The Kinsella Sisters (15 page)

There was to be a big party to celebrate the full moon later that evening, they learned when they arrived at the dive outfit, with an international DJ spinning ‘fresh and funky’ sounds, but before the party started, there were bubbles to be blown.

They’d booked two dives over the internet. The first took them and half a dozen other divers by cabin cruiser to Shark Island, where their dive master took them down twenty metres to visit a fairy-tale city of hard coral surrounded by gardens of multicoloured soft coral, where starry pufferfish gaped at them and titan triggerfish headbutted them, letting them know in no uncertain terms that if their nests were disturbed, they were in for it. A leopard shark lay basking on the sandy bottom, looking like a pasha being cooled by coral fans, and Izzy got a breathtaking glimpse of a spotted ray, soaring high above her like a blue angel.

Back on board, Izzy and Lucy and the other divers dismantled their equipment before speeding back to Sairee, where they lugged their gear up to the dive shop, and hosed it down. On Samui, all this had been done for them by dive masters. Here, everything was hands-on, and Izzy revelled in the sheer hard physicality of the work. This was what diving should be about, not having your kit donned and doffed and disappeared by a team of dive masters behaving like footmen. But as Izzy went to hose down her mask, she saw that another of her hair extensions was wound around the rubber strap. She felt a flutter of panic.

‘Lucy?’ she said
sotto voce
, as they queued to have their logbooks signed. ‘Is there something wrong with my hair? I think I’ve lost a couple of extensions.’

Lucy took a look, and shrugged. ‘It’s hard to tell while it’s still wet,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a proper look when it’s dried off.’

A beach-side cafe beckoned for supper. They ordered slurpy Thai noodles, fish cakes and a bottle of Tiger beer–no sommelier to proffer wine for tasting here, or maitre d’ choreographing a host of waiters with ‘exquisitely presented’ fusion food on silver salvers.

‘Wouldn’t it be bliss if we could stay here for the rest of the holiday?’ Lucy said. She took off her sunglasses and slid them onto her head, the better to observe a beautiful boy who was setting up for a night dive.

‘I couldn’t do that to Dad, Luce. The very most I could push it without feeling guilty would be one more day’

‘Why not phone and run it by him?’

‘He’d probably freak. He’d think that I was making the call under duress, with some white slave trader holding a Luger to my head.’

‘You’re lucky to have a dad who cares so much about you. Mine probably doesn’t even know where I am right now.’

Izzy shrugged. ‘It can be a real pain. I dread the first time I’ll have to bring a boyfriend home to meet him. He’ll be like Robert De Niro in
Meet the Parents.’
Izzy picked up the bill and scanned it. ‘Shit. Can you believe it? This entire meal cost what you’d pay for the cheapest starter in that joint on Samui.’ Extracting baht from her bum bag, Izzy handed the banknotes to a passing waiter. Then she reached up, shook out her hair, and ran her fingers through it. ‘It’s dry now, Luce. Will you take a—’

Izzy froze suddenly, eyes fixed on her hands. Hanks of hair were dangling limply from her fingers like strands of seaweed. She turned stricken eyes on Lucy, who had clamped her hands over her mouth, hiding what might have been an expression of horror, or one of guilty amusement.

‘Ohmi–
ohmigod
, Lucy! My hair! Ohmigod! What am I going to do?’

‘Oh,’ said Lucy. ‘Oh dear. Oh. Dear.’

And then Lucy started to laugh.

Izzy shook her hands to rid herself of the offending hair extensions, and fixed her friend with a hostile look. ‘Well, thanks a bunch. That
is
helpful’ Yanking her sarong from around her shoulders, she draped it over her head. ‘It’s that bad, is it?’

‘Um. It’s pretty bad, all right,’ said Lucy, clearly making an effort to contain herself.

‘On a scale of one to ten, how bad?’

‘Um…seven?’

‘Seven? Oh,
fuck!
I’m a laughing stock. What’ll I do?’

‘Don’t worry about it, Izzy. We’re going on a dive now. Nobody’s going to see your hair underwater. Chill’

‘Chill yourself. It’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who looks like Worzel Gummidge.’

At this, Lucy laughed so hard that she’d actually went, ‘Ha-ha hee hee hee,’ like Taz in
Looney Tunes.

‘It’s not
funny,’
said Izzy.

‘Worzel Gummidge! That’s it! That’s exactly who you remind me of! Hee hee ha-ha-ha!’

‘Shut up, Lucy.’

‘Sorry’ Lucy looked contrite, and then spoiled the effect by letting rip a great snort of mirth. ‘Sorry,’ she said again.

A couple with whom they’d dived earlier raced past them, heading for the dive boat, which was moored some eighty metres down the beach. Lucy threw a look at her dive watch and made a face. ‘Yikes. We’re late.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t care? If we don’t get going now, Iz, we’re going to miss the dive.’

‘I’m not going on the dive.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t go, looking like this.’

‘Oh, don’t be daft! It’s not that bad, really.’

‘You said it was a seven.’

‘I meant more of a six. Please, Iz. It’s a beautiful night for
diving. We
can’t
miss it. Look, why not grab a hat from that stall.’ Lucy got to her feet and headed towards a beach vendor who was selling souvenirs and novelties. ‘C’mon, Iz!’ she threw back over her shoulder. ‘We’re running out of time. Look, they’ve nearly all boarded.’

Further down the beach, the divers were congregating on board the boat. Even at this distance, Izzy could hear laughter, and get a sense of the buzz that was beginning to build. She wanted to be part of it, she wanted to be down there, weightless in water. Hell! What did it matter what she looked like? Impulsively, she followed Lucy over to the souvenir stall.

‘A hat, please–no, not for me, for my friend,’ Lucy was saying.

‘A beautiful hat for a beautiful lady!’ said the smiling vendor. ‘This one is good, yes?’ He took a wide-brimmed sunhat from a hook, and brandished it at her. Izzy could hardly wear a floppy sunhat on a night dive. She shook her head and pointed at an assortment of baseball caps.

‘This one?’ said the vendor, waving a cap at her. ‘Or this one?’

‘That one,’ said Izzy, pointing randomly as she pulled baht from her bum bag.

‘Quick, quick, Izzy!’ Lucy started legging it down the beach. ‘They’re doing a head count.’

Izzy handed over the requisite amount of baht, took the cap from the vendor, and jammed it on her head. Then she raced off after Lucy, feeling the flap flap flap of the rubbish hair extensions–or what was left of them–as they bounced off her shoulder blades.

Their hire gear was on board, waiting for them. There were more divers on this trip, so a little confusion reigned as people stepped over piles of equipment, trying to identify what belonged to whom. Izzy pulled on her neoprene shortie and made her way to the port side, where Lucy had started to fill in details of the morning’s dive in her logbook. She glanced up as Izzy joined
her, and Izzy registered at once the taken-aback expression on her friend’s face.

‘What is it now?’ she demanded.

‘It’s–um–it’s just…what on earth made you choose that hat?’

‘I could hardly go for a sunhat. I know baseball caps are a bit naff, but—’

‘It’s not the cap,’ Lucy told her. ‘It’s the slogan on it.’

‘It has a slogan?’

‘Yes.’

Glancing to left and to right to make sure no one was looking, Izzy whipped the cap off her head. Another hair extension came with it, and she threw it overboard with a vexed ‘Get off!’ before turning her attention to the slogan on her cap. It read: ‘I Like 2 Dyke.’

‘Oh, no!’ cried Izzy, slamming the cap back on her head. ‘Oh, no!’

Beside her, Lucy started to laugh again.

‘Some friend you are, Luce,’ Izzy told her crossly. ‘How can you laugh? This is beyond mortifying.’

‘You’re telling me. Everyone will assume I’m your girlfriend, girlfriend.’

Folding her arms and legs in an attempt to make herself look smaller and thus less conspicuous, Izzy started casting surreptitious looks from under the peak of her baseball cap at all the dudes and dudettes who were diving with them this evening. Nobody was wearing headgear, apart from a hot black guy who was sporting a green, white and gold bandanna. Izzy’s naffness stuck out like a sore thumb, and the worst thing in the world was that she could not take the cap off. On the starboard side, two stunning girls were whispering and giggling together, and she was convinced that they were giggling about her ‘I Like 2 Dyke’ cap.

‘Good evening,’ Izzy heard an Australian accent say, as she
glowered down at her toes. ‘I’m Howard Hanna, and I’ll be leading this evening’s dive along with my assistant dive masters, Lee from China, and Finn Byrne, who hails all the way from Ireland.’

Ireland? Izzy glanced up from her toes, and snuck a peek stern-ward at the Irish dive master.

‘Yo, Finn!’ came a call from aft. ‘Great name for a diver.’

‘Not as good as my mate, Muff’s,’ came the ready reply.

There was much laughter, and as Finn’s eyes scanned the faces of the assembled divers, Izzy lunged for the sunnies on Lucy’s head, and jammed them on.

‘What are you
doing?’
asked an indignant Lucy.

‘Shut up!’ said Izzy. ‘Sh, sh, sh! Ohmigod!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s him! Finn!’

‘Who?’

‘The bloke I told you about. The cute bogger from Lissamore.’

‘No! The one whose mother is after your dad?’

‘Yes. Oh, oh–what am I going to do, Lucy?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just–I just don’t want him to know it’s me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why do you think? Not only am I wearing a baseball cap that says “I Like 2 Dyke”, I’ve got the worst hair in the world.’

Lucy started to laugh again. ‘So here you are, trapped on a boat with him. How do you intend to keep your identity secret? You can hardly go diving in your current disguise. Or are you going to keep my sunglasses on under your mask?’

‘Shut
up
, Luce. Let me think.’ Izzy pulled her sarong up around her face, and thought. Then: ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘When we’re donning fins and masks, be sure to keep yourself between me and him, will you? Once we’re in the water, he won’t have a clue who I am.’

Izzy had a point. With regulators in their mouths, and masks
obscuring most of the face, it was virtually impossible to recognise people underwater.

Howard had set up his whiteboard, and was preparing to draw a map of the dive site. ‘OK. Listen up, people, while I outline the plan,’ he said in his authoritative Australian accent, and Izzy and Lucy shut up at once. They could be in for a thrill at White Rock, according to Howard. Word around the dive outfits was that a whale shark had been sighted there, and if they were very lucky, it might still be in the vicinity.

‘Y’all know the hand signal for shark?’ he asked.

As one, the divers raised their hands to their foreheads, fingers together, representing a shark fin.

‘Good. When you see Finn or me or Lee making that hand signal, you’ll know there’s a once-in-a-lifetime treat in store. Sightings of whale sharks at night are extremely rare.’

Izzy could feel her heart pitter-pat a little faster in anticipation, and tried to slow it down by taking deep breaths. As the boat dropped anchor, she adjusted the strap on her mask, slid her feet into her fins, and stuck her reg in her mouth. On the command, she stepped off the dive platform into the sea, loving the surge and fizz of the warm water as it churned around her in an explosion of bubbles and refracted, silvery light. Then she was at the surface, bobbing next to Lucy, and the next diver into the water was…She waited until he’d resurfaced after entry, then steeled herself to look into his eyes behind the mask…Finn.

Finn Byrne, the instructor had called him. Funny, she’d always thought his name was Kinsella. But then she remembered that that was the surname of his mother and aunt, which must mean that Byrne was his father’s surname. Who might his father be, she wondered. Probably some local Lissamore hippy type, if the mother was anything to go by. He didn’t look much like Río. His black hair was slicked against his skull, his eyes behind the mask were fringed with dark lashes, and on each of his earlobes, a bead of water hung, like diamond
droplets. Sheesh, he
was
übercute, and–having copped a load of him clad in surf shirt and shorts–Izzy was more aware than ever that he was pretty damn fit too.

Finn showed not a flicker of recognition as his eyes met hers, and Izzy knew that, once underwater, when her features would be even more indistinct, her anonymity was guaranteed. She and Lucy looked at each other and gave the OK signal, and Izzy could see that behind the mask Lucy was still smirking as they switched on their torches and descended.

The dive was as near to heaven on earth as Izzy could ever aspire to: the reef came alive at night, like a red-light district in some Gothic metropolis. They negotiated swim-throughs and peered into caves and under rocky outcrops where murderous morays glared back at them, disturbed by the light of their torches. They somersaulted, they played peek-a-boo with anemones, they communed with the jewel-like inhabitants of the big blue, and finally they were rewarded with every diver’s dream: they finned alongside the biggest fish on earth. The whale shark emerged from sapphire depths and cruised past them, and Izzy understood at last the real meaning of the words ‘majestic’ and ‘magnificent’. She felt as if she were in a cathedral, and the words of the world’s first great diver, Jacques Cousteau, came back to her: ‘Underwater, man becomes an archangel.’ Oh, Izzy so adored being an archangel that when Finn finally made the signal to ascend, she wanted to take her regulator out of her mouth and shout: ‘No, no, no!’

But up they went. Slowly Ascend from Every Dive, thought Izzy, repeating one of scuba’s many mantras while scrutinising a novice above her who was evidently having problems with his buoyancy. This boy was more hippo than archangel, ascending in fits and starts, and clearly giving Finn cause for concern. As he tweaked his protégé’s fin to attract his attention, the boy executed an awkward kick–and got Finn directly in the face. In the beam of her torch, Izzy saw Finn sweep his right arm out
to the side, a sure indication that his regulator had been dislodged. As had his mask, Izzy realised. Finn made no attempt to grab it as it drifted downward–his priority was to reinstate his breathing apparatus–but Izzy knew that a diver without a mask is effectively a blind diver. She had lost her mask once during a training session in a flooded quarry, and the sense of vertigo she’d experienced had completely disoriented her: for several terrifying moments she hadn’t been able to work out which way was up and which down, and she’d suffered from nightmares for weeks afterwards.