‘I … I don’t know.’ She didn’t. Except there was no point in arguing any more. She could feel the excitement already seeping away, exhaustion taking over. What was it that therapist had called her? Submissive. Yeah, that was it. Going back to Martin ‘s and doing what he wanted, letting him screw her after a nice cup of tea in his mother’s mail-order cups with the blue roses round the rims.
She crumpled up her paper serviette, banged up from her seat. ‘Okay, boss. Back to bed.’
The next weekend was perfect diving weather—apart from the cold—as if Bea had been saying a novena for clear skies, low wind, calm sea and neap tides. Martin set the alarm for five, and when Chris had concocted an Anglo-American breakfast of waffles and baked beans, they rattled off in Tony’s ten-year-old Ford Transit which doubled as hotel and carry-all. They had bundled in their sleeping bags as well as all their diving gear, Thermos flasks and sandwiches, extra sweaters, change of clothes; speeded down the motorway to a stretch of coast further west than the usual Club venue. Martin wanted safe and shallow water in a deserted spot with no dangerous currents, no boats or sailing clubs. He was trying to keep the risks as low as possible, although he still maintained that February was one of the worst months they could have chosen, the sea breathtakingly cold.
Chris only really realised what he meant when she was standing on a shelf of rock trying to struggle into her wet suit, teeth chattering, shivering with goose pimples. No wind, he had said, yet she could feel a cruel sea breeze sneaking down her neck, attacking all her weak spots. The suit was wilful, seemed as opposed to the whole venture as Martin had been himself. Even in the baths it had been tricky to put on, but there at least it was sheltered, her hands not numb and clumsy with the cold. Martin was helping, tugging the jacket over her shoulders, easing up the zip. He seemed strangely solemn, treating her body no longer as something female which excited him, but merely item number one in the long inventory which followed—wet suit, bootees, hood, life-jacket, watch, knife, snorkel, harness and bottle, weight belt, gloves. He double-checked each item, adjusting straps and fit, inspecting the demand valve, making sure that the emergency cylinder was correctly attached to her life-jacket and the weight belt free to disengage; saying nothing, his total concentration on the equipment. He was the instructor now, the pro, not the randy whooping lover who had come three times in two hours the night he had met her plane and only changed his mind about the dive because he was so knackered after the third, he would have promised anything.
She wished to God she hadn’t pushed it now. Her father was involved again, of course—always was. Both Neil and Dean had been thrilled about her diving, imagined her plunging down to wrecks, exploring the ocean bed. She hadn’t actually admitted that all she had explored, as yet, were two municipal baths. Somehow, she had to prove herself, make her father proud of her by turning phoney boasts to fact. When Martin opposed her, it had become a sort of test case. She no longer really wanted to dive, especially when she felt the cold of England after cushy California, and her father was fading like her suntan. But then it was Martin she needed to impress—or at least stand up to him, disprove that word submissive, substitute words like fearless, independent.
Now she was being punished for it—by cold, discomfort, fear—clinging to her back like clammy garments, adding to the weight of her equipment. She had never felt so burdened by her gear before. In the baths, you sat on the edge of the pool to put it on, then simply tumbled in, or dispensed with half of it and wore just a tee shirt or bikini. Here, you had to pick your way across the rocks, lumbering along in what felt like a suit of armour, your cylinder digging into your back and shoulders and clanking against your weight belt, which dragged you down itself with its fifteen pounds of lead. Every step was an effort, the rubber tight and constricting against your skin, chafing at the crotch, pulling under the arms.
At least there was no one to see them, jeer in disbelief. The rocks were deserted. They had spotted one lone female walking her dog by the quarry higher up, a single jogger panting along the cliff path, but both had vanished now. The sea itself looked grim and grey, grumbling around the rocks. The sun had disappeared and although the sky was clear still, it seemed crazy to be plunging underwater into a temperature of ten degrees centigrade, when anyone in their senses would be hugging the fire indoors.
‘Okay?’ asked Martin, as they approached the last few feet of rock, slippery with seaweed and encrusted with barnacles. He scrambled the last bit on his bottom, sat on the edge of the rock with his feet dangling in the water. She did the same, wincing as a trickle of icy water seeped in at the seams of her suit and inched slowly up her legs. She slipped her fins on, sat upright again as Martin turned on her air, inspected the pressure on her gauge, checked that her harness was secure, the clamp on her bottle tight. The more precautions he took, the more her fear increased. She remembered all the horrors she had read about—decompression sickness, failure of the demand valve, nitrogen narcosis, hypothermia. They had been only words before, theoretical crises you mugged up from a textbook so you could pass your theory tests, complete your training in a safe and heated pool. Panic itself was dangerous. She felt claustrophobic already and she hadn’t even got her mask on yet. Martin was spitting into it, rubbing saliva over the glass, then rinsing it in sea water to clear it. She should be doing that herself, not standing like a ninny, semi-paralysed. This was her last chance to say no. Once she had the demand valve in, she couldn’t speak at all, could communicate only through signs. She had learnt those, too, in her training, but they hadn’t seemed so primitive then, so totally inadequate. There were no signs for terror, total funk.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Martin was asking as he checked his own equipment.
She nodded. ‘F … Fine.’
‘We can go back if you want.’
‘No, of c … course not.’ And have him say ‘I told you so’, label her a coward ever after.
‘Right, once you’ve got your mouthpiece in, I want you to check your breathing for a moment before we actually go in. Okay?’
She nodded again, felt she had lost all power of speech for ever as she splashed her face with sea water, fitted the mask, pushed the mouthpiece in. She had forgotten how to breathe, forgotten everything. All those quiet steady training sessions seemed preparation for some totally different sport, one less terrifying, less sheer bloody crazy. Martin was gesturing to her. She tried to concentrate, stop shivering with cold and fear, inhale, exhale, as he had asked. He was putting on his own mask. Only seconds now and they would both be under.
Stop! I’ve changed my mind. She had intended it as a yell, a final shout of defiance, but no sound came out at all. She didn’t have a mouth any more, only a plug of rigid rubber. Martin had his back to her in any case, climbing down a further shelf of rock. When he turned round, it was to make the ‘Okay’ sign, the signal for them to ease forward and plunge in. Weakly, she signalled back, watched him push off into the water, followed herself, almost in a daze, her heart thud-thudding like a separate piece of equipment which had gone dangerously wrong.
The shock of the dive took her breath away. She had entered some strange whirling churning world where neither she nor anything else had shape, weight, direction or solidity, but everything boomed and blurred around her in a seething ebb and flow. The sound of her own breathing (too shallow and too fast) was roaring in her ears, light and dark spinning through each other, bubbles teasing and blinding in a stream of quicksilver, slimy weed entangling her hands and feet.
One sensation was gaining over the rest—cold, cold, a cruel and stabbing cold past description or belief, as freezing fingers of water shocked between her breasts, poked between her buttocks, seeped inside her suit to grope her stomach and her thighs. If she had thought it was cold before, she had hardly understood the word. She trod water, paralysed, unable to move with the sheer raw shock of it. Martin was a dark shape just beyond her She tried to shout his name, kept forgetting she was muzz
led, blundered towards him instead. He turned to face her, took both her hands in his, lining up his mask in front of hers. She felt almost hypnotised by his reassuring gaze, his solid calming presence, the steady pressure of his hands against her own. Cold and fear were there still, the sea still buffeting and slapping her, but now it had Martin to contend with.
He tapped his hand against his mouthpiece, then touched hers, motioning to her to breathe more slowly, stop panting in sheer panic. She watched the bubbles streaming from his valve, tried to breathe in time with them. He cleared his mask, gesturing to her to do the same, all his movements slow and deliberate, reminding her to relax and keep her cool. She obeyed him like a child, easing her mask and blinking the water from her eyes, feeling less confused already as her vision cleared. Martin had no words, but was using his hands and eyes to calm her down, willing her to remember what they had taught her in the training. They had warned her of this moment—how she would feel disorientated, but must on no account give way to it, just take her time to adapt to the new environment, adjust even to the cold.
Already she felt less paralysed as the world settled back in place, grey marbling into green and the first brutal wound of cold dulling into ache. At least she was weightless underwater. That clanking and cumbersome equipment seemed to have sunk without trace, leaving her light and strangely free. Excitement began to nudge aside the fear. Martin was still beside her, motioning her to follow him. She rechecked her air supply, cleared her ears, then drifted to the bottom, touched down on silver sand. She gazed around in awe at the tumbled crags and boulders—the whole strange distorted secret startling world. Everything looked bigger. The crevices in rocks were gaping mouths, the fine brown thongs of bootlace-weed twisted together like hunky coils of rope. She was blinkered by her mask, longed to have eyes in every part of her body so she could see everything at once—fish, coral, sea anemones, strands of shiny bladder-wrack threshing back and forwards on the current, finer weed sprouting like dark hair from grimacing heads of rock. She glanced back at the surface, heaving like a giant mass of mercury shot with shafts of greenish light, the bubbles from the demand valves streaming up as if they were alive.
Martin was gesturing at the bottom, pointing out a pair of staring eyes. A fish—so cleverly camouflaged, she would never have noticed it herself. Suddenly there were more fish—six or seven darting skittering bodies, flashing past so close she could have touched them, wheeling back again, their silver scales shimmering against the darker weed.
Martin was making certain she missed nothing, turning this way and that to show her a strangely sculpted rock or dark-jawed cave, a sea mouse with iridescent green and golden hairs along its sides, a hermit crab scuttling across the bottom. He pointed to a furrow in the sand, the trail of a whelk which she traced to its grooved and turreted shell. Beside it was a rusting hunk of metal, half a broken engine, encrusted with weed and barnacles. Even junk looked exotic underwater.
He led the way into, a gully between two rocks, piercing the barrier of weed which swashed to and fro with the gentle swell of the waves. She could feel the swell herself, lapping against her body as she dived down after him. It was darker here, more menacing, fronds of seaweed forming prison bars above them, moss-fringed rocks encircling them below. Strange spooky objects had been trapped in the cleft, abandoned there for years—bits of ship or fishing gear, scraps of life now dead or mouldering. Martin was tugging something free, offering it to her as a souvenir. It was a dumpy little beer bottle, circa 1985, slimy brown and cracked, but the sea had transformed it into treasure. She took it from him with as much excitement as if it were an ancient drinking vessel. Martin had talked so often about wreck-diving, but only now did she grasp the thrill of it. It wasn’t just a greedy lust for loot—he had told her that enough times—but the challenge of retrieving bits and pieces of the past, finding what was buried, exploring a world where everything was treasure, everything transformed.
She turned to follow him, finning from the shadows of the gully into warmer water no longer murky grey. The sun must have come out again, intensifying colours, lighting up the gloom. A bumptious looking fish, greenish-blue with darker rings marking out its fins, was swaggering through the weed, dodging away from them. She longed to ask Martin what it was, shout out her excitement. He had warned her that the dive might be a washout, in the sense that they wouldn’t see much so early in the year. She had seen enough to stock an underwater museum and her eyes were still out on stalks trying to take everything in. Martin seemed to have tuned in to her mood, even without words, was showing off, trying out a somersault. She dared one herself, realised that the clumsy funky chicken-livered booby who had set out half an hour ago had vanished like the weight of her equipment, leaving behind a graceful streamlined fish as fearless in the water as the greeny one still playing tag with them.
Martin was signalling to her, ‘Follow me’, streaking on ahead. He must have spotted something, another treasure, wanted her to share it. He paused a moment to check his watch and depth gauge. They couldn’t have much time left, but they’d come down again tomorrow, every day they could. She was hooked now, wanted only to dive and dive and dive, see more of this amazing secret world. She swooped after him through a rippling veil of weed, took his hand, tried to say with the pressure of her fingers that of course she would follow him, anywhere he went, to the deepest furthest ocean.
‘Cod and double chips, please, a cheese and mushroom omelette, and a pot of tea for two.’
‘Oh, Martin, it was great.’
‘You’ve said that twenty times. And a portion of bread and butter. Chris, you don’t want bread, do you?’
‘Yeah, I do, I’m starving. When can we go again?’
‘Tomorrow, if you like, if we can get our cylinders filled. Make that bread and butter for two—no, three. Depends on the weather, of course, but …’
‘What was that fish we saw? The bluey-green one?’
‘Wrasse.’
‘What?’
‘Ballan wrasse. They’re very common, actually. They’re called sea swine sometimes or even sweet lips.’
‘Sweet lips? You’re joking.’
‘No, I’m not. Sweet lips like yours. Give me a kiss.’
Chris made it a double like the chips. ‘Oh, Martin, I do love you.’
‘Ssh, the waitress’s coming back.’
‘I don’t care.’ Chris paused to pour the tea, filled his cup, went on pouring. ‘I just can’t tell you how wonderful it was. I mean, I never realised …’
‘Look out! You’re flooding the whole table. Give me that pot. I can see diving’s gone to your head.’
‘It has. Oh, I wish it was tomorrow and we were down again already. Can we make it longer next time?’
‘No. You were perished as it was. You’re even shivering now.’
Chris blew on her tea, cooled it with a dash of milk, then drained the whole cup almost without pausing. ‘Now I’m not. Anyway, it’s worth it. It’s not until you’re that cold you realise just how wonderful hot tea is. Want a fill-up?’
Martin found her knee. ‘I want you—soon.’
‘You’ll have me after tea. It’ll be funny doing it in Tony’s van. D’ you think we’ll both fit in one sleeping bag?’
‘We’d better. Sssh …’
The waitress had returned again, banging down the plates of food, making a final slam with the ketchup bottle as she saw the pool of tea.
Chris giggled. ‘D’you think she heard?’
‘D’you think she’s ever done it? Poor bloke if she has.’ Martin started shovelling in his chips, offered one to Chris. She gobbled it, stared down at her omelette, seeing not golden eggs, but silver sand, fronds of weed instead of mushroom stalks. She had cleared her ears, her eyes, rinsed out her wet suit, washed herself, her hair, but she couldn’t clear her head. The sea was still surging to and fro in it, not just the tiny fraction she had explored herself, but the entire vast ocean which covered three-quarters of the wor
ld and included the deep dangerous waters of the abyss which plunged down so far they swallowed up mountain peaks and craters, drowned whole islands where dinosaurs had lived once, a hundred million years ago. She had read about those icy depths which sounded like a realm from outer space or a spookland in a saga, with their total darkness, their babel of discordant sounds, their weird blind creatures gliding to and fro in the eternal night. It had been book-learning before—astounding facts and figures which couldn’t fail to move you, but which were remote and set apart. Now it touched on her own experience. All right, so she had been down only a puny thirty feet, would need not only a whole lifetime, but maybe two or three more centuries of technological advance before she could ever go so deep, but at least she had made a start. She was no longer a total novice, one of those timid landbound plodders who hugged the shore, refused to get their feet wet, refused to quest or dare. Martin had turned her from funk to fish, taught her to fin, fly, defy gravity and danger, had joined her to that chain of higher souls who for twenty or thirty centuries had been battling to expand their lungs or invent new apparatus so that they could explore the whole underwater world.
She had had her initiation, passed with flying colours, and that meant more to her than any exam she had ever sat, her three A levels put together, even the acceptance slip from Bristol University. She was tempted to bypass Bristol altogether, take her exams in diving rather than modern languages, gain Honours underwater. Except it wouldn’t be worth the uproar from her mother. She must see her degree as a sort of gift to Martin. He planned to travel, didn’t he, so languages might help. Now she could go with him, share his diving life. Her Ma and Grandma would be shocked by that sort of life, living like a nomad, never secure or settled, badly paid, often out of work. But they didn’t understand the thrills, the chance of winning fame or fortune if you were prepared to take the risks and had that crazy combination of sheer guts and dogged patience which Martin had himself. Even kids and amateurs had found amazing things. The sea was full of wrecks—four-thousand-odd off Florida alone, and further down this very stretch of Devon coast, there was said to be a treasure ship with nineteen tons of gold and silver coin spilling out among the skulls. Someone had to bring it up. Why not the new and famous duo of Brett and Gordon, the man-and-woman team whose name was headlines in the diving world? Okay, so she was fantasising, but even if they didn’t find a dickybird, there was still the excitement of the life itself, the challenge and the travel, the freedom from stupifying in some boring suburb, settling down behind their starched net curtains with nothing to survey but privet hedge and garden gnomes.
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