Chapter 20: Surface

The last metre took ninety minutes.

From one metre — one point one atmospheres — to zero metres — one atmosphere, surface pressure. Ninety minutes in which the gauge moved so slowly that watching it was like watching the hour hand of a clock, the movement imperceptible in the moment but undeniable over time, the number descending through fractions that the gauge could barely display — 1.08, 1.06, 1.04 — each fraction a step, a release, a letting go.

Kwame watched the gauge. He had not watched the gauge before — not like this, not with the sustained attention of a man watching the last numbers of a countdown, the countdown to the surface, the countdown to the air. For twenty-seven days, the gauge had been a fact — a number on the wall, a reading he checked the way he checked the time, a parameter that described the condition of the chamber. Now the gauge was a narrative. The gauge was telling the story of the return. The gauge was counting the distance between the depth and the surface, between the between and the world, between the man he had been for twenty-seven days and the man he was about to become.

One point zero two. One point zero one.

The hiss of the exhaust valve was barely audible now — a whisper, a breath, the last molecules of excess pressure venting from the chamber, the atmosphere inside approaching the atmosphere outside, the two pressures converging, the gap closing, the difference diminishing to the point where the chamber and the world were at the same pressure, at the same atmosphere, at the same condition.

One point zero zero.

Sarah Webb's voice on the intercom, and her voice was the voice of a woman who had watched six men ascend from 150 metres over five days and who was about to open the hatch and return them to the world: Chamber pressure equalised at one point zero zero atmosphere. Decompression complete. All parameters normal. Preparing to open the outer hatch.

Mac said: About bloody time.

The chamber laughed. Not the helium laugh — the helium was gone. The real laugh, the surface laugh, six men laughing in their natural voices for the first time in twenty-seven days, the sound of the laughter correct, the pitch right, the voices restored to the register they were born with, the deep sounds of men who had been speaking in falsetto for four weeks and who were now, finally, unmistakably, themselves.

The hatch opened.

The hatch was on the end of the chamber — the main access hatch, sixty centimetres in diameter, the same hatch they had entered through twenty-seven days ago when they had climbed in feet first and the blow-down had begun. The hatch opened outward, swinging on its hinges, and through the opening came the air.

The air of the world. Not heliox. Not trimix. Not the processed, analysed, scrubbed, temperature-controlled, humidity-managed atmosphere of the saturation system. The air. The actual air of the North Sea, carried into the vessel through the ventilation system, smelling of salt and diesel and cooking and the particular compound of odours that an offshore vessel accumulated — the paint, the hydraulic fluid, the cleaning chemicals, the sweat of a hundred men, the sea itself, the vast wet cold living sea.

Kwame smelled it. The smell hit him like a wave — not a metaphor but a physiological event, the olfactory receptors that had been dampened by the helium atmosphere suddenly receiving the full spectrum of airborne molecules, the nose overwhelmed by the richness, the complexity, the sheer quantity of information that the air carried, information that the chamber atmosphere had not carried, the chamber atmosphere having been stripped of everything except the essentials — oxygen, helium, nitrogen — the non-essential molecules removed, the smell removed, the world removed.

The world was back.

He climbed out. Feet first, the way he had entered, the sixty-centimetre hatch requiring the same contortion to exit as to enter, the body folding and unfolding through the steel opening. His feet touched the deck — the main deck, the open deck, the deck that was at one atmosphere, at surface pressure, in the air.

He stood on the deck. He stood up straight. The ceiling was three metres above him — not the thirty centimetres of the bunk, not the three metres of the chamber's diameter, but the full height of the deck space, the overhead far away, the space around him suddenly enormous, the volume of the world suddenly available, the body registering the space the way a released spring registers the absence of compression, the muscles and the posture and the breathing expanding into the available room.

The deck was bright. Not the fluorescent brightness of the chamber — the cold, even, unchanging brightness of tubes behind sealed covers — but the daylight brightness of the North Sea in summer, the light coming through the portholes and the open doors, the light carrying the quality of the sky, the grey luminous quality of the Scottish coast, the simmer dim, the between-light.

Kwame stood on the deck and breathed. He breathed the air. He breathed it in and held it and breathed it out and breathed it in again, and each breath was a discovery, a reclamation, the lungs filling with the atmosphere they had evolved to process, the oxygen at its natural partial pressure, the nitrogen at its natural fraction, the air tasting of the world, the breath carrying the world into his body, the world entering him through his lungs the way the helium had entered him through his lungs twenty-seven days ago, except that this entry was a return, a homecoming, the lungs welcoming the air they knew.

Mac came out behind him. Then Fraser. Then Tomasz, Sean, Davy. Six men standing on the deck of the Highland Endurance, at one atmosphere, in the air, blinking in the daylight, breathing the unprocessed atmosphere, hearing their own voices at their natural pitch, the sound strange after four weeks of helium, the deep voices unfamiliar, the men listening to themselves speak the way you listen to a recording of your own voice — recognising it but not recognising it, knowing it is yours but hearing it as though for the first time.

Gary Hendricks was on the deck. He shook each man's hand — the dive superintendent's handshake, firm, brief, the handshake of a man who had been in saturation himself and who understood what the handshake meant. Not congratulations. Acknowledgment. The acknowledgment that these men had been sealed inside steel for twenty-seven days at pressures that would have killed them without the system and the procedures and the attention of the people who maintained them, and that they had done their work and they had survived and they were now, once again, part of the world.

Sarah Webb was on the deck. She stood by the chamber's access hatch and watched the men emerge, and she did not shake their hands. She nodded. The nod was her acknowledgment — the acknowledgment of a woman who had watched their numbers for twenty-seven days, who had maintained their atmosphere, who had kept them alive, and who was now watching them walk away from the system that had sustained them, the men separating from the machine, the biological components departing the mechanical system, the system that had functioned, that had held, that had not failed.

Kwame stopped in front of Sarah. He said: Thank you.

Sarah said: Just doing my job.

Kwame said: I know. Thank you for doing it.

She looked at him. The look was brief, professional, the look of a woman who maintained the boundary between herself and the men she kept alive, the boundary that allowed her to do the work without the weight of personal attachment, the boundary that she erected and maintained the way she maintained the chamber atmosphere — by attention, by discipline, by the sustained effort of a person who understood that the work required a separation between the watcher and the watched.

But the look also contained something else — a recognition, a moment of contact between two people who had shared, for twenty-seven days, a system that depended on both of them, the diver breathing and the LST maintaining, the man inside and the woman outside, the two halves of the equation that the chamber required.

She nodded again. He moved on.

The helicopter was scheduled for the next morning. Kwame had one night on the vessel at surface pressure — one night in his cabin, in his bunk, at one atmosphere, the cabin that he had slept in on the first night, twenty-seven days ago, the night before the blow-down, the night when he had lain in the dark and listened to the harbour sounds and thought about the letters waiting in his flat.

The letters were still waiting. The letters had been waiting for twenty-seven days, accumulating on the floor below the letterbox at 14b Crown Street, each one a week of his mother's life, the blue aerogrammes mixing with the bills and the junk mail, the pile growing, the paper patient.

He would read them tomorrow. He would read them the day after tomorrow. He would read them when he was in the flat, at the table, with a cup of tea, with the time to read them properly, to read each one twice, to hear his mother's voice in the handwriting, to know the things she had told him — the market, the weather, the medication, the church, the stairs, the tap, the tree.

But first he had to do something else. First he had to make a phone call.

He went to the vessel's communications room. The satellite phone was available for personal calls, and Kwame picked up the handset and dialled Yaw's number — the number he knew by memory, the number that had not changed in twelve years, the eleven digits that connected the North Sea to Accra, the vessel to the house in Dansoman, the brother to the brother.

The phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Four.

Yaw answered. His voice came through the satellite link with the slight delay that satellite communications imposed, the fraction of a second between the speaking and the hearing, the signal travelling up to the geostationary satellite and down to the ground station and through the terrestrial network to the phone in Yaw's hand, the distance covered in a quarter of a second, the speed of light doing what the speed of post could not.

Yaw, Kwame said.

Kwame, Yaw said. And then, with the particular attention of a man who was hearing his brother's voice for the first time in a month: You sound like yourself.

I am myself, Kwame said.

A pause. The satellite delay. Then Yaw said: Good rotation?

Good rotation, Kwame said. The work is done. I'm at the surface. Helicopter tomorrow.

He paused. He could hear, through the satellite link, the sounds of Yaw's house — the television, perhaps, or the radio, the domestic sounds of a home at 17:00, the evening sounds, Akosua perhaps playing, Abena perhaps cooking.

Yaw, he said. I am coming home.

The satellite delay. The fraction of a second. Then Yaw said: Home.

Not a question. Not a statement. The word repeated, held, examined. Home. The word that meant Accra, Osu, the house, the kitchen, the table, the stairs, the tree. The word that meant the mother and the brother and the niece and the compound and the neighbourhood and the city. The word that Kwame had not used in this context — to mean his own destination, his own direction, his own return — in six years.

I am booking a flight when I get to Aberdeen, Kwame said. The first one I can get. I am coming home. I want to see Mama. I want to see you. I want to meet Akosua.

The pause was longer than the satellite delay. The pause was Yaw — Yaw processing, Yaw hearing, Yaw receiving the words that he had been waiting to hear without knowing he had been waiting, the words that answered the question he had not asked because the asking would have been a criticism and the criticism would have been an accusation and the accusation would have been a breach of the patience that Yaw had maintained for six years, the patience of the present son, the patience of the man who stayed.

Yaw said: When.

Kwame said: As soon as I can. A week. Maybe less.

Yaw said: Mama received your letter. Two days ago. She has been carrying it in her pocket. She has read it seven times. I know because I counted — she reads it at the table in the morning and she reads it after lunch and she reads it before bed and she reads it when she thinks no one is watching, and I am always watching because I am here and I see.

Kwame heard the sentence. He heard the layers — the information (the letter arrived), the observation (she has read it seven times), the statement (I am always watching because I am here). He heard the love and the reproach and the relief, all of them present in the sentence, compressed into the words the way the letters were compressed into the aerogramme, the meaning exceeding the container.

Yaw, Kwame said. I owe you — I owe you more than I can say on the phone. I owe you the acknowledgment that you have been doing the work I should have been doing. The driving and the carrying and the fixing and the being there. You have been the present son. I have been the absent son. And the present son has done more than the absent son, and the absent son has not said so, and the not-saying has been — it has been wrong. It has been wrong and I am sorry and I will tell you this in person when I come. I will tell you at the table, in the kitchen, in the house. In person. In my own voice.

The satellite delay. The fraction of a second in which the words travelled from the North Sea to Accra. Then Yaw said: You had better come, then.

And Kwame heard it — heard the crack in Yaw's voice, the small break, the fracture in the careful neutrality that Yaw had maintained for years, the neutrality that was not indifference but discipline, the discipline of a man who had held his feelings at bay the way a hot water suit held the cold at bay, the control maintained, the barrier intact, until the words from his brother broke through the barrier the way the cold broke through a failed suit, fast and direct and impossible to resist.

I am coming, Kwame said.

Good, Yaw said. The word was not Mac's "good" — the chamber good, the compressed good, the single syllable carrying the weight of the unsaid. Yaw's "good" was something else. Yaw's "good" was a gate opening, a valve cycling from closed to open, the flow resuming, the current that had been blocked for six years finding the path clear and moving through it with the force of six years of accumulated potential.

Kwame said: Tell Mama I am coming. Tell her — tell her I will be there.

Yaw said: I will tell her. But she already knows. She has your letter. She is carrying it in her pocket. She knows.

Kwame ended the call. He stood in the communications room of the Highland Endurance and he breathed the air and he felt the deck beneath his feet and he heard the sea against the hull and he was at the surface. He was at one atmosphere. He was in the world.

He went to the mess for dinner. The food was rig food — steak pie, chips, beans, the same meal he had eaten on the first night, twenty-seven days ago. The food tasted like food. The food tasted extraordinary. The salt and the fat and the starch and the gravy arriving at his taste receptors with a vividness that made his eyes water, the flavour so intense after four weeks of helium distortion that each bite was an event, a small explosion of taste, the mouth remembering what flavour was.

He ate with Mac. They sat across from each other at the mess table, the way they had sat across from each other in the chamber for twenty-seven days, except that the table was not a fold-down and the chairs were not bench seats and the room was not a three-metre-diameter steel tube at fifteen atmospheres but a mess room at one atmosphere with windows that showed the North Sea and the sky.

Mac ate his steak pie. He drank his tea. He said: I'm going to phone Linda tonight. About the house. About going in. About the clock.

Kwame said: Good.

Mac said: And you? When are you going?

Kwame said: As soon as I can get a flight. A week. Maybe less.

Mac nodded. He ate his chips. He looked out the window at the sea, the grey water, the grey sky, the world in its northern palette, the world that Mac would return to — Peterhead, the Land Rover, the house, the clock.

Mac said: We'll both go in, then. Into the houses. Into the rooms. We'll wind the clocks.

Kwame said: We will.

They ate in the silence that followed, the comfortable silence of two men who had shared a chamber and a bell and a seafloor and a decompression and who understood each other in the way that dive partners understood each other — not completely, not in the way that lifelong friends or family understood each other, but functionally, practically, in the way that mattered, in the way that kept you alive at 150 metres and that carried, at the surface, a different but related weight.

After dinner, Kwame went to his cabin. He lay in his bunk at one atmosphere and listened to the sounds of the vessel — the engines, the ventilation, the sea, the sounds of a ship at sea that were not the sounds of a chamber at depth but that were, in their own way, the sounds of the between, the sounds of a vessel that was neither onshore nor on the seafloor but on the surface, in the middle, in the place between the land and the deep.

He was still in the between. He was at the surface of the sea, but he was not on land. He was out of the chamber, but he was not home. He was at one atmosphere, but the decompression — the emotional decompression, the six-year decompression — was not complete. The hatch had opened, but the journey was not over. The next hatch — the door of the house in Osu — was still closed, still waiting, still in the future.

But the future was closer now. The future was a flight and a taxi and a door. The future was a week. The future was Yaw at the airport and Akosua in his arms and his mother at the kitchen table and the letter in her pocket and the room upstairs with the bed made and the window open and the mango tree in the glass.

The future was close enough to touch.

Kwame lay in his bunk and breathed the air and felt the ship move beneath him — the slow roll of the vessel on the North Sea swell, the movement that had been imperceptible from the chamber but that was now, at one atmosphere, in his cabin, felt through the bunk and the hull and the body, the sea's movement communicating itself to the man, the man responsive to the sea in a way he had not been for twenty-seven days, the body reconnecting with the world, the senses opening, the interface between the self and the environment expanding from the chamber's three-metre diameter to the vessel's hundred-metre length and from there to the sea's infinite expanse and from there to the world.

He slept. The sleep was deep. The deepest sleep in twenty-seven days — the body at one atmosphere, the tissues at equilibrium, the gas released, the pressure resolved, the decompression complete. The body slept the way a body that had been working for twenty-seven days deserved to sleep — heavily, completely, the muscles unwinding, the joints settling, the heart maintaining its steady rhythm, the lungs drawing the air of the world in and out, in and out, the breathing the only sound in the cabin, the breathing of a man at rest, a man at the surface, a man who was, for the first time in twenty-seven days, in the world.

In the morning, the helicopter would come. In the morning, the world would begin again.

Kwame slept. The vessel rocked. The sea held the vessel and the vessel held the man and the man held, in his chest, the intention that had survived the depth and the pressure and the dark and the decompression and that was now, at one atmosphere, in the air, alive and real and ready to be carried from the vessel to the shore to the airport to the sky to the city where his mother waited, the letter in her pocket, the house ready, the door open, the mango tree in the window, the world at surface pressure, the distance closing, the return begun.