by Lisa Glass
‘No way am I doing that backbend either,’ Kelly said. ‘My spine’s had enough of a beasting already from three hours of kayaking.’
‘Oh no, time’s up. Savasana,’ the teacher said, gazing at Zeke.
‘Chill-out sesh,’ he translated for me.
‘Time to get your socks and jumpers as the body will get very cold very quickly once the muscles are inactive,’ the teacher went on. She didn’t bother getting dressed though, I noticed, wondering again why anyone in their right mind would choose to do yoga wearing a bikini top.
I didn’t have socks or a jumper, but I didn’t care because, lying next to Zeke, I was red hot.
The teacher lit an incense stick and a candle, and then she turned off the lights.
For a moment the room was absolutely silent, and then people began to breathe deeply as the teacher went through every area of our bodies, getting us to focus on the muscles that she wanted us to relax. Zeke was breathing really loudly next to me, much louder than I was. All of the boys were. Did boys have bigger, stronger lungs than girls? Or was that totally crazy? Yep, I had gone crazy. Fantasizing about a boy’s lungs was a new low.
Just relax, Iris, relax, I told myself.
‘Breathe into any areas of tension. Breathe out any stress. Be at one with the universe.’
I messed this up totally. I was incapable of being at one with the universe. I wasn’t even capable of being at one with my yoga mat. I kept shifting, wriggling to get comfortable. All I could concentrate on was the fact that the first boy I had fancied in ages was lying next to me. When do you get to lie on the floor, in the dark, with a cute boy?
When it counts, that’s when.
Kelly skipped out in the middle of the relaxation segment of the class, as she always had a cleaning shift on Friday evenings, but she made the phone sign, so I knew I’d be hearing from her before too long. Seeing Kelly get up, another girl also took the opportunity to leave early. That girl had seriously long legs, red hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck like a ballet dancer and the sort of curves that Daniel would call ‘pure filth’. I didn’t get a look at her face from my position sprawled on the floor but, as she padded quietly past me, I heard her whisper, ‘Bye, Zeke. See you tomorrow, darling.’ Even from her whisper I could tell she was posh. She had that confident public-schoolgirl drawl, like Liz Hurley chatting up Nate Archibald in Gossip Girl. Uggh.
Who was she? More important, who was she to Zeke?
Finally the class ended and I started to roll up my mat, keeping my eyes firmly on the ground in case Zeke caught me staring, but also because it was hard to look straight at him: something about him was a bit blinding. I was just putting the mat in the big cardboard box at the back of the ballroom when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘You surf?’ he said.
chapter two
The Earth is constantly battered by waves. Sound waves, light waves, heat waves, radio waves, but the waves of the ocean are the only ones I care about. When you step into the ocean you are stepping off the everyday solid world and entering something that has way more power than anything you will ever encounter on land, and it is awesome.
Yeah, I surfed, but I was so startled by his question that it took me a moment to answer. There’s surfing for fun, which I did, and then there’s radical skills surfing, which I didn’t do. So I went with, ‘Um, a bit.’
‘Knew it.’
‘Sure you did,’ I said, smiling.
‘You’ve totally got the surfer shoulders.’
‘Oh,’ I said, not sure if I liked the sound of that.
‘And, y’know the incredible poise,’ he added, trying to dig himself out of the hole. He caught my gaze and looked at me dead-on, making my mind go totally blank again. ‘There’s a big swell coming in. Sets building at the north end of the beach. Wanna go catch a few?’
‘Haven’t you already been out today?’ I said, looking up at his still-damp hair.
‘Yeah, but only like four or five hours. Can fit in another two hours, easy, before sundown.’
After five hours of surfing I would be dead, that much I knew. This boy surfed seven hours a day? That was insane. Or at least a serious addiction. No wonder he was a pro at yoga. He must have been all muscle.
All these thoughts flooded through my head in a split second, but my brain caught on the image of Zeke in scorpion pose and his T-shirt riding up and I couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘The lifeguards will have gone home.’
‘We can take care of each other.’
‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘The lifeguard flags will be gone, so everyone will be mixed in. These conditions? It’ll be packed out there until the sky turns pitch black. We’ll have to watch out for kooks and speed bumps.’
Kooks are novice surfers and they are a pain in the ass to more advanced surfers. They get in the way, they don’t know how to handle their boards and what’s worse is that they roam in packs of hundreds, which is why the lifeguards normally cram them into a little space down the south end of the beach, between the black-and-white flags, where they can’t cause too much trouble to real surfers. They’re always injuring each other though, because they’re show-off menaces with no proper training and a minimal understanding of the sea’s power.
‘Speed bumps?’ he said, frowning.
‘You know — bodyboarders.’
He smiled. ‘I never heard that before. Harsh, but kind of accurate, I guess. Back home they call them dick-draggers. Or shark biscuits.’
You’d think that stand-up surfers and bodyboarders could be friends, but it never seemed to work out like that. There was this rivalry that didn’t go away. It could be funny but it was also a shame, because almost all stand-up surfers started out bodyboarding as kids.
But why would you stick with a bodyboard when you had the option of a proper surfboard? Something that took proper skills and paid off with proper thrills. I didn’t get it.
‘So you gonna come hang? You can use one of my spare boards if you can’t be assed going to get yours.’
I looked at my watch, not because I was particularly interested that it was 7.35 p.m., but because I needed a moment to think. He wasn’t actually asking me out, was he? Me, with my ancient shorts and make-up-free face?
As I told Kelly later, I’d have much rather gone home and watched EastEnders than gone surfing with this gorgeous boy. Even though I really liked him. That was how scared I’d become in the few months since Daniel, suspicious of everything outside my own bedroom.
But something the yoga teacher had said came back to me. During relaxation she’d been banging on about the importance of being open to new experiences, to new adventures and to new people, telling us how saying yes, instead of no, could change our lives for the better. It sounded a million miles away from the boring person I’d become.
What’s the worst that can happen? I thought.
‘OK. You’re on.’
I put on my flip-flops, grabbed my skateboard and followed him out of the ballroom, through the hotel’s bar and down to the esplanade.
‘Boards are on my van,’ he said, nodding at a retro VW camper which was gleaming silver in the evening sunlight and looked as if it had been refurbed to mint condition. He had his own ride, so he was at least seventeen, then. A year older than me. The same age as Daniel.
I looked out to the bay and saw set after set lining up; pure corduroy.
‘Definitely OK for me to borrow one?’
‘Sure.’
‘What if I ding it?’ Nightmare. Damaged surfboards were tricky and expensive to fix, but if you didn’t bother, the board would get waterlogged and have to be chucked in the bin.
‘You won’t. I trust ya. Even if you do, who cares?’
He trusted me. I’d known him less than one hour. I didn’t even trust me and I’d known me for sixteen years.
‘Can I leave my skateboard in your van? Don’t want it to get nicked.’
‘No problem. Sling it wherever.’
I slid it in front of two of his skateboards, a regular-sized one and a much longer carveboard. It made sense. Skateboarding is basically land-surfing, or ‘sidewalk surfing’ as they call it in America.
He had five surfboards on the roof rack of his van, including two seriously fancy high-performance longboards. Just those two boards alone would have cost him a couple of grand.
Zeke stood behind me as I examined all this, and I eventually picked out a seven-foot-six mini-Malibu, which I knew I’d be able to catch at least a few waves on.
Surfers say you are what you ride. In which case, that would make me a pretty sturdy, pretty easy pig board.
‘OK if I nab the mini-Mal?’
As I said it, my eyes dropped to the inside of his van again and I noticed he had a rolled-up duvet and some pillows stashed near the back. Home-from-home or shag wag? A lot of the dopehead surfers who lived in their vans at the South Fistral esplanade were total douches when it came to surf groupies. There were always girls angling to get into a surfer’s wagon, even if only for a half-hour, and there were plenty of guys that let them. In the years I’d spent hanging out at the esplanade, I’d seen some of the worst offenders have five or six girls going through their vans in one afternoon. I really hoped that wasn’t the case with Zeke.
‘Good choice,’ he said. ‘You’ll get some great rides on that.’
‘Hope so. I guess it’s the safe choice really. The easiest board to ride …’
‘Nothin’ about surfing is easy. Or safe.’
‘Yeah, but these waves are, what, four or five feet?’
He stared at the break, this heavy look in his eyes. ‘I know this French guy. Great surfer. Rode huge waves at Teahupo’o in Tahiti. He comes back to his home break in Biarritz. Shoulder-high waves that day, nothing special at all, but he falls, and he hits the bottom. With his head.’
‘Shit. What happened? Is he OK?’
‘That was his last surf. He broke a cervical vertebra and severed his spinal cord. He’s in a wheelchair now, paralysed from the neck down. No reef there, and he didn’t even cop a boulder. The bottom was sand. The force of the wave closing out on his back slammed his head into the sand hard enough to snap his neck.’
‘Shit,’ I said again. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘So yeah, surfing’s always dangerous, whatever you ride, wherever you ride it. And no board is harder or easier than another. They’re all just instruments with their own music.’
I noticed how much Zeke used his hands when he talked about surfing, how he couldn’t seem to keep still, not even for a moment, which was weird after seeing him so still and composed in yoga class.
With every passing minute, I was liking him more. He was just so totally himself. No front, no bull. And he was freakily chilled out.
Zeke looked over his remaining boards and eventually picked up a red-and-white longboard that looked like it should have been in the Surfing Hall of Fame. It was heavily glassed, single fin and shaped in a retro sixties design.
‘It was my grandfather’s,’ he went on, as if reading my thoughts. ‘Pop used to shape his own boards. Made some money. Taught my mom too. Later my pa bought into the business, once my mom taught him how to surf.’
Zeke was obviously from surfing royalty, then. His parents were surfers, so was his granddad, and I’d bet if Zeke ever had a kid, the kid would surf too. It was in the genes.
‘She taught him to surf?’
‘Yeah, he’d hardly been in the water until he met her. She was a natural. Like a young Rell Sunn. She looked like Rell too. Just beautiful. Their board business is still going strong, though someone else owns it.’
Rell Sunn was Hawaiian. A legendary waterwoman and a world surfing champion. So was Zeke’s mother Hawaiian too? Or some other kind of foreign? It would explain Zeke’s good looks. Those high cheekbones.
‘Oh, right,’ I said, hoping he would tell me more, but not wanting to ask any personal questions about his family. Being with Daniel had made me sensitive to those particular pitfalls. Zeke seemed to have no such hang-ups though, and carried on like it was normal to talk about your folks to a complete stranger, ‘I’m a bit of a mutt. My mom’s Hawaiian and my pa’s from Newquay, but he only just moved back here. Before that he was doing his paramedic thing someplace called Ex … Exeter, I think?’
‘So you’re just visiting?’
‘Yeah. Pa’s about to turn fifty and is having a huge party. Plus Nanna — Pa’s mom — is pretty sick with her heart, so I wanna stick around as long as I can.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. That must be really rough for your dad.’
‘It is. I say “Pa”, but he’s actually my stepfather. My biological father is some Danish guy, but, after having three sons with my mom, he figured family life wasn’t for him. He bailed when I was five months old. Haven’t seen the loser since.’
‘It’s OK, you don’t have to tell me about it, if you’d rather not.’
‘Nah, it’s no secret. Pa adopted me and my brothers, and we had this amazing childhood. But he and Mom split up, what, three years ago, when I was, like, fifteen. It’s all good though. They’re still friends.’
So Zeke was eighteen.
‘Sucks when that happens,’ I said, thinking of my own parents.
‘Pa wanted to move back to England permanently. Mom didn’t. She’s in love with Hawaii. She got a boyfriend pretty soon after my pa left. She’s a big personality, you know?’
I nodded, although clearly I didn’t know.
‘So what do you think of Fistral?’ Safest to change the subject.
‘What’s not to like? The surf’s clean, so is the beach. I’ve never actually been here before, as Nanna only recently switched nursing homes. Before that she was in, um, Exeter, but she wanted to come back here, as it’s where she lived when she was young, so Pa changed his job to be with her. Had a short gap in my planner, so I thought I’d stick around for my family. Stoked I did.’
He gave me this really pointed look. Did he mean he was happy because of me? Nah, that was ridiculous. We’d only just met.
‘It’s looked pretty solid for the last week,’ I said.
‘Yeah, it’s been great out there. Just the best fun, and I’ve scored plenty.’
‘Yeah?’ I said, my heart freezing.
‘Of waves, I mean.’
I was glad he cleared that up. He was right about the surf. We both turned to look at the beach. The waves were totally clean with no wind chop, and I was actually starting to look forward to an evening surf session. I hadn’t been out for ages. I hadn’t wanted to do anything except watch crummy telly, eat Cheerios straight from the packet and obsessively listen to the song ‘Daniel’ by Dia Frampton on my iPod.
Once upon a time nothing had made me happier than surfing. How could I have given up something I loved so much? Just because I was worried about bumping into a stupid boy?
‘Wow, the sky is pretty here,’ Zeke said. ‘One of the great things about living near the sea is that you can really relax your eyes. In the city, your eyes never really look into the distance. They’re always being caught by something in the foreground. But if you come out here at dusk or dawn, you can stand on the cliff and look out and the light is soft enough for you to not get dazzled and you can really look into the distance. Your eyes can just let go and soar.’
Looking out over the ocean then, with Zeke next to me, felt a lot like soaring.
‘My wetsuits are gonna be way too big for you,’ he said, breaking the silence. He was a lot taller than me, and though he had that surfer narrowness around the waist, he also had the typical surfer barrel chest.
I couldn’t go home to get my own, because as soon as I was through my front door, I’d lose my bottle and not come back.
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
The board-hire shack was about to close, but I ran up to a dreadlocked guy who was hosing down the wetsuits.
‘Hey, Denny, any chance I could grab a su
it?’
‘No worries, Iris. Take whatever you want. Just chuck it in the big yellow bucket round the back when you’re finished. Promise you won’t pee in it, huh? No wettie warmers.’
I laughed. What happened in the ocean stayed in the ocean. Except in the case of wetsuits.
‘I promise. Actually, I’d better use your loo before I get into it.’
I came out carrying the cold wetsuit over one arm, and saw that Zeke had changed his mind about the old longboard, and put a shortboard on the pavement instead.
He was busy wriggling into his own wetsuit and I saw his baggies crumpled on the pavement, so he was obviously old school and went naked underneath. I quite often did that too. There’s nothing worse than a bikini getting jammed in some unspeakable place underneath a wetsuit and you not being able to move it. I grabbed a beach towel from the van and began the undignified process of squeezing myself into the suit while trying not to flash any passers-by; not an easy task.
Eventually the suit was over my legs and I was grabbing the neoprene on my hips and tugging it up, while holding on to the towel with my chin and jumping down deeper into the suit. Zeke was trying not to watch this, but I could tell he was amused.
‘Need a hand?’ he said.
I forced my arms into the damp fabric, dropped the towel and turned my back to him. ‘Yeah. Cheers.’
He grabbed the zip and I could feel his fingers on my back, giving me goosebumps. He zipped me up slowly so as not to catch any skin and I turned back around to do the same for him, when I noticed a jagged scar running between his shoulder blades up to his neck.
‘What’s with the Jaws scar?’ I said.
‘Coral reef tattoo.’
I zipped him up and was going to ask him more when a car with some crazy heavy-metal tune pumping came tearing down the road. As the car slowed behind me, I realized the track was ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage Against the Machine, and then I saw the blue VW Beetle with a black shark painted on the bonnet. Daniel. Next to him was his new girlfriend.