In the sharks’ den

OUT THERE, FEBRUARY 2001

A SMALL GIRL PRESSED her face against the window and screamed. I knew she was screaming, although I could hear no sound. She looked like Edvard Munch’s little sister, though tinged with a deeper shade of blue.

I looked at another window and there was another small girl, also screaming. I felt obscurely pleased. I haven’t made girls emote like that since the time I shoved a shuttlecock down my trousers and sang “It’s not unusual” in a Welsh accent at the Sunday School talent contest. (I was, lest the Carte Blanche team come knocking at my door, 10 years old myself.)

Now, as then, the girls were screaming in terror. It puzzled me. As far as I could remember, I had left my shuttlecock at home. I turned. A 12-foot shark was moving towards me, eyes small and dark like cigarette burns in a wooden table, mouth jagged and ajar like a kitchen drawer overstuffed with cutlery. I backed away, air-tank rattling against the glass of the window, the air of my exhalation escaping in a great cloud of cowardly bubbles.

I wished I could reach through the glass for one of those small girls and hold her out in front of me. Or better, I wished Clint Lishman were there. You don’t know Clint Lishman. He was the little boy who beat me into second place in the Sunday School talent contest with his musical teaspoons routine.

I’m not sure precisely what prompted me to scuba-dive in the predator tank of the Two Oceans Aquarium. Perhaps it was the prospect of having to spend a whole weekend in Cape Town. Perhaps it was the fact that I had to write another column this month. For a modest fee, the aquarium takes divers on an escorted 30-minute tour of the tank. The escort is a charming young lady carrying a thin wooden stick.

Sitting on the platform above the tank, preparing to enter, I had eyed the thin wooden stick with some suspicion. “That’s it, eh?” I’d murmured. “That’s it,” she’d confirmed. “A thin wooden stick, hmm?” I’d ventured. “As you say,” she’d agreed, “it is a stick that is thin and wooden.”

It is a meaningful moment in a coward’s life to slip off a platform into an enclosed space containing predators with teeth. All the more so when protected only by a slip of a lass with a thin wooden stick and a nasty sense of humour. My breath came quickly as we sank through the dappled blue; I patted the pockets of my wetsuit for a cigarette.

Water has its own spatial demands. It’s not enough to look over your shoulder for approaching sharks; you must also check beneath and above you. It is a large tank, but well stocked. There is a large rock structure, and around it circle yellowtail and turtles, dories and dogfish and a vast stingray, easily two metres across. But my attention was taken with the five ragged toothed sharks of imposing size and mien. They are vast and impossibly silent. There is something terrible yet familiar about them, like the shadows of your own mind, or the stirrings of a bad dream before you’ve quite fallen asleep.

Familiarity brings comfort. They avoid humans, as wild animals do. Occasionally one or more becomes curious, but I find a firm prod with a thin wooden stick does the trick. When the big boy backed me up against the glass, I pushed him away with my hand, politely but firmly, as though I were a dieter and he a second helping of sticky pudding.

All the same, I felt heroic and terribly manly, like Sean Connery in Thunderball, or Nick Nolte in The Deep. I turned to the small girls to give them a rugged thumbs-up, but the attention spans of children these days are shameful. They had already wandered off to look at the sea urchins.