Poppet

Diving Beyond Qualifications

IT IS COLDER than the Arctic. So cold Flea’s lungs are pressed by it and she has to concentrate hard on keeping her ribs lifting and lowering. She descends, like a stone, down down down into the blackness. This is the way Mum and Dad died, nearly four years ago. Except they probably went head first. No one is sure how much of it they were conscious for.

She checks her wrist. The dive computer she has strapped there is her private, clandestine unit – it is kept under lock and key when she’s not using it. If it got into the wrong hands the records of the illicit dives she’s logged on it could cause serious trouble.

She gets to the first milestone – the fifty-metre mark, and dabs a little compressed air into the vest to slow the descent. Get her neutral buoyancy back and level out. Her ear is good. So far at least.

It takes a bit of searching with her underwater torch to find the gateway. A net emblazoned with warning signs: DEPTHS EXCEEDING 50 METRES. DO NOT DIVE BEYOND YOUR QUALIFICATIONS AND CAPABILITIES. Set there to discourage recreational divers from pushing into uncharted depths. This is the threshold. The doorway to hell. You cannot and must not predict what happens past here.

The cold is going to slow her thinking, so she works methodically, rigidly adhering to the routine, taking her time: using a torch to check depth, air supply, duration – comparing it religiously to her dive plan. There’s the slightest pain in her ear, spreading over her temples into her eye. It might just be the tightness of the mask, which hasn’t been used in months, but if the pain gets any worse she’ll have to head to the surface. There’s no nausea yet, and that has to be a good sign.

Two short snaps on the valve. Automatic. Then she tips herself forward until she is prone, suspended in mid-water, one hand on the net to steady herself. She pushes it aside, squirms her legs over it, and lets herself sink even further, feet first, her hands at her sides.

The rock face comes at her suddenly out of the gloom. She grabs on to it and, rotating ninety degrees, so her body is flat against the rock, feels her way, crab-like, down the quarry, examining the rock wall with one gloved hand, skimming over the moss and lichen.

Below her the quarry continues to drop. What she’s looking for is halfway between here and the quarry floor. Every metre she must descend, the greater the pressure on her ear – the more the chance of disaster.

At sixty metres she stops. There’s just blackness and the magnified sound of her own breathing. You never think about the amount of water overhead – if you did, you’d go mad. The entrance is somewhere here. She hangs on tightly, keeping those breaths steady. She studies everything in the beam of her torch, trying to recall the secret striations and signature formations. Her heart is thumping but she slows her breathing wilfully. Panic is the prime reason people die at depths such as this. Breathing consistently is everything.

Her hand finds it before her dive torch does: a small crevice that marks the upper edge of the hole. The entrance is sufficiently wide for two divers in full gear.

It’s only further in that it gets really narrow. No one would find this if they didn’t know what they were looking for. No matter how skilled.

A wah wah wah noise pounds in her ears. Maybe the first sign something’s going to go wrong. She ignores it. This is the deepest she will go tonight – from here on it is upwards. Even if someone did, in the unlikeliest of scenarios, happen on this entrance, they wouldn’t dare to go further. The ascent through the chimney is ragged with danger – toppling boulders, sweeping debris and clay into the shaft, trailing roots that could hook the cylinders right off your back, shards of rock that could puncture a buoyancy jacket. But at least it’s upwards all the way; it will give her body a chance to recover from the extreme pressure.

She knocks out a few more shallow breaths to make herself sink further, then uses her fingers to propel herself inside the cave. She moves on, following the slope of the floor, torch pointing up, until it locates the next opening overhead: the entrance to the narrow chimney. The bubbles from her regulator shoot upwards in a silvery haze – collecting in the various overhanging crags and ledges above her. When they get big enough, they spring away from the walls, racing up the chimney after the others. Disappearing. She knows where they will eventually break the surface, forty-six metres over her head. If only she could get messages from those bubbles about what’s up there. Whether anything has changed. What is waiting for her.

The dive computer on her wrist now says sixty-three metres. A bad bad depth. She positions herself so she is standing at the foot of the chimney, raises one hand over her head, and releases a jet of compressed air into her vest. Slowly she begins to rise, following the gas bubbles. It’s a strange feeling of lightness – as if she’s heading for the sky.

Forty-five metres. Her first scheduled decompression stop. She halts, hands braced against the rock. The pain in her ears has lessened. She’s through. She’s through. She’s done it. Her ears have held up and she’s past the first hurdle.