Chapter 32: The Hatch

One point zero four. One point zero three. One point zero two.

The gauge moved with the patience of a thing that had been moving for five days and that would not be hurried by the proximity of its destination, the needle descending through the fractions with the same imperceptible motion at 1.02 bar as it had shown at 14.8 bar, the rate unchanged, the physics consistent, the decompression schedule maintaining its discipline in the final metres as rigorously as it had maintained it in the first, the schedule understanding what the body understood and the mind did not — that the last metre was as dangerous as any other, that the final fraction of pressure could produce a bubble as lethal as any other, that the only safe arrival at the surface was the controlled arrival, the slow arrival, the arrival that the schedule permitted.

Kwame watched the gauge. He had been watching it for two hours — not continuously, not with the fixed stare of a man watching a thing that moved, but with the intermittent attention of a man checking a process that he trusted but that he could not stop himself from verifying, the checking a habit, a compulsion, the body's need to confirm that the ascent was continuing, that the numbers were falling, that the surface was approaching.

The chamber was different at 1.02 bar. The atmosphere was different — lighter, thinner, the density of the gas reduced to nearly surface density, the helium mostly purged from the mix, the oxygen and the nitrogen replacing it, the breathing gas approaching the composition of air, the atmosphere in the chamber approaching the atmosphere outside the chamber, the inside and the outside converging, the two conditions — pressurised and surface — approaching equality with the same gradual inevitability with which the gauge's needle approached zero.

The voice was back. Kwame's voice at 1.02 bar was his voice — the deep, measured voice that his mother would recognise, the voice that Yaw would recognise, the voice that the helium had taken twenty-nine days ago and that the decompression had returned, the voice restored to the register it was designed to occupy, the vocal cords vibrating at their natural frequency, the air column resonating at its natural length, the sound arriving at the ears of the other men in the chamber with the pitch and the timbre and the particular quality that identified it as Kwame's, the voice as individual as the weld, the voice a signature.

Mac's voice was back too — the low, steady bass that the helium had raised to a tenor and that had now descended through the registers back to its origin, the voice settling into its foundation the way the pressure was settling toward its foundation, the voice finding the depth it was meant to occupy. Mac was sitting on his bunk, his Tom Clancy finished — page 487, the final page reached on day twenty-eight, the novel and the rotation completing their respective narratives within twenty-four hours of each other, the coincidence noted by Mac with the satisfaction of a man who appreciated symmetry.

Sean was talking. Sean had not stopped talking for twenty-nine days, and the return of his natural voice — the Cork accent fully restored, the vowels and the consonants and the particular music of the southern Irish English back in their proper arrangement — had given his talking a renewed energy, as though the voice had been stored during the helium weeks and was now being released, the voice decompressing along with the body, the words flowing with the urgency of a pressurised gas escaping through a valve.

Tomasz was doing his final crossword. Fraser was cleaning the chamber — not because the chamber needed cleaning but because the cleaning was Fraser's way of preparing for the transition, the way other men packed their bags or checked their equipment, Fraser cleaned, the act of cleaning an act of completion, a closing, the surfaces wiped down, the bunks stripped, the chamber returned to the state it had been in twenty-nine days ago when the six men had entered and the hatch had sealed and the blow-down had begun.

Davy was sitting at the table, his hands on the surface, the hands still steady, the steadiness now unremarkable, the tremor a thing that had happened and resolved and been absorbed into the young diver's accumulating experience, the experience that would make him, rotation by rotation, the diver he was becoming — the diver who had been humbled by the depth and who had bent without cracking and who carried the knowledge of the bending in his body, the knowledge that the body was a partner and not a tool, the knowledge that the depth extracted a cost and that the cost was payable only in the currency of respect.

One point zero one.

Sarah's voice came through the intercom. Her voice was clear — not clear in the way it had been clear at depth, where the clarity was electronic, the voice processed through the unscrambler, the clarity artificial. Clear in the way that a voice was clear when it was carried through air at surface density, the sound travelling at the speed it was designed to travel, the frequency arriving at the ears without the distortion of the helium, Sarah's voice fully Sarah's, the Life Support Technician's voice restored to the register that the men would hear when they stepped out of the chamber and into the dive control room and saw the woman who had kept them alive for twenty-nine days.

Chamber pressure is at one point zero one bar, Sarah said. Decompression schedule is complete in approximately fifteen minutes. The hatch will be opened when the pressure equalises with the surface. All parameters nominal. Atmospheric composition is transitioning to normal air. Temperature is twenty-eight degrees. Welcome back, gentlemen.

Welcome back. The words were a formality, a tradition, the Life Support Technician's acknowledgement that the decompression was ending and that the men were returning to the surface, the words spoken at the end of every sat as a matter of custom, the custom carrying the weight of the thing it represented — the return, the surfacing, the completion of the transit from depth to surface, from the pressurised world to the atmospheric world, from the chamber to the air.

The men received the words with the particular silence that preceded the hatch opening — the silence of anticipation, the silence of the last minutes, the silence of men who were about to step out of a steel cylinder in which they had lived for twenty-nine days and into a world that they had not seen or smelled or touched for twenty-nine days, the world that had continued without them, the world that was on the other side of the hatch, the world that was, at this moment, separated from them by sixty centimetres of steel and 0.01 bar of residual pressure.

Kwame felt the transition. Not in the pressure — the 0.01 bar was imperceptible, the difference between 1.01 and 1.00 too small for the body to detect, the senses unable to distinguish the last fraction of the atmosphere from the atmosphere itself. He felt it in the quality of the waiting. The waiting was different now. The waiting had changed from the waiting of the chamber — the passive, enduring, helium waiting — to the waiting of the threshold, the active, expectant, surface waiting, the waiting of a man who was about to step through a door.

One point zero zero five. One point zero zero two. One point zero zero zero.

The gauge reached zero. The needle rested on the mark that represented one atmosphere, the mark that represented the surface, the mark that represented the pressure at which a human body was designed to operate, the pressure at which the blood carried oxygen and nitrogen in the proportions that evolution had determined, the pressure of sea level, the pressure of the world.

The equalisation was complete. The chamber was at surface pressure. The atmosphere inside the chamber was the same as the atmosphere outside the chamber. The barrier between the inside and the outside was no longer the pressure — the pressure was equal, the differential zero, the two atmospheres identical. The barrier was the hatch. The barrier was sixty centimetres of steel, the same sixty centimetres through which they had entered twenty-nine days ago, the hatch that had sealed above their heads and that was now the only thing between them and the surface.

The hatch mechanism turned. The sound was mechanical — the dogs disengaging, the locking ring rotating, the seal releasing, the sound of the system unlocking, the sound of the opening. The sound was not loud. The sound was the sound of metal moving against metal with the precision of a mechanism designed for this purpose, the hatch engineered to open and close and open again, the engineering reliable, the mechanism sound.

The hatch opened.

The air came in.

It came in not as a rush — there was no pressure differential, no flow from high to low, no hiss of equalisation — but as a presence, an arrival, a thing that entered the chamber the way a person entered a room, by being there, by occupying the space, by changing the quality of the atmosphere through its presence. The surface air. The air of the world. The air that carried the smells that the chamber air had not carried — the diesel of the vessel, the salt of the sea, the cooking from the galley, the paint and the steel and the particular compound of odours that constituted the Highland Endurance's atmospheric signature, the smell of the vessel, the smell of the surface, the smell of above.

Kwame breathed the air. The first breath of surface air in twenty-nine days. The breath entered his lungs and the lungs received it and the blood took the oxygen and distributed it and the body was, for the first time in twenty-nine days, breathing the air it was designed to breathe, the nitrogen-oxygen mix at one atmosphere that had sustained every human being who had ever lived, the air of the world, the ordinary air, the air that was so common and so constant that no surface-dwelling person ever thought about it, the air that the divers thought about constantly because they lived without it, the air replaced by the heliox, the natural exchanged for the artificial, the ordinary for the engineered.

The air was ordinary. The air was extraordinary. The air was both.

Mac went first. Mac always went first. He climbed the ladder that led from the chamber floor to the hatch opening — three rungs, the rungs cold steel, the hands gripping the rungs with the care of a man who had not climbed a ladder in twenty-nine days and whose legs, accustomed to the flat floor of the chamber, were adjusting to the vertical, the body relearning the posture of ascent, the muscles recalibrating.

Mac's head appeared through the hatch. Then his shoulders. Then his torso. Then his legs. Then Mac was standing on the deck of the vessel, on the steel plates of the main deck, in the air, in the light — the grey, overcast, North Sea light that was, compared to the fluorescent light of the chamber, as bright and as vast and as overwhelming as the light of the sun after a cave.

Mac stood on the deck and he breathed and he looked around and he said nothing for a moment, the silence his acknowledgement of the transition, his recognition that the surface was a different world and that the entry into it required a moment of adjustment, a moment of recalibration, a moment of standing still and letting the senses take in the data that the chamber had not provided — the horizon, the sky, the movement of the sea, the wind on the skin, the distance, the open space, the unconfined, the unlimited, the world.

Fraser went next. Then Sean, who emerged talking, the voice preceding the body through the hatch, the words arriving before the man, Sean's contribution to the surface world beginning before he had fully entered it. Then Tomasz, quietly, the Polish diver stepping onto the deck with the composed silence of a man for whom the transition was a private matter. Then Davy, the young diver emerging from the hatch with the particular care of a man who was surfacing from his sixth sat and who was beginning to understand that the surfacing was not the end of the experience but the beginning of the processing, the body on the surface, the mind still at depth, the integration of the two a process that would take days.

Kwame went last. He climbed the ladder. He gripped the hatch rim. He pulled himself up and through the opening and onto the deck, the sixty centimetres of the hatch the last confinement, the last enclosure, the last passage through the narrow space, the trunk, the birth canal, the opening through which the man passed from the inside to the outside, from the pressurised to the atmospheric, from the chamber to the world.

He stood on the deck. The air was cold — the North Sea air, the April air, the air of the latitude, the air that carried the smell of salt and diesel and rain and the particular quality of moisture that was Aberdeen's contribution to the atmosphere, the damp grey air that Kwame had been breathing for eighteen years and that was, despite its greyness, the air of his life, the air of his working world, the air of the surface.

The sky was above him. The sky was grey, overcast, the cloud layer low and continuous, the ceiling that the North Sea maintained for most of the year, the grey lid that covered the water and the vessels and the platforms and the rigs and that was, for a man who had not seen the sky in twenty-nine days, as beautiful and as vast and as astonishing as a clear sky, as a star-filled sky, as any sky, because the sky was the sky and the sky was above and the sky was the thing that the chamber did not have, the thing that the depth did not have, the thing that the pressurised world excluded by its nature, the sky the exclusive property of the surface, the sky the reward for ascending.

He looked at the sea. The North Sea was grey-green, the surface moving with the long, slow swells that came from the north-west, the swells the sea's breathing, the rise and fall of the water the inhalation and exhalation of a body so large that its breathing could be felt by every vessel on its surface. The sea was the same sea he had been at the bottom of for twenty-five days. The sea was the same body of water that he had worked in, descended through, breathed inside, the same water that had pressed against his suit and carried his umbilical and held the bell and covered the pipeline. The sea from above looked nothing like the sea from below. The sea from above was surface and light and movement. The sea from below was darkness and pressure and stillness. They were the same sea. They were entirely different.

Gary was on the deck. Gary shook each man's hand as they emerged — the handshake the superintendent's acknowledgement, the physical contact the confirmation that the men had returned, that the bodies were here, that the decompression was complete, that the rotation was over. Gary's handshake was firm, brief, the handshake of a man who had shaken these hands many times and who understood what the hands had done and where the hands had been and what the hands' return to the surface meant.

He shook Kwame's hand. Good rotation, Gary said. Clean work. The client is happy.

Kwame said: Thank you, Gary.

The words were insufficient. The words were always insufficient for the thing they were meant to carry — the gratitude not just for the compliment but for the management of the rotation, the oversight of the safety, the maintenance of the system that had kept six men alive for twenty-nine days at the bottom of the North Sea. But the words were the convention, and the convention served, and the handshake said the rest.

Sarah was in the dive control room. Kwame saw her through the window — sitting at her console, the gas panel behind her, the gauges that she had watched for twenty-nine days now reading the surface parameters, the numbers that represented the end of her vigil, the numbers that told her the men were out, the chamber was at atmospheric pressure, the life support was no longer supporting lives, the work was done.

She looked up. She saw Kwame through the window. She nodded. The nod was small, brief, the acknowledgement of the Life Support Technician to the diver she had kept alive, the nod carrying the weight of twenty-nine days of watching and adjusting and maintaining and not failing, the nod the quiet signal of a job completed, the signal of survival, the signal of the thing that had not happened because she had prevented it.

Kwame nodded back. The exchange lasted two seconds. The exchange was sufficient.

He went to his cabin. The cabin was the same cabin — starboard side, one deck above the saturation complex. The bunk was the same bunk. The cabin smelled of surface air, of diesel, of the vessel. He sat on the bunk and he put his kitbag on the floor and he opened the kitbag and he took out the notebook and he took the aerogramme from between the notebook's pages, the letter he had written at seventy-five metres, the letter to his mother, the letter that had decompressed with him from 8.5 bar to 1.0 bar, the words at surface pressure now, the letter at atmospheric.

He looked at the letter. The handwriting was his handwriting — the block capitals, the strong pen pressure, the letters formed by the hands that welded and gripped tools and held umbilicals and that had, at seventy-five metres, in the transitional voice, in the between-state, written the words that the depth had prepared him to write.

I am coming back, Mama. I am swimming toward the bell. I can see the lights.

He sealed the letter with tape from his kitbag — the electrical tape that he carried for minor equipment repairs, the black tape wound around the aerogramme's seal, the tape holding the letter closed, the seal different from his mother's — she used clear tape, he used black — but the function the same, the seal maintaining the integrity of the enclosure, the letter sealed the way the chamber had been sealed, the contents preserved, the atmosphere inside protected from the atmosphere outside.

He would post the letter from Aberdeen. He would post it and it would travel through the system — the Royal Mail depot, the sorting facility, the aircraft, the connections, the final delivery — and it would arrive at the house in Osu, and the postman Emmanuel would bring it to the door, and his mother would take it to the table, and she would open it, and she would read the words, and she would know.

But the letter would arrive after he did. He would book the flight from Aberdeen. He would fly from Aberdeen to Heathrow to Kotoka. He would take a taxi from the airport to Osu. He would arrive at the house before the letter arrived at the house. He would be there when the letter came, or the letter would find him already there, the man and the words in the same place for once, the writer and the letter in the same room, the son at the table where the letters had been opened for eighteen years.

The letter would be unnecessary. The letter would be made redundant by the presence, the way his mother's unfinished aerogramme had been made redundant by his arrival in chapter twenty-two of his own story, the letter interrupted by the thing the letter was trying to achieve. The letter would arrive and it would be unnecessary and it would be the most necessary letter he had ever written, because the letter was not the communication. The letter was the decision. The letter was the record of the moment at seventy-five metres when the man in the chamber had picked up the pen and written the words and meant them, the letter the evidence of the intention, the weld inspection report of the heart.

He lay on his bunk in the cabin. The vessel rocked. The sea moved beneath the hull. The helicopter would come tomorrow, and the helicopter would take him to Aberdeen, and from Aberdeen he would go to his flat and read his mother's letters and find among them a blue aerogramme that said come home, the mangoes are early, they will not wait, and he would read the letter and he would already have decided, and the decision and the letter would meet at the kitchen table in his flat the way he and the letter would meet at the kitchen table in Osu, the correspondence converging, the mother and the son writing toward each other through the distance, the letters crossing in the post the way the umbilicals crossed at the bottom hatch, the lines running in both directions, the connection mutual, the flow both ways.

He closed his eyes. The vessel rocked. The Aberdeen sky was grey above the grey sea. The rotation was over. The decompression was complete. The hatch was open. The air was in the chamber and the men were in the air and the pressure was one atmosphere and the world was the world and the surface was the surface and the distance between the vessel and Aberdeen was twelve hours by sea and ninety minutes by helicopter and the distance between Aberdeen and Accra was six hours by air and the distance between the airport and Osu was forty-five minutes by taxi and the distance between the compound gate and the kitchen table was twenty steps and the distance between the door and his mother was four metres and the distance between his hand and her face was thirty centimetres.

The distances were measured. The distances were known. The distances were finite.

He would cross them.

He would cross them the way he crossed every distance in his working life — by descending, by passing through the trunk, by entering the bell, by locking out through the bottom hatch, by swimming through the dark to the place where the work was, the place where the weld needed to be made, the place where the metal needed to join, the place where the gap needed to close.

He would cross them by going. By getting on the helicopter and the plane and the taxi and walking through the gate and across the compound and through the door and down the corridor and into the kitchen.

He would cross them by arriving.

The vessel rocked. The sea breathed. The sky held its grey light. And Kwame lay in his bunk at one atmosphere, at surface pressure, in the air of the world, with a sealed letter in his kitbag and a decision in his body and the knowledge that the decompression was complete — not just the decompression of the chamber, the five-day process of reducing the pressure from fifteen atmospheres to one, but the other decompression, the longer one, the one that had taken not five days but six years, the decompression of the distance, the slow release of the pressure that he had carried since the last time he had been home, the pressure venting gradually, rotation by rotation, letter by letter, thought by thought, until the gauge read zero and the hatch opened and the air came in and the man stepped out and stood on the surface and breathed.

The decompression was complete.

The hatch was open.

He was going home.