia. My life is pretty rad, but it’s also pretty sweet. I get to pick the best spots, surf all day and hang with the guests. The local crew are great workmates and my boss is the best bloke, even if he is a little crazy sometimes. Seriously, you’d have a hard time picking a better ShelfLife to live for a week. So leave yourself behind, book a week and come and be me, Marty the Deckhand.’

  Andy sat back. This was exactly what he had wanted: a chance to be the stall-to-tube-to-cutback guy. The week’s life rental included full board and meals, professional indemnity insurance, and a list of tasks that seemed no more difficult than cleaning up after a family barbeque. On the downside, there were about eight to ten ‘on-duty’ hours a day, the ‘possibility of sea-sickness’, the need to ‘mediate minor guest disputes’ should they arise and some ‘occasional light manual labour’.

  Marty had not yet been reviewed or rated, but he was a ‘verified ShelfLife host’ (whatever that meant) and, most interestingly, his booking calendar showed he had slots available. Andy clicked through to a few of the other profiles, read the FAQs, scrolled through some of the testimonials and scanned the founders’ bios. The site was billing itself as ‘the Airbnb of lifestyles’ and, at the bottom of every page, kept asking ‘Who would you rather be?’

  Andy decided he rather wanted to be Marty the Deckhand, thank you very much. He completed the application form and was overjoyed to find a pre-approval email in his inbox the following morning. All that ShelfLife required now was confirmation of his surfing ability, via a short video clip of him at his local break, a recent medical certificate and half of the booking fee. A few days after that, he received a confirmation phone call from ShelfLife’s customer support team. The young man reminded Andy to sign the waiver and indemnity forms, and to familiarise himself with the ShelfLife instruction manual, How to Be Marty the Deckhand. Andy printed out a copy, tucked it in his briefcase and re-read it every spare moment he got.

  ***

  The crossing from the Sumatran port town of Padang to the Mentawi Islands was uneventful, at least from Andy’s perspective. The 4am wake-up call, the motion-sickness tablets, the rolling ocean and the tropical sun all conspired to put him asleep within minutes of stepping aboard. He woke in a fog to learn from Chook, the captain of the CrossShore and his boss for the week, that a favourable current and slight tailwind had delivered them to the closest of the decent surf breaks in the island chain with about an hour of daylight to spare. The guests would be in the water on Day One, which always made for a smoother start to the trip.

  Marty’s instruction manual had explained that some international guests had been on planes and in check-in queues and transit hotels and gate lounges and taxis for thirty-odd hours before they even set foot on the CrossShore, and often became disgruntled to learn there were still hours more sailing to be done before they arrived at the mythical waves of the Mentawis. And even when they did, it would probably be too dark to see, let alone surf. Some guests, unable to contain their pent-up excitement, would paddle out in the gloom, get washed in over the reef and spend their first night of the trip scrubbing tiny pieces of fire coral out of their shallow wounds with a toothbrush. According to manual, this was # 3 on the ‘Top 5 worst possible ways to start a surf trip’.

  The CrossShore slid into anchor beside a left-hand break known as Scarecrows just as the rays of the setting sun basted the tops of the palm trees deep orange and the opposite end of the sky started to blush with the purple of early nightfall. Only one other boat was anchored nearby, although most of its human cargo appeared to be pouncing on anything that looked like a wave.

  ‘It’s bad form to just rock up and let our guys paddle straight out,’ said Chook, grimacing as he peered through the forward window. ‘Like farting in an elevator. Makes it unpleasant for everyone.’

  ‘Maybe if we just let half of them go?’ suggested Andy. ‘Five guys isn’t so bad, right?’

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Chook with an air of fatalism. ‘It’s the last half-hour of light. We’ll deal with the fallout after dinner. Might make a nice first job for you, eh Marty?’

  Chook slapped Andy on the shoulder and made his way to the back deck, where the ten guests were pulling boards out of covers, threading leashes and screwing fins into plugs. He tried to set some ground rules – don’t descend as a pack; wait for a few waves to go through before paddling on to the peak; let the guests from the other boat take the bigger waves; don’t act like dickheads – but most of the guests had waxed up and thrown themselves over the side before Chook made it halfway through his list.

  Within minutes, the lineup descended into chaos.

  Words were spoken, leashes pulled and drop-ins became standard operating procedure. The surfers from the other boat gave up in disgust, cursing and complaining as they paddled home in the fading light. Chook sent Andy over to the other boat with a slab of beer and an apology. They would all be sharing these waters for the next week, it made no sense to start out as enemies.

  ‘Thanks for the beers, mate, but honestly, you guys are going to be needing them more than us,’ said the tanned, balding captain of the other boat as Andy stepped aboard.

  ‘Yeah, it was a bit of a tense crossing and Chook just had to let these guys get wet, y’know?’

  ‘Oh yeah, we all get that on Day One. Sometimes it’s easier to just to do the crossing at half-throttle and arrive after dark,’ said the captain, taking a long pull of his beer, ‘But you guys have a special case on your hands this time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Jesus, mate, haven’t you seen who’s on your boat this week?’ The captain’s voice rose in disbelief. ‘Chook must have been fucking desperate for revenue is all I can say.’

  ‘Yeah, Marty told me there was a last-minute cancellation or something. Had to put two smaller groups together to fill the booking.’

  ‘Where is Marty, anyway?’

  ‘He’s taking a break this week,’ said Andy, using the cover story he’d agreed with Marty. ‘So I’m sort of filling in for him.’

  ‘Wow! So you’re the guy who rented Marty’s life for the week?’

  ‘He told you, huh?’

  ‘And he gave you this week? With this group of guests?’ the captain asked, his register continuing to climb.

  ‘It appears so.’

  ‘That Marty’s a fuckin’ clever cat, mate. Half of your guests are Brazil nuts,’ the Captain handed another beer to Andy. ‘And the other half are Seth Effricens, mate.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ asked Andy, eyebrows raised in hope.

  The captain let the equation hang in the air for a moment before solving it with the crack-hiss of a ring pull.

  ‘Bad enough when they’re in the same ocean.’ The captain looked back across the bay to the CrossShore. ‘But in the same boat? Madness.’

  Andy took the tender back to the Crosshore. He clambered up over the duckboard and into the main dining area to find the two groups of surfers crowded around opposite ends of the d
ining table, heads bowed, shovelling forks full of pasta. A gap in the middle of the table marked the no-man’s land where neither Zilla nor Saffer would enter, lest it be taken as a sign they were comfortable in each other’s company. Chook sat on the railing, just on the edge of the light, surveying the truce and chewing slowly.

  After dinner the two groups broke out the cards. The South Africans played kaluki and the Brazilians truco. The tension slowly faded as the soporific effects of jetlag and carb loading won out. The guests drifted away from the table like autumn leaves, disappearing in ones and twos, until Andy and Chook were alone on the back deck sharing a bottle of rum. The Indonesian deckhands quietly went about cleaning and stacking and folding and storing, trading jokes and good-natured insults in low, happy voices.

  ‘Aren’t you worried about how these guys are going to get on?’ asked Andy.

  ‘Could go either way, I reckon,’ said Chook, sipping slowly. Marty’s manual described Chook as a former oil-rig worker who took up surf boat charters to get a change of scenery. It also listed him as possibly bipolar but generally ‘a top bloke’.

  ‘I need you to identify the two ringleaders. Get them on side and they should keep the rest of their guys in line.’

  ‘What else do you need me to do?’ Andy rolled the tumbler between his palms. ‘I mean, what else would Marty normally handle, besides peacekeeping?’

  ‘Get up early and paddle over to check the break,’ Chook nodded towards the waves crashing in the darkness. ‘And then get back here and make sure everyone’s boardies are pressed.’

  ‘What? Like ironing?’

  ‘The iron is in the cupboard next to the galley.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I will not tolerate creased boardshorts on my boat,’ Chook put his rum down and stared at Andy.