by Lisa Glass
I could hear the stress in my voice. It was one thing me taking risks for myself, but it suddenly felt like a massive responsibility to be looking after someone else in the ocean. If Kelly died, I would die. She was my girl. My rock. The only person in my life that I knew would still be there in fifty years.
‘Iris, you have got to chill out, bird. I’m not going to do anything crazy,’ she said, turning to face me.
‘Right, well, you never turn your back to the ocean unless you’re about to catch the whitewater, OK?’
Just as I said that, I could see a medium set of waves building and coming in fast.
‘All right, position your board, now get on it and paddle, paddle, paddle. Faster, else you’ll miss it. Keep the nose up or you’re gonna do a headstand and go over the top.’
Kelly caught the wave but she bodysurfed it in to shore. I grabbed the next one so I could catch her up.
‘How come you didn’t stand up?’
‘I don’t know. It just felt like I was going really fast and it was over in a flash.’
‘You were going really fast. That’s surfing. As soon as you’re on the next wave, get to your feet, OK?’
Kelly gave me the Zeke Francis signature sloppy salute and started wading out again, pushing her board in front of her.
‘WHOA! Never put your board between you and a wave, not unless you want your face smashed in. Push it to the side of you.’
My heart was racing. It was like I was looking after Cara or some other little kid. I had turned into Kelly’s mother. Luckily she didn’t take offence and just hopped the board to one side of her.
‘You don’t have to worry about this stuff when you’re bodyboarding,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, bodyboards are made of foam and don’t have fins that will slice your ear off. Right, catch this one.’
It wasn’t the most elegant pop-up I had ever seen, but she did manage to scramble to her feet. However, she then stood so high that she immediately wiped out backwards. I’d forgotten to tell her to keep low with her arms out for balance.
I’d been so busy stressing about her safety that I’d neglected to tell her some of the most important technical things.
She bobbed up with her hair plastering her face and seawater bursting out of her nose.
‘I was up! I was surfing!’
‘You were up,’ I said grumpily. ‘Next time stay low.’
‘Iris,’ she said, waving away my instruction with one hand, ‘you have got me surfing on my second wave. Give me a high five!’
It was impossible to be stressed when Kelly was like this. It made me remember how excited I’d been when I caught my first long ride, managing to stay up as other surfers in the water whooped and hollered in congratulation.
Kelly had a long way to go, but she was my mate and she was laughing her head off, and so I just smiled and said, ‘You’re a surfer now, so let’s get you another wave.’
We surfed for about an hour and Kelly caught some mellow rides and was buzzing from it, just totally pumped up, like it was the best thing she’d ever done. But after her tenth wipeout she was starting to look tired and I caught her rubbing her forearms. All the paddling and pushing up on her board had probably wrenched her tendons.
‘Let’s go get a cuppa,’ I said.
‘Not before I sit on the beach, strip off this wetsuit and wax my board,’ she said, getting a disc of Sex Wax out of her bag.
‘People normally wax their boards before a session,’ I said dubiously, ‘and yours is a foamie which doesn’t even really need to be waxed.’
‘I have letched at surfers on this beach my whole life and dreamed of being one of those cool surfer girls with a board under her arm. I am milking this moment, Iris Fox, and there’s not a thing you can do to stop me.’
I laughed. She was a proper kook all right. Funny though.
When she finished her wax job, she took the board back to Denny and I sat cross-legged in the lapping waves at the edge of the sea, just watching the pack. I still loved watching surfers wipeout from the shore, even though I knew how it felt. It looked so comical though, as these little rubber stick figures plunged sideways off their boards.
I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and turned to see Daniel. He sat down next to me on the wet sand. The bruises on his face had finally faded and he looked like his old self.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Can’t talk. Kelly’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Ah, Kelly loves me.’
‘She really doesn’t.’
He smiled and said, ‘Well, I wanted to tell you I’m not gonna top myself. In case you was worried.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ I was relieved he’d come to his senses. For one thing, there’d already been far too much tragedy in his lovely mum’s life, without Daniel piling on more.
‘Things are on the up for me.’
‘Sounds good. Like how?’
‘I’m training to be an RNLI lifeguard. I’m gonna join Fistral Lifesaving.’
‘Seriously? Congratulations.’
‘That’s not even all of it. There’s something even better, but it’s a surprise.’
At that moment, I saw Saskia walking up the beach with a fancy, ten-foot Alaia board under her arm. Alaia boards are wooden, finless and were ridden for centuries in ancient Hawaii. I had never even seen one, except in magazines. It was another thing that emphasized to me just how superior Saskia was in every single way.
She was giving me a hard stare and then my brain engaged. Saskia had found me chatting away to the person who stabbed Zeke.
Daniel chose that second to grab my hand and tell me he had to get back to work since his boss probably had binoculars on him at that very moment.
‘Yeah, go,’ I said. ‘Please.’
Saskia was approaching me from one direction and Kelly was coming from the other. Both of them were giving me confused looks, as if to say, ‘What were you doing with that loser?’ I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head.
Saskia reached me first.
‘Hanging out with the guy that assaulted Zeke? Really?’
I opened my eyes and stood up to face her. ‘It’s not what it looks like.’
‘It never is with you. I’m starting to think you’re trouble with a capital T.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Honestly, is it so very hard to treat Zeke with a bit of respect, and not flirt with the person that stabbed him? You’re drifting terribly close to “beach skank” territory.’
Kelly arrived then and said, ‘Whoa there. Don’t you dare speak to Iris like that. You don’t know her, all right? So butt the hell out.’
Kelly’s eyes were blazing, and Saskia put up her hands in a gesture of apology.
‘Fine. Point taken.’
‘Sorry,’ Kelly said, rubbing her forearms. ‘I didn’t mean to get all aggro there. Long morning of surfing, and my arms are frigging killing me.’
‘It’s probably tendonitis from poor paddle technique,’ Saskia said. ‘Get some ice on it and the pain should ease off in a day or two.’
‘Will do. Cheers,’ Kelly said. That was classic Kelly. Furious one minute, and completely over it the next. She put her arm around my waist and dragged me off towards Ben & Jerry’s for celebratory ice creams.
As we walked away I looked over my shoulder at Saskia and saw that she was still staring at us. It occurred to me that for all of Saskia’s confidence and gorgeousness, I had never seen her with a female friend. Maybe, just maybe, she was lonely.
chapter nineteen
Kelly wanted me to call her asap. She had news. Big news.
‘You were just on the radio.’
‘Um, no I wasn’t.’
‘Not you you. But your name. They played an interview with Anders.’
‘Tell me everything.’
Part of Anders’s interview had been to drum up publicity for the new British female surfer that Billabong was going to sponsor. He was on Pirate FM talking
about how the final show-down would be in September at North Fistral for Wavemasters. Ed Sheeran was going to be gigging the festival and he would be the one to present the Billabong contest winner with a £5,000 cheque.
‘Ed Sheeran, Iris! Five grand!’
I took a deep breath.
‘Can you come over?’ I said, collapsing back on to my bed.
‘Dead right I’m coming over,’ she said. ‘And I’m bringing strawberry cupcakes from the Little Cake Shop.’
‘I don’t know if I can eat that,’ I said. ‘I already had ice cream and I’m supposed to be in training.’
‘Yeah, and you’ve been burning like ten million calories a day. You’re eating some cupcakes.’
By the time she arrived, I was starving. Or ‘ravenous’, as Saskia would say. I smiled as I thought about Saskia, and then wondered why on earth I was smiling at the thought of the girl who was standing between me and Ed Sheeran.
Kelly arrived with the cupcakes, but I was in the en-suite shower, thinking about Zeke and singing Carly Rae Jepsen’s insanely catchy ‘Call Me Maybe’ at the top of my lungs, and I didn’t hear her come in. I stepped out of the shower, looking for a new bottle of conditioner, which my mum had annoyingly left in the bathroom cabinet.
Kelly popped her head around the door and said, ‘Bloody hell, Iris, you’ve lost weight.’
‘Stop checking me out, perv,’ I said, laughing and quickly stepping back behind the frosted glass of the shower cubicle.
She sat down on the towel hamper and tucked into her cupcake, demolishing it in record time. ‘You need to eat at least three,’ she said.
‘I haven’t lost much weight. Least, I don’t think so.’
‘Have you been on the bathroom scales?’
‘No. But I guess I have been doing a lot of exercise lately.’
‘And have you been eating?’
I thought about it. When was the last time I’d had a proper meal? I’d gone from scoffing everything in sight, morose about Daniel, to hardly eating a thing. Every time I thought about Zeke, my stomach clenched, a feeling like butterflies but worse, and I lost my appetite.
Was this more than crazy infatuation? Love was supposed to make you feel like this. New love, anyway. The long-term love I’d had with Daniel was a different thing altogether. We were part of each other. Two sides of the same person. At least until he’d gone postal. But Zeke was totally new and totally exciting. What would it be like to spend the night with him? Cry in front of him? Listen to him talk about his past, his previous relationships, the girls from his phone?
I couldn’t imagine it. Not really. It was too much to start again with someone new. But how could I feel that way already? I was sixteen, not sixty.
Kelly was giving me a sharp look. ‘Tell me exactly what you’re thinking. Right now.’
‘Um …’
‘Tell me.’
‘Er, just wondering if I’m tough enough to start a real relationship with someone new.’
She properly rolled her eyes and handed me a cupcake, which I devoured.
‘Get dressed.’
‘Wasn’t planning on knocking around naked.’
‘So hurry up already.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see. Just wear something skimpy.’
I put on a denim miniskirt and a white strappy vest, and then a fleecy Sea Shepherd jumper over the whole lot, as if an advert for saving the whales could save my trashy outfit.
Kelly changed into a yellow sundress of mine that I hadn’t worn since I was thirteen. It was short on me then. It was positively obscene on all five-foot-seven of Kelly.
She shovelled on as much make-up as our faces could take, which included bronzer, liquid eyeliner, lipliner and gloss, and then she handed me a fake ID from her reliable vendor.
‘We are going on the lash,’ she said.
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll never get in anywhere. We’re blatantly underage.’
‘Let the doormen be the judge of that.’
‘It’s 12.45.’
‘Well then, the sun is over the yardarm, as my mum says.’
‘Are you sure about this?’
We hadn’t taken our fake IDs on the town during broad daylight before. Normally we tried to slip into clubs behind groups of older people, so we wouldn’t be noticed.
This seemed unnecessarily risky.
‘Where are we going? Sailors? Belushi’s?’
‘The Central.’
I groaned. The Central was the most touristy pub in town. During the summer months in Newquay, guys outnumbered girls twenty to one, so the Central would be heaving with out-of-towners looking to impress the local girls with their flashy watches and fat wallets. With my brain foggy from too much sleep, I didn’t think I had the stamina to listen to a load of rubbish from boys I wasn’t interested in.
Kelly gave me the once-over and then said, ‘You need this. Trust me. You need to remember.’
‘Remember what?’
‘How to walk in high heels, for one thing.’
She ushered me down the stairs, and I looked for my house keys as she opened the door. To Daniel. Who, for some reason, was wearing multicoloured Hyperfreak board shorts which he’d teamed with a T-shirt with a smoking-fox on it.
I was standing right behind Kelly, and I saw her body stiffen. Flying across Daniel’s face was a slightly panicky look and then his jaw dropped as he took in my miniskirt and platform shoes.
‘Hello, Stabby,’ Kelly said, without a hint of a smile.
‘What do you want, Daniel?’ I said.
‘You to kick this Zeke dude to the kerb.’
‘Good for you.’
‘I’m sorry I hurt him. Really sorry. But I still don’t like him.’
‘Yeah, you’ve made that plenty clear. Just as well you’re not going out with him, huh?’
Kelly grabbed my wrist and pushed past Daniel, giving him a hard stare.
‘We’re going out,’ she said. ‘So bog off.’
We walked the side streets down into town and I could hear Daniel’s footsteps behind us, at a distance, following. Kelly never turned around, so I couldn’t either. Finally we crossed into the Central beer garden, and when I looked over my shoulder, Daniel was gone.
We were in the beer garden for all of thirty seconds before the first group of lads approached us: fifteen men in their early twenties dressed as superheroes. A man in a padded Superman costume came right up to me and said, ‘Fancy a drink, darlin’?’
‘I dunno. No.’
‘Come on, why not?’
‘OK, well, just a Diet Coke.’
‘Nothing in it?’
I shook my head. ‘Nah, we’re detoxing,’ I said. ‘A whole month without booze.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘What about my friend?’ I said, nodding over to Kelly, who was standing awkwardly and looking through the open double doors towards the bar.
Before he could answer, one of his friends, a lad with blond hair and a Robin outfit, stepped up and said, ‘I’ll get her one.’
My Diet Coke arrived and surprisingly it didn’t have a sneaky shot of vodka in it.
‘What’s your name?’ Superman asked me.
‘Elena.’
‘That’s pretty. But, hey, that’s to be expected.’
This was something that Kelly and I always did when we were out. We’d fabricate new names, new hobbies and sometimes new accents. Kelly would sometimes go totally crazy and tell boys that she was actually twenty-three with two small children at home and a husband in the navy. I never really got this, but she found it hysterical. I was mostly content with a new name and a few new hobbies. Not bungee-jumping or shark-diving. More snail-collecting and trainspotting. I guess it was a test. To weed out the shallow ones.
These guys weren’t creepy or desperate, which couldn’t be said for all of the tourists hitting Newquay. They were just out to have fun and were happy to
chat to some girls, with no strings attached. They had no idea we were sixteen. They’d have been mortified. But that was the thing about make-up and tarty clothes: they could totally fool half-drunk men.
We finished our drinks and then moved to another area of the pub, where we got talking to some lads from Manchester who were spending the summer in Newquay. One of them was training to be an airline pilot, another had scored a job as a barman at Walkabout and the third was just bumming about with his indie band and learning to surf. His name was Matt and he had fair spiky hair and an eyebrow ring. There was something about him, this crazy enthusiasm, that I liked. He nodded his head at everything I said, and really listened. He reminded me of Zeke.
That was when it dawned on me. I hadn’t thought about Zeke, or Daniel, in a whole hour. That was definitely a record. Maybe Kelly had been right to bring me out. Cheesy as it sounded, it had given me a bit of space from the constant worrying.
Matt and his friends walked with us to the next pub, just ten steps away from the Central, a place that had been aptly named Help.
Matt was telling me all about his band, which was called ‘White Side of the Moon’ and he was stoked because they’d been booked for a couple of small gigs around town. He played bass guitar.
‘I can teach you, if you like,’ he said, handing me a glass of Malibu and Coke. Malibu reeked so strongly of coconut that even if my mum smelt it, I could blame it on my shampoo or sunscreen.
‘To play the guitar?’
‘Why not? It’s easy.’
‘Sure it is.’
‘And maybe you could give me a surf lesson? Quid pro quo, Clarice.’
I laughed. Quoting Hannibal Lecter was a debatable strategy thirty minutes after meeting a girl, but with the huge grin on his face, I wasn’t too worried.
I hesitated.
‘What, do you have a boyfriend or something?’ he said, still smiling.
‘Ummm …’