A Drop in the Ocean. Jenni Ogden
My mouth was dry, and I concentrated on keeping up.
KITTED OUT LIKE A DEEP SEA DIVER, I STOOD AT THE edge of the lagoon and let the warm sea lap my feet. The beach was deserted. Thank goodness. I squinted over the blue to the white fringe farther out, where the sea was breaking over the edge of the reef. I closed my eyes but the picture in my head of the reef edge dropping away into the deep blackness wouldn’t budge.
“All we’re going to do today is play around in the shallow water. The corals and little fish in the lagoon are enough to keep us content for hours.” Pat splashed water over her face and spat in her mask. She already had her flippers on.
I sat on the sand and wriggled my feet into my flippers, wincing as the muscles in my right foot cramped, contorting my toes. Standing up awkwardly, I weighted my foot until the cramp lost its grip, then I turned around and began to back into the water—one step, two steps. Now for the mask. I wet my face and the mask with seawater, and spat on the glass. My mouth was still dry and the small bubble of saliva I managed to produce was barely enough to smear over the glass. I swilled it out and eased the mask over my face. It was a tight fit. Good, I didn’t want any chance of a leak.
“You haven’t forgotten,” Pat said. “Snorkeling’s like riding a bike; once you learn you never forget.” She stuck her snorkel in her mouth, twisted around, and floated off, her flippers barely moving.
I could see the white sand under my feet. A little group of slender white fish swam by. About twenty meters farther out were the dark shapes of the coral. Pat was out there, lying motionless, facedown, in the still water. I saw her mask flash as she looked up and then with two flips stood at the edge of the coral, the water coming up to her breasts. “It’s only this deep,” she called out, her voice clear in the still air.
I looked around, thankful that there was not another soul in sight. I stuck the snorkel mouthpiece between my teeth and took a few experimental breaths. Kneeling down, I gingerly laid my face on the water, keeping my eyes wide open. The mask had steamed up a bit but I wasn’t about to fix it. All I could see was the white sand. Then I let go and I was floating, the short wetsuit giving me buoyancy. I told myself to breathe. Some brightly colored fish flashed below me, and I moved my flippers. Don’t splash. Move your legs smoothly from your hips. I heard Dad’s voice and I was ten years old again.
A funny little brown-splotched fish looked up at me from a hole in the sand and then disappeared backwards into its lair. I raised my head and saw Pat waving. A few more flips and there were her legs. I stood up, gasping.
“Okay?”
I nodded, grinning around my snorkel mouthpiece.
“Follow me. We’ll stay within a few meters of the sand.”
Then she was ahead of me, flippering along. I heard my own flippers splashing as I went after her. She stopped and I stopped, looking down. We were over a ring of corals—red, orange, white, and fluorescent blue—and immediately below me was a large anemone with two clownfish backing in and out of the poisonous tentacles, warning me off. A shoal of black-and-white-striped fish floated by, and their name floated through my head from all those years ago—moorish idols. Nipping at the corals were myriads of other small fish: silver, blue, striped, yellow, orange, red. I focused on a white-and-yellow fish and tried to remember the pattern of black stripes crisscrossing its side so I could look it up later. One of those impossible butterfly fish. Dad’s voice again.
I looked sideways under the water surface at Pat. She was pointing farther out. She flippered off and I followed, my eyes glued to the kaleidoscope beneath me. Water slopped about in the bottom of my mask, and spying a small patch of sand I stood up and pulled the lower rim of the mask away from my face, letting the water escape. I breathed in again and clamped the mask back on my face before sinking back into the water to follow Pat. She was circling a large round coral—a bommie—the name came back to me. She pointed down and I realized we were in much deeper water. I felt myself breathing faster and forced myself to slow it down. Around the bommie crowded much bigger fish—green, orange, and pink parrotfish busily rasping at the surface of the coral, the funny little scratchy noise they made with their beaks magnified under the water.
An oblong green fish outlined in brilliant blue with a bright yellow mouth and yellow tips to the fins streaming behind it swam below us. I pointed at it, and Pat stuck her head out of the water and I heard her say, “Angel fish.” Then she beckoned me farther and we glided over more gardens, over some beautiful brain corals—I had no trouble remembering what those were called—and then we were over a patch of sand covered in waving sea grass, and there it was below us. A turtle. It must have sensed us above it, because it floated gently off the sand where it was grazing and flippered calmly away. We flapped after it, but even though it seemed to be moving slowly, it soon lost us.
AFTER LUNCH AT PAT’S HOUSE—I COULD HARDLY EAT I was still so buzzy—I went home and spent hours poring over a large, well-thumbed book on the fishes of the Great Barrier Reef, one of the books in the small collection on the shelf under the bedside table in my cabin. The book was annotated with dates and places, presumably referring to Jeff’s sightings of the fish. The dates went back fifteen years.
Snorkeling in the lagoon at high tide became a daily ritual, sometimes with Pat but more often alone. Her idea of snorkeling was out over the reef edge. I wasn’t quite ready for that. In truth I wasn’t sure I ever would be, but I didn’t care. The treasures in the lagoon filled me with joy, day after day. What with my nightly wander around the island looking for laying turtles—more and more were coming up every night, and I lived in hope that Tom would make good on his promise to let me to join his tagging team—I barely had time to write my memoir, although I did manage to read a few of the novels that crowded my Kindle.
The campground was getting busy as well, and I enjoyed my twice-daily stroll around the tents to make sure the campers were behaving themselves. They were almost entirely university students—skinny, tanned girls with long, salt-infused hair, wearing very little, and muscular young men, hair in stiff spikes and often wearing wetsuits half on. Diving tanks leaned against the low wall of the barbecue shelter, and beach towels festooned the top. The bin for recycling beer cans seemed always full in spite of Basil’s now-daily visits to empty it and the rubbish bins. Most of the tents were small two-person affairs, with the occasional larger tent where everyone congregated in the evening for a shared meal cooked on the big barbecue. They were a friendly bunch, and I sometimes accepted their casual offer to join them for a beer. Their conversation was of diving and fish, giant manta rays and moray eels, and mind-blowing sightings of a pod of killer whales, hunting in a pack. I had little to offer—my toddles about the lagoon embarrassed me—but at least I was able to contribute a few bits of information about the turtles.
The girls were friendly and seemed unaware that I was old enough to be their mother as they swapped trivia while they threw salads together and turned sausages on the barbecue. All of them snorkeled and some were scuba divers, but they gravitated towards their own gender for light relief from dive-speak. I had a hard time sorting out who was with whom, and while there were a few set couples there, the overall impression was one of mix and match. Very different from my day, and probably a lot more fun.
One of the girls, Kirsty, was pregnant, and I was amazed that she was there at all. She had her own little tent and was on a working holiday, helping out Violet in the café and cleaning the holiday cabins over the summer. One afternoon she wandered past my cabin when I was reading on the deck, and I offered her a cold drink. We chatted about this and that, and I discovered she had no partner, was only nineteen, and had decided to take this job because she figured it would be her last chance for a bit of freedom. She intended to keep the baby, which wasn’t due until April. Her job finished in mid-March, when the summer season petered out. I cautiously expressed my concerns about the lack of health facilities on the island should she need them, but she brushed them off, saying that she’d be back on the mainland by her due date. The confidence of youth.
I asked her if the father would have any contact with the child once it was born, and she grimaced