by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie
“Wow.”
We didn’t say anything for a bit.
“Planning your escape from the axe-murderer?” she asked, brightly, though I wasn’t thick or stoned enough not to see how shallow the brightness was.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m fairly fucked in the head and all.” Then I got a bit worried I’d been offensive. I just wanted her to know I did have some idea of what it meant to have your mind get away from you. I’d taken a little too much of this and that over the years; had a lot of family I didn’t talk to; had scars all up my arms that weren’t all as old as I’d have liked. Still have those, obviously, though now they’re old enough. First time we went to bed, Melanie kissed them. Girlfriends had done that before and I’d never liked it – felt like it was all about how tender and accepting they were and I’d have liked to just get laid occasionally without the reminder of what a fucking mess I used to be. But when Mel ran her tongue over them and murmured “they look like gills” it felt different.
Seeing as we ended up shagging, Melanie couldn’t have been that offended with me, though she did raise her eyebrows and smile at me in a kind of aren’t-you-just-adorable way, which I guess I could have been offended at in turn, but I wasn’t.
I liked it.
The remains of the dead were washed from their repositories, and several skeletons appeared scattered upon the beach. A stone coffin, containing human bones covered with tiles, was also seen, but before it could be removed, the violence of the surge broke it in two pieces.
My diving buddies from Australia had all said that there would be no decent sites in England, which is wrong, and that English sea freezes your balls off ten months of the year if you so much as look at it, which is right. Still, even before Melanie I’d got some vaguely patriotic feelings about the old grey Atlantic booming under the English chalk – which, being as much British as anything else, I’d a right to. Something austere and uncompromising about that flexing armour of steel and that made it the more beguiling when it would soften in the sun into blue or rose. And though it’s also true that often the visibility down there tends towards the fairly crap, that used to feel kind of fitting to me: all those wrecks and reefs were properly hidden and secret in the greenish dark, so not just anybody could get to see them.
Also, you’d never forget you were in an alien place that wasn’t really meant for you. Which is a big part of why anyone with any sense wants to go there.
We’ve already dived the wrecks of Spanish galleons and German bombers. Now Mel’s dug up an actual drowned town not far from our cramped Sussex cottage, which is not that surprising given both Mel’s interests and the fact that in England, nothing’s ever all that far away.
(Though sometimes, I’ve wondered, did she know about it before? Is that why she wanted us to live there? I’d expected her to want to go back to Cornwall, though after everything that she’d been through with her mother I’d bought it readily enough when she said it was too painful. Probably it just was and I’m being paranoid but this is another fucking thing, Melanie – another thing that I’ll never fucking know and if I’m not being reasonable that would be because of you.)
“When a storm’s coming,” said Mel, “You can still hear the church bells ringing under the sea.”
She loved her drowned city stories. Lyonesse, which got her started, Kitezh, Cantre’r Gwaelod, Atlantis, Saeftinghe, Ys; the wicked towns sunk by angry gods, cursed by kidnapped mermaids, dragged down by watery devils. She loved all the monsters swept under by Noah’s flood, the queens who turned into sea-nymphs, the unrotted sailors still lying peacefully on their bunks in sunken ships.
And she loved it when it any bit of a story came true, and so I hadn’t known her very long before I was well-acquainted with the fact that little old Britain is not, in fact, immune to tsunamis and other aggressions of the sea, and so there are around a billion underwater towns looped all around the island. And practically every fucking one of those fucking stories has that detail about the bells, that you can still hear them – on nights without a moon, or when there’s a storm, or when something horrendous is going to happen to the people left on land.
“So is there actually anything to see,” I asked, feeling I’d probably have heard about it before if there was. “Or are we talking some really exciting sand?”
“It’s not all about the pretty fishes, Lloyd,” she droned. Melanie took the usual freediver thing of laughing at bubblers a stage further: as far as she was concerned, you weren’t serious if you went down there just to look at anything. It was about inhabiting the planet’s depths, about distance and remoteness. It was about just plain being underwater.
If you’d seen her dive you’d understand. The first time I laid eyes on her, I was standing on the roof of the deckhouse of the HMAS Brisbane, watching the lionfish and the noon wrasse stream past in flashes of neon, and this creature just flies past my head – soaring like a lark through air. Short yellow-white hair flaring and rippling around her head like a burning halo. A plain black cossie leaving almost all her skin bare to the water, while the rest of us are covered head to foot in our wetsuits, tanks on our backs and masks over our faces, practically indistinguishable from each other. While she could only have been herself. I could barely believe how far and deep a single breath could take her, how long she could make it last. I couldn’t take my eyes off her either. How long since I’d first seen her, now? Two, three minutes, and she’s still gliding around the hull like she’s never even heard of air. When she swooped down the wreck’s funnel into the boiler room my chest ached in sympathy she clearly didn’t need. Then no sign of her for what seemed like forever; then she burst out the other side of the wreck like an opening anemone, and startled a shriek of bubbles out of poor Barry who was minding his own business hovering over the gun turrets. And then she took off, skimming away into the blue, and I sort of assumed that was the last any of us would see of her, that she was just this fucking… spirit or something, flickering through.
“Anyway, yes there’s stuff to see,” said Mel, sitting on our kitchen table amid the debris of watercolours and paper and grinning. “Skeletons still wash up out of the old churchyard there all the time.”
“See, for me that’s not an incentive,” I said.
“Wimp,” she said happily, and didn’t elaborate that her entire life was spent in the company of way worse stuff than that.
She was happy. She’d been out of the hospital six months; the new meds were working great, no side effects that particularly bothered her. She still saw all the usual crap, but she was used to that and at least the burning faces in the wallpaper didn’t talk any more. She was selling a bit of art to a greetings card company – sad-eyed mermaids and black-winged angels for gothy teenage girls. (“You leave gothy teenage girls alone,” said Mel, sternly).
I felt prouder of her happiness than maybe I should have, like it was a certificate of how very much my shit was together. I wasn’t just married, with a job, and a mortgage, I was also demonstrably capable of seeing my wife through an extremely grim episode without caving in or going in any way loopy myself. And though in principle I knew she’d have more bad times, I think I still felt like we’d given her mental problems a kicking they’d never forget. And I didn’t even have any of my own any more.
Mel was training hard, and maybe-possibly had some sponsorship lined up for a contest in the Andamans in August, and even if that fell through we were going to Boracay in November, and already had money enough to pay for it even if we wouldn’t be able to do much in the way of eating.
In the meantime, the English sea was as close to warm and welcoming as it’s ever going to get.
Mel’d nag me sometimes to ditch the tank and the mask, all that clumsy stuff between me and the water, and even though I loved to watch her swim unhampered, I’d argue that she was the one who was missing out. “But you’re tied to the surface. I mean, it’s amazing how long you can go on your own air but, still, it’s minutes. You can’t st
ay down there. I can.”
“That’s true,” she’d say sadly. And she would scuba from time to time, when there was no other way to get where she wanted. And I would join in with her training to lengthen the time I could hold my breath, and sometimes I’d try leaving the gear in the boat.
But I couldn’t really get past the feeling that I was drowning. Couldn’t stop missing the ready oxygen at my lips.
So usually we each did it our own way. Beside’s it’s just safer, if you’re freediving, to have someone there who isn’t. Sometimes they black out, freedivers, bodies still clutching the one breath locked in their lungs, and even if you get them to the surface they won’t let it out to claim another. It’s not even technically drowning.
So this time I’m piling all the usual stuff into the little hired boat, and Mel’s got her goggles and the monofin that makes her move through the water like a mermaid and out we go.
Another thing I loved about the English sea was that slight shock when you got into it, the way you had to fight the reluctance in your flesh no matter how many times you’d done it before. It never, ever makes it too easy. Used to give me a little thrill of some kind of conquest even before I was fully under.
Melanie straps her dive light to the shoulder of her suit, though I know she hates having to bother with even that much baggage. Mine’s already clipped to my belt. She slips in first, as usual, and I tip myself over after. Don’t take in anything very specific about the surroundings at first as I’m still enjoying how the water changes the light, makes it something with a texture and a weight, how it changes the rhythm of my heart. Also, Mel always thinks that if we’re alone and occasionally if we’re not, the first minute of a dive is an excellent time for a bit of feeling up.
When we’re done with that she sinks away from me, and fades almost at once, first to a dim green silhouette, then to nothing but the hazy electric glow of her light. The visibility is awful, for all the sea’s been quiet for days. The water’s thick and smoky with silt and, a few meters further down, with waving strands of kelp.
It’s clear to me at once that, at least from my point of view, this is going to be a pretty boring dive. Well, not exactly boring: I still like to see starfish plastered to rock and blennies moseying around the sand. But there’s nothing new, and there’s nothing interesting about the terrain, and, as for the town, well – I’m increasingly getting the feeling I was right and it’s only still there in the most minimal possible way.
I could watch Mel, of course, when she comes close enough: the sunlight glowing dimly through the white polypropylene of the blade fixed to her feet, rippling criss-cross over her skin.
After zigzagging around for a bit we find the hummocks of tumbled brick. They get a bit more organised as we go along – you can just about recognise the layouts of buildings and I think Mel, ahead of me, might be swimming down what was once a street. But still, it’s basically all rubble — it’s really not like we were ever going to run into Stonehenge or a castle down here. No bell tower and no bells left, whatever the stories say. I do find a long ridge of larger, squarer blocks of tawny stone, chiselled hundreds of years ago and I’m sure this is fascinating if you’re really into mediaeval architecture. Or if you’re Mel, but I’m neither of those things.
I swim closer to the half lit shadow that’s Mel and find her drifting upside down, trailing her fingers through the sand. We exchange okay signals, then she heads up for gulp of air and while she’s gone I try and see things her way. I get a vague shudder thinking of people walking these streets, talking, eating, doing their jobs – how I’m swimming through their sky. Even more of one when I imagine the sea trampling in like an army and claiming a few hundred of them as tribute. But I don’t think that’s exactly what she’s after here; I mean it’s not really the people she’s into, she can get enough of people anywhere. No, I think it’s that here the thing she spends so much time chasing as deep and as far as her body will take her, edges close, lines up to the world she has to live in.
She’s back, an undulating shadow streaming on into the dark, and I seem to have got myself to a weird place in my head and for a moment I feel this is a private thing of hers that I shouldn’t be here for and that I kind of don’t want to be.
I decide I’ll just focus on the wildlife, thanks, even if there isn’t anything here I haven’t seen a million times before. I meet a hermit crab bumbling around over the remains of a long flint wall. He isn’t bothered by the beam of my torch, so me and the hermit crab hang out together for a while.
The crab scuttles across a fallen block of stone that’s shaped differently from the others – a wedge shape with a gentle curve to it. The keystone of an arch.
And I get a bit more interested because I think maybe there’s something carved on it – though it might just be the work of the water – and I reach out to brush the silt away.
And that was about the last second of my life that I thought I understood. And so it follows that trying to explain anything that followed is hard enough even in my own head.
So, let’s start with this: I’ve known conditions to change very fast at sea, especially in these waters. But never that fast.
The closest thing to a warning is that for an instant the visibility gets a little better. The particulate in the water’s all dragging away and down, and I see Mel is closer than I thought. We look at each other. Mel’s eyes wide with something I’ve tried and tried to decode all these years, though at the time I thought it was simple alarm.
The sea snatches hold of her, whisks her off faster than my instinctive cry can bubble out of my mouth. Her light blinks out. And mine goes dark the second after that, so by the time I’m yanked to the bottom it’s pitch black.
It’s like a huge storm wave’s come out of nowhere and piled itself down on us. I have this detached, sarky moment to think ‘he died doing what he loved’ and then just nothing but fuck fuck please no fuck Mel Mel Mel as I bounce over rock and brick and silt, churned arse over tit, helpless in the grip of what’s dragging me further and further out.
My lungs burn. The regulator’s been jolted from my mouth. I can’t get enough control, enough time to get hold of it before I’m hurled over again. I can’t do anything. Certainly can’t equalise the pressure in my ears.
My ears. It must just be my own pulse, chiming huge and muffled in my skull, but I start to hear the ringing then.
Dragged up, turned over, bashed down again. It stretches out, somehow; I stop feeling the impacts, spend longer floating dreamily in the water’s dark hold.
And something runs over me, light and sure, like a slow stream of bubbles, like an appraising hand, and I don’t feel like I’m alone. I think again, Melanie. But it isn’t her.
Bash into the sea bed again. Softer landing again. Away into blue-green-black.
I’m in our bedroom at home; the windows are open and moon wrasse dart in and out. The bells are louder, clearer, more joyous, like there’s a wedding going on. Melanie’s sitting on the windowsill, swinging her legs. She’s in the sundress she got married in, with a wreath of daisies on her hair, which is blazing and swaying around her face with the rock of the water. She looks back at me, gives me the OK signal and pushes herself out. I’m not scared for her though we’re on the top floor and there’s concrete underneath, because of course she floats. She hangs there outside the window, and I go over and she reaches through and puts her arms around my neck, lays her cheek against mine. She might be talking but I can’t hear because she hasn’t any breath, and doesn’t need any now. Beyond her there’s – well, there’s nothing.
Nothing but the mountains higher than Everest, the chasms spilling out magma, the valleys too deep for sunlight to touch. And all the monsters swept off with Noah’s flood, the queens who turned into water-nymphs, the sailors fast asleep in their bunks.
Then I think: this is bollocks. The fact is that I’m hallucinating at the bottom of the sea where I’m in the process of getting the shit kicked out
of me.
I thud hard on the and then nothing’s holding me any more. Can’t orient myself for a moment but eventually I work out that the bottom is down here and the surface is up there. I get hold of my regulator. Heaven of oxygen in my mouth and maybe I am going to survive this after all. I thrash upwards faster than I should; I try to slow myself but at this point I really can’t make myself worry all that much about the bends, not set against getting out of this now.
Light and air on my face. I let the reg drop out of my mouth again and breathe and scream Mel’s name.
Where the hell are all those waves? I thought I was coming up into the middle of a crazy freak storm. But the surface is just as placid as when we left it. But what there is though is thick, thready white mist the water. I can’t see much further than I could down below.
And I can still hear the ringing. Sad, blurred swells of sound, pulsing heavily off the water. But I shout for Mel until I almost stop noticing.
I had oxygen at least part of the time. The girl can hold her breath a long time, but no one can hold it that long.
I start swimming inelegantly, becoming aware as I do it that I’m pretty beaten up and remain very much in need of a significant dose of luck. All I can do is hope blindly I’m going in the direction of the shore or Melanie or no, both, both, both for godsakes.
Then, amazingly, there’s the boat – barely thirty yards away from where I came up. I was sure I’d have been dragged twenty times that and more.
I think maybe Mel’s already found it and is just lying in the bottom too exhausted to answer me, and though I know really this has to be bull it helps get me there. I flounder over and drag myself up, and the boat’s empty of course, but for the bottled water and a packet of fucking sandwiches.
There’s the dry-bag with both our phones.
I really don’t want to ring for the Coastguard because I don’t want to think of Mel as being lost at sea rather than fleetingly out of sight, but I’m not a total idiot so of course I grab the bag and I sit there, stabbing at buttons, shivering a little, blood dripping from elbows and knees, in the middle of all the white.
