Chapter 11: The Dark

The night dive was no different from the day dive. At 150 metres, there was no night and no day. There was only the dark.

Kwame descended through the bottom hatch of the bell at 18:30, and the water closed over his helmet with the sound he knew — not a splash but a compression, a sealing, the world contracting to the volume of his helmet and the reach of his light — and he sank three metres to the sea floor and stood on the clay in the cone of his helmet lamp and looked out at the darkness that surrounded him on every side, above and below and in every lateral direction, the darkness of 150 metres, the darkness that was not the absence of light but the presence of water, 150 metres of water between him and the nearest photon of sunlight, the water absorbing and scattering the light until what reached this depth was nothing, not even the theoretical residue, not even the mathematical ghost.

At the surface, it was night. The North Sea was black under a cloud cover that blocked the stars and the late summer light. The vessel's deck lights cast their orange glow on the waves. The DP thrusters held the vessel in position with the steady rumble of machines doing what machines were designed to do.

At 150 metres, the surface conditions were irrelevant. The darkness at depth was the same at midnight as it was at noon, the same in June as in December, the same in storm as in calm. The darkness was a constant. The darkness was the medium in which the diver worked, the permanent condition of the deep, as much a part of the environment as the pressure and the cold and the current.

Kwame had worked in this darkness for twelve years. He had made his peace with it, if peace was the right word for the accommodation a person reached with a condition that could not be changed and that had to be inhabited. The accommodation was not comfort — the dark was never comfortable, could never be comfortable, because the human animal was a visual creature, dependent on sight for orientation and navigation and the basic cognitive function of knowing where things were, and the removal of sight was, at a fundamental level, a removal of the self, a dissolution of the boundary between the person and the environment.

In the dark, at depth, you were aware of yourself only through the things that touched you — the suit against your skin, the helmet on your head, the boots on the clay, the umbilical trailing behind, the tool in your hand. Beyond the reach of touch, you did not exist. The darkness erased you. You were a point of consciousness in a volume of nothing, the helmet lamp a small assertion of presence in the infinite absence, the light reaching two metres before the water absorbed it, the particles suspending in the beam like dust in a sunbeam except that these particles were not dust but marine snow, the constant slow rain of organic matter from the surface — dead plankton, faecal pellets, fragments of the living ocean falling through the water column in a gentle, endless precipitation, the detritus of the world above sinking to the world below.

He walked to the manifold. The manifold was a steel structure approximately ten metres long, five metres wide, and three metres tall, a framework of pipes and valves and instruments that served as a junction for three pipelines, the gas from three separate wells gathered here and routed through a single export pipeline to the platform. The manifold had been on the seabed for fifteen years, and the ocean had claimed it in the way the ocean claimed everything — gradually, incrementally, the marine growth accumulating on every surface, the hydroids and barnacles and soft corals and anemones colonising the steel, converting the industrial structure into an accidental reef, the manifold becoming, over fifteen years, as much a part of the seabed as the clay it sat on.

Kwame began the inspection at the east end, working methodically along the structure, his helmet camera recording the condition of each component. He measured the anode wastage — the sacrificial zinc anodes bolted to the manifold's frame, the anodes that corroded preferentially to protect the structural steel, the zinc dissolving into the seawater at a rate determined by the electrochemistry and the water conditions and the quality of the coating on the steel, the anodes sacrificing themselves so that the manifold could survive, the zinc giving its substance to protect the iron.

The anodes were at forty-two per cent wastage. Within specification. Within the expected range. The manifold would survive another five years before the anodes needed replacement.

Mac was beside him, managing the umbilical, the beam of his helmet lamp swinging across the manifold's structure as he moved, the two lights crossing and uncrossing in the dark like the beams of two lighthouses, each one illuminating a small section of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

They did not speak. The communications were open — the intercom connected them to each other and to the bell and to the surface — but they did not speak unless there was something to say, because speech at depth was work. The helium distorted the words, and the effort of being understood — of enunciating clearly, of speaking slowly, of repeating when the surface asked for confirmation — consumed energy and attention that were better spent on the work. They communicated instead through the language they had developed over five years of diving together — a vocabulary of gestures and lamp movements and the positioning of the body, the non-verbal language of men who had learned to work in an environment where the verbal was unreliable.

A lamp pointed at a valve: look at this. A hand raised: stop. A thumb up: confirmed. A hand swept across the throat: emergency. These gestures carried as much information as speech and were transmitted instantaneously, without the delay of helium distortion, without the need for the surface to unscramble and interpret.

Kwame moved along the manifold. He inspected the valves — sixteen of them, each one a gate valve or a ball valve controlling the flow of gas through the manifold's pipework, each one checked for corrosion, for damage, for correct position (open or closed, as specified by the operations manual), for the condition of the actuator that allowed the valve to be operated remotely from the surface. He cleaned the marine growth from the valve identification plates with a scraper, the growth coming away in sheets, the barnacles cracking, the hydroids tearing, the small ecosystem that had established itself on the metal disturbed by the scraper and drifting away into the dark.

The work was methodical. The work was slow. The work required the attention he was good at providing — the sustained, careful observation of details that, individually, were unremarkable but that, collectively, described the condition of a structure that was critical to the operation of the field, a structure that processed gas worth millions of pounds per day, a structure that had to function reliably for twenty-five years on the sea floor without maintenance access except for these inspections, these visits by divers who descended in bells from vessels that held station above and who spent six hours examining the structure with their lights and their cameras and their hands and then ascended and left and did not return for five years.

The manifold was alone for five years at a time. Alone in the dark, in the cold, in the pressure, with only the ocean for company and the marine growth for decoration, the structure enduring the conditions that the divers visited but did not stay in, the manifold permanent where the divers were transient, the steel more durable than the men, the metal outlasting the flesh that inspected it.

Kwame thought about endurance. He thought about it in the way he thought about most things at depth — not as philosophy but as observation, the observation of a man who worked with metal and who understood, at the molecular level, the difference between the things that endured and the things that did not.

Steel endured. Steel at 150 metres, properly protected by coatings and anodes, would outlast the men who installed it. The manifold would be here for fifty years, a hundred, long after the gas had stopped flowing and the field had been decommissioned and the vessel had been scrapped and the divers had retired or died. The steel would remain on the seabed, gradually corroding as the anodes depleted and the coatings failed, the ocean slowly reclaiming the iron, converting it back to oxide, to rust, to the red-brown dust that iron became when the chemistry that held it in its metallic state was no longer maintained.

Iron to oxide. A return. A decompression of sorts — the metal releasing the energy that had been invested in smelting it, the energy that had separated the iron from the oxygen, the energy that had compressed the atoms into the metallic lattice, the structure that made steel steel. When the energy was released, the structure collapsed, and the iron returned to the state it had been in before the furnace, before the welding, before the pipeline, before the manifold, before the men and the vessels and the industry.

Everything returned. Given time. Given the right conditions. Everything returned to its previous state. The question was whether the return was controlled — a decompression, a gradual release, a managed transition — or uncontrolled, a sudden collapse, an explosive failure, the kind of return that left damage.

He was thinking about going home.

The thought arrived without announcement, the way thoughts arrived at depth — surfacing from the dark the way objects surfaced in the beam of his light, suddenly there, suddenly visible, having been present all along but invisible until the light found them.

He was thinking about going home, and the thinking was not the familiar, deferred thinking — the I-will-go-home-when-the-schedule-allows thinking, the conditional, future-tense thinking that he had been practising for six years. This was different. This was a thought about the mechanics of return. This was a thought about what going home would actually require — not the flight, not the schedule, not the logistics, but the emotional procedure, the steps that would have to be taken, the preparation that would have to be done, the way a decompression had to be planned and managed and executed in the correct sequence to avoid the catastrophic release that the body would suffer if the pressure were dropped too quickly.

He could not go home the way he left. He could not simply arrive, appear at the door of the house in Osu, present himself to his mother and his brother and his niece as though the six years were a weekend, as though the distance were a bus ride, as though the man who arrived was the same man who had left. He was not the same man. The pressure had changed him. The distance had changed him. The years had changed him. He was Kwame Asante, but he was the Kwame Asante who had been compressed to fifteen atmospheres and saturated with the inert gas of absence, and if he decompressed too quickly — if he went home without preparation, without the slow, controlled release of the pressure he had accumulated — the return would be painful, would be dangerous, would risk the kind of damage that could not be repaired.

The bends. The emotional bends. The bubbles that formed when a man surfaced too quickly from a depth he had been at too long.

He did not know how to decompress. He did not know the procedure. The saturation diving decompression schedule was published, documented, calculated by physicians and physiologists who understood the solubility of helium in human tissue and the rate at which the body could safely release the dissolved gas. The schedule specified the rate of ascent — metres per hour — and the stops — the depths at which the diver paused to allow the gas to equilibrate — and the duration — five days from 150 metres to the surface, five days of slow, controlled, patient release.

There was no equivalent schedule for the emotional decompression. No table that specified the rate of return from six years of absence. No physician who could calculate the stops and the durations and the safe rate of ascent from the depth of distance to the surface of presence. Kwame would have to find his own schedule, his own rate, his own stops. He would have to decompress himself.

He thought about this while he inspected valve number twelve, a sixteen-inch ball valve on the export pipeline header, the valve body colonised by a community of Metridium anemones, their white plumes waving in the current, the anemones having found in the valve's sheltered geometry a habitat that suited them, the industrial structure providing the hard substrate and the current exposure that the anemones required.

The anemones did not know they were living on a valve. The anemones did not know about the gas flowing through the pipe or the pressure in the pipeline or the manifold's function in the field's production system. The anemones knew only the current and the food it carried and the substrate beneath their feet. They had colonised the valve the way any organism colonised any available surface — opportunistically, without plan, without the consciousness of purpose that humans brought to their settlements.

Kwame had colonised Aberdeen the same way. Not with purpose — not with the intention of staying forever, not with the decision to make Scotland his home — but opportunistically, the scholarship providing the substrate, the diving industry providing the current, the flat on Crown Street providing the shelter. He had settled on the valve, so to speak, and had lived there for eighteen years, and the living had become a colony, a community of habits and routines and the particular forms of comfort that a person accumulated in a place, and the colony had grown and established itself and become, over time, the thing he called his life.

But the valve was not the sea floor. The valve was a surface, a substrate, a place to attach. The sea floor was beneath, and the sea floor of Kwame's life was Accra, was Osu, was the house where his mother sat at the kitchen table and wrote letters with a pen that was running low on ink, the floor beneath the colony, the foundation that everything else rested on whether he acknowledged it or not.

He finished the valve inspection. He moved to the next section. The work continued. The dark continued. The pressure continued.

At midnight, they returned to the bell. The ascent took twelve minutes. The trunk took two minutes. The chamber took them in, warm and bright and humming, the atmosphere maintained by Sarah's replacement, by Colin, who read the numbers at midnight with his quiet voice: PPO2 zero-point-four bar, CO2 zero-point-three per cent, temperature twenty-eight degrees, all parameters normal.

Kwame showered. He ate. He sat at the table in the chamber that was both his home and not his home, the place where he lived for twenty-eight days and the place he would leave when the decompression was complete, the temporary permanent, the chamber that was, like Aberdeen, a colony rather than a foundation.

He opened his notebook. He held his pen. He thought about the thought he had had at depth — the thought about going home, about the mechanics of return, about the decompression that would be required.

He wrote: I am thinking about going home.

He looked at the sentence. Five words. Five words that had taken six years to write. Five words that sat on the page like the beginning of a weld — the first point of contact, the arc struck, the metal beginning to melt, the joint beginning to form.

He wrote: I do not know how to go home. I know the flights. I know the route — Aberdeen to Heathrow to Kotoka. I know the cost — I can afford the cost ten times over. I know the logistics. What I do not know is the procedure. The sequence of steps. The preparation. The way to arrive at a door I have not opened in six years and knock or enter or stand or sit or speak to the woman behind the door who has been writing to me every week for eighteen years and whose letters I read in batches because I cannot read them in real time because real time is the time of the surface and I live at depth.

He wrote: Mac has not entered his mother's house since the funeral. Four years. I have not entered my mother's house since the last visit. Six years. We are the same. We are men who cannot go into the houses that hold the people we love because the houses hold the people and the people are a pressure we cannot face, a depth we cannot dive to, a dark we cannot enter.

He wrote: But I enter the dark every day. I enter the dark at 150 metres and I work in it and I am not afraid of it. The dark at depth is a known dark. It is the dark of the North Sea at the bottom of the water column, the dark that is described by physics and managed by equipment and survived by procedure. The dark at home is different. The dark at home is the dark of the things I have not done and the words I have not said and the time I have not been present, and no helmet light can illuminate it, and no umbilical can supply the gas I need to breathe in it, and no hot water suit can keep me warm in the cold of my own absence.

He closed the notebook. He put it under his pillow. He lay in his bunk and listened to the chamber.

Mac was asleep. Mac's snore was a helium whistle, high and thin, the sound of a man at rest in a medium that distorted rest the way it distorted everything else — the sound, the taste, the sleep, all of it shifted by the pressure into versions of themselves that were recognisable but altered, close but not right, the way Kwame himself was recognisable but altered, close to the man his mother had raised but not right, not the same, the pressure having changed him in ways that were not visible on the surface but that were structural, fundamental, the way the pressure changed the properties of gases — the density increasing, the behaviour shifting, the substance the same but the state different.

He was Kwame Asante. He had always been Kwame Asante. But the Kwame Asante at 15.2 bar was not the Kwame Asante at one bar, and the difference was not the pressure but the duration, not the depth but the time spent at depth, the years of saturation that had dissolved something into his tissues that would take more than five days to release, something that the decompression tables did not account for, something that no physician had calculated and no procedure could manage.

The distance. The distance was dissolved in him. The distance was in his blood and his bones and his breath, the way the helium was in his blood and his bones and his breath, and the decompression from the distance would take longer than the decompression from the depth, and the stops would be harder, and the risk of the bends — the emotional bends, the bubbles of unprocessed feeling rising through the bloodstream of his conscience — was real and present and unmanageable by any schedule he knew.

But he had written the sentence. I am thinking about going home. The arc was struck. The root pass was begun.

The chamber hummed. The pressure held. And Kwame lay in the dark of the chamber — a different dark from the dark at depth, a managed dark, a dimmed-lights dark, a dark with the knowledge of light waiting behind the switch — and he thought about the other dark, the dark he would have to enter, the dark of return, the dark of the house in Osu and the kitchen table and the twelve steps and the mango tree and the mother and the brother and the niece and the letters and the silence and the six years of absence that had accumulated in the rooms of that house the way marine growth accumulated on a manifold, gradually, persistently, the growth a record of time passed, a measurement of how long the structure had been alone.

He would have to clear the growth. He would have to scrape it away, the way he scraped the marine growth from the valve identification plates, revealing the original surface beneath. He would have to find the original surface of his relationship with his mother, the surface that existed before the growth of distance and silence and absence had covered it.

He did not know if the surface was still there. He did not know if the original metal was still sound beneath the growth. But the anodes were at forty-two per cent. There was still protection. There was still time.

He closed his eyes. The dark held him. The chamber held him. The pressure held everything.

And somewhere in Accra, in the house in Osu, in the bedroom upstairs with the window overlooking the mango tree, his mother was sleeping, and the dark that held her was the ordinary dark of a tropical night, warm and close and full of the sounds of the city — the generators, the dogs, the distant traffic, the fan turning — and in her sleep she was not thinking about the numbers or the pressure or the gas or the dark at 150 metres. In her sleep she was dreaming, perhaps, of the boy who had run up the stairs two at a time, the boy who had lined up his food in neat rows, the boy whose voice she remembered in its original register, deep and warm and unmistakably hers, the voice she was waiting to hear again, the voice that existed somewhere in the world, somewhere in the dark, somewhere at a depth she could not fathom, held by a pressure she could not feel, speaking in a frequency she could not detect, but there, she believed, still there, still her son's voice, still the voice she had known before the distance changed it, before the helium changed it, before the years and the depth and the steel and the sea had made it into something she could not recognise on the phone.

The voice was there. She was sure of it. A mother was sure of these things the way a Life Support Technician was sure of the numbers — by watching, by attention, by the sustained vigilance that love required, the monitoring that did not stop, the care that did not look away.