Swell (31 page)

‘Jason, where are you? Please, come quickly!’

I stumbled through the door.

Jason looked embarrassed at first but then sensed the urgency in my voice.

‘What is it? What’s happened?’

I grabbed his hand and struggled to catch my breath.

‘Please come. It’s Rory,’ I gasped.

Jason let me pull him into the garden.

‘The Tiger Sharks have him cornered out there’ – I pointed frantically towards the ocean while we ran – ‘he can’t get a wave. Cain made threats. Said he wouldn’t be able to buy a wave when he finished with him.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘At the Sunset contest. We didn’t want to worry you.’

Jason’s brow was set in a deep furrow by the time we reached Ruby. He rested his hand on her back and lowered his head.

‘Can you see him, Ruby?’ he said with surprising calmness. ‘Is he doing OK?’

I clasped my chest and felt it heave. Perhaps I was exaggerating the danger. Rory was an incredibly capable surfer after all. Maybe I overestimated what Cain was capable of.

‘There he is.’

We followed the line of Ruby’s arm and saw Rory crossing arms with Rosario in a desperate struggle to catch the wave. Orca paddled in front of Rory in an attempt to block him while Waipahe and Maika’i were caught unawares by the voluminous wave that wrapped onto the reef at a disjointed angle. Rosario was heavy and strong but not as fast as Rory. Rory put his head down and dug deep for every last ounce of his strength.

‘Go, darl’,’ Ruby urged.

My heart was in my throat and my head throbbed as Rory propelled himself into the wave. Orca blocked his path but at the last moment, Rory yanked his board to the left and flew past Orca, taking the wave at a precarious angle. He freefell and crumpled deep into his legs at the base of the wave. For a moment I thought he was too off-balance to make the essential turn but Rory absorbed the impact and righted himself. The wave stood up, its tube as misshapen as a Dali clock.

‘Thank God.’

Ruby exhaled and bent down slowly to collect her knitting. My eyes drifted to the Tiger Sharks who were punching the water and each other in the line-up for having allowed their plaything to escape.

‘No, that wave is ugly,’ Jason said, almost to himself.

He held his hands up to his face. He strained to see, moving from one foot to another as he gradually edged closer to the beach.

‘Don’t go for the barrel, Rory, straighten out.’

The anxiety in Jason’s previously calm voice caught Ruby’s attention and mine. I watched the expression on Jason’s face flash between concern and fear.

‘What is it, Jason?’

‘He didn’t make the barrel,’ he said in a monotone that made me shiver.

Ruby flicked her head back towards the ocean.

‘But he made the take-off.’

‘That wave was ugly,’ Jason said again.

My eyes scanned the ocean but the dusky light hampered my vision. My hand reached out of its own accord and came to rest on Jason’s arm. I could feel him shaking.

‘I don’t think he made the barrel. I can’t see him.’

Jason moved quickly towards the beach entrance.

‘Stay here,’ he pointed firmly at us. ‘I’m just going to check. Stay here.’

Ruby’s knitting needles clattered to the ground.

The anxiety in Jason’s tone was enough to make us do anything but stay where we were. I took Ruby’s hand and followed. The cold hands of fear strangled my airway.

‘What’s happening, Bailey? He’s alright isn’t he?’

Ruby’s hand trembled in mine.

‘It’s fine, Ruby. Jason just couldn’t see him. I bet Rory’s walking towards us as we speak. He’ll be starving by now.’

My voice sounded like a distant chatter. The next few seconds seemed to move in slow motion when we reached the beach and all three of us stopped dead in our tracks. A small crowd had gathered at the shore, their fingers pointing at an abandoned surfboard bobbing around in the shallow waters. The board lilted towards us on the swell and Rory’s Poseidon stickers reflected in the dwindling light of the day.

‘Where is he, Jason?’ Ruby said in a ghostly whisper.

It was Rory’s surfboard but there was no sign of Rory.

Jason’s eyes were ice when he looked at us, his face as white as if every last drop of blood had drained to his feet. A tear ran down my cheek before I could stop it.

‘Where is he?’ Ruby said again.

Ruby and I stared at Jason as if he had the power to rewind time. He said nothing before he span on his heels and raced along the sand, stumbling in holes and tripping over exposed reef as he desperately tried to reach the board.

Jason threw himself fully dressed into the water and half-swam, half-ran out towards the surfboard, which he grabbed with both hands and yanked into the air. Half a leash hung lifelessly from the tail of the board where it had snapped under strain. The other half would be attached to Rory’s ankle.

Ruby and I held hands and ran as far as the shallows. When I stopped at the water’s edge, Ruby just kept on going. She dragged her legs through the water as if she hardly noticed she had left the beach. She fell and smashed her knees against the razor sharp reef but just got up again and kept ploughing on. The voices of the small crowd made no sense to me.

‘Ruby,’ I shouted, ‘please, Ruby, come back. Jason will find him. Ruby!’

I grasped my head to stop the throbbing in my brain.

What was happening? Was this a vivid nightmare I would awake from, soaked in sweat rather than the salt water of the ocean?

‘No, please no, not Rory,’ I said over and over. ‘Please, no.’

I was reminded of the first Pipeline contest I had watched at this very spot the December before when Jason had lost the world title to Cain. Jason survived, I told myself, and so would Rory. The same fear gripped me although this time it was much more intense because these people had become my true friends. I loved Rory like a brother and the thought of something happening to him was unimaginable. I would not let myself imagine the worst.

I plunged into the water and tried to run against the current to help Ruby, to get away from the thoughts in my own head. My legs ached and my progress was as slow as if I were attempting to run through treacle.

‘SURFER DOWN!’ Jason hollered from the water.

Those on the beach who had not yet realised what was happening sprung to their feet. Some grabbed surfboards and ran down to the water. Others still stood in groups whispering and shaking their heads. The few surfers remaining in the line-up turned sharply towards Jason who was paddling out on Rory’s board, his eyes scanning the water. Every surfer paddled towards Jason. Every surfer that was except the four Tiger Sharks, who paddled straight to shore and made their way towards their house under the cover of the enveloping darkness. Now was not the time to deal with Cain’s henchmen.

I reached Ruby and grabbed her by the shoulders. She was not crying. She had a look of unstoppable determination etched on her face.

‘Let me go,’ she wheezed. ‘I must find him.’

Waves lapped over the reef towards us, hitting Ruby in the stomach and knocking her backwards. She was drenched as far as her chest. Her breathing was shallow and fast.

‘Ruby, don’t do this,’ I pleaded. ‘Please come back to shore. You have to think of the baby. Please.’

In deeper water, Jason dived beneath the surface and swam into the maze of caves that provided a lethal foundation for an already deadly wave. I was exhausted but pumped with adrenalin as I tried to stop Ruby sacrificing herself and her unborn baby to the power of the Banzai Pipeline.

Jason and the surfers tried to scour every inch of the ocean surface but darkness was closing in fast. I remembered the sound of the screams of the woman who had lost her husband in Hossegor but the fact that Ruby was neither crying nor screaming filled me with a greater fear. She was already in a deep state of shock and her body was as hard
and immovable as stone. I struggled to move her onto land while the shore break waves smashed against us with terrifying force.

‘Over here!’ I heard a high-pitched voice cry.

The Barbie girl surfer was waving her arms in the air.

‘Come, Ruby, quick, they’ve got him.’

Ruby moved her neck mechanically and relaxed enough for me to guide her back to the safety of the beach. Her body began to shake and she fell every couple of steps as we stumbled along the sand. I squinted in the darkness but was afraid of what I would see.

I could just make out the prone body of a man lying on the surfboard that Jason, the girl and three other surfers were pushing forcefully through the water. When they reached the shallows they lifted the board aloft like pallbearers with a coffin and carried the body to the beach. An arm tumbled off the side of the board clutching the Velcro strap of a surfboard leash in its hand. My heart flipped with joy. Rory had managed to rip the leash off his ankle, he had saved himself and he was still alive. The sound of sirens shattered the peace of our tropical paradise.

‘He’s going to be alright, Ruby,’ I breathed, holding her tightly.

We pushed gently through the onlookers.

Jason crouched over Rory’s body while the girl pumped his chest with astonishing force. I clasped a hand to my mouth when I realised Jason was giving Rory mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

‘Don’t you dare leave me,’ Jason shouted every few breaths. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’

‘Let me through,’ said the paramedic who swept through the crowd with his partner and brought an instant sense of reality to the situation.

The paramedics opened bags and set machines in motion and spoke a language to each other that might well have been Slovakian for all the sense it made.

‘What’s happening?’ Jason asked over and over, his breathing heavy in the silence of the sombre crowd.

The paramedics did not respond.

I held Ruby tight and refused to let her go. She stared at the ground in front of her as if in a trance. Unable to bear the sight of Rory’s lifeless body, I looked up and saw the figures of Cain and the Tiger Sharks some distance away on the beach. They were too afraid to come any closer.

Suddenly Ruby clutched her stomach and fell from my grasp onto her knees. Jason and I reached out to catch her but she lurched forwards and flung her hand past the paramedics and onto Rory’s naked chest.

‘NO! I love you, Baby,’ she screamed erupting into sobs that came from somewhere deep inside. ‘I don’t want you to go.’

The very next second, one paramedic sat back and pressed his face into his hands. The other let out a long breath and turned the switch on a machine that screeched in the darkness like a vampire bat. A tear ran down my cheek and dropped into the sand. Jason wrung his hands and howled at the sky.

‘I’m sorry, we did all we could, but he’s gone.’

Ruby rested her head on her fiancé’s shoulder and pulled her petite pregnant body into the curve of his arm that still clutched the fragmented leash. Rory’s eyes stared up at the sky, empty and cold. Darkness swallowed up paradise and time stood still.

CHAPTER FORTY

A stunned disbelief settled on our pretty blue beach house as if we were shrouded in a freezing fog. The colours had faded from the scene and a stale smell filled the air. At times I felt as if I could hardly breathe. At first nobody dared set the funeral wheels in motion because to do so would be to accept that Rory was truly gone from our lives. I remembered the same suffocating panic when my father died. The fog of death seemed to seep through every crack and crevice, reaching me wherever I tried to hide. As a teenager I had thought if I pretended hard enough my father was still alive he would come back to me. A man with such a colourful spirit could not simply cease to exist. I had refused to play the Grim Reaper’s rules until enough time had passed to make the pretence no longer possible.

Now, as grown adults, we were all playing the same game. Rory was young and handsome, adored and talented and he had been about to start a new wonderful life as a husband and father. It just did not make sense that Rory’s death could be part of the greater plan. It was simply not fair and we were not willing to believe it was true. Of course it was not a choice we had the power to make. Rory was gone and all we had were memories. Every one of us replayed his last days. Each of us wracking our brains to desperately remember details of the last words we had exchanged with him and what he had looked like and whether he had been smiling. Jason unfortunately could recall all too well their final exchange. Regret, the emotion he had refused to entertain before, was strangling him.

I remembered the terror I had felt when I could not recall my father’s final words to me, as if they held the key to his memory that would vanish completely without those closing moments. I lay in my bed at night staring at the ceiling just trying to recall as many of Rory’s words as possible. I even wrote them down.

I quickly realised I had to accept responsibility for my dear friends. I had been there before and I was more equipped than most to deal with the emptiness and to ensure the living continued to live.

I took on the horrendous task of informing Rory’s mother and stepfather, whom I had spoken to only for a matter of minutes before in the sort of meaningless, chirpy telephone conversations that do not forge any lasting relationships. Their cries haunted me until I saw them in person at Honolulu airport, broken people among the colourful holidaymakers in the arrivals hall. I arranged for Ruby’s parents to fly in on the next available flight from Perth along with Ruby’s brother, Tim. Jason paid for first class travel but none of them would have relished the comfort. Ruby’s parents took charge of their daughter in the way only parents can and I immediately worried less about the health of her baby. Ruby refused to leave Oahu and begged to be allowed to move in to the beach house she had dreamed of sharing with her new husband. Chuck and I unpacked the furniture Ruby and Rory had ordered together and prepared the rooms in the impersonal manner of a hotel. The setting was soothing but displayed none of Rory’s identity. Ruby was not yet ready to live among happy memories of the man who had been her “One”.