Chapter Fifteen
He awoke to the sound of rain on the roof. It was 8.00 a.m. according to his bedside clock. He knew Gina wouldn’t be coming for a few hours yet so he pulled the blankets over his head and dozed off. He woke to someone knocking at his bedroom door. He lifted his head from the pillow, thinking that it was Gina, but instead Hayden came into the room.
“Hi,” he said. “Your dad let me in. He said I should wake you up.”
“What do you want?” Josh said as he let his head fall back to the pillow.
Hayden looked at the surfing posters on the walls. “Wow, do you really get waves like that?”
“That’s Hawaii. Now what do you want?’
“Oh, I wanted to know if you were going surfing?”
“Is it still raining?”
“Yes.”
“Have you had a look at the surf?”
“Yes,” Hayden said and sat down on the corner of Josh’s bed. It made Josh feel uncomfortable.
“Well, what’s it like?”
“I don’t know really. It doesn’t look as good as yesterday. The waves are all over the place.”
“Sounds messy.”
“Yes, it looks messy.”
Hayden looked at Josh and said, “So, are we going?”
“No,” Josh said. He wanted Hayden to leave.
“Why not?” Hayden said.
“You can go if you want. I’m going to wait for Gina.”
“Gina?” Hayden repeated.
“She’s coming here this morning, and then we’ll do something together.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll see when she gets here. It depends on the weather.”
“So you’ll do what she tells you?”
“No, we’ll decide together.” Josh sat up in bed and faced Hayden. “What is your problem anyway?”
“I don’t have a problem,” Hayden said. “I just thought you were going to help me and now you’re going off with this girl.”
“I’m sorry, Hayden, but I’m not going to waste my entire holiday teaching someone how to surf. I’ll do what I want to do, and today I want to spend time with Gina.”
Hayden stared back at Josh for what seemed like ages. Josh tried to hold his gaze steady, but he could see the hurt in Hayden’s eyes. Looking away, he broke the contact and wondered why he felt so guilty.
Hayden got up from the bed and left without saying anything. Josh almost got up to go after him then fell back on the bed with a sigh. Why did people have to be so complicated?
He got up, showered, changed and went to the kitchen for breakfast. His father was at the table, hunched over his cup of coffee like the morning before, and seemingly lost in his own thoughts.
“What are you doing today?” his father asked.
“Nothing much.”
“You’re not surfing with Hayden?”
“No, not in the rain.”
“It’ll stop by lunchtime.”
Josh didn’t know how his father did it, but he could always accurately predict the weather at Piha.
“What’s the weather doing anyway?” Josh asked.
“At the moment a small front is going over and there’s a high pressure system following it. There’s a very deep low pressure system developing in the Tasman. I reckon it’ll make its way up the South Island and reach us by New Year’s Day.”
“That could mean big surf,” Josh commented.
“Yes, especially if the high pressure cell blocks it and it stalls in the Tasman. It could push up a big swell from the south.”
“Great,” Josh said.
“You’d best be careful if the surf gets too big.”
“I can handle it. I know what I’m doing,” Josh said.
“You’re not invincible, Josh,” his father replied.
Josh remembered the dream. He hadn’t had it this morning, but the memory of it made him unsettled. Was it a premonition? Was he going to get into trouble? It was impossible. He knew Piha too well.
“I’ll be careful, Dad. Have you heard from Mum?”
“No, I’ll leave her alone. She needs her space.”
“I miss her,” Josh said quietly, almost to himself.
“Me too,” his father said as he sipped at the coffee. “Besides, neither of us can cook.” He smiled as he said this and Josh knew that he was trying to relieve the situation, but it wasn’t working.
They both heard a footfall on the deck and looked up. Gina peered in.
“Hi, Josh.”
“Come in, Gina,” he said.
“How’s your hand?” she asked of his father.
“It’s fine, thank you,” he said as he got up from the table. “I’m off to the store for a decent coffee.”
Gina took off her jacket and Josh hung it in the laundry.
“What shall we do today?” Josh asked Gina.
She shrugged and said, “I thought you might have some ideas. What do you do in Piha when it’s wet?”
“There’s not much to do down here when it rains. My parents read and I watch TV. We don’t have an internet connection here so usually I just hang around and wait for it to stop.”
“We can hang around here then.”
“My dad’s been at me to sort out my room. Do you want to help?”
“Yeah, whatever. Maybe I’ll find out your deepest, darkest secrets,” Gina teased, and laughed.
“I don’t have any.”
“We’ll see,” she said and followed him to his room where she sat on his bed and looked at the posters on the walls.
“Bevan’s got these, too,” she said.
He sat next to her on the bed. He was close enough to smell the fragrance in her hair. She turned to him and he wrapped his arms around her. He started kissing her and a warm feeling spread from his stomach into his groin. He slid his hands underneath the bottom of her T-shirt and ran his fingers over the skin on her back. She was soft. He slid down so they lay across the bed and started to tug at her T-shirt. He wanted to get at all that beautiful soft skin.
“No,” she cried as she pulled away from him.
He couldn’t get his hands out from under the T-shirt and he struggled as she slapped at his upper arms. Finally, they were free and she jumped to her feet.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, frightened she was going to leave him. “I didn’t mean … I wasn’t thinking. Let’s go for a walk or something. We don’t have to stay here.”
She surprised him by laughing. “Let’s not sit on the bed,” she said. She looked around the room. “What’s in the boxes?”
“Magazines, photos and stuff.”
“Are there photos of you?”
“Yes, they’re in one of these boxes.”
“Let’s find them.”
Gina knelt down beside one of the boxes and started to open them. Relieved, Josh crouched down beside her. This girl intrigued him but confused him all at the same time. Sometimes she seemed to come on strong and then she’d push him away. He’d never felt this way around a girl before. Was he falling in love?
When his father returned, they were sitting on the floor of his room, surrounded by the stuff that had come out of the boxes. They’d found photo albums which Gina had eagerly flipped through, stopping now and then at photos that caught her interest. He’d found old surfing magazines and had gone through them one by one, remembering when he’d first started and had bought everything ever written about surfing.
His father appeared at his bedroom door. “Are you going to tidy this up, Josh?” he asked.
“Sure,” Josh said without conviction.
“Is this all you’ve been doing since I’ve been gone?”
Josh looked up at his father and caught the look on his face. He glanced at Gina, but she was looking down at a photo album and hadn’t looked up.
“Yes, this is all we’ve been doing.”
“It’s stopped raining,” his father pointed out, but Josh didn’t kno
w why. “Perhaps you’d like to go out.”
Now Josh understood. He thought about where they could go.
“Would you like to visit the waterfall?” he asked Gina.
“There’s a waterfall?”
“Yes, at the end of Glen Esk Road. You have to walk up to it, but it’s not hard.”
“Sure,” said Gina as she put aside the photo album.
As Josh left with Gina, he caught his father’s speculative look. He knew if he started to deny anything, his father would think him guilty anyway, so he didn’t say anything.
Let his father wonder.