Randy the co-pilot came with me. I thought we might have trouble with customs having purportedly entered their country illegally, but someone in the chain of command must have been on our side. We found a taxi in the form of a battered old ute, and lugged a couple of oxygen cylinders into its rear. I took the doctor’s bag, an old Gladstone, and my overnight bag. We got going.
Randy loosened up a bit for the ride. I asked him how come he flew for Fox Holdings and he said he’d got bored crossing and recrossing the Pond for American Airlines, so he looked for something a bit more varied and maybe a bit less regulated. The Fox job came up. The money was good and Elmer was a great captain. And Fox himself? He pulled a face and said ‘Hmmm’ equivocally through pursed lips. ‘His bark’s worse than his bite. All that macho stuff is just for the cameras.’
I’d suspected as much. There had been something staged and showy about that tirade down the phone.
The trip up the east coast of Espiritu Santo was rough going and there was very little to see beyond the howling wind and rain. We went through some huge puddles, displacing great tsunamis on either side of us. One was so deep that I thought we weren’t going to make it but we came out the other side with much steam and hissing, and the brakes went very squelchy. We might not make it on the way back. Then we were back by the sea with the stink of mangroves and the extravagantly swaying palm trees. I’d imagined we’d find Saskia Fox in some tourist paradise but we left the Champagne Beach resorts behind us and turned down a deserted rough track and pulled up beside an isolated clapboard beach hut that reminded me of my mum and dad’s place on Ninety Mile Beach, Nepenthe. In New Zealand we call it a bach, pronounced ‘batch’. I jumped down from the ute on to the bach’s deck, knocked on the rickety door jamb, and went inside.
She was alone.
It was the tall slim dark-haired girl whose picture I’d been studying a few hours before. She was sitting forlornly on the floor in the corner of a bare room with her knees drawn up and her arms clasped around them. She wore an ivory and blue striped linen shirt, and a crumpled pair of brown shorts. She was staring straight ahead and she didn’t alter her gaze.
‘Saskia?’
She darted a quick glance at me.
‘Who the hell are you?’ There was something fierce and combative about her. Like her father.
‘I’m Alastair. I’m a New Zealand doctor. I’ve come to offer you a ride home.’
‘Did Daddy send you?’
‘No. We just borrowed his aircraft.’
‘Then you’re working for him.’ She spoke in a low-pitched, hard-to-place mid-Atlantic accent. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’
Maybe she was right. Maybe Trans-Global should have politely declined Fox’s offer and chartered another aeroplane. I let it pass.
‘I’m okay.’
‘You got any symptoms?’
‘Just some tingling down my right arm.’ She gave me a brief and succinct history. The dive had been about eighteen hours previously. Yes, she had had a dive buddy: Patti was still at the airport as far as she knew. Saskia told me how yesterday she had surfaced with some back pain, she had felt a bit confused, and her right arm was pretty useless for a couple of hours. And she had a fit of coughing and brought up a trace of blood.
The chokes.
But by late last night she felt so much better that she self-discharged from the hospital and came back here. She’d done that on impulse when she heard Daddy was sending the cavalry for her.
‘You still got pins and needles?’
‘A bit.’
‘May I take a look?’
I knelt down on the floor directly in front of her. The beautiful face was expressionless. The grey eyes watching me gave nothing away. She let me take her right arm. Apart from some skin marbling around the wrist, it examined pretty normally. Motor function grossly intact. I tried a finger-nose test. It was all over the place.
‘Pretty shitty, huh? What do you think?’
‘I think you’ve got decompression sickness. I think you should come back to Auckland and Devonport Naval Base will put you in a decompression chamber and you’ll be fine.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Well, I can’t say. This might not reverse. And you could have other sequelae.’
‘What’s that?’
‘After-effects. This condition can rebound. Pain. Maybe more breathlessness. Useless arm.’
She weighed it up. She shook her head. ‘I’m not going.’
This was all about her father. This was why she chased extreme weather events. She travelled to the ends of the earth and disappeared into the vortex of a cyclone to get away from her father.
I hadn’t heard Randy come in. His silhouette filled the doorway. The sky behind him was almost black. ‘Doctor, we’ve got to go. The driver’s getting very nervous. The puddles are getting deeper.’
Saskia looked up. ‘So go. I’m not coming.’
The co-pilot caught my eye and invited me outside with a barely perceptible backward tilt of the head. We stepped out into a warm monsoon on the deck.
‘Look. She’s just a slip of a girl. The two of us, we can scoop and run, no worries.’
‘You mean, abduct her?’
‘These are Mr Fox’s orders.’
‘Well, I don’t work for Mr Fox. And actually it’s none of his business. She’s 18 years old and, as far as I can tell, of sound mind. So that’s not going to happen.’
He gave me a look as if to say, it’s your funeral. It crossed my mind that Saskia Fox was suicidal. Her lifestyle was the posh version of that of people who no longer give a toss. They start taking risks. They drive like hell, get careless with home appliances, and walk out in front of buses. Had her father driven her to this? Maybe Randy was right about ‘scoop and run’. Maybe I should section her under the Mental Health Act. What was the alternative? The alternative was to keep a suicide watch.
‘Wait here a sec.’
I went back into the bach.
‘The pilot’s got to go. Last chance, Saskia.’
‘Goodbye.’
But she looked so utterly lost, I couldn’t possibly leave her. I said to her, ‘I can’t abandon you like this. If you’re staying, I’m staying.’
It was another ‘it’s your funeral’ look. Then she shrugged indifferently. I went back out on to the deck.
‘She’s not budging. Look. You go, I’ll stay and look after her. I’ll talk her round. Hopefully that’ll mean your boss won’t give you grief. What will you do?’
‘Try to find some hangar space I guess. Or if we can’t, if we can get out we might clear off across to Queensland until this blows over, then ask Mr Fox for further instructions. What about you?’
‘Could you leave the oxygen cylinders here? I’ve got an idea.’
We left it at that. We went out into the wind and rain, and together wrestled the two cylinders off the ute and into the bach. I dragged the first one across the floor to her. I made sure the oxygen tubing was securely attached, and took the oxygen mask out of its cellophane wrapping and passed the tie over the back of her head. ‘Here. Breathe this.’ Rate of flow? High rate for a short time or low rate for a long time? I decided to use up the first cylinder, high flow, at 15 litres a minute, and maybe run the second at a gentler rate, depending on how she responded. ‘Sorted. Hope you don’t mind if I stop over.’
‘I couldn’t care less. Only one thing. Touch me, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.’ The eyes flashed at me. I raised a hand. ‘That’s fine.’
‘Sorry, I don’t mean … I know you’re doing your best. Don’t think I’m not grateful …’
Funny, mixed-up kid.
‘Where’s your diving gear?’
‘Next door.’
I went through and took a look at it. Her own stuff and, presumably, her diving buddy’s. There were plenty of spare tanks. That made possible a crazy idea that was brewing at the back of my mind. Why not dive her here? In-water recompression. It was said to be a big nono, to go back down with the bends, fraught with hazard. But then that was when it was a given that you had options. This was an altogether unusual set of circumstances. The storm might as easily uproot this flimsy shack, and where would we be then? It would be lovely to get out of this wind – it crazed you after a while – and sit calmly on the sea bed a hundred feet below the turbulent surface. I went back through and put it to her.
‘Fancy a dive? Might save you a trip to Devonport.’
Her eyes lit up. ‘Would that work?’
‘Don’t see why not. But Saskia, you need to promise to do exactly what I tell you. No funny business.’
She nodded.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
So that’s exactly what we did. We got kitted up and made the transit through a gale, slapping down the sloping white sand in our fins to the water’s edge. Into the water and down, and, at last, an escape from the elements.
She was a much better diver than I was. I’d had a brief flirtation with scuba in my teens and had done some courses in the Bay of Islands, but I never really felt at home under water. Actually, I find it a bit claustrophobic. It’s my private phobia. I hate confined spaces. I can’t stand being closed in. Maybe that’s why I love flying. Give me the wide open spaces. Let me die outside. I had my usual difficulty equalising the pressure round my eardrums, and tried a Valsalva manoeuvre and all sorts of facial contortions until the earache went away. You might say I was a fish out of water. It would just be the thing if I got into trouble and Saskia had to rescue me. Perhaps I would be like a do-gooder who jumps into a river to save a damsel in distress and ends up drowning himself. And another thing – I’d hopefully be flying home in under twenty-four hours. Another diver’s no-no. I’d have to share the oxygen cylinders with Saskia. All these thoughts and worries whisked around in my head.
I wish I could tell you I spent a glorious hour down on the coral reef in company with the inquisitive turtles, reef sharks, and Napoleon wrasse. But it wasn’t like that. I was once more in the monochrome battleship-grey world of the instrument pilot, keeping myself orientated, concentrating intensely on Saskia, and watching out for the unpredictable.
For her part, she seemed to forget her troubles – whatever they were – and she was content to explore the flora on the sea bed and commune with whatever marine life had come out to play. I stayed on edge, keeping an eye on her, counting the minutes, even looking out for big predators that might be lurking just beyond the grey curtain of invisibility. I have a lively imagination. After about half an hour I coaxed her off the sea bed and we conducted a controlled ascent with a stop every ten feet. Coming up too quickly is like taking a bottle of tonic out of the fridge, shaking it, and opening it. All the carbon dioxide comes out of solution and bubbles over. It’s the same with us, except the bubbles are nitrogen.
Another ten feet up and pause. I wonder why whales don’t get the bends. They dive to great depths, apparently with impunity. Mind you, there’s a theory that beached whales have actually got the bends. People hug whales on the shingle, pour salt water over them and try to coax them back into the ocean. They don’t comply, it’s said, because they are disorientated, but maybe it’s because they’re ill. They’re a bit like Saskia. You try to persuade them to undergo a therapy and they tell you to bugger off out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
Another ten feet up. Bit unfair to liken Saskia to a beached whale.
Enough, already. Time to return to the storm.
I took off my oxygen tank at the water’s edge and helped Saskia’s with hers, then hurried her back into the shelter of the bach. I went back and retrieved the tanks before they blew away. By the time I’d got back Saskia was dried, and back in her shorts and shirt. I proffered her the oxygen mask again.
‘Do I have to?’
‘Doctor’s orders. You might as well get the benefit of it and use it all up. We might scavenge the dive tanks as well.’
‘Does that mean we’re not going for another dive?’
‘Not today. Now then, what facilities does this accommodation have to offer?’
‘Phone’s down, electricity’s down. Everybody in their right mind has left.’
‘Any food in the larder?’
‘Yep. Kitchen’s quite well stocked.’
We breakfasted, improbably, on root beer and bagels.
‘How’s the arm?’
She flexed it experimentally. ‘Better.’
‘Good.’
Now all we had to do was sit out a storm. Saskia was content to spend most of the day with her nose buried in a book. She was reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, all about the 1996 Everest disaster. Maybe she was planning her next extreme-weather event. Occasionally she would pop into the kitchen and fetch me another root beer, and we would cautiously exchange segments of our life histories to pass the time. I learned that she had had a fairly harum-scarum childhood, if in a high-class way, wandering between continents and stepmothers. She had a younger sister, Tamsin, who was the favourite of another stepmother and who went to school in Cheltenham. I must remember to ask Caitlin if she knew her. Saskia was off to Oxford next autumn. Which college? Magdalen. What was she going to read? Schools? Greats? PPE.
Perhaps she would inherit the Fox empire, but somehow I didn’t think so. I had a sense her life’s ambition was to put as much space between herself and her father as possible. I asked her, perhaps a little mischievously, if she fancied staying in the White House, but she gave me a murderous look.
When darkness fell again the wind really got up and I realised that what we had suffered thus far was merely akin to a balmy summer’s breeze. In the centre of the bach was a basement with a trapdoor dug into the ground. A kind of hurricane room. It would be our last bolt-hole. I moved a couple of straw palliasses down, and some food and drink.
Saskia had one last nasty surprise for me. Having sorted our snug in the hurricane room I came back up to find that she had disappeared.
I opened the door on to the beach. It snatched itself away from my hand, tore itself off its hinges, hurtled crazily along the beach, and vanished. I had stepped out into a 120 mile-an-hour typhoon. There was a dark shadow in the water, thigh-deep. I gritted my teeth, put my head down, and battled against the gale. If I could just reach that shadow … I grabbed her and hauled her out of the water. There was a brief glimpse of palm trees bent almost to the ground. Then, by a miracle, the wind threw us both back up the sloping white sand and through the aperture that had been the bach door. I pulled open the trapdoor of our dungeon and yelled at her, ‘Saskia get down!’
She stared back at me. I think she was trying to figure out whether I was just one of her father’s lieutenants, or whether she could trust me.
‘Please.’
‘’kay.’
She dropped down into the bolt-hole. I followed, pulled the trapdoor over our heads, and bolted it secure.