Sea Star Summer

By Sally Ann Partridge

All sixteen-year-old Naomi wants to do over December is read books and avoid other people. Jeffreys Bay promises the perfect drama-free holiday. But when she encounters the strange and imaginative Elize on the beach, everything changes. Elize, however, isn’t the first to notice the awkward, red-haired newcomer and soon Naomi finds herself caught between a blue-eyed local surfer and Elize's dark and mysterious brother. But what if Naomi is drawn to someone altogether different . . .  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Human & Rousseau
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780798181358

Sally Ann Partridge

Sally Partridge was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 notable Young South Africans of 2011. She has received the MER Prize for Youth Literature for four of her novels and won a SALA Award for her novel, Mine, in 2019.  She has also been honoured by IBBY International for her young adult fiction. She lives in Cape Town. 

Book preview

* 1 *

WE SET OFF late at night, or rather, in the early hours of the morning, sometime just after 3 am. Dad decided we should leave at this unholy hour to miss most of the holiday traffic. It feels like we’re sneaking away in the dark. I can’t speak for my parents, although Dad isn’t particularly close to his family, especially his sister Aunt Mary, but it’s a relief to be escaping to another province for a few weeks. It was a tough year, and I need to recover from it. How I’m supposed to get through another two years of school I don’t know.

It’s a long, unfamiliar route. In the darkness, only the distant headlights, roadside petrol stations and murky truck stops are visible, their neon lights glimmering like unfamiliar lighthouses. The mist on the mountain pass above Somerset West is so bad that Dad has to slow the car to a crawl. It reminds me of Mary Shelley’s perilous journey to Switzerland in 1816 with her new husband, Percy Shelley:

The road was serpentine and exceedingly steep, and was overhung on one side by half distinguished precipices, whilst the other was a gulf, filled by the darkness of the driving clouds.

Fragments of her letters and journal entries flip through my memory. I’ve memorised other classic female writers like Emily Dickinson, the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen too. Most of my luggage is taken up by books. I probably won’t get through half of them this holiday. Or scarier still, I’ll run out.

Mom shifts in her seat and adjusts the green plaid blanket covering her legs. Are you sure there was no one you wanted to bring with us, Naomi? It’s a lovely beach house, and there’s plenty of room. I can’t remember now if the listing said there were three or four bedrooms …

Thankfully, she doesn’t turn around when she speaks, so she can’t see my facial expression. I clear my throat. And who exactly was I supposed to invite?

Silence. It doesn’t help telling my parents I don’t have friends. They don’t believe me. I overexaggerate apparently.

What about that lovely girl with the blonde hair that came to visit, Ellen, Eleanor …

Andrea I think it was? chimes in Dad.

Oh yes, says Mom. She seemed sweet.

I sigh softly. I must have repeated this story at least three times already. She wasn’t visiting. She was extorting from me and was coming to collect. Showing up at our house was an intimidation tactic to prove she could find me anywhere if I didn’t give her what she wanted.

Mom readjusts her position. Still …

Still? I sink back in my seat. I give up on you two. Honestly.

Okay, so it wasn’t exactly extortion per se. Andrea was collecting for somebody or other’s birthday and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I didn’t expect her to actually show up at the door.

I pick up my phone and google Mary Shelley’s letters to her sister Fanny, imagining her excitement about running away from everything she knew and also her fear of the unknown. Now that we’re speeding further and further away fom Cape Town, my anxiety is already disappearing, but unlike Mary, my anxiety stems from what I’m leaving behind.

WE STOP SO I can be sick. In the too-bright petrol station bathroom mirror, my pale skin looks green, and my freckles resemble a rash caused by some incurable disease. No one looks twice at my baggy pyjama bottoms and hoodie. If I saw someone with this many freckles, I would also overlook their wardrobe. Even my hands are freckled.

Around 6 am, the sky lightens enough to see our surroundings, mostly farms and endless highway, followed by the early-morning grey of the sea at Mossel Bay. Not Jeffreys Bay. We still have a long way to go.

Eight hours. It feels like an impossibly long time to be in a car, like being trapped inside a box.

Mom dozes up front. Dad continues to drive, unperturbed. He insists on driving all the way himself, like it’s some kind of challenge to beat his personal best.

How long till we get there? I ask.

Another four hours or so, he replies.

Ignoring all the books on the seat, I stare out the window. Like it inevitably does, my brain drifts back to school and all its horrors – the cliques and hierarchies and the constant battle to be seen but stay hidden at the same time. I have a secret suspicion that high school is where all the awful people of the world learn it all, a sort of Sociopath Training Academy.

Mom says the other students are intimidated by my superior intellect. I think the problem is that I’m an only child. I never learnt how to socialise properly. But I can’t tell Mom that. She knows everything (to be expected of a psychiatrist, I suppose). Besides, her comebacks are brutal.

Don’t blame other people if you haven’t even tried, Naomi.

Thank goodness books can’t talk back.

The scenery becomes a lot more interesting along the Garden Route. Almost haunted. Everything is so green and wild, and the ferns have swallowed the forest whole. I try to catch the lakes and Afromontane forests with my phone camera, but we’re travelling too fast. All I manage to capture are ghostly green blurs.

We could live here. My parents could find other jobs. Then it wouldn’t matter if I spent my weekends alone in my room reading. I could take a canoe out onto a lake and sit and read for hours. I’m bound to meet new people while I explore the forests – other strange loners looking for peace.

I daydream for a bit until we reach Wilderness and I fall in love all over again with the deep ravines and misty shore.

When she wakes up, Mom starts rattling off a list of chores we have to tackle when we get to our Airbnb.

The first thing we need to do is switch on the geyser so we can have hot water and then open all the windows. We don’t know how long the place has been standing empty, so it probably needs a good dusting. Naomi, you can change the linen on the beds for us. We should stop for wood and charcoal too.

The Weber only uses charcoal, Margo, like it always has.

Mom ignores Dad’s quip. What else do we need? Milk. Fruit juice. Butter.

Do you want to braai tonight or go out? he asks.

I’m not sure. What do you feel like?

I leave my parents to it and check out Plettenberg Bay. It looks like the type of place where cool people hang out. I know the matrics are planning to come here over the holiday. It’s a school tradition. As imaginative as I am, I can’t picture myself on one of those trips. I never even saw the birthday gift I was forced to contribute to and I wasn’t invited to the party.

My mood begins to dip, which is my cue to check out from reality. I pick up a book, Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons, which is also set at a school, and disappear between the neat lines of text, each line taking me further and further into 1950s England.

I know we’ve left the Western Cape far behind when towering ivory wind turbines dominate the rolling green landscape. Huge herds of cattle march across the bright-green farms. The sky looks different too. There seems to be more of it.

How long now? I ask.

An hour or so. We’re almost there.

I settle into my seat. I can last another hour. The prospect of three weeks in the middle of nowhere with nothing but an empty stretch of beach and my books is my kind of fun. It’s going to be a lovely long holiday with no drama whatsoever.

MY FIRST IMPRESSION of Jeffreys Bay is that it’s a pretty old-school place. The main road is full of small-town speciality stores that sell home-made cakes and biltong.

Everything looks so old-fashioned, I say, taking in the typical holiday town bungalows with open front lawns. And where is all the electric fencing? Don’t they get break-ins?

The crime probably isn’t bad here yet, replies Dad.

And it’s mostly retired people and families that come out here anyway, adds Mom. It’s a quiet little town, just what we need after this year. My New Year’s resolution is to see fewer patients. Now that we’ve taken on another specialist, I can finally afford to start referring people elsewhere.

Dad rubs Mom’s knee, and I puke a little on the inside.

We turn into a street with a signboard full of colourful surfer stickers.

This place is famous for surfing, isn’t it? I ask, remembering seeing something on Facebook about big surfing competitions taking place here. The sea looks like bright-blue icing on a cream cake. And it’s pretty empty too, which is promising.

What road am I supposed to be looking for? asks Dad as he swivels his head left and right.

Mom starts rummaging frantically in her bag. Hang on, let me open my e-mail quickly.

It’s not like we had eight hours to check or anything, I say under my breath.

They ignore me, which is pretty typical of my parents.

Here it is. Flamingo Way, says Mom triumphantly. Do you want me to Google Map it?

That would be helpful, thank you.

Uhm, don’t bother, I say from the back seat. It was literally the last left turn we passed.

My parents are beyond help. I have no idea how they’ve survived this far in life with their forgetful bumbling. Sheer stubbornness, I suppose.

ONCE WE DRIVE through the gate, the house is nothing much to look at. It’s squat and dull, with cream walls and a flat, curved roof that wouldn’t have been out of place in the seventies. I grab my suitcase full of books and head inside, encountering a dark passage lined with what I suppose are meant to be cheerful paintings of fishermen’s cottages, complete with the obligatory wooden boat lying on its side. There’s even a hanging sign proclaiming No bad vibes welcome here.

It smells like mothballs in here, I say loudly.

When I enter the living area, it becomes obvious why my parents chose this place.

Large sliding doors open up onto a patio and a grassy slope that extends right down to the beach. I drop my suitcase next to a squashy white couch and walk forward, hypnotised by the sight of the bright-blue water no more than a few metres away. Without waiting for my parents, I unlock one of the doors and step outside, surprised by the freshness in the air. The wind picks up my red hair and flings it around while a gull calls overhead. It feels right.

Not too shabby, hey honey? Dad says behind me. He removes his glasses and wipes them with the front of his shirt so he can get a better look at the view.

No, not too bad at all, I say.

The sound of cupboard doors being bashed open and closed echoes from inside the house. Seconds later, Mom starts calling out orders. Ben, put the geyser on. Naomi, I need you to start unpacking the cooler box into the fridge before everything goes off. I hope the eggs are all right.

Coming, Dad and I say in unison. We share a smile before he hurries inside, shouting, I’m sure they’re fine, but if not, there’s probably a Woolworths around here somewhere.

I hang back for a moment to stare at the long stretch of creamy beach. There’s only one person out there, a dark-haired girl about my age, kicking her feet through the incoming tide. The way she’s laughing and shrieking, clearly in a world of her own, makes it look like she’s having a great time. I envy her lack of inhibition. If it was me, I’d be worried about who’s watching.

I turn to go inside, wondering what she’s daydreaming about.

* 2 *

THE SUN HAS been blazing since 5 am. My internal body clock is still on school routine time. Feeling the urge to explore a little, I cover myself with half a bottle of sunscreen and pull on a wide-brimmed hat before heading down the wooden steps at the end of our garden that lead to the beach. My plan is to spend the morning reading on the beach, then return home when I’ve had enough sun and continue reading inside. I need to finish Cat Among the Pigeons before moving on to the next Hercule Poirot mystery, The