THERE WERE HUNDREDS OF THEM GATHERED AT THE WATER; a couple of thousand, maybe. Imraan stood with his hand in a pocket of his corduroys, fingering the new Moleskin notebook. He had ventured down to the sand at the pavilion almost against his will. He kept looking between the men on jet skis in the calm place beyond the waves, and then back towards the mountain where the shark-spotters on Boyes Drive scanned the sea. The cars were backed up for kilometres: the Sunday traffic was at a standstill. Imraan was grimly pleased. There were some rewards, at least, attached to the leaky, windowless cottage they were renting in Kalk Bay. He had intended to come down for an afternoon stroll along the walkway by the sea but had instead stepped sideways out of time. Only the sun moved.
He was annoyed; it was a good walk spoiled. The story was already boiling up in his head – just as the online writing course had promised – and he wanted time by himself to do the nothing that would make the characters walk and talk. It would be a story about real men, he thought, one in which the real man didn’t endure the real woman’s stretched jerseys and her fat fertility statues and her probing, constant questions about when the baby came. But now that he was here, he might as well look for material. A real man would, while walking moodily by the sea, save a drowning swimmer’s life and say modestly to the papers that it was nothing, that he was only doing his duty as a citizen. Imraan had never learned to swim.
Above his head the paper kites trailed like jellyfish, and the clouds clumped together over Hangklip. On the beach a man with a megaphone was shouting into the crowd, but his voice was whipped away in the wind. Still, people were smiling at one other, making eye contact. Imraan squinted at the banner strung up on the pavilion: GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS SURF ATTEMPT!!! it shrieked. Imraan disapproved of exclamation marks; he disapproved, in general, of exclamations. He preferred the sober warnings of the notice board that provided information about when to swim and when not to swim. He was warmed by the neat, posturing icons.
He gazed at the surfers lined up on Muizenberg beach. Morons. They had all spawned carelessly, scattering children with biblical names and knotty hair that coarsened and bleached in the sun – more people just like them. Not that the surfers cared: they were collected around their boards in pockets, kicking at the hot sand and pushing each other as they waited for something to happen. Their kids ran around, dodging the surfboards that angled up from the sand, jagged as sharks’ teeth. Why would anyone have them? Imraan wondered. There were enough people in the world.
He peered at the semi-nude surfer girls, whose eyes only slid unseeing over his head. Their wetsuits were peeled back from their breasts and their smooth arms; they wore circlets of flowers on their heads like mermaids. He wondered if they had read the notice board, with its warning that menstruating women shouldn’t swim here: sharks patrolled these waters. Imraan stared at one woman next to her surfboard. She was moving gently to the music that was blasting out of the speakers all along the esplanade, and her hair rippled with her, like seaweed. It was so long that she could have been naked beneath it. It was still dry and lying loose, and it reminded him of Anya’s – hair that he had at first longed to lose himself in, and then later had wanted to chop off with the kitchen scissors when it shed and blocked the shower drain. The woman jiggled on, missing every fourth beat because she was concentrating on the water, waiting for the sign. Imraan thought it might be a Chili Peppers song, the one that was on the radio all the time now when he was trying to find FMR, the signal lost in the valley between him and the weak transmitter in the bowels of the Artscape theatre.
The men on the jet skis were looping endlessly back and forth behind the waves, their machines buzzing like insects, audible in bursts when the wind dropped. They were holding bright pink flags like wings. The man with the megaphone suddenly came to him clearly.
‘The world record is forty-six!’ the man was shouting. ‘Forty-six! That’s older than me, folks!’
His hearty on-air chuckle made Imraan feel tired. Besides, he’d read in the Cape Times that the unofficial record was fifty-three. The rule for qualifying for the Guinness record stated that everyone had to be on the same wave, and everyone had to stay upright for at least five seconds. Ridiculous, thought Imraan. It would never happen. People didn’t co-operate unless they were forced. It was the space between you that got you where you needed to be. Still, he didn’t turn around and go back to the cottage, back to Anya and her pottery statues with their saggy breasts and bulging bellies. He wanted to stay to see the attempt fail spectacularly, see all these happy, sunburned people droop and go home, shivering and dripping snot that they told each other was only seawater.
The whack on the back of his thigh made Imraan stagger, and his first, ridiculous, thought was, Shark. He had once seen a horror flick where the giant fish motored through the beach sand, shredding towels and bloodying bathers as it went. It didn’t matter if you made it out of the water; there was no high ground. But when he looked down it was only a little boy whose small surfboard had pushed him aside as he hurried across the sand. Typical, he thought. Not a thought for anyone else. Me, me, me. The board was bright yellow. It had a name stencilled across it: JONAH.
Imraan’s attention was dragged back to the water. The men on the jet skis were waving their pink flags, the undersides of their arms flashing whitely in counterpoint. The man with the megaphone yelled, ‘Boards up!’ like an army sergeant, and all the surfboards were pulled like teeth from the sand and turned upright. In their ranks they were less like teeth: they seemed to Imraan like the houses he had made out of ice-cream sticks when he was small, and then smashed. I must write a story about that, he thought.
‘Into the water!’ bawled the man with the megaphone, and the surfers ran at the low waves, slowing as their medium changed, shouting with the cold. They hurled their boards down and threw their bodies over them, and they were in. He looked for Jonah and found him on the far right hand side, settled only precariously on his tiny yellow board.
Later Imraan would read that there were two hundred and eighty people in those waves that foamed up like spit – so white the foam had its own reflection – and the youngest of them was seven, and the oldest (the papers said) was sixty-eight. They peppered the water, all the people in neoprene, boys and girls and men and women and brown and white in every combination; they shrank the horizon itself with their numbers. Soon the whole earth would look like this, thought Imraan. There would be nowhere left to go.
‘Spread out!’ the man with the megaphone kept yelling. People seemed to be taking turns to say this over the sound system. ‘Spread out, guys. Like, to Gordon’s Bay on this side. To Mozambique.’ They kept breaking off to laugh.
The marshals on jet skis were waiting for the next pulse, making their way along the waves, and then they were swinging their pink cloths over their heads to signal that the next wave was The One. The counters stood with their clipboards on the shore, and Imraan stood with them, watching the kid, half-hoping he would fall off and spoil it.
Six times the surfers gathered and threw themselves into the foam. Six times they stood up on their boards, as smooth and slow as if they could stand forever. They held their arms out like telephone poles, like letters of a wet alphabet, close enough to touch. The false starts and the lost boards and the slippery surfaces of other people in the waves slowed them down, but the good humour of the watchers on the beach didn’t change. The man with the megaphone was shouting himself hoarse and Imraan was glad.
‘Like that! Just like that! Jump off! Let’s do it again!’
By the third attempt Imraan had lost the boy on the end. Maybe his parents had decided that enough was enough, hauled him in and towelled him down, run their hands through his hair, loving every wet triangulated eyelash, every freckle. By the time all the surfers were back on the beach and the man with the megaphone was congratulating them for turning out, there were one or two abandoned boards floating in the shallows. One was bright yellow.
They beat the record, the papers would say on Monday – both official and unofficial – on every attempt except for the first, which was a split wave and divided the surfers. On the third attempt they counted seventy-three people on a single wave, all upright for at least five seconds.
They should have paid more attention to the second attempt, Imraan would think, over his cappuccino. That one was seventy-four.
All in all it took about two hours. When he turned towards St James to go home again it was after five and the sun was gone all the way along the horizon except for the bit over the harbour, where it always shone. He picked up the pace, striding through the garden at Danger Beach that smelled of fresh laundry – or maybe sun-dried cotton smelled like fynbos – past all the fathers in the parking lot with their chests drooping like candle wax. They were standing proud and bisected by their towels, shivering and changing out of the open boots of their cars. They didn’t want to put the rest of their clothes on, or go home. They didn’t want Monday morning to come. Imraan stopped by the black flag and the board that warned that this was shark territory, and watched the families. He thought, I can see it on them. It’s happiness. The thought made his stomach twist a little.
One man peeled his wetsuit down to his waist and pressed his grey chest hair against his wife. She squealed and laughed, and he danced her across the painted lines on the tarmac to the song in his head. Then she pushed him away and walked quickly back to the car. She bent and straightened, bent and straightened, packing things – a fold-up chair, a blue cooler box, a pair of fish slip-slops – with her head almost buried in the boot. From the depths of it, as if she was underwater, Imraan heard her say, ‘Where’s Jonah?’
‘I thought he was with you,’ said the husband. She backed up and looked at him hard, the temporary music fled.
The man closed the boot. They went back through the tunnel to the beach. They walked fast, but they didn’t run. It was Imraan who ran – faster than he had since he was eleven, so fast that his notebook banged against his bruised thigh – to find the man with the megaphone.