by Luke Davies
In the morning I open my eyes to silence. Expecting noise, I am not even sure I am awake. I lift myself on one elbow to gaze out the window. Clouds are moving fast, like caravels with sails unfurled, across a crisp sky. The windowpane, the eaves, the plants and shrubs in the garden, are shimmering and expectant with droplets of water, and every drop seems an extravagance. The world quivers in the greenness. A magpie struts across the yard.
Good, I think, throwing the blankets aside. Diving soon.
Though the weather now is fine, the sea takes another three days to unchurn itself, and then suddenly it is laid-back heaven in Byron, the way the brochures depict it.
I enrol at the Deep Six Dive School and promptly fall in lust, though only temporarily, with Charlie, the instructor, who resembles Willem Dafoe. I read the dive book studiously at night and practise all the manoeuvres during the day. On the third day of classes, when Charlie asks me what I’m doing later, I think he’s taken about twenty-four hours too long. I am happy all the same. I touch him several times on the arm at dinner that night while assailing him with the chronologically incoherent, high-speed intensity of my life story as we meander our slick-fingered way through a lobster feast, trying to let him know that, yes, it would be good to fuck tonight. Yes, I’m only here temporarily and yes, please pick up the signals and let us not waste time. When he walks me home to my door and only leans forward to kiss me once on the cheek, I listen to the voice of my blood and take pity on his boyishness—he is only twenty-three—and clasp the nape of his neck in my hand and lead his mouth mine. Charlie is surprised, but not so surprised as to not continue.
We kiss and fuck all night. The needle arm of the turntable is faulty—there is a CD player but the old vinyl collection is better—so that when a record ends the needle lifts and returns to the start. Thus we hear, this night, a crackly side one of Tim Buckley’s Greetings From L.A. perhaps fifteen times. It is like dream music to our liquid callisthenics.
Four days later I receive my laminated certificate and card: Open Water Diver. I’ve done two preliminary pool dives, a beach entry, and four boat dives, including a wreck.
Afterwards Charlie takes me aside. ‘It’s my day off tomorrow, and I can get the second boat. I’m going to take you somewhere special.’
‘Great! Where?’
‘It’s the Minnow Bluff. We don’t take schools there, because there are some dangerous currents and we’d get into legal trouble if anyone got hurt. But privately it’s okay. Not as part of the school. It’s where that American guy on his honeymoon got taken by a great white last year. But don’t worry, that was a freak accident, very unusual.’
‘Very unusual. Well, that’s a relief then.’
‘No, I’m serious. It’ll be okay,’ he continues. ‘It’s beautiful there. It’s the right time of year. It’s a surprise. It’s a present for you. You wait till you see it.’
In the morning we leave just after sunrise, walking sleepy-headed from the bungalow to the dive shop’s storeroom, loading the boat with our wetsuits and tanks and heading out to sea to Charlie’s secret spot. I am reminded of good times with Matt. I feel older, but lighter. We track the coast for twenty minutes and then veer east, towards a horizon that divides two different shades of blue.
We come upon a submerged reef two kilometres offshore, a safe anchorage only on relatively calm days, for an hour or two during high tide. Charlie weighs anchor from both stern and bow, just to be safe, and we help each other with our tanks and equipment. We jump from the boat into the water.
‘You okay?’ asks Charlie.
I’ve already put on my mouthpiece and mask. I raise my thumb and nod.
‘Let’s do it then,’ he says, and we go under.
Visibility is extraordinary, at least twenty-five metres, as if the storm has never occurred. We descend nine metres to the plateau of the reef and glide around the rocks and luminous vegetation as fish eye us with cautious curiosity. We are levitating on the top of an underwater mountain. Charlie motions to follow, and disappears over the edge.
With two kicks of my fins I too reach the edge of the precipice and allow myself to fall downwards. I feel I am an eagle, wings outstretched, held aloft by the wind and slowly descending a sheer cliff face. Halfway down the cliff I pass a moray eel loitering in a crevice, its ugly head bobbing backwards and forwards in the attitude of an imbecile, its mouth opening and closing as if chewing its cud or locked in an eternal effort to utter some fact for which words do not exist.
By regulating my buoyancy control device I can reascend and drop slightly so that gradually I trace a zigzagging perpendicular down towards the ledge where Charlie waits at a depth of twenty metres. He is partly obscured by a slow-motion whirlwind of tropical fish. When he waves at me the fish go into a temporary flurry and for a moment he is clearly visible, hovering upright, his fins keeping balance on the small sandy floor of the ledge. Then the fish reassemble themselves into the thick swirls of colour that hover near his webbing sack of breadcrumbs.
He passes the sack to me. I feed the fish hesitantly at first, my hand jerking back involuntarily as the bolder among them lunge for the bread and peck my fingers. There are fish everywhere. My eyes meet Charlies. It is strange to be in a situation of such unexpected and intense pleasure and yet physically not be able to laugh.
When the bread is finished Charlie beckons me to follow again. We round the corner from the ledge and come into a verdant valley, a luxurious V-shaped depression in the reef where fish of every variety dart and foliage sways and a strong current can be felt tugging from the dark blue distance.
For fifteen minutes I explore the valley, all my senses exquisitely attuned to the thrill of this freedom of movement through three-dimensional space. Perhaps it is like my dream. Perhaps I am leaving that Antarctic ledge behind, and down here, deeper than I expected, are the warm currents.
A large groper follows me wherever I go, colourless and bland among the psychedelic fauna, almost human in the expression of stress and seriousness it wears on its face. I imagine it saying to me, ‘I don’t belong here. I’m made for better things. Please get me out.’
I am busy peering into a fissure and watching some strange crustacean either mating with or killing one of its own when Charlie taps me on the shoulder. I turn around and he points upwards. I look towards the surface. I almost gasp and take in water; it is all I can do to keep breathing into my mouthpiece.
Above our heads is passing an immense flock of stingrays. There are hundreds of them, in orderly formation, like a flotilla, the lowest only a few metres above us. It is a staggering sight, such a strange and determined convoy passing through the valley. But the most extraordinary thing is that, without exception, their wings are all moving with exactly the same motion.
There is only one single thing in the world, in the history of my entire life, that I can compare the situation to. It’s the convoys of spaceships, the allied forces gathering to destroy the evil Death Star, lumbering through the depths of space in my second-favourite movie of all time (after Star Wars, of course), The Empire Strikes Back.
The ranks pass above us, langorous and graceful, six or seven abreast and several layers high, so that light is blocked out. Their wings seem to ripple in translucent silhouettes. I move an arm up towards the lowest ranks above me and merely cause a gentle undulation in the flow of movement.
When the last of the stingrays has passed overhead, the light that filters down through the water reformulates itself. The sun’s rays reach down through the water like slats of liquid light, to illuminate the coloured fish, the coral, the seaweed that sways at the bottom of the valley. But it’s time to begin the return, punctuated by rest-points to avoid decompression sickness, to that world from where we departed twenty minutes earlier.
So this is Charlie’s gift. I know it will remain one of the best presents I’ve ever received in my life. Charlie will be gone soon—he’s a handsome boy and a good fuck but not a lasting proposition—yet th
is thing here, these moments in the Minnow Bluff, will move into my blood and lodge there forever. Everything there for the taking in. What appears to be chance is in actual fact providence. When the fin kicks down here, or the crossbar quivers on the high-jump, then providence moves too. At any rate, chance favours the hungry mind, the open posture. Chance occurs, as Laura the captain said, when we become prepared for it.
We ascend five metres and follow the stingrays for a minute, tailing the tail-enders. It’s like joining a flock of migrating pterodactyls, in an imaginary age four hundred million years earlier, on a planet where the atmosphere flows like honey. We kick forward and move through the flock for a while, swooping and gliding among the huge rays. The stingrays take not the slightest notice of us, only altering their trajectories slightly to avoid making contact with these alien creatures. Then Charlie and I stop, and hover, fins moving softly in that weightlessness, and the flock recedes into the gloom.
At the surface we rip off our masks.
‘Fuck! Fuck! How was that?’ shouts Charlie.
‘That was…that was…’ I can barely speak for laughing. ‘That was incredible, Charlie. That was unbelievable.’
On the deck of the boat, stripping down from my wetsuit, I say, ‘But how often do they come here? How did you know they’d be there at that moment?’
‘I didn’t.’ Charlie laughs. ‘I had no idea!’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘I had no idea in the wide world, Isabelle. I swear. The present, I mean the special treat, was just the Bluff itself, the valley filled with fish. That would have been enough. I’ve never even seen two giant stingray together, let alone anything like that. It wasn’t me, baby. I thought it must have been you. I knew you were special but I didn’t know you put on shows like that!’
I laugh. ‘But where were they going? What were they doing?’
‘I have no idea,’ says Charlie. He is full of life, generous and keen, and I hope his own future brings him bounty.
That night I pack my bag. Ten days’ worth of dirty clothes, and the handful of books I brought along. Charlie comes over later and we make love one last time. In the morning we swap addresses and phone numbers, more out of a sense of social habit than the knowledge that we will ever look at them again. Everyone moves so much, anyway, that numbers are never valid for more than a year.
‘Look me up if you’re in Sydney,’ I say. ‘I might be back up here next year. I’ll do the same.’
But I know that words are empty in this phase of my life. Conversation is weightless. Filled with light, it can pleasantly infuse the hours. There is the absence of Matt, which means that his body is gone, and all his words are unspoken now and will be that way always. Likewise my lonely father, drifting at peace somewhere else in the heavy slumber of forever. But something is rumbling towards me from the future. Isabelle’s Glorious Precept Number One: I am subject to the delivery schedules of timetables not my own. I look forward to the time when I will inhabit my own body again and enter conversations at the moment they actually occur. To the uncertain and ambiguous gods in whom I partially believe, I pray for patience.
POSTSCRIPT
2006
THAT WAS MATT’S DEATH AND DAD’S DEATH. THERE are details afterwards that don’t need to be told here. A lot happens in six years. Life pans out. Now, at thirty-six, I am giving birth to my second child. A boy is about to arrive. The first, a girl, Morgan, is already two years old, flame-haired and pale-skinned like me.
The room in the birthing centre is sterile, pleasant, all creams and yellows and some sunlight leaking through the vertical blinds. But I prefer to spend as much time as possible in the adjoining room, with its large spa and shower. While Morgan’s birth was an ordeal, I am relaxed, excited even, about this one: I know more of what to expect. I have slept from nine last night to five this morning, when my waters broke. I arrived at the hospital at 7 a.m. and at eight-thirty I am less than an hour away from giving birth. Michael has just returned, having first dropped me at the hospital and then taken Morgan to Tess’s to be babysat.
He fishes; he’s a fisherman, operating charter boats. He lectures a little too. We met six years ago, not long after Dad died. I was thirty; he was forty, emerging from a marriage that had drifted into decay. He was lecturing in the marine coxswain’s course that I’d started taking soon after I got back from Byron Bay.
One night the class—eleven men, of whom two or three were morons, plus me, who nobody quite knew how to take—was learning about ‘Marine Survival’. We went out to the Qantas emergency simulation training terminal. I had to jump from a ten-metre height, fully dressed and in a life jacket, and drag other members of the class to safety. I had to right a flipped life raft, help the others in, then climb aboard myself during a simulated storm, in darkness, while being sprayed by fire hoses. Once we were all huddled on the raft, one of the men started telling an obscene joke about a woman. Being the only woman on the raft, I didn’t take kindly to his lack of tact.
What’s apparent is that life is very short and there are times when a gentle acceptance will just not do. Sometimes, taking a stand doesn’t do anyone any harm. I punched him in the face with all my might. It was not part of my normal nature and had I known how much a punch would hurt my fist, I would never have done it. It was a circumstance beyond my control. As he teetered backwards in shock and pain, I launched my foot into his chest, hard into the logo on his life jacket, to help the momentum along.
In the darkness Michael, supervising events from the side of the mock-ocean, heard a shout, a commotion, then a splash. It was Michael, my future husband, who had to gather together the different versions of events and decide on a course of action. The joker was threatening to press charges for assault. The general consensus was that he had it coming. The one thing Michael wasn’t prepared for was to fall in love with his student, me. In my written explanation of events, as lucid, as concise and as strongly argued as I could manage, I acknowledged the inappropriateness of my actions and apologised for the disruption to the class. On a separate sheet of paper I wrote, for the joker:
I apologise for punching you in the nose and kicking you off the life raft during the simulated storm.
I. Airly
Michael deemed it wise to throw the amusing but possibly inflammatory letter into the bin. (As for the joker, he came up eventually with the face-saving opinion that ‘The bitch was probably on the rag; let’s just let it drop.’)
Curious for more contact, Michael responded to my letter, thanking me for my explanation and implying that, unofficially, he admired what I had done. I wrote back to Michael, to thank him for his lectures and teaching, and to explain more, off the record, about how I had felt that night and why I had done what I did. I had intended the letter to be short but found myself rambling in unexpected directions.
‘Ultimately,’ I wrote, ‘I think that your biggest fear is that because you are a woman, in the end you might always be vulnerable. Because the average man sucks. I guess that’s why I love the sea. It makes me feel strong. You know what you are dealing with. It’s a force that is stronger than anything, any man or woman.’
It was common ground, or ocean, enough. Enough for his heart to move a fraction. Enough for him to phone me—inappropriate use of the school database, as I love to remind him—not knowing even if I was in or out of a relationship. ‘This might sound dumb,’ he said, ‘but I was wondering if you’d like to meet for a drink some evening.’
A couple of years later we were married. It was a nice event, very low-key, a small church; Louise, my beautiful bridesmaid bedecked with flowers. Uncle Dan, big cheesy grin, the family man, the Futon King, gave me away. It’s a funny old world. Maybe I should hate him the most. For that moment of transgression, which started everything. But hatred has a way of feeding on itself. Hatred means having someone living rent-free inside your head. If the past, like the future, gets too big in there, then the present can be a very narrow place. On the other
hand it seems the more we manage to live in the moment, the more infinite it becomes.
And now here I am. Now comes our second child. The spa bath stands in the middle of the white-tiled room. From the wall protrudes a detachable sci-fi shower nozzle. Stainless-steel handles are bolted to the wall on either side of the shower. Between contractions I use the handles to lower or raise myself. Sitting in the spa, I am soothed by jets of warm water. I drop my head forward and play the nozzle over my neck and upper back. Michael, sitting in his Speedos on the side of the spa, moves forward to take the nozzle from me and spray my back.
‘No, no more,’ I say, panting.
‘Do you want me to rub your back?’ he asks.
‘No, nothing right now,’ I say. ‘I can’t be touched right now.’
I slump delirious beneath the spray of water. I know that even between the closest couples infinite distances continue to exist. The trick we seem to be trying to discover lies in how to love this distance. Then there is the greater chance that each can see the other from head to toe. And there he is, Michael—God bless his kind soul— on the edge of the spa. You make a choice and a thousand events spring forth from it.