by Tony Parsons
Rose was floating weightless by my side, looking all around. But there was no sign of the other divers. They had left us. Water began to seep into my mask. I tilted my head upwards, pulled back my mask and roughly exhaled through my nose. My mask cleared. Rose was looking at me, her blue eyes wide behind glass, jerking her thumb from side to side.
Which direction?
I checked around, hoping for the reassuring sight of some human shapes finning through the darkness. There was nothing. And every direction looked the same. I gazed up at the hull of the boat, far above us now. It seemed to be drifting away from us. Or perhaps we were doing the drifting. Rose jerked her thumb to the right.
Go that way.
I shook my head. Was she crazy? She was indicating that we should swim out to sea. I stabbed my thumb in the opposite direction, towards the shore. Or to where I imagined the shore to be.
Go that way.
She shook her head, tapping the compass she had strapped to her wrist. My finger and thumb formed a reluctant circle.
Okay.
She led the way and we finned into the darkness. My mouth was dry with nerves. I looked at my air gauge. Still plenty left.
Then we were suddenly on top of it, emerging out of the twilight like some great abandoned city, the rotting grey and black metal encrusted with more than fifty years of coral.
A sunken Japanese troop ship from World War II.
We grinned at each other with shock and elation. This ship was the reason for our dive. There was still no sign of the others but they were probably on another part of the ship. You could only see a fraction of it in this light. By now we didn’t care.
The ship was sitting in deep water but the upper deck and the bridge were just about within our limit. We finned across the deck and I felt something icy enter my heart. The gaping windows of the bridge were like empty eye sockets. The dead wood of the deck was like dried bones. Men had died in this place.
We were in a graveyard.
I knew that we shouldn’t be here. Rose indicated the gaping hold, giving me the thumbs up as she pointed into the black abyss. I emphatically shook my head. Was she crazy? I tapped my air gauge. Time to think about going up.
Rose hovered weightless above the void, her arms crossed casually in front of her chest, her breathing regular. Then she reared backwards as a giant turtle suddenly emerged from the darkness of the hold and almost collided with her. She looked at me, her eyes wide with wonder, and I had to smile.
The turtle had the head of a thousand-year-old man and yet it moved with an impossible grace. Below the crusty shell its legs were like magic paddles and it glided across the surface of the sunken ship as if it believed itself to be a thing of infinite beauty. And in a way, it was. So I was hardly surprised when Rose began to follow it into the colder waters where the bottom of the sea abruptly dropped away beneath us.
The turtle—it had to be a female, it was so large—turned its bald head to look at Rose, its large eyes blinking with what seemed more like shyness than alarm. Rose gently touched the scaly shell and spun on her back, shaking her head with a joy that was unconfined. Then the current hit us.
It was like being seized by a giant hand and thrown into a tunnel that went all the way to the end of the world.
Rose and the turtle and the ship were gone. I was going down into the freezing blackness and I couldn’t stop myself. There was a sheer wall of coral by my side and I tried to fin towards it. I kept trying until my legs were heavy with exhaustion, but the down current was like being trapped in a broken lift, and I believed that this would be the last day of my life.
My face and body slapped hard against the coral, knocking my regulator out of my mouth and cracking my mask. I grabbed two fistfuls of razor-sharp coral and held on tight as it tore at my fingertips. Swallowing a gutful of sea water, I fumbled for my regulator through my broken vision and forced it into my mouth, gulping terrified mouthfuls of air. My mouth was dry. Completely dry. My wet suit was shredded on one side. There was a terrible pain in my hip.
I looked for Rose. I couldn’t see her. I checked my gauges. Forty metres. And down to 30 bar of air. But I couldn’t surface. Rose might be looking for me. Rose would definitely be looking for me.
Then I saw her, clinging to a clump of dead coral, her legs horizontal from her body in the current. She had lost her mask. Her eyes were half closed and almost blind. But she finned over to me, one bloody hand clinging to the coral, the other waving across her chest.
Calm down, calm down.
I nodded, sort of laughing and crying at the same time. I began to float upwards. She gripped my BCD and pulled me down with a strength I never knew she possessed. If I came up too fast from this depth, I would certainly get decompression sickness and possibly die. But I couldn’t stop myself from drifting upwards. I just couldn’t stop myself.
Rose pointed at my waist. I had lost my weight belt. Still holding on to me, she desperately tore a rock from the face of the coral and stuffed it into my hands to weigh me down. But my hands were ripped and torn, and I couldn’t hold it. It slipped through my fingers.
I looked at my air gauge. It was all gone. Rose forced her spare mouthpiece between my lips. But there was next to nothing there. The short gasps of breath seemed to stutter and die. We were breathing borrowed air.
Rose touched the top of my head.
Then we let go of the coral.
I started to ascend to the gathering light while Rose, looking like an astronaut cut from her mooring in space, no longer trailing bubbles, drifted down into shadows that seemed to stretch to infinity.
I watched her drop away from me through the tears and bloody mucus that streaked the inside of my cracked mask. I tried to say her name but I couldn’t make a sound.
She was my reason.
eight
What I notice first about her are the clothes.
Her black raincoat is unbuttoned and you can see her tube top, short skirt and these sort of furry high heels. Are they called kitten mules? She looks like she’s on her way to a club. A bit too much make-up. Her skin is white and her tights are black and her hair is bottle blonde. The roots need some attending to. Is that a gold ankle chain concealed beneath her tights? Probably. She doesn’t look as though she’s going to some funky, fashionable club in the middle of town. She looks like she’s going to a club in the deepest suburbs.
She is pretty but exhausted-looking, like a former beauty queen who is down on her luck.
She’s in the staff room at Churchill’s when I turn up for work. Usually the room is empty when I arrive, but today this tired, pretty woman is occupying our only armchair, her face in a battered paperback.
That’s odd, I think to myself. You don’t see many teachers dressed like that.
‘Have you read this?’ she says, looking up.
Her voice is pure, working-class London. She has to be from Essex. Nobody talks like that in London any more.
‘What is it?’
‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,’ she says. ‘By Carson McCullers. She wrote it when she was twenty-three. It’s about this young girl called Mick growing up in Georgia during the Second World War.’
‘I know what it’s about. It’s about loneliness. I used to teach it.’
‘Really?’ she says, her painted eyes wide with wonder.
‘Yes. To a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys who wouldn’t know their heart from their elbow.’
‘You really taught this book?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But did you read it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, did you love it? Did it mean anything to you?’
‘Well, I thought that the plot was a little—’
‘Because to me it’s about the way life cheats you.’
‘Well, the central theme of the book—’
‘Look at Mick. She starts out full of dreams, full of plans. She wants to travel the world. She wants to be a musician. She wan
ts to bust out of her little town. Everything excites her. And then she gets cheated.’
‘Cheated?’
‘Cheated. How old is she at the end of the book? Sixteen? Fifteen? She’s got a job in Woolworth’s because her family are so poor. And she already knows that none of her dreams are going to come true. Mick’s been cheated.’ She smiles, shaking her head. ‘Wow! You taught The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Incredible.’
‘I’m Alfie, by the way.’
She stands up. ‘Jackie Day,’ she says.
Then she does something that makes me realise that she is not a teacher at all.
She goes to the cupboard in the corner of the room, forages around for a minute and comes out wearing a pair of yellow gloves. Why is she wearing yellow gloves to teach English as a foreign language?
Next she pulls on a blue nylon work coat, a bit like the one my mum wears in the kitchens of Nelson Mandela. Then she is standing there with a bucket in one hand and a bottle of disinfectant in the other.
It’s a bit like watching Clark Kent turn into Superman.
If Superman was a cleaning lady.
They pulled me from the sea and gave me oxygen on the deck of the dive boat.
I remember voices speaking in Tagalog, someone shouting into a radio, the boat’s engine kicking into life. Someone said something to me about a recompression chamber in Cebu. They needed to get me to a recompression chamber. I had come up from too deep, too fast. There were bubbles of excess nitrogen in my flesh and in my blood, although I couldn’t feel them yet. But I was definitely going to get the sickness. The decompression sickness.
I remember that I was flat on my back, the oxygen mask clamped across my mouth, the rain lashing my face. As I tried to sit up and tell them to wait for Rose, the bends began with a blinding pain in my back that made me gasp and weep. I had never known pain like it. My vision blurred with tears, and stayed blurred even when the tears were gone. With every second my eyesight was fading. I felt dizzy and sick, there was a tingling pain in all my joints, especially across my neck, shoulders and back, but what frightened me the most about the sickness was my fading vision. I was very quickly going blind. By the time we reached Cebu, I kept my eyes closed because the coming darkness terrified me, just terrified me.
Strapped to a stretcher, I was bundled on to the dock and into an ambulance. I couldn’t move my legs by now. I couldn’t even feel them. My head felt as though someone was hitting it with a hammer. A voice said something about an air embolism. They said it was a little bubble of air at the base of my brain, that was why I couldn’t feel anything in my legs. An air embolism. Jesus. I remember I kept my eyes closed. I remember praying. Even though I had lost everything that ever mattered to me, I didn’t want to die. I was very afraid.
The ambulance edged slowly through the thick Philippine traffic, its siren howling. At our destination there were excited voices in Tagalog and English as the stretcher was carried down crowded corridors. Finally we were in what seemed like some kind of cool, subterranean tomb. I remember there was the sound of a heavy metal door being opened and then, after I was carried inside, closing behind me. I remember I felt as though I had been deposited in a bank vault. This was the recompression chamber.
Someone was with me. A woman. A middle-aged Filipina. She held my hand and stroked my face and told me in good English that I was very sick but that everything was going to be all right. She promised to stay with me.
The chamber smelt damp and musty. It was all blackness. And I wondered how you know when you are dead, if it is possible to get it wrong, if you could mistake death for something else. I remember I kept thinking that perhaps I was dead already. Then after a stretch of time that couldn’t be measured, there were shadows in the chamber and a numb sensation in my legs.
The woman holding my hand told me that I was doing fine but I needed a special injection to stop the bubble at the base of my brain from swelling. A steroid injection. The woman laughed nervously and told me that she had only ever injected oranges before. There were people looking through the little portholes of the recompression chamber, telling her what to do, excited voices speaking in Tagalog, although all Tagalog sounds excited to me.
Frankly, the needle in the hands of the woman who had only ever injected oranges seemed like the least of my problems. And after all the nerves and anticipation and excited voices, her injection was next to nothing, like a bee sting given to a man who had just had the living daylights kicked out of him.
I remember she stayed awake with me. She constantly reassured me, and I felt like crying at her kindness. My vision slowly began to clear, my eyes sticky and sore, and she was revealed to me as a small woman about my mother’s age.
For the last ten hours in the chamber we were on special oxygen masks, and she squeezed my hand every time I had to take a breath. That’s what she had to do, that woman who saved my life. She had to keep reminding me to take another breath.
We were in that recompression chamber for two days and two nights, the sickness slowly seeping out of me. But sometimes I feel they didn’t get it all out. Sometimes I think sickness came into me that day. And it will be there for as long as I am.
It’s strange the way the loss of one person can leave such a giant hole in the middle of your life. It’s not as if the hole they leave behind feels like the size of another human being.
It feels more like the size of a world.
I should be going out more. I really should. Not all the time, of course. It’s far too soon to be going out all the time. It will always be too soon for that. But I should be going out once in a while.
One thousand years from today, I will be ready to go clubbing. I’ll put it in my diary. A man has his needs, you know. And a woman, too, no doubt.
But when I don’t see Josh, and I don’t see Josh all that often, I usually spend my nights in my room, listening to Sinatra on my mini stereo system, usually one of the great Capitol albums of the fifties, but sometimes a Reprise record from the sixties or seventies—not so good, of course, but not so familiar either.
What is it about this music? I like the upbeat stuff, songs like ‘Come Fly With Me’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’, albums like A Swingin’ Affair! and Songs For Swingin’ Lovers! But what I like best are the songs about love breaking down. ‘In the Wee Small Hours’, ‘Angel Eyes’, ‘One For My Baby’, ‘Night and Day’, ‘My Funny Valentine’ and all the rest.
Listening to Sinatra makes me feel as though I am not the only person in the universe who ever woke up to find themselves in some place that they never imagined. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel that I am not so alone. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel more human.
Frank recorded entire albums—Where Are You?, No One Cares, Only the Lonely—about missing some woman. The hippies think they invented concept albums in the sixties, but Frank Sinatra was doing it in the fifties. Sinatra will talk to you about it all night long, if you need him to. And I need him to.
I need this music the way normal men need food and football. Sinatra seems to point a way forward, to encourage me to get on with my life. When Sinatra sings of love dissolving, there is always the consolation of love to come. Love is like a bus in these songs. There’s always another one along in a minute.
But I know that’s not how it was in Sinatra’s heart. I have read all the classic texts, and I know that Sinatra never got over Ava Gardner. She was the woman who owned his heart. She was the one whose photograph he tore up, threw away and then stuck back together with sellotape. If Sinatra never got over Ava, then why should I get over Rose?
The music is an endless source of comfort, though. Sinatra makes missing someone sound noble, heroic, universal. He makes suffering sound as though it has some kind of point to it. And in the real world, it doesn’t. It just hurts like hell.
And there’s something else. As Sinatra mourns love, celebrates love, anticipates love, I can almost smell the manly cocktail of Old Holborn and Old Spice when my
grandfather sat me on his lap, back when the world was young and everything was ahead and it felt as though everybody that I ever loved would live forever.
The way my mother deals with my father going away is to carry on as normal. She gets up in the morning, she goes to work in the kitchens of Nelson Mandela High, she comes home with an affectionate smile and stories of her kids. She even starts to take an interest in her garden—or at least she busies herself clearing up the mess she made when the old bastard walked out. This is how my mum reacts to a crisis.
It’s not that she ignores it. She just refuses to look it in the eye.
I go to work, wander the streets of Chinatown, listen to Sinatra in my room. And all the while I fantasise that one day my father will be there, bearing flowers and full of apologies, on his knees before my mother, begging for forgiveness. It doesn’t happen.
I don’t see how he can build a life with Lena on such flimsy foundations. I can’t imagine how they can form a lasting union when they don’t even own a kettle. I am convinced that one morning he will see her dancing in her chair as she eats her high-bran breakfast, and it will drive him nuts.
But I start to realise that even if their love nest does get repossessed, that doesn’t mean that my old man is ever coming back home.
There are phone calls between my parents. I make no attempt to listen because there are things that happen between your mother and father that you want to keep your distance from. The pattern is always the same. He calls her. There are long silences while he—I don’t know. Pleads for understanding? Asks when he can pick up his Stevie Wonder records? Asks if he can borrow a kettle? I don’t know what she tells him, but I can hear that she tries to keep the bitterness and hurt and anger out of her voice.
It’s impossible.
She likes to act as though nothing that my father does surprises her, that she knows him so well, that all this upheaval is only what she would expect from the man she has been married to for half a lifetime. It’s not true.