Diving Belles

by Lucy Wood

  Praise for Diving Belles

  ‘Bewitching … magic encroaches upon their narratives as slowly but surely as the incoming tide, so that even the most outlandish goings-on come to seem natural’ Daily Mail

  ‘Beautiful’ Harper’s Bazaar

  ‘It is as if the Cornish moors and coasts have whispered secrets into Lucy Wood’s ears and, in response, she has fashioned exquisite tales of mystery and humanity’ Ali Shaw, author of The Girl with Glass Feet

  ‘A vibrant new voice’ Tatler

  ‘A refreshing debut collection … a winning combination of spooky mystery and toast-and-tea cosiness, with much warmth and tenderness, even as an unsettling quality remains, as if Wood might be enjoying a joke you can’t quite figure out’ Metro

  ‘One of the best aspects of these stories is the way in which the daily lives of their characters become imbued with a mystical, folkloric significance … Wood’s major talent is as an observer of the everyday. She captures the drift of life in a modern West Country town superbly’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Wood has a wonderfully deadpan way with her surreal subject matter’ Literary Review

  ‘Lucy Wood is a sorceress. These stories unfold in a dreamy marine light, one that reveals the miraculous in the everyday’ Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

  ‘Vividly imagined, utterly original and grounded in the belief that metaphor, allegory and symbolism are the cornerstones of literature’ Sydney Morning Herald

  For Mum and Dad

  Contents

  Diving Belles

  Countless Stones

  Of Mothers and Little People

  Lights in Other People’s Houses

  Magpies

  The Giant’s Boneyard

  Beachcombing

  Notes from the House Spirits

  The Wishing Tree

  Blue Moon

  Wisht

  Some Drolls Are Like That and Some Are Like This

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Diving Belles

  Iris crossed her brittle ankles and folded her hands in her lap as the diving bell creaked and juddered towards the sea. At first, she could hear Demelza shouting and cursing as she cranked the winch, but as the bell was cantilevered away from the deck her voice was lost in the wind. Cold air rushed through the open bottom of the bell, bringing with it the rusty smell of The Matriarch’s liver-spotted flanks and the brackish damp of seaweed. The bench Iris was sitting on was narrow and every time the diving bell rocked she pressed against the footrest to steady herself. She kept imagining that she was inside a church bell and that she was the clapper about to ring out loudly into the water, announcing something. She fixed her eyes on the small window and didn’t look down. There was no floor beneath her feet, just a wide open gap, and the sea peaked and spat. She lurched downwards slowly, metres away from the side of the trawler, where a layer of barnacles and mussels clung on like the survivors of a shipwreck.

  She fretted with her new dress and her borrowed shoes. She tried to smooth her white hair, which turned wiry when it was close to water. The wooden bench was digging into her and the wind was rushing up her legs, snagging at the dress and exposing the map of her veins. She’d forgotten tights; she always wore trousers and knew it was a mistake to wear a dress. She’d let herself get talked into it, but had chosen brown, a small victory. She gathered the skirt up and sat on it. If this was going to be the first time she saw her husband in forty-eight years she didn’t want to draw attention to the state of her legs. ‘You’ve got to be heartbreaking as hell,’ Demelza advised her customers, pointing at them with her cigarette. ‘Because you’ve got a lot of competition down there.’

  Salt and spray leapt up to meet the bell as it slapped into the sea. Cold, dark water surged upwards. Iris lifted her feet, waiting for the air pressure in the bell to level off the water underneath the footrest. She didn’t want anything oily or foamy to stain Annie’s shoes. She went through a checklist – Vanish, cream cleaner, a bit of bicarb – something would get it out but it would be a fuss. She pulled her cardigan sleeves down and straightened the life-jacket. Thousands of bubbles forced themselves up the sides of the diving bell, rolling over the window like marbles. She peered out but couldn’t see anything beyond the disturbed water.

  As she was lowered further the sea calmed and stilled. Everything was silent. She put her feet back down and looked into the disc of water below them, which was flat and thick and barely rippled. She could be looking at a lino or slate floor rather than a gap that opened into all those airless fathoms. A smudged grey shape floated past. The diving bell jolted and tipped, then righted itself and sank lower through the water.

  Iris held her handbag against her chest and tried not to breathe too quickly. She had about two hours’ worth of oxygen but if she panicked or became over-excited she would use it up more quickly. Her fingers laced and unlaced. ‘I don’t want to have to haul you back up here like a limp fish,’ Demelza had told her each time she’d gone down in the bell. ‘Don’t go thinking you’re an expert or anything. One pull on the cord to stop, another to start again. Two tugs for the net and three to come back up. Got it?’ Iris had written the instructions down the first time in her thin, messy writing and put them in her bag along with tissues and mints, just in case. The pull-cord was threaded through a tube that ran alongside the chain attaching the bell to the trawler. Demelza tied her end of it to a cymbal that she’d rigged on to a tripod, so that it crashed loudly whenever someone pulled on it. The other end of the cord drooped down and brushed roughly against the top of Iris’s head.

  She couldn’t see much out of the window; it all looked grey and endless, as if she were moving through fog rather than water. The diving bell dropped down slowly, slower, and then stopped moving altogether. The chain slackened and for a second it seemed as though the bell had been cut off and was about to float away. Then the chain straightened out and Iris rocked sideways, caught between the tension above and the bell’s heavy lead rim below. She hung suspended in the mid-depths of the sea. This had happened on her second dive as well. Demelza had suddenly stopped winching, locked the handle and gone to check over her co-ordinates one last time. She wouldn’t allow the diving bell to land even a foot off the target she’d set herself.

  The bell swayed. Iris sat very still and tried not to imagine the weight of the water pressing in. She took a couple of rattling breaths. It was like those moments when she woke up in the middle of the night, breathless and alone, reaching across the bed and finding nothing but a heap of night-chilled pillows. She just needed to relax and wait, relax and wait. She took out a mint and crunched down hard, the grainy sugar digging into her back teeth.

  After a few moments Demelza started winching again and Iris loosened her shoulders, glad to be on the move. Closer to the seabed, the water seemed to clear. Then, suddenly, there was the shipwreck, looming upwards like an unlit bonfire, all splints and beams and slumped funnels. The rusting mainframe arched and jutted. Collapsed sheets of iron were strewn across the sand. The diving bell moved between girders and cables before stopping just above the engine. The Queen Mary’s sign, corroded and nibbled, gazed up at Iris. Empty cupboards were scattered to her left. The cargo ship had been transporting train carriages and they were lying all over the seabed, marooned and broken, like bodies that had been weighed down with stones and buried at sea. Orange rust bloomed all over them. Green and purple seaweed drifted out through the windows. Red man’s fingers and dead man’s fingers pushed up from the wheel arches.

  Demelza thought that this would be a good place to trawl. She’d sent Iris down to the same spot already. ‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘they all come back. T
hey stay local, you see. They might go gallivanting off for a while, but they always come back to the same spot. They’re nostalgic bastards, sentimental as hell. That makes them stupid. Not like us though, eh?’ she added, yanking Iris’s life-jacket straps tighter.

  A cuckoo wrasse weaved in and out of the ship’s bones. Cuttlefish mooned about like lost old men. Iris spat on her glasses, wiped them on her cardigan, hooked them over her ears, and waited.

  Over the years, she had tried to banish as many lonely moments as possible. She kept busy. She took as many shifts as she could at the hotel, and then when that stopped she became addicted to car boot sales – travelling round to different ones at the weekends, sifting through chipped plates and dolls and candelabra, never buying anything, just sifting through. She joined a pen pal company and started writing to a man in Orkney; she liked hearing about the sudden weather and the seals hauled out on the beach, his bus and his paintings. ‘I am fine as always,’ she would write, but stopped when he began to send dark, tormented paintings, faces almost hidden under black and red.

  She knew how to keep busy most of the day and, over time, her body learned to shut down and nap during the blank gap straight after lunch. It worked almost every time, although once, unable to sleep and sick of the quiet humming of the freezer – worse than silence she often thought – she turned it off and let the food melt and drip on the floor. Later, regretting the waste, she’d spent hours cooking, turning it into pies and casseroles and refreezing it for another day.

  She ate in front of films she borrowed from the library. She watched anything she could get her hands on. It was when the final credits rolled, though, when the music had stopped and the tape rewound, that her mind became treacherous and leapt towards the things she tried not to think about during the day. That was when she lay back in the chair – kicking and jolting between wakefulness and sleep as if she were thrashing about in shallow water – and let her husband swim back into the house.

  Then, she relived the morning when she had woken to the smell of salt and damp and found a tiny fish in its death throes on the pillow next to her. There was only a lukewarm indent in the mattress where her husband should have been. She swung her legs out of bed and followed a trail of sand down the stairs, through the kitchen and towards the door. Her heart thumped in the soles of her bare feet. The door was open. Two green crabs high-stepped across the slates. Bladderwrack festooned the kitchen, and here and there, on the fridge, on the kettle, anemones bloomed, fat and dark as hearts. It took her all day to scrub and bleach and mop the house back into shape. By the time she’d finished he could have been anywhere. She didn’t phone the police; no one ever phoned the police. No one was reported missing.

  Despite the bleach, the smell lingered in cupboards and corners. Every so often, an anemone would appear overnight; she would find a translucent shrimp darting around inside an empty milk bottle. Sometimes, all the water in the house turned into brine and she lugged huge bottles of water home from the supermarket. The silence waxed and waned. Life bedded itself down again like a hermit crab in a bigger, emptier shell.

  Once in a while, Annie and her husband Westy came round to see Iris. They lived on the same street and came over when Annie had something she wanted to say or if she was bored. She could smell out bad news and liked to talk about it, her own included. Westy went wherever she went. He was a vague man. He’d got his whole Scout group lost when he was twelve because he’d read the compass wrong, so he was nicknamed Westy and it stuck – everyone used it, even his wife; sometimes Iris wondered if he could even remember his real name. When Annie dies, she sometimes thought, his mind will go, just like that, and mentally she would snap her fingers, instantly regretting thinking it.

  When she heard them coming up the path she would rush round the house, checking water filters, tearing thrift off the shelves. If she ever missed something, a limpet shell, a watery cluster of sea moss, Annie and Westy would look away, pretending not to notice.

  Last month, they came over on a Sunday afternoon. ‘I don’t like Sundays,’ Annie said, drinking her tea at scalding point. ‘They make me feel like I’m in limbo.’ She was short and spread herself out over the chair. She made Iris want to stoop over.

  It was damp outside and the kitchen windows had steamed up. Annie had brought over saffron cake and Iris bit at the edges, feeling she had to but hating the chlorine taste of it. She’d told Annie that before but she kept bringing it over anyway.

  ‘Don’t forget the envelope,’ Westy said.

  Annie shot him a quick look. ‘I’ll come to that.’ She glanced down at her bag. ‘Have you heard about the burglaries around King’s Road?’

  ‘I read something about it,’ Iris said. She crossed her arms, knowing that Annie was trying to ease into something.

  ‘Five over two weeks. All in the middle of the day. The owners came back to stripped houses – everything gone, even library books.’

  ‘Library books?’ Iris said. She saw that Annie and Westy were wearing the same fleece in different colours – one purple, one checked red and green.

  ‘Exactly. One of the owners said they saw a van driving away. They saw the men in there looking at them.’ Annie paused, looked at Westy. ‘Imagine going in there, seeing the bare walls, knowing that someone had gone through everything, valuing it.’

  ‘Their shoes,’ Westy said.

  ‘Everything,’ said Annie. ‘And no chance of ever getting it back.’ She stopped, waiting for Iris to speak, but Iris didn’t say anything. Annie reached down into her bag and got out a blue and gold envelope and put it on the table, cleared her throat. ‘Ever heard of Diving Belles?’ she asked bluntly.

  Iris didn’t look at the envelope. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. She saw Annie take a deep breath – she was bad at this, had never liked giving out gifts. Iris’s mind raced through ways she could steer the conversation away; she snatched at topics but couldn’t fasten on to any.

  ‘When Kayleigh Andrews did it,’ Annie told her, ‘it only took one go. They found her husband as quick as anything.’

  Iris didn’t reply. She tightened her lips and poured out more tea.

  ‘It seems like a very lucrative business,’ Annie said, pressing on. ‘A good opportunity.’

  ‘Down on the harbour,’ said Westy. ‘By the old lifeboat hut.’

  Iris knocked crumbs into her cupped palm from the table edge and tipped them into her saucer. The clock on the fridge ticked loudly into the silence. The old anger swept back. She could break all these plates.

  ‘A good opportunity,’ Annie said again.

  ‘For some people,’ Iris replied. A fly buzzed over and she banged a plate down hard on to it.

  ‘What you need is one of those electric swatters,’ Westy told her.

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble,’ Iris said. She gripped the sides of her chair.

  Annie pushed the envelope so it was right in front of her. ‘The voucher’s redeemable for three goes,’ she said.

  ‘It’s kind of you.’

  They looked around the room as if they had never seen it before, the cream walls and brown speckled tiles. A sea snail crawled over the windowsill.

  ‘I can’t swim. I won’t be able to do it if I can’t swim,’ Iris said suddenly.

  ‘You don’t need to swim. You just sit in this bell thing and get lowered down,’ Annie said. ‘The voucher gives you three goes, Iris. You don’t have to swim anywhere.’

  Iris stood up, stacked the cups and plates, and took them to the sink. Soon Annie would say something like, ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ Her hands trembled slightly, the crockery clattering together like pebbles flipping over.

  After they’d left, she watched the envelope out of the corner of her eye. She did small jobs that took her closer towards it: she swept the floor, straightened the chairs, the tablecloth. Later, lying in bed, she pictured it sitting there. It was very exposed in the middle of the table like that – what if somebody broke in?
It would be a waste of Annie’s money if the voucher was stolen. She went downstairs, picked up the envelope, brought it back upstairs and tucked it under her pillow.

  The reception at Diving Belles was in an old corrugated-iron Portakabin on the edge of the harbour. Iris knocked tentatively on the door. The wind hauled itself around the town, crashing into bins and slumping into washing, jangling the rigging on the fishing boats. There were piles of nets and lobster pots and orange buoys that smelled of fish and stagnant water. No one answered the door. She stepped back to check she had the right place, then knocked again. There was a clanging above her head as a woman walked across the roof. She was wearing khaki trousers, a tight black vest and jelly shoes. Her hair was short and dyed red. She climbed down a ladder and stood in front of Iris, staring. Her hands were criss-crossed with scars and her broad shoulders and arms were covered in tattoos. Iris couldn’t take her eyes off them. She watched an eel swim through a hollow black heart on the woman’s bicep.

  ‘Is it, I mean, are you Demelza?’ Iris asked.

  ‘Demelza, Demelza … Yes, I suppose I am.’ Demelza looked up at the roof and stepped back as if to admire something. There was a strange contraption up there – it looked like a metal cage with lots of thick springs. ‘That ought to do it,’ Demelza muttered to herself.

  Iris looked up. Was that a seagull sprawled inside or a plastic bag?

  Demelza strode off towards the office without saying anything else. Iris hesitated, then followed her.

  The office smelled like old maps and burnt coffee. Demelza sat behind a desk which had a hunting knife skewered into one corner. Iris perched on the edge of a musty deckchair. Paperwork and files mixed with rusty boat parts. There was a board on the wall with hundreds of glinting turquoise and silver scales pinned to it.

  Demelza leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette. ‘These are herbal,’ she said. ‘Every drag is like death.’ She inhaled deeply then rubbed at her knuckles, rocking back and forth on the chair’s back legs.