Catherine Steadman - Something in the Water - A Novel

Breakfasts canoed across the rippling green of the lagoon to us. Juicy ripe fruits that I don’t even know the names of. Padding barefoot across cool-tiled floors and hot decking. Slipping into clear pool water. Letting the sun soak deep into my tired English skin right down into my damp British bones.

Mark in the sunlight. Mark’s glistening body through the water. My fingers running through his wet hair, across his browning skin. Damp sex tangled up in sheets. The soft hum of air conditioning. I model a flipbook of delicate, beautiful underwear every day. Cobweb-thin black lace with glinting crystals, fuchsia blooms, brassy red, cheap white, rich cream, silk, satin. Long, easy conversations across paddleboards and bars. As we decided, I stopped taking the pill seven weeks ago. We make plans.

A helicopter tour of the surrounding islands. The thick thudding of rotor blades through cushioned headsets. Endless blue in every direction, above and below. Forests seemingly growing clean out of the ocean. A heaven on earth.

The pilot tells us that, out past the reefs, the waves tower so high that seaplanes can’t even land on the water. This is the second-most-remote island chain in the world. The waves here are the largest waves on the planet. We see them breaking, rolling, through the Perspex floor of the helicopter, through its windows. We are thousands of miles from mainland, from the nearest continent.

Desert islands crest up out of the ocean. Cartoon drawings made real. The smallest circles of sand to the craggiest peaks, all with at least one palm tree. Why do desert islands always have palm trees? Because coconuts float. They float across the ocean, they float alone for thousands of miles, until they beach and plant themselves in the hot sand. Their roots sink deep, right down into the earth until they hit the rock-filtered fresh water far under the ground. Like swimmers finally making it to shore.

A day spent snorkeling in the soft water of the lagoon. I think of the cold weather back at home as I float quietly, surrounded by great gliding manta rays, like gray ghosts made flesh, rippling muscular through the pristine silence.

Mark books out the scuba-training pool for us, just me and him. A session to ease me back in. The bad experience, the one before I met Mark, shall be forgotten, he promises. I was only twenty-one when it happened, but I remember it with crystal clarity. I panicked at eighteen meters under. I don’t know why but I suddenly became certain that I was going to die. I thought of my mum. I thought of the fear she must have felt, trapped in that car. I let my thoughts take over and I panicked. I remember people saying at the time I was lucky it worked out the way it did because it might not have. I could have easily taken a great gasping breath of seawater. But I don’t panic these days. I don’t let my thoughts take over. At least I haven’t since then.

I hardly sleep the night before the pool—it’s not fear exactly, just low-level anxiety. But I had promised Mark and, more than that, I had promised myself. Every time my mind drifts to the thought of the oxygen regulator, I feel the tension pinching deep in between my eyebrows. Who am I kidding, I’m fucking terrified.

I’m not scared of drowning or water or anything like that. I’m scared of that blind panic. The blind panic that traps rabbits in snares, pulls the noose tighter, and drowns them in their own blood. Silly things happen in blind panics. Things die.

Look, I’m not crazy. I know it’ll be fine. It’s bloody scuba diving. It’s supposed to be fun! Everyone does it. I know nothing will happen. It will be beautiful. So beautiful. Awe-inspiring out under the South Pacific Ocean. Something to always remember. But my thoughts just keep opening up like trapdoors under me. Panic, disorientation, claustrophobia. An accidental gasp of water and thrashing terror.

But no. I’m a grown woman. I can control my fears. That’s why I’m doing this, really, right? That’s why we challenge ourselves, isn’t it? To silence those fears. To wrangle them back into their box. I think of Alexa in her cell, in her cell for fourteen years. We wrangle our fears, don’t we? That’s what we do.

When Mark and I get to the pool, we slip into the water and start our pre-dive buddy check. Mark guides me slowly through. I’m glad of the cooling effect of the pool water, as the back of my neck is hot with nerves. Just breathe, I have to remind myself. Just breathe .

“You’re doing great,” Mark says reassuringly. “You remember all this bit perfectly, and this is the tricky bit, to be honest. I’ve got your back, okay? I’ve got you. But listen—” He stops and looks at me seriously now, his hands on my shoulders. “If you feel panic rising at any point underwater, just continue breathing. If you want to shoot up to the top, just keep breathing. It’ll only be your brain trying to protect you from something that isn’t really a problem. It’s no more dangerous down there than it is up here, I promise you. Do you trust me, honey? It’ll be fine.” He smiles and pats my shoulders. I nod. I will always trust him.

The thing that keeps swimmers afloat is the oxygen held in the lungs. The lungs when full are like two rugby balls inside our chests making sure we stay up. That’s why if you lie on your back in the sea you can relax your whole body and float with just your face out of the water. The trick for the diver is learning to use this buoyancy to regulate depth. That’s what the weights are for: to drag us to the bottom.

We descend together suspended in pale blue. Tiny bubbles go up and we lower smoothly as if in an invisible elevator. The silence under the pool’s surface is amniotic. I can see why Mark likes diving. I feel calm, all thoughts of panic dissipated. Mark glances back at me, beatific through a foot of dense water. It’s like we’re separated by thick glass. He smiles. I smile back. We feel closer down here than we ever could up there. We exchange the “OK” dive hand signal. You know it; it’s the hand gesture “the Fonz” would give you if you asked how his date was going. Mark and I sit cross-legged opposite each other on the scratchy tile floor of the deep end, passing the oxygen regulator back and forth to each other like a twenty-first-century peace pipe. Still I remain calm. The trapdoor thoughts are gone. They feel inconceivable now as I look into Mark’s calm face. We are safe. Just us and silence. It could just be the oxygen relaxing me, of course. It’s supposed to have a calming effect, isn’t it? I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere, something about oxygen masks on airplanes. Or maybe it’s the color of the pool that’s soothing me. Or the thick underwater silence. Or Mark. Right now all I care about is that I’m perfectly at peace. I am fixed. Mark has fixed me. We stay under like this for a long time.

—

The dream continues. Warm sand at sunset. Ice clinking on glass. The smell of sunscreen. Fingerprints on my paperback. There’s so much to see. So much to do. Until day five.

—

On day five we hear a storm is coming.

Storms here aren’t like storms back home. That much is clear. You don’t just move your patio furniture inside and cover the roses. Here, storms are serious business; the nearest hospital is an hour’s flight back to Tahiti and no one flies in a storm. Storms can last for days, so they’re handled with logistical precision. The beaches are cleared, restaurants battened, guests briefed.

After breakfast a friendly manager knocks on our bungalow door. He tells us that the storm should hit around 4 P.M. and it’ll probably last until early tomorrow morning. It’s only hours away. He reassures us that it will pass the island by; although we’ll feel it, we won’t get the full brunt of it, so we don’t need to worry about being washed away to sea or anything crazy like that, that never happens here. The manager chuckles. The bungalows are in the lagoon, protected from the waves by the atoll, so I suppose it would take a bloody strong wave to crest the atoll and the string of islands, pick us up and carry us off. The lagoon has been here for thousands of years; it’s not going anywhere today.