Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

  • • •

  THEY HAD REACHED a depth of fifty metres and had been down below for forty-five minutes. It was time to head back. Adam touched Mark’s shoulder and made the sharp thumbs-up ‘back-to-entrance’ signal. He had emptied his line reel, which now hung motionless in the water, tied off at the furthermost belay—a record of their deepest penetration so far.

  Following the guideline, Adam started swimming back in the direction they had come from, picking up the pace significantly. Each additional minute they stayed down here would require additional decompression time and they were looking at a good hour and a half of stops already.

  The first order of business would be to retrieve their tanks with the compressed air they would need for their ascent. The guideline stretched ahead of them, a white thread spooling in the direction of home, tracing its route through chambers, restrictions, along twisting tunnels…

  Something was wrong.

  Adam stopped swimming. He peered into the gloom. Surely they should have reached the tanks by now? But Mark was already pushing impatiently against his arm, signalling that they should go forward.

  He started swimming again, but a question mark was starting to form in his mind. He didn’t recognise this passage. Still, there was the line, their guide leading to safety. Probably he was simply getting tired from the mental concentration required to overcome the effects of depth.

  He rounded the curve of the cave wall and stopped, his mind suddenly shouting with alarm.

  Tied to an outcrop of rock was the guideline.

  It led nowhere.

  • • •

  WHAT WERE his limits? How far was he prepared to go?

  It was a question he—Yuri Konstantin Grachikov—had asked himself before, and now he knew the answer.

  He had always considered himself a pragmatic man, but ever since he was a boy he had also believed in the concept of revenge. Humiliation called for retaliation, otherwise you could not call yourself a man. If he had let Adam Williams get away with what he had done, he—Grachikov—would have slowly sickened. Over the years the knowledge that another man had bested him so utterly would have eaten away at him like cancer, sucking his energy from him. Even had he continued to live his life elsewhere, where no one knew anything about his past, the memory of the contempt in Williams’ voice, the dismissal in his eyes, the terrifying blows of his hands would have forever shadowed his thoughts, causing him to hesitate at crucial moments. What he had done today had been absolutely necessary in order for him to wrest back his self-respect.

  It was sheer good fortune he had knowledge of the two men’s diving plans. Talking to his friend Jukka on the phone this morning, the man had casually mentioned that the doctor and his friend had just left his shop and were on their way to Giant’s Castle.

  Good fortune, yes. But also fate. What was meant to be, was meant to be. Another man might not have had the guts to grasp the opportunity suddenly presented to him. People often misjudged him initially, fooled by his accent and his smile. But they were always the final losers in any confrontation.

  Namibia had turned out to be a bad card for him. After the Pennington’s Island fiasco, he was facing financial disaster. He had now finally faced up to the fact that there was no way he would ever be able to pay his creditors. So he was simply going to skip out. It was time he got going, anyway; the diamond trade was far too regulated in this country.

  Which was why he would be leaving for Angola tomorrow. He had already arranged for passage on a fishing trawler that was sailing up the coast to the Ivory Coast. Even though he had business contacts in Angola, he had never visited the country before. He knew the trade in diamonds up there was rough and dirty and without rules. Such a place would suit him perfectly.

  But although he was now anxious to leave, he was heartsick at the knowledge that his beautiful hotel would never become reality. The careful architect’s drawing—an artwork in itself—was destined to be relegated to a dusty shelf in the planner’s office. The thought gave him an almost physical pain.

  A gull suddenly plummeted from the sky and skimmed past the boat, causing him to look up, and he saw that the sun was climbing in the sky.

  For a moment he looked towards the far end of the lagoon. He could not see the cave entrance from here, but in his mind’s eye he saw murky water and a black tree with an outstretched branch like the arm of a man reaching toward the light.

  Feel: his pulse was calm. See: his mind was clear. He had done what he had set out to do smoothly, efficiently, with a minimum of fuss.

  He fired up the engine and turned the wheel in the direction of the open sea.

  • • •

  THEY WERE LOST.

  Mark’s mind had stalled, but this one thought was stuck in his brain like a sharp-edged pebble lodged in a groove.

  They were lost.

  They were now swimming without using their legs, holding on to the side of the cave and dragging themselves forward with a pull-and-glide motion to conserve air. Arm muscles required less fuel than leg muscles. By not kicking, their air consumption would be lower.

  Mark’s head was throbbing, his mind filled with the repetitive sound of drumming: his beating heart. But he also felt strangely detached. He had stopped looking at his pressure gauge. What was the point? Whatever air he had left was all there was.

  He was tiring. The sound of his heart so deafening, it made his skull feel soft. Was he going to die? Was he going to die here within this world where the colour had bled out of everything, where one water-filled cavern followed the other with numbing similarity? He did not want to die. He wanted to see his son again. He wanted the chance to kiss his wife.

  He was aware of his breathing, every breath inhaled, every breath exhaled. From the corner of his eyes he saw hands winking at him from the shadows. A disembodied face floated up from the cave mud. Come to me…

  No. Stop it. This was the narcosis taking over. Get a grip. Concentrate. But he was so tired…

  In front of him Adam had stopped. He was signalling something, but he was only able to stare at his friend stupidly, his mind slow to work.

  ‘Mark!’ Adam’s grunt shook him into awareness. He blinked, his mind snapping into some sort of focus. He looked to where Adam was pointing.

  In the side of the cave wall, there was a sign. A giant Z.

  At the same time that his heart leaped with relief, his mind exploded with a new fear.

  Where were their tanks?

  • • •

  MARK WAS LOSING IT. Adam reached out and placed a calming hand on his friend’s shoulder. His eyes behind the mask remained dilated. And Mark’s movements showed how close to exhaustion he was.

  But fear had entered Adam’s mind as well. It was coating his every thought like a sticky substance, slowing him down mentally, killing him physically. The adrenaline that flooded his body was causing his heart to beat too fast, his breathing to accelerate too quickly, his consumption of air to speed up horribly.

  Stay calm. Adam closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe slowly, normally.

  He opened his eyes and looked carefully around him. There was the Z. It was here that they had tied the decompression tanks to the guideline. He had hoped that whoever was responsible for tampering with the line would simply have dropped the tanks right here. But no such luck. The scuba tanks were nowhere to be seen. Someone had wanted to make very sure that they would not get out of here alive.

  He checked the stop time remaining on his computer and the pressure left in his tanks. Bad, but not awful. Not hopeless. He might just have enough compressed air to finish his decompression; that is, if he juggled around with the oxygen tanks waiting for them at their six-metre decompression stop. It was a big if—the oxygen bottles may no longer be there, either.

  He turned to Mark and checked his friend’s pressure gauges. He felt his mind contract. The readings were frightening. Unlike the pressure in his own tanks, Mark had little compressed air left.


  For a long moment Adam stared at the readings, trying to force his mind not to implode with the significance of what he was looking at.

  They had been down here far, far longer than they had planned. They needed to decompress. But, between the two of them, they did not have enough air left for a staged ascent.

  If they simply shot up to the surface, their bodies would collapse utterly under the onslaught of nitrogen bubbles. He had seen what happened if a diver skipped decompression stops. Many years ago, one of his diving colleagues had surfaced after a deep dive without decompressing on the way up. Malfunctioning equipment had confronted the diver with an impossible choice: stay underwater and drown, or surface and risk going through the hellish nightmare of the bends. He had chosen to surface.

  What had happened next was something Adam would never forget. The diver had died in torment. Once at the surface, nitrogen bubbles overwhelmed his blood, cutting off the flow of oxygen to his body parts. The pain in his joints and muscles made him scream in agony. He had become paralysed, lost control of his bladder and bowels. A massive heart attack finally killed him. The pathologist later told Adam that, when he opened the diver’s heart, it had been filled not with blood, but only a curious, rose-tinted froth.

  Surfacing without decompression was not an option.

  OK, then. Think. Don’t panic. Think.

  But his heart was slack.

  Think. No time. Act.

  His movements methodical, Adam unclipped the tank from his harness. Taking a deep, deep breath from the tank, he affixed it to the shoulder ring of Mark’s harness, taking care to affix it to his friend’s hip ring as well. There was not enough air for two divers to ascend. There might be enough for one.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Mark was shouting through his mouthpiece. His speech was disjointed, but the panic came through loud and clear.

  Adam kept his eyes locked on to Mark’s. He signalled emphatically with his hand. Go!

  Mark screamed. He flailed his arms wildly in denial.

  Without hesitation, Adam grabbed his friend’s face mask and, with one cut of his knife, sliced through the strap. Mark, blinded, turned away and reached instinctively for his spare mask.

  Kicking strongly, Adam finned away, back into the maze of tunnels. By the time Mark’s vision had been restored, he would be gone.

  • • •

  THE COLD. He was feeling so cold. Adam looked at his hands; they appeared deathly white.

  His diving light lit up the wall of the cave, which looked like melted wax. Against the wall, the outline of his shadow: a companion, keeping watch.

  So cold. The seconds ticking by in strange slow motion. His chest hurting. His mind starting to shut down. The last thought at the moment of death determines the character of the next life. He remembered that from the bardo, the Tibetan book of the dead. The last thought…

  Justine—she was leaning over him, her arms encircling his head. As he looked up at her, her eyebrows were the wings of a bird and the curve of her lip looked like a kiss.

  He is sitting on the wide windowsill, watching her as she bends from the hips. She is adjusting the volume of the music and her sweater is riding up against her back, exposing a glimpse of perfect skin. The high-ceilinged room filling up with sound, drowning them in melody. ‘You need to listen to the pauses, as well as the notes,’ she said, smiling at him over her shoulder. And he had thought back to the only time he had seen rain in the desert. Purple clouds against a green-tinted sky and a feeling that every single living thing was holding its breath. In the city, rain seemed noisy, the drops spattering against the black tarred roads, drumming against the windows, dripping from open gutters. In the desert, he had learned that rain had no sound.

  When had he first known of Justine? How had the idea of her first entered his consciousness? He could not remember any more. It was as if he had been walking in the desert, his eyes blinded by sand, and then a tiny piece of grit had lodged itself in his heart, chafing the surrounding tissue, and from the dirt and the blood had bloomed a pearl, a thing of beauty.

  How wide was a man’s longing, how deep his dreams? For nine years he had tried to answer that question by writing to her, hundreds of pages of his thoughts, his doubts, his desires. How sad that she never got to read them.

  He took out his diving knife and pressed the tip against the surface of the rock. The rock face here was crumbly. If you put enough pressure on the outer layer, it started to give way.

  He increased the pressure on the knife and it released a shower of flakes. As he started to carve, the water around his hand became cloudy and he had difficulty seeing through the particles of dirt. But he continued to carve the string of words into the wall, the letters angular and spiky and of different sizes: the J of Justine out of proportion large to the rest.

  So cold. His chest on fire. So tired.

  He tilted his head back and the rocks above him soared upward like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. He let his arms fall to his side, his mind at peace.

  His life, his different selves.

  A small boy throwing a model aeroplane made of wood into the air, and his mother laughing.

  A killer fleeing the scene of his crime, the edges of his shoes wet with dew.

  A man taking a book in his hands and reading words that seemed maimed and garbled, but persevering until the letters slipped into order and worlds opened inside his mind.

  A woman parting her gown for him, her thighs creamy in the darkness. His head on her stomach and her hand resting on the nape of his neck.

  A wolf watching him and a closed door reflected in the moist arc of the animal’s eye.

  Adam turned his head to look at the door behind him. It was open.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  A STIFF south-westerly wind was blowing and the tiny prop plane swerved from side to side. As it came in to land, it looked as though it might overshoot the runway, but then, with a clumsy three-pointed touchdown, it landed and moved swiftly down the tarmac, its propellers slowly winding down.

  The door of the small aircraft opened. A fat man in a Hawaiian shirt and with a camera around his neck descended the rickety stairs. Behind him followed a woman in a yellow dress. Her face was hidden by a wide hat and Mark stared, his heart suddenly beating faster. But then she lifted her head and he saw that she was elderly.

  The doorway remained blank. The plane looked like an outsized toy where it squatted on the runway. The wind blew. The sunlight was harsh. Nothing seemed to move inside the plane.

  And then, there she was. She stood framed in the doorway, looking in the direction of the small, tin-roofed building from where he was watching her through a smeared plate-glass window.

  She was wearing a long floating skirt and the wind tugged at the hem. Enormous black sunglasses obscured most of her face. But as she walked down the stairs and started to cross the tarmac toward the building, he knew it could only be her. ‘Tiny,’ Adam had said, ‘but with steel in her every movement. The way she carries herself is one of the things I love about her the most. You’ll see; it’s this extraordinary mixture of defiance and vulnerability.’

  His palms were moist. His eyes were burning inside his head.

  ‘Justine?’

  She turned toward him. ‘Yes?’ There was a question in her voice.

  ‘My name is Mark Botha.’

  ‘Oh…’ She smiled. She took off her glasses and he saw that her eyes were blue.

  ‘Where’s Adam?’ she asked.

  • • •

  THE STRENGTH of the wind had increased. The sea was churning. From where she sat, she could see thick flecks of foam blowing across the watery surface, which gleamed like a mirror caught in sunlight.

  ‘More tea?’

  Justine looked away from the window. Rita was hovering with a teapot in her hand.

  She shook her head and pushed to one side the old-fashioned teacup with its pattern of pink roses.

  Rita sat down again, per
ching awkwardly on the edge of her seat. ‘Mark should be ready any minute.’

  Justine nodded. She knew she should at least try to say something to this woman who was looking at her with compassion, but her mind felt incapable of forming even the simplest of words.

  On the laundry line outside two shirts and a pair of trousers flapped wildly in the wind. The outside awning above the window was creaking.

  The wind. She had been here for only three hours and already her brain felt tired from its constant presence.

  ‘Does it ever stop?’ The sound of her voice produced a slight shock in herself and she saw Rita start.

  ‘The wind?’

  ‘Yes. Is there ever an end to it?’

  Rita sighed. ‘We have a few calm weeks in June. But the wind is always there. You become so used to it, you know.’ She glanced out the window. ‘I don’t think it’s going to continue at this strength all day, though. It should quieten down by night-time.’

  Silence again. They were now avoiding each other’s eyes. They sat there, two women caught in a situation of having too much to say to each other, but also too little.

  Then she saw Rita look past her shoulder, her face showing relief.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Mark was standing in the doorway, a bunch of keys clutched in his hand.

  ‘Yes.’ Justine got up from her chair. For a moment the kitchen with its white-painted cupboards and yellow check curtains spun about her. She took a deep breath and placed a steadying hand on the surface of the table.

  ‘Yes, I’m ready.’

  • • •

  THEY DID NOT speak on the way. The roar of the wind and the sound of the Land Rover’s engine would have made conversation difficult in any event.

  For the first twenty minutes they stuck to the road, the ocean on their left, but then, without warning, Mark turned the Land Rover’s nose inland. For the next few minutes Justine clutched the dashboard as the vehicle bumped and swayed, its wheels skidding in the thick folds of sand. She found herself instinctively pressing down on an imaginary brake pedal, but Mark seemed to be increasing their speed, pushing the revs way up so that the vehicle produced a high-pitched laboured whine.