The low-air signal

Underwater there is no conversation. There is a vocabulary, and it is small.

There are about twenty-five hand signs in total, and on a basic course you use twelve. Twelve gestures for everything. For how much air is left, for I have a problem, for stay with me, for go up now.

I did the course at forty-four, afraid of water. Not afraid of drowning: afraid of not being able to breathe when I wanted to, which is another matter entirely and is worse.

It was six sessions in a five-metre dive well, in the evenings, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Thumbs up.

The first thing you learn and the first thing everybody gets wrong. Thumbs up does not mean everything is fine. It means go up, now, we are finished.

Anybody who gives that sign meaning "all good" interrupts the whole class. I did it in the first session and Durval had me on the surface before I understood why, and only at the side did he explain, without laughing, that the sign for fine is a different one.

The real lesson is that down there words have no margin. You cannot explain yourself afterwards.

Thumb and forefinger in a circle.

That is fine, and it is question and answer at once. The instructor gives it, you give it back, and that happens every two minutes for an hour.

By the second session I was answering without thinking. By the third I noticed I was looking at his hand before he raised it.

In course terms there is nothing to say about that. In any other terms, there is.

Two fingers to the eyes, then point.

Look there. It is the directed-attention sign, and it is the only one that orders you to take your eyes off the person speaking.

In a five-metre well there is nothing to look at. Tiles, the ladder, the grating over the bottom drain, and a submerged wall clock the club fitted in the nineties that still works.

So in his sessions that sign became a technical joke: he would point at the clock when I was burning air too fast, to tell me I was in a hurry about something that was not in a hurry.

About the kit, which is where the part no brochure explains lives.

Before every entry there is a buddy check. It is compulsory and it is done on the other person, not on yourself. You check your partner's jacket by pulling the buckles, the valve by turning the cylinder wheel, the inflator by tugging the hose, and the weight belt with your hand inside, to see that it is right-hand release and comes free first time.

That is four points. The weight belt one sits at the waist, at the side, and you have to put your hand between the jacket and the person's body to reach it.

Six sessions, two checks a session, each in alternating directions. Twenty-four times.

Through five millimetres of neoprene you do not feel temperature. You feel pressure. A hand on neoprene is information with no warmth in it at all, and it is no less information for that.

Flat hand, palm down, rocking.

Something is wrong. It is a deliberately generic sign, because underwater you cannot be specific.

I gave it in the fourth session, at four metres, during mask removal and replacement.

That exercise is the one that fails most people on a basic course. You take the mask off, stay twenty seconds without it, eyes open in the water and your nose exposed, breathing through your mouth only, and then put it back and clear it by blowing through your nose.

It is simple and it is against everything the body believes. I panicked on the first attempt and gave the sign.

What he did is protocol, and I read the manual afterwards to check that it had been protocol: he held the front of my jacket with his left hand, put his forehead against my forehead, and gave the slow-your-breathing sign with his right hand between the two of us.

Forehead to forehead is in the manual. It says "firm, stable contact". I went and looked.

We stayed like that for a length of time I cannot measure, and in that time the only thing that existed in the world was the sound of my own air leaving the regulator.

On the second attempt I did the whole exercise.

Closed fist at chest height.

Low on air. It means the gauge has reached fifty bar and the dive is over, regardless of anything else.

It is the most honest sign in the vocabulary because there is no appeal against it. Nobody argues about reserve. The gauge says so, you give the sign, both of you go up.

In the sixth session, which was the last, I gave the low-air sign at fifty-two minutes, with my air at eighty bar.

Eighty is not reserve. Eighty is another ten minutes in a five-metre well.

He looked at my gauge, as procedure requires when somebody signals low air, and saw eighty.

And went up with me.

The club changing room at twenty to eleven on a Tuesday has the light from one corridor and nothing else, because the club turns the rest off at half ten.

Getting out of wet neoprene cannot be done with any elegance. Getting somebody else out of theirs takes less.

The bench is slatted wood and bolted to the floor, and it is where my mask stayed until I remembered it the following Thursday.

I finished the course. I have the card, I did four open-water dives afterwards and I do not dive any more, because I found out I like wells and do not like the sea.

Durval still teaches at the same club, Tuesdays and Thursdays, in groups of six.

The first thing said when a head comes out of the water is always technical, because that is what is loaded and ready.

That night he took his regulator out and said "eighty bar", looking at me, and waited.

I took mine out and asked when the next course started.