Forgotness: Book 1: 200m

“Come back my love.”

It was going to be a slow morning but we were not sure why we were hearing a medley by the Darts in our head. The Darts were a band we were never going to admit to liking but actually did. But when were they played? Who knew? We remembered hearing Phyllis, just about.

Bill and Ben were crashing round the Smithy getting ready for the breakfasters. Frankly was snoring, still on the bicycle, which showed impressive balancing skills while still asleep. We watched the morning start, our back to the wall, body still cozy under the blanket.

Someone must have put a blanket over us. Must have been Bill or Ben.

Soon we were thinking about the paramotor and the sheet of tiny nano filaments. Could you see the filaments or were they so small they were invisible? Just how small was nano? It sounded much smaller than tiny.

We leant over and gave Leicester a shove.

“Wake up Leicester.” Was about all we could manage. Leicester grunted but the eyes opened.

“What?” Leicester asked, “what time is it anyway?”

We reckoned it was about eight.

“Oh freak off,” said Leicester and went back to sleep. We considered giving Leicester another shove but couldn’t see the point. We weren’t in any particular hurry to be anywhere so we got up and shuffled over to the bar.

“Hi Ben.”

Ben looked up.

“Morning Felixstowe. Looking good. Fancy a nettle tea?”

We nodded and Ben poured out a large cup of hot and slightly green water. We sipped it slowly.

“Remember what we talked about last night?” Asked Ben.

“About the nano filaments and current mulitiply-y stuff, yes.”

“Anything else?” Asked Ben looking up at us.

“Um, no?” we weren’t sure what Ben was on about; always the more complicated of the two we found. “Was there? Can’t remember.”

“No,” said Ben smiling. “We were just, you know what it’s like, not sure.”

“Yeah, good night,” we agreed. “Thanks for the tea.”

Ben went off to wipe down tables. We took big sniffs of the nettle infused steam. It was all very soothing.

Leicester appeared beside us and took a sip of our tea.

“So, what’s the plan?” Leicester asked.

“Guess we head out to Park Farm and take a dive down and see what we can find?”

“Do you reckon the Mugs are away now?”

“Probably. Got no reason to hang around. Should be OK. Do we need anything else for the dive?”

“No, the roof’s off, reckon it should be OK just from the boat.”

“OK,” we said and looking round for Ben. “Hey Ben any chance of some food, added to the tab?”

Ben nodded. “Bubble’n Squeak?”

Leicester looked up. “That would definitely hit the spot.”

Some time and somewhat greasier later, we left the Smithy and headed back down to our boat. It was still there.

“Not even the Mugs wanted it.” Some wit called out from an allotment. It was a joke that had obviously been doing the rounds as there were repeats of the line and laughter coming from various homes as we passed. It was all good natured, though sometimes we felt that the Ridgeway looked down on us clan folk for living out on the water. At least we had a bit of land, there were some who just floated about on giant rafts.

“You know, we should call this boat Prince,” announced Leicester.

“OK, why?” we asked. Leicester shoved us off and jumped in. We spun the boat round and settled down to row.

“It’s purple,” explained Leicester.

“OK.”

We rowed back the way we had come, through low clouds and rain. Within a few minutes there were no landmarks to see and we only had a fat hazy sun to guide us though the mist. We heard a few other boats nearby but nothing particularly threatening or Mug-like. We passed a boat from Treetops on a fishing trip but they had no news so we didn’t feel any rush to get home. Instead we drifted south a bit until we were over Park Farm and the paramotor club shed.

“Are we going down together or taking it in turns?” We asked.

“Reckon,” began Leicester, “that we’ll go down alone and find the shed. You stay here and keep Prince on the spot. Then when we’ve found it we’ll take a line down and tie it to something, a door handle. Then we’ll both go down and have a hunt for this sheet stuff?”

“Fine by me,” we moved to the stern with one oar and sculled gently to keep the boat in position, “good luck.”

Leicester sat still for about ten minutes to slow the heart rate then took a deep breath and dived in.

No one had taught us diving but it was a skill nearly everyone, OK not Bill and Ben, but most, a lot of Wetters, had. Being in water or on it was the norm. We didn’t feel the cold much, we were just so used to it. And we could hold our breaths, we could really hold our breaths.

The trick was to slow down your heart rate before the dive, take a deep breath and very, very, very slowly let it out again during the swim. We can do about eight to ten minutes under water, Leicester claims to be able to do fifteen but we thought it was more like twelve. Some said that they have heard of folk who could do twenty or more. We could see how that would be possible.

And the big eyes were useful. It was pretty murky and muddy down there, not a lot of light. Not a lot of light up here either which made it even worse down there. And there were bad things, not just eels to worry about. We got caught on a bit of old farm machinery once. A thing like a big wheel but with hundreds of bent wire spikes sticking out. We got some clothing caught in it and whichever way we pulled the wheel just turned. Eventually we had to take our trousers off and swim back up. Oh how our friends laughed. There was a whole week of bad trouser jokes.

And there were old trees, a lot of barbed wire, some of it sort of floating around attached to fence posts which was really scary if you got caught up in that.

People always asked about the eels. They were bad and getting worse, but like the floating junk you just have to get on with it. This was where we lived and this was our livelihood.

Leicester reappeared and swung an arm over the side of the boat and climbed aboard. We reckoned that had been about 6 minutes. We let Leicester rest first, quietly staring up at the sky and clouds.

“All right?” we asked after a bit. Leicester nodded and gave the thumbs up. We waited a bit longer.

“Yup,” said Leicester after a few more minutes, getting up on to the seat and taking an oar. “Let’s go over this way ten metres or so, then we’ll take a line down and tie up.”

When we were lined up right and after another pause Leicester took the boat’s rope and dived in. We fed the line out. After a couple of minutes the rope went tight and a minute later Leicester reappeared.

“There’s lots of crazy shit in there. We’re not going to know which one’s the right one.” Leicester explained.

“Guess we’ll have to bring it all up then. Let Bill and Ben sort it out.” Leicester nodded.

“Yeah, ready?”

“Let’s go,” we said. We prepared and dived in together.

We followed the rope down. Soon our eyes got used to the dark and the world opened up around us.

The big grey H-shaped farmhouse was over to our right with a large collection of barns to the north of it. We swum down, over the farm buildings, over a smaller pair of houses, to a little triangular field filled with old machinery and rotten tin huts. There was a line of tree stumps to our left and another line ahead. All the wood had been chopped down long ago and probably made up the majority of the huts, boats and rafts for miles around. But, tucked into a corner of the field, was a more modern looking corrugated shed, maybe six metres by three. The roof lay beside the hut where Leicester had dropped it.

We swam over the hut and looked down. It did not look promising. We were surprised Leicester had gone in there alone. To be honest it looked like a death trap. There were hundreds of trailing lines of white rope swaying gently in the water. Getting caught up in that lot would be deadly. But Leicester had got in and out successfully so that was what we were going to do.

Leicester signalled: one at a time, Leicester going in first. We watched as Leicester swam down and grabbed a couple of lines. As Leicester reversed away, the lines grouped together as if alive and reaching out for a meal. Slowly a dark bundle followed out through the tangle and then floated free. Leicester signalled for us to try.

We swam forward, grabbed the first line we could and started pulling. Again all the lines curled out towards us. With a jolt, a lump came free and we could see a tightly packed roll of material rising out of the hut. We headed back up to the surface together.

Going up was slow with the extra weight and we were getting very close to our limit, our diaphragm was throbbing painfully despite regularly letting out air. We were very grateful to reach the surface. We heaved the roll onto the boat and then floated for a minute catching our breath. Then we climbed on board. Leicester was already there, unrolling the material.

“Not sure how we’ll know which one is Whispering Grass. Terrible name though.” The material was a tough nylon, almost unaffected by what must have been decades underwater. It had quite a lot of muck on it, slime and algae, but otherwise seemed undamaged.

We nodded, not really wanting to speak yet.

Leicester unrolled ours. It was the same. A bright blue sheet with what looked like the start of words in red with a white outline. An L and an A, probably Lambourn or maybe something daft like Lazerlight. We had noticed how folk of old loved dramatic text for boring stuff. ‘Buffing a turd’ the oldies would say.

“Next time,” we said, Leicester looked up, we continued, still catching our breath. “Next time, could we go first? We don’t have the gills for this.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Leicester replied. “Should have let you go first that time hey? Sorry.”

“We’re just going to have bring them all up aren’t we?”

“Reckon so, just to get them out of the way if anything. They probably put the special stuff away somewhere. Locked it up.”

“So we’re going to have to clear the room you mean.” We pointed out, Leicester nodded. We swore. This was going to be a long day. Or longer than that.

We went down three more times before stopping for a bite to eat at midday and kept going down all afternoon. By five we had cleared the hut of the lose lines and had nearly filled our boat with paramotor sails.

It was early evening before Leicester suggested stopping again.

“What, for the night?” We had been getting quite into it all. Plus the sheets would make decent covering for huts and good fresh water collectors and a whole lot more besides. We were sitting on a goldmine.

“Come on, one more dive.”

Leicester looked at the sun.

“Suppose we’ve got an hour or so yet. But we’re just going to look around, see what’s what, try a few drawers.”

We agreed, eager to get on.

“OK Fishface, let’s go!” Leicester only called us that when in a really good mood. We dived in and followed the rope down.

Soon we were at the hut. It looked different now, empty. A few helmets swayed on the ground, rocked by the gentle currents. One wall had a floor to ceiling cupboard, another had a worktop with cupboards underneath, while the other two walls were bare. We swam in and held on to the cupboard door handles to stay in place. Then we began looking around.

When you spend a lot of time underwater you learn to feel the currents swirl and eddy around you. So we felt the eel’s movement in the water before its shadow passed over us and made us momentarily colder. It was a big one. We watched its body snaking over and then it was gone.

Leicester reached over and held our arm. No movement, that was the message. Maybe the eel was gone but maybe it had come round and was about to come over any one of the walls behind us and strike. We would have held our breath excepting we already were.

Leicester signalled a countdown from five and then swam slowly up to the top of one wall and peered over. Thumbs up: all good. We moved to the other wall and looked over that: no eel. We swam to the other ends of the hut. Leicester checked over the wall and then we looked over ours. Again nothing.

Leicester looked at us and pointed to the cupboards: time to check them. As Leicester turned, the eel curled back over the wall, caught an arm in its teeth and wrapped Leicester with its thick body, a good third of a metre in diameter, spiralling round in a black coil of muscle.

We swam over as fast as we could and stuck our bayonet into its body. It reacted immediately, uncoiling from Leicester and spinning round us. But it kept its teeth locked on Leicester’s right arm. We could see that Leicester was trying to get a knife out of its sheath but was finding it difficult to reach with the left hand. We pulled out our steel hair pin and stuck that in the eel as well. The water was starting to turn dark with blood. We pulled the bayonet out and, pulling ourself up the body, stuck it back in above the pin. We were trying to work our way up towards the eel’s head. The higher we got the harder it was for the eel to wrap its body around us. Leicester got the knife out of its sheath at last and managed to stab one of the eel’s eyes. It let go and with a lightning fluidity it swam over the hut wall and out into open water. We were still clinging to our knifes. We pulled the bayonet out and in the rush of water the pin just slid out of the body and the eel was gone in a cloud of blood.

We hung in the water for a bit, then felt Leicester touch our arm. We turned and, putting an arm under Leicester, we swam up together clumsily, but as fast as we could.

We got straight into the boat and wrapped up Leicester in a blanket and took a look at the bite on the arm. There were teeth marks either side of the elbow, biting deep into the muscle. We cleaned them out as best we could and bandaged the arm with some old cloth.

It was starting to get dark now. We had to get back to Treetops and get Leicester’s wounds looked at properly. Then we realised that the anchor rope was still attached to the hut. We would have to go down and untie it. We could just have cut it but we can’t waste good rope.

“No,” said Leicester, “just cut it, we’ll come back another day.”

“If we cut it someone might find it and follow it down to the hut, and then they’ll find the sheet.” We argued.

“We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“You’re not swimming again for weeks.” We pointed out. “You arm’s a mess.”

“Look,” we continued, Leicester tried to interrupt. “We’ll go down, check out the last cupboard, untie the line and be back in minutes.”

“No, just wait a...” Leicester began but we dived in. We hadn’t even waited to slow our heart rate. After so many dives it was already much slower than normal, though the fight with the eel had been a rush, in every sense.

We swam down. It was much darker now but we kept touching the rope with every stroke. We reached the hut and checked the cupboard under the worktops first. They held books and papers that were now just a pale cloud of mush.

The first tall cupboard at the end of the hut held more kit: helmets, ropes and boxes of carabiners which, though normally something we would take, were not what we were interested in now: we wanted the parawing. The last cupboard was empty apart from the remains of a cardboard box that drifted apart as we opened it. Inside was a tight roll, it was another paramotor sail but it felt completely different from the nylon of the earlier sails. This felt smooth in a liquid, almost untouchable way, as if it would slip though your fingers. It was like trying to hold an eel.

This had to be the one.

We attached it to our belt and untied the mooring rope. It was dark now as we swum up. The mooring rope drifted as we rose but we were not too bothered. We knew which direction to head even though we couldn’t see the boat above us yet.

It was slow going, dragging the sail, especially after such a long day swimming. We got to the surface further from the boat than we had thought and floated for a moment as we caught our breath.

It was then that we heard voices: Mugs.

Two of their boats were alongside ours. We could hear Leicester arguing with them which was in itself risky, Mugs only had one way to solve an argument: fatally. But what was worse was that we could see that one of the boats was Trumps’, the leader of the of the Mugs. We don’t know what Trumps’ real name was but whatever Trumps did it was always as the biggest arsehole on the planet. We could hear the insane shouting and ranting across the water.

“Wow! Whoa! That is some great stuff. Worth thousands. So nice, thank you very much. That’s really wonderful. Thank you. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be in a wonderful sea of giving like this. And it’s an honour for you to have me here. This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no gifterizing like this. And, I can tell you, some of our divers, they went in. They didn’t know the air didn’t work. They sweated like dogs. Hard work. Cold work. Thankfully you this here now me.”

We swam closer. Luckily the two Mug crews were watching their leader, laughing and cheering at every word. Or more to the point, if a boat had turned up they might have spotted it, but they were not going to notice one slow swimmer with a heavy bag attached to their belt. We swam up to the stern of our boat where the fewest number of eyes could spot us. Leicester was sitting at the other end where Trumps was standing, raving, spitting and waving.

“I take this, you give me this, we’ll be friends, best friends, these are my friends. Good friends. I love them. They love me. We love each other. They were abandoned, uncared for. Why? Why not? They’re the best, the truest and we know the truth and now we’re here so this is mine wind.”

We weren’t sure if Trumps has said wind or winned? Neither made much sense and it made us pause briefly before we began rocking the boat ever so gently but adding a little more with each pull. Leicester saw us and was moving in time with the rocking, increasing it.

“Are you listening? I’ll not have you disrespecting to us,” said Trumps.

“We really respect your nuts,” said Leicester and in one movement kicked Trumps between the legs and dived overboard. At the same time we let go of the stern in mid swing and pulled it the other way. The boat, already top heavy with all the paramotor sails stacked up on it, threw Trumps off balance and into the water

We ducked down just as the shouting started. The dead weight of the paramotor sail pulled me down. Leicester, swimming slower with the bandaged arm, grabbed us as we sank.

Looking up we could see the flourescent splashes of Mugs diving into the water above us. They might not see us in the dark beneath them, but we would not be able to stay down for long.

An idea started to form in our mind, not a vision as such, but a possibility that, to some part of us, made sense.

We signalled for Leicester to climb on our back for a piggyback ride. We cut the loops holding the paramotor sail and it billowed out above us. We twisted the twin left and right sail ropes around our wrists and suddenly the sail flattened out and we were gliding underwater.

First we just went down at an angle then, as we started to get the idea of how the ropes worked, we pulled back on the two rear ropes. The sails began to cut down through the water at a less steep angle. We pulled more and we levelled out. Then we tried angling up and all the while it felt like we were moving faster and faster.

We wondered if Trumps’ Mugs had seen the sails unfold and had watched us silently slide away from them.

We flew for about five minutes, guessing the direction we wanted to head as it was now too dark to see any of the underwater landmarks. But we had to come up to the surface for air. We angled the parasail up.

Just below the surface we stalled the sails and before they had time to pull us down we gathered them up and swam to the surface.

The first thing we heard was Leicester laughing.

“What the freak was that! You’re a freak’n genius! How did you know?”

We tried to shrug but in the darkness it would have been hard to see.

“Dunno,” we said, “we’ve no idea where that came from. It just seemed like something that might work.”

“Was it Ben?” Leicester asked. We looked puzzled as we trod water.

“What? Why?”

“Well, Ben was talking to you for hours last night.”

“When? We went to sleep.”

“After they gave us a blanket, you and Ben chatted forever.”

“Really?” We had no memory of that, must have been worse off than we thought. “Whatever, we’ve got to get to shore, there’s a good couple of miles to go yet.”

“OK,” said Leicester. “We’re up for it.”

Leicester paddled round and climbed on our back again. We sank down and let the sail unfold and we were off. We had got a sight of the moon in the dark and had an idea which way to head.

For the next hour or so we flew north underwater, heading for Treetops.

Eventually we felt the land rise beneath us and saw lights ahead. We had reached land.

It turned out we missed Treetops by a fair bit but had got to the Ridgeway a mile or so east of the White Horse.

We rolled up the sail as we stumbled out of the water and headed towards the nearest fire and asked for help.

Soon Leicester’s wound was getting cleaned, stitched and bandaged, while we sipped hot soup by a fire.

We told our story of Trumps and the Mugs but kept quiet about the sail and quite how far out to sea we had been. Even then our story of swimming so far at night gained us some notoriety. But, eventually, they left us alone.

Later, we rolled up together in the parasail and went to sleep.