Blue Water High Page 3

  There was a large sigh of relief from the crowd as Fly’s body jerked and she reunited the half of the Pacific Ocean she’d swallowed with the half she’d been swimming in.

  As they lifted her up and carried her towards the medical tent, the ambulance guy confirmed that Fly had, in fact, fainted. Low blood sugar. Probably skipped breakfast. How could he know that? How could he know that instead of eating her toasted cheese sandwich Fly was rescuing the little one from the portaloo?

  Lying on the bed in the medical tent, she could hear voices. Talking about someone. Someone who sounded more than a little like her.

  ‘Has anyone called her parents?’ … ‘Is the ambulance on its way?’

  And then, somehow, without her permission, she was off the bed, like her body had kicked into auto before her brain was plugged in. She was upright for only a second before she found herself on the floor.

  ‘Whoa, there. Not so fast, young lady.’

  Simmo’s arms were beneath her, lifting her back onto the bed.

  Fly blinked. She heard Simmo being called away to the phone. And then there was a commotion at the door of the tent. Heath stood there, a first aid officer barring his way.

  ‘It’s okay. I’m her brother,’ Heath said.

  It made her smile, which made her wince. A sudden reminder of her recent fight with the Tangaroa.

  Heath bounded over. ‘Hey, Sis.’

  Fly fought the urge to smile again. ‘Don’t be funny. It hurts.’

  Heath checked out her cuts, abrasions, loose tooth.

  ‘So I wonder if they’ll run the heat again,’ he said.

  Fly shrugged. ‘Why should Stacey have to surf again ‘cause I picked a bad wave?’

  Heath thought about it. ‘If you’re chucking blame about, I’ll take a slice for hassling you onto the bad wave – and Stacey should take two slices for trying to sabotage you in the first place.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ said Fly. She tried for a brave smile. She should have known it was going too well. But still, she hadn’t expected the whole thing would end in the medical tent. In spite of all her protesting that she didn’t think she’d make it, there must’ve been a pocket of hope. Otherwise she wouldn’t feel like there was a huge hole in her belly.

  Heath must’ve seen it, because he reached out and gave her shoulder a squeeze and suddenly Fly felt like she could cry, which was irritating in the extreme. Fly was not a weeper. She’d stood on a pitchfork when she was seven, one of the prongs driving right up through her toe, and she hadn’t wept then. But now, nearly a whole decade later, in troops this guy, joins her cheer squad without even asking, saves her life and is kind enough to make her want to blubber? She needed to get a serious grip. She breathed in hard, and toughened up.

  ‘So … there’s the issue—’ She hated that word. ‘The issue of your board.’ That ought to straighten things up, she thought. Get rid of any shoulder squeezing. She pushed on. ‘I know you said you got a good deal. But it’ll still be expensive to replace. I’ll get a part-time job when I get back home. It might take a while, but I will get you the money.’

  She could hear her voice, all kind of crisp and formalsounding. Why was she acting like such a grown-up?

  ‘I made the board myself,’ Heath said.

  Fly shot him a look – yeah, right.

  ‘I found the board at the tip. Borrowed a friend’s gear to cut it back and reshape it. I drew the design myself and bartered computer lessons for the glassing. So I think in total your bill is about twenty-five cents.’

  Fly stared some more.

  ‘There’s not a lot of money in my house,’ he added. ‘You want something, you make it yourself.’

  Fly regretted the crispness of her voice. And at the same time, she was kind of angry. Why was he making her act like such a git?

  At that moment Simmo reappeared. The ambulance was there. They wanted her to have an X-ray, just to be sure. Fly’s aunt would meet them at the hospital and they could work out what to do from there. Heath stood back while the ambos lifted Fly onto a stretcher. He raised a hand in farewell as they marched her out of there.

  She knew she felt sad about how things had turned out in the water, but as the doors of the ambulance closed Fly realised she felt sad about something else too. She felt sad about the fact that, in all likelihood, she would never clap eyes on Heath Carroll again. She didn’t know why but she couldn’t help feeling like that was a sad, sad turn of events.

  Chapter 5

  Casualty. Fly had no idea why they called it that. No-one there seemed to be suffering casually. Everyone except her seemed to be suffering seriously. Maybe they should’ve called it Seriousty instead. She’d been here for four hours now, neck-deep in the walking wounded. She’d been queue-jumped by kids who’d fallen out of trees, people with broken hips who’d lain on the floor for two days before anyone found them, drunk twenty-year-olds who’d walked on broken glass but were too smashed to feel it …

  Finally, three hours and fifty-five minutes after she’d arrived she’d been seen to. Her mouth had been X-rayed and she’d been given a cubicle. All to herself. With her own bed to swing her legs on impatiently while she waited for her Aunty Robyn to come and take her to the bus stop for the long and hideous bus ride back to Capel, WA.

  A nurse spoke from behind her – she had a visitor.

  Without turning around, Fly bounced off the bed and reached down to collect her bags, saying to her aunt, ‘I’ve already checked the bus, and we’ve got twenty-five minutes to get to the bus stop.’

  ‘You’re really keen to get home, aren’t you?’

  The voice wasn’t her Aunty Robyn’s. It wasn’t even a girl’s. Fly spun around.

  Heath stood casually in the doorway.

  ‘So keen to go home you didn’t bother to check if they were going to run your heat again. Which they are, by the way. Tomorrow.’

  Fly didn’t know what to say. Her head whirled trying to take in this new information.

  Heath slid into the cubicle, checking it out. ‘How’s the mouth?’ he asked.

  Fly’s hand flew to her face instinctively. ‘It’s okay,’ she said from behind the hand.

  ‘Can I see?’

  Fly’s hand didn’t budge. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

  Heath stood there waiting, puzzled.

  ‘Seriously, there’s nothing to see, because there’s nothing there.’

  Heath seemed excited by this. ‘The tooth’s gone?’

  Fly nodded.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘Pleeeaase! I love sporting injuries.’

  When Fly didn’t respond, he said, ‘Don’t make me go into how I was the one who had to drag your bloody bones out of the sea. This is the least you owe me.’

  With a sigh, Fly dropped her hand, and flashed him her teeth. Where the canine used to be was a big, black, empty space.

  Heath beamed. ‘Brilliant.’

  Fly couldn’t remember the last magazine cover which showed a model with a gaping hole in her gob, but what did she know? And then something else piped up in Fly’s brain, something niggled and jiggled and called for attention. She threw her mind into reverse – what was it? They were running the heat again tomorrow?

  Heath confirmed she had heard him correctly. ‘I reckon it’d be alright to smile,’ he added.

  Fly did. Wall-to-wall grin. Baring that unmissable gap for all the world to see.

  ‘Or not,’ said Heath. ‘Depending on how embarrassed you really are about that tooth.’

  Fly’s lips came down like a roller door. But she couldn’t stop the giggle, or the joy she was feeling at having a second chance. Before she knew what she was doing, Fly was up off the bed, hugging Heath for all she was worth.

  Heath was a bit shocked at the sudden rush of affection, but she felt him relax into it, and it was this that sent up the warning signal. Flashing lights and a siren blared in Fly’s head: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  She pulled herself out of Heath’s arms, clea
red her throat and started babbling. ‘I don’t know what I – Sorry, I don’t usually hug – I – I’m sorry.’

  Heath looked confused. ‘You don’t usually hug?’

  ‘I don’t usually hug strangers,’ Fly said.

  Heath nodded. ‘Me neither. But I’m prepared to overlook it just this once. Till we get to know each other better.’

  He reached down for her bags, telling her that Deb, the other coach at the academy, was waiting downstairs.

  ‘And unless we get you out of here, and ready for tomorrow, you’ll blow your second chance and I won’t get to know you better anyway.’

  It turned out Fly’s Aunty Robyn had been called away to Brisbane for work. There’d been a long debate about where Fly should stay. She hadn’t really earned the right to stay with Heath and the other heat winners at the Solar Blue Academy boarding house and so Deb had made other arrangements. Before she started at the academy, Deb had worked at the College of Sport. She still had contacts there, and so, for her first night on her own away from the farm, Fly would be staying in dormitory D.

  As they walked through the darkened grounds, it seemed to Fly that she was, in fact, the only person with a heartbeat staying in the whole place. Dormitory D was a tiny building on the edge of a large, empty hockey field. Deb assured her that there were coaches up in the main building and a phone in the room – if she needed anything, she only had to call.

  Deb was friendly enough. She was youngish, maybe in her twenties, and fit. As they opened the door of the dormitory, Deb told Fly they would pick her up in the morning around seven and take her to the dental hospital to be fitted for a temporary tooth before the comp. Then she looked to Heath, nodded for them to go.

  But Heath hesitated. ‘I thought I’d hang out for a while and walk back.’

  Deb frowned. This was not part of the plan.

  ‘Fly’s away from home for the first time,’ Heath argued. ‘She might be a bit – you know – scared.’

  Fly was about to launch an indignant protest when Deb shrugged. She wanted Heath back at the academy by nine or he’d lose points before he even started.

  Heath waved Deb off and turned back to see a very unhappy Fly.

  ‘Just for your information, I am not scared of staying on my own. Not one single bit.’

  Heath shrugged, stepped into the room.

  ‘But you haven’t stayed on your own before, away from the farm, have you?’

  Fly wanted to cut his argument to pieces. She wanted to tell him she’d travelled for six months through the outback, with nothing but a compass and a can opener … But the truth was, apart from school camp, and the usual sleepovers, Fly had only really stayed on the farm. She had slept out under the stars on her own. She’d slept 10 kms from the farmhouse and watched the Milky Way creeping slowly across the sky, but it was kind of different. The farm was her territory, and here, on her own in the city, was not. Not that Heath was waiting for an answer anyway, he was already exploring her new digs.

  The dormitory was large and spectacularly concrete. White concrete floor, white concrete walls. Harsh fluorescent strips of light hummed on the ceiling and hundreds of tiny gnats headbanged against the tubes like they were at the gig of their lives. Above every bunk was a poster of a sporting champion. It was the only thing to tell Fly that she hadn’t been booked into a prison cell.

  Heath bounced on all the beds. A choice of six so she might as well take her pick. Then he got down to it. He wanted to know what kind of preparation she was going to do for tomorrow.

  ‘Just going to go out there and give it my best.’

  Heath looked at her seriously. ‘I don’t want to freak you out, but I’ve got this thing that goes off when I can sense something uncool is going to happen. My mum calls it the tilt monitor. Like on a pinnie. I can tell when someone’s hit the machine too hard ‘cause they’re not getting their way.’

  Fly stared at him. She thought pinball machines went out with the Ark.

  ‘Anyway,’ Heath continued, ‘whatever it is, if I tell you I’ve got the tilts about you, it’s usually better to stay in bed. Stacey Jervis sends my tilt monitor into hyperspace and I reckon you need to be prepared for her to try something shifty again.’

  Fly wasn’t expecting Heath to go all clairvoyant on her. She didn’t need any spooky predictions. Not tonight, on her first real night away from home, not when she was desperate to prove him wrong by not being scared.

  ‘I don’t think Stacey’s out to get me. She’s just desperate to get in and people do dumb things when they’re desperate.’

  Heath stared at her like she was an alien.

  ‘Aren’t you desperate?’

  It took Fly by surprise. Was she?

  When she didn’t answer, Heath got up off the bed and headed for the door. ‘If I were you, I’d start getting desperate in a big way. ‘Cause last time I looked, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance.’

  He raised his eyebrows at her, then pulled the door closed.

  Fly sat there, alone. Then, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do, she started testing out each of the beds. They were rock hard. All of them. Designed to encourage you out of bed for training at an unnatural hour. She settled on one by the window. Heath was right; she was a little bit freaked out being on her own. The dormitory seemed stupidly large. There was too much space. Too much silence. There were no sisters snuffling their way in and out of dreams on the other side of the room.

  She pulled the blind back and stared at the stars. It was the same galaxy rolling around the earth, the same twinkling bits would be sprinkled above the farm in a couple of hours. She couldn’t get Heath’s question out of her mind. Was she desperate to get in or not?

  Fly thought about the trials a few weeks ago. They’d been held at her local beach. If you could call having to get a lift and two buses local. Fly used to have to get up in the dark if she wanted a chance of getting to Prevelly Park in time for any of the best morning waves. It was a beach she’d surfed since she was eight. The waves were rarely bigger than five or six foot. And maybe that’s why she’d made it her local. Maybe that’s why she never stayed on the bus another couple of stops to Busselton or Yallingup, even when she knew the waves there would be better.

  Everyone in town had been talking about nothing else but the Solar Blue Trials for two whole months before they happened. There was no other news. If the aliens had invaded and taken over the local fish and chip shop no-one would’ve noticed, because it wasn’t related to ‘The Trials’. Even the teachers at Fly’s school didn’t bother marking the roll that week – they knew when they were up against something just too powerful to beat.

  The judges from Solar Blue were in town checking out the talent for a week. It was like Australian Idol with zinc cream. There was a holiday feeling. Lots of friendly groups gathered in the street, comparing notes on how it was going. Anyone who’d ever even seen a surfing movie was down there giving it a burl.

  If the trials had been on a year before, Fly would’ve been first in the queue to try out. Not cocky, but quietly confident. Everyone knew she was the best grommet to have dipped her toes in the Indian for a long time. That’s how she got her name. When she was in the water the older boys reckoned she stuck to the wall of the wave like a March fly. At home, when she was annoying her sisters by hanging around too much, they reckoned she was more like a blowfly hanging off the back of a sheep’s bum.

  A year ago Fly was fearless. But then, at the end of the summer holidays, after nearly six whole weeks of hanging in the water till she was wrinkled like a prune, Fly joined a couple of the older guys for an afternoon session down at Cowaramup. It was getting late. They knew they were pushing it, but the waves were too good to let go. There was a killer swell, the tail end of a tropical cyclone curling down the coast, and it was flinging waves in at the coast like a bull whip. On that afternoon a year ago, the ocean had curled its watery fingers around Fly’s throat and squeezed the quiet confidence right out o
f her.

  Sitting there on the bed in the dormitory Fly could feel her heart banging away in her chest. She didn’t let herself think about what had happened. Not ever. Not that she remembered a lot. She didn’t remember the wave. She didn’t remember making it to shore. She didn’t remember getting home. And she didn’t tell her mum and dad what had happened. She didn’t tell her best friend Tamara. It was only after a week that her oldest sister Kate had Chinese-burned the truth out of her.

  And it was her oldest sister Kate who had, on the morning of the last day of the trials, reefed her out of bed and driven her to the beach. Kate had given her a long lecture about options. Fly didn’t understand exactly what she meant, but she knew Kate had decided to stay on the farm instead of going to university, and there were lots of days where she didn’t seem too happy about it.

  So now she was there, she might as well get in the water – that’s what Kate had said as they’d pulled up at the beach. Fly guessed she was right. She just thought she’d go out there and surf the way she always did after what had happened. Safely. She would pick her waves very carefully. She would let the brutes pass because she wasn’t up for it anymore. That was her plan. But something happened when she got out there. It was a four-foot swell, fairly regular. Nice and predictable. She picked the middle wave and pushed to her feet and then, without her permission, her body just took over and she was surfing like a maniac. Like the maniac she used to be, anyway. She cut the waves to pieces. And it was only afterwards, only when the big white envelope from Solar Blue arrived, that she started to freak. She’d made it through under false pretences. Even though she could surf like that, it wasn’t how she was going to surf again. She wanted to, she wanted to let herself go absolutely, one hundred per cent mental, but the last time she did that she’d paid, big time.

  And again, without her permission, Fly was back there. She could feel the fear, cold and tight around her throat. It was off the leash and hunting for something to bail up, like a wild dog, hunting for her. Fly struggled to suck in some air, just like she had at Cowaramup. That was the worst, that helplessness. To see how far away the surface was and to be completely at the mercy of nature’s timing. You had three seconds left before breathing stopped being a question and to know that your wishes didn’t count, there was a stronger force in action. It wasn’t personal, it didn’t care that you just handed in a great geography assignment, or that it was your turn to cook dinner that night – what you wanted just didn’t matter. Everyone said the great thing about surfing was that it was just you and the wave. But the wave doesn’t care about you. You are a bystander. A hanger-on. A piece of seaweed.