In Too Deep (8 page)

He awoke to the sound of rain on the roof. It was 8.00 a.m. according to his bedside clock. He knew Gina wouldn’t be coming for a few hours yet so he pulled the blankets over his head and dozed off. He woke to someone knocking at his bedroom door. He lifted his head from the pillow, thinking that it was Gina, but instead Hayden came into the room.

“Hi,” he said. “Your dad let me in. He said I should wake you up.”

“What do you want?” Josh said as he let his head fall back to the pillow.

Hayden looked at the surfing posters on the walls. “Wow, do you really get waves like that?”

“That’s Hawaii. Now what do you want?’

“Oh, I wanted to know if you were going surfing?”

“Is it still raining?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had a look at the surf?”

“Yes,” Hayden said and sat down on the corner of Josh’s bed. It made Josh feel uncomfortable.

“Well, what’s it like?”

“I don’t know really. It doesn’t look as good as yesterday. The waves are all over the place.”

“Sounds messy.”

“Yes, it looks messy.”

Hayden looked at Josh and said, “So, are we going?”

“No,” Josh said. He wanted Hayden to leave.

“Why not?” Hayden said.

“You can go if you want. I’m going to wait for Gina.”

“Gina?” Hayden repeated.

“She’s coming here this morning, and then we’ll do something together.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll see when she gets here. It depends on the weather.”

“So you’ll do what she tells you?”

“No, we’ll decide together.” Josh sat up in bed and faced Hayden. “What is your problem anyway?”

“I don’t have a problem,” Hayden said. “I just thought you were going to help me and now you’re going off with this girl.”

“I’m sorry, Hayden, but I’m not going to waste my entire holiday teaching someone how to surf. I’ll do what I want to do, and today I want to spend time with Gina.”

Hayden stared back at Josh for what seemed like ages. Josh tried to hold his gaze steady, but he could see the hurt in Hayden’s eyes. Looking away, he broke the contact and wondered why he felt so guilty.

Hayden got up from the bed and left without saying anything. Josh almost got up to go after him then fell back on the bed with a sigh. Why did people have to be so complicated?

He got up, showered, changed and went to the kitchen for breakfast. His father was at the table, hunched over his cup of coffee like the morning before, and seemingly lost in his own thoughts.

“What are you doing today?” his father asked.

“Nothing much.”

“You’re not surfing with Hayden?”

“No, not in the rain.”

“It’ll stop by lunchtime.”

Josh didn’t know how his father did it, but he could always accurately predict the weather at Piha.

“What’s the weather doing anyway?” Josh asked.

“At the moment a small front is going over and there’s a high pressure system following it. There’s a very deep low pressure system developing in the Tasman. I reckon it’ll make its way up the South Island and reach us by New Year’s Day.”

“That could mean big surf,” Josh commented.

“Yes, especially if the high pressure cell blocks it and it stalls in the Tasman. It could push up a big swell from the south.”

“Great,” Josh said.

“You’d best be careful if the surf gets too big.”

“I can handle it. I know what I’m doing,” Josh said.

“You’re not invincible, Josh,” his father replied.

Josh remembered the dream. He hadn’t had it this morning, but the memory of it made him unsettled. Was it a premonition? Was he going to get into trouble? It was impossible. He knew Piha too well.

“I’ll be careful, Dad. Have you heard from Mum?”

“No, I’ll leave her alone. She needs her space.”

“I miss her,” Josh said quietly, almost to himself.

“Me too,” his father said as he sipped at the coffee. “Besides, neither of us can cook.” He smiled as he said this and Josh knew that he was trying to relieve the situation, but it wasn’t working.

They both heard a footfall on the deck and looked up. Gina peered in.

“Hi, Josh.”

“Come in, Gina,” he said.

“How’s your hand?” she asked of his father.

“It’s fine, thank you,” he said as he got up from the table. “I’m off to the store for a decent coffee.”

Gina took off her jacket and Josh hung it in the laundry.

“What shall we do today?” Josh asked Gina.

She shrugged and said, “I thought you might have some ideas. What do you do in Piha when it’s wet?”

“There’s not much to do down here when it rains. My parents read and I watch TV. We don’t have an internet connection here so usually I just hang around and wait for it to stop.”

“We can hang around here then.”

“My dad’s been at me to sort out my room. Do you want to help?”

“Yeah, whatever. Maybe I’ll find out your deepest, darkest secrets,” Gina teased, and laughed.

“I don’t have any.”

“We’ll see,” she said and followed him to his room where she sat on his bed and looked at the posters on the walls.

“Bevan’s got these, too,” she said.

He sat next to her on the bed. He was close enough to smell the fragrance in her hair. She turned to him and he wrapped his arms around her. He started kissing her and a warm feeling spread from his stomach into his groin. He slid his hands underneath the bottom of her T-shirt and ran his fingers over the skin on her back. She was soft. He slid down so they lay across the bed and started to tug at her T-shirt. He wanted to get at all that beautiful soft skin.

“No,” she cried as she pulled away from him.

He couldn’t get his hands out from under the T-shirt and he struggled as she slapped at his upper arms. Finally, they were free and she jumped to her feet.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, frightened she was going to leave him. “I didn’t mean … I wasn’t thinking. Let’s go for a walk or something. We don’t have to stay here.”

She surprised him by laughing. “Let’s not sit on the bed,” she said. She looked around the room. “What’s in the boxes?”

“Magazines, photos and stuff.”

“Are there photos of you?”

“Yes, they’re in one of these boxes.”

“Let’s find them.”

Gina knelt down beside one of the boxes and started to open them. Relieved, Josh crouched down beside her. This girl intrigued him but confused him all at the same time. Sometimes she seemed to come on strong and then she’d push him away. He’d never felt this way around a girl before. Was he falling in love?

When his father returned, they were sitting on the floor of his room, surrounded by the stuff that had come out of the boxes. They’d found photo albums which Gina had eagerly flipped through, stopping now and then at photos that caught her interest. He’d found old surfing magazines and had gone through them one by one, remembering when he’d first started and had bought everything ever written about surfing.

His father appeared at his bedroom door. “Are you going to tidy this up, Josh?” he asked.

“Sure,” Josh said without conviction.

“Is this all you’ve been doing since I’ve been gone?”

Josh looked up at his father and caught the look on his face. He glanced at Gina, but she was looking down at a photo album and hadn’t looked up.

“Yes, this is all we’ve been doing.”

“It’s stopped raining,” his father pointed out, but Josh didn’t know why. “Perhaps you’d like to go out.”

Now Josh understood. He thought about where they could go.

“Would you like to visit the waterfall?” he asked Gina.

“There’s a waterfall?”

“Yes, at the end of Glen Esk Road. You have to walk up to it, but it’s not hard.”

“Sure,” said Gina as she put aside the photo album.

As Josh left with Gina, he caught his father’s speculative look. He knew if he started to deny anything, his father would think him guilty anyway, so he didn’t say anything.

Let his father wonder.

Later they sat at the very top of the waterfall from where it plunged through a series of rock pools to its eventual final descent to the forest floor below. Few people came up that far. Josh and Gina had been hot after climbing the difficult track and had a swim in one of the rock pools. Now they lay in the sun, Gina at right angles to him, her head in his lap while he played with her hair. The cicadas chirped in the bush behind them, the water crashed over the rocks below them. Josh decided this was as close to heaven as he was going to get.

“Do you want to come to a party tonight?” Gina asked as she looked up at him.

“Party?” he asked. “Where?”

“At the bach next door to me.”

“Will Bevan be there?”

“I expect so, but don’t worry about him.”

Josh wasn’t so sure about that.

“Well, are you coming or not?” she asked.

“Are you sure Bevan’s not going to have a go at me?”

“He won’t, he’s too busy with that girl of his.” She cuddled up to him and kissed his cheek. “Please say you’ll come. It’ll be fun.”

“Okay,” he said, with a shrug of his shoulders, although he only wanted to be alone with her.

“Cool,” she said and kissed him on the lips.

He became aware of nothing else in that deserted spot but the two of them.

Standing in the twilight at the front door of the bach next door to Bevan’s, Josh felt nervous and unsettled. It had been easy to say yes when he was alone with Gina, but now he wasn’t so sure. He could hear the sounds of the party on the other side of the door and raised his hand to knock. It opened before his fist could connect. Gina stood in the doorway.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked.

“I’ve been watching for you. You’re late. I thought you weren’t coming.”

“My dad gave me a hard time. He didn’t want me to come.”

She pulled him close for a kiss then led him down the passage towards the music and the sounds of the party. He caught a quick glimpse of bedrooms and a bathroom before he came to a large open-plan room that faced the sand dunes and the sea. It was full of people who spilled out onto the deck beyond the room and onto the sand. Bowls of food lay around and everyone had a drink in their hand. Josh quickly spotted Rhys in the crowd, his arm around a girl he recognised as one of the regulars at Piha. He couldn’t see Bevan.

“Let’s get you a drink,” Gina said as she headed towards the kitchen, which was situated in one corner of the room. She opened the fridge door to reveal packs of beer inside.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Josh chose a beer and had only just popped the tab when he stiffened at the sound of a familiar voice.

“Howzit, bro? Still alive, eh?”

He turned and faced Mitch. Scott stood beside him. Josh braced himself for attack, but they just stood there, smiling at him.

“You took a beating last time we met, bro,” Mitch said and held out his hand. “No hard feelings, eh?”

“Nah,” Josh said as he tentatively shook the offered hand. “You staying a while?” Josh sipped at his beer to hide his nervousness. He hadn’t seen these two at Piha before and presumed they had just arrived at Bevan’s invitation.

“Until after New Year’s. Bevan’s going to show us the good surfing spots.”

“I might see you out there,” Josh said.

Mitch and Scott moved off together and he lost sight of them in the crowd. He thought it was strange that they admired him for taking the beating from Bevan, like some kind of medal of honour.

Gina hooked her arm through his. “Come on, it’s hot in here,” she said as she moved him towards the deck.

As they walked out into the cooler night air, Josh spotted Bevan. He was leaning against the railing on the deck and had his arm around a girl. Bevan and he locked eyes for a moment and there was a challenge in Bevan’s eyes. Josh only looked away when Gina led him over to a group of people.

“This is Katie,” she said, introducing him to a tall, dark girl. There was a similarity to Bevan in her features, but her face held none of the vindictiveness that Josh had seen in her brother’s. The boy with her was Sean, a regular at Piha, and Josh shook hands with him.

Gina introduced him to more people, but he forgot their names within a few minutes. He could feel Bevan’s eyes on him and glanced at him over his shoulder. Bevan was staring at him and he didn’t like the look in his eyes.

Together they went back into the bach and Gina pulled him into the crowd that was now dancing inside. He wasn’t good at dancing and moved awkwardly, feeling self-conscious until the song ended when they went back to kitchen where he retrieved a beer from the fridge. He drank eagerly, the warm weather and the press of bodies had made him thirsty. Gina led him over to a sofa that had just been vacated. She pulled him down beside her and snuggled up to him. From across the room, Bevan, his arm still around the girl, was glaring at him. For a few seconds Josh stared back, meeting Bevan’s stare, and it was Bevan who looked away first and moved out onto the deck, taking the girl with him.

Gina moved closer. He felt her breath in his ear. “See, didn’t I tell you Bevan would be cool?”

Josh didn’t reply. He had an uneasy feeling. Something was wrong here and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

Gina pulled him up for another dance. The music was getting louder, or had the beer affected his hearing? With Gina opposite him, moving her body to the music, he could forget Bevan and the strange looks he was giving him. He could even forget that he couldn’t dance as long as he had Gina with him to make him look good.

The evening passed quickly after the third beer. He danced with Gina some more and talked to Mitch and Scott about surfing. The alcohol in his system made him relaxed and confident.

“You wait here,” Gina said as a song finished. She ran her hand all the way down the inside of his bare arm, making a shiver run up his spine, and then went down the passage in the direction of the bathroom.

He had lost track of time, but it felt late. He also didn’t know how many beers he had drunk, but it didn’t matter. He was enjoying himself. He lowered himself onto the sofa next to Mitch and found himself talking about skating and surfing all at the same time as though the two activities were one. He didn’t even notice that his speech was slurred or that he wasn’t making a lot of sense.

When Mitch got up to get another beer Josh closed his eyes and laid his head back on the sofa. He let the music pulse through his body and carry him along its waves as if he was in the ocean, cradled by the swell of the sea and being rocked to sleep by its lullaby.