Underwater Breathing

by Parkin, Cassandra;

  He looked at the boat and wondered which man was which. If he stayed here too, there would be three men here who had died for love. Did they think it was worth it for that brief mad ecstasy? If he swam down to join them, Ella would never follow. That was the way, he realised; he would stay here, and Ella would return to the surface. She was stronger than him. She would find a life without him.

  He tried to swim down towards the deck, but Ella had hold of his arm. He tried to make her let go, but she shook her head. He pointed to her, then upwards towards the surface of the water. She shook her head again. With some effort, he prised her fingers off his arm, then tried to give her a final hug, but she simply floated out of his reach, her gaze steady within the constrictive seal of her face-mask.

  He was going to have to leave her without that final comfort, then. She was right. No good could come of pro-longing it. As soon as he began to descend to the wreck she would understand.

  He could feel the temperature dropping as he descended, but soon that wouldn’t matter any more. It shouldn’t take long, this dying business. What was it Mrs Armitage had said, about the air running out quicker the farther down you went? He had no idea how long they’d been here, and no idea how to read the gauges that hung at his side. He only knew that death would come, as inevitable as the tide. The boat was nearly upon him now; his flippers grazed the slime of the deck. He was surprised to find he could still see. Ella must be pointing the torch downwards to guide him.

  He looked up to give her a final acknowledgement, a last glimpse of her to take with him into the dark, and found she was almost on top of him, and then beside him, the stream of bubbles growing stronger as she took deep panicky breaths, but still she came, letting her feet touch the deck with barely a shudder. She turned her face towards the place where the remains of the two men lay, forcing herself to confront them. A crab tiptoed delicately across the deck towards her flippered foot. He saw the moment when she realised, saw the heave of terror in her chest and the thick plume of bubbles rising. Then she closed her eyes and put her hand over her belly, willing herself back to a place of calm, and then she opened her eyes again and sat down on the deck.

  He shook his head. She folded her arms. He pointed again at the surface, willing her to understand. He was the older one. He was responsible for her. He was supposed to keep her safe. He’d failed in every way he thought a person could fail, but he would succeed this time. He fastened his fingers around her arms and pushed her away, taking deep greedy draughts of air, knowing this would drain his tank even more quickly and glad to know it. If he could only get her away from the boat, she would never dare the descent a second time. But the moment he let her go, she was back with him again. Her meaning was unmistakable. I’m staying with you.

  He wanted to take out his regulator and yell at her, but what would be the point? His words would dissolve in the water. And what could he say? He wanted to tell her, I’m staying here so you can be free, but what if she didn’t believe him? He was so tired. Even buoyed up by the water, he could feel the tremble of fatigue in the muscles of his legs. He took another breath. It felt strangely difficult this time, as if someone had narrowed the hose. Perhaps it was the pressure of the water. He exhaled, watching the stream of bubbles rise. He took another breath, felt the same strange resistance. What was happening?

  The answer came to him on the third breath: he must be running out of air. This was it, then. He was here, on the bottom of the sea, among the dead where he belonged.

  Now his only remaining task was to convince Ella to leave him behind. Another deep, difficult breath, as if he was sucking something thick from the bottom of a glass. He was beginning to feel dizzy. He pushed weakly at Ella, pointing again to the surface. Ella looked at his gauge, and then pointed imperiously up towards the surface.

  He shook his head. No. She pointed again, her gestures frantic. Again he refused. She took him by the shoulders and shook him, then spread her arms wide. Why are you doing this? He made the shape of a heart with his hands. Because I love you. His hands felt clumsy. Was that the gloves? Or was it the lack of oxygen? He let his hands fall apart. And my heart is broken.

  He tried for one more breath. The edges of his vision were beginning to dim. In another moment Ella would leave him. This was how it had to be. This was the right and proper end for everything he had done and not done: to let it all be washed away by the North Sea and buried in the mud. He could go into the darkness knowing he had done one good thing, one pure and beautiful deed to make up for all the ways he’d failed. His body hurt and his chest hurt and there was a terrible pressure building in his lungs, but soon that would all stop. Soon the fish would pick his ribcage naked and swim between it with clean little flicks of their bodies. He would be free. And so would Ella. He closed his eyes. Would it hurt to die? Or would he be drawn into a quiet dark tunnel and on into endless peace? his lungs were convulsing, painfully dragging the last few ounces of air, but there was a bright light around him now, and he felt as if he was floating.

  Then someone tugged at his regulator, and even though it was now near useless he felt in some primitive way that he needed to keep hold of it. He clamped his teeth around it, but then it was gone, and he tasted salt for a moment before something else was jammed in there, and before he could stop himself he took a long deep breath, easy and painless this time, and he felt life rushing back into his resisting body. When he opened his eyes he slowly realised what had happened: Ella had taken out her own regulator and forced it into his mouth, and she now hovered in front of him in the water, floating in the column of light that came up from the torch, abandoned on the deck of the boat.

  Hadn’t he made himself clear? Life wasn’t what he wanted. He snatched the regulator from his mouth, nodded in satisfaction as Ella took it back and drew her own deep breath. Then she offered it to him once more.

  He shook his head. He’d tried so hard to do the right thing. All he wanted was to set her free. He could still do it. All he had to do was get past his primitive terror and open his mouth and let the water flood into his lungs.

  She floated in front of him, beautiful in the dim torchlight. The regulator floated between them. Was she ever going to take it? He tried to read her expression. Using her teeth, she took off one glove, then put her hand gently against his face.

  You won’t need to be afraid, ever, because we’ll be together.

  She was going to make him keep his promise. He took the regulator between his teeth and took a deep, blessed gulp of air. Only then did Ella take it back from him and do the same.

  Holding tight to each other, ascending as slowly as they dared, they rose through the peaceful depths and back towards the turbulent surface.

  He had no idea how long the journey back to the air took them. He only knew that he was sick with exhaustion and his body felt as if it weighed a thousand tons. He was alive only through the force of Ella’s will, as she dragged him up through the thick weight of water and forced him to draw air from her tank.

  He knew they had reached the surface when the air hit him round the face and forced him to open his eyes. The storm was subsiding, leaving behind a choppy sea and a relentless mizzling rain. He tried to tread water, but the weight of the equipment was like trying to hold up the earth on his shoulders. Ella was shouting something, but he couldn’t hear her over the roaring of the water against his ears. He felt her fumble around his waist, and then the release as the weights dropped from his hips. Her hands were on the front of his chest, unfastening the clips that held his tank to his back. A quick shrug of his shoulders and the whole useless lot of it was making its way towards the bottom of the sea.

  Ella shed her own equipment, then grabbed for his arm and pointed towards the spot where something loomed intermittently between the sheets of rain. It was Mrs Armitage’s boat, not drowned and not set adrift, but waiting for them like an obedient dog. The boat looked almost impossibly tall and he had no idea how they would ever scale its sleek sides, but
as they grew nearer they saw there was a rope ladder dangling near the stern.

  “Come on!” Ella was at him again, almost slapping him, forcing him to stay with her. “Climb up!”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

  “You have to.” She had thrown away her mask along with her tank and belt. The rubber seal had left red indents in her skin. “We have to get out of the water.”

  He took hold of the first rung, but his limbs were as limp and boneless as seaweed. “I just feel so tired.”

  She was close enough to kiss him. Another moment, and she was kissing him. He thought her tongue must be the last warm thing left in this world. “You can do it. You can do anything.”

  And because he would do anything to please her, he found that he could do it, and somehow he was struggling up the rope ladder and onto the smooth wet wood of the deck, and he could finally rest.

  He lay flat for what felt like a long time, long enough to drift into a half-dream where he was back in his own bed and the house was filling with water and his bed was floating away. The sea was soaking into his covers and making him cold. No, it wasn’t, he was cold because he was out in the rain on Mrs Armitage’s boat, sprawled on the deck as if he’d been harpooned. The roaring in his ears had subsided, and he could hear water smacking against wood. Was Mrs Armitage waiting for him to wake up, with words of sharp comfort and difficult questions about what had happened to her scuba gear? He imagined her expression and cringed.

  But then again, he could have been dead right now. His flesh could have already begun to bloat and swell in the gloom of the wreck. At least he was alive. Whatever came next, for now he was alive. He slowly sat up and looked around, but saw only Ella, propped against the side, as pale as her own ghost.

  “Mrs Armitage? Mrs Armitage?” Was there a part of the boat he hadn’t seen? Some below-decks space, perhaps? The boat was tiny, there was no way she could be hiding from them, but he stumbled around anyway, convinced that he must have missed the sight of her.

  “She’s not here,” said Ella.

  “She must be. She wouldn’t leave her boat.”

  “She’s gone. She said she was going and now she has. She’s left us, Jacob. She’s gone back home.”

  “How can she possibly have –” Exhaustion was making him stupid. He felt his eyes prickle with tears. “She’s gone into the water, hasn’t she? She’s drowned.”

  “Maybe she hasn’t drowned. Remember when we first met her and we thought she was a seal? Maybe she put on her other skin and went back home to her people.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  She looked straight at him. “Don’t you?”

  He was too tired to know what he believed. He only knew his oldest and kindest friend was gone, and his house might well be gone too, and his father and mother were both lost, and he was out on the ocean in a boat he didn’t know how to pilot and the future was a blank to him. He let the tears fall for a while, leaning against Ella for comfort, knowing from the way her chest heaved and the small hurt sounds that crept out from her that she was weeping too.

  “Why did you save me?” he asked at last, when their tears began to dry up along with the rain, and a watery shaft of sunshine shot from the grey sky and into the water, then disappeared again. “I was willing to stay down there. And you could have had your whole life without me. That was what Mrs Armitage wanted, wasn’t it? For me to set you free.”

  “No,” said Ella, with conviction. “That wasn’t it. She sent us down there so we wouldn’t drown trying to save her.”

  “But then why bring us out here at all? She knew about – us – remember? She knew what I did. And she knew the only way for me to fix it was to leave you for ever.”

  “It wasn’t what you did,” said Ella. “It was what we did, both of us together. And I know what you were trying to do, but I couldn’t leave you down there, I couldn’t! If it was going to be either of us, it should have been me.”

  “No! Don’t you dare say that, Ella, don’t ever ever say that, please –”

  “Yes, it should. Whatever happened to Mum – seeing things, imagining people following her – what if it happens to me too? It can be inherited, can’t it? It might be in me right now. I mean, there’s got to be something wrong with me, hasn’t there, for me to fall in love with –” Even now, she couldn’t make herself say the words.

  “I don’t care. I love you, I’ll always love you, no matter what happens to you. Nothing’s ever going to change that.”

  “I bet Dad thought that once too. He must have realised what was wrong and thought he could cope. But he didn’t, did he? It destroyed them both in the end. I don’t want that to happen to us. And even if it didn’t – we’d still be looking over our shoulders every day, wondering if someone was going to realise. We couldn’t have children, God only knows what they might end up with. I ought to have stayed down there on the wreck. I did think about it. But your air was running out and I knew you’d never get back to the surface on your own and I was too afraid –”

  And there it was again, that helpless, irresistible tug that drew them together even as they knew it was doomed and hopeless. She was soaked and scruffy, her face and hair speckled with grains of seaweed and streaked with tears, but she was the love of his heart and she always would be. He put his arms around her. There was no one to see them, out here in the sliver of space between the grey sea and the grey sky. And besides, who was there left in the world that would care?

  “She was the last one who knew,” he said wonderingly. “She was the only one who knows you’re my sister. And now she’s gone too.” He kissed the top of Ella’s head. “What did she say to you again? Before she pushed us in, I mean?”

  “Oh.” Ella shrugged. “She said I look absolutely nothing like Dad.”

  They sat in silence for a while, feeling the boat rock beneath them.

  “What do you think she meant?” Jacob asked.

  “Just that I don’t look like Dad, I suppose. I mean, I don’t, do I? You look more like Dad and I look more like Mum.”

  “But she must have had a reason to say that to you. She knew we’d never see her again. Ella, have you ever seen your birth certificate?”

  “Maybe. I don’t really remember.”

  “Was Dad’s name on it?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned around in Jacob’s arms so she could look at his face. “Why?”

  “There were two men in her book, weren’t there? She left the first one to be with Dad. But we don’t know when it happened, because they never told us. All I remember is Dad bringing her home to meet me, and then a few months after that, you were born. But Mrs Armitage was right. You don’t look anything like Dad. I know I do, I see him in me all the time, but you don’t. And you never have.”

  Ella’s eyes were huge and brimming with tears.

  “But then –”

  “Is it possible, do you think? Is that what she meant?”

  “But you’re my brother,” she said. “Whatever happens, you are. Even if we’re not related, we grew up together. We’re brother and sister.” She held his hand against her cheek. “Aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and kissed her. “I don’t know anything any more. But it will be okay. It will.”

  When he looked again at the sky, he saw that it was clearing, and a thin shadow of land was beginning to appear through the rain. At the end of the boat, a thick rope hung from a winch and over the side. That must be the anchor. They would have to haul it in, and then they would have to work out how to start the engine, and somehow find their way back to land; to land, and to whatever would come next in their lives.

  Acknowledgements

  The first and most important thank you belongs to my amazing editor Lauren Parsons, and everyone else on the Legend team. Thank you for inviting and encouraging me to write Underwater Breathing, and for all you do to support us all in becoming Legendary authors.

  A special tha
nk you to my lovely friend Krista Wood for advice on police procedures, to Shirley Gubb for advice on nursing and medicine, and to everyone who joined in my Facebook thread speculating on the dissolution properties of various prescription tablets in warm drinks. Like most writers, I have a Google history that makes me look like an uncaught serial criminal, but your brilliant (and almost alarmingly non-judgey!) advice saved me from looking even more arrestable than usual.

  Thank you to Louise Beech, Vicky Foster, Michelle Dee, Linda Harrison and Julie Corbett. You are truly the Sisterly of Hull, and I’m honoured every day to be one of you.

  Thank you to my daughter Becky for making sure I remember to leave the house at least once a day, and to my son Ben for asking such brilliant questions at my book launches. You’re the most amazing support team a writer could ask for.

  Most of all, to my husband Tony – none of this would be possible without you, but for Underwater Breathing, I owe you even more than usual. Thank you.