Blue Water High

  Shelley Birse was born in Lake Macquarie. She studied Communications and was lucky enough to score a traineeship with the ABC. Fifteen years later, she’s still being paid to make stuff up.

  Shelley’s writing and script production credits appear on a multitude of award-winning programs, including ‘Wildside’, ‘Love is a Four Letter Word’, ‘Young Lions’, ‘Blue Water High’ and, most recently, the screen adaptation of Tim Winton’s Lockie Leonard.

  First published 2007 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Southern Star Entertainment Pty Ltd 2007

  Film Finance Corporation Australia presents a Southern Star Entertainment

  production in association with New South Wales Film and Television Office

  produced in association with Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Australian Broadcasting

  Corporation. Financed with the assistance of FFC Australia, Film

  Finance Corporation

  © 2005 Australian Film Finance Corporation Limited, Southern Star

  Entertainment Pty Limited, New South Wales Film and Television Office.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

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  or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or

  mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any

  information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Birse, Shelley.

  Blue water high.

  For children.

  ISBN 978 0330 42366 3 (pbk.).

  1. Surfing – Juvenile fiction. 2. Teenage girls –

  Juvenile fiction. I. Title. II. Title : Blue water high

  (Television program).

  A823.3

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  These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced

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  person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any

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  Blue Water High

  Shelley Birse

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  Acknowledgements

  Any work of this nature inevitably comes from the contribution of many heads and I want to acknowledge the creativity of the other Blue Water High series writers: Noel Price, Mimi Butler, Jennifer Mellet, John Armstrong, Michael Miller, Kym Goldsworthy, Kristen Dunphy and Marissa Cooke – all of whom wrote scripts it was a guilty privilege to plunder.

  Chapter 1

  So there’s an ideal way to prepare for the biggest day in your life …

  And then there’s today.

  Fly Watson had been on the bus for fifty-six hours. Okay, there’d been a pee break here and there. But the fifty-six hours didn’t include the pee breaks. She’d been sitting on that hard little seat watching the countryside whiz by for so long it felt like her knees had been bolted into right angles.

  In an ideal world she would’ve made the 3314-kilometre journey from the Margaret River to Sydney two days ago. She would’ve spent some time getting to know the Blue Water break. She would’ve sat on the beach watching the currents sucking in and out, like some huge water-breathing dragon was snoozing just off the coast. She would’ve gone to bed early last night and woken well rested this morning. She would’ve had a high protein breakfast, taken a run on the beach and had a good, long warm-up session.

  But Fly was not doing any of that. No, three hours before the finals to get into the best surfing school in the country began, Fly was, in fact, in a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. She was waiting for a toasted cheese sanger and trying to work out whether she would need surgery if she ever wanted to straighten her legs again.

  Not that she was complaining. Fly had been trained out of complaining at a very early age. It just wasn’t stood for in the Watson house. Complaining was a crime of the highest order. ‘Whiner’s disease’ her mother called it. And complaining was tolerated only when there had been a very, very, very unfortunate turn of events.

  So instead of complaining about the fact that she couldn’t get to Sydney sooner, Fly did what preparation she could before leaving home. She spent hours on the internet in the school library, glued to the Solar Blue website. She printed off maps of the break. She stared at the biographies of all the previous winners, wondering what special quality they all shared until her eyes were red and square and had their own screensaver.

  And anyway, she wasn’t the only one doing the miles. The competition for a place at Solar Blue Surf Academy was Australia-wide. If she was coming from the left ankle of the country, she knew there would be other people coming from as far as the right nostril too. That’s how special this chance was.

  The girl behind the counter flipped Fly’s sandwich and pressed it down hard. She was really hammering that thing. If it got any thinner Fly could slip it in an envelope and post it home. She heard a bus start up outside the window and grimaced as it ground up the gears. She turned to see it ride awkwardly up and over the curb on its way out of the driveway. She wasn’t surprised – the driver looked like an escapee from a retirement village.

  Things suddenly went very still inside Fly’s brain.

  Her wrinkly old driver …

  Her bus riding over the curb …

  Her bus driving away …

  WITHOUT HER!

  The bell over the door screamed in protest as Fly flew through it. She dodged the parked cars, scanning for the bus. It was already at the exit, blinker on, waiting for a gap in the traffic. She screamed her lungs out. She flapped her arms. In reply the bus belted a huge cloud of diesel at her, and took off down the road.

  Fly stood there in the biting dawn, cars rocketing past her. This was not how it was supposed to end. It hadn’t even started for goodness’ sake!

  Maybe this could be considered a very, very, very unfortunate turn of events.

  Maybe even she, the mistress of ‘sucking it up and getting on with it’ might be allowed to have just a little grizzle now?

  Then the bus suddenly swerved to the left and pulled off the side of the road. It skidded to an awkward stop, its bum rising in the air with the sudden shift in plans. The doors hissed open
and the wrinkly old driver puffed down the stairs just as Fly reached them.

  ‘Forgot the little one,’ he panted, and rushed straight past her.

  For a second she thought he was talking about her. But why was he running the other way? And then she realised ‘the little one’ wasn’t her. It was the six-year-old boy sitting two rows behind her.

  Fly climbed back onto the bus and tried to stop glaring at the second hand on her watch, eating down the time until she would be officially late. She could feel a ball of tension starting to work up a tidy little knot in her tummy. When she thought about it, that knot had been there ever since she first saw the announcement for the Solar Blue Academy surf competition. It was in a surfing magazine she had borrowed from her best friend. The ad took up a full page. It had shimmering blue letters and it asked the question: How would you like to spend a year of your life training in the best surf school in the country for free?

  They shouldn’t have bothered with the question mark really. The question mark was a waste of ink because who in their right mind was going to say, ‘Not much, really. I’d rather just hang out here in my ordinary life, thanks anyway’? Every year, the school took seven of the best young surfers and trained them like crazy. As if that weren’t a big enough prize, at the end of the year two of them got wildcard places on the world circuit.

  Where was the driver? She stared down at her watch again and cursed that speedy second hand. Time was weird like that. When you were waiting for a double period of science to finish the seconds flicked over lazily, dragging their feet like a tired two-year-old. When you actually needed to be somewhere it was like the seconds could feel your antsiness and they sprinted for you. Fly couldn’t stand it any longer. She pushed her bag under the seat and stomped off the bus to see what on earth could be taking so long. Bad move.

  As it turned out, the little one and his mother had failed to board the bus because he’d somehow managed to get himself stuck in the portaloo. By the time she got around the corner of the servo, a group of other passengers had wrestled the portaloo down onto the ground. It lay on its side like a green and yellow Dalek that Dr Who had managed to slay. A couple of passengers were fiddling with a small square plate on the bottom of the loo. And a number of them were staring at Fly, murmuring things like, ‘She might be small enough to squeeze through’, and, ‘She really is quite tiny, isn’t she?’

  And so it was that on this, the most important day of her fifteen-year-old life, Fly Watson found herself waist-deep in truck drivers’ whizzle, dragging a small child from a portable toilet.

  Excellent preparation.

  On the upside, the portaloo had a small mirror in it. And as she jammed the top half of her body through the hole in the bottom, Fly caught sight of herself. Blue eyes, tanned skin, freckles dotted across her neat little nose from too much time in the sun. Fly liked her face – probably a good thing given it was fairly attached to the rest of her head. It was a simple face, a kind face … She gave herself a smile in the mirror and it was then that she copped a look at her hair. Fly’s hair was long and wavy and it usually hung from the top of her head and pointed down towards the ground. Today she looked like a cockatoo had landed on her head and danced the Macarena there for three hours.

  Generally Fly had to be reminded to check in with the mirror every now and then. Without the portaloo rescue she would’ve tumbled out of the bus looking like she’d been using her head as a toilet brush, which wasn’t that far from the truth now she thought about it.

  When Fly finally tumbled out of the bus at Blue Water Beach, her hair hung in two long plaits. So it made her look younger? It was that or the toilet brush.

  The driver wheezed as he dragged Fly’s board and bags from the bus. She’d borrowed a backpack from one of her sisters and an overnight bag from her aunty. The letter inviting her to come and compete in the finals had instructed them to pack their bags ‘with a view to starting training immediately’ if they were selected. It was just too weird an idea – that she would get on the bus, win one of the seven places, and not see the farm or her family for a whole year … Definitely too weird. She’d packed halfheartedly, almost embarrassed to pretend it might come true. And yet, here she was. After all the waiting, after all the nerves and the rushing and the portaloo, this wasn’t a dream. She was here.

  Fly shouldered her bags. When she looked up, the little one’s mother was standing on the bottom step of the bus waiting for her. The woman pressed a ten-dollar note and a muesli bar into Fly’s hand – not much, but all she had to spare.

  ‘Good luck,’ she whispered.

  Fly felt like she was going to need it.

  Chapter 2

  Blue Water Beach wasn’t exactly as shown on the website. It was bigger. It was jam-packed with people and bright blue waves smacked the sand viciously. There was a huge Solar Blue tent in the middle. Long, coloured sponsor flags played tug-of-war with the wind. Loudspeakers barked on poles.

  And what they barked was that the fifth heat of the day was a boys’ heat, which could mean two things. If it came after the last girls’ heat (supposedly hers) then her day was about to go downhill fast. If it was before the girls’, she’d better make like a rabbit.

  Fly wrestled her stuff down onto the sand. There were clusters of people everywhere. Kids getting pep talks, being congratulated, being supported. She recognised the odd face from the preliminary trials held a month ago back home, but the truth was Fly stood on the beach, about to surf the most important heat of her life, and she was on her own. She could feel a small nugget of sadness forming. She swallowed it back hard. No time for that kind of rubbish … And then, right in front of her, Mr Simmonds appeared.

  Simmo – as he seemed to be universally known – was the chief of all things surfing at Solar Blue Surf Academy and he’d played a big part in the culling process of the competition to get in. And there’d been a lot of culling. The first trials had reduced seven thousand hopefuls to three hundred very hopefuls who got to surf a second time. Those three hundred then surfed again and had an interview before they were hacked down to the fifty very, very hopefuls who were now on the beach praying, begging, pleading for one of the seven spots at the school. It reminded Fly of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – these were the golden tickets.

  Fly remembered Simmo from the interview. He was a funny mix, his long shorts and thongs and sunnies all screamed Mr Casual, but there was something serious about him too. Just when you thought he was going to make a fart joke, he came out with something surprisingly sombre.

  ‘Fly Watson,’ he said. ‘Thought you were going to stand us up.’

  Been here five minutes and in trouble already.

  ‘The bus was … held up,’ she said. No point going into the whole portaloo drama. Even though it was true, Fly knew it sounded too much like ‘the dog ate my homework’.

  ‘Am I too late?’ she asked.

  Simmo shook his head. ‘You don’t have time for a massage and a lie down, though. They’ll call you in ten when the guys finish.’

  Simmo winked at her and jogged away.

  Fly stepped out of her thongs and wriggled her toes in this new sand. This was something she never tired of. During the day, while she was at school, she could feel her toes busting to get out of those steaming lace-ups. To get into the clean, dry sand. She reached down and grabbed a handful … and found herself staring at a board. It was a five-footer. White with an intense design ripping right up through the middle. The shape was violent and soft, sharp black edges curling around each other – and the more she stared the more she could see that it wasn’t just a pattern. It was a picture. The hint of a fishhook curling upwards, and then, snaking out of the top edge, a head. Belonging to a man or monster Fly couldn’t be sure, but she couldn’t stop staring at it, locked into its grave, gentle gaze.

  ‘Tangaroa.’

  Fly looked up into a smiling, brown face. A boy. About sixteen, shirtless, big brown eyes. He seemed to be talking to her. A
nd maybe because she was still thinking about the figure on the board, or maybe because she had a long history of muddling things up when it came to boys, Fly started her first conversation with Heath Carroll very much on the wrong foot.

  She was right that the word – Tangaroa – was not an English word, but that the speaker was not English too? Well that’s where the muddling up began.

  He said it again. ‘Tangaroa.’

  Fly shook her head and very slowly, very loudly, said, ‘SORRY. I. ONLY. SPEAK. ENG-LISH.’

  Heath started to smile. Fly wasn’t sure how to respond. You didn’t meet too many people from overseas in Capel, population 750, two hundred k from the nearest 7-Eleven. Maybe she hadn’t said it clearly enough? So she pointed to herself and said it again.

  ‘ENG-LISH. Sorry.’

  ‘Yeah I speak it too,’ said Heath.

  Fly could feel the blood bolting to her cheeks. She was a world champion blusher. She could cook up twelve shades of beetroot in under five seconds.

  Heath didn’t seem to notice. He thrust out his hand.

  ‘Heath Carroll. My mum’s from New Zealand, but I was born here.’

  Fly shook the hand and started blathering. She could hear herself trying to explain. She could also hear herself using the word ‘sorry’ way too many times.

  Heath just nodded and returned to waxing the board, fat lumps of beeswax pocking the design as he moved back and forth.

  ‘It’s a Maori design. It’s called a Tangaroa. Guardian of all things that live in the sea.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fly. She nodded for good measure. Stood there. Nodded some more. She was an excellent conversationalist some days.

  Saved by the PA.

  ‘Stacey Jervis and Fiona Watson to the judging area. The last girls’ heat will start in ten minutes.’

  It took a second before Fly sprang into action. She was so rarely called Fiona Watson these days it hardly sounded like her name anymore. Unless she was in trouble for not cleaning up her room, or one of her sisters was deliberately trying to wind her up, it was just plain old Fly. But here it was – Fiona Watson to the judging area. She reached down and grabbed her gear.