Taking The Plunge

It was time Lana tried something a little more daring . . .

IT all started the Monday after that TV programme began its latest series. You know the one, where people who were once famous do daring and silly things, just to remind us of why they stopped being popular in the first place.

Lana, Colin and Janet had all convened as usual at the table in the far corner of Crumpet’s Café.

Outside, a sharp November storm was just past its peak. As the wind stirred up the litter on the sea-front, they all felt rather proud of how they had managed to get out for their weekly warm-up on such a frightful morning.

“Nothing like a bit of a challenge to keep you on your toes.” Colin blew across the froth on his coffee.

“For a man who drinks a skinny decaf flat white, anything that causes a bit of excitement is well worth the effort.”

Lana laughed at Janet’s wry comment. Colin sat back into the cushions on the window seat with a wistful look on his face.

“Karen would be proud of me for not going back to the dark side.”

Colin, three years retired as National Sales Manager for a watch company, had existed through most of his working life on a diet of sweet black coffee and cigarettes. That was until his own ticker went rather dicky, encouraging him to cut down on the stimulants.

Life had been a lot less sweet to him since Karen died of a stroke 18 months previously, but the weekly warm-ups with her old friends helped him to get out of the house on a Monday morning.

While there were coffee shops in the world, there would always be a mug of decaf for him to hold to keep him comfortable.

Lana cut the Belgian bun into three pieces.

“I quite like a challenge.” She pushed the plate into the middle of the table. “I mean, I’m not saying I would eat a crocodile’s unmentionables, but I want to do something to make me feel proud. Something to tell the grandchildren the next time they are over for dinner.”

“You’re not thinking about a tattoo again?” Janet had her schoolteacher voice on.

“Janet, I’m not getting into that discussion now. I’m thinking about doing something that I’ve always said I’ll do one day, but I’ve never got around to.”

“Like sorting out the airing cupboard?”

They all laughed. “Speak for yourself, Colin. My shelves are always neat and tidy,” Lana retorted.

Janet took the largest piece of Belgian bun while Lana was deep in thought.

“Diving,” Lana declared suddenly.

“Lana, you can barely swim.”

“I can swim. And I meant diving with a mask on. Scuba.”

Janet put down the remnants of the bun.

“You can’t do that at your age.”

“I can. Sixty-five. It’s the new fifty, and when I was fifty I was still going to pop concerts with the kids.”

“Yes, Lana,” Janet began, “but jumping around to Take That is a little different from jumping into the sea with a set of iron lungs to keep you going.”

“I’m sure it can’t be that dangerous, Janet. I’ve seen a sign about it at the local pool. I think I’ll pop in on my way home.” Lana stirred her coffee, nodding. “What would you both do, then? There must be something to take you out of your comfort zone.”

“Nothing wet and cold, that’s for sure.” Colin was still hugging his mug.

“I walked here today. I think that was quite a battle in itself.” Janet finished off her piece of bun.

Colin looked up at Lana. “I did a bit of diving once, a long time ago. It was pretty boring when we went through exercises in the swimming pool, but we saw quite a bit when we went into the sea. It was good fun. We even went up to the wrecks at Scapa Flow. That was amazing.” Lana was enthralled. “You’ll have to tell me more.”

“The sea sparkled. It was so clear. It all felt so peaceful. Like you were flying in another world.”

The women sat, captivated, as Colin

began to recount the marine life. The Moray eel, peeking from a porthole. The spider crabs, skittering across the sea bed. And the octopus, pulsing through the water, luminescent.

“It sounds magical.” Lana smiled.

“I don’t think you’ll see that in the bottom of the local baths, though, Lana. You might get a few sticking plasters and a set of dentures if you’re lucky.”

Sharon, one of the swimming teachers at the pool, was enthusiastic.

“No, you’re not too old at all. As long as you pass the health questionnaire you just need to be able to swim reasonably well. Can you tread water?” Sharon handed Lana a clipboard with a form on it.

Lana remembered the swimming sessions at school, when she inflated her pyjamas in the deep end.

“Yes, I’m sure I still can. It’s not something you forget, really.”

She completed the information, quite proud to be able to answer no to the medical questions. It wasn’t that daunting.

The assistant checked the completed form then smiled.

“We run taster sessions on Saturday afternoons if you’re interested. And as you’re a senior member here, you get it at a discount.”

Lana checked her diary and looked determinedly at Sharon.

“Yes, I’m free then.” “Have you got a friend who could do it with you?” Sharon asked. “Diving is all about having a buddy to rely on.”

When the phone rang, Colin banged the back of his head on the airing cupboard shelf. He stepped over the Keep and Throw piles to answer the call.

“Yes, I suppose so. I’m sure I’ll be fine to do it now the doctor has given me the all clear. Half past one? I have to buy some towels first but I’ll be ready. It will be fun.”

Colin sat on the bed and began to fold the linen he planned to keep. He thought about the few diving trips he had gone on back in the Seventies, before life restricted his weekends away.

He thought of Karen and all the things they planned to do in their retirement, and of how few they’d managed to tick off once the time came.

He opened the bedside drawer and took out a notebook that their grandson Liam had given to Karen on her last birthday. On the front, Liam had decorated it, writing To Do in glitter pens and sequins.

Inside, the pages remained blank.

Colin reached for a pen and on the first page he wrote the date. Underneath it, he wrote New guest towels. Beach towel for me.

Below, he drew an octopus.

“Not sure it’s my cup of tea, Lana, but thank you for asking. You can tell me all about it on Monday.”

Janet kept the call short. She was walking Gino, her cockapoo, on the foreshore and the wind made it difficult to hear.

As she stepped over the pieces of old boat rope and plastic cartons, she thought again about their conversation in Crumpet’s.

She rather envied Lana’s ability to get on with things. Lana, who had been on her own for so long now, able to make her decisions and plough her own furrow.

Janet was still thinking about Lana and comfort zones when her husband Geoff came home from work that evening.

“When you eventually decide it’s time to retire, we can get to our own bucket list,” she said rather pointedly as they ate their evening meal. “One day you’ll have to do it, you know. Hand the keys over to someone else.”

“I handed the keys over long ago, love. It’s the spanners that I can’t let go of.”

Geoff ran a commercial workshop, and liked nothing more than to be under the hood of a defective lorry.

Sure, he wasn’t so fond of rewiring the trucks these days; his fingers and his eyes didn’t work the way they used to. But he could still get an engine singing, and it still pleased him.

Janet didn’t want to start an argument but she sighed. How she wished that he would stop feeling indispensable.

How she longed for him to stop the weekend work, so that they could go out for the day, instead of him recovering from a week of hard labour by parking himself in front of the telly.

“I just think that our bucket list has a bit of a hole in it, Geoff. A little hole, with all the time leaking out of it.”

“Don’t get all maudlin, love.” Geoff reached over and stroked her hand. “I’ll cut down one day, I promise. When Steve’s up to the task.”

“When will that be? Steven’s thirty-two, Geoff.”

Steven, their only son, was perfectly capable of running the entire garage, not just the office.

She remembered when he started working with his dad on Saturdays, dreaming of Formula 1. Now he was in the grips of family life, and his only excitement happened when his RNLI pager went off.

“You could always come to the garage with me, you know. I could teach you a thing or two!”

But Janet was thinking about the RNLI. About how they were always asking for help to keep the lifeboats maintained, and how Geoff was always too busy to give up his time.

“Why don’t we close the garage on Saturdays and go and help down at the lifeboat station?” she suggested.

“But Saturdays are my busy day, love. That’s when most of the customers want me to look at their vehicles, while their drivers are at home for the weekend.”

“Perhaps it wouldn’t have to be a Saturday, Geoff. Perhaps you could take a day or two off in the week. You always say Mondays and Tuesdays aren’t so busy. Now I’m not teaching, we could do things.

“And if you must get your spanners out, at least the lifeboat station is by the beach. I could help you, or take the dog out, and bring you a coffee and a bun from Crumpet’s.”

Janet was pleased to see Geoff was nodding his head.

“I won’t say no, love. Let me and Steve take a look at the books. Perhaps it’s something we could start in the New Year? Let’s see how the finances are.”

Janet knew Geoff had a habit of saying these things, promising tomorrow, but now she was going to take control. Even if Geoff had to get his spanners in a row before letting go a little, what was stopping her?

“I’ll give Steven a ring later to see how I go about volunteering. It’ll be something for me to do while you’re busy under a bonnet.”

“Diving is all about having a buddy to rely on”

Lana became a little nervous when she put on the wetsuit. It was only a thin layer of Neoprene; the kind of wetsuit that the children wore for windsurfing on a blustery summer’s day.

As Sharon zipped her into it, Lana felt her breathing become a little constricted and her heart rate went up a few beats. But with a few stretches she soon felt more comfortable.

On the poolside, the diving equipment made it all more real. Six people were having a taster dive, and now that

Colin had joined her she wasn’t even the oldest. Some of the enthusiasm and excitement from a father and son, sharing this experience for the lad’s twelfth birthday, rubbed off on Lana, and by the time Colin waddled on to the poolside she was smiling broadly.

They fitted the masks, giggling at their funny voices and squashed faces. Lana braced herself as the buoyancy jacket and air tank was clipped in place, and as she practised breathing through the regulator it all became very real.

She was pleased that Colin was there to share it with her and he was pleased with how much he had remembered – and how little had really changed – since his days in the Sub Aqua club.

He wasn’t so sure about the fluorescent coloured fins, but as they waddled unsteadily around the poolside he saw the humour in having long bright pink feet.

Someone was waving at Lana from the spectators’ entrance. Without her glasses it was hard to tell who it was, but as the lady came towards her she realised that it was Janet.

“Geoff’s had an emergency repair to do, so I thought I would come down and give you a bit of moral support!”

By the time the divers were ready to enter the water, Janet regretted her reluctance to join them in the pool.

Soon it was time to take the plunge and Colin and Lana were stepping into the shallow end, then kneeling on the bottom. Within a couple of minutes Lana had her first experience of watching the underwater world emerge clearly from behind her facemask.

She quickly adjusted to the strange sensation of breathing through the regulator, and smiled at Colin and the instructor as she confidently made the “OK” sign, feeling like a new, if rather silver-grey, mermaid.

Once they were all comfortable in the shallow end, they swam underwater over to the diving pool.

Lana felt calm in the deeper blue. She looked up and liked how the surface twinkled.

Without her glasses, she could pretend this was Scapa Flow, or perhaps somewhere a little warmer.

She could pretend that the boy and his father were a pair of dolphins playing.

She could pretend that the grittiness at the bottom of the pool was sand, and that the plastic starfish that the instructor threw for her to retrieve was real.

All too soon they were out of the water again and she found herself, together with Colin, hearing all about the full course that the swimming school offered.

“And when the weather gets warmer we run dives from the beach, too,” Sharon explained. “You can do your open water qualifying dives right off our beach!”

Lana said how excited she would be to see the local marine life, but Sharon’s smile dimmed a little.

“Unfortunately we don’t get a great deal of life in the sea round here at the moment, although things are improving each year, now that the water is cleaner than it used to be,” she explained. “Most of our dives give us the opportunity to clear up some of the rubbish on the sea bed.”

Janet came over to join the conversation.

“I notice all sorts of rubbish when I’m out with the dog. You think the council would do more!” she exclaimed.

“It’s expensive, running beach patrols, especially out of season,“Sharon replied. “When I’m out with my kids we take a bin liner and pick up anything that doesn’t belong there.

“You can make a game of it. Challenge yourself not to stop walking until you’ve filled the bag. Some days it takes ages, but often you can fill it rather quickly, I’m sad to say.”

The following Monday, Lana, Janet and Colin were much later than usual getting to Crumpet’s. The three of them had met an hour earlier on the foreshore.

Janet let Gino have his walk and they all set a team challenge of filling a bin liner before they could go for their coffee.

Windblown and rather breathless, they managed to complete the task and proudly the three of them put their filled bags into the rubbish bins.

Lana’s shoulder was a little sore, and she rubbed it a few times as they walked towards the café.

“Is that from Saturday? Was your buoyancy jacket rubbing you a bit?” Colin was a little concerned. He hoped the weight of the tank hadn’t given her second thoughts about doing the full diving course in the spring.

“All in good time,” Lana said mysteriously.

A few minutes later, as Janet came over to their table in the corner, carrying the tray with three cups of coffee and a Belgian bun, Lana unbuttoned her cardigan and revealed the cause of the pain.

On her shoulder was a fresh, small tattoo of a pair of pink fins.

Colin started to laugh and Janet looked at her friend in amazement.

“I think that puts me two challenges ahead of you, Janet!” Lana laughed.

“I think I’d rather eat a crocodile’s unmentionables!” Janet retorted. “But for now, I’ll make do with a third of a Belgian bun, and you can tell us what you’re planning next.” n

Janet regretted her reluctance to join them in the pool