The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (3 page)

His friend fared no better. He had made the split-second decision to pretend he’d seen nothing, and started laughing instead at his friend sprawled on the floor, as if he thought he had simply fallen over, or slipped. And he too appeared to feel a rush of embarrassment at this. He didn’t even glance in the direction of the man at the bar, as if even looking at him might earn himself the same treatment. Instead, when his friend was back on his feet, he began quickly finishing his drink, and muttering something about how it was time to go somewhere decent. It was only when it became clear they were leaving that Natalie realised she had been holding her breath.
 

As they left some bravado returned to the two young men. The one who had fallen shouted how ‘next time’ someone was going to get the shit kicked out of them, then he quickly ducked out the door. Natalie watched them through the plate glass window, she flinched when the other man gave it a hard kick. It bowed and for a moment it looked like it might break, but then it seemed to bounce back. And then the men were gone.
 

The young man reading his poetry, who had barely moved at all during the whole episode now stood up and gave an elaborate bow towards the man who had helped him. In response this man lifted the drink the barman had just put down in front of him. There were a few half-embarrassed whistles and cheers from across the bar, and then everything returned to normal. It was as if nothing at all had happened.
 

Natalie watched her friend Alice saying something to the barman, then she began talking to the man. They stayed chatting for some time, every now and then looking over to Natalie as she waited at her table. Natalie hoped she wouldn’t bring him over. Not because she didn’t like the look of him. He was handsome, tanned skin, with very dark hair and sharp features that split every now and then into a warm smile. No, she didn’t want Alice to bring him over because if that happened she knew Alice would end up sleeping with him. And he didn’t look like the kind of guy Alice needed in her life right now.

Alice brought him over.
 

“Natalie, meet Jim,” she said. “I had to buy him a drink after what he just did.”

Jim gave her a smile which confirmed to Natalie that he was as arrogant as he looked, then he and Alice resumed their flirty conversation from the bar. Natalie hardly listened, instead she wondered how long this one would last. Maybe it would just be a one night stand? Maybe she wouldn’t have to spend too long supporting her friend when this one split up with her.
 

And then Alice had stood up saying she had to go to the ladies room, and as she’d passed by where Natalie was sitting she leaned in close to her ear.
 

“It’s not me he’s after,” And she walked away, trailing one finger along the surface of the table behind her.

five

OUR CAMPSITE WAS just a mile away from the village, right down by the beach. It had three rows of static caravans, a field for tents and another one for travelling caravans. There were two toilet blocks with showers that didn’t work very well, and a covered area with a row of sinks where people went to do their washing up. The grass was pockmarked with molehills.
 

There was a house that came with the site. The main room downstairs was also the shop and reception for the campsite. The rest was just a normal private house, which became home for Mum and me. The windows were tiny and the walls were thick but that hadn’t stopped the damp settling into the furniture and carpets over the many years since they’d been laid. From the upstairs windows you could see the ocean, but not the beach, since there was a high bank of shingle that stopped the high tides from flooding the camping fields. Compared to Australia it wasn’t much of a beach anyway. The warm blue waters and white sand I was used to were replaced by slate grey sea and patches of dirty-coloured sand scattered among the pebbles.
 

Mum found out about it from a magazine article that was left on the plane. It was one of those articles that gives suggestions for life-changing adventures that people could do. You know the type, go and count monkeys in the rainforest, or build an eco-house in Mexico. I don’t know why she chose the campsite, I was too young to talk about it at the time, and there never seemed much point later on. But it’s weird to think I could have turned out a monkey specialist. Or a Mexican drug lord. But instead I was stuck in Wales in the fucking rain.

 
The campsite was sold as a going concern, which meant there were visitors right from the day we moved in. Mum thought I’d enjoy working in the shop, and driving the tractor around to cut the grass and under different circumstances I might have done, but I was a twelve year old kid, I’d just watched my Dad blow himself up and then I’d lost every friend I had in the weeks afterwards. So I didn’t much.

I don’t remember much about the first few weeks, and I don’t much like trying to remember. I knew the whole thing was insane of course, but I felt it was my fault. I’d fucked up somehow and this was my punishment. I cried all the time, during the day at least, but not for Dad. I cried for me, and where I was. At night it was Mum that cried. She’d bury her face in a pillow so I wouldn’t hear, but her sobs were so loud it didn’t work.
 

The day Dad died was the last day I went to school in Australia, and a few weeks later I started a new school in Wales. They were pretty different. There were more kids in my old school than in the whole village we’d moved to. My new school had less than a hundred students. I was probably the first new kid any of them had ever seen, I was definitely the first Australian.
 

 
I do remember starting at that school. It felt like arriving on another planet. They spoke English at least, not that guttural gargling Welsh the old folk in the village still coughed up when they queued in the post office, but none of the kids wanted to talk to me, and I pulled a fierce scowl onto my face every morning to warn off anyone who thought of trying. There were twelve kids in my class. Twelve kids was an easy number for the teachers to work with. Six tables of two. “Choose a partner,” the teachers would say. Sometimes they’d remember to add: “Jesse, you work alone for now”.
 

 
Every day it rained. Every day I hated everything and every day it got a little bit worse. But I didn’t tell anyone. After school I’d get back to the campsite and I’d tell Mum it was alright, then I’d go to bed early to have a little cry, and I’d try to sleep while all the time hearing her crying in the room next door. The only thing that kept me going in those early days was this idea I got that I just had to sit it out for a while. Eventually Mum would come to her senses and we would go back to our old life in Australia.
 

But Mum wouldn’t take us back. She didn’t think we could go back. She didn’t think people would ever forget what had happened to Dad, not the way it happened. Plus by then she thought everyone back home would think she was a coward for running away, and then a failure for not making it work. So for Mum the only option left was to make a go of it. And I think she got some relief out of being so busy as well.
 

There was a steady flow of regulars to the static caravans, a trickle of caravans and tents popping up and down on the grass like mushrooms. There was a regular flow of complaints too, since the site was run down. So Mum jumped in and out of overalls to fix plumbing and electrics and stock the shelves of the shop with brands of food I didn’t recognise but had decided I didn’t like.
 

We’d been in Wales maybe six weeks when I finally got that we weren’t going back. It was a Saturday. And I turned thirteen years old. Back home on that exact day I was supposed to be having a beach party, only because of the time difference, by the time I woke up it would have already been over. I was so excited I’d already invited a load of my friends, before Dad died I mean. I was allowed as many as I wanted because we were doing it on the beach. Dad was going to do a bbq and we’d play Aussie footie and I knew for a surprise he’d booked some blow-karts - they’re like land yachts that you can race on the beach at low tide. But we’d only do any of that if there was no surf. What me and my mates all hoped was we could spend the whole day surfing and then stuff our faces with sausages and burgers slathered in ketchup, and then watch surf movies all evening. It was going to be the perfect birthday. I wondered if anyone had thought to cancel all those invitations. I wondered if any of my friends had turned up at the beach on the off chance. I wondered whether the surf had been good. I wondered if the blow-kart guy had come with the little yachts loaded in the back of his Ute and scratched his head and then spat on the ground and gone for a beer.
 

Back in Oz nearly all the boys in my class were surfers, so I was too. The town we lived in was a surfer town. We all had posters of the Aussie surfing legends on our bedroom walls and we hung out by the lifeguard’s tower, arguing about whether we’d got tubed or not. We never did of course, we were just groms - that’s what the other surfers called us kids. But being a kid you got to pester the pro’s every year when the world tour came to town. We’d camp out there all day and beg the guys for autographs when they finished their heats. Sometimes they’d even let you carry their boards.

So anyway, my birthday, my actual thirteenth birthday started badly. The rain had been so heavy overnight the lower toilet block overflowed all over the grass. I actually didn’t mind, cleaning up shit with Mum was better than being in school anyway. And when we came in and cleaned ourselves up Mum made me go and look in the little shed at the side of the house. She said there was a surprise there waiting for me. She followed me and watched, and I knew what it was at once. Dad had spent ages talking with the shop guy about this board’s volume and rocker flat, he’d worked out that it was perfect for a kid my size, but I’d just fallen for the airbrushed colour scheme, the whole deck was this beautiful morphing from orange in the tail through yellows and reds to deep purple in the nose. I could see it glowing through the bubble wrap now. It was my surfboard. Our old neighbour - the other side from the fence guy - he’d packed it all up for Mum and sent it over. He was a surfer too and he’d packed it real carefully, cutting a polystyrene block to protect the fins.
 

I cried as I unwrapped it. Mum did too. She thought it was tears of joy, or release, or finally tears of grief over Dad, something like that. But it wasn’t. I was crying because I knew I was never going home now.

six

IT FELT LIKE it rained the first six weeks we were in Wales. It wasn’t like the rain back home, which came in short bursts but came hard, so the streets would flow with orange-red rivers for a few minutes and then steam as the sun sucked the moisture right back up into the sky. In Wales the rain started when you got up and just hung around all day, right up until you went to bed. Then it did the same the next day. In Wales even the rain was shit.

But then the weather changed. A couple of weeks after my board arrived I came home from school and the sun was shining. You could look up and the sky was blue. I honestly hadn’t thought that could happen here. There was something else different too. I heard it first and although I knew that sound it was like I couldn’t quite place it. It sounded wrong.

 
The shingle bank meant you couldn’t see the beach from the campsite, but I still ran down to look and my heart was pounding. I held my breath as I climbed the path that led up the bank, I didn’t dare to hope too much but it sounded so familiar. And then I looked over the top and there it was. The beach I’d come to regard as permanently flat and choppy and grey was holding a three foot wave. The sun was shining down on the water so it was like a billion diamonds were floating in the bay and playing with that sunlight. But better than that, there was a small pack of surfers out there already, their backs turned to me, bobbing up and down, then turning as the swells reached them and jumping to their feet, riding them back towards the shore. I didn’t stop to watch for long. I sprinted back to the house and shouted to Mum as I ripped off my clothes, searched for my board shorts.
 

“I’m going surfing!” I shouted. I didn’t wait for a reply.
 

 
It’s scary to paddle out in a new place amongst a group of surfers you don’t know, even more so when you’ve just turned thirteen. But I didn’t hesitate. This wasn’t like the school in the village where weird Welsh country kids eyed me with suspicion every time I came too near. This wasn’t the campsite where people on their shit holidays expected me to care if their shower was cold. These were surfers. I
knew
these people.
I knew I’d fit in. I paddled right into the middle of them, so excited I spun around instantly and caught the first wave that came through.
 

Sometimes when you’re surfing you can remember the few seconds of riding a single wave for years afterwards as clear as if it was burnt onto videotape. That first wave I caught in Wales was like that. I was lucky, in just the right place at just the right time and I caught the wave easily, and stood up before it even got that steep, then I dropped down the face into a powerful bottom turn, for a kid at least. Certainly I had enough speed to reconnect with the lip with a slashing turn, and then another and another. And then I just pulled into a fast section that nearly tubed on top of me, finally riding out over the dying shoulder of the wave and sinking into the water behind. Even by Aussie standards it was a good ride. Despite, or maybe because of the build-up of emotions inside me, I let out this scream of delight. I sounded like I was an animal or something.

I might have thought I was the same as the other surfers out that day, but in reality they were all staring at me in amazement, this crazy kid in red shorts freezing his butt off while they were all black-clad in wetsuits. I couldn’t have been more different. But anyway. That was how it was when I first met John Buckingham.