Running or walking being the very thing I was trying to avoid. Joshua took my hand and began to run, dragging me along with him as our feet crashed into the water. Shit, that is cold! This was meant to be Sydney. It was freezing. I held my breath as Joshua, now waist deep, let go of my hand and dived into a crashing wave. In a split second, I knew I had to do the same, that or face the wave – literally. Bloody hell, I was going under. A rush of heart-stopping water pressed against my body as I pushed through the wave. Rising to the surface, I turned, disoriented, to find Joshua cheering just metres away. Christ, the water was cold. And if these waves weren’t big enough to surf on, I wasn’t in a rush to get to Bondi. Joshua gestured towards the horizon as another one approached. I pushed myself under the surface and through the wave once again. Arghh. Resurfacing, I swallowed sea water. Somewhere Sam and Jamie would be swallowing cake. I dived under water again. Suddenly Joshua was beside me, beckoning me out of the water to get the boards. As I struggled to stand, he grabbed my waist and pulled me to my feet.
‘Don’t you just feel alive?’ he buzzed, reminding me of Sam and all the times I had refused to surf. I looked back into the angry ocean, my mouth hanging wide, breathless in disbelief. I couldn’t believe I had just been in there. I looked back to Joshua, his inquisitive face still waiting for my response. I felt cold, I felt messy, I felt scared. But deep down – very deep down – I felt a little exhilarated. And, deep down – very deep down – I guess I felt a little more alive.
I collapsed on the Coogee Beach steps as Joshua strode away in search of coffee – a search that in a suburb where there was a 1:3 coffee-shop-to-person ratio took him all of three minutes. I looked across the ocean, trying to slow the rapid pace of my heart. A heart recently and repeatedly submerged in the Tasman Sea.
Along the beach I could spy Joshua returning, both hands clutching steaming cups of coffee towards his bare chest. His turned-down wetsuit top trailed behind him, as did three other figures walking with him on either side.
‘Look who I found,’ he hollered. Through my salt-stung eyes the faces of Alice, Andrew and Mark came into view. Sam and Jamie’s church crew. I tried to flatten down my sea-slung hair. Randomly bumping into people on a Saturday? It was the kind of community I’d naively hoped we’d all have in London. Instead, I’d found myself forty-five minutes from everyone – and made to think that ‘wasn’t all that bad’.
‘I didn’t know you were a surfer,’ Alice said, a raised eyebrow stretching above her Ray-Bans, cup of coffee clutched in her manicured hand – it wasn’t even sunny. Just once, I wished she wasn’t seeing me sweaty, wet or out of my depth.
‘I’m really not, I’m—’ I began, before Joshua cut me off.
‘She’s great. You should have seen her out there.’ He sat down beside me, smiling and handing me my coffee. I let the heat of it warm through my hands and lifted the steam closer to my face. I’d earnt this.
‘You should see Mark.’ Andrew lifted his own cup to take a sip. ‘Words cannot describe—’
‘How great I am?’ Mark interjected, exchanging smirks with his partner, trying and failing to hold back a laugh.
‘Sure,’ Andrew agreed, his words dripping with sarcasm, ‘that’s exactly what I was going to say.’ He looked at me, rolling his eyes. ‘Just like you’re an amazing flower-arranger.’ Andrew and Alice laughed in unison as Mark faked disdain.
‘Sam kind of… double-booked himself.’ Alice turned to me to explain, even more bronzed again a backdrop of beach. I tried my best not to think about what else Sam had been double-booking: he had me and Jamie living in his house, didn’t he?
‘To taste cake or select centrepieces, that is the quest—’ Andrew began.
‘A question no one ever asks,’ Mark interrupted again, as they all laughed.
‘Anyway,’ Alice pressed on in spite of them, ‘Jamie asked us whether we could fill in for one of their appointments, check out some blooms for their big day.’ A familiar sinking feeling filled my belly.
‘Jamie must have been so mad.’ Joshua shook his head, covering a smile with his coffee cup, another image of Jamie jarring with the ‘little Miss Perfect’ I’d been shacked up with all week. Did she even get mad? So far, she’d been able to keep her cool with me but something about their nods told me she could blow.
‘I said we could take the cake-tasting,’ Andrew continued in between sips of coffee.
You could tell the chatty one of the two.
‘But we got landed with the flipping flowers. Thank God we had this one.’ He squeezed his partner’s leg affectionately. ‘And his expert eye.’ Andrew winked at me again. Clearly it wasn’t as expert as Mark liked to think.
‘We still didn’t get it right,’ Mark said, a genuine glimmer of regret in his deep blue eyes. ‘We needed you with us, mate.’ He smiled at Joshua and the three of them nodded in agreement. I looked into my coffee, unsure what qualified Joshua for the job. Other than being a pretty decent guy. I took another sip, letting the hot liquid warm me from the inside out. I shivered again as Mark and Andrew fell into a heated ‘dahlia or delphinium’ debate.
‘Here, take this.’ Joshua pulled a jumper out of the rucksack he had either trustingly or naively left alone on the beach as he had surfed and I had pretended to.
‘Thank you.’ I smiled as he held my coffee and I pulled the jumper over my still-damp wetsuit. Every inch of me hurt. Joshua looked at his friends, who were getting passionate about peonies, then turned his full attention towards me.
‘It gets easier the next time,’ he said, boldly assuming there would be a next time. I had only suggested surfing to spend time with Sam. ‘We’ll get the boards up to North Bondi or South Maroubra where the waves are really gnarly.’ Joshua’s teeth blinded me in the sunlight. He could actually pull that word off. And that rash vest. He could definitely pull that off again. ‘You really did look good out there,’ Joshua went on. I raised both eyebrows. Wasn’t lying a sin? ‘No seriously.’ He laughed warmly. ‘Jamie didn’t even stand up the first time we went out together.’
I looked back at Joshua – for the first time praying my waterproof mascara was punching higher than its five-dollar weight – and smiled; Jamie hadn’t even stood up. I felt a glow of pride warm my chest. Somewhere between the disappointment, the awkwardness and the inability to feel my toes, I guess I had felt something of the exhilaration Sam had banged on about all those years we were together.
‘She was hilarious,’ Joshua said, taking a sip of his coffee and shaking his wet fringe out of his eyes. ‘She finally thought she’d cracked it… until she realised the board was beached up on the sand!’ He continued to laugh, caught in a precious moment he had shared with a wetsuit-cladded Jamie. He sure seemed fond of her. And he seemed to know her taste in flowers. Sam should watch himself; wasn’t ‘indie band boys’ her ‘type’?
‘You should have seen her with my youth group.’ Joshua mistook my silence for permission to carry on. ‘Jamie helps me on our trips out sometimes. At least I try and encourage her. But kids can be brutal.’ He wiped a tear from his eye; a private joke I wasn’t invited in on. They’d been surfing with the youth; they’d been surfing alone; he even knew her chest size.