Kris was sitting on the gunwale, regulator in hand and ready to roll over. ‘Come on, lover, let’s get going.’
       It’s always like this when we go diving. By the time I’ve put on the wetsuit, Kris is all kitted up and ready to go.
       ‘I’m very, very concerned that it’s half past four already and we’ve barely an hour of sunlight left,’ I replied, adjusting the BCD straps, ‘Not to mention that we’re going to dive in open seas, in a current. And that you’ve not been honest with me about the depth. My air won’t last more than twenty minutes down there, at most. Can we please reconsider this?’
       ‘Would you leave your woman on her own, unprotected in this wild sea, prey to all manner of beasts?’
       I could see Kris actually fluttering her eyelashes inside the mask as she said this.
       ‘Of course I wouldn’t, I’d see it as my responsibility to dissuade you from–’
       ‘Love you too, see you down there.’ With a wicked grin, Kris put the regulator in her mouth and rolled over the edge. No coming up to the surface to signal that she was okay, not even waiting for me, the bloody woman just went down.
       ‘Hurry boss, or you not fain’ her in current,’ the skipper said as he tried to manoeuvre the boat back to the spot where Kris had gone in.
       Fucking hell. This is not how I like my dives. I pulled on the mask, no time to clean it, and rolled over. The last thing I saw before the roll was BB giving me a half-hearted thumbs-up; then I was under water, being spun around by the savage surface current, desperately bleeding the BCD of any remaining air, finning furiously to get down below the current while trying to breathe calmly. The dive computer – bloody instrument, too precise for my liking – showed me that I’d already wasted close to a third of my air. And looking down didn’t help.
       A blue-grey mass of water, the visibility appallingly bad. I recalled Kris saying that the bottom was fine sand and mud, and it looked like a good deal of it was suspended in the water around me. Once below seven metres I could feel the current decreasing, so I stopped kicking and let myself sink slowly. I started looking for Kris while I kept an eye on the depth reading. She’d said that the upper part of the ship was at thirty metres, so I had at least another twenty to go. If, that is, we were above the ship, which I wasn’t sure about despite both Kris and the skipper insisting that this was the right location.
       There she was. I could see a vague shape below and in front of me, moving slowly back and forth, probably also looking for the ship. Then the shape flicked its tail and disappeared down. Not Kris, then, just a grey shark. At least I was telling myself that it must’ve been a grey, no point in contemplating the possibility of it being one of its less friendly cousins.
       Again I had to force myself to relax and slow down my breathing, with barely half of the air left now, continuing to sink. After what seemed like forever, a dark mass was coming up to meet me, so huge I could barely see its indistinct edges. Goddammit, they were right, Kris and the skipper, and we were spot-on. This calmed me somewhat and I made for the railing, covered in multicoloured soft coral swaying gently back and forth. Maybe this would be a good dive, after all, I thought. Now just to find Kris. She’d given me a handful of recognisable markers on the wreck and all I had to do was follow these towards the spot she wanted us to check out.
       A few more minutes before I saw Kris, sitting calmly on the deck, between two large gorgonians, and clapping slowly in my direction. Cheeky woman. I finned over to her and could see how excited she was, taking out the regulator and blowing me a kiss. Signalling that I follow her, she went over the edge and disappeared in the murk below, following the crack that was apparent even up here, snaking its way across part of the deck.
       I mentioned earlier, didn’t I, that I hadn’t had time to clean my mask before going in? It was all fogged up and I was constantly having to let water in to clear the lenses. I hate diving without thorough preparation – where’s the pleasure in a dive if you barely see anything?
       I finned down, dropping to nearly forty metres before I reached Kris. She pointed at the crack that was wider here, then pulled out her torch and shone the light inside. Floating just above her, I used my torch as well to light up the interior. What must have been a cabin once now looked like a tiny underwater cave, heavily encrusted in marine growth. Kris turned around to face me and indicated that she was going in, then got stuck almost immediately as she tried to swim through the narrow opening.
       Going from incredulity at what Kris was trying to do, to near panic imagining her cutting the regulator hose on a sharp edge, to relief as she wriggled out, I signalled to her that we should go up, now, showing her I only had seventy bars left. All I got back was an okay and another big smile, regulator out of her mouth again. Then the silly woman undid the BCD straps and, before I realised what she intended to do, pushed the BCD with the attached tank and regulator through the crack, then followed it. Once inside, she calmly pulled on the BCD, secured all the straps and only then retrieved the regulator, giving me another okay sign followed by both hands forming a heart, and then showing five. Five minutes?! I gesticulated wildly that she come out immediately, all standard diver signs forgotten by now, but Kris ignored it and, turning her back on me, proceeded to methodically search the cabin, picking up everything that seemed loose, or semi-loose, and shoving her hand in every crevice, oblivious to any potential risks in doing that. The silt that had collected inside over the years and was now swirling around didn’t help. I could barely see her rummaging around.
       My mask was getting worse, and letting water in to clear the glass only worked for moments. So when Kris pulled out something long and narrow from one of the cavities I couldn’t make out what it was even though, eyes lit up triumphantly, she held it up for me to see. In exasperation, I pulled off the mask and started rubbing the glass with my fingers to remove the moisture film.
       The last thing I expected was to be hit from behind. The force slammed me into the crack, nearly made me drop the mask, and I inhaled seawater through my nose. As I fumbled to put the mask back on, retching, I was hit again, and shaken violently this time. Mask back on and only partially drained, I could just about see Kris staring at something behind me.
       I turned around to see a grey shark barely an arm’s length away, fins down and back arched, flicking the tail in jerky motions. Behind it, another grey was swimming back and forth, also highly agitated. As I instinctively pulled back towards the crack I felt Kris coming out, then she was next to me, pulling on the BCD, regulator in her mouth by now, and stuffing whatever it was that she had found inside the straps, all with a minimum of movement. We looked at each other briefly, not wanting to let the sharks out of our sight, and signalled “up”. By now I had a measly twenty bars left, not even enough for a straight ascent, let alone adequate for a decompression stop.
       We had barely gone up a metre when the shark further away went rigid, then charged us. I’ve no idea how I managed to push Kris away from me while tilting my body to the left, but I had time to see the jaws open and the eyelids close before the grey hit my right shoulder, shook it savagely, then promptly swam away. I didn’t need to look, I could hear the escaping air screaming from the ripped BCD and the remains of the regulator hose, and tasted seawater in my mouth. Even if we could fend off further attacks, I would still have to make my way up to the surface without air.
       I did the only thing I could think of. I spat out the regulator, unsnapped the BCD and shrugged it off, letting it sink still trailing bubbles. Instinctively, both sharks dived sharply towards the escaping air, giving me enough time to look at Kris, check out her remaining air – still over ninety bars left, good girl – grab her octopus and, holding tightly on to her BCD, start finning hard upwards. The remaining air in my tank would only last a handful of seconds and I urgently wanted us away from this spot. Then Kris did the one thing all beginner divers are warned against. She fully inflated her BCD. At first slowly, then gaining momentum, we began ascending at a pace guaranteed to rupture our lungs or at best give us the bends. But this was our only option now and all we could do to minimise the risks was to breathe sparingly and, heads tilted up, open up as straight a passage as possible from the lungs to the mouth to exhale fully. Meanwhile, I was desperately scanning the water above us, looking for any signs of the surface. If anything, the water was getting darker and I thought that if we somehow survive this, I would never, ever get into water again with Kris, not even in a jacuzzi.
       Kris was continuously monitoring our depth as we zoomed up. At one point she dumped most of the air in her BCD which slowed our ascent considerably, and signalled that we were at ten, then nine, then eight metres – still ascending too fast, but manageable. As she let out the remaining air we focused on exhaling, aware that the last few meters are the most dangerous in fast ascents. At last we broke the surface, greedily sucking in fresh air, and were met by a heavy, cold rain whipping up the water. When we had gone in, the sky had been clear and, other than the current, the sea calm. Now, it was a leaden grey everywhere I looked, the sun invisible and the surface of the sea a rolling mass of frothing waves. And no boat to be seen. Kris was prepared, though. She pulled out and unrolled her safety sausage and proceeded to fill it with air from her regulator, while I frantically scanned the sea below us, expecting the sharks to come up and finish what they had started.
       A two metre high orange beacon, pointing at the sky like an oversized erect penis, is normally sufficient to get the attention of any dive boat skipper. But in these circumstances, with the rain having reduced the visibility badly and the towering waves, I was not sure it would be of much help, if any. No one would be able see the sausage unless actively looking for it, within no more than maybe ten metres from us. I was so happy to be wrong, and to this day I’m convinced that we owe our lives to the Bajau skipper and his uncanny ability to locate us. A few minutes after Kris had inflated the sausage, there was a flash in the sky, not too far from us.
       ‘They’ve seen us,’ Kris said calmly, ‘We should be up and dry soon.’
       She was right. The boat appeared, chugging through the waves, and I’ve never welcomed BB’s ugly visage more than on this occasion, seeing his concerned look, hanging halfway over the railing, scanning the sea while holding a ladder in place for us to get onboard. Next to him, and nervous, was the boy, eyes going in all directions.
       ‘Get your gear off and I’ll help you up,’ I said between mouthfuls of seawater, doing my best to repress a vision of open shark jaws rushing up towards us and ignore the throbbing pain in my shoulder.
       ‘Will do, darling, as soon as I secure this,’ Kris responded, unbuckled the BCD and carefully removed the object she had found and shown me earlier, then passed it to the boy who looked both awed and scared, followed by her fins. BB had managed to grab her BCD and tank.
       Trying to remain cool, at least outwardly, I rolled my eyes, ‘Do whatever you feel compelled to do, just let’s get out of the water. Now, if possible.’
       At that moment, there was no place in the world where I would’ve wanted to be more than on that crappy boat, out of the water and away from the sharks, under the tarpaulin and drying out with a cold beer. Thankful for still being alive. Somehow I managed to control my base impulses and assisted Kris with climbing up on the boat, pushing hard on her lovely bum until she was safe.
       I was acutely aware of being alone in the water now, all the time checking below me, pulling off the fins and passing them on to BB. Or the boy, I didn’t look up, too concerned with what was underneath. And there they were, the fucking sharks, three of them now, rushing up towards me.
       ‘Get me up now!’ I bellowed, stretching up my arms above me. ‘Shar–’
       I could feel strong hands clamping my wrists, then I was pulled up, painfully scraping my shoulder and back against the hull, and deposited in a disgustingly smelly slush of old seawater seasoned with diesel, fish guts and fuck knows what else. And I was in serious pain.
       ‘Fuck you, BB! You’ve broken my shoulder, you dickhead,’ I wailed.
       ‘No, man,’ he looked at me intently, ‘your shoulder not broken. Just eaten. Ha!’
       I turned my head to the right – bloody painful, it was, and my first thought was that I’d got a serious case of the bends. Then I saw my right shoulder and wondered briefly why anyone would pour a ton of ketchup on a perfectly good midin salad (for the unenlightened, it’s made from a very tasty fern growing in Sarawak).
       The rest of that day is mostly a disconnected blur, likely because BB was playing the nurse, liberally plying me with the local alcohol of choice, tuak – fermented and distilled palm sap, it sounds exotic but tastes like liquid shit – from the skipper’s private reserve on the boat. I have vague memories of being carried from the boat to a shack, then having more tuak poured over my shoulder. Not a friendly way of greeting a stranger into your household, I felt, but was unable to protest after a greasy cloth was shoved into my mouth. Then I promptly fainted as someone proceeded to dismantle my shoulder. Next thing I remember is being pulled out of a car, not too gently, carried to a very comfy bed, with several voices crying ‘dokter, dokter’ just before I happily embraced Morpheus.