Wreckage

WRECKAGE

The June sun fizzed then dissolved as the sea rushed over her face. Suspended in that sliver of space between exhilaration and anxiety, an unfamiliar thought washed through her mind. This time, would she come back?

She should not have been going alone. Meghan knew that. So did the Porthoustock fisherman she’d persuaded to take her. He’d no love of divers that was for sure. More than once, just for sport, they’d cut the orange-buoyed ropes securing his costly lobster pots, pots he’d never get to retrieve. Sometimes they’d take the buoys as trophies. Or to decorate their gardens. Other times, believing themselves noble saviours, they would release his catch of lobster and crab, making it that much harder to put food on the table through the winter months. The £150 plus fuel costs she’d offered him ‘righted some wrongs’, he’d said. But she knew from the deepening sun-cuts in his face that despite the wrongs, and the money she offered, his agreement was not without conscience.

Meghan conducted her solo ‘buddy-check’, silently mouthing the mantra designed to keep her safe: BWRAF—buoyancy, weights, releases, air, final OK. She mentally noted the presence of the sharp, serrated knife strapped to her calf in case she became entangled in abandoned fishing net. Sliding her left hand down her right shoulder strap, she checked the security of the underwater camera clipped to the D-ring on her buoyancy jacket, and the torch that would help her find what she was looking for. Then placing the regulator in her mouth, Meghan crossed her arms over her chest and let the weight of her air tank tip her backward from where she sat precariously on the side of the boat. And she fell.

Breaking back through the surface, as she’d done a thousand times before, she touched the tip of her right index finger to the tip of her thumb and made the familiar ‘OK’ signal to the boatman.

‘Forty minutes,’ he warned.

She signalled ‘OK’ again, before giving a ‘thumbs down’—the signal for descent—and slowly let the air out of her buoyancy jacket, slipping under the water, leaving only pools of exhaled breath on the surface.

She loved this place.

Porthallow Cove was sheltered from westerlies—the prevailing wind—and in any case, today saw nothing more than a gentle Force Two, meaning no white horses racing toward the shore. Nevertheless, it didn’t do to forget the cove was perilously close to Manacles Reef, with its ferocious currents and gigantic submerged rocks that had bitten their way into many a ship’s hull. Diving the Manacles, a badge of honour for many divers, was restricted to slack water, that hour between the ebb and flow of the tide when the sea idled, before roaring back into life. Only a fool would push their luck too far. But it happened, and the Manacles had taken many a life. Sailors. Fishermen. Travellers. The unwise. The unlucky. Churchyards on the Peninsula testified to the tragedies, as well as the courage of the Cornish men and women who’d risked their lives trying to save passengers and crew alike. Many were saved, but many more perished, like those lying cradled in one grave in St Keverne, its monumental granite headstone bearing the stark word: Mohegan. But none of this was on her mind now as looking down she gasped at the emerging beauty. It was just as it had always been, like diving an aquarium

Porthallow reef, at little more than ten metres depth, and on such a bright day, was crystal clear. Scattered below, littering the quartz-glittered granite, sparkling like jewels in the penetrating sunlight, were round white sea urchins, their shells so much lovelier in life than dried out in baskets outside souvenir shops. And purple snakelock anemones, their sting the reason she always wore the lightweight neoprene gloves, even when the water temperature was, for Cornwall, a balmy 18oC. Long-legged spider crabs clambered like alien creatures over the sand and silt seabed. Camouflaged cuttlefish scuttled and merged into the tall swaying kelp, furred with plankton. Outlines of flat fish were visible in the sand beneath which they hid. Tiny velvet swimming crabs danced on their rear legs, waving their claws and daring the world to take them on. Transparent shrimp flitted round dark mouths of inlets where conger eels lurked. Dog fish darted in and around. Silvered mackerel, wrasse, multi-coloured cuckoo fish—so much life …

Her throat tightened.

Meghan checked her air gauge and watch. Six minutes already gone. Releasing more air from her jacket she completed her descent, hovering in neutral buoyancy two metres from the seabed. At this depth it was shallow enough for her air to last a full forty minutes, giving her a safety margin before the sea began to suck back through the reef. Kicking gently with her right fin, she turned her upper body to the left and began to track her intended route.

Except for the seasons, the terrain here did not change much, not even after a storm. That was something they’d both loved: revisiting familiar territory, knowing which nooks were home to a crab or lobster, which shelves or gullies housed a conger eel. The natural world seemed timeless. Only the wrecks would really change, as the salt water eroded their twisted metal skins, sculpting them less over decades.

They’d dived the globe together. Thailand. Egypt. Mexico. Australia. Canaries. Sri Lanka. But always they’d come home to these waters, where visibility was never as good, wildlife never as colourful, nor water temperatures something to relish. But there was always something magical about the waters off the Lizard. Always something to bring back.

Nothing made a dive more special than discovering ‘treasure’: a John Dory to photograph on a night dive, its startled spines caught large in the torchlight, a discarded urchin shell from a drift dive out from Penzance, a piece of clay pipe from a German U-boat off Pendennis headland, But the best things they every brought back were the stories.

The one they’d loved and laughed over most often was their find on the wreck of the SS Volnay, a heavy schooner-rigged steamer merchant ship lying off Porthallow. Destroyed in 1917 by a German mine, she’d carried, amongst other things, munitions—many shells and detonators remaining live despite a century submerged.

It was usual for divers to be dropped onto the wreck’s bow, or more often, onto what remained of her three boilers. On one dive they’d found a perfectly intact lump of coal that should have been used to fire her engines. The size of a large house brick, the coal was like a large diamond-shaped bar of black soap, the date impressed into its face—1917. Delighted with their find they’d taken it back to the cottage they shared in an out-of-the way hamlet near Cadgwith and left it to dry. That winter, short of cash and coal for their ancient Cornish range, they’d lit paper and wood from an old dining chair. Then, not expecting to succeed, placed the salvaged coal into the flames.

Within seconds it had burst into life, flaring as if enraged it had ever been lost, left for so long, never fulfilling its purpose. She’d marvelled at its defiant spirit, arguing it proved the adage ‘where there’s life there’s hope,’ but Sarah had laughed, roundly mocking her, saying she was full of romantic nonsense: more like it was cordite that had become welded into the side of the coal when the ship went down.

The seabed held the remnants of so many lives. For that reason, wreck dives were the most special. She understood the desire to retrieve something, return something that had been taken away; she understood the compulsion to restore the balance, to right the unfairness. Sometimes the simplest piece of broken cup or plate could feel like the most precious find when it came with the knowledge that at some point in the distant past, a hand had held it, or lips sipped from it. Whether because of the lives attached to them, or the submerged worlds they had become, wrecks held a special magic, even more so than coral reefs. She could have stayed forever.

Meghan shook away the memories and began moving slowly, carefully, so her fin tips didn’t disturb the sand and silt, destroying the visibility. She knew why she was there; her purpose had been firm in her mind from the minute she’d made the decision, but just for a moment, she wanted to revisit everything she’d seen five years ago on their first dive together. She wanted to recapture the awe, the magic, their whole falling in love with the place.

She believed she would remember the route instinctively, that despite the years that had elapsed she would know exactly where she was heading, how long it would take. As she focused on navigating her way through the thick kelp, a sudden shadow passed overhead, momentarily blocking the light. She looked up sharply, her breath quickening, for a moment using her air more rapidly. It was a sun fish. She knew these odd, disc-shaped fish visited these waters, but she’d never seen one. They were a marvel. Female sunfish could lay more eggs than any other vertebrate in the world—up to three hundred million each season—a massive vessel of potential life.

Forgetting everything else, she turned to follow its strange shape, grasping for the carabiner clip of the camera attached to the D-ring on her buoyancy jacket. As the sun fish began to disappear, she finned harder, thankful the waters were giving less resistance than they might if she were swimming against an onshore current. But despite her efforts, the sun fish moved out of sight. Disappointment raked briefly before she instinctively checked her air gauge and watch; she had thirty minutes of air left if she had remained at a depth of twelve meters, but her depth gauge indicated she was in deeper water—sixteen metres. Her trajectory had been to travel north-east to south-west from the boat. But the distraction of the sun fish meant she had changed direction. Porthallow Cove was now behind her and New York, if she kept going for four thousand miles, in front. Her destination was little more than a couple of hundred feet from where the boat had dropped, and she’d been confident she could navigate by terrain from the route they had always taken. But she was no longer on that route. In her pursuit of the sun fish, she’d lost her way.

She turned a full 360 degrees but could spot nothing familiar. The waters at her new depth had grown darker, more turbid, taking on a gloomy, grey blue tinge. The outlines of the rocks that had given such definition before were now much less distinct. There was less colour. Less life. She checked her depth gauge again: eighteen metres now. Her breath came faster, filling her lungs and using air more quickly. With increased depth came increased atmospheric pressure and the neoprene of her suit began to compress, causing the fin on her right foot to loosen and try to break free. She grasped at the strap, pulling it tighter, at the same time remembering angry words from the past:

‘I don’t care,’ Sarah had spat, ‘how good a metaphor it is, or its place in feminist literature; a fin is a fin, not a flipper! Flipper’s a dolphin! Diving a Wreck? I doubt the woman ever dived in her life!’

‘It’s Diving into the Wreck. Maybe get your facts straight before you have a go about stuff beyond your limited comprehension,’ Meghan had retorted, grateful her favourite poet hadn’t committed the ultimate sin of referring to a diving mask as goggles.

‘A wreck, the wreck. Whatever.’ Sarah had snorted.

It was how they used to fight. With words aimed at soft but well-known targets. Words that were sometimes clever, sometimes cruel, and usually stirred by something stupid. For the past two years, Meghan had lain awake at night regretting every harsh word ever spoken between them.

At the time it had driven her mad, the way Sarah fixated on one detail, one notion, one word, then would rant, intransigently. Most times Meghan had been able to switch off to it, but not about that; she loved Adrienne Rich’s poems and that one particularly meant something to her beyond the words and interpretations. She’d read it to Sarah, wanting to share an intimacy.

But Sarah never got it, couldn’t see beyond the concrete. Or refused to. Instead, she’d focused on that one small detail and exposed it mercilessly. It was the same when Sarah got sick, that picking at words:

‘Necrotising fasciitis eats. Leprosy eats. This thing doesn’t EAT. It grows. It spreads. It colonises. It doesn’t EAT.’

That was her way of dealing with things. Get angry. Yell. Fight. But despite the fight, Sarah sank into the cancer, as it grew, and it spread, and it colonised.

Meghan blinked away the past as the sea around her became a cold, dark violet and her unplanned descent continued. With increased depth, each lungful of air took more from her tank than she’d allowed for. As she sank, she felt the weight of the lead around her waist, the steel tank on her back. As if in a dream, her left hand reached for the inflator valve on her buoyancy jacket that would lift her from the deepening waters. But she didn’t press it. She hovered there, unmoving, staring into the gloom. So easy, she thought, it would be so easy now. The weight would keep her down. The current would take her deeper, further out; thirty, forty metres. They’d never find her. It would spare them the funeral at least, that grotesque farce where nothing of a life is truly revealed. Nothing of the person is really there. It would spare everyone that.

Salt water stung her eyes. Instinctively she pressed the heel of her hand to the top rim of her mask and tilted her head, breathing out through her nose to clear her mask of what her training led her to believe was sea water. But it wasn’t the sea that had leaked in, and her vision continued to blur until she could no longer make out her surroundings. There were no shapes. No colour.

But there was a sound, faint and distant, but distinct. It sounded like a bell.

There’d been stories of a bell being heard by divers when they visited the Manacles Reef. It was said to be the bell of the SS Mohegan, which sank on only her second voyage. She’d hit the Manacles Reef on 14 October 1898 with the loss of a hundred and six of the 197 on board. The wreck of the Mohegan lays twenty-two meters down, gripped in the massive jaws of rock pinnacles, starkly covered in spongey white Dead Men’s Fingers.

Logic should have told her the sound could not be a bell. More like it was the creeping effect of nitrogen narcosis, a side effect of breathing compressed air at depth. No bell would ring down here, logic would have told her. But she was no longer in a place where logic worked well for her.

She heard it again. Straight ahead. Or was it to the right? At once she felt tired. And heavy. It felt as if it was the weight in her heart, not the lead weight belt around her waist. She closed her eyes. She was so tired she could sleep now. She could just drift away and sleep.

Sleep had not come easy since she’d first felt the lump in Sarah’s breast. They’d agreed it was probably nothing, but best to get it checked. Sarah, at only thirty, had always behaved as if she were immortal, always being the one who would want to take the biggest risks, make the deeper dives. She’d always been the one to take on the world. Meghan had never been that brave, but Sarah gave her the courage to face most of her fears. And while Sarah turned on the cancer with a warrior-like strength, and the belief that any enemy could be fought, although not necessarily beaten, Meghan had dealt with it the only way she could—by pretending it didn’t exist, that it would just go away, and everything would be fine. At times she still couldn’t bring herself to believe that Sarah was really gone and had been for two years. Two years in which Meghan had existed in a fog that sometimes seemed lighter, sometimes darker, but never disappeared.

After the funeral and friends had melted back into their own lives, Meghan began to see Sarah everywhere she went. So, for weeks she stopped going out. But Sarah filled the cottage and Meghan couldn’t bring herself to throw out her clothes and possessions. She was caught between the desire to move on and the delusion that one day Sarah might come back and would be mad as hell if she found her stuff gone.

She’d refused anti-depressants, but after the first year, gave in to her doctor’s pressure to have grief counselling. She went once, hating to hear her own words as they were reflected back to her, hating to admit that Sarah was gone, hating to reveal her own hopelessness. She’d tried alcohol, once swallowing half a leftover bottle of Sarah’s Jack Daniels, but it had only made her sick. And so, she slept. For six months, until the doctor's notes stopped and the anniversary of Sarah’s death loomed for a second time. In desperation, she’d gone back to the counsellor who’d suggested she did something positive, significant, to mark the anniversary.

On one of their many dives at Porthallow Cove, they’d found what might have been the signs of a shipwreck. There was precious little left of it, just a few large, ancient timbers that may have once formed the rigging. There was also a curved beam wedged into a gulley. They knew from the growth on the timbers and their condition it had been there a very long time. On one of their subsequent visits to the site, they’d found a stout, beige glazed pottery bottle, chipped, but not broken. The bottle had helped them date what they soon convinced themselves was from an uncharted, undiscovered wreck—their wreck. Whatever the truth of it didn’t really matter to them; for Sarah and Meghan, it was their find, their secret. Many an evening was spent spinning tales of the life of their wreck, who’d sailed her, where she’d been, how she was lost. The fantasy would grow and grow which was better, they’d wondered, the wreck, or the story of the wreck.

They never told a soul about the site and when the counsellor suggested Megan marked the anniversary by doing something significant, she knew exactly what she would do. She would go there.

Alone.

Once the thought had taken root in her mind, it would not go away. Some nights it woke her cold with sweat from fear of what she would have to face. She’d never dived alone. Sarah had been her strength. Goading, encouraging. There was so much she’d attempted only because of Sarah was there. The fear and desire to run away was overpowering at times, but one thing drove her on. Sarah would be so proud, she told herself. Sarah would be amazed. She wouldn’t believe it when Meghan told her. But you can’t tell her, a voice said, it’s pointless, Sarah will never know. But I’ll know, Meghan had shouted at the wall, I’ll know.

Breaking out of her lethargy, she kicked down, moving her body upward through the water, allowing the air in her buoyancy jacket to expand with the relief of pressure. Checking her compass, she turned back toward the path that would navigate to her destination.

She moved faster through the water now, trading the risk of running out of air against the risk of running out of time before slack water ended and the powerful outgoing tide took over. Ahead of her she saw the edge of a deep gulley, its shape seeming distinctive and familiar. She remembered she had to pass a gulley to access a narrower channel, and then she would see a line of stones in the seabed, the Seven Sisters they’d named them. The gulley was choked with kelp and the camera and torch kept catching. There was no sign of the stones. She was stupid to think nothing would have changed here. Stupid to trust her own memory. She felt the panic start to rise and concentrated on slowing her breath. Switching on her torch, she moved slowly as she dared, sweeping the light from side to side. There were no stones. She was at the point of no return. She could return to the boat and safety or search with the remaining minutes of her air in the hope she would find what she was looking for. She went on.

Using her compass, she followed an imaginary line then turned left into a wide gulley with tall rocks at the entrance. As she finned towards her goal, she became immersed in memories. Her throat ached as a collage of visits to the place began to unfold. She remembered the times when visibility was so poor they had swum straight into it or past it before seeing it. And the time they found it guarded by a very large and very fierce looking crab they’d named Herman, for no reason at all. And the time they stayed so long searching for more pieces of wreck they had almost run out of air. All these memories and more came back to her until at last the familiar shape loomed out of the kelp and relief flooded through her. It was still there. She raised her torch and the light danced along the beams. And that’s when she saw it. Carelessly carved into the timbers, into their wreck:

KEVIN

WOZ

HERE

She stared in disbelief at the words now scarring the wood. She stared, unblinking, until a bitter truth stung her. Nothing is sacred. Nothing. From cradle to grave, life is about loss. And grief is a thing with teeth.

Her heart hurt so much she felt it would stop forever. But then it came at her, fast and from nowhere, with its huge black mouth and its rows of relentless, razor-sharp teeth. And she howled, letting loose a sound that seemed barely human. She howled and thrashed as hard as she could until the world kaleidoscoped into a thousand bloody, desperate pieces and she span uncontrollably upward.

Back on the boat, the fisherman stared at the angler fish lying lifeless on the deck by his feet, a large dive knife sticking out of its spine. He could barely suppress his delight. One of the ugliest creatures in local waters, the angler fish was better known as monkfish on the menus of the elegant restaurants and gastropubs now lining the Cornish coasts and coves. He knew it would fetch him at least £20 a fillet.

He watched as she dropped her weight belt to the deck, the sea water draining from her suit and pooling around her feet, stained with the blood from the bite the angler fish had inflicted on her hand. She looked different somehow; less fragile, despite her encounter, and he was aware how glad he was she was okay.

‘Did you get what you came for?’ he asked.

She glanced back at the water, and nodded.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I think so.’