The
PRAYING
NUN
Michael Smorenburg
First published in the United States of America by CreateSpace in 2016.
Copyright © Michael Smorenburg, 2016
All rights of Michal Smorenburg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Some of the concepts and quotations expressed in this fictional tale first appeared, some in a different form, in various print or electronic expressions by the originators, authors or presenters so named.
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www.MichaelSmorenburg.com/PrayingNun
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House of Qunard Publishing
Copyright © 2016 Michael Smorenburg & Qunard Publishing
All rights reserved.
ISBN Print: 978-0-620-72261-2
ISBN eBook: 978-0-620-72262-9
CreateSpace ISBN-13:978-1976101632
ISBN-10: 1976101638
DEDICATION
We are not born equal.
We are born only with potential, but into circumstance.
This novel explores the human spirit and how it becomes suppressed or amplified by the mores and strictures of different epochs, and the position we occupy within them.
.
Not equal but all the same, it is only circumstance that makes us who we are.
The Praying Nun
Based as it is on facts, this work remains tale of fiction: names, characters, places and many incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Also by Michael Smorenburg:
Ragnarok—Qunard Publishing—2017
LifeGames—Qunard Publishing—1995 & 2016
A Trojan Affair—Qunard Publishing—2016
The Everything Sailing Book Part 2—Adams Media 1999
The Everything Sailing Book Part 1—Adams Media 1998
Business Buyer’s Kit—Career Press 1997
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a true story.
A tragedy.
Let us pause a moment to remember 200 nameless lost lives, utterly forgotten.
_________
Thank you to darling Kirstin Engelbrecht for your tireless line-by-line edits and putting up with me in all ways.
A huge “thank you” to Karolyn Herrera of DocEditing.com for her attention to detail in editing—I should have listened more in class to make your job easier. / To Gemma Poppet Rice of Southern Stiles Book Covers for this and my other covers—they’re fabulous Poppet! / To Leila Summers of Leila Summers of Spread-the-Word, whose efforts put this book into your hands.
Thanks to all proofreaders, particularly Hans Pietersen for taking an entire working day to do an emergency last minute proofread to iron out some lurkies that tried to hide.
Thanks to all who have given me so much encouragement to keep writing.
Part 1
A TRUE STORY
Chapter 1
Autumn, 1986
The object appears to be part of a large tooth, standing slightly proud out of the surrounding black conglomerate.
I’m under six metres of water with a scuba tank strapped to my back. That’s just twenty feet of depth in old money.
Conglomerate rock is the congealed detritus every shipwreck acquires in its grave, a bit of everything cemented together by corals and other sea life, turned to rock from age and chemical reaction with the salty water.
A dirty and yellowed bump the size of my knuckle, protruding above the coal-like sediment, caught my eye more than fifteen minutes ago. It looks to me like evidence of a large tooth hidden from view. I’ve been attempting to wrestle the whole chunk loose from the granite crevasse ever since.
Trouble is, I know I’m about to reach the end of my air supply.
Forty-five minutes is about what you get from a ten-litre aqualung of compressed air at this depth when you’re working hard.
You can eke out an hour if you don’t exert yourself. But I’ve been straining and heaving to loosen this football-sized chunk of black mass from the grip of the African continent, so the tank is sure to run dry a lot quicker.
Today’s conditions have pushed my breathing harder as well.
It’s achingly cold, but at least the frigid water has given us perfect viz. I can see through my mask out to maybe half the length of an Olympic swimming pool in distance. Across the sugar-white sand beyond this reef, another dark patch of rocky outcrop looms at the very edge of my visibility.
I have enough experience to know that I’m reaching the point when the air runs out. When it does, it will do so quickly. I’ll suddenly find that I must suck in the last few breaths to get anything at all.
“Come on!” I find myself growling into the mouthpiece of the demand valve as I pull on the lump with all my diminishing strength. The accompanying eruption of bubbles from my frustrated bellow boils out in front of my goggles, momentarily obscuring the crisp clean water.
And, here it comes!
It moves a finger’s width then locks again Ffffff…!! I fizz with irritation into the mouthpiece again.
But it’s loose. There’s wiggle room. Progress!
I test the play. It’s no longer attached, but it’s still wedging itself with frustrating determination somewhere in the crack between the granite boulders.
Calm down… I remind myself, emphasizing the admonishment by resting to examine the exposed piece of tooth again.
Lordy, but this is intriguing, I think as I stare more closely.
I’m an amateur, not yet twenty-one years old, and certainly no archaeologist, but that really looks to me like a tooth in the conglomerate rock.
A persistent piece of kelp washes in front of my mask and it makes me look around to see whether the kelp forest has changed its nature in the last half hour. Swell is pushing in fast and that means this site, so close inshore, will not be accessible in the coming days. This thought accelerates my heart rate with an urgency to get this extraction done.
What started as a curiosity at the beginning of this dive has grown into an obsession. Something about the intrigue of it is driving me beyond any evidence of intrinsic value—it sure isn’t gold.
No matter. I just have to know what this thing is.
I peer a little closer and push the kelp aside yet again. It’s definitely something organic… bone or tooth... and there’s another piece of it, I notice. Now that it’s loosened just that fraction from the grip that time has put on it, I can rotate it just enough to see that it appears to be larger than I first thought. About a finger’s length away from the original bump that grabbed my attention, I see more of it protruding, grinning at me through the clinging tar of conglomerate, teasing my appetite for wonder.
Knowing better, I just can’t resist and retrieve my knife from its sheath strapped to my right calf.
If I start excavating the conglomerate material now, I can see if it’s worth more effort. I pause with that thought in my head, desperately wanting to crack the grit away that cements my treasure to see if this is ind
eed one single giant tooth.
No. Not worth it, I remind myself.
Jacques, my dive buddy and discoverer of this wreck, knows far more than me and constantly preaches caution.
Big chunks of conglomerate rock must be extracted whole from the sea if possible.
If there proves to be anything worth a buck inside, it could be destroyed by a clumsy effort to liberate it from the encasing rock.
These thoughts remind me to check on him and I see his bubbles steadily rising not far from me.
I rise a little off the bottom and peek over the rock that separates the areas we’re working in. He’s still busy trying to wrench the encrusted cannon loose. We know that once we haul it out, it’ll probably turn out to be iron and immediately start to oxidize and disintegrate, but he’s already got a plan for that one.
One thing about this guy, he’s always got a plan.
I reckon that’s why he intrigues me.
That’s why my folks hate him.
He’s always got a plan.
The plan’s to get his cannon back into a salt-water bath as soon as we retrieve it.
And then what?
If he’s got a plan for that, he hasn’t shared it yet.
I fall back to the ocean floor and my own task. The cursed kelp becomes more obstinate in the rising surge and holds its ground when I push it away.
Even during this short time, the currents and eddies have grown bolder, towing me around so I have to hold on while I work.
The ocean around here is fickle like that; it can change its mood in no time.
I look up towards the surface and see that the bamboo-like trees of the kelp forest have intensified their sway from just moments ago.
This really is bad news.
The foul weather my crazy mate predicted is now arriving fast. The push and drag of the arriving swell serves as an unwelcome messenger.
I focus again on the lump of conglomerate.
Wiggle-wiggle, wiggle-wiggle... It’s stuck fast, so I punch it back into the crack with my neoprene gloves then pull it toward me.
Punch it again, and pull it forward three more times. It’s not going anywhere.
Something is holding it in place. Some obstruction I can’t see.
The best thing to do is to feel what’s going on, so I pull the glove off my right hand.
The water must be 12° centigrade today—that’s about the temperature of ice water when it hurts your teeth. It’s so cold it seems to cut through the skin. The trouble is, when you do get sliced in these conditions, you’re so numb that it doesn’t hurt till it’s too late.
I slip my hand out of view around the conglomerate, gently tracing its rough surface.
Very gingerly, careful to avoid moving too boldly where sharp barnacles and spiny urchins grow, I trace the intersection that my prize is making with the bedrock.
The way it moves just slightly when wrestled, it seems that there’s a notch or step or some other impediment in the granite that is wedging the darned thing in, foiling my every attempt to extract it.
The push of the swell messes with me again, alternately pressing me toward, then dragging me away from the crevice.
Just then, I see Jacques rising above the rock that has separated us, leaving each in our own little world of excavation.
He draws his index finger across his throat, a universal scuba motion indicating he’s out of compressed air to breathe. I see him reach the surface and signal with my fingers that I need two more minutes.
I go back in to finish my task. Without the glove, I can feel how the crevasse flares open beautifully when I push the object down, at ninety degrees to the direction I’ve been yanking and slamming it.
And then my exploring fingers discover why it won’t shift in that direction: there’s something in the way, something I quickly realize has a familiar bearded fringe, an abalone, a giant snail of sorts. It is a jailor, locking my prize in place.
When touched, these things clamp to the rock as if cemented in place. I reach for my knife and, with horror, feel that my breathing has suddenly become laboured.
What I’d dreaded is happening. My scuba tank is running on empty, and I can feel how it is gaining buoyancy, another tell-tale sign that it has little air left in it to give to me.
I curse not having or being able to afford one of the new-fangled reserve valves that I could flip to give me another minute or two if I did.
At best, I only have five or six breaths available.
NOOOOOOO… Not now! my mind screams at fate. This is the most frustrating moment for this to happen.
My airflow tightens a little more with my next breath. The easy draw of my demand valve is faltering; the effort required for my lungs to suck each subsequent breath feels increasingly asthmatic and laboured.
The bloody mollusc is in the most awkward position to be reached. The creature’s bearded fringe would have felt my touch as certainly as I felt it’s silky caress. It would have instantly clamped to the rock, tighter than a shark’s arse. I’ll probably have to break the shell a bit to get the knife under it.
The knife is in my hand and out of view, its tip seeking a gap to get under the shellfish and lever it off of the rock.
My second breath is exhaled and I draw a third through the grudging mouthpiece, holding that breath and rationing air as sparingly as possible.
As the blade slips under the creature, a particularly powerful swell sweeps past and I lose my grip, yanked away from my task. I fin and pull myself back and get my hand on the knife jammed in place… fourth breath used!
Just one more and it’s out, I tell myself.
This fight is now personal, me versus the Atlantic.
That fifth breath comes to me sluggishly as if drawn through a long, thin straw, mean and tight. It leaves me seeing stars from the effort and I know I have to quit now but I need the knife to be deeper, only its tip is in and that’s not enough leverage.
I slam it with the last of my strength and the knife slides in, but now there’s no room to lever it.
Through my rising panic, spots and starbursts of lights are exploding in my vision. My air’s gone along with my chance at recovery of the prize.
Shallow water blackout? I find myself pondering in an almost dream state. Does it apply to scuba diving or only to breaths from the surface?
Through the effort and swirl of pain from trying to hang in, I can’t recall the answer to that riddle.
All I can recall is that shallow water blackouts can kill, and this little section of coast has a bad enough reputation for drowning the foolish.
It’s time to quit. Just one more try, I foolishly gamble.
The next swell surges through and takes the absurd decision out of my hands—my grip is broken and I’m plucked unceremoniously away from my position and sent in an awkward tumble backward over the reef.
The CLANG of my scuba tank meeting the naked granite rock as I somersault is startling and sobering. I don’t have money for a fix. If it’s damaged, hopefully it’s just a ding needing just a lick of paint.
I manage to reorient myself and see Jacques watching me, clearly amused at my ungainly exit. I’m a reasonably good diver, but he’s infinitely better than me. He’s innately skilled in the water, like a seal.
Strange thoughts are running through my mind as I tumble over and over in the surge and the sandstorm that it’s created around me. Sky-kelp-sand-reef is all I see.
What really bothers me is that I’m so at peace. I’m either hypothermic in this icy water or my brain is seriously oxygen deprived, because I just don’t care right now about consequences and I dare not violate the golden rule of scuba: breathe out on ascent and never rise faster than the slowest bubbles rising before one’s mask.
There’s a momentary lull as the ocean draws back and gathers for the next incoming wave. The surge rolls past overhead. The first harbinger of the storm that is to come is now upon us.
I gain my balance on the floor and ori
entate—crouch, spot the surface and push off toward it.
The bubbles from my last exhalation boil past and I spit out my demand-valve as I crash through the shimmering surface, gulping at the air.
The first thing I see is Lion’s Head, the old crouching two-thousand-foot tall mountain that soars above my beloved beach. It is wearing a mane of clouds. The weather’s coming in fast from the north, wisps of cloud fleeting past the rock face high above.
Jacques is laughing at me.
“Faaaaark, but you’re clumsy.”
He’s sure got license to laugh at me today. My exit was spectacular.
“You don’t know what I just found down there. You got air?”
“Dead.” He shakes his head.
“Want to have a go on the snorkel? I got a monster piece of conglomerate. Looks like a huge tooth or bone in it. Wedged in by a perlie. My knife’s stuck under it,” I splutter.
Perlie is the local name for abalone, a name that derives from its silver and shimmering pearl-like shell.
He shakes his head and points out to sea. I follow his gaze and see that a new set of even bigger waves are inbound. They’re hunching vast shoulders on the finger of reef that runs toward the horizon from our location.
I watch as the first of them, a football field’s distance out to sea, begins to lump and smoke at its crest as the ocean floor below interferes with its charge toward the shore.
Just to the south of the reef extremity and the inner reef that we’re working is deep water, and we begin to fin toward it to avoid the coming turmoil.
We have maybe fifteen seconds to scarper from this shallower position, but it’s clear that we’ll still catch the edge of this wave as it roars by.
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