Ritual

27

Thom wanted to write Flea a note so she didn't forget he was going to borrow her car. He needed to be reminded of appointments like this, and it made him think she would too, so he insisted on sitting at the table and putting it on a Post-it in his laborious handwriting. Flea stood at the sink, her arms crossed, studying his faintly bruised-looking eyes, the dark lashes lying diagonally across the pale skin, the way he crabbed himself over the paper to write. His colour had come back, but somehow she knew it would never return properly. If someone had asked her when she'd last seen her brother, she'd have answered truthfully: on the day of the accident two years ago.

It wasn't that she hadn't seen him physically since; in fact, she hadn't left his side, not through all the hospitalization in Danielskuil when they'd told her he might die, or during the dreadful journey home via Cape Town with the air hostess who wouldn't give her a paracetamol for him because the airline was afraid of being sued, or during the eight weeks of the investigation into their parents' death. She'd seen the physical Thom, his body, the shell he was in, but her brother was gone. You could look into his eyes and see nothing. So she would say that the last time she had seen him was that day at Boesmansgat when he emerged from the sinkhole crying and vomiting, thrashing his arms in the water.

Under him yawned the dark hole, a hundred and fifty metres wide, and three hundred metres deep. Like an oubliette for a sleeping predator. It was a grave too. Bushman's Hole had taken three divers in the last decade, and now two more: David and Jill Marley. Dad had gone first, heading straight down into the dark. Mum followed. Thom had made desperate grabs for them, and for a few moments he'd even had a precarious grip on Mum's right ankle, but he couldn't keep hold. It was as if, determined to get to the bottom, they had both turned face down into the gloom. Which was unthinkable because the bottom was a hundred and fifty metres deeper than they'd intended and they had both known it was suicide to go even ten metres deeper than the dive plan.

They'd planned it scientifically, because if David and Jill Marley knew anything it was respect for the water. Bushman's Hole was the pinnacle for them, the height of a lifetime's addiction to extreme sport diving. It had started a long time before the kids came along, so long ago that Flea didn't know the exact equation it had sprung from. But she did know one thing: it was Dad's gig. Mum had gone along with it, had got an enthusiasm of sorts going, but Dad was the addict, fatally attracted to it, and Dad who, in his quiet moments in the study, dreamed he was in the deep.

He'd been wearing a video camera on his helmet in Bushman's Hole. He'd have filmed his descent, and his own death. But the South African investigators had never found the bodies or the camera, and with only Thom's fractured memories to go on they couldn't do much more than put the Marleys' death down to either 'narcosis' from a miscalculation in the deep-dive gas content or possibly a hyperoxic blackout. The British coroner, who'd got permission from the home secretary to hold an inquest without the bodies, ruled out narcosis — the disorienting euphoric effect nitrogen can have at too much pressure. Because the 'Trimix' combination of gases the Marleys were using was specifically designed to combat narcosis, the coroner guessed instead that David Marley had begun to breathe too fast and deeply, shutting down the sensitive carbon-dioxide receptor in the back of his neck, which had knocked him out. When he'd started to drop Jill had tried to stop him — that much they knew — and maybe descending so quickly she'd held her breath, causing the Trimix system's oxygen sensor to over-deliver oxygen. In effect she'd died in exactly the same way as David had: from hyperoxia, too much oxygen.

He'd been a kind man, the coroner, and had added in his summing up that the Marleys' son Thom had done the right thing to let them go. As difficult as it was, it was one of the most important rules in technical diving and he'd stuck to it. He should be commended for it — should be proud. Instead, of course, it was destroying him. He'd let his parents die.

Flea didn't know what she felt guiltiest about. That she hadn't been with Thom in Bushman's Hole when it had happened, or that, deep down, she'd been glad that Thom had gone along on the trip to Danielskuil. It used to be her Dad pushed, always urging her on — 'See that tree, the big one? Bet you can climb that, Flea Marley!' She'd never thought of saying no, just done as she was told — knowing in some dark corner of her heart that if she didn't it would mark her out as different. Weak, somehow. Not a true Marley. But then Thom had come along, a shy little thing who didn't walk until he was nearly two, and Dad's focus shifted away from her and on to Thom. The message from Dad was clear: Never show fear. There is no place in this family for cowardice. It became instinct, the same instinct that had driven Thom years later when he had climbed with his parents into the cold, motionless eye of Boesmansgat.

After his parents had disappeared, Thom had had to spend six hours coming back to the surface, stopping every few metres to decompress and allow the concentrated gases to expand and leave his body because helium lodged not in the soft tissue like nitrogen but in the bony cavities and took longer to dissipate. Tears filled his mask and a helium bubble had formed in his inner ear making his head spin. One of the police divers who'd come in when the alarm was raised had had to clip him to the shot line D-ring with a karabiner and stay with him because he'd lost the feeling in his hands and didn't know any longer which way was up. The last ten metres were the worst, the most dangerous of all, and the most frustrating because each stop was for more than an hour and he could see the surface, could see the sun filtering down, but had to wait, had to stay there in the cold, with only one thing to think about: how he'd failed and, worse, what was happening three hundred metres below him.

As far as anyone knew, and the truth was no one did know for sure, there wasn't a big enough outlet at the bottom of the sinkhole for a body to pass through, so Mum and Dad would have settled, unmoving, on the bottom. Using Thom's statement, the investigators had worked out the approximate area they'd have ended, and sent a remote-operated vehicle, a small submarine mounted with a camera, down to search the side and the very deepest corner of Bushman's. But the ROV could see nothing. There was no point in waiting for the bodies to float. As they began to decompose, when most bodies would lift to the surface, the Marleys never would; the gases of decomposition would be under too much pressure to float them and, anyway, the diving equipment would keep them weighted down until they rotted where they lay and all that was left of them was the bony pickings. The investigators had run out of resources. There was nothing more that could be done to recover them.

There were other bodies around the world suspended in their own silence, nosed and buffeted by currents and fish, divers who'd died in places so treacherous that it would cost the lives of other divers to rescue them. She'd been lectured on it by the South African police, by her counsellor, by Kaiser, to accept that Mum and Dad's last resting place was on the floor of Bushman's Hole. And she'd made a kind of peace with it. But she never stopped thinking about it.

Sometimes Flea got pictures of them on her inner eye, fleshless, eyeless armatures floating on an axis. She'd turn them over and over in her idle hours, trying to place them, trying to imagine how they'd be lying. Thom said Dad had gone first, but she hadn't needed to hear it from him. In a way somehow connected to his meditation in the study, and somehow to the long hours he had spent with Kaiser, she knew instinctively it would have been that way: Dad going first. And so her mind had settled on a picture with Dad lying face down, arms plunged into the sand up to the shoulders, as if he was embracing the floor of the cave, while Mum was always lying on her back, facing the surface with her arms up, as if she was still hoping someone might notice her mistake and pull her back to the world.

But now, standing at the sink, the midday sun coming through and picking out all the dust and details in the kitchen, Flea thought more about the way they'd sunk. Could they have gone down in the opposite direction, away from the corner of the hole that had been searched? Was that what Mum had been trying to say?

At the table Thom was writing fastidiously. She imagined saying to him: Could there be something wrong in what you remember about the accident? Maybe we should sit down and go through it all again?

But no. No point in upsetting him over something flimsy. An hallucination. She turned on the tap and let the sink fill, soap bubbles swirling and catching the sunlight. She looked again at the way the greyish veins meandered down her inner arms. The ibogaine was going to open her skull, pour light in — and maybe by this evening she might be able to explain what she was missing. She wasn't going to talk to Thom about it, but one thing was sure: she was going to ask Mum on which side of the hole they'd ended up.