Swell (18 page)

‘Good luck, dude.’

I had to fight the urge to pull him to me like a mother and tell him not to go.

‘Wow, you guys look like you’re at a funeral,’ Rory laughed. ‘It’s a surf comp, you’re supposed to enjoy it.’

‘So are you looking forward to it?’ I asked to lighten the mood.

Rory pursed his lips.

‘Well I don’t know if you look forward to Chopes as such, mate. This wave has claimed more lives than any other wave in the world in the last ten years and paddling in is harder than towing in. It’s the surfer against the monster and it’s a technical wave to ride.’

‘Oh and you wonder why we look sombre?’

Rory dipped his head and smiled.

‘OK it’s pretty gnarly but you just have to approach it with respect. The thing is I could go out there today and catch the ride of my life. And life would be boring as hell if we didn’t risk it once in a while.’

‘You love this don’t you?’

Rory gave me a crooked smile.

‘Too right, bring it on!’

He pulled himself up to kiss Ruby and when he paddled away I reached over and clasped her hand.

‘He’ll be OK,’ I whispered, ‘and so will Jason.’

Chuck clicked his tongue.

‘He goddamn better be. Dead clients ain’t too good for the bank balance you know what I’m sayin’?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The first day of the competition was both exhilarating and exhausting. I had done very little except sit in a boat in the scorching sunshine and watch wave after awesome wave but, after a dinner of fresh fish, rice and mango salad, I retired to the cosy wooden hut that was my home for the duration of the contest. In preparation for my arrival, it had been decorated with fresh flowers. Petals had been strewn romantically across the bed. It still smelled like an exquisite box of sweets.

My high double bed was shrouded in a mosquito net, making it look like the bed of a fairytale princess. I sat cross-legged and let the inspiration of the day flood out. My fingers moved effortlessly on the keyboard of my laptop as if I were playing a well-practised melody on a piano. I wrote about the wave, the place and the people. About the smells and sounds and the adrenalin that had been coursing through my veins all day just watching Jason and Rory paddle into perilous waves for a few seconds of glory.

‘Hey, Bailey, are you coming to the bar?’ said Jason.

I looked up from my work to see his head poking around the door. In just a few days, his hair had turned a whiter shade of blond and his cheeks had caught the sun. He positively glowed. Jason had, everyone had agreed, caught the biggest wave and he radiated the confidence of a man who had spent an extremely good day at the office.

‘I’m working right now, Jason, but thanks.’

‘I admire your dedication my esteemed biographer but you know what they say about all work and no play.’

‘I do but equally all play and no work won’t get the job done.’

Jason smiled and kicked off his sandals at the door.

‘You have an answer for everything,’ he said as he entered the hut. ‘May I?’

He lifted the edge of the mosquito net. I nodded and he crawled underneath, settling cross-legged beside me on the bed.

‘What are you writing about?’

‘You of course. This is your book remember.’

‘Right,’ he nodded. ‘Read me some.’

He tried to read over my shoulder but I quickly lowered the screen.

‘Writers are very solitary creatures, Jason. I can only show you my work when I feel it’s ready to be divulged. Otherwise it loses its magic.’

He leaned back against the headboard and linked his hands behind his head.

‘I understand. As long as you’re writing magic, that’s fine by me. Now don’t mind me. I’ll be quiet.’

Jason stretched out on the bed beside me, crossed his legs at the ankles and closed his eyes. I was instantly distracted. His soft grey T-shirt shifted up from the waist of his shorts just enough to reveal a couple of inches of bronzed skin. His firm stomach settled inverted from his hipbones when he lay on his back and a thin caterpillar of blond hair ran up the centre of his belly. The hair on his legs was much darker, almost black in the crevices of his solid blocks of muscle. I glanced at the waistband of his khaki walk shorts then tried to shift my eyes away, but they rested on the hard slab of stomach before travelling up over his broad chest and his latissimus dorsi muscles that spread out from his back to his raised arms like the wings of a flying fox. His biceps bulged against his smooth forearms. From the gentle curve of his Adam’s Apple, my eyes moved slowly
over the neat, dark blond six o’clock shadow on his square chin to his soft beige bow lips. I gulped and flicked my eyes to his. Thank goodness his lids were closed and he could not see me absorbing every inch of the most perfect body I think I had seen in my life.

I shakily exhaled and shook my head to rid my brain of the thoughts that had preoccupied it since our kiss at the ranch. I could still taste him. Despite the fact we had shared a very intense and passionate moment, we had managed to still be comfortable with each other since arriving in Tahiti. I hoped it was simply because we were mature individuals who were very fond of each other. I suspected, however, it was because deep down Jason knew he was right and that my resistance was not because I did not find him attractive. I sometimes wondered whether he could see right through me and read the thoughts in my head. If he could, he would have every right to feel smug.

I allowed my eyes one more casual journey over his body, momentarily lost myself in a silent fantasy and then returned to my work. Jason fell asleep and breathed rhythmically on the bed beside me.

The first thing I saw when I woke up was the blinking blue light of my laptop on standby. The next thing I saw was the shape of a man’s head on the pillow beside me. I blinked in the early morning light and rubbed away the mascara I knew would have smudged under my eyes. I tried to ease myself away from Jason’s side as if trying not to wake an angry dog.

‘Morning, Bailey,’ he said, stretching himself out without the slightest hint of embarrassment, ‘so you didn’t work all night. Did you sleep well?’

‘Um, yes, er you?’ I pulled the cotton sheet up to my chin. ‘I must have dozed off. I didn’t know you were planning on staying.’

‘I wasn’t but sometimes no plan is the best plan. Man, I slept like a baby.’

He sat up and the sheet fell from his shoulders to reveal a naked torso. I gasped and shut my eyes.

Jason laughed.

‘Don’t panic I’m not naked under here. I just got a bit hot that’s all. You can open your eyes.’

I opened one eye and then the other. They say the all-important factor in choosing a property is location, location, location. If the view from my bed was anything to go by, my wood hut had just doubled in value.

Jason reached under the pillow for his T-shirt and pushed the sheet away with his feet. I breathed again when I saw he was still wearing his shorts.

‘Don’t be shy,’ he said, flicking out his T-shirt and hitting me gently with it, ‘we’re friends.’

‘Yes but I don’t make a habit of sleeping with my friends.’

‘Relax, it was just sleeping. We kept each other company. It could have been worse. You could have woken up next to Chuck or Oli.’

‘Eugh,’ I shivered.

I twirled my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck and wriggled free of the covers.

Jason pulled his T-shirt on over his head. I heard footsteps on the terrace outside and cringed at the thought of Chuck catching us like this. However innocent we knew it
was, it would not look that way. I yanked at the hem of Jason’s T-shirt and slipped the material down over his back. He looked back at me and winked.

‘I’d prefer you to be undressing me but I guess it will have to do.’

‘Get out of here and stop teasing,’ I smirked.

We both crawled to the edge of the bed and Jason fiddled with the mosquito net to find an exit.

‘Did you write magic by the way?’ he said.

‘Oh yes, it was utterly magical I promise you.’

‘Was it really you motherfucking whore?’ shrieked a very distinguishable voice.

I whipped my head around so fast, I overbalanced and tumbled out of bed. The mosquito net caught on my watchstrap and yanked out of its ceiling hook. Jason and I fell to the floor with a crash and flailed around like flies caught in a spider’s web. When I worked out which way was up I blinked through the netting at the spindly woman who stood over us like a hungry red back spider ready to kill its trapped prey.

‘Portia,’ Jason gasped, ‘what the hell are you doing here? I thought we talked about this in Australia.’

The barbed toe of her stiletto hit him squarely in the left kidney.

‘It was a fucking surprise!’ she seethed, her eyes flashing wildly.

She’s wearing stilettos in Tahiti. Who wears stilettos in Tahiti?
was all I could think, until she let out a war cry.

‘I’m gonna kill you, you fucking English whore.’

‘Nice to know you haven’t forgotten my name. How lovely to see you again, Portia.’

She launched herself at the mosquito net and tried to rip it from us to get at my flesh.

‘Bitch, whore, fucking groupie prostitute,’ she cried.

‘Portia, please stop,’ Jason shouted, pulling at the skinny limbs of the wild creature masquerading as a woman.

‘Ouch, Jason, just get this lunatic off me.’

When Jason finally succeeded in prising my assailant’s acrylic nails from my hair, I had a bleeding lip, a patchwork of bruises and an eye that was beginning to swell like a rising soufflé. I struggled to catch my breath and Jason was fighting to keep Portia’s arms by her sides when another female figure appeared at the doorway. In contrast to Portia, Ruby radiated goodness like the fairy at the top of the Christmas tree.

‘Bailey, darl’, you are not going to believe my news, it’s just so amazing… oh. My God, Bailey, what happened to your face? And Jason, what are you…? Oh, it’s you.’

Her stern expression looked out of place on Ruby’s fresh little face.

‘We didn’t do anything,’ I said meekly. ‘We were just sleeping.’

Ruby floated towards me, her simple presence calming the scene. She looked naturally beautiful in a thigh-length white dress dotted with faint pink hearts and a pair of pale pink leather pumps. Portia’s cat eyes narrowed as Ruby sailed gently past her, hardly acknowledging her presence. Portia may have been a desirable, sexual beauty but even she could not compete with the effortless prettiness of Ruby. She had one up on Portia in that she was beautiful inside and out.

‘You poor thing,’ she soothed, touching my bruised cheek. ‘Let’s get that seen to, darl’.’

I let her guide me towards the door.

‘So, what was your news?’ I asked.

‘It seems out of place now but, oh well, it will lighten the mood I suppose.’ She stopped at the doorway and waved the fingers on her left hand. ‘Rory asked me to marry him last night and I said yes.’

‘Congratulations,’ I gasped and pulled her to my tender ribs. ‘I’m so happy for you.’

From the unearthly sound that Portia made behind us, one would have thought King Herod’s henchmen had just popped round to decapitate her newborn baby. Ruby and I ran from the hut and left Jason to tame the banshee.

‘Poor guy,’ I said as we ran through the trees towards the restaurant.

‘Stupid bloody idiot,’ Ruby replied.

‘Gosh, Ruby, I think that’s the harshest thing I’ve heard you say about someone.’

‘Well it’s true. He feels sorry for her and he keeps letting her come back to spend time with him. She just stirs things up with her devil fork and unsettles everybody. She’s a bitch and you mark my words, with Portia around we can all forget about Jason’s world title.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Ruby’s prediction was surprisingly accurate. She may have been a sweet girl who would not ask someone to move if they were standing on her foot but she had also been around the surf world long enough to know how things worked and what state of mind Jason had to be in to perform at his best. Clearly, at least to all of us, a state of mind involving Portia was not it.

The swell dropped for the final day of the competition but the waves were still of such magnitude that by the tenth heat of the day there had been one dislocated shoulder, two grated faces, several broken toes and a ‘semi-serious’ head injury that would have had the average human taking several month’s sick leave.

Of course the unofficial bikini contest in the channel sent Portia in a spin even though she could have given every girl there a run for her money with her naturally toned, petite figure that had been taken beyond perfection by her plastic surgeon. Not that I wasted my breath in telling her so.

‘Jason’s a good, intelligent guy who hates drugs but that chick is more addictive than crack and more dangerous for real,’ was Chuck’s summation of the Portia situation. ‘Tell him, B, he listens to you.’

‘You tell him, you’re his manager.’

‘But you’re his…’ – Chuck struggled to finish the sentence – ‘He’s not sleeping with her but the fact she’s here hanging out, does it not bother you, dude?’

‘I’m his biographer,’ I said firmly, ‘and that is all. If he wants to allow some stupid girl to wreck his head then there is very little I can do about it.’

I found it hard to sleep that night. It bothered me. And the fact that it bothered me bothered me even more.

Usually so focused and relaxed when he paddled out to his aquatic office, Jason seemed to go to pieces in Portia’s presence. He made tactical errors and simple mistakes, falling on waves that he would usually make with his eyes shut. Unsurprisingly, Jason lost his quarterfinal heat to a young wildcard surfer from France who, at the age of sixteen, looked set to be the youngest surfer ever to qualify for the top echelon of professional surfing. Petit Sylvain, as he was known, was tri-lingual as well as three times better looking than most of the rest of the surfers and supremely talented. He was a sponsor’s dream. Poseidon had snapped him up at the age of ten and ever since, Oli had arranged for his family to take their other two children out of day school and move around the world to the best surf spots to guarantee Sylvain’s future in surfing. The family’s future rested on his shoulders. It sounded like an immense amount of pressure to put on a young man but I had to admit, it seemed unlikely Sylvain would choose to jack in a lifestyle surfing tropical islands for millions of Euros to hang out on street corners drinking cheap spirits with his teenage mates.