“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.”