Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

Two things happened on the last day. One was that, under pressure from Will, I
agreed to try scuba diving. He had been on at me for days, stating that I couldn’t
possibly come all this way and not go under the water. I had been hopeless at
windsurfing, barely able to lift my sail from the waves, and had spent most of
my attempts at water-skiing faceplanting my way along the bay. But he was
insistent and, the day before, he arrived back at lunch announcing that he had
booked me in for a half-day beginners’ diving course.
It didn’t get off to a good start. Will and Nathan sat on the side of the pool as
my instructor tried to get me to believe I would continue to breathe underwater,
but the knowledge that they were watching me made me hopeless. I’m not stupid
– I understood that the oxygen tanks on my back would keep my lungs working,
that I was not about to drown – but every time my head went under, I panicked
and burst through the surface. It was as if my body refused to believe that it
could still breathe underneath several thousand gallons of Mauritius’s finest
chlorinated.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I said, as I emerged for the seventh time,
spluttering.
James, my diving instructor, glanced behind me at Will and Nathan.
‘I can’t,’ I said, crossly. ‘It’s just not me.’
James turned his back on the two men, tapped me on the shoulder and
gestured towards the open water. ‘Some people actually find it easier out there,’
he said quietly.
‘In the sea?’
‘Some people are better thrown in at the deep end. Come on. Let’s go out on
the boat.’
Three-quarters of an hour later, I was gazing underwater at the brightly
coloured landscape that had been hidden from view, forgetting to be afraid that
my oxygen might fail, that against all evidence I would sink to the bottom and
die a watery death, even that I was afraid at all. I was distracted by the secrets of
a new world. In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated oosh shoo of my
own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black and white
fish that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces, with gently swaying
anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant
landscapes, twice as brightly coloured and varied as they were above land. I saw