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 ancient 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.’”
“What does my name mean, Daddy?”
“Your name, Sol, means . . . your mum knew. Something about a house.”
I stroked my dad’s cheek, preemptively wiping away tears. “Tell me about Chiyo.”
My father explained to me that ama diving has been around for two thousand years and it’s a dying trade. In order to try to preserve her knowledge for future generations, Chiyo went to meet a young girl in the village, to teach her how to dive. “You’re a fogey,” the girl said with a groan. “I can’t see what I could possibly learn from you.”
Chiyo stoically set about showing the girl how to check her tools for the dive. My dad had recently watched a TV programme about Japanese divers, and he revelled in telling me the names of some of those tools, but they haven’t stayed with me. What I do recall is that at some point, Dad said: “There’s a reason the ama divers of Japan are women, Sol. Do you know what it is?”
“Is it because the men don’t want to do it?”
“That could be it, pup,” he replied, roaring with laughter. “That could be it. But it’s also to do with body fat. Women store more fat in their bodies than men, and it keeps them warmer underwater.”
When I heard this, my mind began to wander. I knew men and women looked different on the outside. But it was the first time it ever struck me that their insides might be different. The discovery set something off in me, and the colour of that something was a bright and angry red.
My dad continued with the story. He told me how excited the girl was when she dived into the water, but how difficult she found it to hold her breath. “Chiyo could hold her breath for over a minute, though. And while she was down there, she saw something glinting. She prised it out from between two rocks and shot back up to the surface.” He gave a dramatic pause. “It was an abalone shell!”
“What about the girl?” I asked, biting my hand. “Was the girl all right?” I had a feeling that this was going to be a story about how naughty little girls always get their comeuppance, even though I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong lately to deserve such a tale.
“The girl was fine. Treading water and panting like a dog. Chiyo took her back to the shore, and then she opened up the shell to reveal a large, yellow muscle of meat.”
“Yuk,” I said through a yawn.
“That’s what the girl said too. But people believe that eating abalone keeps you young, and they’ll pay top dollar for it. Anyway, this shell was particularly precious, because when Chiyo prodded and poked the creature’s gut, she pulled out a pearl.”
At this point, my dad stood up, knees clicking, and he started creeping out of the room.
“Daddy?”
“Oh, I thought you’d dropped off.”
“Is that the end?”
“That’s about the size of it,” he said. “Chiyo and the girl went out diving together regularly after that, yadda yadda yadda. The moral of the story is: don’t judge a book by the cover. Night, Sol.” He shut the door behind him, and I heard his slippers shuffle down the stairs towards the fridge.
I wasn’t about to go to sleep, though. The angry red was still blazing inside me. I threw off the covers and watched the fan. I watched the fan for so long that the moving blades began to look like a smooth, spherical object. Like I was looking at a pearl. Or a crystal ball. Or a planet.
8
“Your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction!” That’s what the submarine designer Graham Hawkes once famously shouted at people who believed that space was the final frontier. There’s so much left to explore in the depths of our planet’s oceans, he said. Why go elsewhere?
When you’re on the floor of the North Sea, you can’t see much. You might get the occasional beige flicker: a passing cod or pollock. You might even spot a crab scuttling around your feet. But the mud and murk shouldn’t deceive you. There’s a lot going on down there. And the deeper you go, the better. Once you reach the midnight zone, which is over a thousand metres deep and black as soot—that’s where you find the good stuff. For example, the female anglerfish has a lantern growing out of its head. The other fish can’t believe their luck when they see the bright light. Finally, they think, there’s something in this darkness. They migrate towards it, mesmerised, and when they get close enough, they’re swallowed in a single gulp. I’ve never been deep enough to see an anglerfish. Almost no human has.