eyes, dark like the colour of those raspberry-filled Lindt dark chocolate balls, if you must know.
‘Me?’ I laughed, making the kids in the surf shop look up at one another from under their flat peaks. I never think my laugh is that loud, but people always look up whenever I laugh. Lily says I sound like a hadedah. I’m not sure if she is right – being a doctor surely can’t make her right about everything, even if Kari thinks so. ‘Nope, I’m not one for the sea. I don’t like the cold water or the sea creatures that you could touch with your feet.’ Or having the other sea creatures rightly mistake me for a pregnant seal in my wetsuit. Or having all that sun add years to my face at the age of flowering forty-four. Ain’t nobody got time for that. ‘The boards are for my kids,’ I said. Something funny happened inside; I didn’t want to tell him that I had kids. What difference would that have made?
‘How old?’
‘How rude, your mother never tell you not to ask a lady’s age?’ I tilted my head at him, stomach-in chest-out, daring him to say something. My age is not to be spoken about out loud, least of all with a ridiculously hot and cheeky man-child who is likely young enough to be my child.
Oh.
The Cupid’s bow started twitching on the left in a not unattractive way. You can’t do that when you have Botox. He was trying not to laugh. He meant the kids. I didn’t blink, pretended I hadn’t said anything.
‘Twins, three years old. Four in December. A girl and a boy. They are desperate to surf, but I’m thinking to start them off on bodyboards – they’re too young for surf lessons.’ I tried to recover myself.
‘Cool, but these boards are for adults. You need to get that size over there.’ More movement from the Cupid’s bow, before he started picking his way through clothing rails and wetsuits hanging like empty skins on the walls. I watched him sort unhurriedly through a stack of boards on the other side of the shop. I hoped he would find what I needed and quickly too, remembering Di’s tight-lipped nod when I left Coffee & Cream to get the boards. I’d ignored her. I had to.
After this morning, I could no longer ignore the intense nagging and emotional blackmail that the twins (mostly Stacey) had subjected me to for my lack of taking them bodyboarding. They wanted to surf, but apart from them being too little, that idea was too far out of my comfort zone, so we’d settled on them bodyboarding in the shallows. I still avoided doing it with them, using my work at the shop as a reason I couldn’t take them. Jerry was no help. He told them that his big toe had arthritis and hurt too much in the cold water, and then he gave them ice cream after supper so they forgot to nag him and were (more) psychopathic by the time I got home. I wish I were the dad, especially one close to fifty – you can get away with anything. No such luck for a mom on any day.
But today I needed those boards, and preferably someone else to take them into the water while I watched. It was a guilt buy. I don’t deny it. This morning they gave me the cutest Valentine’s cards they’d made with their teacher at playgroup. I told them it was the best Valentine’s I’d ever received – which was true – but clearly words were not appreciation enough. They’d waited expectantly; Kari’s Adam was at the same school and he’d told them that Kari gave him a card and a box of chocolates (sugar-free) for Valentine’s. How was I to know that’s what moms were doing? Goody-two-shoes Kari could’ve tipped me off, saved me from yet another MomLife fail.
Why was he taking so long? I halfway across the shop towards he-who-had-the-smell, when he came back, smaller pink and blue boards under his arm. Stereotyped. But admittedly they were the exact colours the twins would want.
‘Thanks, service is good in this shop,’ I said, scratching in my bag for my purse when we were done and standing at the till. He’d helped me pick out surf booties for the twins. They had wetsuits, but he said they’d last longer in the water if their feet weren’t frozen. I tried to keep my eyes focused on his eyes, tried not to look at any other part of him or breathe in too much Pina Colada Coconut Vanilla Dessert.
Rebellion.
Couldn’t stop myself. I took a deep breath in.
‘I don’t work here. I was just visiting my friend James.’ He did an up-chin move to the curly blond guy who was scanning the barcodes on the boards. ‘You looked like you needed help.’ He leaned forward over the glass-top box counter, looking at the racks on the wall as I took my credit card out of my purse. ‘Get her some of that Sex Wax,’ he said to the curly blond. ‘She’ll need that too.’ He looked at me with a little wink, a tiny tuck of dimple showing itself in his left cheek. I almost choked. Was the man-child flirting? I looked down and saw that the square brown box was labelled Mr Zog’s Sex Wax. ‘Makes the boards less slippery.’ He smiled as he saw me check it out. Quick Humps. The best for your stick was printed on the packaging. Well, flower me sideways, why don’t you?
‘Check you later, bruh,’ he said to James. ‘And if you need me for anything …’ he said to me, the pause just long enough to perhaps mean something ‘… to, like, help your kids in the water. Doesn’t matter if they’re little – if they’re amped, then get them used to the sea with someone who knows what they’re doing. They could learn to bodyboard, maybe even surf. You never know,’ he said, redeeming himself for the casual listener when I was sure he’d started off meaning something else. ‘My man James here will give you my number.’ And with a last Lindt look at me and a fist bump to the curly blond James, the tall (yes, he was also ridiculously tall), sweet-smelling man-child left me with a mouth full of veneers, a heart thumping like flowers, and a platinum credit card stuck in my sweaty fingers. The chutzpah of him! I waited while James dutifully scrawled in blue Wayde Surf Coach, together with an ‘072’ number on the back of my copy of the till slip, folding the paper carefully before handing it to me with a mumbled something I didn’t catch.
His name was Wayde.
And the Sex Wax?
I opened the box while I waited, breathed in the smell of the round wax cake.
Pina Colada Coconut Vanilla.
Dessert.
Rebellion.
I tucked him into my bag.
2
I forgot about my surfshop-scapade until I got home and unloaded the bodyboards from the back of the Range Rover in the double garage. I left the boards propped against the kitchen island, booties next to them so that they would be the first thing the twins saw in the morning. Harley would love it, but Stacey was my wild card, older by two minutes and infinitely harder to please. I surveyed the evidence of my thrill of the day, remembering the wax and the till slip still in my bag. It was past nine. I hadn’t meant to be so late, but there was a problem with the cashing-up system that took me an age to sort out, and I wanted to un-Valentine the store window, which I could do only after we closed at seven. It was Di’s afternoon and evening with her girls, but I’d forgotten, and Di wasn’t impressed when I was late after getting the boards. Nowadays Di was nearly as hard to please as Stacey.
‘How was it at the shop this afternoon?’ she’d messaged me exactly at seven. ‘Okay, but no coffee,’ I’d replied, meaning that it was average-to-disaster. A few women browsing, the odd husband looking for last-minute Valentine’s gifts. The main drama was that the girl who should’ve come – the one who could be barista in Di’s place – didn’t pitch. I haven’t been able to master a decent cup of coffee out of the machine, so there was no coffee for the afternoon, which is about as crap as you can get in a shop that sells only cake and coffee and gifts. I also had Jerry spamming me with
