Calvin tried to enjoy the morning breeze coming in from the Indian Ocean. He tried to enjoy the view: the unblemished sky; the water that went from brochure-blue to turquoise to entirely clear as it neared the pier. It lapped at the stilts beneath and passed under his feet to move slowly through the shallows and up the white sands of the shore, where palm trees waved him to their shade.
The Maldives. Every bit as beautiful as it had looked online.
Their overwater bungalow was one of only a dozen at this particular resort, each of them thatched and connected by a single long pier curving out from the island to give an uninterrupted view of the ocean. The beautifully clear, beautifully gentle, ocean. It reflected the morning sun in spectacular dazzles and flashes as slow waves rose and then fell, but Calvin’s attention was suddenly caught by a more specific blink of light.
There it was again.
He moved down their private deck, looking for what it might be. From his new position he could see across to one of the other bungalows where a woman rested against the railings of her own deck. She appeared to be scanning the water for something, too. She moved up and down the walkway, sometimes leaning over to look down at where the sea passed under her feet. Perhaps she’d seen some interesting fish. Or perhaps she’d seen something else, flashing in the light, as Calvin had.
As if she’d sensed being watched, the woman looked up and saw Calvin.
She was an attractive woman, about his age but looking better with it. She wore a kimono over a colourful one-piece swimsuit. Calvin waved and she waved back. It was friendly, but not the hello that his had been: she went back inside.
Calvin turned his attention back to the sea, unbuttoning his linen shirt to catch some of the cool air before the day warmed up. Later he’d need to slather himself with lotion, but he’d wait until Nina mentioned it. He disliked the oiliness on his skin, and how it made his bald head shine.
There. That winking flash again. Something bobbing in the water, catching the light.
A bottle.
He was surprised to see it. A lot of the world’s oceans were polluted, of course, but the resort had been remarkably clean. Pristine, even, as you’d expect of paradise.
And yet there was another one.
And there.
Bottles.
Dozens of bottles.
They were lifting with each wave, then bobbing back down again as the wave dipped, held in tidal limbo. It looked like there was a curl of paper inside each one.
With little more thought, Calvin went to the steps leading into the sea and descended. It was cold at first, shaded by the pier, and he sucked in a sharp breath as the chill clutched at his thighs and higher until, in a moment of sudden bravery, he dunked under completely, washing away the remaining fug of sleep and a hangover. Then, wading further out, his wet shirt billowing around him like the bell of a jellyfish, he made towards one of the bottles.
It was clear glass, with no sign of ever having had a label. The rolled note inside was protected from the sea by a screw-top lid that had never been cracked open. Calvin twisted the lid where he stood and tipped the paper to his palm. He dropped the bottle and with wet hands unfurled the note.
I hope you’re okay with me contacting you like this. We should meet up for a drink or something and talk about what happened. I understand it might feel awkward, but I think it could be good for us, for everyone, if we talk about it . . .
“What?”
He looked around for someone, saw no one, and read it again.
I hope you’re okay with me contacting you like this . . .
“What the hell?”
He recovered the bottle bobbing beside him and emptied it of seawater as he searched for another. The water was so clear that he could see the flitting shapes of fish and his feet in the sand, but he could not see any other bottles. Not a single one.
There had been so many of them a moment ago.
He tucked the note back inside its bottle and made his way back to the bungalow to look again from a higher position.
He found the woman from the neighbouring bungalow waiting for him.
“What did you see?”
She was British, her accent one Calvin associated with money. Closer now, she looked exhausted, like she hadn’t slept much lately, either. She was holding her kimono closed with crossed arms.
“I saw you looking,” she told him.
Calvin apologised. “I didn’t mean—”
“You were looking at the water. What did you see?”
Calvin wondered what was wrong, why she was asking. He wondered what she might have seen herself.
“Bottles,” he said. “With notes inside.”
He expected some understanding in her expression, perhaps some relief at having seen the same thing, but instead she frowned.
“You didn’t see the jellyfish?”
“Jellyfish?”
“Yes,” she said. “The ocean’s ghosts.”
Calvin shook his head. “No. No, I just saw bottles.” He remembered he was holding one and showed it to her, tipping the note out to show her that as well, though he didn’t unroll it for her to read.
“Sandra!” a French man called from the woman’s bungalow. “I have made breakfast!”
But the woman, Sandra, was already retreating from Calvin.
“They have my mother’s face,” she said.
She wiped a tear from her eye and forced a smile before heading back.
The French man waved at Calvin, and Calvin raised his hand to wave back. It still held the note he’d found.
I hope you’re okay with me contacting you like this . . .
He was about to take another walk around the bungalow to see if there were more when the glass doors behind him slid open—
“There you are.”
—and Nina emerged with two glasses of strikingly bright orange juice, a large slice of fruit clinging to the rim of the glass. She handed one to Calvin as he pocketed the note.
“Our own little sunrise,” she said.
“As in, tequila?”
She laughed. “Sorry. Just juice.” She noticed he was wet. “Morning swim?”
He nodded. “Trying to wake up.”
She clinked her drink to his and stood beside him at the railing. She was wearing one of his shirts, unbuttoned to show off her bikini beneath. It was as strikingly bright as their drinks.
“Do you like it?” she asked him.
Calvin looked away and attempted a sip of his drink. He flinched from the protruding garnish, plucked the orange slice away, and took a long, deep mouthful. “Yes,” he said. “Very nice.”
“I meant the bikini.”
Nina stepped away and spread the shirt open to give him a slow turn, lifting the shirt at the back.
“Very nice,” he said again.
It was enough.
Nina nudged in close. “It’s so beautiful here, don’t you think?” She gave a hesitant smile, looked as if she might say something else, then gave up on both and linked her arm with his. She rested her head against his shoulder and looked with him out to sea. “I love you,” she said.
Calvin squeezed her arm then kissed the top of her head, but that was all.
“The Maldives is made up of more than one thousand, two hundred islands,” Nina read from her phone. “It’s an . . . archy-pelar-go? Arki-pella-go?”
“Ark-a-pell-a-go,” Calvin said. “It’s a group of islands.”
“An archipelago of some twenty-six atolls . . . ” She glanced at him.
“Ring-shaped reefs or islands.”
“Thank you. Twenty-six atolls with a tropical monsoon climate and—”
“Neen?”
“And I should put my phone down and just enjoy it.” She smiled at him and put the phone on the table between them before lying back into her lounger. She no longer wore Calvin’s shirt, just her bikini. She’d unfastened the straps to tan her shoulders.
“The bikini was named after an atoll,” Calvin said.
“Yeah?”
“Bikini Atoll. It’s where they tested atomic bombs. Whoever invented it—the bikini—thought it would have the same kind of impact. Metaphorically speaking.”
She squinted at him, shielding her eyes with one hand when her sunglasses were right there in her hair. “Do you want me to put some more lotion on?”
“Well, I did enjoy watching the last time.”
It was a joke that surprised them both, but whereas Nina responded with a grateful smile, Calvin chose to add, “I think everyone enjoyed it,” and Nina’s smile faded.
They’d given up the privacy of their deck for the patio and beach of the small island’s bar because Nina liked the infinity pool and Calvin liked the cocktails. It wasn’t a coping mechanism if you were on holiday. Besides, there were quite a few other couples enjoying the cocktails, too. Most of them were Calvin’s age or even a little older, but a few were in Nina’s range. The women were as preened and perfect as magazine advertisements, while the men looked like they’d stepped straight out of a gym or an action movie. Calvin had watched them watch Nina as she applied lotion to her body.
“I meant do you want me to put some more lotion on you.” She shook the bottle at him, then flipped the lid open. “Come on,” she said, beckoning, “bow to your queen.”
Calvin tipped his head and Nina rubbed lotion into his scalp. It was cool on his skin. “You’ve caught a little sun,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“How’s the view?”
Bowing towards her, his view was entirely cleavage, but all he said was, “You’ve caught a bit, too.”
She leaned away from him and adjusted the cups of her bikini to see. “Bit pink,” she agreed, and rubbed in the leftover lotion from her hands.
Calvin looked for who else might be watching.
“You know, we could always go back to bed for a bit,” Nina suggested.
But Calvin settled into the comfort of his lounger. He closed his eyes. The leaves of the palm trees leaning over them whispered in the breeze while barely-there waves washed up the nearby shore with a soft, lullaby hush.
“Cal?”
“Mm?”
“We don’t have to sleep.”
It was almost too late for Calvin. The bar’s quiet music, and the palm leaves, the sea, were combining with the heat of the sun to ease him into drowsy peace.
It was a man’s voice that startled him awake.
“Nina! Hello!”
Calvin was suddenly alert—he knew exactly who this would be—but the bronzed man in the bulging Speedos wasn’t anyone Calvin knew, just as the French accent should have told him, but he was still standing so close to Nina’s lounger that it was practically foreplay.
“Cal,” she said, leaning around the man. “This is . . . ”
“Jacques,” the man said, and stepped aside to face Calvin with an apology. He sat on the edge of a vacant lounger beside them and offered his hand to shake. His grip was too firm.
“We just met,” Nina said.
Calvin had sort of met him, too. He’d called over to Sandra about—
jellyfish
—breakfast.
“He kayaked past our bungalow when you were in the shower,” Nina explained.
Jacques pointed at the bungalows. “I am over there. One, two, three from you.”
“Yes,” Calvin said, though he didn’t look.
“Did you enjoy the kayaking?” Nina asked.
“Yes, very much! There are so many beautiful fish.”
“Sounds nice.”
“What kind of fish?” Calvin asked.
Jacques shrugged.
“Groupers? Fusiliers? Batfish?”
“You are a fish expert!” Jacques declared. “They were blue and yellow, like this.” He mimed with his hands, one colour above the other.
“Fusiliers,” Calvin said.
“You like fish? Do you dive?”
“We do,” Nina answered.
“Ah. You will love it here, there are so many fish, and there are sea turtles, and rays. Manta rays?” He made floaty waving motions with both hands. “And there are sharks.” He made a fin of his hands over his head.
Nina was appropriately shocked—“Sharks?”—and Jacques laughed.
“Most of the time, they are not dangerous.”
“Most of the time,” Nina repeated, and Jacques laughed again. He was a happy man, this Jacques. He made another hand-fin, adding the theme from Jaws. This time Nina laughed with him.
“Are you going kayaking again now?” Calvin asked.
Jacques turned his smile on Calvin and said, “No, not today.” Then he saw someone over Calvin’s shoulder and stood, calling, Viens ici mon amour! We are here!” before beckoning to someone who had just arrived at the bar.
It was the woman Calvin had seen that morning. Sandra. She was wearing the same one-piece swimsuit but with a flowery sarong wrapped around her waist now instead of the kimono and a large sunhat keeping her face shaded.
She waved as she approached.
“This is Sandra,” Jacques said, and greeted her with a kiss before completing the introductions, adding, “Calvin likes fish.”
“Have you been to the shipwreck?” Sandra asked him.
“No shipwrecks,” Calvin said.
“We just arrived,” Nina explained.
“Oh, you must see it. There’s all this beautiful, colourful coral, and so many stunning fish. Butterfly fish and damsels and—”
“Sharks,” Jacques said again, hands in a fin once more to menace Nina.
“What about eels?” Calvin asked. “They can be territorial. They bite.”
Jacques snaked his arms together and turned the shark fin of his hands into a snapping mouth that he clapped at Calvin. Calvin flinched.
“Okay!” Jacques said. “Drinks!”
“They seemed nice,” Nina said.
The sky had deepened to indigo for their slow walk back to the bungalow, the surf an ongoing sigh beside them. They were carrying their sandals, the evening sand cool beneath their feet, and occasionally Nina pulled them to the water’s edge to enjoy how the wet sand squeezed between their toes. Calvin watched the footprints they left behind fill with water and disappear in the emerging moonlight. The moon was bright and low and full, and it prompted Nina to sing a quiet line about pizza pie from That’s Amore. She was clinging to Calvin’s arm with both of hers, leaning against him.
“Do you really want to go diving with them tomorrow?” she asked. “Or were you just being polite?”
“Why? Don’t you want to?”
“No, it’s fine, it’ll be fun. It’s just . . . ”
“Just what?”
Nina waited a moment. Calvin thought he knew what she was going to talk about, and he dreaded it, but she proved him wrong when she asked, “Did Sandra tell you her mother died?”
Ghosts of the ocean, he thought.
“That’s sad,” he said. “Recently?”
“I don’t know. But time goes a bit funny when someone dies, doesn’t it? It probably feels recent.”
Calvin agreed.
“She said Jacques works a lot, like you do, but they came out here so she could get away from everything for a bit. I just don’t want to get in the way of their holiday. Like, maybe they should spend this time together.”
“They invited us,” Calvin reminded her, trying not bristle at her comment about work.
They were approaching the pier. The lights beneath the railings were on, casting a glow across the boards, and lanterns at the walkways to each bungalow cast their light onto the sea in beautiful halos, gentle wave-top nimbuses reflected and diffused by the motion of the ocean.
“So beautiful,” said Nina, and tried, “So romantic.”
She pulled Calvin to a stop and kissed him. Calvin felt her tongue briefly just before he pulled away.
“Let’s get inside,” he said.
Nina nodded, her eyes as bright as the lantern light. “Yes.”
She took his hand, pulling Calvin from their stroll into something more urgent.
“What’s the rush?”
“Come on.”
Buoyed by the alcohol and the atmosphere, and for a moment remembering only how they used to be, Calvin let her lead him. They were almost running. It felt good to be running towards something.
At the walkway to their bungalow, though, a dazzle of light on the water caught Calvin’s eye. He stopped abruptly and Nina’s hand was surprised out of his by the sudden halt.
“What is it?” she asked.
Calvin leaned to look but saw only the dark, vague shapes of fish zigzagging beneath their feet.
“Cal?”
“Just a moment.”
There.
No.
There.
Nina was at his side again, taking his hand.
“There’s a bottle,” Calvin said, pointing.
Could it be the same one as before?
“Where?”
“There. See it? I think there’s a note inside.”
Nina laughed—“A note?”—but she at least pretended to look with him.
“It’s right there,” said Calvin, pointing. “Look.”
But it wasn’t. It was gone.
“Stop teasing,” Nina said, and again she led him back towards the bungalow. She paused at the door. “Wait here. I have something special to show you.” She kissed him again, a quick one, and went inside, saying, “I’ll call you in when I’m ready.”
Calvin went to the deck’s railing and scoured the water for the bottle he’d seen, wondering at the message it might hold. He checked the whole perimeter but all he saw in the water was the silvery light of the moon.
He checked again.
He checked a third time.
A light came on at one of the other bungalows. Sandra’s, he realised, because there she was outside, looking at the water from her decking just like him. He waved but this time she didn’t see him. Jacques came out to her and the two of them exchanged a few words before Jacques went back inside with a dramatically dismissive gesture. Sandra waited a moment, then followed.
Trouble in paradise, Calvin thought.
He returned his attention to the sea, but despite another thorough search, followed by another, he found nothing.
By the time he went back inside, Nina was asleep on the bed, curled on her side. She was wearing something diaphanous over lingerie he’d never seen before, and he could tell from what remained of her makeup that she’d been crying.
Calvin woke in one of the hammocks on the deck. The sun was shining directly into his eyes. Blinking away the glare, it took him a moment to see Nina standing in the light.
“What time is it?” he asked her.
“Still early. You slept here all night?”
He sat up and put his feet on the deck before the hammock could toss him out. “Must’ve done. Sorry.”
She said nothing.
“You look nice,” Calvin said.
She was wearing a halter twist bikini top and short shorts that sat low on her hips to show the ties of her bikini briefs. A flowy black cover up completed the ensemble. It was a seemingly modest outfit, especially compared to what she’d worn yesterday, but the sheer black of the loose cover up actually seemed to draw more attention to what she didn’t wear beneath. Much like the lacey thing she’d worn over lingerie last night.
“There’s some orange juice there for you,” Nina said, pointing to the table. No slice of sunrise this time, but he was grateful.
“Thanks. My mouth is all sand.”
“It’s the last of it, but I’m off to pick up a few things so I’ll get some more.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No. You stay and wake up properly. I won’t be long.” She hesitated, then added, “I’ve left my phone.”
Calvin slapped at her behind as she turned to go. It was meant to be a playful apology for abandoning her last night, but he accidentally struck a little too hard, which surprised them both. He was even more surprised by the noise she made, and the excited way she looked at him.
“When I get back,” she said, and smiled a bright smile, and he knew he was forgiven. There was hope in that smile.
She took it with her, leaving Calvin to hydrate and take in the view.
He rubbed sleep and sunlight from his eyes, blinking into the morning. He examined the criss-cross marks in his skin from the hammock netting, the rope lines and knot marks, and he thought about the way Nina had just sort of squealed, just sort of sighed, when spanked. What else did she like? Either she was still something of a stranger to him, or she had become one.
He guzzled half of the orange juice and carried the rest with him as he walked the perimeter of the bungalow, trying to clear his mind. Wisps of cloud striped the sky at the horizon, but the sun was shining, and the water twinkled little signals that flashed like Morse code and—
Yes.
There.
And there.
More of them, each with a message demanding his attention.
He tried to ignore them but knew he wouldn’t manage for long.
When Nina returned, she was with another man. Calvin was waiting on the deck, watching for her, and at the sight of them both he thought: it’s him.
It wasn’t.
The man was helping Nina carry her loaded beach-bag between them. He was middle-aged, younger than Calvin and a little heavier. His chest and arms were silver-haired and tattooed. He saw Calvin looking and gestured Nina’s attention towards him. Nina waved with her free hand.
“Here he is,” she said, as they neared the walkway, “my sleepyhead husband.”
Calvin gave a curt nod.
The other man handed Nina her bag as she said to Calvin, “Honey, didn’t you say this resort was adults only?”
“No kids allowed,” Calvin confirmed.
The man with Nina sighed. “I’m going to have to put in a complaint, then.”
“David’s in the one just over,” Nina told Calvin, pointing to the next bungalow. “There were kids running up and down the pier all night, yelling and screaming.”
“And we came here to get away from all that,” David said.
“Of course,” said Calvin.
“You got kids?”
Calvin shook his head. Nina said, “Not yet.”
“Don’t. That’s my advice. I love mine, I do, but just . . . don’t.”
Calvin wondered if the man regretted his chest tattoo as well; two baby faces smiling over where his heart beat. Darren and Skye, according to the scrollwork.
“Did you hear them, honey?” Nina asked. To David she explained, “He slept on the deck last night, under the stars.”
“Slept right through,” Calvin said.
“Yeah, my wife too, both nights. She thinks I dreamt it.”
“You got the orange juice there, Neen?”
“Yeah.” She hefted the bag, and took the prompt, telling David, “It was nice meeting you. I hope you get a better sleep tonight.”
“Yeah, me too.” He saluted them. “Enjoy your dive.”
Calvin stood aside for Nina to pass and considered slapping her behind again to hear the noise she’d make. He wondered what other noises she made he hadn’t heard yet and when she might have made them last.
“You excited about it?” she asked.
“Excited?”
Nina slid the door open and said, “Diving.” She headed towards the fridge with the provisions she’d picked up. “With Jacques and Sandra.”
When she turned to look at him, Calvin was standing in the lounge area. It was a large space with comfortable white cushions on wicker sofas and an open section in the floor offering direct access to the water below. There was a glass table next to this, and Calvin gestured to it with both hands. He’d lined up all the bottles he’d retrieved from the sea, a note rolled inside each one.
“Look what I found.”
Nina frowned.
“What do you mean, found?”
She went to the table and picked up her phone.
“I told you I’d left it,” she said, unlocking the screen. “Did you check it?”
“What? No.”
“Because you can keep checking if that’s what it takes.” She offered the phone to him.
“I don’t need to.”
“Good,” she said, “because there’s nothing to check.” But still she offered the phone, and so he took it.
“I don’t need to check because it’s all in the notes.”
“What notes?”
“The notes,” he said, “the Goddamn notes, in the Goddamn bottles!”
Nina didn’t look at the notes or the bottles. She only looked at Calvin.
“Stop shouting at me.”
Calvin growled in frustration and threw Nina’s phone to the table. He missed, though, and it flew straight through the floor and into the sea.
“Thank you,” Nina said. “That’s great.” She went back to the fridge, thrusting items away. “I guess you won’t be checking anything now.”
She was close to tears.
“I hope you’re okay with me contacting you like this,” Calvin recited.
Her tears came then.
“Don’t,” she said.
“We should meet up for a drink or something and talk about what happened.”
“Please don’t.”
“I understand it might feel awkward, but I think it could be good for us, for everyone—that bit was underlined, I suppose he meant me—good for everyone if we talk about it. So, let’s talk about it, shall we?”
Nina stood with her head bowed, hand still on the open door of the fridge. “Again?” she said, quietly. “Shall we talk about it again?”
“Humour me.”
She closed the fridge to face him. “I’m sorry, Cal, I’m really sorry, and I’ve said I’m sorry so many times. Please believe me. It was one time, and—”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yes. It was.”
“He was very explicit about how many times, if I remember the rest of the message correctly.”
For a moment, he was thrilled to see that hurt her.
“One night, then,” she said, crying. “But it was a stupid mistake, a huge mistake, and I told him that, and then I told you, and I never spoke to him again, or messaged, or anything. Please, Cal. We’ve talked about this. We’re here to get away from it all, aren’t we?”
He let her cry and watched for a while, hoping her tears would stir something in him beyond . . . whatever it was he was feeling. Or not feeling. He didn’t know anymore. Everything he used to feel had been blasted away. Nina’s tears were just a familiar part of the fallout.
She was crying so hard now that she hitched for breath and snipped her words.
“You keep . . . keep saying . . . we’re going to . . . going to be . . . okay.”
He did keep saying that. He was trying to persuade himself it was true.
Looking at her sobbing, all the anger suddenly drained away, and Calvin only felt hollow again.
“It is okay,” he decided. It was the only lie he kept telling her.
“We’ll be okay,” he said. He wasn’t sure about that one, but he said it anyway because he hated to see her cry—most of the time, he hated to see her cry—and he didn’t know how else to comfort her.
“We better get ready,” he said.
Nina nodded, but otherwise didn’t move except to wipe her tears.
When Calvin came out from the shower, buttoning a fresh shirt, Nina’s phone was sitting on the table in a bowl of couscous that had plumped up around it. A substitute for rice, he supposed, though the phone was likely beyond saving. Some broken things could never be fixed.
Nina was outside on the deck. She’d stripped down to her bikini to retrieve the phone and was drying herself under the sun.
Calvin looked back from Nina to the table and her phone in the swollen couscous and realised all of the bottles were gone. If she had thrown them back into the water, they were nowhere he could see, and maybe that was for the best.
They met with Sandra and Jacques and rather than pay for a guided dive they rented a boat and diving gear between them. “We’ve already done it,” Sandra said. “We can show you.”
“For only a fraction of the price,” Jacques joked, reaching as if to take money. He was attempting to break some of the obvious tension, Calvin realised. Not just between him and Nina: there was something brittle between Jacques and Sandra as well. It wasn’t long, though, before the four of them were bumping over waves that turned into spray as they sped towards the hidden wreck, the boat’s engine too loud for any conversation, and by the time Jacques slowed them to a stop, much of the tension had been swept away by the exhilaration of the boat trip.
“From here we will swim,” Jacques said, and they focussed on the process of gearing up and checking each other’s equipment. When they were ready for the water, each was abuzz with excitement.
“Suis-moi!” Jacques cried, then jumped. He hit the water feet first, body ramrod straight, hands at his mask.
Calvin and Nina took a less dramatic approach and rolled backwards together, tanks leading them into the sea.
It was a different world below the boat, a full rainbow of colours teeming with life—“Like swimming in an aquarium,” Nina would say later—and they took turns pointing out one fish after another: beautifully chevroned triggerfish; striped sweetlips; clownfish. There were so many, it was breath-taking. They saw giant clams, too, more iridescent in colour than either of them had imagined, gathered like a flowerbed in the ocean. A majestic manta ray sifted the seabed for food. They even glimpsed an octopus, but it swept up a sandy cloud to hide itself, blending its colours into camouflage. There was an anxious moment when Nina swam too close to the fan-like fins of a lionfish, but Calvin guided her away. He would explain later about the venomous spines hidden within its flowing mane.
Yet as varied and vibrant as it all was initially, as they neared the hulk of the wreck the environment began to change. The previously colourful coral paled, colours fading so that before long they were swimming amongst a landscape that was only ghostly white. It was a strange development and unexpected. Even Sandra and Jacques seemed surprised, judging by their body language. Sandra looked back at Calvin and Nina as if to gauge their reaction. Jacques swept his arms wide, all encompassing, as if to say check this out, before giving an elaborate shrug.
Rising out of the white like it was mired in hoary frost was the dark bulk of the wrecked vessel. It was as if the ship had been caught by the coral, trapped in a vast, spindly spider’s web that clutched it to the ocean floor. Large sections of the ship were missing. Rust-crusted beams leaned and curved in skeletal shapes. Spaces gaped, vacant. Nothing moved. It was a metal net that trapped only shadows. Calvin had expected to see fish flitting in and out of the ruin, but the bright assortment of life they had passed through earlier was entirely absent.
A sudden flurry of movement beside him startled Calvin.
Sandra was thrashing.
She kicked her legs and swept at the water with both arms, trying to propel herself backwards, and Calvin’s first thought was: shark!
He scanned the area on full alert, searching for the silver-grey streak of a sleek body threading through the darkness of the wreck. Openings in the vessel that should have been enticing now filled him with dread. He saw no danger, though. Only Jacques, oblivious, passing over the bleached field of coral, and Nina, wide-eyed in her facemask, hand at her mouth as if to hold the respirator in place.
Calvin pulled at the water and kicked to where Sandra was swatting at nothing, slap-boxing in a panic that would have her hyperventilating if she wasn’t already. He checked around them again for danger, checked for sharks, for moray eels, for the translucent tendrils of—
the ocean’s ghosts
—a jellyfish, but there was nothing that he could see. He thought, narcosis. But they weren’t deep enough for that. Something wrong with her oxygen? He put himself in front of her to show there was no danger. He held his hands up to calm her.
But then Jacques was suddenly there as well. He shoved Calvin and made to do so again, thinking him the source of Sandra’s fear, but she grabbed his arm and shook her head, ending the ridiculous underwater tussle before it could begin, and calming herself in the process. Calvin made an okay at her and she nodded, eventually giving the okay back and nodding some more. She gave the same to Jacques, but then pointed up and back the way they’d come. She turned on the spot and finned for the boat.
Jacques followed, patting Calvin’s shoulder as he passed.
Nina was sweeping her arms wide and slow-kicking to keep herself in place. She, too, made the okay but Calvin couldn’t return it.
Behind Nina, coral sprouted from the wreck’s remains like white mould from something rotten.
Back in the boat, Sandra tried to dismiss the entire incident. “I thought I saw something,” was all she said as they stripped of diving gear. “I feel silly now.”
Calvin and Nina let it go at that, comforting her when necessary, but Jacques persisted with his questions, even speaking to her hurriedly in French at one point, which she ignored entirely. Some of the earlier tension of the morning crept back.
“What was with the coral?” Nina asked, trying to steer the subject away.
“Coral bleaching,” Calvin said.
“Like, pollution?”
“It happens when the ocean gets too warm.”
“El Niño,” Jacques said, the Spanish sounding strange with a French accent. “Only it was not this colour a few days ago.”
“It was all alive,” Sandra said.
Jacques nodded. “I do not think El Niño happens so quickly.”
Calvin remembered reading that the Maldives had suffered a bad El Niño a few years ago that destroyed something like ninety percent of its coral, and it took a long time to recover. If it hadn’t been for the wreck, he would have simply assumed Sandra and Jacques had taken them to the wrong location.
Suddenly Jacques said, “Nina! There is La Niña, too!”
“Yay me!”
“But it is when the sea is cold.”
“That’s all right,” said Calvin, “because then El Niño comes, and she is warm again.”
He was trying to maintain the levity Jacques was using to lighten the mood but something about what he’d said or the way he’d said it seemed to sour the attempt, at least judging by Nina’s reaction.
“Warm?” said Jacques. “She is hot!”
Nina laughed. She struck an exaggerated modelling pose.
“Yes, she is too hot to be La Niña,” Jacques decided, and gave Calvin a thumbs up as if he had achieved something.
“Can we go back now, please?” Sandra said. “I need a drink.”
“But of course!”
To Calvin and Nina, Sandra said, “Please say you’ll join us?”
Nina, eager to keep the mood light, said, “But of course!” with the same accent and enthusiasm as Jacques, who laughed.
Sandra only smiled and looked overboard as Jacques started the boat engine.
She watched the water the whole way back to the island.
Back at the bar, after a drink, Sandra confided to Calvin that she had seen another jellyfish.
Nina and Jacques were in the pool. Nina had disrobed to her bikini immediately, wading in, and Jacques had called to the others in the water, “Watch out! La Niña is coming!” She’d splashed him. He’d splashed her back.
As they frolicked, Sandra said, “Thank you for trying to help me back there.”
Calvin toasted her with his drink. He didn’t want to say anything else about the incident in case it embarrassed or upset her, but she said, “I thought I saw a jellyfish.”
“Well, that would panic me a bit, too.”
She gave him a tight smile, and he thought that might be all, but after a long moment of silence between them, disturbed only by the banter in the pool, Sandra spoke again.
“We went out to that wreck three days ago. On one of those guided dives. I think we told you?”
Calvin nodded.
“The guide told us about all the things we might see, and afterwards all the things we had seen, and it was him who called jellyfish the ocean’s ghosts. He only meant because they’re see-through, I think, and because of how they move, but it sounded quite poetic, and it stuck with me. Then I started seeing them everywhere.”
Calvin thought of bottles, winking at him from the sun-dazzled sea.
“Not just jellyfish. Ghosts. Because all of them, every jellyfish . . . ”
They have my mother’s face, Calvin remembered.
“Ah, shit,” Sandra said, and wiped at new tears.
Into the awkward silence, Calvin said, “I’m sorry about your mother.”
Sandra said, “Thank you. Me too. But it doesn’t help much, does it?”
No, Calvin thought, looking to where Nina and Jacques played in the pool. Because sorry never changes anything.
“I thought going there today with you two, things would be different. I thought it might stop me seeing . . . anything strange. And it worked, at first. Now I can’t even bring myself to look at the pool in case it’s full of jellyfish. In case my mother’s face is there, floating in the water.”
What Calvin saw was a pool full of bottles. Nina was waist-deep in them, glistening wet at the far end of the pool, staring from its infinity to a horizon Calvin couldn’t see.
The wind picked up in the afternoon until it was no longer a gentle breeze that stirred the palm leaves and by early evening they were thrashing against each other violently. Lines of sand began snaking up the beach, striking the low wall of the patio to be cast up like spindrifts that had everybody poolside blinking or putting their sunglasses back on despite the fading light.
Jacques suggested to Sandra that they go back to the bungalow, but she argued it was too early and accused him of using the weather as an excuse to get some work done, so they stayed and tried to put up with it, repositioning their loungers out of the wind. It wasn’t long, though, before they admitted defeat.
“It’s not supposed to be like this,” Nina said.
“No,” said Calvin, meaning more than the weather.
“Are you staying?” Sandra asked.
“We’ll try a bit longer,” Calvin said, but soon the wind was strong enough to scatter furniture and he and Nina left as well, retreating while staff hurried to retrieve parasols and joked, “Monsoon!” It wasn’t yet the season but remembering the coral that had bleached itself dead in a matter of days, Calvin thought: time goes a bit funny when something dies.
At the pier, with less need to shield themselves from the sand, the change in the weather was more tolerable, and the wind, blocked by some of the bungalows, less ferocious. There was more chop in the water beneath their feet, though. Calvin could hear all the bottles in it, clinking together.
“It’ll be good to get inside,” Nina said, and Calvin agreed, but at the walkway to their bungalow, he stopped.
“You go,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Nina said, “No,” as if she didn’t believe him. “No, Calvin.” Then, “Calvin, please.”
“It’s okay,” he said, the lie he kept trying to make true. “I’m only going to the end of the pier.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, you go in. Put that new lingerie on again.”
Nina hesitated.
“I promise I won’t sleep in the hammock.”
She still didn’t move, but she let her hand slip limp from his. “Please stay,” she said, quietly, but Calvin pretended not to hear and walked away.
He pretended not to hear the bottles, either, bumping against each other under the pier. Instead, he felt for the one in his pocket. It was a tonic bottle he’d pocketed from the bar, and inside was a rolled napkin he’d written on.
“Jesus Christ,” someone called, “just go to bed!”
The shout came from one of the other bungalows.
“Darren! Skye! Shut the hell up!”
Calvin looked around as if there may have been a couple of children he hadn’t noticed running up and down the pier and he saw Sandra, standing in the glow of her bungalow’s welcome lantern. She was leaning on the railing, facing the wind with a drink in hand. “Long time no see,” she joked.
“You okay?”
She gave him a sad smile. “Just chatting with my mum.” She nodded at the water, but Calvin didn’t look to see what she might mean.
From behind him came another cry for Darren and Skye to be quiet.
“No one else can hear them,” Sandra said. “They’re like the jellyfish, I expect. Or your bottles.” She raised her glass and drank.
“Where’s Jacques?”
“On the phone to work, apparently.”
She gestured behind and Calvin saw Jacques in the bungalow, pacing. He was talking with some urgency, phone pressed to his ear. When he noticed Calvin he raised a hand in hello, then switched ears with the phone.
Except it wasn’t a phone.
“On the way back, he saw a message in the wet sand,” Sandra explained, “asking him to call.”
Jacques was holding a large shell to his ear, talking into a conch and listening to whatever came back.
Calvin looked behind at his own bungalow and saw Nina in silhouette, standing at the glass.
“She’ll start to think we’re having an affair or something,” Sandra said, and smiled to show she was joking, that she couldn’t ever compare to someone like Nina, but why not? Maybe he should kiss her right now. Maybe he should take her right there against the railings. Jacques probably wouldn’t even notice; he was so caught up in . . . whatever he was doing.
“You okay, Calvin?”
He mumbled something that was both an embarrassed apology and a hasty goodbye and resumed his walk to the end of the pier, looking to the horizon.
A line of cloud was rolling in, a hurrying dark upon the dark. There was so much of it, tumbling over itself in its hurry to reach the island, that it looked like a special effect from a film, and as he watched, the clouds lit up with a pulse of lightning so bright it seemed to flicker through everything, through the whole world, before it was gone.
Calvin wished the past could be gone so quickly, but the past lingered. It didn’t disappear like footprints in wet sand. It was more like a shipwreck, hidden beneath the surface, rotting on the ocean floor and casting ruined pieces of itself back upon the shore. It was the tide itself, the to-and-fro of eroding waves, wearing Calvin down to his bleached bone core.
Another bright flash scattered beneath the clouds, and this time, as the lightning chased itself away, thunder rumbled.
Calvin leant against the railings at the end of the pier and watched the coming storm. Every bright strike of lighting reflected back at him from a sea choked full of bottles. They rolled in with the tide and thunder and, coming with them, in the next flash of lightning, Calvin saw a man on a jet-ski. He was steering with one hand while the other tousled at the long hair which the speed of his travel threw out behind him. A mane of hair, tossed around in the wind and rain like the spines of a lionfish.
From behind Calvin came a cry, sharp and desperate, but he kept his eyes on the jet-ski tsunami bumping over the bottle-strewn waves. An eel was emerging from the man’s shorts now, hanging huge and glistening.
A moray, Calvin thought. There’s always a bigger fish.
When the world seems to shine, like you’ve had too much wine, that’s . . .
“Calvin!”
But he kept his eye on the man, this storm-brought El Niño, who, when he came, brought the sopping wet thrashing of a monsoon with him, and though he was too far away to see clearly, Calvin knew who it would be. He’d brought the man with them, after all.
“Cal!”
At last, Calvin turned to face what was behind him and saw Nina. She was running, a nightdress clinging to her skin in the rain, and though she held an arm across her body for modesty she was clearly naked beneath. Her other arm reached for him, but under her feet the boards of the pier stretched on and on and she ran without making any progress. Another special effect, like she was trapped in a dolly zoom.
Calvin still held the tonic bottle with the message he’d written. One word split in two, scrawled on a napkin. A holiday word turned instruction.
Get away.
He didn’t know who it was for.
Calvin held the bottled message in one hand. The other he raised, either to reach for Nina or to keep her distant.
“I can’t get back to you!” she cried.
“No,” Calvin said, and wondered how long she’d try.
Originally published in Nightmare Abbey, Winter 2023/2024.
