Blue Read Free Page B

grand.
    Zeke stood behind me as I examined all this, and I eventually picked out a seven-foot-six mini-Malibu, which I knew I’d be able to catch at least a few waves on.
    Surfers say you are what you ride. In which case, that would make me a pretty sturdy, pretty easy pig board.
    “OK if I nab the mini-Mal?”
    As I said it, my eyes dropped to the inside of his van again and I noticed he had a rolled-up duvet and some pillows stashed near the back. Home-from-home or shag wag? A lot of the dopehead surfers who lived in their vans at the South Fistral esplanade were total douches when it came to surf groupies. There were always girls angling to get into a surfer’s wagon, even if only for a half-hour, and there were plenty of guys that let them. In the years I’d spent hanging out at the esplanade, I’d seen some of the worst offenders have five or six girls going through their vans in one afternoon . I really hoped that wasn’t the case with Zeke.
    “Good choice,” he said. “You’ll get some great rides on that.”
    “Hope so. I guess it’s the safe choice really. The easiest board to ride . . .”
    “Nothin’ about surfing is easy. Or safe.”
    “Yeah, but these waves are, what, four or five feet?”
    He stared at the break, this heavy look in his eyes. “I know this French guy. Great surfer. Rode huge waves at Teahupo’o in Tahiti. He comes back to his home break in Biarritz. Shoulder-high waves that day, nothing special at all, but he falls, and he hits the bottom. With his head.”
    “Shit. What happened? Is he OK?”
    “That was his last surf. He broke a cervical vertebra and severed his spinal cord. He’s in a wheelchair now, paralyzed from the neck down. No reef there, and he didn’t even cop a boulder. The bottom was sand. The force of the wave closing out on his back slammed his head into the sand hard enough to snap his neck.”
    “Shit,” I said again. I didn’t know what else to say.
    “So yeah, surfing’s always dangerous, whatever you ride, wherever you ride it. And no board is harder or easier than another. They’re all just instruments with their own music.”
    I noticed how much Zeke used his hands when he talked about surfing, how he couldn’t seem to keep still, not even for a moment, which was weird after seeing him so still and composed in yoga class.
    With every passing minute, I was liking him more. He was just so totally himself. No front, no bull. And he was freakishly chilled out.
    Zeke looked over his remaining boards and eventually picked up a red-and-white longboard that looked like it should have been in the Surfing Hall of Fame. It was heavily glassed, single fin and shaped in a retro sixties design.
    “It was my grandfather’s,” he went on, as if reading my thoughts. “Pop used to shape his own boards. Made some money. Taught my mom too. Later my pa bought into the business, once my mom taught him how to surf.”
    Zeke was obviously from surfing royalty, then. His parents were surfers, so was his granddad, and I’d bet if Zeke ever had a kid, the kid would surf too. It was in the genes.
    “She taught him to surf?”
    “Yeah, he’d hardly been in the water until he met her. She was a natural. Like a young Rell Sunn. She looked like Rell too. Just beautiful. Their board business is still going strong, though someone else owns it.”
    Rell Sunn was Hawaiian. A legendary waterwoman and a world surfing champion. So was Zeke’s mother Hawaiian too? Or some other kind of foreign? It would explain Zeke’s good looks. Those high cheekbones.
    “Oh, right,” I said, hoping he would tell me more, but not wanting to ask any personal questions about his family. Being with Daniel had made me sensitive to those particular pitfalls. Zeke seemed to have no such hang-ups though, and carried on like it was normal to talk about your folks to a complete stranger, “I’m a bit of a mutt. My mom’s Hawaiian and my pa’s from Newquay, but he only just moved back here.