Ritual

36

Don't let them bring us up…

It was late in the day and the shadow of the overhead light was long, reaching almost to the wall when Flea got up and dragged the old leather chair to the computer. Pulling a cardigan round her shoulders she switched on the computer and typed in 'Bushman's Hole'.

At first, after the accident, she had monitored the web all the time. When the inquest and the investigation were over, she became addicted to the chatter in the diving community, the theories about what had gone wrong with that dive. It interested all divers, sport and commercial alike: they were afraid and excited by what it might mean. People from Tasmania to Bermuda to the Hebrides, with sig-lines like 'You never have to ask a good diver to go down' from every different time zone, they all hopped in and out of the discussion, adding their experience to the mix. Sometimes Flea would stay up at night silently watching the forums, watching them talk, hoping for a mention of Mum and Dad, hoping it would be more than just technical theories, liking it when they called Mum 'Jill' and Dad 'David', instead of 'the Marleys', winnowing through the chaff for a mention of what they'd been before they were the world's most notorious victims of a cave-diving accident.

Getting into divenet, one of the biggest of the international dive websites, she scrolled down to the Trimix forums — Mum and Dad had been using Trimix to get down to one hundred and fifty metres; a controversial method that always got people talking. Sometimes people talked about Bushman's Hole here, too. Maybe there'd be someone who knew its shape, someone who knew the slope she'd hallucinated.

As soon as she got into the forum she could see there had been more activity than usual. There had been fifty new posts in the last two days — usually the chatroom only attracted five or six a day. Someone must have dived a particularly difficult cave and be getting back-slaps. She didn't want to think of the other possibility: that someone else had lost their life the way her parents had.

She scrolled down. As she did the hairs on her arms stood up. Navigating the mouse to the first thread she clicked again, her heart thudding as the message filled the screen. She read it once, and when she saw it wasn't a mistake she pushed aside the mouse and stared in disbelief at the screen, not seeing, not feeling anything. It was impossible. Impossible.

It took her a few moments to realize the phone was ringing. She picked it up numbly.

'Hello,' said the voice. 'Hello.'

Flea leaned forward and clicked the next message in the thread. On the phone the woman was talking, but Flea wasn't listening — she was glued to the screen, reading the next message and the next. Her heart was thumping so loudly it was making her head hurt.

'Hey, Flea? You there? It's Mandy. Flea?'

Slowly Flea straightened the phone, holding it tight against her ear, her eyes still on the screen. 'Mandy?' she said faintly. 'Yeah. I'm here.'

'You sound odd.'

'No-'

'Out of breath.'

'No-'

'Good. Then can I speak to your brother?'

'My brother?'

'Yes, Flea. Your brother? Thom? Remember him?'

And then it all came back to her. The agreement. Thom and the car.

'Flea? Is he there?'

'Uh, yeah. Of course he's — uh — here.'

'Can I speak to him?'

'No. He's — he's in the garden.'

'He's got his phone switched off.'

'Oh,' Flea said faintly. 'Has he?'

'Yes.' There was a pause. 'Flea, lovey, are you all right?'

'I'm fine.'

'You don't sound it.'

'I am.'

'Then just give Thom a shout, would you?'

'No.'

There was a pause, an intake of breath. Then Mandy said, a little quietly, 'No? Did you say "no"?'

'I can't. He's…' She looked over her shoulder at the closed curtains. 'He's right at the bottom. All the way down by the lake.'

'By the lake?'

'There's a juniper down there — it's, you know… He's giving it a cut for me. I'll… I'll ask him to call you when he comes back up.'

And before Mandy could say anything else Flea dropped the phone into the cradle, sank back into the chair, staring at the computer screen, not blinking, the words burning into her eyes. 'Mum,' she murmured, gripping the mouse and inching forward in the chair. 'Mum?'

Ben Crabbick and Andy Pearl were in their twenties and had been diving since childhood. Two health-conscious, extreme-thrill-seeking Australians from the west coast, they had dived almost every cave known to mankind and between them had notched up five hundred Trimix dive hours. Once, in the infamous John's Pocket in Florida, Crabbick had got wedged by his cylinders into a small hole just fifteen metres from the surface. Pearl buddy-breathed him for twenty minutes while they struggled together to free him. Because they were panicking, they were down to their last five bar of air by the time they got to the surface. But even that experience, said Pearl on the divenet forum, was nothing compared to what had just happened in Bushman's Hole.

Pearl was live online from Danielskuil, the town nearest to Bushman's Hole. He was safe and dry with a beer in hand, and now that things had settled he was telling the story to an avid audience, all firing questions at him. 'Me and Crabbick have been mad about Bushman's for years,' he typed. 'It's like the place gives off pheromones, you know, as if all those poor bastards that've died there are attracting the rest of us.' That, he said, could be the only explanation for why other divers insisted on venturing into the treacherous, never-ending watery funnel.

Pearl and Crabbick had raised sponsors in Western Australia for the dive. Pearl wore a Suunto logo on his cylinders, while Crabbick's dry suit had blue and white flashes on the arms and back: the company colours of an Australian broadband provider. Every minute spent at depths of over three hundred metres added hours to their surfacing time, and every second increased the chances of narcosis, so they'd agreed twenty seconds on the bottom, just time enough to photograph each other and their logos, was sufficient to justify the dive. Pearl remained clear-headed enough to stick to the dive plan. Crabbick, the less experienced of the two, wasn't as resilient.

They were at two hundred and fifty metres when Pearl suspected something was wrong with his dive buddy. Crabbick was complaining of a wah-wah sound in his helmet — a sound that to Pearl might mean there was still nitrogen in Crabbick's gas mix and that this was the onset of narcosis. His heart sank. He couldn't let him surface alone with narcosis even though it signalled the failure of the dive. Briefly, he even hated his old friend. But he knew what they had to do.

'Hey,' he said, into his through-water coms mic. 'Let's start for the surface.'

'No,' came the reply in his ear.

'Yes,' Pearl said. It was pitch black down there and he held the torch on Crabbick's chest, not wanting to direct it on to his face and blind him. 'We're going back.'

He shone the submersible torch upwards into the darkness and made a calculation: the first rescue diver would come down to the hundred-metres stage cylinders, the nearest human being, a hundred and fifty metres away, which would take them almost an hour with the right decompression stops. Pearl would lock Crabbick into the shot line and hold him there on the ascent. He hated having to turn back, but he knew he was still physically strong enough to get them both up. If they went now. 'We're aborting, Ben.'

'No. Want to go all the way.' Crabbick was slurring. Another sign of narcosis. His gas mix was definitely wrong. 'No point otherwise.'

'Sorry, Ben, no argument.'

Pearl was turning for the surface when a strong, determined hand gripped his arm. His flashlight rolled up and found Crabbick's masked face there, only a few inches away, the eyes dilated. He was shaking his head. Not speaking, but staring at his friend as if he was a stranger. Pearl wrote on divenet that it was like looking into the eyes of someone possessed. He said that if someone told him there was a devil at the bottom of Bushman's Hole, waiting to swim into the head of any diver who ventured down there, he'd believe them just from the look he'd seen in Crabbick's eyes.

'Ben. Listen to me. It's Andy. Remember me? I'm Andy, and I'm telling you now we're turning back. You always say yes.' He gave Crabbick a slow-motion shake. A move that made his ears tighten and his head spin. 'You always say yes and you always turn back when I say so.'

But this time, instead of speaking, Crabbick disentangled himself and headed towards the bottom. It was as quick as that: one minute he was there, the next he had gone into the darkness and Pearl was left with the image of a flipper moving in his flashlight beam.

'Ben? Ben, you fucker?' he shouted. 'Stop. Stop.'

Pearl stayed where he was for twenty seconds or so, his heart thumping, the sound of his breathing getting tighter and tighter in his ears, all the rules he'd learned rattling through his mind. Never dive beyond your own limits to tackle another diver — not even to save their life. It was written in stone. You'll over-exert yourself, forget to check your gas mix and dive computers, and the overwhelming probability is you'll end up with not one, but two deaths. You have to let them go. Pearl knew this — but Crabbick was his best mate. They'd been through high school together and you didn't check out on a friend that easily. His breathing got tighter still. He could almost feel the blood in his arteries, as if thickened by the pressure, struggling through his body. Then he thought that if Crabbick reached the bottom and was still conscious, he could be convinced the journey was a success, and they could turn for the surface.

Pearl might have been right that he could make the bottom and still endure the twelve-hour labour of carrying a friend to the surface. Except that when he got to the bottom he couldn't find Crabbick. He gave himself thirty seconds to look, not a split second longer, and it wasn't nearly enough to find his friend. The floor of the sinkhole was dark and unspeakably lonely, and the shock of finding mud under his feet made Pearl's head spin for the first ten seconds. But even when it had cleared and the nausea lessened, he was still disoriented. His flashbeam wavered over the ghostly desert landscapes, over the long silt dunes, empty as far as the torch would reach. And no sign of Crabbick.

Feeling sick now, his tired heart thudding uncomfortably, he gave the signal on the line that he was coming up.

It was, he wrote on divenet, the worst moment of his life.