Buoy

We used to do things differently around here. You listening, girl? These days, you want to go dive under Buoy, you’ve got to get in one of them big bells, there’s got to be two of you down there at all times, all sorts of safety rules and policies and mechanisms.

Good reason for it, though. Things changed about fifteen years ago. Before then, Scrapers worked in teams of two: one below and one above. You know how every now and then the mariners bring a boat up onto dry dock, scrape down barnacles and such? Well, you can’t very well put Buoy itself into dry dock, can you? Too damn big and unwieldy. So we have to do the scraping in situ. Fancy term for “in place” as in “go diving with a long hook and pull all the shit off the bottom”. Nasty job, but someone’s got to do it. Hence: Scrapers.

As I said, normally you’ve got one Scraper up top, running the air pump and monitoring for signs from the diving Scraper. Sounds like an easy job, but it ain’t. Most of the time you don’t need to do nothing, but if you stop paying attention for even a moment, you might find yourself hauling up a dead Scraper buddy. And no-one’s gonna want to work with you again, for sure. You might see a Scraper above lighting a pipe and smoking it, but watch their eyes. You’ll see. They never leave what’s going on.

Not that being a Scraper below is any easier. You got to have strong nerves to put on a big ol’ clumsy suit, take up a hook, and then jump into that cold, dark water. You got to remember there’s only one way back up, and that’s through the shaft you came down. The shafts are spaced across Buoy so you can get to anywhere underneath pretty easy, but if something goes wrong, the next shaft across might be a hundred meters away. And they didn’t used to be as wide as they are now. Big enough for one diver through at a time, was all would fit. So if things went wrong, not like anyone could dive in and come get ya, easily. You had to be brave, or stupid. Preferably the former, but we had plenty of the latter, too.

It’s dark down there. No natural light under Buoy, except at the edges. All the suits had these big electric lights in the middle of their chest. Pretty bright, but when it’s the only light you got, and you got to turn your whole body around just to see what’s behind you, you get a tad nervy. We had more than one Scraper come up, a complete mess, swearing they heard something they couldn’t account for, refuse to ever dive again. Lot of turnover in the Scraper profession. Five years below is about the most anyone wants to do, and if you last longer it’s because you was a bit peculiar to start with, or the work made you that way. I think I did about five years, myself, but by the time I graduated to a Scraper above job, I was real good and ready.

Anyway, it wasn’t a perfect system. Plenty of dangers, for sure. We lost em to pump failures or tubes getting tangled or tearing. Doesn’t take long without air to breath before it becomes pretty unlikely we’ll be pulling you out alive. Good pay, though, of course, to compensate. Good enough to keep the young lasses and lads coming, sure they’re invincible enough and clever enough to collect. Still is that way, I suppose.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah — what changed.

So this kid, she’s maybe eighteen. Been a Scraper below for a couple of years. Good kid. Unshakeable, great attitude. But steady, you know? Reliable. Never took any unnecessary risks, none that I saw. We’d worked together as partners a few times and I didn’t have a bad word to say about her.

So we’re down at the depot, just shooting the shit. Mueller’s there, and Abel. I ever tell you about those two? Story for another day. The chief comes in and throws us a job — some kind of big obstruction, close to the Bow. He thinks it might be some kind of floating wreck or something. I tell him that if it is that big we’re gonna need to mount a larger expedition, but he tells me no, that first we’ve got to get eyes on the thing, see what it is and what’s gonna be involved clearing it. I can’t argue with that, so the kid and I grab tools and mosey off Bow-wards.

We decide to start at B3. You might imagine we’d start at B1 but I prefer to avoid the edge if I can help it. There are eddies and weird little currents that run around the edge of Buoy and it can make things just a little harder. So, B3 made sense to my mind. I got the pump going, the kid put on the suit, we ran through the usual safety checklist (”You ready?” “Yep” “Alright, then”) and the kid dropped below. She ran about fifty metres of tubing out and made a wide circle, but when she came up she said she couldn’t see much of anything. She thought she might have seen something closer to B8, but visibility was murkier than usual. We packed up and wandered in the direction of B8.

Now, B8’s a bit of a tricky one to get to. You need to duck in the alley whose entrance sits between Barber Nell’s and that cafe run by the cranky old Gaul. And then, once you’ve pulled your pump through the narrow alley, you’ve got to fit it through an access door and lower it down to a kind of basement area. Takes two people and you’re both puffed before you even get ready to dive. A real pain in the behind.

So we did all that, took five minutes to rest and smoke a pipe. Then the kid gets in the suit, I start up the pump, and down she goes. I’m sitting there, arms crossed, watching the tube spool out. Ten metres, twenty, twenty-five — no problems.

Then, there’s a sharp jerk on the tube. Sometimes, if the tube has gotten snarled on something, a Scraper below will give it a bit of a yank to get it clear. But this didn’t seem like one of those tugs. And it didn’t seem like a communication tug. So I’m paying close attention now.

The tube slackens a wee bit, so I reel it in some. The kid must be heading back, I think. But it stops again, and everything is still. I imagine the kid under there, in the dark, slowly turning one way, then slowly turning back the other way. She’s seen something, but she doesn’t know what yet.

The tube spools out, slowly, a couple of meters. Trying to get a better look, I suppose. I can imagine, now, the kind of thing she must have seen, in that dim light. A jumble of dark shapes, something that looks like a large school of fish all gathered around an obscure mass. It’s hard to say exactly how much she would have been able to make out. But she must have seen enough.

The line slackens rapidly and I pull it in. She’s heading back towards the shaft, at pace. Faster than she usually moves, much faster. Like she’s panicked. Not like her at all. I’m wondering what the hell is going on down there.

And then the line goes taut. And then slack. And then taut again. It’s pulling backwards and forwards, like a fishing line with a marlin or something else big on the hook. Now I know she’s in real trouble, and so I start pulling on the line myself. I figure she needs my help to get free of whatever’s got a hold of her. She’s only about ten metres away at this point. I’m pulling on this line, and I can feel it thrashing under my hands, but it’s not giving at all — I can’t pull it any closer.

And then the line pulls once, tight, hard, and then, suddenly, there’s nothing. No resistance at all. I’ve been pulling the line so hard that when it goes I fall back on my arse.

I pull the last few meters of tubing in and up over the edge, and all I can see is this angry, torn end where something has bitten clean through.

The kid’s gone.

I slump on the ground, staring at the shaft, hoping she got free of her suit and is moments away from surfacing, but every second that passes I know means less hope. I keep staring. I keep waiting. I notice myself counting seconds. I wait a hundred seconds. Two hundred.

I resist the mad urge to dive down there myself and save her. If they got her then I’m not going to fare any better. I’m useless.

The pump is still churning away, so I stagger up and switch it off. It shudders into silence and now all I can hear is the creaking sounds that Buoy makes, and the splash of water against the shaft’s walls, all echoing in this windowless room.

Eighteen years old.

Eventually, I pull my shit together. I leave the pump where it is and I climb out of the access, walk up the alley and stumble towards the depot. The early evening sounds and smells of Buoy are all around me, everyone carrying on their business. There’s the smell of a street vendor’s popcorn, the sound of live music and chatter from one of the Bow’s bars. No-one knows what’s happened. No-one but me knows the kid is gone.

I make it to the depot. There’s still a bunch of folks around. The chief’s there. I tell him what happened. He goes pale, sits me down, gets one of the Scrapers to fetch me a drink. A flurry of activity, everyone else standing around looking sick. They organise a bathysphere expedition.

Time passes. People leave me alone, mostly. My cup gets refilled. Dusk turns to night. There’s a crowd of about thirty folk, all waiting, talking in hushed voices in the lamplight. Finally the bathysphere folk come back. There’s some kind of dead, giant squid under the Bow, they say. It’s attracted a bunch of sharks, all gone crazy on the blood and the meat and taking bites out of anything that comes near it. The kid must have gotten just a little too close, and they went for her. Not anyone’s fault. Just the way it is.

Someone else has the job of telling the family. Maybe it’s the chief. I’m glad it’s not me.

After that, I was done with Scraping. Couldn’t bear to see anyone else go diving under there. Didn’t have the stomach for it. I was having these dreams, you see. Dreams of being in the suit again, hearing my own breathing, the light in my chest illuminating this squirming darkness. Watching shapes detach from the mass and swim towards me, and then teeth.

I got a dry job, managing shifts at the depot. I kept to myself. People in the depot didn’t really want to talk to me, or even look me in the eyes anymore. They didn’t know what to say, I guess.

After that, things changed for Scrapers. People were shaken up about how the kid went. I guess everyone could imagine what that must have been like, it was too much for em to let go. So Buoy put a whole lot of work into widening the shafts, building these big metal bells, all that stuff I was telling you about before. Seems to have done the trick, I suppose. A lot less accidents these days.

I’m not telling you this to scare you off, girl. If you got your heart set on being a Scraper and you’ve the nouce and the nerve, then you go for it. The pay’s still good and it’s never been safer. But don’t forget that when you go down there, you’re trespassing on a space that ain’t yours, and that will swallow you whole without pause. You respect the darkness below, you fear it, you never forget you’re a guest down there. You do all that, you get paid, you go home to your family.

Alright. I’m done. Story-time is over. You go away and think about it. If you’re still keen, come Thursday, I’ll book you in for some shifts next week, set you up with somebody experienced.

Get on, now. Go.