Falling animals, p.8
Falling Animals, page 8
Slowly, he realises that the steady whistle of the ship has been joined by a percussive rumble. The sound is uneven enough that it could be the accidental hum of the wind through distant pipes, starting and stopping again – but for a moment, just a moment, it sounds like someone is speaking, singing even, in a language he can’t understand.
Then, from the hatch in the corner, a dark patch breaks away from the shadows and moves, undulating against the reddened hull. The silhouette has its arm raised, as if it is desperately reaching for something, for anything. Donal whimpers, scrabbling away from it. Then the dread smashes into the alcohol in his blood, like soldiers against a shield-wall, and flips over into rage. Some sad bastard has been watching him all along, watching him piss, has heard him crying over nothing at all.
He stumbles across the rubble, fists clenched and raised, but he slips on a pile of seaweed that has the texture of wet jelly. He lands on his back, hard, so hard that his teeth snap down on his own tongue; he tastes iron and is winded for a gasping, frozen moment. The floor is angled so the blood dribbling from his mouth seeps backwards towards his nose, and it’s in his eyes, his fucking eyes. He tries to blink the redness away, force air back into his lungs, haul himself to his feet, but panic and shame have him now and his breaths are short, panting gunshots. He elbows his eyes to clear them, to triangulate the distance between the intruder and the doorway, to find the way out.
But there are only shadows twisting in the flames, and no sound except the wind and the crackle of salt-light. The campfire has spilled over a little and is still going, flames green-licked from the salt, and the damp in the air is turning to steam. Pieces of broken wood collapse in on themselves and a shower of sparks screams against the metal. They race up strips of dry seaweed to the ceiling, where they settle into flames that ripple in upside-down waves. His brain kicks in to tell him that metal does not burn, and he starts to breathe again, but there is a flicker of bright light and a flowering of intense heat that forces his eyes closed.
His feet come awake without consulting his brain, so he is already racing to the hull when the flash of damp flame hits him, kicking and kicking with his steel-capped boots at the salt-weakened metal until it gives way, and he’s bending now and heaving at the small opening with his hands, shaking his jacket off and over his fingers to protect them, but the thin leather shreds to pieces almost as easily as his bare skin. Light and heat and noise; he’s reaching through the sharp hole in the hull, reaching towards the clean air, his shoulders slanted and wiggling, his hips, his knees stuttering over the jagged edges of the opening, hands palm down into a pool of water, being shat out, reborn – and then he’s out, he’s out! slopping head and shoulders first into the water like a seal, twisting on to his back to look back at the ship, panting.
The fire is hidden now, the yellow glow contained behind the metal hull. There is a shudder as something falls inside; a greasy bang and a whomp of flame billows upwards. He pulls himself out of the water and lurches to his feet, then goes down again, over the thick links of the anchor line that rises and disappears into the white-hot hull. His hands are destroyed, flaps of skin are hanging from his fingers and blood is outlining the lines in his palms.
From the distant beach floats a scream, a shout, but in the darkness the voices are disembodied, unreal, coming from a world away. He slaps himself to stop the shaking, spits syrupy blood from his bruised tongue. His limp turns into a stagger, into a run, away from the billowing flames, away and back to his car, away home, just away, and he doesn’t look back until the memory of heat has faded from his shoulders.
the diver
At high tide, it is simply a bare patch of ocean about five hundred metres from the shore. The only hint that anything lies underneath is a slight cross-hatching of the waves, a rippling patch that runs perpendicular to the rest. Otherwise, the water is calm, although the sky threatens rain; the distant mountains are fading into mist.
The three men stare at the surface in silence. Finally, the boatman clears his throat, looks over at Robert and his silent partner. Well, are you going in?
There’s always a moment, just when he dips his head below the water, when Robert is convinced that he is going to die. His body rebels against going under, convinced it is suicide, and it takes a firm grasp of logic to persuade it otherwise.
He’s seen this dread descend on others, from novice divers to veterans. A primal reflex just takes over and screams: air, I need air. They rip the mask and mouthpiece from their face, ignore the air tank on their back and kick out for the surface, forgetting anything and everything that they’ve learned. The air is that way, their animal brain says, and off they go. If they’re lucky, they choose the right direction. If they’re lucky, they have enough air in their lungs to make it to the surface. If they’re lucky, they aren’t deep enough for compression sickness to set in. If they aren’t, they’re fucked. Afterwards, the reports will say they got into difficulty, as if the diver were stuck on a tricky problem in a maths exam. Drowning due to the onset of an unnameable, unknowable dread doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Robert has had to dump weight belts in his time, when things have gone wrong, and has had to break for the surface when his spare regulator clogged up. But he has never felt the blind panic take over. Although the decompression stop can feel like the longest few minutes in existence: just staring at the surface, willing the nitrogen in your blood to dissolve faster so you can get back to the real world, where Homo sapiens can take the helm again, away from the half-lit underwater reality where you are never sure if you are dreaming.
Robert has been diving for twenty-odd years. When he tells people that he is a diver, their faces brighten. They picture coral reefs, mottled octopuses, tropical parrotfish and David Attenborough voiceovers; they tell him all about their wonderful dives in the Maldives, the Canaries, the Great Barrier Reef. But he is not that kind of diver, he tells them. His business is industrial: construction, maintenance, inspection and repairs. Their mouths sour and turn downwards in disgust when he tells them about the raw sewage, the confined spaces, the sores around his lips from the mouthpiece. The full hazmat suits for dives where the silt and debris are so thick he can barely make out his hand in front of his face, and he has to rely on his groping fingers to free the snag, unkink the pipe, fix the seal. Sitting for hours in a decompression chamber; hosing the toxic waste off with jets so strong they leave bruises.
But I’m sure your dives were lovely too, he says and they usually change the subject.
They bring him over from London to inspect the old ship about two years after the fire. The site is near a flyspeck village on a sandbank that dries out at low tide, but the access window is small and the surveyors have struggled to cross the wet sand. The shipping company wants everything recorded, the extent of the damage on file for the insurance, but there has been delay after delay. So far, they haven’t been able to photograph the entire vessel, and someone has decided that the site is better accessed by water, at high tide, which Robert agrees with – floating through tight spaces is easier than climbing or crawling.
His work has brought him to many strange sites all around the world, but an underwater arson investigation is a new one to him. Not that it is much of a mystery: from what he has gathered, the guards believe the owners set the fire themselves, to wash their hands of the wreck and claim the insurance payments. Robert himself suspects that local kids were pissing around setting fires and it got out of hand. He did the same when he was a teenager: broke into derelict places, made bonfires out of pallets, drank warm beers and kissed girls, scattered like spiders when the guards arrived with searchlights to break them up. His older brother Stewie had a silver tongue and always managed to talk his way out of trouble, some fantastical tale that conveniently absolved him of all guilt. Robert didn’t have the imagination to lie.
But today, it is not his job to prove malice, just to record the site with the camera strapped to his forehead. He’s not sure what they’ll do with the footage – likely there is some specialist out there who can deconstruct an explosion, turn back the clock, reassemble the pieces. He and another commercial diver – you never, ever dive alone – have been sent to this beach in the middle of nowhere. At the deserted pier, they met a man with an inflatable boat who drove them the short distance to the site, where they are now staring at the water.
Air tank, buoyancy jacket, weights; he spits into his facemask to keep it from fogging up. He signals his readiness to the other diver, a sullen man who seems to have little interest in making conversation. Robert lets the weight of the tank pull him backwards into the water, the outline of the boat shrinking, as if he has heaved himself off a cliff and time has slowed to let him watch his own demise. The water is not deep, though, so after a few seconds he reaches the sea floor, flips over on to his stomach and fins strenuously for a few metres to warm himself up. His thick drysuit keeps out the worst of the chill, but the Atlantic never warms enough for his liking, and the rubber seals around his wrists are a frozen border.
His buddy follows him down to the seabed and hovers a few metres behind him as they fin towards the site. Visibility is poor and a strong tide makes the seaweed stretch and undulate across the rippled sand. The ship looks like it has been lying for a century rather than just a decade and a half – the cargo holds haven’t been breached, but the funnels and railings have collapsed, and the entire forward hull is gaping wide open on one side. Robert knows well enough not to go into small spaces where he could be trapped, or brush against anything that looks unstable, but the constant ebb and flow of the tide have cleared out most of the debris. What is left is a shell, the internal structures mostly disintegrated.
The two divers circle the site, slowly and deliberately, their headtorches painting lightning patterns against the hull. On the flight over, Robert studied the map of the ship provided by the shipping company until he could trace his way through it with his eyes closed. Of course, the damage makes the map a fantasy, but he can at least use it to roughly orient himself. They are searching for the ignition point, to confirm what is already known – the fire was set in the forward hull, below the partly drained engine room. The leftover fuel ignited and the explosion came from there.
They drift, Robert rotating on to his back to turn his head in a 360-degree circle, letting his camera capture as much as possible. He checks his watch. The dive computer tells him he has been under for thirteen minutes; at this shallow depth, a decompression stop is not strictly necessary, but the watch face calculates it automatically for him. He reaches for the gauge around his waist and checks it out of habit; his breathing is slow and controlled, so there is plenty of air remaining. He flips on to his back and signals to his buddy with his fist and fingers, and the other man responds with his own reading.
He turns forward again and sees a beige-grey pattern that is slightly offset from the rippled seabed. As he fins closer, the cuttlefish gives up its camouflage and darts across his path. Robert kicks hard to follow it for a few moments, but it finds a pile of rocks and squeezes into a hole no wider than the circumference of his thumb, disappearing entirely. He drifts with the underwater tide, waiting for his buddy to catch up, waiting to catch his breath.
Robert’s older brother, the one with the silver tongue, once found a cuttlebone on a white-sand beach in Cornwall when they were children. The thick, leaf-shaped husk was long as their forearms. Stewie gasped when he saw it and announced that it was the soul of a drowned man. From then on, every time Robert went to the beach he glued his eyes to the debris thrown up by the receding tide, hoping to find a soul of his very own. Every glint of white sent his heart leaping, but it was always a razor clam, a piece of ceramic, a plastic spoon. It became a mythical quest for a treasure as rare and precious as a unicorn’s horn.
He was a grown man before he saw another cuttlebone, but it was in a book this time, and he learned it wasn’t a soul, or even a shell, rather an internal shell that lets a cuttlefish float. He wanted to study marine biology, once upon a lifetime ago, but he didn’t have the brains for the science of it, or the patience for the slow and detailed work. He spent years in the civil service instead, doing slow and detailed work that he had even less patience for, and diving at the weekends. Living for those brief submergements, where the only sound was the gentle in and out of his own breath, the whisk-whisk of underwater shoals, the fizzing of photosynthesising corals, the clicking of stones rolling along the seabed.
It was his wife who suggested he quit and retrain; after her third miscarriage their grief became too large for the house they lived in together. His brother, ever the storyteller, had danced around their lives with a lightness of foot until he found a story that swallowed him whole: a wicked witch of an ex-girlfriend who bottled him so hard he lost a chunk of his brain and went blind. Now Stewie lives in an assisted living facility, asks after their non-existent children and pisses himself daily. Robert’s wife visits him every weekend, brings chocolate and sports magazines that she reads aloud. She has stopped asking her husband to come along. She knows the sight of his own brother revolts him, and that makes Robert loathe himself even more. These days, he chases the quiet of the submerged. It is only underwater that the voices in his own head stop berating him, as if even they are holding their breath, unwilling to distract him.
It has been years since he looked into Stewie’s blue-blind eyes. Years since his brother lay unconscious on the kitchen floor, bleeding and dying, before his stupid bitch of a girlfriend finally called the paramedics. And a lifetime since two skinny boys found a cuttlebone on a white-washed beach.
Twenty-seven minutes into the dive and the other diver signals that half of his tank has been used up. Robert has a little more, but he nods and makes a twirling motion with his finger, turning them both around. The beam from the other man’s torch dances like a candle flame. They have reached the very fore of the vessel and there are black streak marks all along the hull where the metal has sweated and buckled. One structure has kept its vague shape: the anchor locker, from what he remembers from the blueprints. The covering over the opening seems newer than the rest of the metal surrounding it, as if it were a later addition. The outer frame is swollen, like an infected boil, but in the centre, it has protruded outwards and burst into a red-bellied flower, petals of metal curling back on themselves.
The opening is about as wide as his hips, and dark; the water changing colour slightly, as if the inside and outside were two different substances, mercury that has sunk under water. The gap is too small for him to fit comfortably into – he is a large man, made larger by the air tank and buoyancy jacket – but he pulls himself along the hull until he can aim his headtorch and camera into the locker. Inside, there are the remains of an anchor chain, barely visible through the silt. This part of the ship is less discoloured than the rest, even allowing for the fire, as if it had been sealed away for years. The heat must have caused the hatch covering to buckle and burst, opening up the room again to the elements.
There is a flash of movement, a glint of bleached bone, and he leans forward to see better, hoping to glimpse the cuttlefish again. He dips his head into the pool of mercury, and suddenly his suit is too tight. He can feel every centimetre of it pressing against his skin, the weight of the thick fabric like a full-body gag. The hood is constricting the blood to his head, his buoyancy jacket is pressing against his lungs, tight, tight, tight, and the water around him is as thick as treacle. He tries to fin backwards, but his buddy is in the way; they flail at each other to separate themselves, but at this point Robert has lost all control over his body and his brain. Panic, sheer panic lands his fist against the other man’s head, connecting with a low thunk that is audible even under the water. His mask is clouded with steam; all he can see is grey metal, all around him in every direction as he hurtles away through the silt that his fins have kicked up.
The husk of the ship is collapsing, condensing in on him; he will be caught under the debris and remain there for a hundred, thousand, million years, until he is compressed as tightly as the heart of a neutron star.
What the fuck’s wrong with you, the boat driver is roaring at him, the engine whining like an angry wasp.
Robert hauls himself over the rim of the inflatable, the blast of pure adrenaline launching him up like a submerged buoy. He shoves away the boatman’s helping arms, fumbles with the straps on his scuba kit. A click and release: the jacket slides off him and the heavy tank crushes his foot, but the pain is a bright spark, real, alive. He is alive. He is alive. He is alive.
A minute later his buddy surfaces, spitting out his mouthpiece to curse, and it is only then that Robert realises he left the other man behind, skipped his decompression stop, broke all the rules he has religiously followed throughout his career. His chest is still heaving, but free from his jacket and air tank the awful claustrophobia is lifting. He pulls at his drysuit too, ripping the skin on his fingers against the zip when it doesn’t come quickly, peeling his arms out one by one. He breathes deeply, takes massive, gulping breaths, until he is so full of precious, glorious air he could drift upwards off the rim of the boat and into the sky like a lost balloon.
