David Brookes

IN YOur Arms

The water was blue-grey and choppy beneath our boat. Richard held my hand tightly but stared across the narrow deck, over the bare beaded shoulders of the other divers, at the frigid Celtic Sea.

Our little pleasure cruiser and its skipper could handle the waves. With each powerful upswell we seemed to go weightless for a moment and then crash back into the frothing water.

As we bounced along the Cornish coast, I saw Rich’s eyes dart up to the red buoy rings hooked onto the cabin above the window of the bridge. Then he peered at the wooden box-seats the people opposite us sat on, where he knew spare life jackets to be stored. We were already wearing life jackets over our wet T-shirts and swim clothes.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, giving his hand a squeeze. ‘We’re not even that far out.’

St Ives harbour beamed camel-white across the bay, still close enough for us to make out the milling families on the sand, the wind-twirled beach umbrellas.

Somewhere among the little bright buildings was our budget hotel. As usual we’d settled for a single-sized room, since Rich couldn’t sleep unless we were pressed together like spoons, burning increasingly hot throughout the night so that I would awaken sweating and unrested.

The sight of the town, within reach for a novice swimmer, seemed to reassure him. But still he clutched my hand so tightly that my skin lost its tan beneath his fingertips.

*

The Cornish coast. On stormy days the greyness can be overwhelming. High winds and steep ocean floors coincide to create vast swelling waves, the kind that rise and plunge with an explosive clap against the rocks. Surging crests boom against the slate sky, until spume turns to spray across the bleak stretches of waterlogged beach.

In summer the seas are deep blue. The tide seems to greet the black cliffs with a kiss. From a boat on a high swell, you see the green expanses of England stretched out before you like the untouched landscape of a nomad’s dream.

The boat had stopped. I was now half-submerged in the water, my fingers tightly gripping the steel rungs of the boat’s ladder. Richard looked down at me from the deck.

‘Come on!’ I called to him. I tasted salt on my lips. My lungs seemed to rise in my body every time the surface swelled, lifting me towards him before lowering me again. ‘It’s not that cold.’

Rich shook his head. He hadn’t even put on his snorkel; it was clear that, as he’d already promised, he had no intention of joining me in the ocean.

‘It’s too risky,’ he’d said, when I suggested we take a diving tour off the coast. The area was full of rocky outcrops and reefs barely beneath the surface, thriving with ocean life. Local folklore heaved with stories of wreckers and pirates, mad Arthurian magic.

These stories didn’t appease Rich, who would shudder whenever he thought of the formless black abyss beneath his paddling body. The black abyss terrified him, whether he imagined himself in a boat or treading water. The vastness, the nothingness of it was petrifying. He had no particular fear of shark or kraken or leviathan, but of being untethered from land — free-floating, literally, over an unknowable darkness. A thalassophobic metaphor for the unconscious Deep.

The Celtic Sea rarely dipped below 300 feet. Parts of Morcombe Bay, close to where Rich was born in Lancaster, were deeper by almost five times. You’d have to travel 250 miles south of Penzance to reach the first oceanic shelf, a sheer 15,000-foot drop into the Abyssal Plain of Biscay.

I know this because I researched it in my attempts to beg Rich to join me. He loved being in water, he loved the wonders of the natural world, watching Attenborough documentaries about our enormous, miraculous, fragile blue planet and the countless amazing creatures it sustained.

‘Don’t go,’ he said suddenly, stretching his arm down over the boat’s railing. I was just out of reach and didn’t want to be grabbed by him anyway. His eyes were full of panic. The spots of ocean spray on his forehead looked like newly sprung sweat.

I tried to soothe him as I rubbed spit around the inside of my mask and then drew it over my face. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll look at some fish and tickle a mermaid and then I’ll be right back. Okay?’

The other divers on the tour, who had already descended via the other ladders, were tuck-diving beneath the glittering, undulating surface. Rich’s anxiety had touched me a little and I didn’t want to be separated from them.

‘I’ll bring you back an oyster!’ I promised half-heartedly, then bit down on my snorkel and rolled under the next wave so that I didn’t have to hear his response.

*

About six months after we moved in together I started having these dreams. I would be trapped alive in a coffin, gasping for air and clawing at the wood. Or I would be forced to use a very narrow tunnel to escape a fire, crawling on hands and knees in a clanging silvered air duct that grew blisteringly hot under my palms.

When I’d tell Rich about these nightmares over breakfast, he would leap from his chair to hug me tightly, and whisper so close to my ear that it hurt. The moisture of his breath would condense on my skin. ‘Oh, my poor darling. That sounds awful. I love you.’

Crushing me in the vice of his affection.

*

I descended through the submarine world. The water was only relatively clear for the first few feet; below that was the murk and silt of that strange alien landscape I’d always been drawn to. A shiver ran up my spine, and not just because of the chilly currents that slithered around me. The sun had warmed the surface to a degree, but quickly I was out of its influence.

The boat had brought us to a long sandbank, which was home to a modest reef. It was one of the many humps of ground close to the surface that had posed such a danger to shipping all these centuries. Cornwall’s history is replete with wrecks. The tour operator ran a separate trip for those equipped with scuba gear, who had the oxygen to descend to the furry green remnants of those long-rotted hulks.

I had only my snorkel and my lungs. So what if I couldn’t deep-dive with an air cylinder? What could I be missing? There were myriad delights here, in the shallow realm of a single deep breath. I had already seen two great shoals of fish — large silver pollack and darting blue mackerel — swoop and pass through one another without exploding. Varieties of seaweed or kelp I’d never bothered to learn the names of: lacy varieties, and jungles buoyant with blisters of air, and huge drifting veils of lime-green fronds so fine they barely seemed to be there at all.

I paddled on the surface with my face in the water, a visitor on the threshold of two worlds. What membrane keeps them apart? Only gravity, pulling the denser liquid down but permitting the gas to rise.

Here the warm Gulf Stream carries marine life from more temperate climes to the chilly coast of the UK, and the nutrient richness that comes with it sustains such curiosities. There was so much to see. I had come to dive, though my lungs were still tight from a recent infection. I was going to see everything I could.

I inhaled deeply through the snorkel, tasting plastic in my throat, and then jack-knifed under the surface. For a moment I was swallowed by a gusting cloud of kelp from my left that tickled my bare arm and chest, feathering against my throat. I used the thick stipes to pull myself down toward the seabed, barely three metres from the surface where my breath bubbles broke.

You know what cowry shells and topshells look like, even if you don’t recognise the names. But you’ve probably never seen them alive, with their snail-like skirts and tiny rippling limbs climbing amongst floral sponges, tube worms… In the balmy water I shuddered to see a massive spider crab lurking within the forest of green stems.

Then I saw a magic trick from the corner of my eye, something that was there becoming no longer there. As though the sandy carpet of shattered shells had been whipped up to conceal something precious. But when I turned my head, sluggardly in the liquid atmosphere, I saw nothing.

Time for air. I rose with a few kicks of my flippers, surfaced, and blasted water out of my snorkel like a breaching dolphin.

The boat had drifted further away than I’d expected. I could make out Rich’s white oval face, expressionless as he scoured the ocean in a slow sweeping motion from aft to stern, like a lighthouse beam.

I gulped down some slightly frothy air, and dove again before he could see me. It wasn’t that I wanted to hide. More that I didn’t want to see the beseeching look on his face, his lonesome anxious plea.

And there was something down there I had to witness, that vanishing obscurity that defied the direct gaze.

*

Once again in the murk of the churning waters, amongst the alien contours and colours of the reef, I searched through the smears on my mask for that shapeshifting mirage. My eyes dragged over a dozen marvels: peach-coloured sea fans, their fine and horny tendrils reaching up like the fossilized skeleton of a leaf. Ross coral, a mound of rusty ears. Cup coral, that rubber sunset in Dayglo yellows and greens.

And then—

The flickering illusion of hot tarmac, a sorcerer’s jape. An animal appeared out of nothing. I had hoped to see a cuttlefish or two, or god willing a leatherback turtle surfing the warm currents of another ocean. But I hadn’t dared to see an octopus, with such chameleonic skills as to appear like the devil out of a puff of smoke.

Less than ten feet below the waves, the water here tugged back and forth. My limbs felt like pieces of driftwood strung together with twine. To steady myself, I let go of the kelp and pulled myself closer to the octopus using the rocks embedded in the sand.

Holding onto a large algae-stained rock with both hands, I stared at the living miracle that was just inches from my face.

Its curled-up tentacles, with their outward-facing suckers, looked like fleshy cogs in a weird machine from beyond our world.

As I watched, the ringlets of its arms unfurled. To see an octopus uncoil is to see the blooming of a strange flower. The long front of its face became only a part of its webbed skirt, and the bulbous head rose upward like a balloon that longed to shoot to the surface. And the tentacles strapped down, painlessly, over my right hand and the rock.

*

I was reminded of my grandmother months before her death, closing my fingers around a roll of paper money, and then holding my fist in both her hands. Instructing me to clasp tightly to one thing, and prepare to let go of another.

In this way the lanky cephalopod encompassed my knuckles and wrist. I felt a faint vacuum effect weld my fingertips to the stone outcrop. My thumb was free — enamoured with the playful rubbery creature in front of me, I tickled it gently. A pulse of chromatophoric colour zapped over the octopus’ skin. One ring, then several others, like ripples painted in ultraviolet.

In awe, I laughed through my snorkel. Above the hum of the ocean I heard my muffled voice, encased in bubbles, jitter up to the surface. Immediately my lungs wondered where the oxygen was.

Vowing to return to my new eight-armed friend, I swung my flippers down in the slow-motion medium of the water and braced against the sand, ready to push up. But when I tried to tug my hand away, I found that I couldn’t. The octopus was stronger than it looked. It grasped my hand tightly to the rock.

With my feet firmly planted, I put my free hand on the rock and pulled from my other shoulder. I gained some distance but the suckers of three tentacles clung tightly to the skin of my hand, the other tentacles gripping the rock in a multistrand embrace. The arms stretched as I pulled; the octopus’ head seemed to shrink and flatten.

As I relaxed my arm to avoid hurting the animal, I realised two things.

I was going to drown if I didn’t breathe in the next twenty seconds.

And to get free of the innocent creature I was going to have to badly hurt it.

*

My dive back down to the reef, the encounter with the octopus and my first effort to free myself had taken all of ten seconds.

Now my thoughts were whirling. For a moment not a single thought made purchase on my mind; I felt the first rush of panic. A belt was tightening slowly around my chest.

The octopus still glommed around my right hand was now a fleshy cream colour, mottled and contracted like a pruned fingertip. There seemed nothing sinister in the slit of its pupil, or in the weird pulp of its head.

I tested again, this time to the apparent limits: when I pulled my hand up from the rock, the tentacles stretched and thinned, becoming taught muscular ropes. The suckers slid apart from one another and became ovoid. But the grasping tips of those tentacles would not let go of the rock, and I couldn’t slide my hand out from underneath the creature’s cowl, even though I had a full inch of seawater between the rock and my palm.

If I pulled any further I’d rip the thing’s arms off. And it wasn’t trying to hurt me. It didn’t know what would happen to me if it didn’t set me free. It probably didn’t even know it was an octopus.

Without relaxing my position, I moved to hold the bulb of the octopus’ head with my free hand. I wanted to pull it away. But when I tightened my grip, the head deflated alarmingly under my fingertips like a water balloon. If I’d grasped tightly enough to pull, then I’d probably have burst it in a disgusting cloud of floating purplish offal.

I let go gently. The elastic arms shrank. My palm once more cupped the stone, trapped.

Now my lungs were burning. The belt had tightened, was still tightening.

I could feel my own ribs being sucked inward, toward the space where precious air should be. I desperately wanted to draw on the snorkel but I knew that would be suicide.

And I was already feeling a hazy lightness behind my eyes.

I tried to pull the sticky, stubborn arms off the rock and my hand, one by one. I couldn’t even get my fingers around the first two. The third arm relented slightly, and my knuckles scraped urgently beneath the suckers, tearing off my skin against the harsh stone. Wisps of my blood curled upward like gunsmoke.

It didn’t work. I’d drag one coiling tentacle loose, but it would simply twine back around the rock whilst I was busy with the second.

Above me, rays of light pierced the dappled surface to meet me through the gloom. In the roving hazy searchlights I attempted to ignore the stabbing pains in my chest. Of course, there was only one real choice. It felt ludicrous even to have tried this long to find a harmless solution.

Do, I thought, or die.

With more time I probably could have torn off just enough tentacles to get free, without necessarily killing the octopus. Cephalopods can regrow lost limbs. Some even chew off their own arms when it suits them. It didn’t have to die. But I had run out of time.

I forced the fingers of my free hand under the front of the octopus’ webbed cowl. My thumb dug into the flesh of its face, if an octopus could be said to have a face. Its bulging eyes retracted in a rubbery grimace.

Then I tore it loose.

There was a burst of blue vapour. The sucking compression over my right hand vanished and I immediately kicked for the surface. As I rocketed upward I saw two severed tentacles fall away amongst the coral, and a frantic flurry of bubbles.

Back in the human world of air, I didn’t wait to blow the water out of my snorkel before inhaling; I just ripped it out of my mouth and gasped noisily. After a few seconds the agonising tightness in my chest relaxed. My vision de-clouded.

Already I felt guilty about the animal. I put the mask to my eyes and pressed my face back into the water, down toward the reef. Below me I could see one of the amputated tentacles still drifting amongst the cerulean blood of my victim. But no wounded octopus.

Maybe it would crawl into a hole to die. But I had a feeling that it would survive.

*

Rich smiled at me in a brittle way as I climbed aboard the boat. The weight of my own dripping body wore me out instantly. I plopped onto the wooden bench beside him, and told him what had happened. It already felt like no big deal.

But as I moved on to list the fascinating fish and reef creatures that I’d seen, I noticed something change in Rich’s eyes. He was looking away to some other place, an expression of anxious concern in every line of his face. Looking into a distant abyss, a separate deep and lonely place.

David Brookes is a writer currently living in the UK, from where he runs his editing firm The STP Literary Service.  He has stories published in many magazines including Litro, The Stand, The Cabinet of Heed, Scrittura, Every Day Fiction, Electric Spec, Pantechnicon, Bewildering Stories, Whispering Spirits, Morpheus Tales, The Cynic and Aphelion. His first novel, Half Discovered Wings, was published internationally by Libros International in 2009.