Diving Belles
Authors: Lucy Wood
Diving Belles
‘Bewitching … magic encroaches upon their narratives as slowly but surely as the incoming tide, so that even the most outlandish goings-on come to seem natural’
Daily Mail
‘Beautiful’
Harper’s Bazaar
‘It is as if the Cornish moors and coasts have whispered secrets into Lucy Wood’s ears and, in response, she has fashioned exquisite tales of mystery and humanity’ Ali Shaw, author of
The Girl with Glass Feet
‘A vibrant new voice’
Tatler
‘A refreshing debut collection … a winning combination of spooky mystery and toast-and-tea cosiness, with much warmth and tenderness, even as an unsettling quality remains, as if Wood might be enjoying a joke you can’t quite figure out’
Metro
‘One of the best aspects of these stories is the way in which the daily lives of their characters become imbued with a mystical, folkloric significance … Wood’s major talent is as an observer of the everyday. She captures the drift of life in a modern West Country town superbly’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Wood has a wonderfully deadpan way with her surreal subject matter’
Literary Review
‘Lucy Wood is a sorceress. These stories unfold in a dreamy marine light, one that reveals the miraculous in the everyday’ Karen Russell, author of
Swamplandia!
and
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
‘Vividly imagined, utterly original and grounded in the belief that metaphor, allegory and symbolism are the cornerstones of literature’
Sydney Morning Herald
For Mum and Dad
Contents
Lights in Other People’s Houses
Some Drolls Are Like That and Some Are Like This
Iris crossed her brittle ankles and folded her hands in her lap as the diving bell creaked and juddered towards the sea. At first, she could hear Demelza shouting and cursing as she cranked the winch, but as the bell was cantilevered away from the deck her voice was lost in the wind. Cold air rushed through the open bottom of the bell, bringing with it the rusty smell of
The
Matriarch
’s liver-spotted flanks and the brackish damp of seaweed. The bench Iris was sitting on was narrow and every time the diving bell rocked she pressed against the footrest to steady herself. She kept imagining that she was inside a church bell and that she was the clapper about to ring out loudly into the water, announcing something. She fixed her eyes on the small window and didn’t look down. There was no floor beneath her feet, just a wide open gap, and the sea peaked and spat. She lurched downwards slowly, metres away from the side of the trawler, where a layer of barnacles and mussels clung on like the survivors of a shipwreck.
She fretted with her new dress and her borrowed shoes. She tried to smooth her white hair, which turned wiry when it was close to water. The wooden bench was digging into her and the wind was rushing up her legs, snagging at the dress and exposing the map of her veins. She’d forgotten tights; she always wore trousers and knew it was a mistake to wear a dress. She’d let herself get talked into it, but had chosen brown, a small victory. She gathered the skirt up and sat on it. If this was going to be the first time she saw her husband in forty-eight years she didn’t want to draw attention to the state of her legs. ‘You’ve got to be heartbreaking as hell,’ Demelza advised her customers, pointing at them with her cigarette. ‘Because you’ve got a lot of competition down there.’
Salt and spray leapt up to meet the bell as it slapped into the sea. Cold, dark water surged upwards. Iris lifted her feet, waiting for the air pressure in the bell to level off the water underneath the footrest. She didn’t want anything oily or foamy to stain Annie’s shoes. She went through a checklist – Vanish, cream cleaner, a bit of bicarb – something would get it out but it would be a fuss. She pulled her cardigan sleeves down and straightened the life-jacket. Thousands of bubbles forced themselves up the sides of the diving bell, rolling over the window like marbles. She peered out but couldn’t see anything beyond the disturbed water.
As she was lowered further the sea calmed and stilled. Everything was silent. She put her feet back down and looked into the disc of water below them, which was flat and thick and barely rippled. She could be looking at a lino or slate floor rather than a gap that opened into all those airless fathoms. A smudged grey shape floated past. The diving bell jolted and tipped, then righted itself and sank lower through the water.
Iris held her handbag against her chest and tried not to breathe too quickly. She had about two hours’ worth of oxygen but if she panicked or became over-excited she would use it up more quickly. Her fingers laced and unlaced. ‘I don’t want to have to haul you back up here like a limp fish,’ Demelza had told her each time she’d gone down in the bell. ‘Don’t go thinking you’re an expert or anything. One pull on the cord to stop, another to start again. Two tugs for the net and three to come back up. Got it?’ Iris had written the instructions down the first time in her thin, messy writing and put them in her bag along with tissues and mints, just in case. The pull-cord was threaded through a tube that ran alongside the chain attaching the bell to the trawler. Demelza tied her end of it to a cymbal that she’d rigged on to a tripod, so that it crashed loudly whenever someone pulled on it. The other end of the cord drooped down and brushed roughly against the top of Iris’s head.
She couldn’t see much out of the window; it all looked grey and endless, as if she were moving through fog rather than water. The diving bell dropped down slowly, slower, and then stopped moving altogether. The chain slackened and for a second it seemed as though the bell had been cut off and was about to float away. Then the chain straightened out and Iris rocked sideways, caught between the tension above and the bell’s heavy lead rim below. She hung suspended in the mid-depths of the sea. This had happened on her second dive as well. Demelza had suddenly stopped winching, locked the handle and gone to check over her co-ordinates one last time. She wouldn’t allow the diving bell to land even a foot off the target she’d set herself.
The bell swayed. Iris sat very still and tried not to imagine the weight of the water pressing in. She took a couple of rattling breaths. It was like those moments when she woke up in the middle of the night, breathless and alone, reaching across the bed and finding nothing but a heap of night-chilled pillows. She just needed to relax and wait, relax and wait. She took out a mint and crunched down hard, the grainy sugar digging into her back teeth.
After a few moments Demelza started winching again and Iris loosened her shoulders, glad to be on the move. Closer to the seabed, the water seemed to clear. Then, suddenly, there was the shipwreck, looming upwards like an unlit bonfire, all splints and beams and slumped funnels. The rusting mainframe arched and jutted. Collapsed sheets of iron were strewn across the sand. The diving bell moved between girders and cables before stopping just above the engine. The
Queen Mary
’s
sign, corroded and nibbled, gazed up at Iris. Empty cupboards were scattered to her left. The cargo ship had been transporting train carriages and they were lying all over the seabed, marooned and broken, like bodies that had been weighed down with stones and buried at sea. Orange rust bloomed all over them. Green and purple seaweed drifted out through the windows. Red man’s fingers and dead man’s fingers pushed up from the wheel arches.
Demelza thought that this would be a good place to trawl. She’d sent Iris down to the same spot already. ‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘they all come back. They stay local, you see. They might go gallivanting off for a while, but they always come back to the same spot. They’re nostalgic bastards, sentimental as hell. That makes them stupid. Not like us though, eh?’ she added, yanking Iris’s life-jacket straps tighter.
A cuckoo wrasse weaved in and out of the ship’s bones. Cuttlefish mooned about like lost old men. Iris spat on her glasses, wiped them on her cardigan, hooked them over her ears, and waited.
Over the years, she had tried to banish as many lonely moments as possible. She kept busy. She took as many shifts as she could at the hotel, and then when that stopped she became addicted to car boot sales – travelling round to different ones at the weekends, sifting through chipped plates and dolls and candelabra, never buying anything, just sifting through. She joined a pen pal company and started writing to a man in Orkney; she liked hearing about the sudden weather and the seals hauled out on the beach, his bus and his paintings. ‘I am fine as always,’ she would write, but stopped when he began to send dark, tormented paintings, faces almost hidden under black and red.
She knew how to keep busy most of the day and, over time, her body learned to shut down and nap during the blank gap straight after lunch. It worked almost every time, although once, unable to sleep and sick of the quiet humming of the freezer – worse than silence she often thought – she turned it off and let the food melt and drip on the floor. Later, regretting the waste, she’d spent hours cooking, turning it into pies and casseroles and refreezing it for another day.
She ate in front of films she borrowed from the library. She watched anything she could get her hands on. It was when the final credits rolled, though, when the music had stopped and the tape rewound, that her mind became treacherous and leapt towards the things she tried not to think about during the day. That was when she lay back in the chair – kicking and jolting between wakefulness and sleep as if she were thrashing about in shallow water – and let her husband swim back into the house.
Then, she relived the morning when she had woken to the smell of salt and damp and found a tiny fish in its death throes on the pillow next to her. There was only a lukewarm indent in the mattress where her husband should have been. She swung her legs out of bed and followed a trail of sand down the stairs, through the kitchen and towards the door. Her heart thumped in the soles of her bare feet. The door was open. Two green crabs high-stepped across the slates. Bladderwrack festooned the kitchen, and here and there, on the fridge, on the kettle, anemones bloomed, fat and dark as hearts. It took her all day to scrub and bleach and mop the house back into shape. By the time she’d finished he could have been anywhere. She didn’t phone the police; no one ever phoned the police. No one was reported missing.
