GRACIE MAE BRADLEY
The trio set out for the wreck after the midday heat had passed; once the submarine winds of the tides had calmed, the sand settled.
The boat was constructed in the traditional way for that part of the world. It sat low on the waterline, thigh-deep, one plank wide at the bottom. Then it widened from the base, until it was broad enough for a couple of benches, one in front of the other. Four curlicued lengths of wood branched out from the head and tail, joined on either side by stabilising planks that skimmed the sea. The boat shone a bright painted white with twirling patterns in a forthright red and blue. It looked like a creature. Not an insect, for it didn’t have quite enough limbs, but nevertheless like something ornate and made to fly.
The boat would originally have been for fishing, with a small crew using oars or paddles. Now modified for tourist excursions, it had a small engine that grumbled roughly and let out the occasional bloom of smoke.
Scott stood at the back at the tiller, amid the snorkel masks and fins. He used the long lever to steer them. The other two sat on their benches, feet dangling, eyes out for the buoy.
They were old friends. Jack and Lola had been a couple already when they’d met Scott at a drinks party for exchange students in Paris. Scott and Jack had made a habit of going to an awful Irish pub by Grands Boulevards every Sunday to watch the rugby. Soon after that, they’d started going as a group of three to old queer cinema reruns every so often as a peace offering to Lola, who at that time, deep in a flush of second-wave feminist discovery, had taken to describing herself as a reluctant heterosexual. They’d found an ease in one another’s company, watching the whole Doom Generation trilogy a series of Saturday afternoons one November; gossiping each week over gin fizz at the bar on Rue Saint-Martin.
Lola’s impulse to push against the mores of her upper-middle-class upbringing – an impulse more pedestrian than it was rebellious – was in large part what had drawn her to Jack in the first place. The boy with the diamond stud in his ear who she’d approached with characteristic boldness at the freshers’ fair. She’d read his brown skin and loose trousers as a shorthand for the unknown, even though she soon found out that he’d grown up in a nice semi-detached in Surrey. It was that same impulse that had drawn her to Scott, who when they’d met in Paris was already enmeshed in a rotation of much older men, had sworn the chains of monogamy would never take him.
As the three of them made their way through their twenties, their friendship had settled across continents and careers and mutual acquaintances’ weddings into something with the ease and stature of an old building, something solid that could breathe as the world changed around it.
At the front, Jack reached into the bottom of the boat, extracted his rash vest and pulled it on.
“I’m too hot, I might get in.” He didn’t turn as he said it.
Behind him, Lola pushed a tussock of fine blonde hair behind her ear, then put her hand up to her eyes.
Scott called out over the engine to him. “Will you take one of the stabilisers or did you want me to stop?”
“I don’t really want to get there too late. You can’t see anything when the sand comes up in the tide. That’s what they told us at the kiosk.”
Lola was still moody in the afterglow of their argument. She had a tendency to sharpness which in good times made her a riot. Now, in her hurt, that sharpness was heavy on them all and the men knew not to provoke it further.
“I’ll hold one of the stabilisers then,” Jack replied.
Scott killed the engine and gave a thumbs up. “Just stay near the front will you? I’d rather you didn’t get sucked into the prop if you let go.”
Jack turned and slid from the front of the boat. There was barely any swell, and the water was a saccharine, untroubled blue. After a couple of seconds, he surfaced and took hold of the stabiliser. He looked up at Lola to his right. The sun played little gems off his sandy skin. He beamed at her. She looked back at him in exasperation, with something else unreadable at the edges of her pink mouth. She turned away.
“I just think it’s funny that you’d bring me halfway around the world, and speak to my Dad about proposing beforehand, if you weren’t actually going to do it,” she remarked to a passing gull. “We leave tomorrow.” The bird cocked its head.
Since their days in Paris, Jack and Lola had settled for corporate roles that afforded them all the hallmarks of millennial success. The freehold in Zone Two that they’d upgrade when her inheritance came in; the luxury of planning for children without worrying about the cost of a nanny. Lola had over the years cultivated a healthy disdain for women who were eager to be married, but when Jack had broached the idea at the start of the year, she’d felt her heart leap at the prospect of another achievement. Then she’d felt ashamed. Eight months later, on a holiday that would have been the perfect setting for the proposal that she’d been led to expect, her shame was approaching mortification.
The noise of the engine eventually broke the silence that followed, as Scott moved to head off the approaching squall, a low lilac curtain against the bright sun. “Illegal,” he called out from the back. “No, no, no. I’m here for three days and you can table this for after I leave.”
Breakfast had been tense. Over the buffet Lola had bound Scott up in smiling questions about the kitchen renovations he was having done back home. She had ladled congee into her bowl with a force that had flecked the table, dragon fruit the unreal pink of phenolphthalein in acid, while Jack had tried to mime ‘scrambled eggs’ in a language that he didn’t speak, aware of how stupid he looked as he acted out the eggshell cracking against the table, desperate for Lola to intervene. Eventually, the waiter brought the cook out from the kitchen. Only then, once an unholy halo of white around each of Jack’s pupils had appeared, the kind of white that means a cloud is bearing snow, had Lola deigned to acknowledge him, even if she hadn’t looked at him as she’d spoken. “Did you need me?”
Back on the water, Scott changed the subject. “Did you see the TV earlier? Another beaching in the Canaries. Pilot whales.”
The small boat rocked in a warm flutter of wind fat with roasting meat from the beach. The couple ignored their friend.
“That must be the buoy for the wreck.” Jack pointed to two four-pint milk cartons bobbing a short distance away. On the far side another not-quite-insect boat was at anchor. Its dark-skinned captain sat impassive, observing the swimmers below.
“It’s sadder than the killer whales,” continued Scott, ignoring Jack’s comment as Jack had ignored his. “At least they’re fighting back. Not that we’re in whale country now. Friendly critters only. Fingers crossed.” He laughed to himself.
They nosed a little closer to the buoy, then Scott killed the engine again. Lola had covered herself in another slick of sunscreen and pulled on her goggles, luminous and ready to jump into the water. But Scott’s mirth had punctuated her mood, and something had begun to seep out. Seeing an opportunity to take herself out of a low place and up onto a familiar righteous pedestal, she snapped at them.
“I actually think it’s bullshit, all the discourse about how the orcas are ramming boats to stop us destroying their habitats. That’s just another one of those messed up bedtime stories we like to tell ourselves so that we don’t have to take responsibility for fucking the climate.” Lola pushed her hair back from her face, catching a tangle on the small pearl she wore on her index finger. The annoyance seemed to spur her on.
“If we anthropomorphise enough then we can trust that nature will eventually save itself and we can keep living the way we do in the meantime.”
Neither of the men rose to the rhetorical flourish. They kept their eyes on the eddies in the water.
They were right up close to the buoy now, as close to on top of the wreck as they could be.
“It’s pointless, isn’t it.”
A hot breath of dripping fat turned their stomachs again.
Jack clung silently to the stabiliser. Scott cast his eyes heavenwards, crossed himself, and then bit. “What’s pointless?”
“Us, here. It’s worse than a joke. Flying halfway round the world to see a reef that’s dying because people keep flying halfway round the world to see it. You, Jack, constantly on about a granddad you’ve never met to justify the time we spend on expensive holidays like this. Getting in touch with your roots.” That look played again on the corners of her mouth; she turned his name like a sommelier would an overpriced wine.
“And wasn’t he from Antigua, your granddad, a fisherman? Isn’t the coastline there disappearing? But you’ll just take the whimsy bit, your seafaring heritage, the earrings.”
Jack’s eyes were wide again.
“Lola do you have sunstroke? You’re being vile.”
“Middle-class diaspora kid on a boat.”
Lola’s voice was low and curt, as if she wanted to take back what she was saying as she said it, but was too stubborn to change course. The dead finality of her tone fell hard on Jack. He took this as his cue to start wallowing. He felt a counterfeit joy as he pulled on the familiar robe: she was mean, he was helpless, and that meant that he was innocent, even if, with his reticence about the proposal, he’d hurt her first.
The duellers heard a deep glug, then a gentle pepper of droplets against the deck, as Scott piked into the water with a small anchor in his arms. Once it was down, he surfaced again to retrieve his mask and his fins and cut an elegant front crawl away from them.
Lola tipped herself backwards off the boat and made an unhappy starfish, frowning into the sky. Realising that she didn’t have any more venom for him, Jack let go of the stabiliser and swam after his friend.
The wreck was twenty feet or so deep, on the edge of a shelf that gave way to a forbidding night-sky blue. A sunken US Army vessel, it seemed to retreat in the already rising tide, enmeshed with a mound of corals that were fungal and psychedelic nearest the edge of the shelf. They were trippy not only in their colours but in their alien shapes: bulbous spheres, floral, tree-like growths, flat feathered constellations like magnified mosses. A grey outcrop closer to the shore was dying.
Photo: Nadia Huggins
A shoal of pompano flickered underneath them, reflecting barbs of sunlight into their eyes. The shining fish looked dirty at the edges, pulled through a gutter, forked tails the colour of bile. Lola swam up alongside the men, gesturing to a gaudy moray eel. It powered in and out of the windows of the wreck with the nonchalance of a true predator, scattering smaller fish in fright. As they watched the eel move through the water, they saw something flat and muddy with the shape of a ray or a skate tossing sand at the seabed, nearer the shore.
The group from the other boat was close by, all of them beating hard against the current, which was trying to pull them out and east. The trio watched them sink slowly in their diving gear, then separated.
Lola headed for an orange patch of coral that called out like a beacon. Behind her, in the direction of their boat, Scott stalked a triangular fish with a pointed beak. Jack stayed back a short while to follow the slow-motion dance of the divers, regretting that he couldn’t reach their depth.
They each made a lonely circumnavigation of the sunken vessel, awkward against the lithe glitter of the fish, pausing limp whenever they were tired.
As they regrouped close to their starting point, Scott caught a quiet signal in Jack’s eye, and after a deep breath dove towards the remnants of the deck, furred with algae, still metres below. A handful of thumb-sized creatures flashed blue and green around his fins, hopeful that he might have something for them.
Jack watched his friend descend, then he steeled himself, pulled his goggles into his hair, and tapped Lola on the shoulder. His throat grew tight as she shook her head and swam away from him. He hesitated, then dove after Scott, and she let the current take her, feeling like she could swim forever. As the pull took her towards the divers’ boat, the captain beckoned her closer, gesturing that there was something to see.
“What is it?”
“Just look.”
Lola took hold of the boat’s rim and then submerged her head, scanning through the spectral motes that had begun to cloud the sea from below. They met the bright knives of the sun in bursting columns of light.
She gave a scream which was swallowed by her mouthpiece and pulled her feet towards her chest. Still metres and metres away, down in the forbidden night blue, a distant shape, serrated tail and jagged fins. Unmistakably a shark. She looked to the captain through the fog of her goggles and quickly grew indignant. His broad stomach and smile shook gently above her. The man was consumed by giggles.
“Look at the mouth,” he tried to reassure her. “It’s a basking shark. The only kind we get here. A friend.”
Lola dipped her head again, but the gold wind had grown strong just in the brief time that she and the captain had been speaking, and the shark was lost to view. She turned to him.
“Thanks. I think we need to go.”
She put two fingers into her mouth and whistled until Scott looked towards her. He made a signal that asked if they should leave.
Lola shouted back. “Yes, but get me from here? The current.”
The men worked their way back to where they were anchored, then into the horizon, towards her. They were there in a minute, and she dropped her flippers into the boat first, then used the stabilising plank to clamber into its belly.
Once Lola was seated, in the noise of the engine, Jack turned on his bench at the front to face her, and tested.
“I loved that eel.”
Lola looked at him.
“I know you’re disappointed. It felt like too much and I just wanted to be in it, with you, here, not thinking about what’s next. I can’t – I don’t know how to think about the future with…everything. The news.”
Lola waited.
“Don’t you ever feel like it will disappear if you treat it like it’s real?”
“Jack that’s called avoidance. You’re not a unicorn.”
“And I wish you wouldn’t speak about my granddad the way you did earlier.” He couldn’t find his words, choked a sob at being unable to reach her.
Lola looked at him coldly. “I’m not wrong though, am I?”
In that moment Jack hated her in that way we can hate only our families, she was so slick around him in his skull that he could not breathe and he wanted her away.
Scott pressed the boat forward, through the rising swell, towards the colours of the resort on the beach. Again, charred meat on the wind.
And out of their wake, a needlefish arced, pellucid in the deepening the sky.
