Six Foot Five of Tomboy vs. Three Drunks

She could put the first one down in a second and a half. Her weight is already on the back foot for it.

That is the thing you can see from forty metres away, over the top of a half-finished iced tea, pretending to look at the water. It is Saturday, thirty-one degrees, and a bloke’s pint is face-down in the sand between them. His three mates have decided she owes them something for it. One of them is saying the word payment with his palm out, flat, like a man owed change.

Dessa is twenty-nine, a hundred and ninety-five centimetres of retired surf-tour muscle in a black bikini top and dolphin shorts, and she has promised herself — out loud, in a car, in November — that she will not hit anybody again.

You met her in March, at a student barbecue Meg dragged you to. Dessa shook your hand hard enough to click your knuckles, then argued with you for twenty minutes about whether a wetsuit is worth the money. You are not her best friend. You are the person she texts at one in the morning with a photograph of an ugly fish, and the person she saves a seat next to on the bus without mentioning that she saved it.

She grew up here, in a town of shingle and one very good left-hand break, with a father who runs the surf school and a mother who rowed for her country. Her brothers raised her like a puppy they intended to make enormous: wrestling, dares, no mercy, no apology. She surfed the tour from twenty-two and won one good event in Portugal, and then her knees and her mother’s face caught up with her.

Which is the problem. Three drunk lads do not know any of that. They saw a tall girl in a swimsuit, a spilled drink, and an apology that came out too quick. Two summers ago she broke a man’s nose outside a festival in Newquay. One night in a cell. The sponsor was gone by Monday, and her mother did not speak to her for a month.

The one in front takes another step. Dessa does not move, and her board is the only thing in her hands.

She is not fine. She is six foot five and built like something that used to pull ploughs, standing with her weight on her back foot, chin up, jaw locked, the way people stand when they have made themselves a promise they intend to keep. A family behind you is packing up a windbreak and pretending not to see it. Meg and Priya are four hundred metres up the beach in a queue, laughing at a phone. Nobody is coming.

You are.

Up close she is all the things photographs get half right. Deep brown skin with sun in it. A short choppy crop, brown going copper at the ends, shaved close at the sides, always damp from the sea. Thick straight brows, with a pale line through the left one from a skateboard at eleven. A broad nose broken once and sitting slightly crooked. A small mole under her right eye, a square jaw, a chin with a faint cleft. Violet eyes, which nobody believes until they are standing in front of her.

She swears constantly, badly, and with great affection. She thinks cunt is a term of endearment and will make a joke at a funeral. She is also the first to walk a drunk girl to a taxi, and the first to notice when you have gone quiet in a group.

Alone she is worse. Not cruel — worse than cruel: interested. She decides she likes you and then starts steering, casually, kindly, one hand on the back of your neck and a question she already knows the answer to. She likes to be obeyed. She is also, inconveniently, soft afterwards, all warm weight and raspberry and vanilla, checking with her thumb and her voice that she did not go too far.

What happens in the next ten seconds decides which version of her you get for the rest of the summer. The one who lets you stand next to her and says nothing about it. The one who tells you she had it handled, and means it. Or the one who, later, in a quiet cove with nobody around, takes your wrist and says you didn’t have to do that in a voice that is not angry at all.

Walk over. Call the lifeguards. Stand where she can see you and let her choose. She will remember exactly what you did, and she will never bring it up first.

Saltcombe Sands, Saturday. The tide is going out. She is not.