Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“You’re still in love with someone who’s dead,” my father tells me.

Love didn’t make me a better person. Just the opposite. Love made me indifferent to the rest of the world. Love narrowed my horizons down to a pair of blue eyes, to a goofy smile, to one young woman.

Shortly after Rose and I had begun, I was on a plane flying back to Hong Kong. I had just spent a week with my parents, my first trip home since leaving London, a trip that had been arranged long before I met Rose. It was too late to cancel so I went to see my mother and father and grandmother but there was no pleasure in it for me; my heart was somewhere else. I wanted to get it over with, to get out of London, to get back to Hong Kong, to get back to her, to get back to Rose.

But there was a problem on the plane. A serious problem. A man-this middle-aged executive sitting across the aisle from me-suddenly became short of breath. He gasped for air, he made strange croaking noises, he looked like he was choking to death. At first I assumed that he had overdone the complimentary drinks. But then, as the stewardesses crouched by his side and the pilot asked if there was a doctor on board, it soon became clear that he was sick, very sick.

They laid him in the aisle, stretched out on the floor, right beside me, close enough to touch his terrified face, and two young doctors knelt by his side, pulling his shirt open, talking to him like priests beside a death bed.

We couldn’t fly to Hong Kong. The man needed a hospital and so our flight diverted to Copenhagen where a medical crew was waiting to take him off the plane. And all the passengers were very understanding about the diversion, of course they were, even when they learned that we would have to wait for hours at Copenhagen Airport until we could get another crew. Our pilot explained that our crew could no longer take us to Hong Kong because, with the diversion, they would exceed their permitted hours in the air. So we had to wait. For hours.

Everybody was very understanding. Everybody except me.

I hated that sick man. I didn’t want to divert to Copenhagen so that he could get medical treatment. I wanted the pilot to stick him in with the suitcases and let him take his chances. It was worse than indifference. I felt a rage toward him that I could hardly contain. I didn’t care if he lived or died. It meant nothing to me. I just wanted him out of the way so that I could get back to Hong Kong, back to my girl, back to my life, back to the best thing that had ever happened to me.

That’s what love did to me.

Love messed up my heart.

R OSE WAS BEAUTIFUL IN THE WATER. She had been diving for years, long before she came out to Hong Kong, and she had that still, weightless quality that separates good divers from the rest of us.

We looked like two different creatures when we were underwater. I was always a nervous wreck, struggling to maintain neutral buoyancy, constantly fiddling with the air in my BCD jacket, letting a little out as I started drifting to the surface, letting a little in as I began to sink, never getting it right for very long.

Rose just hung there, floating in space, doing it all with her breathing, doing it all with minor adjustments to the air in her lungs, remaining weightless with what seemed like little more than sighs.

I was never happy with my equipment, forever clearing my mask of water, nervously checking my air gauge to see exactly how much was left-I was a glutton for air, always having to return to the surface long before anyone else-and adjusting my tank as its heavy weight seemed to shift and slide on my back.

I just didn’t look happy underwater. Like all good divers, Rose looked as though there was nowhere else she would rather be.

She had learned to dive at home. She had gotten her scuba diving card in freezing dark waters off the south coast of England and in a flooded quarry in the Midlands. She had done it the hard way. So the dive sites of Asia-warm blue waters, endless coral reefs, so much marine life that sometimes the fish blotted out the sky-seemed like the next best thing to paradise.

I learned to dive because of Rose. I had a crash course on our honeymoon in Puerto Galera in the Philippines, getting used to breathing underwater in the hotel swimming pool with a local instructor and a couple of twelve-year-old Taiwanese, learning the theory in some little classroom behind the resort’s dive shop and finally being taken out into open water for the real thing. Rose was as excited as me when I got my scuba diving card. Maybe more.

And we had some good times. Once, on a weekend trip to Cebu in the Philippines, I sucked up most of my air in a ridiculously short amount of time and got sent up by the dive master. I had to make a safety stop for three minutes at a depth of five meters to let the excess nitrogen seep out of my body. Although her tank still had plenty of air, Rose came up with me and those few minutes making that safety stop were the best diving that I ever had. We hung there together in the shallow waters where the light was dazzling, the coral reef shining like a treasure chest, watching a school of angel fish swarm around us as our bubbles of air mixed together and rose lazily to the surface.

But diving was just one of the many things that Rose did far more easily than me. She was comfortable at parties and meeting new people and floating weightless 15 meters below the surface of the South China Sea. But no matter how much I tried-and I tried hard because I wanted to please her more than anything in the world-I really couldn’t be. It just wasn’t in me. That was the difference between us underwater and, now I come to think of it, everywhere else.

I swam.

She flew.

It felt wrong from the start.

On Friday night the weather had been still and clear, typical of this part of the Philippines in late spring, but by the time we were walking down to the beach on Saturday morning, the blue skies were turning to gun-metal gray and the waves out at sea were showing flecks of white foam.

We were already in our wet suits. I was carrying a big yellow dive bag containing our masks, snorkels and fins. We would rent the rest of our kit from the dive shop. I watched Rose squinting up at the sky.

“We could just chill out at the hotel,” I said. “The weather doesn’t look great.”

“It’ll be fine,” she said. “Ramon won’t take us out if there’s any problem.”

Ramon was the dive instructor of the resort, a stocky Filipino in his early forties, who watched over his dives with calm authority. A lot of dive sites in the Philippines have notoriously unpredictable currents, which means you can see some beautiful coral growth. But tricky currents also mean you need an experienced guide to take you out. We had spent a few weekends at this resort and Ramon had always led our dives and had taken good care of us. But when we arrived at the dive shop, Ramon wasn’t there.

In his place there was a skinny kid, no older than twenty, unusually tall for a Filipino, his worn and ragged wet suit pulled off his brown, bony shoulders. He was laughing with a pair of European tourists, a couple of tall blonde girls in bathing suits who looked so healthy and milk-fed that they could only be Scandinavian.

“Where’s Ramon?” I said.

“Ramon sick,” he said, glancing at me for just a second before turning his attention back to the blondes. “I take the dive today.”

I looked at Rose for a moment. She just shrugged and smiled. She really wanted to dive that day. So we joined the other divers next to a row of battered scuba tanks and started putting our equipment together as the little dive boat came into the bay and chugged toward the beach, its bow lifting and falling with the waves.