The sound of my own mechanical breath filled my ears. Weighted down by the lead bars in my vest, I fought the instinct to control my surroundings. All I could master was myself. I forced my legs and arms to relax, let them adjust to the buoyancy my gear provided and gave myself up to the ocean’s currents. My heart rate slowed. I felt myself drop down with it, entering that strange liminal space where the self is forced to turn inwards. The closest thing I’ve ever found to it on land is meditation. In those moments, as in this one, I became an empty vessel. I was breath and tissue, heart and lungs, a cork bobbing on the tide, tethered nowhere, to nothing, my identity as ephemeral as a worn label on an old bottle. I could have floated away and washed up on a strange beach, reinventing myself as someone new. I shut my eyes, resisting the temptation to try. I’d remade myself once; I could do it again. Something touched my shoulder – a hand, soft as an octopus tentacle or a fragment of leafy kelp. I closed my eyes and sucked in a breath around the regulator mouthpiece, salt water stinging my lips and tongue. When I opened my eyes Nico was peering at me through his glass mask.

He tapped his forehead.

You feeling okay?

Yes, I signalled. It was strange, the loss of verbal language, the shift into kinetic motion. The only way to understand each other now was to use our hands and eyes.

Come on, he gestured.

Nearby, through dense floating particles, I could see Bram and the rest of the Texel team. Emerens’ boys had swum further out, sleek, black shapes floating in the semi-dark. They circled back slowly towards us, Emerens at the head of the group gripping his torch – a flashy, sleek design lighter than the ones Bram had distributed to us before we descended. He tapped the GPS on his dive computer, pointed down. The seabed was still a good ten metres below us. He wanted us to sink lower. I felt the pull of gravity in my stomach and pelvis as bubbles rushed past, twisted shapes fizzing away from me, zooming up towards the light. The bottom of the ocean was an alien landscape. Seen from above, it had a shape and texture I could understand, but as we approached it, the shifting currents and murky shadows cast by the boats overhead tinged it green and it became a mirage. Even when we reached the bottom and I ran my fingers through the gritty sediment, it was hard to believe it was really there. I could have sworn the sea was nebulous, a hidden creature, camouflaged, concealing its true self.