The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (17 page)

“Fucking hell!” Darren shouted at the sky and he went next, copying John’s technique and disappearing the same way. I’d picked myself up by now and retreated a bit to higher ground. From there I could see the two of them paddling as hard as they could. They were paddling straight out, but the rip was so strong they were being dragged sideways faster, back the way we’d just walked. But they didn’t even notice. Every few strokes they had to interrupt what they were doing for another duck dive to get under a new wall of water that pushed them back and battered them around. It looked pretty full on.
 

My heart was pumping like mad and I felt the wetsuit tight against my chest. It didn’t feel constrictive anymore, it felt thin, no match for the wind that cut across the headland. I didn’t know if I wanted to go in or not, actually that’s a lie. I’d have just sat down and watched from the rocks if I’d felt I had a choice. But there was no choice. How could I face John and Darren ever again unless I got in there? So I picked my way back towards the water until the ends of the swells were once again clawing at my knees. I locked my teeth together to stop them chattering, with cold, or fear, I don’t know. I got lucky then and there was a break in the waves, just a little lull, so before I could change my mind, before I even knew I was doing it, I threw myself forward and started paddling, ignoring the feel of rocks scraping at the tips of my fingers.

Because I’d seen John and Darren get pulled so fast to the left, I aimed more to the right than they had, much more, and this seemed to help, or maybe I just got lucky. I had to make three fast duck dives, the last a deep one where I could feel the wave sucking hard off my back, like a beast clawing at me as it rolled over my head. When I surfaced you could hear its anger that I’d slipped through, this snarling moan that went on howling as it rolled away from me. Then it went quiet. Eerie quiet. I paddled fast through this long flat section where the sea was bubbling and swirling like a fast-moving river - the air pushed underwater by the waves was finding its way back to the surface. This was the impact zone and I knew you don’t want to hang around here. Ahead of me a new set was building and I forced my arms to work faster, ignoring the pain in my muscles as I dragged myself through the boiling water. I had to get over the waves before they broke, that was all that mattered in the world.
 

 
Suddenly the first wave was right in front of me, still unbroken, but feathering and about to unload. I put everything I had into pulling my arms through the water. I was paddling uphill and the swell was transforming into a plunging, breaking wave not in front of me but
around
me, to my right it steepened and hollowed and threw itself out and down in a hissing, ugly roar that tore at my legs, way too big to duck dive this one. But for all the fear in my body I knew I was ok, just far enough out to claw my way to the top and over down the other side. Behind it the spray whipped around me and I felt the vacuum in the air try to suck me back, like standing next to a railway track as an express thunders through. There was no way back the way I’d just come. The scream in my arms made me slow my paddling, but I still kept heading out, pulling myself over the remaining waves in the set. Then it all went quiet. I was out the back.
 

It was massive. There was nothing out there to give a sense of scale, that’s why we hadn’t seen it from the land, but now I was the scale. The swells were like roaming mountains with great ugly lumps of chop on them the size of cars. There were streaks of foam running like veins across the water surface, and when a wave broke, a way inside of me now thank God, great blizzards of spray lashed downwind for hundreds of metres stinging my face and eyes. My heart was nearly beating out of my chest. I’d have done anything to get out of there.
 

I know I said I was good, that I ripped, but here’s the truth. I might have been OK at Town Beach. But what you’ve got to know is that Town Beach was the
only place
I’d surfed the last three years. And the wave there was soft as hell. Even before that in Australia I really only went out in small waves. So when I say I was a good surfer what I mean was, I was good at carving little turns and trying to punt airs on soft little waves. Kid’s stuff. I had exactly no experience in the type of big, scary pointbreak waves that I suddenly found myself in. And I was out there all alone. The others had vanished.

I was kind of frozen with fear for a bit, just watching the horizon and paddling for my life whenever a set loomed up, but that kept taking me further and further out and eventually I realised I’d actually paddled right outside the inlet and was in danger of being swept down the coast. If that happened I faced a good few miles where big swells were crunching directly onto rocks and cliffs, all the way until I got to the shelter and sand of Town Beach. There was no way I could do that. I’d either drown, or more likely be beaten to death on the rocks if that happened. That thought knocked a bit of sense into me and I started trying to get back into the bay. I hadn’t seen the other two since I’d launched myself into the water, but then a swell lifted me up and I got a glimpse of them, sitting there, sort of huddled over their boards. They were right opposite the Hanging Rock, tucked in out of the wind just where we’d said we would sit. It looked miles away.

Like a proper kook I was battling directly against the current and the wind, and I could see from the headland beside me I was putting all my energy just into staying in the same place. And I was tiring fast. I was crying too, it was like half my brain had shut down and was just whimpering inside my head. But fortunately the other half was still just about working. There was this one time back in Oz when the lifeguards came into school to tell us how to beat a rip tide. You never paddled or swam straight against it, but had to go diagonally, or sometimes even let it take you right out and around and choose another place to come in. They handed out these cartoons for us to take home and put on our walls. Panicking Peter did the wrong thing in every drawing, Calm-headed Cindy always got it right, and she looked sexy in her little bikini. I kept mine up until one of my friends laughed at me for having it there. But I still saw it every time I went to sleep for maybe four years. I guess it sunk in. I turned around and started paddling back out into the middle of the bay, even though it felt like the wrong thing to do.
 

If you stand on the headland you can see what happens to the water. Hanging Rock Bay is shaped like a V, each side being maybe five hundred metres long. It’s the only feature in an otherwise straight section of rocky, cliffy coastline so there’s little to slow the tides as they rip northwards on the push, and southwards as they ebb. And that tide was always at its worst right there on the corner. That’s where I was stuck, still quite close in, but right where all the tide was running and also where all the water flowing out of the bay. You paddle straight against it, you’re fucked. You’re Panicking Peter. You’re this little matchstick figure trying to beat the entire Atlantic ocean pushing high tide up the Irish Sea. But you paddle out and around - it’s a long way and still not a nice place to be, but at least you’ve got a chance.
 

And sometimes the ocean does funny things to help you out. Another set made the horizon turn black and lumpy, but instead of turning towards it and trying to get over it before it broke, this time I was too tired. I just stopped and lay on my board panting, crying, watching it rumble toward me. Then just before it arrived pure fear made me do something. I didn’t want to face any waves, but I definitely didn’t want to face a whole set, so I decided to try and catch the first one. It might drown me or it might just tumble me back in through the impact zone. Either way, it didn’t feel my life was in my hands at that point.

That first wave still hadn’t broken so I spun my board around and just paddled for all I could, trying not to hear the groan the wave made as it stood up around me. I felt it lift the back of my board up and then this flat ocean I’d been paddling in morphed sickeningly into the downward slope of a watery mountain. I felt the board pick up its own speed as it skidded downhill and on an instinct I stopped paddling and tried to stand up. As I did so the board hit some chop and I stumbled, ending up on my arse, hands tightly gripping the rails. But I was lucky too. The board was now facing along the wave, towards the shoulder where it would peel to. Behind me there was this detonation of spray, but it was well behind me. And then it was like being spat forward, the water walled up, the chops were stretched flat and I was right in the pocket of this howling freight train of a wave, the biggest, scariest wave I’d ever seen, and only instead of crouching low like some hero surfer, I was sat on my arse.
 

All I knew was the longer I could ride it, the more chance I had of getting out of the rip current, so I just straight lined along this beautiful, perfect wall. I dared a glance behind me and glimpsed this blue-black curl as the eye of the wave fought to catch up with me, then I looked forward again at the perfection of a long, sloping shoulder that stretched all the way to the neck of the bay. Dignity came back quick and I tried to get off my bum, but as I did so I steered the board too high up the face of the wave and I couldn’t move my weight to send it back down again, so I ended up skipping over the top and onto the flat water behind it.
 

There was another wave right behind my one, but it didn’t look quite as terrifying as the mushroom cloud that I’d caught out at the point, Even so I paddled like fuck to get out past it, as I did so I caught sight of a pair of heads in the water a bit further out, and kept going until I reached them, my arms dying in their sockets when I got there.
 

“Fucking hell man, these waves are amazing!” John’s eyes were wide open and bloodshot from the spray.

“Hey Jesse you were right out beyond the point, almost around the corner,” said Darren. “I don’t think you should go right out there, it doesn’t look safe.”

I was panting so hard I could hardly speak and just nodded in agreement. But John didn’t care about that. I’d never heard his voice quite like this before, he wasn’t talking, he was screaming.
 

“That was one sick motherfucking wave you caught there Jesse. You rode it on your fucking arse!” He slapped the water with both his hands and yelled at the sky. A roar of celebration. “Can you fucking believe this place?”

On reaching them I’d assumed we’d all concentrate on finding a way to get back ashore, just basically getting the hell out of there and never coming back. however it was clear they weren’t moving, but waiting for a wave to ride. Suddenly I was conscious how much I’d been crying and hoped it didn’t show on my face. I looked around me. We were about half way along the north edge of the reef, and the water in here was much calmer, we were well out of the current sweeping north by the entrance of the bay. The waves when they came were smaller too, still big compared to anything I’d surfed before and still clean and, well, perfect. I realised I was sitting out there with the sort of waves we’d dreamed of and talked about for years.
 

John went for one in the next set. He turned around and began to paddle as this shoulder reared up behind him, the wave already breaking further up the point. I hoped he wouldn’t catch it as being all together somehow felt safer, but when the wave had swept through he was nowhere to be seen. You could see the curl of the wave working down the reef from behind and as I watched it John’s head popped up behind the wave, he must have fallen and let the wave roll over the top of him. He paddled back more amped than ever.

“You’ve got to catch one of these Jesse, this is way better than fucking sex.”

Even out there I felt the lurch. Obedient as Pavlov’s fucking dog an image of Cara formed in my mind, she was wet-haired, bedraggled and - get this - wearing Calm-headed Cindy’s skimpy swimwear. But this time something was different. This time I was there with John. John who’d fucked the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. The most beautiful girl I thought was possible. Who’d pressed his face into that mysterious space at the top of her thighs. Who’d slept on those breasts that tortured my dreams. Who’d pressed himself into her so many times that he’d bored himself. And here he was saying that surfing this wave was better.
 

Suddenly I wanted one of these waves. I’d suffered so much I deserved one. Not on my arse. Not shaking with fear either. I wanted a real one. The next good swell that came along I started to paddle for it, seriously paddle for it and the thing was it was so easy. I had so much time to jump to my feet and then this beauty of a wave just opened herself up to me. I kept low and stuck my hand into the surface as it built up into around me. I was perfectly in control. I stood up high and held my arms aloft and let out this scream that came from somewhere deep inside. The speed was like nothing I’d felt before, I could arc into turns just by thinking about it, it was like I was some seabird riding the winds of a storm. I’d grown up obsessed with surfing but I realised on that wave I’d never really done it. I’d fucked around on little beach breaks but I’d never really
surfed
. And that image of Cara Williams in my head? I just laughed. From that wave forward she looked no better than one of the waves in Town Bay. A good one maybe, but nothing compared to what I now knew. How had I ever fooled myself into thinking she was important? When there was so much living to do?
 

When I could
surf?

twenty-three

 
AT FIRST SHE waited for the call, every time the telephone rang she hesitated before lifting the receiver, allowing herself a moment before hearing that Jim had washed ashore. A moment before the questions would begin about what was found in his blood. Why she’d told the police the tablets were hers. But when the phone rang it was never about that. There were practical calls, handling Jim’s affairs - even without a body the nature of his disappearance meant the coroner issued a death certificate after just six weeks. Personal calls, friends, relatives, phoning to see how she was getting on, checking up on her it sometimes felt. The worst were the impersonal calls, strangers asking for Jim as if they had known him, still happy to try and sell to a dead man. But
that
call never came. And as the weeks turned into months and into years, Natalie realised that now it never would. Whatever evidence stayed in a body wouldn’t last this long. Whatever happened to Jim would never be known for sure. And then, eight years later, the phone rang, and her life changed forever.