by Kitty Sewell
‘It’s an ambition, not a vision. I don’t trust that word,’ she said uneasily, ‘and neither should you.’
Sebastian marshalled her forward, insisting she ought to see Europa Point, at least to imagine his Luna’s Crossing. What she saw was the two oceans, Mediterranean and Atlantic, colliding wildly against each other in a strange and formidable dance.
Eva
They sat on the narrow seats at the stern of the boat, bobbing in the waves off the east side of Gibraltar. Sebastian had his wetsuit on and was ready to gear up. Eva took her time with the preparations. She knew the importance of being absolutely meticulous.
Sebastian indulgently followed her every move with his eyes, but when she separated her hair into three strands and began braiding them together, he reached out to stop her. ‘Is it really necessary?’ he exclaimed. ‘Your hair floating free in the deep is the most beautiful sight a man can behold. Please, don’t deprive me of it.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ She shivered. ‘Don’t ever forget that coral.’
During those first days in Dubai, Sebastian must have spent a fortune booking her for private dives. She overheard her boss taking his calls, suggesting other instructors, male ones, but Sebastian insisted he would only dive with her. It soon became obvious that he wasn’t there just to improve his diving. Sure, he was impressed with her professionalism and skills, but – he would later tell anyone – ‘her long fair hair, rippling around her in the water like a cape of seaweed’ so mesmerised him, he seemed convinced she was a mermaid.
He overcame his tongue-tied awe of her and suggested dinner. Being quite intrigued by this quietly intense man, she threw out her principles and defied the rules of her employer. During dinner in an out-of-the-way restaurant he talked of nothing but his work. He was nervous, not at all like the smooth-talking playboys that tried to hit on her at the diving centre. His shyness turned into fiery enthusiasm and she was unable to take her eyes off him as she listened, imagining for herself the edifices he built with words for her benefit.
At the end of the four-hour meal he called for a taxi. They waited for it outside the restaurant, sitting on a low wall in the balmy evening.
‘I can’t bear to take leave of you,’ he said, for the first time taking her hand and lightly kissing the tips of her fingers. ‘Will you come home with me?’
‘Tonight?’ she said, surprised at this sudden boldness.
‘We don’t have to make love. I’ve never slept with a mermaid, I wouldn’t even know where to begin,’ he said. ‘We could just submerge ourselves in my bath tub, head to foot.’
She burst out laughing. What a weird and wonderful guy! As he looked at her, a feverish glow shone from his dark eyes and she felt herself go weak inside. Just as quickly, fear grabbed at her, not sure about that look. Desire, lust or something darker, how could she know? He looked away to give her space to decide. It was a subtle gesture that said such a lot about him. He expected nothing. He was unfathomable in some ways, but her instinct told her she was safe with this man.
The taxi drew up beside them and they hopped off the wall.
He opened the door for her. ‘Where would you like to go?’ he said quietly.
That night she became his mermaid and showed him how it worked, though they never got as far as the bath tub.
A few weeks after their first night together, her hair got tangled up in the salmon-pink peak of a coral reef, thirty metres below the surface of the Arabian Sea. Sebastian reacted instantly, first trying to disentangle her but this just snared her hair more firmly to the barbed surface of the coral. He gestured for her to be calm, and swiftly pulled out his diving knife. The task of cutting her free was difficult – wet hair does not shear easily with a knife – and it was made all the more urgent by her own escalating panic.
The incident had an air of fatalism; for Sebastian, at least. He was convinced that their future together was sealed. They needed each other, they had saved each other. He asked her to marry him that same evening. Of course she said it was too soon, and she didn’t really believe in marriage, though she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the reason why.
She was still trying to tell him.
It was four in the afternoon and the sun stood high. Sebastian kissed her before pulling on her hood, tucking her braid in. The boat hardly moved. The water was calm despite the violent power below the surface; two seas, heaving, tugging at each other through the narrow gap of the strait. The air quivered with the thunderous noise of a plane taking off. The runway began and ended in the sea, covering the length of the isthmus, the narrow bridge of land that separated Gibraltar from the Spanish mainland. Gibraltar was a tiny, confined peninsula. It had two oceans and a strip of a border with guards requesting passports.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
With that tightening in the pit of her stomach Eva turned around to look at Jonny Risso. He met her gaze with customary indifference. Jonny owned the boat and he always watched their preparations with beady eyes, the only part of his face that showed awareness. On a day-to-day basis he fished out of Catalan Bay, preferably with paying tourists on deck. Fishing was a fantasy job these days, he’d told them, but he’d inherited the boat from his fisherman father, and a man had to earn a living somehow. Jonny also bragged about a time when he’d made bags of money smuggling duty-free tobacco into Spain. Everyone with a boat had done it, but then the fishermen were outdone by rich kids in high-speed launches – so he’d gone back to ferrying scuba divers and taking tourists out fishing. Money was his great motivator and – should it ever become necessary – for a fee, Jonny would slip her to the mainland, bypassing the border.
The drone of the plane faded away. Just as they were about to fit their masks, Jonny spoke.
‘Sorry? What did you say?’ Sebastian asked.
‘Nobody dives on this side of Gib. I bet you and the missus have found something down there. You’ll think of your boatman, won’t you? I want my share.’
He made it sound like a joke, but she knew it wasn’t. If they hauled anything from the seabed, he’d want his cut. It was the second time he’d taken them to the site, and she suspected he still had no idea what made Sebastian Luna want to dive in that particular spot again and again. The Mediterranean side of Gibraltar had poor pickings for divers. Eva had told Jonny they were exploring an Italian submarine sunk during WWII, but there wasn’t much of it to see, really, and Jonny Risso knew it.
‘My wife here is a pre-history nerd,’ said Sebastian. ‘She hopes to find a Neanderthal spearhead or something.’
Jonny rolled his eyes in obvious contempt. Eva had to turn away to hold back a fit of giggles. Pre-history nerd! What a cheek, why her? Why not him?
‘Come on, missus,’ Sebastian said, grinning at her. ‘Put on your mask. Time is short and the deep beckons.’
They were in the water, sinking, sinking, hand in hand. Sebastian swam towards the cliff, pulling her along. With excited gestures and boyish eagerness he pointed out the marks – made by members of the geotechnical team only the day before – where giant T-shaped interlocking concrete-and-polymer encased steel brackets would be anchored in twenty-metre deep slots in the rock. She nodded and gave him a thumbs-up, all the while wondering if this wall of rock really could sustain a cantilevered shelf weighing countless thousands of tonnes. She’d heard that some of Sebastian’s team members were concerned about the hydrodynamic forces acting on the brackets and if the strain resistance of some of the composite materials had been correctly calculated. Then again, Sebastian’s project wasn’t her concern, and maybe her foreboding was fed by her own deepest fears.
Yes, she decided, as always this was the root of her anxiety. When everything seemed wonderful and rosy, you were in fact teetering on a pinnacle from which the only way was down.
They descended further, and he showed her his signature carved into the rock-face. The seabed was just visible but the water was murky. Along the submerged cliff were a few large cave open
ings, some extending above the waterline. Tens of thousands of years ago these had been clear above the surface and apparently home to small groups of Neanderthal people. This was another disrupting factor: archaeology zealots objected to any tampering with the caves, pointing out that Gibraltar – despite its puny size – was one of the richest places on Earth for Neanderthal findings.
Sebastian was taking dozens of photos of strategic places in the cliff. Eva looked at her watch and began to feel the sting of urgency. Twenty-five minutes to go and she could already feel the pull of the tide. Though the Mediterranean showed no discernible tidal fluctuations, millions of gallons per second were forced back and forth continually through the narrow gap of the strait. It was something that not even her lover could contain. And the tides were deceitful, pulling in different directions at different levels, in some places dragging the diver straight down into the depths.
She touched his arm, pointed to her watch and he nodded. Slowly they swam towards the surface until they saw Jonny’s impassive face peering down at them through the water.
*
Roller in hand, she began to paint walls of the kitchen white. Mimi, a silent witness to her efforts, was in the process of mixing a fruit smoothie.
‘Okay, okay, d’ya have a spare roller?’ Mimi asked with a grimace. ‘Is there only one stepladder?’
‘Here, have my roller.’ Eva fetched the ladder. ‘Would you like me to lift your foot onto the first rung?’
Mimi tried unsuccessfully to hide a smile. ‘I’m only doing this for one hour, max.’
Eva shrugged and started on the door. She opened a pot and dipped a clean brush into it, then let the creamy pale paint glide over the dark wood. She knew she was committing sacrilege, painting the oak doors a pale eggshell blue, but Mr. Stagnetto had said to do absolutely anything she wanted. After all, the place had not seen a paintbrush for a century, and they’d all get depressed enfolded in this shade of dung.
‘Why only an hour?’
‘I’ve got a date.’
‘A date? Already? Quick work, buddy.’
No response. She tried again after a while. ‘Is he nice?’
‘Of course not, he’s an absolute troll.’ Again, a long pause. ‘Carlo has invited me to do a tour of the cathedral.’
‘Carlo?’ Eva almost dropped her paintbrush. ‘The downstairs guy, Carlo Montegriffo?’
‘Yes, him!’ Mimi asserted. ‘Some of us need a bit of mysticism in life, so whatever snide comment you’re about to make, don’t bother.’
‘Hey, don’t make assumptions,’ Eva said. ‘You know nothing about my beliefs, okay?’ After a moment she added, ‘But it’s slightly mysterious why a Catholic bachelor in his forties might want to hang out with a seventeen-year-old girl.’
‘The snide comment,’ Mimi said, laughing sarcastically. ‘Mind like a sewer, just like my bro. You guys think sex comes into everything?’
Eva went on with her painting. She had ascertained that if you wanted any kind of conversation with Mimi you had to be thick-skinned. But why give up while there still was a conversation?
‘So when did this invitation happen?’
‘I saw Raven making a dash across the street. It’s a scooter death trap, so I picked him up and brought him home.’
‘Okay, so you saved the blackbird killer. And he just invited you, just like that?’
‘I guess I’ve expressed an interest. I actually envy people with a faith. Catholicism has some kind of dramatic appeal. It’s cryptic, all those strange rituals and stuff.’
‘Yeah sure, but I still have to wonder what he’s up to. The age difference…’
Mimi sighed exaggeratedly. ‘Don’t you start… I’m not planning to screw the guy. Not unless I get desperate.’
‘Okay okay. Good forward planning.’
Mimi sniggered, and Eva couldn’t help chuckling too. She had no experience whatsoever of rough-edged teenagers and had never been allowed to be one herself. At the same time she’d never had to care for anyone vulnerable, and Mimi did seem vulnerable even though perhaps she wasn’t. She’d probably blossom into a delightful and responsible adult, and – three months short of eighteen – she might not be around for long.
They painted in silence for a while, then Mimi began humming a Meatloaf track Eva loved. She joined in, and they both began to bellow out the lyrics. They sounded quite good together. Mimi had a great voice, rich and husky.
Eva stood back from the door and studied the result. Sure, oak was a very fine material, but the truth was, the door looked even more elegant in eggshell blue. In fact, it looked absolutely stunning.
‘Look at this, Mimi. Tell me I’m right.’
Mimi, who had made good inroads with the walls and the plaster cornices, came down from the ladder and stood beside her. ‘Yeah, all right,’ she conceded. ‘Sophisticated.’
Eva put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Do you think you could be happy here? It’s a new beginning for all of us.’
With a visible shudder, Mimi shrunk free of the hand. But seeing Eva so startled, her frown softened. ‘Worry about yourself, Eva. You’ve got good reason to.’
For a moment Eva stared at her, wondering if the girl knew anything about the menace that never stopped breathing ice onto the back of her neck. No, of course not, how could she? ‘Why? What do you mean?’
Mimi looked away, then plopped the roller into the paint bucket. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Religion beckons.’
Eva watched her skulk down the corridor towards her room. Twenty minutes later she re-appeared in the doorway, dressed slightly less punkily in jeans, and pink instead of black lipgloss.
‘I’m going.’
Eva tried not to look surprised at the token courtesy. ‘Okay. Have a good cathedral.’
‘Bye then,’ said Mimi. ‘Enjoy your white.’
A great leap forward – she’d said goodbye.
Mimi
‘In ancient times a Moorish mosque stood right here.’ Carlo tapped his foot on the worn-out tiles. ‘Then, when the Spanish conquered Gibraltar in the fifteenth century, it was demolished and a Catholic church built in its place. But make no mistake, this very courtyard here is a true remnant of those Moorish devils.’
‘Devils?’ Mimi said, raising an eyebrow. ‘More racist slurs?’
‘Look, the Moors had this place by the neck for over seven hundred years, and they were cruel in the extreme. After one of the last sieges of Gibraltar by the Spanish, the Moorish governor decapitated the Spanish commander and his headless body hung on the walls of Gibraltar for the next twenty-two years.’
‘Yeoww!’ She grimaced. ‘Twenty-two years. That could not have been a pretty sight. Reminds me of Mrs. Cohen.’
Carlo narrowed his eyes. ‘You know about Mrs. Cohen’s death, do you?’
‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded. ‘She choked to death and you found her…how much later?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not really a good subject for discussion during a tour of the cathedral.’
‘Fair enough.’
Carlo led her in through the main doors of the imposing building. Mimi had never set foot inside a Catholic church. She took in the solemnity of the place with wide eyes.
‘Hey, awesome,’ she exclaimed.
To the left was a huge sculpture of Jesus on the cross, his mother and an angel looking up at him. It was horribly realistic, with its painted backdrop of hills and sky. Jesus’ bloodied face mesmerised her. His pain was so brutally real.
‘No wonder people have felt guilty for two thousand years,’ she said.
Carlo smiled and beckoned her into a small niche. He pointed to the long list of names carved into the flag stones. ‘Until the nineteenth, century any person who died in Gibraltar had the right to be buried under this floor.’
‘Any person?’
‘Yes. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people lie under here.’
She bit her lip. ‘All those bodies…stacked on top of each other. Each layer rotting in
turn.’
Carlo laughed and touched her cheek. ‘Some sinister speculations churn inside that pretty head of yours.’
She flinched slightly at his touch. She hadn’t expected it. ‘Am I that easy to figure?’
‘It’s not a criticism. A true writer is always on the lookout for the dark side of existence. That’s what the human race ultimately battles with. That’s what we need to explore and understand.’
She felt herself relax. ‘What are we waiting for? Show me more dark stuff. I need to feed the writer in me.’
‘Are you interested in the tunnels? I told you I’m writing a book about them. They’re dark enough, as long as you’re not claustrophobic.’
‘I’m not claustrophobic,’ she said, knowing that was not entirely true.
‘I’m planning to do a bit of exploration this afternoon. Nothing too dirty or daunting. You are welcome to come if you want.’ He glanced at her feet, and if nothing else, she was wearing sensible footwear.
Her stomach clenched slightly, but her motto was to experience life to the full, even the daunting stuff. ‘Yes of course I’ll come.’
Sebastian
Henry Saunders looked weary. He had just flown into Gibraltar on a British Airways flight and come straight to the meeting in a taxi.
