Chapter Eighty-Nine
Eighty-Nine
Damage
He goes and sits on a dusty, rattan chair, his hand reaching out to a damaged section of an orange longboard, eyes closed, trying to tune into something.
‘Caleb,’ I say. ‘You’re a surfer? I’ve never seen you surf once. I’ve hardly even seen you swim in the sea.’
When he opens his eyes, they’re soft. Distant.
‘I don’t mess with the ocean anymore.’ He opens his eyes fully and looks confused to see me, as if he was elsewhere for a moment. ‘That’s why I do physio every day.’
I take a breath and then ask the question that I’ve been waiting to ask since I first saw the marks on his back.
‘What happened to you, Caleb?’
His face falls, making him look suddenly older.
‘I wiped out, hit a reef and broke my neck. I was dead for twelve minutes, until another surfer resuscitated me.’
The scars, the neat surgical incisions. At last, it makes sense.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I can’t talk about it – not to anyone. I don’t let my nan talk about it either. It’s the one boundary of mine she actually respects.’
‘It’s too painful to remember…’ I murmur, wanting to reach out and hug him.
‘No, it’s a complete block. Like, my brain won’t let me go there. Which makes it really funny.’
He starts laughing and wipes sweat from his brow.
I don’t see anything in what he’s said that’s remotely funny.
‘I don’t understand. Are you feeling okay, Caleb?’
His chin shoots up and I see the wounded animal within him, alert to danger.
‘My brain was affected but I’m not crazy. I was just trying to remember.’
‘Remember what?’
‘Why I agreed to write eighty thousand words on how I ruined my life.’
*
I feel myself startle.
‘That’s why I got all my boards out of storage and brought them with me when I moved back to Loor.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They’re my way back, because all those worst times of my life? I have to remember them every day. My manager got me a book deal and I’m locked into a deadline I have no chance of making.’
‘Wait, you have a publishing deal?’
‘Yeah, I have to tell readers how I became a joke in the surf world for trying to ride the world’s heaviest wave and dying for twelve minutes before being resuscitated on the beach in front of the world’s press.’
I remember the news clip. I saw it shared all over social media. A little rubber man the size of an ant falling through the lip of a giant wave. That was Caleb?
‘You’re not a joke. People were amazed you even tried.’
‘It was ego. Desperation. I thought if I could do it, I’d get big money sponsorship, but all that happened is I got injured and lost all my other deals – my only source of income. I had an opportunity to do something amazing and I messed it up. This book is my last chance of clawing back any money… and I can’t even write it.’
‘But you own this amazing house. Can’t you downsize and take the pressure off yourself?’
‘Not mine. I’m renting it cheap off a mate.’
I sit down on the box opposite his chair and try to find the words, but I’ve got nothing except platitudes.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, reaching out my hand and placing it on top of his.
This gesture makes him look up at me and I see a hunted look in his eyes. Some deep pain that I can’t touch. There is something else there, too, as he looks at me.
He rubs his hand across his eyes, as if he’s in a world of hurt, and I rise to get closer to him, drawn by a force I don’t understand. At the moment I stand, he does the same thing, and then we’re in each other’s space, his mouth an inch from mine, and I don’t know how we got here, but I don’t want it to stop.
A crash booms and a cloud of dust rises from the corner of the room, where a stack of kayaks has just fallen. Trotting out of the dust cloud, completely unharmed, and with a bright twinkle in his eyes, is Maurice the rat.
Before I can say anything, Caleb is leaving the storage space, and all I can see is his squared shoulders and the back of a T-shirt that urges me to ‘check myself before I wreck myself’.
Touché, T-shirt. Touché.