Nautical sleeve with diver and sailing ship

The lift was out again so I carried the shopping up fourteen floors and sat on the landing to get my breath back, looking down over the car park where the gulls fight over the bins. You'd have laughed. You always said the sea would find you wherever you lived, and I thought you were being daft, but the wind comes up off the estuary every evening and it smells of salt and diesel just like the dock did when you took me out on the Juana to watch the boats come in.

Mrs Okafor on the ninth floor has a telescope pointed at the water tower, and she swears she has seen a whale turn over in the sky above the flats. I told her it was a crane. She told me I had no imagination, which I took as a compliment, because it's what you used to say about the picture in the hall, the one with the brass helmet and the fish swimming round the boots. Mum wanted it taken down for church, and you never once agreed.

I found your old logbook in the box under the stairs. The last entry is the day you came up from the bottom of the harbour wall with the bubbles going up past your faceplate, and you wrote only: 'Nothing down there but what we left.' I have been trying to work out what that means for a week.

Tomorrow I am taking a flask of tea down to the lift engineer and a bit of the nerve you had. If he tells me it's beyond repair I will take the stairs anyway, and see who is waiting at the bottom.

Love, Shell