by Sue Orr
Cleveland was okay because of the airbags but Kyle Henry, who was in the back of the car, got smashed up. His longboard was on the roof and it got munted. Snapped completely in half.
The first I knew much about the crash was the next day, when school went back. The guys on the surfing trip weren’t there that morning. They’d gone to see Kyle in Tauranga Hospital. But everyone else was talking about the accident.
Someone whose father was in the fire brigade said it’d taken half an hour to cut Kyle from the wreck. The rescuers had to go super slow in case his back was broken. Or he had internal injuries.
Our house is on the main road. I’d heard the sirens both ways. The ambulance went past just after eight o’clock and didn’t come back ’til after ten. It would have been more like an hour to cut him out, I said to a few people, reciting the ambulance times. I liked having a definite fact to contribute. At interval I met Ryan Mishefski at the tuck shop. Ryan was my mate. He and his aunt had shifted to Te Puke a year earlier, at the beginning of year ten. His parents were dead — another car accident — so there was just the two of them. They lived down the road from us.
‘You hear about the accident?’ I said. ‘About Kyle?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ryan. He was kicking a McDonald’s hacky sack. He was a quiet kind of guy. I think probably because of being an orphan, being sick of explaining what had happened to his family.
‘Sounds like Kyle’s pretty smashed up,’ I said.
Ryan was standing on his right leg, holding his arms out from his sides for balance. His left leg was suspended out straight in front of him, the hacky sack in the hollow between his left shin and the top of his shiny black school shoe. He could hold that pose for as long as he liked. Like some sort of skinny origami bird.
‘Kyle’s not the only one who’s going to suffer,’ he said.
‘Meaning?’
‘We’re fucked, too, now, aren’t we.’ The hacky sack flicked off the toe of his shoe, over his head. His eyes followed the ball skywards. He swung his leg backwards and somehow caught it behind him, in the crook of his knee. He was the man at hacky sack. ‘That’ll be the end of the Easter surf trips.’
‘Bullshit, man. One accident’s not going to change anything,’ I said.
‘You wait and see. Cleveland’s stuff ed it up for everyone. The school’ll get involved and it’ll be called off by the parents.’
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘They’ll get over it. The next one’s a whole year away.’
‘Bet you,’ said Ryan. He shoved the hacky sack in his pocket.
THE SURFERS HAD GONE to the hospital in a minibus arranged and driven by Brian Cleveland, Jack’s old man. Brian was the big-shot real estate agent in town. The guys scuff ed back in through the school gates at lunchtime with their heads down, hands in their pockets, not saying much.
During the afternoon, though, details started filtering out around the school. One of the guys would talk to one of the senior girls and she’d go off and tell her girlfriends. The girls met in huddles, had little hugs — you know how girls do that for no reason — going Oh my God and having a cry about the precious new sliver of information.
The main story had already gone around. It was to do with Kyle being in the back of the car when he was the only passenger — that was the first thing everyone asked about. Brian Cleveland told some of the other parents this the night before, straight after the accident.
Brian said the reason his son had lost control on the bend was that Kyle had been wrestling him from the back seat.
Brian Cleveland’s version of events was that while the other guys had been packing up at the camping ground on the Monday afternoon, Kyle had decided to drink all the leftover booze from the weekend. He’d sat on an upside-down chilly bin and got shit faced. Including half a bottle of mezcal with the worm still in it.
Kyle had drunk the worm. The words flew round the school like a virus, faster than anything else about the accident. They ripped through our year eleven classes, everyone gasping and going Holy crap and shaking their heads, half stunned and half smiling, as though recalling their own experiences of worm drinking. Okay, I admit, I did it too. I had never drunk a worm, or even had mezcal, but I’d heard stories. Anything — the worst things — was possible after you’d drunk the worm.
Everyone was feeling sorry for Kyle, and for Jack Cleveland too. How do you keep a car on the road, when you’ve got someone strangling you from behind? An out-of-it moron who’d drunk the worm?
But once the surfers came back from the hospital, the rumour started to mutate.
Candice Johnson went out with one of the guys. Candice was deputy head girl. She was the kind of chick that everyone liked, teachers included; she’d got some sort of award for the spirit of leadership.
Candice came out of one of those girl huddles all staunch. She started putting it out there that all the guys finished off the booze, not just Kyle. They’d packed up their camping gear and taken the last of the piss down to the beach. They’d watched the left-hand break and talked about one final surf, but the boards were on the roofs of the cars by then and the wetsuits packed away. There was just a mouthful of mezcal left in the bottle which Kyle did happen to drink, but there was no worm.
‘Tell everyone that,’ Candice said to me. She stopped me in the hallway in D Block, grabbed me by the jersey. ‘What’s your name? Paul, eh.’
I nodded. She knew my name. The way she was pulling at my sleeve made me go … you know … well, it was awkward. I could feel the warmth of her hand through the wool. I tried to concentrate on what I had to tell everyone.
‘There was no worm, okay? Someone else already drank the worm earlier.’
‘Sure. I’ll tell everyone,’ I promised. I would have promised her anything.
‘Or there might not have actually been a worm in that bottle.’
I nodded, frantic, uncomfortable.
‘There’s not always a worm. Not in every bottle.’
Later on, more information oozed out. The texts were flying and a lot of phones got confiscated, but it still spread quickly.
Kyle had been loading gear into the back seat of Cleveland’s Beemer when Cru Davis had dared Jack Cleveland to a race back to Te Puke. Apparently Cleveland jumped in the car, revved the engine and took off. Kyle was hanging out the back seat, still shutting the door when Cleveland hit Pukehina Parade. The camping ground’s right at the beginning of the parade, so they were off there, onto Pukehina Beach Road, more or less straight away.
The beach road’s okay at first, reasonably straight, but then, as you approach the main road, the curves are pretty sharp. And what did Jack Cleveland do? Well, here’s what he didn’t do.
He didn’t overtake Cru on the metal dump corner, like everyone first thought. He’d actually driven on the wrong side of the road all the way from the camping ground to the highway turnoff. That’s about four ks. He’d actually been racing Cru neck and neck, right next to him. With his headlights off.
Though some of the guys did say the last bit was bullshit.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE everyone knew about the visit to the hospital. Kyle was conscious, but drugged up. He had a broken hip and a fractured skull and bruising around his spine. His head was wrapped in a bandage.
The word was that Kyle had asked straight away whether his longboard had survived the crash. No one knew what to say. Old Man Cleveland launched in, saying the longboard was fine, so one of the things being said was that the Clevelands were replacing Kyle’s board with a new one.
Kyle told the guys he didn’t remember the accident. The only thing he remembered was tying his board onto the roof of the car, pulling the straps down hard, checking there was no movement.
On the way home from the hospital, Brian Cleveland told the guys that it was pretty normal for someone in an accident not to be able to remember the actual moment. It was the brain’s way of coping with trauma, he said.
The story went that the whole minivan trip from the hospita
l to the school had been awkward. Brian Cleveland kept whistling, then casually bringing up little things like how Kyle had always been trouble, though not trouble, but that Kyle never knew when the joke had gone too far, when to pull his head in. And stuff like how the guys shouldn’t blame Kyle for the accident, because it could have been any of them skylarking around, wrestling Jack from the back seat. Apparently, when he said that, it went deadly silent in the van because no one actually knew whether there was any wrestling going on or not. Other than Jack, of course, who said nothing.
The guys told the girls that it was as though by saying it, over and over, Brian Cleveland was forcing the wrestling to be a fact. Most of them were already in the shit over the alcohol. The whole thing was a mess, too hard to think about. They reckoned it was just easier to sit there in the minivan, say nothing, let Old Man Cleveland rave on.
The only bit that really freaked them out was when Jack, who was sitting in the front next to his father, tried to change the radio station. He was reaching over, fiddling with the knobs, and Old Man Cleveland said Leave it alone, you little fuck. It was the way he said it. He just added it on to whatever he’d been saying beforehand. He never took his eyes off the road, never even raised his voice.
JUST BEFORE SCHOOL FINISHED for the day, the final rumour started.
Drew Bristow told Kelly Donalds in biology. Kelly was so blown away she just got up crying and put her books in her bag and walked out. Mr Tennie the teacher was saying Excuse me, what’s wrong? and Get back here now and shit like that — she just walked. Everyone looked at Drew but he had his head down, pen in his hand, working. It was the last period and by the time the bell went the text had gone around and the whole school knew.
During the hospital visit, Drew had been standing at the foot of Kyle’s bed drinking a cup of tea. Someone had knocked his elbow and he’d spilt the hot tea on Kyle’s right foot, which was poking out from under the sheet. Kyle didn’t even look in Drew’s direction. Drew had pulled a hankie out of his pocket and wiped the tea off Kyle, off the bedding.
Kyle hadn’t felt a thing.
Everyone down that end of the bed was freaking out. There was a conversation going on about missing school and a fair bit of laughing too, and, Drew said to Kelly, they all just kept talking, staring at Kyle, pretending there was absolutely nothing happening to Kyle’s foot while the mess was being wiped up.
IT WENT ON FOR weeks. Maybe in other places, cities, it’d be different, but in Te Puke nothing else happened to replace it for conversation. The stories kept coming, changing just a little here and there, a fact left out of one account, replaced with an assumption by someone else and hey presto — a whole new version of events. It was like that game we played when we were little, Chinese Whispers; the rumours kept feeding themselves.
Part of it was because of who was involved, I reckon. It wasn’t like it was the town losers, you know? These guys were the school heroes, the ones who would go on to university, to better things. Even when the guys themselves had had a gutsful of talking about it, their parents wouldn’t let it rest. It was like the person who had the last say would be the one to record the official version of events.
You would have thought that the Clevelands, Jack and his old man, would have backed off, once Jack’s story was put into doubt. But when any adult talked to Brian Cleveland about it, he just closed his eyes and shook his head, with one of those boys will be boys looks. It was natural, he kept saying, for all the guys to close ranks around Kyle, make up a story to protect him. Heck, he would have done the same thing himself at that age.
In the end, it was never really cleared up. The cops interviewed a few people but no charges were laid. Some of the other parents brought up the question of whether Jack Cleveland had been breath tested at the scene of the accident. Just among themselves, though, and they backed away from that one when they realised there’d been heaps of piss drunk by their own kids that weekend.
Maybe the cops just got fed up with chasing their tails trying to work out what exactly had happened. Cru Davis couldn’t help. He said it was dark, his eyes were on the road, and all he knew was that the Beemer had appeared on his right-hand side, then disappeared over the bank. It didn’t help that Kyle couldn’t remember the accident.
Or maybe it did. Kyle ended up okay. The feeling came back to his foot once the swelling around his spine went down. His leg mended, but he was stuff ed for running and the doctors wouldn’t clear him to play rugby. They said another serious knock could cripple him. Kyle didn’t care too much about the rugby; he could still surf. Everyone sort of forgot about the accident, except when Kyle was tired, or pissed. Then his limp would be really obvious. He said he got headaches sometimes, but nothing worse than a hangover.
THAT WINTER THE SURF AT Pukehina was awesome. Massive storms hit the East Coast, lasting three or four days. Then the wind would die away and turn around to an off shore. The swell rolled in, the waves were like mountains — big tubes, perfectly formed, breaking 100 metres or so off the beach. The wind seemed to lean back into them, holding them up, inviting us to see each ride through to its punishing end.
Pukehina’s steep. The sandbank drops away at the water’s edge and the waves dump onto the beach. A few people have drowned there, giving it a name for being dangerous. Which, from a surfer’s point of view, is a good thing because you don’t have to watch out for nuisance swimmers and boogie-boarders.
You’ve got to be patient to surf Pukehina. You have to paddle right out the back, past the dumpers, then wait for the wave. You can sit out there for a couple of hours and only get a few decent rides — even down at the mouth of the estuary, where the break’s more reliable.
That winter, though, it was like one of those all-you-can-eat smorgasbords. Ryan and I gorged on that surf until we were salt-crusted, red-eyed zombies, so knackered we could barely carry our boards back up the beach. Even then we wouldn’t come in until it was dark.
I got my restricted licence and the use of my brother’s ute. He was away doing his OE. Ryan and I kept our boards permanently on the back. Around four-thirty, Ryan would clatter up the metal driveway on his old bike. Mum and Dad were always still at work. Ryan put his bike down the side of the house and climbed onto the back of the ute. He slipped under the cover to hide from the cops. The cops had a thing, for a while after the accident, about stopping you as you drove out to the beach. They’d wait to pounce at the golf course entrance. Check your licence, whether you had a mate hidden on the floor. They never thought to look under the tarpaulin on the back.
We were greedy when we first hit the water, barely turning to paddle back out before grabbing the very next ride. Maybe we were conscious of how little light there was, smack in the middle of winter. After July came and went, though, it started getting lighter, a few minutes every day. After the first frenzy, we’d settled down into a quiet rhythm of sharing the waves.
As the light started to fade, we could just make each other out in the water, dark smudges against our white boards. One of us would give the signal to finish up and go in, but then we’d turn and see the perfect wall of water looming behind us. How could we not surf it? Eventually, we’d call it a day. I drove back to town, Ryan under the ute cover, me blinking hard to stay awake in the oncoming car lights, still caught in the quiet cold magic of being inside a wave.
Hanging with Ryan was like being alone in a lot of ways. I mean, you don’t feel the need to talk to yourself, do you. That’s how it was. It was okay just being, when you were with him. There was a lot of stuff going on that year: the usual school dramas; all the noise around NCEA and teachers and girls; a lot of information that you had to try and manage in your head. You’d get told about something important, like a sports meeting you had to be at, and some other crucial thing would give up its spot in your brain. It would slip away and you’d end up in trouble for forgetting.
Ryan never talked much. I said before it was shyness, but I’m not even sure it was that. It was as
though he didn’t need anyone else. When he first turned up at school, the girls all thought he was hot: long blond curly hair, blue eyes, long eyelashes, all that shit that chicks get off on. But he ignored girls completely. This made them even more interested in him. For a while, anyway. Eventually they just decided he was a freak and they ignored him back.
I don’t know why he hung out with me — whether I was just a ride to the beach, or a decoy to him being labelled a complete loser. I didn’t care. I didn’t need to analyse the waves, talk the big talk. I just wanted to ride them. I liked what I got from Ryan, the uncomplicatedness of him. I liked surfing with him. Sometimes, I’d be paddling back out and he’d be coming in, and I’d find myself staring — at the way he totally owned the wave, dominated it.
I never once went round to Ryan’s house. From the first day, that’s how it was. He never asked me, not that you asked people to come round or anything, but stuff like that just eventually happens usually. Normally I suppose I would have just turned up at someone’s place, someone I’d known for a while — and maybe that was it. I’d lived in Te Puke all my life; Ryan had just arrived. But there was something else which made casual calling-in impossible.
It happened on the day he and his aunty moved in.
I was fifteen and it was the beginning of year ten. It was a really hot day at the end of January, no wind, the sort of day where the heat sucks every bit of energy out of you.
I was walking back from the dairy and I saw a U-Haul trailer outside the empty house a few doors down from our place. I watched as this woman carried an armload of stuff up the front path. She wore cut-off denim shorts and a bright yellow singlet. Her hair was long and black and it sort of fluttered around her face. Her arms and legs were brown as.