Star Wars after dinner?” said Tegan. Teg was only six but she was dead good at this Xbox game. She loved me playing it with her too.
“I’m a bit tired to be honest, Tegs.”
“Oh,” she said, pushing a potato round her plate. Mum glared at me.
I carried on eating. Mum put her knife and fork down.
“You must really love this surfing, if it makes you too tired to spend time with your sister. Sam … you’re always tired. And when you’re not surfing, you’re not really… here. Like your head is somewhere else.”
“I’ve been helping out,” I said. “Shopping, gardening and that.”
“Yeah, but you’re in another world. You barely talk to us.”
She had a point. I was somewhere else. Mostly thinking about surfing, or Jade. Or Jade and surfing. And when I was in the water, I felt like I belonged there. Like everything in between was just waiting, some dream I woke from when I hit the surf.
I wasn’t even any good. Yet. But I still lived for it. So much, it needed Mum to point out I was forgetting all about her and Teg.
As I ate, I thought. They were new here too. Mum didn’t have any friends here yet. Most of her old friends here had been couples, folk that had been friends of Mum and Dad’s. It was Dad that had been brought up here. She was from up country. Every face she knew, every place she went, they had to be reminders of him. I hadn’t even thought about that.
Shit, I thought. I love surfing, but I shouldn’t let it turn me into a selfish prick.
I smiled at Teg, looking for forgiveness.
“You used to be fun,” said Tegan. “Play Lego. Pleeeease?” She reached out a hand.
“Okay,” I said taking it.
“Thanks, Sam,” said Mum. “Actually, I’m going to need you to spend more time with each other. Look after each other a bit.”
“Oh, um, sure. Why’s that then?”
“I need to earn some money. For a while anyway…” her voice trailed away. She meant till Grandma died. Till we inherited the house. And maybe money too. I never asked about that. Didn’t seem right. “I’m going to do some pub work,” she continued. “Lunches, a few evenings, bits at weekends. You’ll need to be home then, Sam. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
She stood, took my plate to go and fill it up again. She smiled.
“It won’t interfere with your surfing too much?” she said, gently teasing.
“No,” I said. It wouldn’t either. But even so, I said to myself, maybe I should go a bit less.
That’s what I told myself.
*
And I did go a bit less. A bit.
But then, one sunny, windless autumn day, when the waves were waist high, I stumbled to my feet just as the wave broke. And didn’t fall off. The board cut loose from the white water before it crashed, and I was on the green unbroken part of the wave. The board got this speed in it, like the brakes were suddenly off, and I was gliding along glass, ahead of the white water, feeling the energy of it surge up and into me.
I watched it wall up. I crouched down, got more speed and felt the rush.
I’d liked surfing before, but riding a green wave was a different kind of ‘like’. Once I’d got a hit of that, I wanted more. I wanted as much as I could get.
The waves were easy going. Good to catch and not closing out. I got a load of them.
And every time I got a good wave I had the same thought: What would Jade think? What would Jade say? I was looking forward to showing her. I imagined I’d paddle up to her at Tin-mines and surprise her, or she’d be paddling out and see me gliding along a wall of water.
That’s how I imagined it. But what I planned for and what I got turned out to be two different things.
*
A week or two later, after I’d been a bunch of times and got used to riding green waves, there was a different forecast on the website from what I’d seen before. Three feet at fourteen seconds wave period, with a secondary swell of two feet at sixteen seconds. The guy who did the report on the website was raving about how good a day it was going to be. There’s gonna be some thumping waves, he’d written. Autumn’s started late, but it’s here now. That seemed odd. Three feet didn’t seem that much. And anyway, I’d got used to seeing a good forecast, then turning up and seeing next to nothing.
Still. Winds were light. It’d be an okay size, but not so big I’d get in trouble. It would be a class day, according to the web guy. I reckoned I was ready for a day like that. I knew I was. I was making progress fast. I even thought maybe better than a learner usually did, but as I was always alone, or out with a couple of surfers who really knew what they were doing, it was hard to tell.
At the beach I saw a couple of surfers heading in. I kept my distance though. I didn’t want to bang into them, or them into me, so I walked right down the beach, to get my own space.
I paddled out easily, there were really long gaps between the sets of waves, but when they came through they were bigger than I’d guessed they’d be, bigger than I wanted and way bigger than I’d been out in before.
They were breaking fast too, really fast. I was a little nervy, but I still had this itching feeling, this twitchy, bursting energy running through me. The same muscles that had screamed ‘enough’ when I’d got out of the water the last time were now begging for more.
Rag was right. Surfing was addictive. Day by day, wave by wave, I was becoming a surf junky. So right then I was crapping myself and excited as a dog chasing sticks on the beach.
When my wave came, I knew it. I’d been in the water enough times that I could see it was no way going to slip under me or break in front. I was exactly where I needed to be. But when it got close, my stomach flipped. It was rearing up, sucking the water into it.
It was vicious looking, and fast, but peaking, with a shoulder, breaking a way to my right, and there was a good stretch between the breaking point and the unbroken hump of green. A rideable shoulder. So I turned and paddled, and gave it one hundred per cent. I dug my hands into the water. I just went for it. For a second I thought I’d imagined it, thinking, It should have hit me by now. Then the water I was in dipped, and I was being sucked backwards, upwards. I put all my strength into getting the board moving, making sure it went a bit to the right, not just straight down, and as soon as the wave’s energy took over, thrust my body upwards.
My feet connected with the deck and I pointed the thing down the wave and dropped, turned, raced up the wave, along it, spun the board, digging the fins into the back of the wave and riding straight back into the heart of the thing. It was like a line of energy, and all I needed to do was follow it. It wasn’t even me surfing the board. I’d connected with something. Something with more power than my body could ever have. It filled me up. Pure freaking juice.
I
