Air (23 page)

saturday

At 5 a.m., when the alarm on my phone started screeching, the argument was still raging on. He was standing with his back to the window, his eyes flashing with anger. He set his mouth into a hard line and started breathing deeply through his nose. Yoga breaths. He was trying to calm himself down.

“We shouldn't be talking about this right now. You have to get Zen for the contest,” he said, opening the blinds. The sun hadn't come up, but the night was clear and the lights of Miami were beautiful. We had come to one of the coolest cities in the world, and we still couldn't be happy.

Shame and regret vied for pole position; I thought I'd been ready for this relationship, but I wasn't. Zeke wasn't either. It was too much. Neither of us could handle it.

My mum had seen it coming, I was sure. She had been reluctant to let me chase my dreams, but I'd worn her down,
convinced her that this was my big chance. Maybe she knew that in these circumstances my relationship with Zeke would burn out, but that she had to let it run its course. I was stubborn, and maybe she thought if she'd stood in my way I'd have left home anyway, at the first opportunity. She'd have been right.

“I don't care about the frigging contest! I'm not even going to it!”

He turned away from the window, alarm in his eyes.

“Yeah, you are.”

We took the coach to New Smyrna, and by the time we arrived Zeke was pale and his eyes were shining wet. I could feel the tears in my own eyes too.

He handed me my bag from the overhead storage. “You have to go compete. Try to shake this off and we'll figure it out after.”

“I don't care about any of this shit. It's just a contest. Tell me what's going on so I can understand it. Why are you on pills? JUST TELL ME!”

“Don't you get it?” he said gently.

Yeah, I got it. My throat ached and my voice, when it came out, was a whisper. “It's me, isn't it?” I said, feeling as if my heart was being clawed out. “I've caused you nothing but hassle since the day you met me. I've made you depressed.”

“It's not about you.”

“It obviously is!”

“It's fucking not! Aargh! I saw the blue stars. I heard Nanna's voice singing the lullaby she sang us when we were little.”

I stared at him, wondering if he'd somehow slipped some LSD without me noticing.

“I don't—”

“My brain was shutting down. I had no air. I felt myself die.”

Blue stars. Someone, and I couldn't even remember who it was, had once told me that was one of the stages of hypoxia. Oxygen deprivation.

Zeke was talking about the Cribbar. He'd almost drowned.

But he never talked about that. He said he didn't think about it, didn't dream about it; said that he was fine.

And then, with a realization like acid splashing out of my stomach and burning through the rest of me, I saw just what I'd missed.

Everyone was off the coach now, except us.

His voice was strained when he said, “I've been held down by waves before, been beaten bloody on coral reefs in three different continents, but every one of those times I felt strong. Knew I'd be OK. It was different at the Cribbar. I couldn't hold on. My lungs were on fire, and I kept my mouth shut until I couldn't anymore, and then I felt them fill with water. Man, that pain . . . and I couldn't do a single thing to stop it. I never felt more powerless
in my whole life. My head's a fuckin' mess I think I maybe have some kind of PTSD.”

Zeke had post-traumatic stress disorder?

“Oh God, Zeke,” I said, holding his hand. “I'm so sorry. I didn't . . .”

Didn't what? Notice? Why? Because I was too busy stressing about the number of girls he'd slept with in the past? The number of contests I had left? The rank I'd make on the board?

My mind flipped back to an old argument we'd had before we left Newquay. I wanted to go to the Headland Hotel to have lunch, but he'd said he couldn't bear to look at the sea if the waves were good, because he'd need to be out there surfing that view was torture, he'd said.

The windows of the Headland Hotel looked out on to the reef where the Cribbar waves broke.

How had I not seen it? I'd focused on all the wrong things; missed the important stuff right in front of my nose.

“Oh God, Zeke,” I said again. “I don't know what to say, except I'm so sorry I haven't been there for you.” I cupped my face in my hands; wished I could disappear.

“Stop,” he said. “It's not your fault. I love you, Iris.”

“I love you too.”

Standing in the aisle, Zeke wrapped his arms around me and I felt the weight of him.

“Maybe it'll be OK,” he said, swinging from despair to hope. “We love each other. We gotta be able to fix this, right?”

The coach driver cleared his throat, tapped his mic, and said, “Hey. Lovebirds. Get off my damn bus.”

three days later

From forty thousand feet in the air, I looked at the cloudscape far below and listened to the deep breathing at my shoulder. Within a few hours, we'd be descending, pulling up on the runway, queuing to collect our luggage, walking through customs and into arrivals, where people would be waiting for us.

I thought about a time a few weeks after Zeke and I got together. I was wrecked from a very late night at his apartment, when we'd talked nonstop until dawn broke around us and we'd watched it set the windows of Newquay aflame. By midday I was shattered, so I sat on the beach with Sephy, while Zeke went off coasteering with a group of little kids and their parents, and Sephy started talking about Zeke's past. She said that when he and his brothers were growing up on the North Shore of Oahu, she always tried to dress them in the exact same T-shirt and board shorts.

“Like triplets?” I said, smiling as I imagined Zeke, Garrett and Wes all dressed identically. They were really close in age,
so it must have looked pretty cute. When I said as much, Sephy scoffed.

“Cute had nothing to do with it. I dressed them that way so that when one of them ran off and got lost on the beach, I could point to his brothers and tell the lifeguard, ‘This is what he's wearing.'”

And then she'd squint through the binoculars, alternating with the lifeguard, until finally she'd hear, “How about this one? Is
that
him?” and at last, with incredible relief, she'd look through the binoculars and say, “Yeah, that's him.”

Zeke, though he was the littlest, was always the biggest worry to her, because he had the most to prove.

“He wanted to be the last surfer to come in at night and was out there even after the older guys had gone home.”

“Zeke,” she went on, “was this little tow-headed grom of seven or eight, always determined to do his best, and he'd still be out there in the water when the sky turned black, and I would call him and call him, and sometimes he'd hear and he'd holler back, ‘Just one more wave, Mom,' and I'd pray he'd get a good one, so he'd get out of the water.”

“He's still like that now,” I said.

“Zeke,” she said, “never had moderation. Whatever he did, he dived in so deep it was hard for him to see the surface. It's just the way he's built. Oftentimes I'd have to get in there and haul him out myself, even when Pipeline was super heavy. Some days I'd have my own board with me, so I could paddle out, but not always, and then I'd have to swim out to him. Swimming out after dark when there's big-ass sharks cruising around is never a whole heap of fun.”

And she told me about a time when Garrett and Wes were visiting their grandfather on the Big Island, and it was just her and Zeke. The waves had been unusually poor that day, and all the other surfers and the lifeguards were gone, but Zeke was still out there, in the dark.

She'd called for him until she was hoarse, battled the impact zone, swum out to the second reef and she still couldn't see him in the water. She got out and patrolled the waterline in case she'd somehow missed him, pacing up and down the beach, panicked out of her mind, thinking the worst. He'd been taken by a current. Or a tiger shark. Or had smashed his skull on coral and drowned.

But at the same time she couldn't truly believe such a terrible thing had happened, because life without Zeke was unthinkable.

She'd just decided to call in the coastguard when she saw him walking toward her through the darkness, a buckled board under his arm.

“Zeke?”

“Hey, Mom I broke my board.”

He'd had a nasty wipeout, and had got disoriented enough to walk off in completely the wrong direction. By the time he got his head together and found her, Sephy said she'd died a thousand times.

“You know, Mom,” he said, looking spooked, “that was real scary just now.”

“Tell me about it!” she said, hugging him again.

“Yeah, I was walking up the beach and it sounded like someone said
shhhh
in my ear.”

Sephy was so emotional that it took her a moment to process what Zeke was saying.

“
That
was scary? Someone saying
shhhh
in your ear? Kid, I thought you were dead!”

She told me that afterward, even when Zeke started traveling alone and surfing giant waves, she never worried about him the same way again, because her panic sensors were burned out.

“I hope I stop worrying about him,” I said, “because otherwise I'm going to drive myself mad with all these mental waves he has to surf next year. He's already talking about Cortes Bank.”

“You'll be good with it,” she said, “in five or six years.”

And it seemed so odd that Zeke's mum spoke that way, because everyone else's parents, including mine, were adamant that summer romances should end with September and none of us teenagers should settle down too early, but Sephy actually thought it was possible that Zeke and me could make it in the long run, and that had blown my mind.

An air hostess walked past, pushing her trolley, and I looked down at the clouds again, and then over to Lily, who twitched in her sleep, and I thought about the other flight, carrying Zeke.

Our planes had taken off and flown in different directions, ours to Heathrow, his to Honolulu, and the last words we'd spoken to each other swirled through my mind.

“You said you wouldn't leave me.”

Hundreds of strangers had been bustling around us, dragging suitcases and shouting at their families to hurry up; we were standing in the center of it all, facing each other.

“Please,” he said, “I need you. Come with me.” He gripped my wrists, his hands sweaty and his blue eyes wild with panic.

“Zeke,” I said, loosening my hands from his, “I can't come to Hawaii. You know I can't.”

“Sure you can—I'll buy you a ticket right now!”

He ran his hands over his shorn scalp, a habit from a lifetime of long hair, and I felt my resolve begin to weaken. The temptation to reach up and kiss him, to give in and say, “Fuck it—I've changed my mind—I'm coming with you,” grew stronger by the second. Because life without Zeke was unthinkable.

My very soul urged me to say yes to him, to do whatever it took to make him happy. But there was also the thin vein of self-preservation at the center of me, which knew better.

“Don't leave me. Not like this. Please, Iris.”

It was then I locked eyes with Lily; she looked so sad, because she knew how much pain I was in, and she nodded gently.

“Zeke . . .” I said, dreading my next words, because once they were said, I'd have to turn and somehow force myself to walk away from him, “I love you. So much. More than anything else in this amazing world you've shown me, but we're hurting each other and we have to stop.”

“So we stop,” he said, brushing away tears with the back of his hand. “We can totally do that. We'll treat each other right again.”

My face was tight with the effort of not crying, but my voice, when it came out, was firm and clear. The moment I'd said it, I saw the last flicker of hope in his eyes die.

“I don't want this anymore—I want to go home.”

I would like to thank the following people, who have helped and encouraged me so much over the past two years:

• Jon and our girls.
  
• My parents, Alicia and Geoff.
  
• Ben Illis of the BIA.
  
• Roisin Heycock, Niamh Mulvey, Rachel Faulkner and Talya Baker.
  
• Leighton Lloyd, John Duigan and Emma Adams.
  
• Big-wave surfer Tom Butler and his mother, Sue Butler.
  
• Pro-surfers Oli Adams, Tassy Swallow, Chris del Moro, Chris Bertish, Jaide Lowe, Tina Beresford and Jessie Tuckman.
  
• Stevie Davies and Nigel Jenkins.
  
• Eve Harvey.
  
• Nicole Grant and Jon Grant of Whiskers, Newquay.
  
• Rhys John, Max Hepworth-Povey and Christopher Hunter of Errant Surf.
  
• Laura Ward, Karl Michaelides, Rachel Lamb, Marci Pearce, Victoria Edge, Tristan Edge, Francesco Rigolli, Catherine Brealey, Lindsey Campbell, Amanda Handley and Alison Brazier.
  
• Maia Garner and Nikita Jenkins.
  
• The writers of YAT.
  
• Jenny Davies.
  
• Sarah Clarke of Checkered Photography.
  
• Daniel Stapleford, Aimee Stapleford and Kristin Becker.
  
• Margaret Cann, Steve Cann, Rich Boyes and Victoria Boyes.
  
• Paul Glass, Laura Glass, Hilary Ely, Moira Briggs, Leena Heino, Kirsty McCluskey, Katherine Neal, Deb Stainer, Claire Beney, Beki Jenkins and Rosy Barnes.