Diving Belles (3 page)

On the first dive, Iris had got a sense of how big it all was, how vast; emptier and more echoing than she had thought possible. It made her feel giddy and sick. She had presumed that there would be something here – she didn’t know what – but she hadn’t imagined this nothingness stretching on and on. She shuddered, hating the cold and the murk, regretting ever picking up the envelope from the table. The silence bothered her. She didn’t like to think of him somewhere so silent.

As she went deeper, small memories rose up to meet her. A fine net of flour over his dark hair; a song on his lips that went, ‘My old man was a sailor, I saw him once a year’; a bee, but she didn’t know what the bee was connected to.

She saw something up ahead: a small, dark shape swimming towards her. Her stomach lurched. It had to be him – he had sensed her and was coming to meet her! She pulled on the cord, once, hard, to stop. The bell drifted down for a few moments then lurched to a halt. Iris craned her neck forwards, trying to make him out properly. She should have done this years ago.

He came closer, swimming with his arms behind him. What colour was that? His skin looked very dark; a kind of red-brown. He swam closer and her heart dropped down into her feet. It was an octopus. Its curled legs drifted out behind as it swam around the bell, its body like a bag snagged on a tree. She had thought this octopus was her husband! Shame and a sudden tiredness coursed through her. She tried to laugh but only the smallest corner of her mouth twitched, then wouldn’t stop. ‘You silly fool,’ she told herself. ‘You silly fool.’ She watched its greedy eyes inspecting the bell, then pulled three times on the cord. A spasm of weariness gripped her. She told Demelza she hadn’t seen anything.

‘I thought you had, when you wanted to stop suddenly,’ Demelza said. She took a swig from a hip flask and offered it to Iris, who sipped until her dry lips burned. ‘Wouldn’t have thought they’d have been mid-water like that, but still, they can be wily bastards at times.’ She turned round and squinted at Iris, who was sitting very quietly with her eyes closed. ‘No sea legs,’ Demelza said to herself. ‘You know what the best advice I heard was?’ she asked loudly. ‘You can’t chuck them back in once they’re out.’ She shook her head and bit her knuckles. ‘I had a woman yesterday, a regular. She comes every couple of weeks. Her husband is susceptible to them, she says. So she goes down, we net him up and lug him back on to the deck, all pale and fat, dripping salt and seaweed like a goddamn seal. And all the time I’m thinking, what the hell’s the point? Leave him down there. But she’s got it in her head that she can’t live without him so that’s that.’

‘Maybe she loves him,’ Iris said.

‘Bah. There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ Demelza said. She laughed and laughed, barking and cawing like a seagull. ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ she said again, baring her teeth to the wind. ‘Plenty, fish, sea,’ she muttered over and over as she steered back to the harbour.

On her second dive Iris heard the beginning of a song threading through the water towards her. It was slow and deep, more of an ache in her bones than something she heard in her ears. There was a storm building up but Demelza thought it would hold off long enough to do the dive. At first Iris thought the sound was the wind, stoked right up and reaching down into the water – it was the same noise as the wind whistling through gaps in boats, or over the mouth of a milk bottle, but she knew that the wind wouldn’t come down this far. It thrummed through the metal and into her bones, maybe just her old body complaining again, playing tricks, but she felt so light and warm. The song grew louder, slowing Iris’s heart, pressing her eyes closed like kind thumbs. It felt good to have her eyes closed. The weight of the water pressed in but it was calm, inviting; it beckoned to her. She wanted to get out of the bell, just get up and slip through the gap at the bottom. She almost did it. She was lifting herself stiffly from the bench when the song stopped and slipped away like a cloud diffusing into the sky, leaving her cold and lonely inside the bell. Then the storm began, quietly thumping far away like someone moving boxes around in a dusty attic.

Iris waited, shuffling and sighing. She felt tired and uncomfortable. Her last dive. She wanted tea and a hot-water bottle. It was chilly and there were too many shapes, too many movements – she couldn’t keep hold of it all at once, things moved then vanished, things shifted out of sight. She was sick and tired of half glimpsing things. It had all been a waste of time. She cursed Annie for making her think there was a chance, that it wasn’t all over and done with. She would give the dress away and after a while she would see somebody else walking round in it. Her glasses dug into her nose.

She felt for the cord, ready to pull it and get Demelza to haul her back up. She had never felt so old. She stretched the skin on the backs of her hands and watched it go white, and then wrinkle up into soft pouches. Her eyes were dry and itchy. She saw a flicker of something bright over to one side of the wreck. It was red, or maybe gold; she had just seen a flash. Then a large shape moved into the collapsed hollow of the ship, followed by two more shapes. There were a group of them, all hair and muscled tails and movement. They were covered in shells and kelp and their long hair was tangled and matted into dark, wet ropes. They eddied and swirled like pieces of bright, solidified water.

Then he was there. He broke away from the group and drifted through the wreck like a pale shaft of light. Iris blinked and adjusted her glasses. The twists and turns of his body – she knew it was him straight away, although there was something different, something more muscular, more streamlined and at home in the water about his body than she had ever seen. She leaned forwards and grabbed for the cord but then her throat tightened.

No one had told her he would be young. At no point had she thought he would be like this, unchanged since they’d gone to sleep that night all those years before. His skin! It was so thin, almost translucent, fragile and lovely with veins branching through him like blown ink. She had expected to see herself mirrored in him. She touched her own skin. His body moved effortlessly through the water. He was lithe, just as skinny, but more moulded, polished like a piece of sea glass.

He swam closer and she leaned back on the bench and held her breath, suddenly not wanting him to see her. She kept as still as possible, willing his eyes to slide past; they were huge and bright and more heavily lidded than she remembered. She leaned back further. He didn’t look at the bell. Bubbles streamed out of his colourless mouth. He was so beautiful, so strange. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

There were spots on her glasses and she couldn’t see him as well as she wanted to. She breathed on the lenses and wiped them quickly. Her hands shook and she fumbled with them, dropping them into the open water under the bench. They floated on the surface and she bent down to scoop them out but couldn’t reach. Her hips creaked and locked; she couldn’t reach down that far. One lens dipped into the water and then they sank completely. Iris blinked. Everything mixed together into a soft, light blur. She peered out, desperately trying to see him. He was still there. He was keeping close to the seabed, winging his way around the wreck, but everything about him had seeped into a smudgy paleness, like a running watercolour or an old photograph exposed to light. He was weaving in and out of the train carriages, in through a door and out through a window, threading his body through the silence and the rust. Iris tried to keep him in focus, tried to concentrate on him so that she wouldn’t lose him. But she couldn’t tell if he had reappeared from one of the carriages. Where was he, exactly? It was as if he were melting slowly into the sea, the water infusing his skin; his skin becoming that bit of light, that bit of movement. Iris watched and waited until she didn’t know if he was there or not there, near or far away, staying or leaving.

Countless Stones

Rita could feel it in her toes; it was always the toes first with her. They were heavier and they ached and when she reached down to touch them they felt harder and colder than usual. She moved them around in the bed but it didn’t take the edge off. The middle of each toe had already turned into stone and the weight of them reminded her of the marbles she and her brother used to play with – grannies, kings, cat’s eyes – so that she could almost hear the soft clicks the marbles made when they hit each other. The top layer of skin had started to dry out and soon it would harden like that brittle layer of sand that bakes and hardens on a beach. And then there was the first pang of the craving for salt that she always got when this happened.

How long did she have? About ten hours. The whole thing usually took about ten hours. It was slow, but not slow enough that she couldn’t feel it if she concentrated: each skin layer seizing up and turning into stone from the inside out, a sort of tightening, a sort of ache, a sort of clicking as stone was added to stone, as if someone were building a house inside her.

It was a Sunday morning and it was early and dark. The clock on the shelf read six. Rita lay in the warm dent of the mattress. There were a lot of things that she had to do but she didn’t get up straight away. Through the wall, the woman next door shifted and laughed quietly in her sleep. The heating clicked on. She would need to turn that off, or set it for an hour in the middle of the day to stop the pipes freezing. It had been a cold winter. Most mornings there was ice inside the windows. Rita had an extra duvet and she had bought an electric blanket which could be switched on one half at a time so she didn’t need to heat the empty side of the bed if she didn’t want to. She liked practical things like that – she had a bottle of hand soap that could be used without water and jump-leads small enough to fit in a handbag.

A car drove past slowly. It had been snowing on and off for the past week. All along the street, snow was piled on cars and trees, all blues and purples and greys, and small icicles hung off the branches like the ghosts of leaves. Everything seemed quieter in the snow, quieter and further away, so that, lying there in bed, Rita had the vague feeling that if she got up and opened the curtains she would see that the world had packed up and moved on without her during the night. It was only a vague feeling though and she turned her thoughts to other things: jobs she needed to do, her plants, salt. When she was thinking like that, Rita often said words out loud, so that now she said ‘lights’, now she said ‘teeth’, but then she clenched her jaw because she didn’t want to think about her teeth turning into stone; the awful, dry crumbliness of it.

She swung her legs out of bed and pulled thick socks over her feet. She went downstairs and into the kitchen. Before she did anything else, she got a glass of water and tipped salt into it and drank it down, crunching up the thick sediment at the bottom. She switched on the radio. ‘Don’t delay,’ the end of an advert said. ‘Visit Lighting World for all your lighting needs,’ said another. She’d read somewhere that a man had bought a lamp from there and it had caught fire. The smell of burnt plastic followed him for days. The news came on. ‘More snow is expected. Temperatures reaching down to minus ten in places.’ Rita filled up the kettle and put it on. There was a cold breeze from nowhere and suddenly she was up on the cliffs with the other standing stones, watching a buzzard rising and circling on its huge spread of wings. Then she was back in front of the kettle again and it had boiled.

She drank her tea and made toast, which she ate cold and dry. She rinsed the plate, never wanting to wash up outside of work; crumbs floating around in water could put her off food for days. Afterwards she checked the fridge to see if there was anything in there that would go off if she was away a long time. There wasn’t much: a portion of lasagne she’d been planning to have that night, a block of cheese, half a yellowing onion, milk. She didn’t know how long she would be away. There were people from the town who had been standing up in the circle for years – five, twelve, thirty. Rita had changed three times before and each time it had lasted less than a month. But you could never be sure. There was always the possibility that next time it would be for much longer. After a while, somebody would let themselves in and turn off your heating, your boiler. They would tidy things up and sort out the post on the doormat. They would turn off your fridge.

She went back upstairs and stood in her bedroom. It was small and dark. On one shelf there was a row of porcelain animals – deer and horses and owls – that she had kept from when she was a child. There was also a small trophy which wasn’t engraved and she couldn’t remember what she had won it for, or if she had even won it at all. She made the bed. She picked up her hairbrush and sat on the edge of the bed and started to brush her hair. She thought it had become paler: she was thirty-six and she thought that over the last few years it had become paler. She could never shift the stale bread and onion smell that working at the café left in it. Once in a while, if she looked at a magazine in a waiting room or saw an advert on TV, she would think about dying it, but she never did. She brushed her hair and tried not to think about it changing to stone, how heavy it would get, how it would drag on her neck and then clog up like it was full of grit, knitting together and drying and splitting and matting. She brushed and brushed her hair.

She was watering the plants and moving them into the warmest places in the house when the phone rang.

‘Hi Rita,’ Danny said. ‘You enjoying the snow?’ He always sounded nervous on the phone – Rita could tell that he was drawing stars all over the notebook he kept on the living-room table. He had pages and pages of stars.