“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 this 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.