Things I Did for Money by Meg Mundell Page B

almost no soil or plant life. Thick fog, no visibility, an unmapped rock … the exact verdict was a guess, because all on board were lost.
    But there was one certainty. Along with sundry unremarkable cargo, the steamship was also carrying a consignment of gold and silver coins, fresh from the National Mint. Most of the coins were recovered in a major salvage operation in the ’60s, but some remained unfound. The wreck’s ownership is disputed, and few divers are willing to brave the fierce currents that clash out there beyond the headland, roiling and entwining in a turbulent slipstream.
    Will’s take on it was that we weren’t here to steal, but anything we found could be considered a fair souvenir. ‘Finders keepers,’ as he put it. None of us was short of funds, but lost treasure has its own peculiar appeal: an aura of chance or luck, of being rescued from the depths. Or it may just be that childish delight in treasure hunts; perhaps it never fades.
    Lucia and Will swam down first, holding the anchor rope as they descended into the gloom. Their exhaled breath rose away on a diagonal slant, pearls of air strung sideways by the current. Mick, being more experienced, led me down after them, not glancing back to check on me. The water was colder than I’d expected. As I followed him down the rope I felt the current pull and nudge at me, like some huge prehistoric creature nosing at a speck of flotsam. A dart of fear shot through me then, and I felt the water pressing in from every side, countless cold tonnes of it, alien and indifferent; I felt the urge to fight for air that was already flowing safely through my lungs. But I kicked on through it, following Mick down the anchor line, counting off the depth until the feeling passed: thirty feet, forty feet, fifty and on down.
    The light faded as we sank. The Steadfast lay strewn across an ocean floor pockmarked with deep cracks and caverns. Her remains were 120 feet down at the deepest point; as we all knew, that translated to fifteen minutes of bottom time, no longer. We passed a good-sized grouper, a curious specimen who fixed me with a bulging eye and mouthed the water amiably, like he was making conversation.
    Eighty feet down Mick finally turned to check I was behind him. Some dive buddy, I thought, as I returned his OK signal. He peered at his compass and pointed up-current — we’d agreed to swim against it to counter the drag, enter the wreck site from its northern edge — and I nodded. In the gloom below I could see the toylike figures of Lucia and Will heading for a flat section of the ocean floor, just beyond the area Mick and I had opted to explore. I could just make out our destination, an uneven moonscape riven with hollows and cracks. Clumps of wreckage must have lodged down there, nestled into rocky fissures or small caves.
    Once we reached the one-hundred-foot mark we struck out into the blind push of the current, heading for the bottom. Deep water leaches out colour, so the ocean floor was a listless palette of browns, blacks and greys. We reached the rock-strewn depths and clung there a moment to check our gauges. On every side rose mini-mountains, some hollow and crumbling, others split by dark crevasses that led down into blackness. Here and there, wedged between the mounds, lay a scatter of recognisable debris: a rusted steel girder, a bluestone ballast block, a length of pipe, all encrusted with waving tendrils of sea life.
    We swam around, scouting, until I found a hole the size of a small car, and gestured Mick over. As we shone our torches down into its mouth, a riot of colours sprang out from where the beams hit the far wall — sulphur yellow, cobalt blue, delicate pinks and raw reds, a pile of rocky shelves teeming with life. The cavern was about thirty-five feet across, its sandy floor twenty feet below. We checked our watches and our air, exchanged the OK signal and swam into the hole. Twelve minutes ,