Blue Water High (17 page)

‘I'm going to head back in.'

It was the most boring thing Heath had said to her since they'd met, and it made her feel like a cockroach.

Fly sat on the grass, playing that boring line over and over again, and wishing a huge can of insect spray would comes down out of the sky and squirt her fair in the head.

Although Fly knew she'd completely stuffed things up with Heath, there wasn't exactly a lot of time to dwell on it. When Deb and Simmo had drawn up the schedule for the year they hadn't left many blank spaces for ‘Sit and Contemplate Hurting Someone You Really Like or the Last Time You Felt Like an Emotional Psycho'. So at least the days were taken care of.

And if anything, they just seemed to be getting busier. Monday morning rolled around and, just like many Monday mornings lately, Deb added one more ‘to do' to their lists.

Deb was very keen on the idea of capacity. She reckoned that, ever so slowly, without them even noticing, they were building their physical and emotional capacity. That's what she said every time she doubled their number of laps in the pool. That's what she said every time she refused to cancel training when they all had major assignments due. She reckoned they'd be able to look back at where they were when they started and be amazed at what they could handle now.

And now that she thought about it, Fly realised Deb was probably right. In spite of the kissing caravan debacle, Fly was actually managing to stay on top of most other things. She wasn't shaping up to be a Nobel Prize winner, but she was doing well in school – not As, but above average. Not bad for the youngest in the year, thanks very much, Mr Exeter. And she wasn't coming last in the water either. She was winning her fair share of the weekly comps and she danced between second and third of the girls on Simmo's whiteboard.

Bec and Perri took turns in the top slot. Anna mostly sat in fourth, but every now and then she'd shock the pants off them all by pulling out something so good it was scary. Deb and Simmo were a long way from writing Anna off as a serious contender and they warned the other girls it would be stupid to think this was a three-horse race.

The boys
were
a three horse race – well, there were only three of them, weren't there? Matt was the only consistent corner of that triangle. Heath and Edge ran hot and cold for different reasons. With Heath, it was as if when the great big chef in the sky was making him, they left out a vital ingredient – they forgot to add the ‘getting your act together' gene. Heath was always running late, he brought the wrong boards, he turned up at the wrong breaks. When he
did
get it together he was awesome. He just needed to get it together more than one day in a row. Not that it was any of her business anymore. She'd kind of made sure of that.

Edge was inconsistent for a different reason. He just
couldn't manage to follow the rules of competition – they made him feel like he was wearing a straitjacket. Instead of doing what he was told and ticking all the boxes, Edge would use the whole wave to generate enough speed to pull off one spectacular aerial and score twos and threes. Simmo tried to talk to him about what the judges wanted, but Edge just couldn't be told anything. He needed life to push him on his backside before he learned anything – and maybe that's why the shark picked him …

Autumn is well known for being shark time. As Mother Nature starts to make the southern seas a bit nippy, lots of her critters decide it's time for a summer holiday. Fly knew it well, because she came from Great White country. In third class her year had done a huge project about sharks. The local marine authority had got them involved in a satellite tagging project. They'd been allocated a shark, which they named Neville, and they logged onto their computers each week for a whole year to follow that twelve-foot fish along the coast. She was on the other side of the country now, but she knew the sharks trawled north along the east coast too, chasing a trail of spawning salmon and tailor and sea mullet.

Surfers generally hate sharks. They know it's an odds game – you can only dangle your legs in their kitchen for so long before you end up on the menu. But that year with Neville had softened Fly. She remembered getting strangely upset at all the bad press sharks copped. They weren't that different from whales. But no-one chartered boats and stood on headlands with binoculars waiting for a tiny glimpse of tail or got the warm fuzzies at the very mention of their name. Why was that? That's right, whales don't eat people.

So it was autumn, it was twilight – and they all knew
twilight was dinner time. Bec and Perri reckoned they should head in, but Edge wouldn't hear of it. The conditions were just too good. And he was right, there was a magic in the air, a stillness that touched them all as they sat out the back waiting for the next set to rock in. It was one of those afternoons that made them want to pinch themselves at just how good their lives were turning out.

Then Edge jumped like someone had plugged him with a cow prod. His leg shot up out of the water and onto his board. His smile had vanished. He swung around wildly, staring at Heath as he cruised past.

‘Did you touch my leg?'

They're the words you never want to hear in the water, especially when you know you did no such thing.

‘I did
not
touch your leg.'

Edge's head snapped one way, staring down into the murky water, then across to the other side. Was that a shadow sweeping by? Edge abandoned any need to be cool and screamed at the top of his lungs: …' SHARK!'

He turned and started paddling like a torpedo. It didn't take much to convince the rest of them to follow suit.

Even with the dry sand under his toes, Edge had the post-scare shakes bad. His hands trembled and his voice jittered. They felt for him – they'd all thought they'd seen sharks before, but none of them had done the skin-to-skin thing.

‘It – it was like … I dunno … being f-felt up by a wad of s-sandpaper.'

They couldn't keep their eyes off him, entranced by the thrilling horror of the possibility …

‘I don't even want to think how l-long it was … four or five metres. Just cruising along beneath me.'

Another ripple of thrill. Thanks to the Neville project Fly knew the big sharks could grow this long – they were talking about the size of a family car here. Then Fly frowned.

‘Matt heard you, didn't he, Edge?'

They all turned to see Matt carefully slipping off his board and into the water. No-one breathed. They all just stared at the space on the surface where Matt used to be. Why would anyone in their right mind stay in the water with an animal known to chow down on human beings?

Matt surfaced again after a moment, and then very slowly, very casually, swam towards shore, pushing his board along in front of him. By the time he waded through the white water Fly was starting to feel kind of cranky with him.

‘Are you mad?' she said.

Matt just shook his head. ‘I was making sure I didn't look like a turtle until I worked out if there was a shark or not.'

Edge exploded. ‘What do you mean
if
there was a shark?!'

Matt shrugged. ‘
If
there was a shark I'd be the last one out of all of us to get the chomp.'

He pointed to Edge.'Your boardies are so bright – lots of contrast for a shark to see. Perri's wearing a kilo of jewellery, which flashes like silver fish scales. The rest of you were splashing in like a herd of injured potential prey.'

He was as cool as an Arctic cucumber. ‘I got off my board because sharks eat turtles and, from below, your board – with a pair of arms and legs paddling on either side – looks like a turtle. Anyway, I went down to have a look. The fish were very relaxed, and if there was a shark about, they'd be jumping out of their skins.'

Fly could see Edge was about to go into nuclear meltdown.

‘Would you
stop
saying
if
?!'

Fly looked up the beach. A bunch of locals were about to head out. If they didn't say anything about what might've happened, if they didn't raise the alarm, were they prepared to wear those other surfers being dinner?

Heath was clearly wrestling with the same dilemma. ‘If they got munched, it'd be less competition for waves for us.'

In the end they told the lifeguards. And the lifeguards had clearly been having the same thought as Heath. They gave the Solar Blue crew a long lecture about how in the past surfers had been known to spread rumours about sharks in order to scare people away from their break. Edge didn't like this theory at all. And now they were out of the water, away from the danger zone, the hassling began. Every shark joke Fly had ever heard came out. They made fins on the top of their heads, talked about the Fleshy Submarines, about Mr and Mrs G. White, they asked how Edge's JAWS were feeling. Fly tried not to join in, she knew what it was like to be hassled, but she couldn't help smiling now and then. Even Bec, who was on Edge's side in just about everything these days, was hard to convince. She was the local, and in all the years she'd been surfing Blue Water Beach there'd never been a shark attack.

Deb watched the hassling too. Fly could see her mind ticking over. She was cooking up something right there in front of them, they just couldn't see that with each new hassle, they were actually making things worse for themselves.

‘They're really enjoying themselves, aren't they, Edge?'

Edge wasn't sure where Deb was headed.

‘Having a grand old time 'cause you got a scare.'

Gradually they all went quiet. They could sense Deb was taking things in a new direction, and they knew her well enough to be wary.

‘And it's given me a great idea for a new assignment.'

She bolted away towards the office and started printing something from Simmo's computer. She left the door ajar, so they couldn't complain too loudly. They just stared at each other, counting down the seconds till Deb returned with the exciting extra work they'd managed to bring on themselves.

Deb handed around a piece of paper to all of them.

‘You've all been paying Edge out for being spooked, but the truth is, there's something that spooks you all, whether you know it or not.'

The paper had the word
FEAR
written across the top, and then a quote underneath it. The rest of the page was blank.

‘So, the assignment is for you all to dig deep and work out what it is that freaks you most about surfing. Maybe it's being held under, or speared by your board – maybe it's failure – whatever.'

Fly could see them all thinking, their minds already sorting through the possibilities.

‘Whether you know it or not, it'll be holding you back in some way. And the good news is, once you have recognised your fear, there's a heap of stuff we can do about it.'

‘Am I excused 'cause everybody already knows what freaks me?' Edge asked.

‘You ready to get back in the water with that shark?'

Edge flinched.

‘Right. So you're not excused. I want you each to write two hundred and fifty words about what it is that scares you. You're going to read it out to everyone and then we'll come up with some strategies. Anna, Heath, Bec and Fly can present tomorrow. The rest of you on Monday.'

They all stood there, staring at their pieces of paper. Fly could feel a huge ball of tension working its way up her throat. It'd been so long since she'd been pounced on by ‘the fear' that she'd let herself believe that maybe it'd just dissolved by itself. Just when she thought her milk-can strategy was working very nicely, that shark came along and headbutted the lid until the fear was being invited to swim right on out again.

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from
danger, but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm
within that endangers him, not the storm without.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Fly stared at the quote at the top of the page till she felt like the letters had come to life, like they were crawling ants darting back and forth across the page. She got that it probably meant something important, that old Ralph Waldo wasn't a famous person for nothing, but she couldn't quite nail it when it came to her. Was her fear in the milk can, her memories of that terrible dumping, a storm from within or a storm from without?