Things I Did for Money by Meg Mundell Page A

did not hear her return.
    There is nothing moving upstairs, nothing. Complete silence, broken by the sound of unanswered phones: thirty rings, silence, thirty more. Then a lighter trill, also ringing out.
    I finally met her — Nina. Told her she was driving me mad with her midnight tap-dancing, could I buy her a pair of slippers? I can hear a crumb drop down here, I said, and you’ve dropped a truckload. She was nothing like I’d imagined her to be. Noise reveals less about a person than you might think.
    I felt foolish for being afraid of a bird but she didn’t dwell on it. The previous night I heard her smashing something (an old chair, apparently, for firewood) and smelled woodsmoke. The bird must have come down the chimney, frightened. Before we let it go I touched its feathers, felt its little heartbeat under my hand, quick and persistent.
    As Nina left she asked to borrow a corkscrew. I meant to throw that thing away years ago. Key to bloody nowhere: twist and pull, sink and drown. But there it lurked, in the back of a drawer. I was reluctant to give her the cursed thing but she insisted, said she hadn’t painted sober in years. We quickly changed the subject.
    She’s a brunette, I’d guess, late thirties. Lanky probably, despite the booze — frets and smokes too much. But what surprised me most was this: the smell of jasmine belongs to her.
    I hear feet on the stairs, agitated voices, fists hammering at her door. People calling her name, again and again.
    When they knock on my door I open it immediately. I hear someone breathing fast, a second person shuffling, and a woman with a sharp, frightened voice asks me, Do I know where Nina is — do I know Nina Verlane?
    I answer, Yes, I do know Nina. And although I try to hide it, my eyes grow wet. It is so very quiet upstairs, almost as if she had never been there at all.

NARCOSIS
    We fell into the ocean backward, making the OK signal for the camera. Later I replayed that footage several times, but it never seemed accurate: all flailing flippers and ungainly limbs, smiles stretched around the mouthpiece, that messy shattering of the surface. Nothing like the slow, deadly grace of being underwater.
    Four of us went down that day: my old friend Lucia and her husband, Will; my ambivalent self; and a man called Mick, an ex–opal miner with a boozy squint who seemed to take an instant dislike to me. I’d noted it over pre-dawn introductions at the marina and the feeling was instantly mutual. That’s the trouble with misanthropes, I thought: they have a knack for recruiting the rest of us.
    It’s not ideal being stuck with a prickly dive buddy — the ocean itself is hostile enough — but Lucia and Will are annoyingly inseparable, so we had no choice. Anyway, I’d invited myself along on this trip, saying it was time I got back out there. ‘You sure you’re ready?’ Lucia had asked. ‘Completely,’ I’d replied, my tone bright. ‘I’m back amongst the living.’
    Our skipper stayed topside with his deckhand-cum-cook, a young Spanish guy who’d been mooching around all morning with his shirt off. We’d all pretended not to notice, but when Lucia caught my eye we hid conspiratorial smiles — two ageing dames acknowledging a surface loveliness that was now lost to us. We asked the young guy to man the camera.
    As we crashed through the looking-glass and began to sink, I repeated the mantra to myself: slow and steady, keep breathing, trust your gear. That morning, over coffee in the cramped galley, we’d scrutinised the blurry maps, vague blueprints of the wreck’s remains, but they couldn’t tell us much. Only that her century-old bones lay deep and widely scattered, playthings for the rough seas and strong ocean currents that swept this area.
    The Steadfast had been smashed up on the dark rocks of a tiny offshore island so steep and wave-beaten that it held