When I first met Constantin I thought he was a cocky git, dismissive of women, boastful, mercenary and proud. I cannot now say that he is not, but he opened my eyes, even at the cost of other senses.

At the time I was just starting off as a diver and I thought that he, less than ten years older, did not know so much.
His experiences, which he seemed too ready to relate, made good stories; but I could not see, as I watched his Slavic, clay moulded, sun fired face that first day, that his recollections were filled with more than aggressive supercontinental macho. Not that I am free of large talk at my own expense but my cynicism allows me humility and passion, I hope.

Our first meeting- dry land, him giving me a lift down a dust road in my dusty clothes in his expensive German car- he told me of his dead wife, his paralyzed buddies, his eel bites, how to face down a shark; as if I knew nothing of animals, or loss.
His voice was strange but I put that down to English being his fourth, bad language, and the only one that we shared. This I felt to be my fault. He spoke Russian and Swedish and Croatian, I think. I was happy to listen and he took little notice of what I said.
I allowed him his cradle of aloofness with the largesse of youth, it was his car. He was a little older and much better paid than me, which he was quick to inform me. He wasn’t rich, he said, industrial deep diving paid well but if he wanted ten million euros to start a dive school he would have to go back to his family. They were rich but they wanted him back in Russia marrying more money, not under some tropical sea, happy and idle.
Let us meet under the equalising blanket of the sea; I thought; where his chatter and his limousine BMW and his rich family could not go and I would match him action for action. In the freedom of the water I was sure that I would be his equal, probably even surpass him, if I saw how.
He told me that he might not sty in Sweden now that his wife was dead, he told me that she had taken three days in a decompression chamber to die.
I am sure that we were completely unperturbed by each other when he left me; at my destination, even though it was ten minutes drive out of his way, ten minutes even at the speed that he drove. He tells me that he was once a motocross rider as he hurls the heavy car into the bends. I held him and regarded him at a distance, as the mental do with the physical. I had been on his territory and so I judged him fairly, as I thought.

Our second meeting- on a boat, us sharing a small clean open ferry to an island with good recreational diving after a satisfying week of work- he greeted me like a brother, though I could tell that he gloried in the fact that I had needed a lift and he had swooped down and saved me. I wasn’t into glory back then; in those days I liked humble folk; worthy folk, not expansive braggarts.
He offered me cigarettes but I didn’t smoke, so he smoked for two. He leant against the side of the boat, smoked and told me that the island we were going to was good for “Diving for fun,”, that everything interesting in the sea was concentrated into the first twenty metres, that his first professional dive had been in the company of a man who had dived with Cousteau and who was himself on his own last professional dive and that the man had died that day in the water before his eyes; while I, glad that he was thinning on top, looked at his expensive kit that sat grinning next to mine.
Following my gaze he told me that the Germans made the best cars, the Italians the best motorbikes and the French the best “Diving ammunition.”
He had all three of course, the car the bike and the ammunition.
Remembering that he had played endless hard house while he drove, I tried to steer him into a conversation about music, trying to find a topic that wouldn’t make me feel inferior. But his face became grave and he replied that he had liked a lot of music, and he knew people who played music when they dived, whereas he liked the sound of the sea. He was never very animated, indeed I had already become certain that he was a good deep diver because his pulse and breathing were unnaturally slow, his calm glacial and deep as Siberian wind. Air under Water. it seemed furthermore that the subject of music saddened him more than the subject of death. So I lapsed into thinking and let him tell me of his formidable acts of self discipline and fortitude when he was a diving prodigy in college. He told me that he was mellowing out in his age. I wanted to ask him about his wife but the crowded boat was not the privacy of his car and so I left it, and him, alone.
He had used up his supply of English and stories, so for the rest of the short and pleasant passage we shared the simple, tropical view in restrained silence.
And indeed, when we had lugged our kit out of the boat we said a fulsome goodbye as two likable guys will after two chance meetings. Before going our separate ways, still unaffected by one another.

The third time I saw Constantin we didn’t speak.

It was under ten metres of sun slashed water.
I was gliding along a fat spit of rock, grazing the surface with my bare fingers. A speck in the water.
The rock ended in the open sea and I rounded the point.
In a curve of life encrusted rock, that above water would have been called a cove, sat Constantin, surrounded by people.
At first sight I could not tell what was occurring but then I realised that they were giggling and chatting. Constantin was regaling them and they were lapping up his; confident, assured; vitality and charm. Very few bubbles drifted up from the group, especially since they often didn’t have breathing tubes in their mouths. Jets of laughter shot up from them though, and exuberance escaped from the corners of their lips.
Then I saw their sign language, the flash of at-first-unrecognisable fingers, Constantin’s eyes drinking in their show of affection, the flirtatious glances, gestures, touching.
I saw their mastery of diving, free and with air. The invisibility of their efforts. Their perfect weighting, balance, nonchalance; their perfect bodies, languorous eyes, their camaraderie, their trust, their strength, their friendship.
Alone and silent, I allowed the current to pull me away, I could not approach.

I did not see him again for a year.

Then again I ran across him on land: perhaps we could be equal there but I didn’t think so.
I was in a bar; with a beer and a bevy of shipmates. I thought that I recognised the man who sat alone at the bar, but I was far from sure. It was a very good time for me, life was flowing towards me, opportunities went hand in hand with due leisure.
I said “Constantin,” in a mid-volume range with a questioning tone and the man ignored me. I was half glad that it had not been him, half disappointed that I had been wrong. I went back with my perspiring bottles to my companions, thinking that I had been mistaken.
However when I returned to the bar I looked at his face and it was him. Saltier, more burnt and deeper lined but I was similarly changed. A year had served well to recover from the jolt that Constantin’s relaxed clique had given me.
When I flapped my flippers the sea moved, when I waved the people rippled; I was ready to face Constantin.
This time when I said his name he turned and looked at me, not recognising me at first, or not showing it.
Then he greeted me and I sensed that we were meeting as equals for the first time, I had gained in his estimation by surviving the life for a year I suppose. I was with friends but I didn’t take him over and introduce him to them, I wanted him all by himself, alone as I had been when I watched him hold court, a year ago.
Also he looked grave and I didn’t want to pull the old man of the sea into a pointless whirl of society.
We sat next to each other at the bar in silence. I was wishing that we were under the sea, free of the room and the past and the future.
“Do you want to go for a dive?” he asked in his strange voice and I knew it was the right thing to do, that it would have worth, as it turned out it led to some things which are worth boasting about.
We put down our drinks unfinished and walked out into the calm and balmy night, a good thing too because I believe we would have dived in a hurricane.
We picked up his kit from a beach bungalow that he was sharing with some perfect young people, past whom we tiptoed as they lay in an anemone profusion of limbs and trailing hair.
We cast off my boat and started the putt-putts of the engine and the compressor. We didn’t go far, the water was everywhere.
We dove in the shorts that we wore in to the familiar, crisp embrace of the ocean at night.
In the year since I last saw Canstantin I had tried to imitate his sparing use of oxygen, his calm, even his inventive, improvisational hand signs, and I was pleased to be able to measure myself against him, not unfavourably. The “luft,”, as I knew he called it, lasted well and we seemed to pass a whole night under the lazy waves.
Then we sat on the boat and he smoked while I pottered proprietorially. Constantin was less talkative than before, as if wrapped in a thick bathtowel of silence, warm and secure.
Then, as the sky announced the sudden dawn, he looked out to sea and grunted,
“I must go now. Perhaps I will see you again.”
He gathered his stuff without wasted effort and I piloted the boat to the nearby harbour.

I did not see Constantin again for another year but our paths did cross and I will tell you about it, though it seemed unconnected at the time.

I was spending some wet weather sodding about on a posh boat, the pride and joy of an eccentric, fair-weather acquaintance of mine.
His name was Paul Wigg and he was an English sun worshipper burned redder than any Australian. He crowned his own bald head with a hat which was the whole of his raiment.
I had met him at an underwater ‘rave in a cave’ for which he had provided the speakers. Paul wasn’t much of one for diving but he loved sun and expensive technology. He had a glass diving bell for entertaining so that he could smoke ganja under the waves. He couldn’t stand to be alone, often took people to the toilet with him, and so his house was a reliable place to expect a welcome.
So, I was sitting with a gin and tonic doing my e-mail on the diminutive but over-equipped bridge of Jabba’s pleasure barge when the strange thing happens.
Paul’s passive sonar was top spec, and I don’t mean the ears on his head, I mean the ones on his boat. You could hear people puking on other yachts, had you a mind to.
He used it for protecting his underwater parties from unwanted guests.
Sonar screens are not that intuitive but something severely out of the ordinary showed up to even my disinterested eye.
As I rocked on Paul’s spring-mounted metal chair composing pithy epistles I was interrupted by a series of shrill, trilling beeps.
The lush green surface of the high definition sonar screen was being sliced by a dozen lances of light which faded as quickly as they had appeared.
I called Paul inside from where he was successfully chatting up two women and tried to describe what I had seen. Maybe he was preoccupied but he brushed my unfocused interest away like dandruff off a tuxedo.
“I can’t tell you everything that bitch can show on her face, she’s too fucking sensitive. And expensive, she’s too expensive to be full of fucking glitches. It’s on long range scan and so it’s just casting about for inspirational listening in the pissing ocean. Barracuda… or some extraordinarily fit shrimps having a dragrace. If you see it again I would be grateful if you don’t mention it to me. She cost me too much to be breaking down this soon just don’t tell me about it. Don’t touch anything while you’re in there without me, don’t you put your grubby little fingers on all her sensitive buttons, hear me, right, good, now if you will excuse me…”
He went back to his sun-kissed skin and I returned to my far-flung cronies in cyberspace.

I was most surprised when Constantin eventually approached me.
Although I had previously felt that he was evaluating me I never considered that he could have any motive to do so beyond human curiosity and male comparison.
However when he came and asked me to dive with him I could tell that something lay beneath the request, a current. Possibly something big: for his heavy face was serious and his manner was more than previously laconic, even slightly military.
I felt myself asking questions that it sometimes does to ask.
“How well do I know this person on a practical level?”
“What have we previously done together successfully?”
“Does danger enhance life?”
I found that the answers that I was supplying were sketchy, like an intermittent air supply.
Most of my information, I saw, came from Constantin’s own, close-lipped mouth.
So I went with him; but I kept my eyes open.
We lugged my kit to the beach by hand, he had no car.
I scanned the moonlit sea for a boat, but there was none.
“We swim from here.” Said Constantin in his flat, ironic voice.
He retrieved his equipment from beneath some piled sand and I saw that it was cheap, and not French.
As we waded into the water to spit and splash our masks Constantin said,
“Hurry please, I have not much luft.”
At the time I thought it an unnecessary thing to say but since then I have considered that it was by way of an extra test. Would a little pressure make me breathless, and useful, or breathy, and dead? He was being overtly cloak-and-dagger or at least seemed so to my spy-novel trained mind. Constantin swam along the bottom of the shallow bay, on his back, facing me as I swam along above; keeping an eye on me wondering where we were bound for.
At the lip of the bay Constantin rose and we followed a surface current out to sea.

I never came back. Constantin showed me things that I could not see and come away again to the land and the people of the land. He was to be my implacable Captain Nemo until my rescuers executed him in front of my eyes. He took me away to the sea and showed me the sirens. He made me a dolphin and a storm petrel and a metal murderer. He warped my world.

I knew my worst paranoid musings were about to be surpassed by truth when I saw that one of the people hiding of the bottom of the sea; crouched, waiting for us, trying not to breathe, trying not to pass out; was a wounded man. He had a clean hole, straight through his thigh. The edges of the wound had the injection-moulded, smooth-roundness of plastic toys. The man was pale blue under the water and the purple bruising on his face was shocking colour.
“You must ride his bike.” signed Constantin, following my eyes to see if I would understand. They showed me the ‘bike’. Most were hidden in the silt and rocks but the one I was to mount was visible ten metres away. It was a tube with two dropped grips, floating unsupported and still in the shifting sea.
I saw Constantin describe that the right grip controlled acceleration and deceleration and that the left grip was to be treated gingerly and left alone. My head observed the world through a clear, plastic curtain of low-level shock and high-level excitement.
Then they led me towards it. I don’t know if they should have warned me.
Maybe it was a final test.
Maybe if Constantin was still alive today he would carry on sometimes throwing undigestible titbits at me to see if I could make myself eat them.
As I got within three metres of Harry Potter’s broomstick I felt like somebody was playing with my air. A great bubble wanted to push inside me without breaking and without caring if, instead, I broke.
A great voice, a great shout and song rose up within me and all around me. I felt as if all my bones were yawning and the bike came closer and the sensations increased. I felt buffeted and randomised. I could feel the quantum fuzzy-fizzing of the water around me and inside me. I was buoyed up but I did not rise. I was constrained neither by weight or density. My mass was free.
I grasped the bike. Gingerly I took hold of the handlebars. Life was not so tentative as it put its first feelers onto land.
I was at the heart of a vortex now. The simple tube described the inner limits of some titanic forcefield, enormous and submerged. I was shown by smiling deaf-mutes how to slightly angle the field with small movements of the left handlebar. To rise and fall in the sea. I struggled to understand them as vibrations from the tube rose, ever more irresistibly, through my body.
I felt like Paul’s sonar array, plugged into the deeps, flashing with shoals of lights that are the lives of fish. I felt the bubbles and the waves inside the people around me. I felt the endless susurration unpicking the muscles of my body, shaking apart everything I thought that I was. Everything that I thought. And behind my thoughts I found the ocean, and she spoke great surf in my mind and ancient currents in my body.
My ears echoed with the capacity of the womb of all life. I felt pain. I felt birth.

Then we rode.

Those tubes were written straight onto space-time with clean, sure lines. Their hydro-dynamics or aero-dynamics were properties of the gravity shape that they chose to contain themselves within. Their attractions to the sun- or to anything else, gravitational- were decided internally.
They were free.
And dangerous. And illegal. And killed humans and the environment. And I with them.
I never heard another human sound after I first heard the sea.
Oh, I could tell when music was playing, could usually tell what the person beside me was saying, but only the sea and the wind got through to me.
All that freedom was as stolen as Zaphod’s Heart of Gold.
Far from land, between twenty metres below sea-level and twenty metres above, we ran for our lives. Below radar, too fast for anyone else, we died of the speed and of accidents.
On land there were too many long exposures without possibility of escape. None of us came within fifty miles of the coast if we could help it, never did one of us go more than a mile inland from the beach. A group of deaf people with only their shared sign-language and a lethal reason to keep an eye out for each other can find it very easy to cut themselves off from lubbers.

That first day was the deepest I ever went on a bike. The group had almost been obliterated by the Russians, I don’t know if KGB is the right word, almost certainly not. The man who’s bike I inherited got away from some gravity-cycle pursuit without leaving a trail but it cost him his life. We didn’t know it as we crept along the somberly lit seafloor but he was already dead in his sling below Constantin’s bike. A KGB man had put a cone of twisted space into his leg and he was bleeding into another universe. To penetrate a gravity bubble with another gravity bubble it must be focused. Evidently the secret policeman’s lance had found its stealthy mark.
The sensation of travelling by tube was unnerving to say the least. Besides the pulling, shifting warp and weft of reality and the boom of Poseidon’s voice all through your skull there was the speed at which the rag-tag vagabonds flew across the vaults of the earth. They stirred up neither wake nor silt but they spread chaos all around them.
The water was visibly shaken by their passage and animals alarmingly blew to pieces when they touched the outer field at speed. Complex creatures became excitable and then mad as the bikes approached them. They swam straight into them with squeaks of joy and were torn asunder. Proud parental fish swam their schools determinedly into death at the invisible hands of the devilish machines. All the horror and carnage was left behind too swiftly to do more than guess at it.
It bothered me.

The Seahorses- for so they signed themselves- did not include me. I was a usurper on a dead man’s bike, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of navy vodka. They were pirates and I was a journalist, they ruled the seas and I recorded the oceans. All day and all night I flew, deaf and wild eyed; full over-bursting with the twin songs of the swelling sea and the screaming, whispering sky. They chose the course and they picked the objectives, all I had to do was to fly blindly amongst them, trying not to get in the way. They knew how to carve gravity shapes that they could not explain to me, with my halting signs and lack of Russian. They used to box me in and move the space around me, with me in it. There were few words, no lies, no explanations.
Constantin spoke to me a little, mostly to help develop my signing.
“The Russians have the best gravity-engines,” He said, “because it helps not to have shit for brains.” If they were Swiss they might not smash up atoms so much but it would be as sexy as being dragged through your life by a toothpick. The Russian machines had balls, they were the offspring of a long line of serious mistakes survived.
The bikes survived well. When unquestioned agents rained through the surface of the seas and showed us that theirs was the air. The bikes could not be touched, they were beyond the reality of death. We were not.

It ended as it had begun- on land. Constantin and I going onto terra incognita to acquire funds. I was not a Seahorse so I could prove myself useful by doing things that their secret fame amongst the law-makers in the world prevented them from doing. Constantin came with me because nobody knew what to do without him, least of all me.
We had swum up out of our ocean onto a thin strip of hard sand that was close to, yet shielded from, a dust road.
There were men in the trees. I have no idea how they knew that we would be there.
When we were too far from the sea for us to retreat the men loomed up. Two between me and Constantin before either of us had seen them.
As I stood, pinned immobile by the experienced menace of my two liberators, a Navy officer walked within five paces of Constantin and nodded at him curtly. He didn’t look Russian but? Constantin returned the gesture with recognition of the man and the situation, and of himself.
They made him kneel on the sand, out of reach of the water but within the soft serenade of the night wind, the sky that they controlled, and they shot him, almost silently.
I was nothing, I had only to show them where their bikes were and I could keep my life.

I am deaf now, as I mouth my story hopefully towards you. You look like you understood but maybe you didn’t. I have the hot sun and the cold, crying beer in the shade of my hand. I have the land and even a few, faint sounds on the wind which will not leave me. I have children and dreams and friends who make me laugh.
But I don’t hear the song of the sea anymore.
Gravity always pulls me down.
I don’t use Seahorse signs anymore.
I live within my head… and I am quite alone in there.
Except for Constantin, the cocky git.
Still trying to make me swallow unswallowable truths
 and spinning unbelievable stories.

 

 

ICAM