I ended up living in Glasgow, because that’s where my first job was. Vessel repair work—nothing fancy, but it took months. Before I knew it, I owned things: saucepans, a coffee table, all the trappings of modern life. Ideally, I’d have lived on the water. The curse of the Flying Dutchman used to sound like heaven to me: endlessly drifting, never docking. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more accustomed to saucepans. Mooring safely in a harbour from time to time is not such a bad thing. It’s just a case of dropping your anchor in the right place.
I call James outside the airport to let him know I’ve arrived safely. We don’t mention what happened this morning. Instead, we talk about what we’re having for lunch. “I’m experimenting with a keto recipe,” James says. “You?”
“Panini from Costa.”
When I hang up, I feel a pang of regret. Why didn’t we talk about it? Are we embarrassed? Is it unlucky? Like one of those old maritime superstitions, where you’re not supposed to say certain words at sea. Words like goodbye and drown, because if you speak them aloud, you’re inviting disaster.
I stand in the taxi queue, breathing in the cold air, then breathing out the steam from inside my lungs. I like exhaling steam. It makes me feel like a machine. When I’m in the diving chamber, I’m no longer human. I’m a cog.
•
Our diving support vessel is called the Seawell. Its belly is full of tubes, gases, valves: stuff that will keep us alive for the next month. And if something goes wrong, it’s stuff that could kill us too.
A lot of people think that my job involves living on the seafloor for a month at a time. It doesn’t. I’ll be right here, on board the ship, in a chamber that’s not much bigger than a garden shed. The three separate compartments—for living, sanitation, and sleep—take up little more than ten square metres in total. It’s strange to think that while we’re locked in our cramped metal enclosure, dozens of other workers are all around us, so close that if the walls weren’t there we’d be able to reach out and touch them.
Once you’re in the chamber, of course, you don’t really think about that. You forget that anything exists beyond that which you can see. You sort of have to.
Four of the other divers on my team are already in the ship’s belly, performing safety checks.
“Just warning you guys that I have not had a shit in three days,” says Eryk. He’s Polish, with a badly drawn paw-print tattoo on one side of his bald head.
Rich throws a wellington boot at him. I’ve never dived with Rich—he’s new to saturation—but he seems to be fitting in.
Dale zips up his rucksack and looks over his shoulder. “Where’s that lazy bugger Tai got to, eh? He’d better leave enough time for all his checks.” Dale has been doing this since the seventies. Back then, half a dozen divers died every year. Though he won’t go into the details, I know he had to bring up the dismembered head of a fellow diver on one occasion. When Dale has advice for us, we tend to listen.
“He’s around,” Cal says. Cal is a man of few words.
Eryk switches his headlamp on and off a couple of times. “If he doesn’t come down soon, I’m nicking his stinger suit.”
“You’ll never fit in it, you fat bastard,” replies Dale.
The banter is all part of a highly choreographed routine. Behind every joke is a huge amount of subtext: I am prepared for this dive. I am comfortable around you. I will make the next twenty-eight days easy for you. I would save your life if you were in peril.
“Still doing your checks, people? I finished ages ago.” Tai has just appeared, clutching six white straws.
We all stop what we’re doing.
“This is gonna be the fifth dive in a row I get the top bunk, guys, I’m telling you,” says Eryk. He picks a short straw out of Tai’s palm and everyone laughs. “Fuck’s sake, man.”
The top bunks are more cramped than the bottom ones. Plus, you worry about waking people up every time you climb up or down, and your stuff keeps falling out onto the metal grate.
“Let’s have a go,” I say, stepping forwards. “I’m gonna pick one while the odds are in my favour.” I flex my hands as if preparing to play the piano, and then slowly draw out a long white straw. “Boom.” I speak like this when I’m diving. “Gonna.” “Boom.” When you spend so much time in such close quarters with one another, language, like just about everything else, is contagious.
“Lucky, Deano, lucky,” says Rich. Most of the guys here call me Deano, because of my surname. Or they call me “lad,” “mate,” or “pal.” Doesn’t bother me. If they’re afraid of my femaleness, that’s not my problem. Besides, there are hardly any women who do this job. In fact, the first time I ever heard of sat diving was on a BBC series about extreme jobs called Real Men. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted to be a Real Man. And being a Real Man makes me feel like more of a Real
