Blue (7 page)

Where had that come from? Had I just been possessed by the ghost of a slutty chambermaid?

He waited for a few seconds and then said in his lovely accent, “You wanna stay here?”

Oh God. Didn't he want me to?

“Well, I mean, it
is
nicer than Kelly's room. Have you lost count?”

“Nope. Sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two . . .”

“It was just an idea. Doesn't matter, I'll stay at Kelly's.”

“No . . . Stay here.”

“That OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

He hesitated again, like he was going to say something else but changed his mind.

“Cool.”

What am I doing? Am I drunk on half a glass of wine and two sips of beer?

No, you're drunk on him.

When he finished his press-ups, he rolled over and said, “Anchor me?”

“Er, sorry?”

“Gotta do stomach crunches.”

“Right.”

“Sit on my feet?”

He sat back and I squatted down, awkward in my super-short rockabilly dress, and eased myself on to his ankles. His skin felt warm against the cool of my bare thighs.

I looked at the hair falling around his face, as he came forward with his palms bracing the sides of his head. His eyes were locked in concentration. I stared at him, looked straight at those sea-blue eyes, bluer even than the sky, and caught a glimpse of the competitive, totally driven pro-surfer that lurked behind the chilled-out exterior. Behind all the hippy dippy stuff was a boy who was absolutely going to win.

He looked across and caught my gaze. His eyes were bright and his face flushed, but he hadn't broken a sweat. He was crazily fit.

“Done. Just need to find my cell phone and we can party.”

Oh dear.

He looked around his room for the phone but of course he couldn't find it.

“I guess I had it in my pocket when I went to the beach. Some local kid's probably listing it on eBay right now. I'll have to pick up another one tomorrow. You have an Apple Store here?”

“No, but Truro does. You're not bummed about losing your phone?”

“Yeah, it's too bad; I had some nice pictures of Fistral on there. But, no worries, I'm always losing cells. I have my planner and contacts backed up to iCloud, so I won't lose anything important.”

So the numbers of the eight million girls on his old iPhone would just be transferred over to his new iPhone. It figured.

He scooped the shirt off the ironing board, buttoned it and tried to straighten out his hair without even bothering to look in the mirror. Then he put his wallet and room key card into his back pocket, grabbed his bottle of Corona and opened the door for me.

“After you,” he said.

“Do you want your room card back?”

There was a moment thick with stuff neither of us was saying, before he said, “Hold on to it.”

I stood next to him in the elevator and my head was a jumble of thoughts: busted iPhones, Hawaiian shirts, Zeke doing sit-ups, the fact that I had just invited myself to stay over in his penthouse suite . . .

We walked into the blare of the Headland's function room.

“Anders! Come talk to my girl Iris.”

My girl?

“Golden Boy tells me you're a natural. Shredding Fistral, so he says,” Anders said, handing Zeke what looked like a pint of some rank real ale.

“Wouldn't go that far.”

“Zeke only tells the truth. This I know. So if Zeke tells me you've got something, then you've got something. Mind you, all surfers are narcissistic suicidal jerks with a chip the size of Mars on their shoulder, me included. It's just the cloth we're cut from, sweetheart, so being a natural surfer isn't necessarily a compliment.”

He talked like he was being paid by the word. It was difficult to keep up with him. What he said was pretty offensive, but he said it with enough charm to be able to get away with it.

“I don't have a death wish,” I pointed out. “I'm just in it for the stoke. Plus I only surf when I can handle the conditions.”

This comment made Anders talk even faster.

“Handle the conditions? The ocean is a bitch that will suckle you at her tit or dash your brains out on a rock, like dear old Lady Macbeth. And she can change in seconds. Don't tell me you haven't been caught out? Course you have. We all have. One mistake can result in death—that's why surfing is classed as an extreme sport. Oh, it's the best rush you'll ever have in your life, but every wave could be your last, and if you don't admit that it's a potentially lethal way to spend an afternoon, you shouldn't be out there. For the ultimate thrill, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. Are you willing?”

“Er, I, um . . .” I mumbled, feeling pretty sure that the guy had been smoking something not available in stores.

“He has a point,” Zeke said. “The beach in Morocco where I train during the spring? A surfer dies there every month, and the waves aren't even that gnarly.”

“I'll just have to take my chances,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I was.

“Atta girl. Well, darlin', it just so happens that Billabong is looking to sign a hot young female charger from Britain. They want an unknown. Someone who hasn't been sponsored before, someone they can build up from scratch and claim credit for. Zeke says you've never even gone semi-pro, not even for free wetsuits. That right?”

“Yeah, my mom would've never let me try for sponsorship, even if I really wanted it.”

“Old-school hippie type? Despises the commercialization of surfing?”

I didn't want to tell him that my mom wasn't a hippie at all; she just hated the risks of surfing; constantly worried about me breaking my neck, or drowning.

“So, are you interested?”

“For real?”

“Yep. It's going to be a big deal. They're looking for ten girls internationally, one from each participating country. Five grand check, magazine coverage, entry to a series of new girls' contests that will run parallel to ASP Qualifying Series events—same locations and dates as the main events, to guarantee the biggest audience. It's gonna rival Rip Curl's ‘Gromsearch,' but this is just for girls under eighteen. Billabong is spending a lot of money on this, really investing in the future of women's surfing.”

“That sounds awesome,” I said, which was an understatement. All the surf magazines wrote articles about the sexism in pro-surfing: how hardly any money was spent on women's surfing, compared to men's; on how women surfers were objectified and judged mostly on their ability to look hot in a bikini. Those same magazines would run pictures of female pro-surfers posing in their underwear, whereas the men were almost always pictured actually surfing. They didn't seem to see the irony.

Anders continued. “The girl's gotta have the attitude, the ability and total courage, because the waves you'll be riding won't be ‘bitchen' or ‘sweet rides'; they'll be killers. Can you handle that?”

Zeke interrupted him. “Iris will give any girl a run for her money. You should see her, Anders. She's a wave magnet. She has great instincts and no fear.”

Well, that was a laugh. If only he knew just how much fear I had in me. I'd been afraid of everything for months on end. Surfing was different though. You could lose yourself in the surf. Or find yourself. Or something.

“How about we try you out tomorrow morning?”

“Are you serious?” I said. “Is it even good tomorrow?”

I hadn't checked the surf report and you could never bank on the surf being good from one day to the next. Beach breaks weren't as predictable as reef or point breaks. The swells came from storms deep in the Atlantic and you never knew exactly when one would arrive and how it would work against the beach.

Zeke turned to me and took my hand. “He's serious. He'll see what I saw.”

“Well, you've got my hopes up now, Zeke, so she'd better not disappoint. Let's hope she's the next Stephanie Gilmore.”

Gilmore was incredible. I wasn't fit to surf the same waves as someone like that. It was ridiculous to compare us, but it was exciting to think of what could happen if by some miracle I managed to impress Anders.

I looked over to Kelly, who was listening, slack-jawed. Saskia was standing next to her with a weird smug look on her face. She was expecting me to bottle it. To say I couldn't possibly do something like that. Well, screw it. Why couldn't I at least try? What kind of girl wouldn't even try something because she was worried about losing? A gutless wonder.

“I'll be there,” I said. It would be super nerve-wracking and it was bound to end in hideous, embarrassing failure, but I had half a white-wine spritzer and three sips of beer inside me, and that was apparently all it took for me to get some guts.

Someone else caught Anders's attention and he moseyed off. My head was reeling. What had happened to my life in the past day? It was crazy. To think I'd been in my pajamas stuffing ice cream for pretty much all of Thursday and now this! I actually had the chance to surf in front of a big kahuna surf agent. What a difference a day could make. The yoga woman had said saying yes could change your life. Maybe she was right.

Kelly was on the verge of doing cartwheels. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God, Iris!”

“Good luck to you,” Saskia said. “This could be the big time, princess. Don't cock it up.”

What can you say to that?
I won't?
Pointless when you know you will.

Zeke was staring into his glass when he suddenly looked up and said, “Iris, come outside with me. I wanna show you something.”

We walked across the heaving dance floor, through some double doors and out on to a terrace which had steps leading down to the grass. The sea wind sent clouds racing past the stars, and I felt goosebumps come up on my arms.

There was a strange noise out there, a deep punchy boom that almost seemed to rock the headland itself.

Zeke pointed to out to the dark water, where an arc of white was racing toward the cliff beneath us.

“Wow,” I said. “I've lived here all my life and I've hardly ever seen it. I can't believe it's happening tonight.”

“Yep, the swell's hit just right and the Cribbar's going off. What do you think? The faces of those waves are, what, twenty feet high?”

The Cribbar is a rocky underwater reef just off Towan Headland, and when conditions are right, with a low tide and a huge swell, the reef sends massive waves surging toward the shore. Cribbar waves are between fifteen feet and fifty feet in height. The sort of waves they get in the winter in Hawaii.

“Yeah, eighteen to twenty. Not the biggest ever, and it probably won't double up with the tide coming in, but seriously cool,” I said, thinking the night was getting stranger and more magical by the hour.

The Cribbar only worked for a few hours and most surfers—sane surfers—steered clear, although one or two might give it a try, if they'd surfed big waves abroad. But it was serious shit. It wasn't called the Widow Maker for nothing. You didn't mess around with power like that unless you absolutely knew you could handle it.

Zeke was watching the waves, mesmerized. He wouldn't even look at me when he was talking. I could feel the lure of the water on him. He was itching to get in there. Even alone; even in the dark.

“You ever surf a big wave, Iris?”

“Five to six foot . . .” Which seemed big enough.

I sat down on a bench and pulled my skirt down over my knees to keep warm.

Startled as if he'd been sleepwalking, Zeke turned and stood in front of the bench, looking down at me.

“I wanna stick around longer.”

“In Newquay?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you?”

“Don't know. I'll work on Anders.”

“You think he'll let you stay?”

“Maybe. Nanna has this enlarged heart thing. It's getting worse and I wanna be around for the end.”

“Really sorry. That's so sad.”

“It's OK. She's ready. She says she's lived a ‘completed life'; seen her children grow up and have their own, which is all she ever wanted. But if she dies it's gonna hit my pa like a fifty-five-gallon drum.”

I thought about the weeks after my own grandma had died, and how shattered my mother had been. How the tears kept ambushing her. How she'd told me that, even though she was forty, losing her mother made her feel like some orphan kid.

“When were you supposed to be going home?”

“Next Monday. I start contest training in Portugal on the Tuesday. Then the week after, I'm in Utah for a base-jumping and slacklining trip with some guys from home. First vacation I've had in two years.”

Some vacation.

He couldn't go so soon. I needed more time with him. This amazing boy couldn't come into my life only to leave it again almost right away.

“But even if I do have to leave then, I gotta come back to Newquay next month for the Saltwater Contest.”

“OK.”

A month was forever. In a month he could meet a hundred girls that were cooler, prettier and nicer than me. Girls who knew how to do things like base-jumping and slacklining.

Zeke sat down beside me, putting his arm around my shoulders. I could feel the warmth of his body, so much warmer than
mine. I rested my head against his shoulder and looked up at the night gulls wheeling in the wind.

Was he going to kiss me?

I never found out the answer to that question as, coming around the corner of the hotel, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, were Daniel and his crew. I say crew, but their private little surf club was more like a gang.

Daniel was doing this aggressive walk where his feet were slightly turned out to the sides, and it looked like he had an invisible roll of carpet under each arm.

Just turn into the hotel and don't look back, Daniel
.

Daniel looked up at us. The laugh died on his lips and he stared hard at me and then Zeke. He said something to his friends and then suddenly me and Zeke were faced with six boys.

“All right, Iris?” Daniel said, like it was a threat, not a question.

I could see that he had been drinking. His face was flushed and his eyes were definitely glazed.

“Yeah, peachy,” I said, in my most formal accent. “You?”

“Having a kiss and a cuddle with the new boyfriend, are you?”

“I told you, he's not my boyfriend, and even if he was, that'd have nothing to do with you.”

“We just came out to look at the Cribbar waves, dude. They're breaking clean.” Zeke said this in a friendly way, trying to defuse the tension, I guessed.

“We're not fucken blind.”

“Didn't say you were, brah.”

“You need to watch the way you're talking to me.
Brah
.”

“Chill out, yeah?” I said to Daniel. His attitude was violent; I had never seen him so aggressive. Like he was juiced on steroids or something.

“Very cozy you look out here, under the stars. Very romantic.”

“Oh, fuck off, Daniel.”

“What did you say to me?
Slut
.”

That was it. Zeke had been all politeness until he heard that word. He jumped up and got right into Daniel's face and said, “Don't talk to her like that.” His voice sounded weird, really serious and low.

“And what are you gonna do about it? You overrated. Pissball. Yank.”

“Cool it,” I said. “You're drunk, Daniel.”

“He thinks he's the big man,” Daniel went on, “but he's a total pussy.”

“I'm the pussy? Yeah, keep surfing your two-foot waves, dude.”

“You don't even paddle out. You get towed by a jet ski. Afraid to mess up your pretty hair? Pussy.”

“You can't catch a train with a skateboard. It's about speed, not balls. And you really don't wanna call me a pussy again.”

“Come on,” Daniel was saying, “how hard is tow-in surfing?”

“Pretty fucking hard actually,” Zeke said. “Unless you think surfing a super-fast wave with a sixty-foot face is easy. But then you wouldn't know anything about that, would you? Stick to the little kid stuff and I'll be out there with the men catching the real waves.”

I cut in.

“Zeke has done nothing to you, Daniel. You're just talking crap. Go home. See Cass.”

“Oh, here she goes. Wetting her underpants over some fuckin' twinkletoes poser. He's not even English, let alone Cornish. Don't know what you're thinking, shacking up with that. It's embarrassing. Thought more of you, girl.”

“Oh, racism too. You're delightful tonight, Daniel. Just go home and take your psycho friends with you.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a great idea,” Zeke said. Then added, “
Aloha
.”

Daniel punched Zeke.