Acorn

This is it. The sailors gather around you, some jealous, some admiring, some fearful. Only a few have gone down in the bathysphere, but never to the depths you’re going. You can only hope the bathysphere is as infallible against the ocean as it is on blueprints. The captain salutes you and reminds you of your orders. When you hit 500 fathoms, you’re to observe any geological abnormalities as predicted from the unusual currents that emanate here.

Some expect you to give a final speech before you descend. Perhaps a thanks to the crew or a witty remark. Any final wishes if something goes wrong. A last chance to repent your sins. You offer nothing. Instead, you climb into the bathysphere, giving the crew a thumbs-up through the observation window. The hatch locks. You ready yourself as you’re hoisted above the ocean, deep and murky, and are dropped in.

Your breathing increases as choppy waves slosh against, and eventually over, the bathysphere. You feel like an acorn, dangling on a string, waiting to be cracked.

The first hundred fathoms are worryingly uneventful. You slowly descend deeper into the abyss. That’s until the knocking. You are approaching 200 fathoms when, against the hatch, you hear that undeniable, slow knock. You stare at the locked cover. You try to kid yourself into thinking that perhaps it’s a shark bumping against the sphere, now disappearing into the ocean. After all, sharks do investigate things with their mouths. You almost manage to convince yourself of this fiction when the knocking starts again, this time frantic and unyielding. The force and determination behind each knock vibrates from your head into your body. Your brain bashes about your skull.

You jump back and grab the telephone. The knocking stops. Silence. You check the barometer. You’re still descending. 250 fathoms now. Halfway down. Without the phone’s friendly static, you realise for the first time how the top of your hair brushes against the metal of the bathysphere, how you can’t fully stretch your legs, how, if you wanted to stand, you’d have to hunch your back and crouch your knees in a manner so unnatural you’d soon want to sit back down again.

The only sound is your ragged breath. Relax, you tell yourself. You’re not doing yourself any favours by panicking. 300 fathoms. With the telephone dead, you check all the apparatus: barometer (fine), oxygen tanks (fine), switchbox (fine). You even check the thermometer, despite feeling your back slick with sweat while you are buried far from the sun’s influence. Just get through this. All you’ve got to do is note what’s at the bottom.

The static on the phone buzzes back to life. “Are you receiving me?” you say. “Pick up.”

“Hello, darling.” A woman’s voice replies. There are no women on the boat.

“Who the hell are you? Put the captain on!”

She tuts. “So impatient. Then again, you didn’t have enough patience to see what you left behind.”

“Put someone else on.” You rap your knuckles against your forehead. The spotlight penetrates into the blackness, greying the area just outside its beam. It’s in this greyness that you think you see a limb gliding past – a human one. Unable to move the spotlight, you swish your own torch in that direction.

The woman replies, “See. Impatient again. If I’d wanted you to see me, I’d have swum right up to the window.”

You don’t reply, even though you try to convince your heavy tongue to shift. You check the barometer. No scuba diver could venture this deep.

350 fathoms.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t you remember New Year’s Eve, dear?” She cheerily says. You sit there for a second trying to remember before a few images flashed through your head. You sitting alone in a seaside bar because you know no-one else in that town. You flirting with a drunk stunner and her flirting back. Ascending the hotel stairs with her. Laying her on your bed, with her red lips and short skirt and innocent yet coquettish face. Removing clothes, both yours and hers.

You didn’t tell her your real address. Couldn’t risk the wife seeing it. Because of that you missed the letter asking to meet to discuss something important, the pictures she sent of her ultrasound, her begging you for help, that you didn’t have to help with bringing up the baby if you didn’t want to, she would keep silent to avoid a scandal, she would disappear if you helped her. But you never saw these, did you? And even if you’d known, you would’ve thrown these messages in the bin.

You stare dumbly out of the window.

400 fathoms.

Slowly, deliberately, she emerges. Her splayed hair came into full view, then the face that’s seared into your memory, then…

You’re horrified by it, repulsed. In her arms she cradles a baby, still tethered by its umbilical cord. You know it’s yours, not because he shares family looks or you feel a natural surge of parental protectiveness over him but because he has your eyes. Not in the way your Aunt Sylvia would always say you have your father’s eyes. No, the baby has the same adult pair of mud-brown pools that confront you every time you shave.

The woman’s entire body is just in front of the window now. As you tear your eyes from your son, you notice she is entirely naked. Her expression is blank, a mask far different to the lustful one she wore on that shabby hotel bed. “I think I’d like to come in now.” Her voice echoes through the phone but her mouth does not move. She pulls back from the window. Reaching down to where the umbilical cord juts out, she yanks more out as if from a coil inside her, letting her baby float beside her. Your son hugs the window and cries a soundless laughter. Once far enough away, she grabs hold of the cord and flings the baby behind her shoulder before hurling him against the window. This wakes you up. You’re yelling down the phone. You’re pleading to her. You’re praying to a god you didn’t even know you believed in until just now. None of this stops her flinging your baby against the window, staining the water pink with each blow. The baby sputters with joy, as if his parents were playing peekaboo. You almost wish you could hear him through the glass. You bare through the dull thuds of your son bashing against the window, again and again. The glass starts to splinter. The first hint of a smile stretches her lips. You close your eyes, preparing for death, knowing that at least the pressure will crush you. Quicker than drowning.

450 fathoms.

You hear the shatter of glass. You’re not dead. You open an eye. The glass is broken but the water doesn’t rush in. Instead, it remains patiently against the window’s frame. She steps in, leaking fat drops onto the metal floor. She places your now silent son in your lap, the umbilical cord falling off onto the floor with a thud. You hold him up to your face, staring into a copy of your own eyes. A substance coating him makes him slippery but the skin underneath feels crusty, as if his skin could flake away. The baby reaches for your hair, running his hands through it. You flinch from the little cold fingers. You’re almost too stunned to feel her umbilical cord climb up his leg, onto his chest, and wrap around your neck. A noose. At least a noose is dead. It has no intent. A snake then. You don’t contemplate this as the umbilical cord tightens, as you claw at it, gasping for breath, as the last sound you’ll ever hear is the excited squeals of your son.

500 fathoms.