“Yuk,” I said through a yawn.
“That’s what the girl said too. But people believe that eating abalone keeps you young, and they’ll pay top dollar for it. Anyway, this shell was particularly precious, because when Chiyo prodded and poked the creature’s gut, she pulled out a pearl.”
At this point, my dad stood up, knees clicking, and he started creeping out of the room.
“Daddy?”
“Oh, I thought you’d dropped off.”
“Is that the end?”
“That’s about the size of it,” he said. “Chiyo and the girl went out diving together regularly after that, yadda yadda yadda. The moral of the story is: don’t judge a book by the cover. Night, Sol.” He shut the door behind him, and I heard his slippers shuffle down the stairs towards the fridge.
I wasn’t about to go to sleep, though. The angry red was still blazing inside me. I threw off the covers and watched the fan. I watched the fan for so long that the moving blades began to look like a smooth, spherical object. Like I was looking at a pearl. Or a crystal ball. Or a planet.
8
“Your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction!” That’s what the submarine designer Graham Hawkes once famously shouted at people who believed that space was the final frontier. There’s so much left to explore in the depths of our planet’s oceans, he said. Why go elsewhere?
When you’re on the floor of the North Sea, you can’t see much. You might get the occasional beige flicker: a passing cod or pollock. You might even spot a crab scuttling around your feet. But the mud and murk shouldn’t deceive you. There’s a lot going on down there. And the deeper you go, the better. Once you reach the midnight zone, which is over a thousand metres deep and black as soot—that’s where you find the good stuff. For example, the female anglerfish has a lantern growing out of its head. The other fish can’t believe their luck when they see the bright light. Finally, they think, there’s something in this darkness. They migrate towards it, mesmerised, and when they get close enough, they’re swallowed in a single gulp. I’ve never been deep enough to see an anglerfish. Almost no human has.
I’m currently in what’s known as the Tartan Field. It’s a network of wells and pipelines, an underwater industrial estate. Until we’ve got an alternative sorted, we need places like this. North Sea oil drives our economy. It heats our homes, fuels our cars, paves our roads. It’s used in life jackets, tampons, ibuprofen. It’s even used to build artificial hearts—it literally keeps hearts beating.
“You ready for this, aye Deano?” asks Hamish, the supervisor on the dive control team. He speaks to me via headphones, and he can see what I’m doing through a camera on my helmet. He’s watching Rich too. Today Rich is diver one and I’m diver two. Cal is in the bell. We’re working the morning shift, and once we get back to the chamber, the other team will go down.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I say. I’ve been working for ten hours straight, and I’ve just finished fixing a pump which feeds oil to a platform over ten miles away. Now I’m retreating while it’s powered up to five thousand volts.
“Make sure you don’t stand on any connectors as you move back,” Hamish says. “Nice and easy.”
Walking along the seafloor takes time. It’s like wading through treacle, but treacle filled with sharp obstacles which constantly threaten to shred your kit. The most important part, the part that you mustn’t break, under any circumstances, is the umbilical. Like a human umbilical, the cord is twisted to prevent tangles. You need to use the cord to find your way back to the bell, but even more critical than that, you need it to keep you alive.
“That’s it. Not long until you can go up for your dinner,” says Hamish.
It’s been a while since I got to witness a pump being tested, and my breath catches in my throat as I wait for it to happen. I imagine the entire North Sea crackling with electricity as I’m fried like a fillet of fish.
Eventually, Hamish speaks. “Nice one, Deano. That’s all sorted . . . Deano?”
Looks like I’ll live to see another day. I start to retrace my steps. “Yeah?”
“That’s all sorted.”
“Oh, right, sorry. I’m still here. That’s great, Hamish. Cheers for all your help.” Normally I’m delighted after a job well done, but today feels like an anticlimax. Something is gnawing at me. It continues to gnaw at me as I enter the diving bell, and it gnaws at me as I take off my helmet, and it gnaws at me as we head back to the saturation chamber, and it gnaws at me as I eat a large portion of lamb stew.
After dinner, I lie on my bunk, and I think about James. He’s sent me two text messages, but I’ve yet to reply. I try not to phone too often, partly because of my helium voice, but also because of the lack of privacy in the chamber. It’s not like you can whisper sweet nothings in a place like this.
I’d never used the L-word before I met James. With him, I found it strangely easy. It helped that he had his own life so sorted: his business, his surfing, his board game nights. He didn’t need me to complete him; he was complete already. He once told me that I was free to leave whenever I wanted. It was about a year into our relationship. I was getting itchy feet. Not because I wanted to be with anyone else—I just missed my freedom. There’s a euphoria that comes with breaking off a relationship. A chance to reinvent yourself, to begin your life anew. I was starting to crave that, and James sensed it.
“I only want to be with you if it’s what you
