Free Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar

when I overheard Mum discussing me on the phone, speaking from her position on the cross, I wanted to ask her for clarification. I didn’t do drugs; I got good grades at school; my teachers liked me; I had friends, guys and girls, a group of mates to hang around with, even if I didn’t have a cloying, specially close best friend in the way of Maddie and Sarah; I wasn’t a bad person – so why, why , did she always proceed my name with a sharply exhaled breath?
    Couldn’t she see that if I always did what he wanted there wouldn’t be any of me left?
    Here’s the sting: if, by some strange act of God, I had been unnaturally mature and pre-empted Maddie by marking the end of my high school years with a sedate Fijian holiday in a resort empty of anybody still young enough to want to party, it wouldn’t have made Mum happy. It would have been wrong, too.
    And that’s because, in the restaurant of life, my mother always wants what someone else is having. Auntie Yvonne is proud of Maddie. She just loves her. She’d be excited whether Maddie was going to Fiji or the Gold Coast or wherever.
    Mum doesn’t feel that about me. So I must be the problem.
    I delete her message without listening to the rest of it.

11
    Collision
Coastalwatch
Swell size 1–1.5 metres – Swell direction S
The strength of yesterday’s southerly change has made for erratic climate-change–style extremes today. It’s more like winter than summer. Some solid 3–4ft waves around this morning, pushing up to 4–5ft during the day. Strong SW winds forecast to turn SE …
    By the time I get down to the back car park dirty grey clouds are scudding across the sky. It’s close to low tide and the break isn’t liking the southerly swell, really sucking up on the right bank, showing a dirty underbelly of grey water pockmarked by sand. The water’s surface looks scaly in the wind.
    I walk down to the break with one of the crows who was in the car park getting changed when I arrived. He’s a nice old guy who likes to talk, always as excited as a kid. One day he just started talking to me like he’d known me his whole life. I didn’t mind though. In fact, I liked it.
    ‘Bloody crowded,’ he says when we see the break. ‘I’ve got to get back up to Crescent Head.’
    ‘Crescent Head would have to be crowded too, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘The point break is, but the beach breaks aren’t. You can have some good surfs there all to yourself. Uncrowded.’
    I’ll have to check with Hannah whether uncrowded is a real word. In surfing it is. Crowds are a major concern. I saw a photograph of Manly on one of the surf websites the other day. It showed a line of surfers, maybe four or five deep, stretching from Queenscliff down to the south end without a break. It looked like hell. Maybe it’s good that this place has got such a bad reputation.
    As though he can read my mind, the old crow says, ‘Been a bit of aggro lately. Few broken boards. Bit of a biff in the car park the other day.’
    I wonder how it happens, the breaking of the board. Does the aggressor wait until the person has laid it down on the bitumen and is unlocking their car, unaware? Or do they rip it out of the person’s arms and break it across their knee?
    I start unwinding my leg rope from around my board.
    ‘That little Shane bastard has got a lot to do with it,’ the old guy says, nodding his head at a surfer making his way across on a right.
    I stare out at ‘Shane’ and see the flash of colour on his forearms, which are covered in tatts. Just looking at him gives me a bad feeling.
    ‘He’s always stirring things up that one. Got a mouth on ’im, that kid.’
    Because the swell is from the south it’s breaking over at Carparks – in line with the top car park – and peeling right. Most of the guys are clumped over there, constantly trying to make the inside. I stick to the Alley, paddling against the sweep to hold my position. There’s a bad feeling about the place today and I