LIR

Her knife. Dropped on the steamer in August. Found in the kelp.

I put an edge on it.

A cockle shell, tied to the hilt with her own blue line. Inside it, scratched with the point, the only kind of words she believes, the kind she can hold:

YOURS. AGAIN.

Nothing in this water touches her unless I let it.

KERENSA

The sea has given my knife back again, sharper than I lost it, which is just showing off.

It's on the bottom rung of the dive ladder at first light, hilt up. Tied round the hilt is a cockle shell on a length of blue polyprop. My blue. Nobody else on this coast buys that blue.

Scratched inside the shell, in small neat capitals:

YOURS. AGAIN.

The back of my neck goes cold under my hat.

I have the morning's slack water on the steamer before the weather comes in, a bronze condenser to cut loose, and a bank that wants fourteen thousand pounds by the end of the month or it wants Morwenna. I do not have time to be haunted.

The knife was my dad's. I dropped it in August, deep, in a gully of kelp you couldn't find a car in. Somebody found it. Somebody put an edge on it that would shave a cat.

"Piskies," says Jago, when I show him.

Jago has tended divers off this boat since before I was born, first my dad and now me.

"I'm a grown woman, Jago. I've got a mortgage on a compressor. It's not piskies."

"Your dad always said there was something down there with better manners than us."

"My dad said a lot of things after two pints."

"He did," Jago agrees, and goes to start the compressor.

The gull who lives on my wheelhouse roof and robs me of a pasty a day is on the slipway rail this morning, as far from the boat as it can get while still glaring at me.

I file that under nothing. I don't believe in anything I can't weld.

Thirty metres down, the Manacles are green and very quiet. I'm on surface supply, a hat and a hose and Jago's voice in my ear, and I burn through bronze bolts in a roar of white light and bubbles.

In two years on this reef my lines have never fouled. Every diver who works the Manacles has a story about a hose round a boiler. I'm the only one who doesn't.

My father's line fouled here fourteen years ago, with me on the other end of it.

I swing round the boiler for the next bolt, and my umbilical goes tight.

Not snagged. Wrapped, dragged hard across my back. I can't go forward. I can't go back. The air in my hat is still coming, and every diver knows exactly how long still lasts.

Something takes hold of my hose behind me. Two hands, working, patient, the way you'd untangle a necklace. Then a voice, low and very clear, right up against the back of my helmet.

"Don't turn round."

A palm settles flat between my shoulder blades and holds me there. Thirty metres down. No boat but mine. Nobody else in the water.

"Who the hell—"

"You've taken two turns round the shaft. Hold still."

"I am holding still. I'm a professional."

"You're a professional who went round the boiler the wrong way."

"Ker?" Jago, crackling in my other ear. "Who you talking to?"

"The wreck," I tell him. "It's being rude."

The second turn comes off. The hose goes slack, the palm lifts away, and I breathe out so hard my faceplate fogs.

"You're free," the voice says.

"Then go away."

"You haven't said thank you."

"I don't thank things I can't see."

A sound comes through the copper. It might be the wreck settling. It might be a man laughing, under all that sea.

"Turn round, then," he says.

I turn round. My lamp finds silt, and kelp, and a long shadow going away into the green, much too big and much too fast.

I send the condenser up on a lift bag and follow it slowly, doing every stop, and the whole way up I can feel that palm between my shoulders.

By afternoon the sky to the south has gone the colour of old lead. The forecast says gale eight by midnight, easterly: the one wind this cove has no answer to.

"We'll take her round to the harbour," Jago says.

"You take the punt in. I'm stopping aboard."

"In an easterly. On that mooring."

"If the mooring goes, I want to be on her."

"That's not a plan, Ker. That's a headstone with a view."

He looks at the ladder. He looks at me. He's been on this coast too long not to know what I'm doing, even if I don't.

"Your dad was the same," he says. "Stubborn as a seized shackle."

He takes the punt in before dark. The gull meets him on the slip with its usual air of being owed money.

Then I do the stupid thing. I take a dive slate from the wheelhouse, write on it in capitals as neat as his, and hang it on the bottom rung, half in the water and half out.

SHOW-OFF.

Then I go below and read my email, because it's that or think. There's one from a dredging firm I've been not answering for a week: a seabed survey in the next cove along. They're offering, to the pound, what the bank wants.

Nobody on this coast likes dredging firms. I leave it unanswered, and I eat my pasty, and for once there's nobody to steal it.

Past midnight, the mooring goes.

I feel it before I hear it: the boat stops pulling against something and starts simply moving.

The chain end bangs the hull, the wind takes her bow round, and Morwenna is loose in the dark with the rocks of the point close downwind.

The engine catches second go. She drives forward for a moment before the pick-up rope wraps her prop with a thump I feel in my teeth, and dies.

Torch. Drysuit. Knife. I'm zipped to the chest and pulling on a fin when Morwenna stops.

Not slows. Stops, in a gale, and swings her bow up into the wind as if someone has her by the collar.

I crawl out onto the foredeck with the torch in my teeth. The bow line is over the side, bar-tight, running down into black water. Somewhere ahead, something is towing my boat into the wind.

"That's my boat," I shout at it, which is the stupidest thing I've ever shouted at a gale. "Do you hear me? That's my boat."

It takes us round the point into the lee, where the sea drops from roaring to grumbling in the length of the hull.

The line goes round iron with a clank, an old ring in the rock from the pilchard days. Two knocks under my stern. Then my ruined pick-up rope comes over the rail in one neat coil.

I go to the ladder.

He's at the foot of it, in the water to his chest, one hand on the bottom rung beside my slate.

Long dark hair, wet to his shoulders, tied back with a twist of blue polyprop. My blue. A face you'd look at twice in a pub and then wish you hadn't, because he'd already noticed. Bare shoulders in a gale. Not shivering.

His eyes catch the torch and throw it back green.

He picks up my slate and tips it to the light. "Show-off," he reads.

"It's addressed to you."

"I gathered." He turns it over, as if there might be more on the back. "Nobody's written to me before."

That shouldn't get under my ribs. It does.

"You towed my boat."

"You said it was yours. Twice. I thought you'd want it back." Something near his mouth considers smiling, and decides against it. "And you were going in after the prop."

"I'm a diver. Going in is the job."

"Not in the dark. Not in an easterly. Not on your own."

"I wasn't on my own." I put the torch full on him. "Apparently."

He turns his face out of the beam, and doesn't argue.

Then he lifts his hand off the rung and makes a circle of thumb and finger. The diver's OK. When one diver makes it, it's a question. When the other makes it back, it's the answer.

I make it back. Then I go down two rungs, into the sea to my knees, and take hold of his wrist.

He's cold. Not chilled: cold all the way through, the cold of the bottom. Under my thumb there's a pulse, slow, one beat to every three of mine. As I hold it, it picks up.

He doesn't move. Not his hand, not his face. The muscles in his forearm stand out like a cable an inch from parting, and I know cables. I know what it costs to hold one there.

"How long?" I say. "My lines."

"Two years. Since the first morning you came back to the Manacles." He says it to my hand, not to me. "You sat on the gunwale in that hat for an hour before you went in. You didn't eat your pasty."

My face goes hot in a force eight.

"That's the most frightening thing anyone's ever said to me," I tell him, "and I've had the bends."

"You should go in. Get warm. You've been shaking since the mooring went."

"I'm not shaking, I'm furious. It looks the same in a drysuit." I don't let go. "Come up. Out of the water."

"I can't."

"Can't or won't?"

"Can't. Not tonight."

"How old are you?"

He thinks about it. "Older than your lighthouse."

"That's not a number."

"It's the one you're getting."

"Then give me a name."

"Lir."

"Just Lir?"

"Nobody's ever needed the rest." He looks up at me. "Kerensa."

No one uses the whole of it. Jago calls me Ker, the bank calls me Ms Pengelly. He says the whole thing like he's been saving it.

"What are you doing out here, Lir? Really."

"Holding your boat."

"Before that. Two years of before that."

He looks at my hand on his wrist for a long moment. "Waiting for you to write."

"I wrote show-off."

"I know." The green in his eyes goes darker. "I'm keeping it."

Then, very low: "Two years I've had your line in my hands. Never this."

My thumb moves on the inside of his wrist, once, because I want it to. His eyes close. I watch him hold still through it, a man taking a load he wasn't built for and not letting it show anywhere but his jaw.

Then he takes his wrist back, gently, the way you'd take a line off a cleat. "The ring's held boats for two hundred years. It'll hold yours till morning."

"Will you be on the steamer tomorrow?"

"Every time your line catches, I'm the one who frees it."

"And if it doesn't catch?"

He pushes off the ladder backwards. My torch follows him down.

And under the black water, where his legs should be, the light catches something long and heavy and bronze-green that folds once, the whole length of a man, and drives him under faster than anything with knees has ever moved.

I don't say it. Not even in my head. I put it where I've put the knife and the shell and the voice and the gull, and I shut the drawer.

The handheld clipped to my suit crackles. "Morwenna, Morwenna, Jago. You all right, maid?"

"Mooring went," I tell it. "I'm on the old ring under the point."

A long pause. "How'd you get her there?"

"Towed."

"Who by?"

"Piskie," I say, and switch him off.

The ladder rocks. The bottom rung is bare. He's taken my slate down with him, wherever down is.

I sit on the top rung with the gale going over high above me and the sea gone flat and black below, and I work it through the way I'd work a lift plan.

He frees my lines when they catch. They don't catch any more; he's seen to that.

He brings back what I drop. Three times this year my father's knife has come up this ladder, sharper than it went down.

For fourteen years I've made sure nothing I love goes into the water without a line on it.

I unclip the knife from my belt. It's the last thing I have that he touched every day.

Then I hold it out over the black water, and I open my hand.