Bright and Dangerous Objects Read online

  James sighs. There are dark circles under his eyes. “Needs more spice.”

  I put down my fork. “How was work, love?”

  “The customer wanted a jellyfish at the bottom of his back. He said he wanted it to literally glow . . . I’ll show you the crime scene later.” “Crime scene” is what we jokingly call the photos James takes straight after he’s done a tattoo, when the customer’s skin is raw and beads of blood are bubbling up out of the puncture wounds. I love those pictures; James is normally so gentle that it excites me to see evidence of his brutality.

  “James,” I say. “I’m definitely thinking about it.”

  I’m not lying. I think about it over the rest of dinner, and I think about it while we watch Alien on the sofa. I think about it when the creature bursts out of the man’s stomach, and I think about it while I load the dishwasher, and I think about it while I brush my teeth, and I think about it when we turn off the lights, and then, under the covers, in complete darkness, in the tiniest voice, I whisper: “Yes, let’s do it. Let’s make a baby.”

  5

  How are you ever supposed to know what you want?

  I remember being in the garage with my dad when I was a kid, about ten. My aunt Marie popped in and said, “I’m off to the shops, ducky. Want to come?”

  Dad was in the middle of welding a table, and I was meant to be helping out. Helping out involved handing tools to Dad when he needed them, and it was a sacred job. My father was a craftsman and an artist. He welded everything from massive yard installations to miniature model cars. I loved to watch him work.

  But I also loved going to the shops.

  “Are you going to the Entertainer?” I asked. I was on the lookout for a new onionskin or peewee to add to my marble collection.

  Aunt Marie smiled. “I think we can manage that.” My dad’s older sister lived with us for a few years after Mum died. I was grateful to have her around, but then she died too. An infected hip replacement.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come with you.” I skipped down the street until I reached next door’s hydrangea bush; then I froze. “Gah! I’m going back.”

  I ran back inside and handed Dad a length of steel tubing. And then I thought about all the marbles I might never own, and I ran outside again. Aunt Marie was at the lamppost on the corner.

  “Hurry up then, child,” she called, shaking her head.

  “No!” I shouted, realising it was my dad I wanted to be with after all. I ran back to the garage, and instantly regretted it. I rushed out, panting, but Aunt Marie was too far away to catch up.

  I cried too much to see the table being finished.

  Now I’ve learnt the secret to making decisions. It’s all about diving in. Am I hungry? I’ll eat a sandwich to find out. Am I tired yet? I’ll go to bed and see. Do I want a baby? I don’t know. Let’s have unprotected sex and see how it feels.

  •

  “I Want to Break Free” by Queen plays on my phone at 5:30 a.m. It’s been my alarm for years. I normally press snooze around the time Freddie Mercury announces that he’s fallen in love, but today I don’t. I don’t check my emails, I don’t jump out of bed, and I don’t take my birth control pill. Freddie Mercury repeats the phrase “I want” four times in a row.

  I begin to stroke different parts of my boyfriend. Collarbone. Sternum. Hips. I can feel the ridges of tattoos on his skin. I try to trace shapes with my fingertips, but it’s impossible.

  I know what I’m touching anyway: Poseidon; a wolf with a woman’s face coming out of its mouth; a sword piercing a peach.

  “Don’t go.” James rolls over and pulls me in close.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “At least, not right now.”

  6

  Whenever I’m in Aberdeen, I’m about to start a job or I’ve just finished one. It’s a portal between worlds.

  I lived in Scotland for a few years, back when I was doing my training. I got my offshore qualifications in Argyll, then my saturation certificate in Fort William. The whole lot cost twenty grand. Dad was furious when he found out how I’d blown Mum’s inheritance. He thought diving was another of my phases. Since studying construction at college, I’d tried plastering, carpentry, brickwork, and welding. I was working as a welder fabricator at the time, and even though my plan was to keep welding, but to do it underwater instead of on land, my dad freaked out. “If you want to weld, Sol, you want to weld,” he told me. “You don’t need water to make it more extreme or whatever.” But he soon saw how much those first diving trips changed me. For the first time in my life, I stopped trying to run away, and I started running towards something.

  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 th
is 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 Woman than ever before.

  Once the bunks are decided, and we’ve made sure that our gear is watertight, airtight, and in full working order, we head for the chamber. As we wait outside the small circular hatch, we pat each other on the back. We hum under our breath.

  Then the hatch opens, and the joking resumes.

  “What’s up, Solvig?” Tai asks, as we wait our turn to climb in. Tai is one of the only people here who use my first name. He learnt to dive in Nigeria. The fish are stunning there, he says, but you have to watch out for the groupers. He once told me a story about a diver who exited a diving bell and went foot-first into a grouper’s gaping mouth.

  “I’m good, thanks, Tai,” I say. “You?”

  He shrugs. “Can’t complain.”

  Last time we were on a dive, Tai told me his mother had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but now doesn’t seem like the time to ask after her. Bringing that sort of baggage in with us feels wrong.

  I’m the last diver to enter the chamber, and I pause to take a deep breath before climbing in. Moments later, the hatch is closed behind me.

  •

  It takes about eighty minutes for the air pressure to reach that of the bottom of the North Sea. During blowdown, the temperature rises to over thirty degrees Celsius. The guys sort out their bunks while I sit sweating in front of the camera for dive control.

  I flip open my Head & Shoulders and unscrew my Colgate. Even the tiniest air pocket can be unsafe. If your tooth has a cavity, for example, it could rupture during compression. I’ve seen a guy’s crown get blown off, taking the whole tooth—and a big chunk of his gum—with it.

  If you get ill while you’re in here, you can’t just nip out of the chamber. Doesn’t matter if you’re having a heart attack or a stroke or you’re gushing with blood. If you decompress too quickly, your body will fill with bubbles. And if the bubbles reach your brain, you’re screwed. It takes five and a half days to decompress safely. Even if there’s an emergency on the ship. Even if the whole place is burning down around you.

  Back at the airport drugstore, I hurriedly bought a pack of prenatal vitamins. They’ve got folic acid, vitamin D, and some other scientific-sounding stuff in them: l-arginine, n-acetyl cysteine, inositol. The chemicals needed to build healthy human beings, I guess. I open the pack while it’s still in my bag and check there’s nothing in it that could explode. I leave it hidden among knives and spanners.

  “Deano?” someone calls. It gets harder to recognise people’s voices as the air pressure increases. We’re being fed a gas called heliox, which is a mixture of helium and oxygen. The helium is used as a substitute for nitrogen, which does bad things to the central nervous system at high pressure. The unfortunate side effect of it is that we speak like chipmunks for the entire month.

  “Yeah?” I call out. “Whaddya want?” It’s the first time I’ve heard myself like this in four months and I can’t help sniggering. It’s good to be back.

  •

  I’ve been lying on my bunk reading Cornish folktales for half an hour. My favourite story so far is about a fisherman who bravely ventures out in stormy midwinter seas and returns to his village with a generous haul of pilchards. The villagers bake the entire catch into a dish they call stargazy pie, because all the fish heads poke skywards. That image seems strangely romantic to me.

  I also read about the ancient site of Mên-an-Tol, where there are three large rocks: two vertical pillars and a hollow circle in the middle, spelling out “101.” The legend goes that if a woman climbs through the circle backwards on a full moon, she’s guaranteed pregnancy. Meanwhile, if children go through the hole naked nine times, they’ll be cured of scrofula.

  “John Skinner!” shouts Dale from the other chamber. He’s a proud cockney, and he definitely hams up the rhyming slang while in saturation. Fisherman’s daughter, “water.” Barbwired: “tired.”John Skinner, “dinner.”

  I put down my book and hop off my bunk.

  “Scrofula,” I murmur.

  I wonder if my mum would have climbed backwards through a hole in a rock for me. I wonder if she’s up there now, in the sky, gazing down.

  The others are already at the table. Dale opens the airlock and takes out six containers.

  “Two cods,” he says, passing them to Tai and Rich. “Steak. That’s mine. Cal, Eryk, the pasta. Deano: vindaloo.”

  A couple of hours ago, we ordered our dinner by ticking a box on a form. Deciding what I want to eat is one of the only decisions I make while I’m down here. The rest of the time I just follow instructions. I find that very relaxing.

  I’ve requested that my curry be made extra spicy. The cooks try their best to keep us happy, but the pressure stops our food from having flavour. Something to do with nasal mucus and food particles.

  We watch an old episode of Cheers while we eat. Rich is giggling so much he sounds like the laughing sailor at a fairground arcade. The more he laughs, the more he laughs at his own laugh, until Eryk thwacks him on the shoulder with a spoon.

  As Cal and Dale settle down to a game of chess, and Eryk and Rich surf the net for GIFs of cats being startled by cucumbers, I head back to my bunk. I open my wallet and find my passport photo of James. The day this was taken, James was still recovering from the norovirus. He looks pale and clammy. We were about to go on holiday to Rome. “You’ll have the best coppa of your life,” James had said, as we booked our flights. At the time, I misheard him and thought he was being flirtatious. Turned out he was talking about cured meat made from a pig’s neck muscle.

  Tai lies on the bunk next to mine, reading a book about how to chop wood. He’s into artisan crafts, a bit like James, but whereas James is into whittling spoons, Tai is into building log cabins. Whereas James is into fermenting a single bottle of gooseberry wine, Tai is into learning how to cultivate a vineyard. I have to admit, I’ve thought once or twice about what it might be like to date someone like Tai, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’d be exhausting. That’s why James and I suit each other so well. We both like limitations. We once made a wheel of cheese that took eight months to mature. We ate it within a week.

  Tai and I lie side by side in silence for a while, until our breaths naturally start to synchronise. Eventually, I ask: “How’s the book?”

  Tai turns to me, eyes wide and moist. “I know what I need to do now.”

  I smirk. “What? Chop some wood?”

  Tai doesn’t smile. “I’m going to help to preserve the knowledge of the a
ncient masters for posterity. It’s my legacy.”

  I don’t know what Tai’s talking about, but I’m unexpectedly moved. “Tai,” I say softly. “Do you think that’s important? You know, to think about what you’re going to leave behind, once you’re gone?”

  “It’s everything,” says Tai. “Without wood, we’re nothing.”

  I realise that perhaps we’re talking at cross-purposes, but I mentally replace the word “wood” with “ambition,” and I put the photo of James back in my wallet.

  7

  Not long after my mother died, my father began to tell bedtime stories.

  Previously, Mum was the storyteller. Dad has kept two of the picture books she used to read to me. The first was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The pages are well thumbed, with a dirty fingerprint on one of the corners, displaying my mother’s loops and whorls. The second, Peace at Last, is about a bear with insomnia. It’s been vandalised to such a degree that only the start of the story remains legible. It reads: “The hour was late.” As a girl, when I couldn’t sleep, I used to think about my mother reading me that sentence. I created a voice for her, low and soothing. “The hour was late.” It helped.

  Dad’s stories were always made up. There’s one I remember more clearly than all the others. He told it to me one summer evening, after an unusually rainy year following my mother’s death. That night, instead of coming into my room with tears in his eyes, my dad walked in smiling, holding a silver fan.

  “Get ready for a hot one, pup,” he said, putting the fan on my desk. He set it so that it swept the room, first blasting me, then blasting him, then making the curtain shiver.

  “Let’s see,” said my dad, clicking his tongue and pulling the sheets up to my chin. I noticed the beads of sweat on his upper lip. His breath smelt of beer. “Right, then. Once upon a time, in Japan, there was this old woman, right?” He wiped his upper lip, but the sweat immediately reappeared.

  “How old?”

  “Let’s say eighty-four. And even though she was over the hill, so to speak, she still swam in the ocean every day, looking for pearls.” My dad explained to me that the old woman was an ama diver, which means “woman of the sea.” Many ama divers keep working their whole lives long. Some regard them as closer to fish than humans. “Hang on a sec, I forgot to tell you the woman’s name. It was Chiyo, which means ‘forever.’”