Blue (5 page)

“I'm not. And I'm not stupid. I know that any wave could kill me, and especially the big ones, just like that.” I heard the snap of his fingers. “But that knowledge that you're real close to death? It makes you feel totally alive.”

Adrenalin junkie. No doubt about it.

Then my eyes settled on Cass, who was running up the beach, shrieking, with Daniel chasing her in an attention-seeking way. In five or six steps he caught her and swept her up in his arms. It was one of his old moves. He was super-charming when he wanted to be. It had made me ache the first time he'd done it to me. I thought I was lucky to be with someone who had that much swagger.

Always be suspicious of a person who doesn't question any of their own beliefs, my mom says. They think they know it all and that makes them dangerous to be around.

Oh yeah, Daniel had all the answers. I should have known to beware.

My teeth had begun to chatter in the cold sea air and Zeke put his arm around me. Suddenly Daniel was looking right at me. Slowly he shook his head.

I checked my watch and saw it was way past my curfew.

Crap.

“I gotta take off,” I said to Zeke.

“Yeah, no problem.”

We walked to Zeke's van so he could give me my skateboard, and I saw that someone had left a note pinned to his windshield.

He read it, crumpled it up and tossed it in the back of the van.

“What was that?”

“Just some punk kid.”

“What's it say?”

“Huh? Oh, that some dude is gonna mess me up and telling me to beat it. I dunno. It happens. Just your run-of-the-mill localism.”

“Jesus, surfers can be such assholes.”

“Don't sweat it. People get the wrong idea sometimes. Assume stuff, you know?”

Yeah, I knew all about that. But what had Zeke done to piss people off? He'd only been in town a week.

The next morning my shift started at 8:30 and I paced around tidying up the shop and sipping at a monster cup of coffee for at least an hour. My hands were busy, but all my brain could do was relive the events of the night before.

It was the kind of thing that Kelly liked to say could happen to a girl like me, especially in the months after Daniel, but I never believed it. But then, I'd never met anyone like Zeke before.

There were only two customers and neither of them bought anything. As I pointlessly said thanks to the second of them, the shop phone rang. It was my boss, Billy, in a total panic.

“I'll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.

“It's Saturday. Shouldn't you be relaxing with the wife and kids?” I said.

“The damn press is coming. The
Cornish Guardian
, can you believe? The shop needs to be shipshape and Bristol fashion.”

“OK . . .” I said, not entirely sure what he was talking about. Probably another Billabong promo gimmick. I tossed my empty cardboard coffee cup into the wastepaper basket and began flicking a duster around the till.

“Do I need to do anything else?” I asked.

“Tie your hair back. You'll want to look presentable for the paper.”

“They won't want me in any pictures,” I said. “I'm nobody.”

“Not true, my dear.”

“What's happening anyway?” I said, but he had already put the phone down.

I slipped away from the shop floor to tidy myself up. I kept a kit of toiletries in my locker and I found an old lipstick in there. I slathered it on. It was bright red and reminded me of Cass. I rubbed it off, but it still left a pink stain.

The shop door opened and a girl dressed in a black pencil skirt and a vintage-style blouse walked in. Her sky-high Mary Jane shoes smashed against the stripped wooden floor of the shop. She turned to me and I was dazzled by wide green eyes and shiny red hair.

Hot on her heels was Zeke. As he came through the door, the red-haired girl turned to him and kissed him on both cheeks. She reeked of money. It wasn't just her clothes; it was the way she moved and how she held her head. It had to be the girl I'd seen at yoga. You could tell she had a trust fund as big as the entire GDP of Cornwall.

“Hello, beautiful,” she said to Zeke, batting her eyelashes. “I can't believe you're here already. Not like you to be so punctual! I wonder what could have brought you here on time . . .”

Her voice was really something. The most plummy Home Counties accent that I had ever heard in real life.

Zeke gave me a quick salute and then started talking to the girl in a low voice. She looked over at me with a surprised expression, which didn't make me feel paranoid at all.

I shuffled around tidying handbags and wallets and then took a deep breath and went over to Zeke, who was looking out the window toward some fishing boats sitting in the bay. His hands were shaking a little, so he was either nervous or hungover, and he definitely hadn't drunk more than one can of lager when he was with me, so . . .

The girl was talking loudly on her cell phone. Giving directions to Fistral Beach.

“Hi there,” I said. “How's it going?”

“OK. I guess I didn't sleep much last night.”

“No?” After yoga, surfing and the beach party, I'd slept like the dead. I wondered what had kept him awake.

He looked back out at the sea again and I said, “I had fun last night.”

“Me too.”

He gave me a big smile. I'd said the right thing for once. Technically the night hadn't been that amazing, as I'd been so nervous to be out with someone other than Daniel that I hadn't been able to totally relax for more than two minutes at a time. First impressions were so important; what if I screwed it up and said something that offended Zeke, or something he thought was stupid? And Daniel shaking his head at me had killed my buzz.

“Who's the city chick?” I said.

“Oh, that's just Saskia.”

Just
Saskia. What was he doing here anyway? My early-morning brain couldn't put it all together.

At that moment Billy came in and bustled over to me.

“Iris dear, I see you've met our star. The press will be here shortly. I've brought some chocolate cookies, so could you arrange them pleasingly on a plate and put on the kettle?”

Zeke gave me a sympathetic grimace, and then the door opened to reveal a stream of young girls clutching posters of Zeke.

I read over one of their shoulders:

I knew he was a good surfer, but this was ridiculous. Hawaii had some of the best waves and surfers on the planet, and Zeke was Hawaiian Champion in the Junior Men's category. He hadn't said a word to me about it and we'd spent the whole of the previous evening together. Well, this explained the stream of star-struck teeny-boppers taking pictures. I'd just thought they were acting so giddy around Zeke because of his looks. Apparently I was wrong. In the surf-contest world, Zeke was a megastar.

It made things less complicated for me. There was no way someone like Zeke would stick around in Newquay. He'd have places to go, people to see, contests to surf. He was probably on the Association of Surfing Professionals world tour, in which case his schedule would be brutal: traveling from ocean to ocean, beach to beach. In a few days he'd be gone and everything would go back to its old boring sameness. And I'd go back to watching garbage TV and eating dry cereal.

Over the course of the morning, the shop filled until there was a line out of the door. Zeke kept checking in with me every so often, and even bought me a cappuccino and a cookie from the cafe downstairs. It was hilarious really, all his polite attentions, because he still hadn't said a word to me about his status as a renowned surf champion. Not one word.

In arranging the signing at my shop, was this his way of telling me? I didn't get it. Did he think that would impress me? It didn't seem like him at all. But then how well did I actually know him?

I guessed he could also just have been embarrassed—having to tell a girl something like that would be pretty major. Like saying, “Listen to how cool I am.” It would sound show-offy, to say the least. Then I figured out that actually Zeke probably didn't have anything to do with choosing the venue at all. He was on the Billabong Surf Team and I worked in the Billabong concept store. Where else in Newquay would one of their champion surfers hold a meet-and-greet signing event?

Twelve o'clock came and I couldn't wait to ditch the shop for lunch break. It was boiling in there, with the hot breath and body heat of tourists and Zeke's adoring fans. I grabbed my spare kit from the storeroom and went down to the beach for a surf.

I only caught two waves, as the wind was blowing the surf out and making it choppy, but when I was up I pulled a few head dips, which is where you lean over and stick the top of your head right into the wave face. It sounds stupid, but it's actually pretty lush.

There is something healing about the ocean. I'd always known about it, ever since I was a little kid when I'd go
open-water swimming out past the breakers after a bad day at school. I had known it even through all the pain and hassle with Daniel, but I didn't want to be healed then. I just wanted to keep picking at the scab, making myself feel worse and worse until even Kelly despaired of me.

I looked to the north end of the beach and I saw a jet ski and behind it a surfer who appeared to be flying above the water. I paddled a bit closer and spotted another one. It was Zeke and his brothers, surfing hydrofoil boards, which were unheard of in Newquay. Hydrofoils were a Hawaiian invention and were ridable in even the choppiest conditions, as the board was suspended two feet above the water, with a strut attached to a small plane beneath, so that they harnessed the energy of the deeper part of the wave and the rider didn't get affected by any choppiness on the surface. It looked impossible. Four long lenses were trained on the Francis brothers, and I knew the photos would be all over the newspapers the next day.

I caught a wave to shore, sat on the beach and looked out to sea.

The surf was junky, but thousands of people were in the water. After five minutes or so, I saw a big crowd of people and cameras gathered around a surfer who was walking out of the mush and on to the beach, with a hydrofoil board slung under his arm. Zeke. So now he was doing a photo shoot.

I had to get back to work, so I tried to box around the crowd but Zeke spotted me.

“Iris!” he shouted.

The red-haired girl, Saskia, was there in bare feet, high heels poking out of a designer handbag. Perhaps she was his girlfriend.
She was definitely into him. She kept looking at him adoringly. But then if he had a girlfriend, wasn't he way out of line for taking an interest in me? Maybe he wasn't interested in me. He might have just wanted to be friendly. After all, it wasn't as if he'd made a move on me.

Saskia walked over to me and said, “Do get in the picture, babe.”

A) I hate being called babe, and B) I hate having my photograph taken.

“I'm sopping wet,” I said. “Anyway, nobody cares about me.”

“You'd be surprised.”

What was that supposed to mean? Had Zeke said something to her?

Zeke came and put his arm around my shoulders, then smiled to the camera in a total cheesefest. The photographer from the paper was at least sixty, and he had the smarmiest face I'd ever seen.

Saskia went around to the other side of Zeke and slipped her arm across his lower back.

After a few more clicks of the camera, I turned to Zeke. “I've really gotta get back.”

He took my hand and another flash went off.

“See you tonight?” he said.

“I don't know. I'm supposed to be seeing Kelly. We're going out for a drink.”

“So bring her along too. We're having a party to celebrate a new board that my sponsors have brought out. I have to promote it as part of my deal.”

“Where's the party?”

“Up at the Headland Hotel. It could be fun.”

“I'll ask Kelly what she wants to do.”

“Go out with the boy,” the newspaper photographer shouted. “Look at him—he's living the dream!”

Wasn't he just? Zeke was living every surfer's dream, I thought grumpily. But some of us were in the real world and were paid by the hour.

I swung back to the shop, stripped off my wetsuit, got dressed and got back to work. No one except a handful of tourists came back into the shop that day, and I had no idea what Zeke and Saskia were up to, or why Zeke seemed so keen for me to go to this party.

I thought about Saskia and the way that she seemed so full of herself and confident. Oh well, those types of girls could never surf, and Zeke obviously liked being around other surfers. Whoever she was, Saskia couldn't be Zeke's type and he couldn't be hers. She'd have her eye on an investment banker with a sports car and a pension plan. Surely.

Kelly called my home phone about three seconds after I'd gotten in the door from work. I slung my skateboard against the wall and picked up.

“We still on for today? And before you say no, you'd better say yes because I've washed my hair especially, shaved my legs
and
done a face mask.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I dunno. The thing is, I've been invited to this party.”

“You're ditching me?”

“No way. It's not like that at all. You're invited too. We don't have to go. I just thought I'd mention it in case you wanted to do something a bit different.”

“Different. What sort of party is this?” she asked, suspicious. She still hadn't forgiven me for the time I took her to my mother's Tupperware party. She said she had never been so bored in
her entire life, or learned so much about plastic food-storage containers.

“It's a surfboard launch.”

“I saw that on Facebook. How did you score an invite?”

Facebook. That was a point. I opened the app on my phone and typed Zeke's name into the search bar. No personal profile but one fan page. With 121,000 likes.

My brain helpfully reminded me that I'd barely scraped five hundred Facebook friends.

“Zeke asked me to come.”

“Zeke?”

“The guy from yoga I was talking to.”

“Whoa . . . back up! You've been seeing that hot dude from yoga on the sly? Go Iris!”

“It's not like that. We're just friends.”

“Friends with benefits, ha.”

“No. Well, I suppose getting an invite to a swanky surf party is a benefit, but nothing else has happened.”

“How come he could get you an invitation? Friends in high places?”

“He
is
the high places. He's a surf superstar.”

“You're not serious.”

“He's the Junior Men's Champion of Hawaii.”

“Score!”

“Oh yeah, he's a big deal.”

“You don't sound all that happy about it, Iris . . .”

“I'm plenty happy for him.”

There was an awkward silence.

“You're going out with an uber-cool surf champ! This is legend.”

“He's hardly my boyfriend. We've only just met.”

“He's kissed you though.”

“Nope. And PS, are you blind? Why would he kiss me? Have you not seen him? He's prettier than I am. Much prettier.”

“I saw the way he was looking at you. Every time you smiled at him he went all sparkly.”

“You've been reading
way
too much
Twilight
.”

“Not actually sparkly. But his face lit up. Honestly. I'm not messing with you, girl, I promise.”

“Well, he hasn't made a move on me yet, so he can't be that interested, can he?”

“He will kiss you though. At the party, I bet.”

“I don't even want a boyfriend.”

“Everyone wants a boyfriend.”

“Not me. I've had enough boyfriends to last me a lifetime.”

“You've had three.”

“Exactly. That's two, maybe three, too many.”

Kelly sighed. Then she had a thought. “What exactly are you planning to wear?”

“My new Roxy jeans and that black sleeveless top.”

“I'm coming over.”

Fifteen minutes later Kelly pulled up in a taxi with an armful of glittery dresses and a pile of shoeboxes almost as tall as her.

“We have like one hour before we have to get there,” I said. “I don't think we've got enough time for you to turn me into a full-on drag queen.”

“Oh shush, and move your butt, girl!”

I had to laugh. Kelly was rarely this girly. My PG-rated relationship with a top surfer was obviously bringing out her romantic side.

My mom was at the library overseeing a book launch by someone from Newquay's Historical Society, so we had the house to ourselves. My mom's a teacher; not one of the nice, generous kind, who believe in the goodness of all children. She's one of the harsh ones who gets through the boredom of invigilating three-hour GCSE exams by playing games with other teachers at the expense of the pupils. Like the one where they walk around the room and the mission is to find the ugliest kid, who they then go and stand next to. Or in round two maybe it's the boy most likely to commit a violent crime. Or the girl most likely to get pregnant before her next birthday. And then they just stand next to that poor kid who's scribbling away, and smirk at each other. My mom's proud of the way she is. She thinks there are too many artistic, sensitive types in the world. My dad was one of those.

The first thing Kelly did was brush my hair so that it was really shiny. Then she sprayed it with water from my mom's plant mister, then hairspray, and then she wrapped a thin headband over my head, cutting across my forehead. Starting from the front, she wound small sections over and under the band until my whole hair was done. I looked like some forties reject. It was the sort of hairdo someone like Saskia would have.

“Don't worry,” she said. “It's not going to stay like that. But when you shake out your hair before we leave, you are going to have the most gorgeous curls. I saw a YouTube tutorial for heatless curls. I swear it works.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. Right. Make-up.”

Kelly was a great painter, which is what made her so good at make-up. Basically, she painted on a more obvious version of her face every morning. She didn't use loads of make-up on me but she had all sorts of tricks for making my eyes look bluer and my mouth look poutier. She had a shedload of products in one of the shoeboxes. Things with names like “Moonbeam Cheek Highlighter” and “Liar Lips Mouth Stain.” Her mother worked on the make-up counter at Boots, so Kelly got all the best samples for free.

I had to admit that I did look all right when she'd finished.

“That isn't just pretty,” Kelly said. “That is practically Model Pretty.”

“Yeah, right. Don't overdo it, friend.”

Kelly smiled.

“What about you?” I said.

“What about me? This isn't my date. Quick swipe of mascara and lipgloss and I'm done. Anyway, nobody's going to be looking at me with you looking like that.”

Talk about overkill. I looked good for me but I wasn't going to be stopping any traffic.

“What about the guy from yoga that you were laughing with? He might be there,” I said, remembering the cute guy with the fluffy blond hair that she'd been chatting to.

“He might be. But I'm not interested.”

“No?”

“Or rather, he isn't. He's 100 percent gay.”

“Really? How can you tell?”

“I can always tell. Especially when they mention that after class they're going over to their boyfriend's house.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It's OK. The best ones are always gay.”

I didn't know about that, but I let it go.

“So what am I wearing?” I said, looking through her dresses, which were all from fancy shops in Truro and Plymouth.

“Try them on and we'll see.”

“All of them? The taxi will be here in ten minutes.”

“Dammit. OK, go for that strapless one.”

It was a clingy pink number that screamed hooch.

“I don't wear pink.”

“It's actually fuchsia.”

“Pink.”

“That purple rockabilly one, then. It's short though, so wear leggings maybe? And you can't wear a bra with the halter-neck.”

I looked at it. It had little black skulls printed on the fabric and black net hanging down from under the skirt. It was pretty awesome.

“I'll wear my Docs with it.”

“Uh, no you won't.”

“Docs are perfect with those kinds of dresses. Without Doc Martens they're just sad.”

“I wear it with stilettos.”

“Yeah, but you're a total slut.”

Kelly rolled up a
Cosmo
mag and hit me on the head with it.

“Dressing like a slut doesn't make me a slut,” she corrected me. She looked up at the clock. “Five minutes, Iris.”

I peeled off my work clothes. Kelly had seen me naked plenty of times, as we'd pretty much grown up together, so I threw all my clothes into a heap on the floor and stepped into her dress. It was a bit tight around the waist, but OK if I held my stomach in. Kelly was busy stepping into the pink dress, which looked surprisingly good against her dark hair and olive skin. She loosened the band around my head and my hair came tumbling out in perfect curls. Kelly gave it a quick misting with a shine spray and it was done.

The beep of the taxi sent us running down the stairs to get our shoes. By the time I'd laced up my Docs, Kelly was already in the front seat chatting away to the cab driver.

“Headland Hotel,” I said, sitting down on the back seat with a big swish of my skirt.

Kelly turned to me and said, “This is going to be a big night for you, Iris. I just know it.”

“Feel it in your waters, can you, dear?” This was the cab driver.

“Just look how beautiful she is. Her new boy is going to be falling over himself to show her a good time.”

“Oh God,” I said.

“What?”

“You've made me really nervous now. I'm bound to say or do something stupid.”

“Confidence, girl. You're going to rock his world.”

Basically, we had no idea what we were walking into.