Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (14 page)

_p. 151
O
nce underwater, Rod turned into a classic Smug Techie. He was the same breed as the man from the Spy Shop who had come to check out her room at the Standard, or the Smug Computer Expert who tinkers with your computer with a smirk and a vocabulary of unintelligible jargon, as if privy to a whole fabulous world which you cannot hope to understand, giving you a mere tasting menu of its delights suitable for a three-to-five-year-old, in order to bask in your childlike wonder and snigger about you with his techie friends later. Rod was somehow managing to convey a tech-esque smirk, in spite of the fact that he was eighty feet underwater and had a mask on his face and an oxygen pipe in his mouth.

Olivia followed him through a crevice and then, when she realized that the crevice was actually a tunnel and that it was getting too narrow to turn, panicked so much that she dropped the regulator out of her mouth. For a few seconds she broke the golden rule and started floundering. What if Rod was one of Feramo’s men too and was going to kill her or lead her to Alfonso, who would perform female circumcision on her? What if she got trapped by an octopus? What if a giant squid wrapped its suckered tentacles around her and . . .
Calm, calm, breathe, breathe.
She collected herself, letting her air out slowly, and remembered what to do: lean to the right, run your hand down your thigh, and the regulator will be hanging just there—as indeed it was.

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The tunnel was narrowing alarmingly. She started having fantasies about reporting Rod to the diving authorities and having him struck off. Could diving instructors be struck off? She wasn’t breathing properly. A combination of fear and indignation was messing everything up. She had to force herself to do what she had been taught: breathe very very slowly and deeply, counter-intuitively, as if, instead of being almost trapped in an underwater tunnel, she was lying down at the end of a yoga class imagining a ball of orange light sliding down her body. Soon she was hearing her own heavy breathing, like a sound effect in a horror movie.

After what seemed an unconscionable amount of time, she emerged into blue water. They were in an enormous cavern. There must have been a pretty large hole somewhere above because the water was clear and illuminated by shafts of sunlight. She looked up, trying to see the surface, but all she could see was diffuse light. Shoals of brightly colored fish darted this way and that. It was like being on some unbelievable acid trip. She swam to and fro, forgetting about time and reality, until she saw Rod in front of her tapping his hand on the air dial, communicating such patronizing sarcasm with each tap that she felt that the scuba world’s gain had been the mime world’s loss.

They had fifteen minutes left. She couldn’t see the entrance back into the tunnel. Rod swam ahead of her, pointed to the gap and gestured to her to lead the way. It took longer than she remembered to get back. Something seemed wrong. She didn’t recognize the route. The fear resurfaced: Rod was a terrorist, Rod had been talking to Morton, Rod was trying to get rid of her because she knew too much. As she turned a corner, she saw what was ahead and screamed into her regulator, screaming and screaming so that it fell from her mouth again.

_p. 153
O
livia was face-to-face with a diver whose entire head was covered in black rubber apart from holes for the eyes and an opening which flapped and sucked around his regulator like a fish’s mouth. For a second, in the semidarkness of the tunnel, they stared at each other, mesmerized, like a cat and a goldfish. Then the diver took his regulator from his mouth and held it to hers, blowing out bubbles, holding her gaze until her breathing steadied, then took it back and took a breath himself. He kept his eyes trained steadily on hers as she breathed out into the water, then put his regulator back in her mouth to let her take in more air.

The instinct to flail and gasp was overwhelming. They were eighty feet underwater, under rock. She could feel Rod behind her, clawing and shaking frantically at her leg, pushing her. Did he think she’d simply stopped to look at the view? She kicked her fins to signal him to stop as the diver gently lifted the regulator to her mouth again.

Diving is a constant fight against panic.
The phrase repeated itself in her head. She had stabilized, she was breathing from the regulator, but another wave of terror was starting to overwhelm her. She was sandwiched between Rod and the hooded man in the narrowest part of the tunnel. Even if she and Rod pushed their way back to the cavern, they might not make it in time. And if they did, they might not find air at the top; they might just die there.

The hooded man held up his finger for her attention. She kept
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her eyes on his, breathing his air, as he reached out along her body. Then he withdrew his hand and held up her regulator. Still holding her gaze like an instructor doing a demonstration, he breathed from it, then held it out to her. She thought there was something familiar about his eyes, but she couldn’t make out the color. Who was he? At least he wasn’t trying to kill her, or if he was, he was prone to self-defeating behaviors. He reached forward again, found her gauge, looked at it, and showed it to her. At this depth she had seven minutes of air left. Rod was shaking her leg frantically. She tried to turn her head. When she turned forward again, the diver was moving away from her, backwards, at a steady speed, as if he was being pulled. She started to kick and moved ahead. She felt a massive stinging burn on her shoulder. Fire coral. She had an overwhelming urge to kick Rod in the face with her fin. If she had planned to go into a tunnel she’d have put on a wetsuit.

The tunnel widened. The light ahead had a different quality. She could no longer see the diver in front of her. She moved faster and faster, bursting out into the open sea, looking up to see the light and bubbles of the surface misleadingly close. Resisting the urge to race her way up there, she turned to check for Rod, who was emerging from the tunnel, making his thumb and index finger into a circle.

She wished there was a signal for, “No fucking thanks to you, you irresponsible bastard.”

Rod raised a thumb signaling the ascent, then jerked his head in a sudden, panicky movement. She looked up to see the shadowy form of a shark.

The shark was maybe twenty feet above them. Olivia knew that calm divers have nothing to fear from a shark. This one was moving fast and deliberately, as if towards prey. There was a flurry of movement and churning water, and then a red cloud started slowly to spread. She signaled to Rod to move away. His eyes were wide, terrified. She followed his gaze to see something falling down towards
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them, like a grotesque fish with a huge dark gaping mouth, trailing fronds which looked like seaweed. The object turned slowly to reveal a human face, the mouth open in a scream, bright red blood belching from the neck, long hair trailing behind. It was Drew’s head.

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R
od swam past her, thrashing dangerously, brandishing his knife and heading towards the shark. She reached out and grabbed his leg, pulling him back towards her. She held up the gauge, signaled with her fist across her throat to say out of air and pointed upwards. He looked down towards the head, still falling into the abyss, and then turned to follow her. She swam smoothly away from the scene, checking her compass for the direction of the shore, checking that Rod was still following, feeling the change in the regulator which told her that the air was almost gone, fighting the panic again. There were dark shadows above them. More predators were moving towards the bloodbath. She started a controlled, out-of-air ascent, blowing her air out very, very slowly, saying “Ahhh” out loud. She felt the air in her buoyancy jacket expand and tighten against her chest and found the air-release hose, taking a lungful of air from it, discharging it slowly into the water, looking up, seeing the magical light and bubbles and blue of the surface beckoning, closer than it seemed, and forced herself to take her time:
Breathe, don’t panic, slow your ascent to the speed of the slowest bubble.

As they broke the surface, gasping for air and retching, they were still far from the shore—the dive shack was a good three hundred yards away.

“What did you do to him?” yelled Rod.

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“What?” she said, pushing her mask up and dropping her weight belt. “What are you talking about?”

She gave the signal for emergency towards the shore and blew her whistle. The usual bunch of guys were sitting around at the shack. “Help!” she shouted. “Sharks!”

“What did you do to him?” said Rod, through a sob. “What did you do?”

“What are you talking about?” she said furiously. “Are you mad? It wasn’t Drew in that tunnel. It was someone in a rubber mask. He gave me his air and then just started zooming backwards.”

“For fuck’s sake. That’s impossible. Hey!” Rod started shouting and gesticulating towards the shack. “Hey, get over here!”

She looked backwards and saw a fin.

“Rod, shut up and keep still.”

Keeping her eyes on the fin, she blew the whistle and raised her hand again. Mercifully, a sense of urgency had finally communicated itself to the dive-shack guys. Someone had started up the boat’s engine, figures were jumping aboard and seconds later the boat was powering towards them. The fin disappeared under the water. She drew her legs up close, mushroom floating, thinking,
Hurry, please hurry,
waiting for a sudden muscular movement, the feel of her flesh being ripped apart. The boat seemed to take an interminable amount of time to reach them.
What were they doing? Fucking stoneheads.

“Leave the tanks—get in,” yelled Rod, suddenly the capable dive instructor again, as the boat drew up. Olivia ditched her tank and her fins, reached out to the arms stretching over the side of the boat and, scrambling with her feet, got herself over and lay in the bottom, gasping for breath.

Back on the jetty, Olivia sat on the bench, a towel around her shoulders, her arms round her knees. The whole horrible ritual of death and its aftermath was unfolding around her. Out at sea, a
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shark cage containing Rod and a buddy was descending from a boat in a plainly hopeless quest to retrieve the remains of Drew, Popayan’s only medical professional, an elderly Irish midwife, was standing helplessly on the jetty, holding her bag. At the sound of sirens, Olivia looked up to see a boat with flashing lights approaching: the medical boat from Roatán, the big island.

“You should be lying down, to be sure,” said the nurse, lighting a cigarette. “We should be taking you off to Miss Ruthie’s.”

“She must be interviewed first by the police,” said Popayan’s one policeman grandly.

Olivia was dimly aware of the talk and theories gathering force around her: Drew had still been out of it on coke from the previous night; he’d gone down without a buddy; he’d been raving about teaching Feramo’s lot a lesson. He could have made a mistake, cut himself and attracted the shark, or he could have taken on one of Feramo’s people and got himself injured. Their voices lowered as they started talking about the figure in the tunnel. One of the boys touched her nervously on her shoulder, right on the fire-coral burn. She let out a slight moan.

“Rachel,” the boy whispered, “sorry to ask, but are you sure it wasn’t Drew in the tunnel? Maybe it was the shark pulling him back.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. The guy was wearing a full body suit and head mask. I don’t think it was Drew. I think if it had been, he would have let me know somehow. Sharks don’t swim down tunnels, do they? And there was no hood on the h—” her voice broke—“. . . the head.”

Miss Ruthie was baking when she returned. Trays of buns and cakes were laid out on the stove and the yellow-painted dresser, and the smell was of cinnamon and spices. Tears started to prick Olivia’s eyelids. Childhood images of comfort washed over her: Big-Ears’s cottage, the Woodentops’ house, her mother baking when she got back from school.

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“Oh bejaysus, sit yourself down.”

Miss Ruthie hurried over to a drawer and fetched a neatly ironed handkerchief with a flower and the initial
R
embroidered in the corner.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she said, taking a sticky-looking loaf out of a tin. “There we go. Now let’s make us both a nice cup of tea.” She cut Olivia a large slice of the loaf, as if the only response to a disembodied-head sighting was a sticky cake and a cup of tea. Which, Olivia thought, taking a bite of the most delicious, moist banana loaf, was quite possibly true.

“Is there a flight out today?” she said quietly to Miss Ruthie.

“To be sure. It goes in the afternoon most days.”

“How do I book it?”

“Just leave your bag out on the step, like, and Pedro will knock on the door when he passes with the red truck.”

“How will he know to stop? How will he know I want to get the plane? What if it’s full?”

Once again, Miss Ruthie just looked at her as though she was stupid.

The knock came just after three. The red truck was empty. Olivia watched as her beloved tan and olive carry-on was loaded into the back, then climbed up in front, gripping her hatpin in the palm of her hand, running her thumb over the back of the spy ring, her pepper-spray pen tucked into the pocket of her shorts. The day was perfect: blue sky, butterflies and hummingbirds hovering above the wildflowers. The sweetness was unearthly, unsettling. She saw the Robinson Crusoe sign and the little bridge leading to the airstrip and started gathering her things together, but the truck turned off to the right.

“This isn’t the airport,” she said nervously, staying firmly in her seat as they ground to a halt on a patch of scrub by the sea.

“
Qué
?” he said, opening the door. “
No hablo inglés.
”

“
No es el aeropuerto. Quiero tomar el avión para La Ceiba.
”

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“Yes, yes,” he said in Spanish, lifting the bags to the ground. “The flight leaves from Roatán on Tuesdays. You have to wait for the boat.” He nodded towards the empty horizon. The engine was still running. He waited impatiently for her to step out.

“But there’s no boat.”

“It will be here in five minutes.”

Olivia got out suspiciously. “Wait just a few minutes,” he said and started to climb back into the cab.

“But where are you going?”

“To the village. It’s okay. The boat will be here in a few minutes.”

He put the truck into gear. She watched as it rattled off, suddenly overcome with exhaustion, too weary to do anything. The sound of the engine gradually faded into silence. It was very hot. There was no sign of any boat. She dragged her case over to a casuarina and sat in the shade, swatting away flies. After twenty minutes she heard a faint whining sound. She jumped to her feet, scanning the horizon with the spyglass. It was a boat, heading towards her fast. She felt wild with relief, desperate to get away. As the boat drew closer, she saw that it was a flashy-looking white speedboat. She hadn’t seen anything like it in Popayan, but then Roatán was much more of an international tourist hub. Maybe Roatán airport had its own private launch.

The boatman waved, cutting the engine and bringing the boat to the jetty in a perfect arc. It was beautiful, big, with white-leather seats and polished wooden doors leading to a cabin belowdeck. “
Para el aeropuerto Roatán
?” she said nervously.

“Sí,
señorita, suba abordo
,” the boatman said, tying the boat up, swinging her bag aboard and holding out his hand to help her up. He pulled the rope loose, put the engine on full throttle and pulled out towards the open sea.

Olivia sat uneasily on the edge of a white-leather seat, glancing back as the coastline of Popayan faded into insignificance,
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then looking anxiously at the empty horizon ahead. The door to the cabin opened and she saw a dark head, slightly balding, covered in short, tightly curled black hair, emerging from the hold. He looked up and an oily, ingratiating smile spread across his features.