Swell (5 page)

We clinked our bottles together again and I suddenly felt part of something. Feeling like I belonged was comforting. I sipped my beer and caught Portia’s eye. She gave me a look that would scare children. It seemed she not only had the bones of a bird and the eyes of a cat but the hearing of a bat too. Something about Portia made me very uneasy. I had the distinct feeling we would be having a second run-in before too long.

CHAPTER SIX

Before I had even managed to grasp the complexities of the scoring, ten of the thirty-five minutes had flown by like a daydream at a bus stop.

‘So Jason has scored a seven and an eight, right?’ I said to Chuck.

‘Yep you got it and Cain has only had the eight-point-five, Cory has two sixes and Hayden is sitting on a five-point-seven-five, so Jason is in the lead. It’s decided on the best two scores of each guy, you get me?’

I nodded and scribbled notes, looking up every couple of seconds to make sure I did not miss a wave. When the horizon bubbled, I knew a big set was approaching. My heart jumped back up into my mouth where it had been hiding for most of the heat. Watching Jason throw himself off the lip of a wave several storeys high was awe-inspiring. Each set of waves seemed larger, louder and more powerful than the last. Every time Jason caught a wave, he had to contend with the life-threatening drop, the watery rollercoaster of a ride, the dangers of wiping out and the paddle back out through moving walls of water. His office may have been a tropical beach but paradise clearly had its disadvantages. Whatever they were paying him would not be enough to make me paddle out there.

‘Cain Ohana is in the barrel,’ Rock O’Rafferty whooped when Cain disappeared from view into an immense tunnel of water. ‘Still in, still in and BOOM, there he is. No time to breathe and he pulls into a second barrel. One mistake here and Cain could be slammed on the reef but this guy is something else. He’s still in there. Two perfect stand-
up barrels at Pipe and a huge re-entry. Awesome. Cain must know that is one hell of a score.’

Cain punched the air victoriously.

‘Prick,’ Chuck muttered.

The second wave roared onto the reef and I nibbled my fingers as I watched Jason digging his arms deep into the water to propel him over the lip that was beginning to froth. It looked like an angry monster foaming at the mouth.

There was an audible intake of breath when Jason took off, jumped onto the deck of the board with the grace of a ballet dancer and free-fell through the air.

‘You gotta watch,’ Chuck laughed, pulling my hands away from my eyes.

At the bottom of the drop, Jason’s muscular legs absorbed the impact. The wave peeled to his left. A second later, the jaws of the angry beast closed around him, consuming him completely.

‘OH MY GOD!’ I shrieked.

‘An epic tube ride from the reigning champ, ladies and gentlemen,’ Rock cheered, rousing the crowd, many of whom were already on their feet. ‘Man, that is so goddamn big, a whale could fit in there.’

‘Where is he?’ I squeaked, my voice now only audible to dogs.

I grasped Chuck’s arm when a jet of water blasted from the end of the watery vortex and Jason appeared, outlined in a halo of water with one arm pointing at the sky.

A cheer loud of enough to dislodge the coconuts from the trees enveloped Jason’s garden party.

‘It’s two perfect tens from Cain and J.C., ladies and gentlemen,’ Rock announced.

The crowd on the beach erupted. Jason and Cain were indeed putting on the show the spectators had anticipated.

I looked at my watch. Five minutes remained. I then looked at Portia, who was applying her lip-gloss in preparation for the presentation ceremony.

‘Is she even watching this?’ I said, nudging Chuck.

‘Huh? Nope, she doesn’t give a shit about the surfing. She just likes the bits that come with the surfing like the money, the fame and the six-pack, you know what I’m sayin’?’

I knew precisely.

I stood on my tiptoes and strained my eyes against the sun to see Jason sitting out in the water. In between the sets of waves, the ocean was surprisingly still, which was the sign of a perfect Hawaiian ground swell. In Hawaii especially, it was advisable to sit and watch the ocean for at least a quarter of an hour before committing to surfing or swimming. Even sunbathing was a precarious activity. I had seen unsuspecting families from Japan settling themselves down for a picnic at the water’s edge during a lull only to have the entire family and the latest hi-tech video camera knocked into next week by the next set of waves.

‘With the minutes ticking away, the situation is Cain Ohana is in the lead with a ten and an eight-point-five. Jason Cross is just point-five behind with that perfect ten and an eight. Cory Jones is sitting on two sixes and Hayden has only caught one wave, a five-point-seven-five.’

The other two competitors seemed to have lost faith in their own ability to beat Jason and Cain. The final was clearly a battle between two rapacious surfing warriors fighting for the same prize: the world champion crown.

‘If the situation stays the same, we will have a new world champion,’ Rock explained.

As if responding to Rock’s announcement, Jason began paddling up and down in the line-up searching for a wave that would improve on his eight-point ride and push him into the lead.

‘He needs to go big,’ said Chuck, opening another bottle of beer and inhaling half of it in a single mouthful. ‘There’s only time for one more set. This is it, B. A happy start to the book or a motherfuckin’ tragedy?’

He ended with a comical grimace.

The crowd fell eerily silent when the final set darkened the horizon. Only the whoops of the Tiger Sharks pierced the tense atmosphere, informing Cain, their leader, that the final waves of the heat were imminent.

‘Come on, Jason,’ I whispered, clasping my hands in prayer.

The set approached like a gathering storm cloud. The spectators were on their feet jostling for a better view. Suddenly Cain began to paddle towards Jason, forcing him to react and paddle further to our left.

‘Cain’s pushing Jason too deep into the impact zone, Chuck warned. ‘Don’t take the first one, man.’

I wished Jason had an earpiece like the cyclists in the Tour de France so that Chuck could advise him in the dying seconds.

The wave built behind Jason, growing the height of a lamppost with each couple of seconds. The sound of the tonnes of water moving at high speed towards the reef was incredibly loud. To Jason it must have been deafening, which may have been a blessing considering the taunts and heckling coming from the Tiger Sharks’ house.

‘You gonna die, Man.’

‘Fuck, check him out, he’s losing it.’

‘Yeah, Brah, Cain is doin’ it.’

‘I feel like going over there and telling them to shut up,’ I growled.

‘They’d eat you alive,’ said Chuck.

Thrusting himself forward with two final powerful strokes, Jason took off. His take off point was so deep, however, the wave had already started to break and the drop was beyond vertical. Jason flew through the air, his feet loosely connected to the sliver of fibreglass that was the only solid thing between himself and a wall of water several times taller than him. I watched him fall. He was upright but even I could see with my limited knowledge of physics that the lip of the wave had sent him on a dangerously arced trajectory. The knuckles on my hands turned white, Chuck’s body stiffened beside me and a gurgling cry burst out from my throat without warning when Jason landed at the bottom of the wall and was concertinaed into the reef. His body crumpled as if he were made of paper and he disappeared from view.

We ran. Chuck was ahead of me, forcing his way through the people on the beach like a bull running through the crowded streets of Pamplona. When we reached the water’s edge, the lifeguards were already mobilizing, carrying a spinal stretcher that
instantly brought tears to my eyes. In the ocean, the water patrol guard on his jet ski desperately scanned the water for a sign of life.

‘Jesus, where is he?’ I cried, my eyes searching for an arm breaking the surface to show us he was alive.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cain take off on a wave. There might have been a world champion drowning in the water beneath him but as far as Cain was concerned, the heat was not over until the buzzer sounded. He wanted that world title by default or otherwise.

‘There he is!’ someone shouted.

The throng carried me along, my feet hardly touching the ground.

I tripped and fell, sand covering my face. It scratched the surface of my eyes when I blinked. I scrambled to my feet and tried to see.

People were in the water now, wading towards Jason. I finally exhaled when I saw he was alive and slowly dragging himself towards land. I realised I had been holding my breath for an improbably long time and my head was spinning.

‘Leave him!’ a lifeguard ordered, yanking an over-zealous citizen rescuer out of the water. ‘Let us do our job, people.’

The lifeguards ordered Jason to sit down on the sand. I saw his legs crumple just before he elected to obey. I picked my way through the silent onlookers. Some were taking photos and videos on their phones. Social media would soon be playing out the drama.

I caught up with Chuck, who let me through the human security fence to see Jason. He was hunched over his knees while the lifeguards busied themselves touching
various parts of his battered body. His Lycra rash vest was shredded as if he had been thrown to the lions. Blood seeped through the holes, diluted by the water.

‘Jason,’ I breathed in a funereal volume, ‘are you OK?’

Jason looked up at me as a broken man. His usually lustrous eyes were as red as his sanguineous skin. He smiled weakly and when he opened his mouth to try and speak, Rock O’Rafferty’s inappropriately jovial voice sang out over the P.A system.

‘A perfect ten for Cain Ohana there on his final wave, ladies and gentlemen. Two perfect tens for the local boy. I have news that Jason Cross is fine so we can all relax. What a final, what a showdown and what a result. We have a new world champion, people. His name is Cain Ohana.’

‘Not really,’ said Jason in response to my question.

‘Outta my way, whore!’ I heard Portia scream.

She dragged me away from Jason by my hair.

‘Baby, baby, are you OK? Jason, oh my God, what happened?’

‘If you had been watching you might have seen it,’ I seethed, rubbing the roots of my ponytail.

Portia rounded on me, her devil eyes inches from mine. She reacted like a rattled wasp in a jam jar when her temper took hold.

‘Step back you English bitch, this world champion is mine.’

‘He’s not world champion anymore,’ Chuck said, pulling Portia away from my face.

I wiped her spittle from my cheek.

‘If you were concentrating on the surfing instead of your make-up you would have known that. So, do you still want him,
babe
?’

Portia looked from Chuck to me and down at Jason. If a photographer had not appeared at that moment to take a shot of the scene I swear she would have walked away. World champion or not, Jason had become my friend and I made a note to myself to sort out this mess. A devastatingly gorgeous millionaire and dozen-times world champion surfer he might have been, but his choice in girlfriends really sucked.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I did not see Jason for the next few days. Finding the Press intrusion and the boisterous, seemingly unending sound of partying coming from the nearby Tiger Sharks’ house unbearable, Jason took a Hawaiian Airlines shuttle to the Big Island of Kona and vanished from the radar. Portia also vanished at precisely the same time, which in some ways was a relief but also made me concerned that she had her claws in Jason when he was at his most vulnerable. Chuck was busy drowning his sorrows in Hawaiian cocktails as the competitive year drew to a close and the surfing community celebrated or commiserated in an end of term manner. Knowing as I did very few people, I spent much of my time alone. Over the first two days I soaked for so long in the hot tub I sweated off a dress size, which would have been great had my skin not resembled used clingfilm. I then decided to follow the example of the locals and power walk on the beach but I was not in the same league as the Hawaiian surfer girls who had tanned, lean legs rippling with toned muscle. The day I was overtaken by a heavily pregnant girl in a bikini who resembled a supermodel with a Kinder egg attached to her six-pack, I realised I had a lot of work to do.

Oahu was both breathtakingly beautiful and rugged. The North Shore was the rural part of the island and had remained largely unspoilt while Honolulu grew as the city on the South Shore. Quirky wooden beach houses sat comfortably among the more recent millionaire dwellings that were still in keeping with the modest character of the Sunset Beach area. One of our neighbours had a tree growing through the centre of her house because she had not wanted to fell the tree to make room for her development.
Sustainability of the environment was respected and protected because, as Jason had pointed out, many of the jobs relied on it for their future.

I explored the local village of Haleiwa, which had a charming marketplace as its centre, selling everything from black pearls to carved wooden Tiki Gods and surfboards. The sweet local delicacy was shave ice; a huge cone of crushed ice atop a dollop of ice cream and soft beans covered in a rainbow of sugar syrups. I ate so many on the third day I gave myself a multi-coloured nosebleed.

Every second shop in Haleiwa was a surf shop and it soon became clear I was in the very heart of the history of the sport. I wandered around the local surf museum run by a man who had enjoyed the Sixties to such an extent he had decided to stay there. He reminded me of Garth from
Wayne’s World
. Although the museum was no larger than my mother’s front room, he managed to string the tour out to an incredible three hours, largely because he spoke so slowly I could have fitted whole sentences between each word. I did, however relish the opportunity to view the surfing memorabilia that dated back to the 1900s. I learned every detail of the evolution of the surfboard, from the first bulky wooden door-like boards that were twelve-feet long, to the boards with a single fin as their rudder, on to the twin-fins, the three-finned modern board known as the ‘thruster’ and four-finned ‘quads’.