A friend for Mesut Ozil

By Sarah Sasson

‘I lost Mesut Ozil.’

B—my four-year-old son, stood crying at the entrance to the kitchen, his body still; head slightly tilted back. It wasn’t the performative yelp that he made when things weren’t going his way. Instead, he was still, tears fell onto his cheeks. His tone was confessional, the one reserved for when he experienced real pain.

It was May. We’d moved to England from Australia two months prior. Because of the differences in school terms, my son was robbed of his momentous first day of formal education. Instead, on a nondescript Monday, he was slotted into a Reception class a good seven months after his classmates had already begun their primary schooling. The metal hook where he was told to hang his bag was the only one without a nametag.

We’d bought B— a few packets of Match Attax football cards as part of his introduction to England’s national sport, the beautiful game. The small blue envelopes were sold at the supermarket checkout. My husband held up Ozil when the card fell from the wrapping. It had special gold and silver detailing around the border.

‘Mesut Ozil…he’s awesome!’ My husband had declared. Since then, the German attacking midfielder had become my son’s most valuable player.

B— described how at recess he’d joined a group of boys from his class and they had pulled out their wads of football cards. The group’s leader was Alfie, a Premier League obsessive. Alfie had taken my son’s pile of cards while the others huddled around him, and pawed through the players. Following that, my son’s collection had been depleted, Ozil missing.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said as I draped my arm around my child’s shoulders and led him towards bed. ‘We’ll sort it out tomorrow.’

 

The next morning, we waited in the playground.

I put my head next to my son’s. ‘Which one is Alfie?’

‘That’s him,’ B— said, pointing to a stocky boy with rosy cheeks.

He didn’t look like a criminal mastermind, but I couldn’t be sure.

‘Hey Alfie!’ I said as we approached. When we got closer, I knelt down, so I could speak to the boys on their level.

Alfie looked at me quizzically.

‘So yesterday B— brought his football cards in, you know, to trade. But he seems to have lost Mesut Ozil which is his favourite card. He didn’t mean to trade it. So…do you think he could have it back?’

‘I don’t have it,’ Alfie said.

‘Well, B— said you have it.’

‘You do!’ Yelled B—.

‘I mean,’ said Alfie, looking squarely at me. ‘I didn’t bring my football cards to school today.’ The child’s mouth wore a small smile, and his eyebrows moved up a fraction.

‘Ok, well do you think you could bring your cards in tomorrow, so B— can get his card back?’ The tone of my voice changed. ‘You know, seeing as B—’s new to the school, and it’s his favourite and all.’ I heard the pleading quality in my words, the cracks appearing over their veneer.

Stooping on hard ground, I fell through a wormhole. Suddenly, I was five years old again. In my school days, there were a few kids who knew how to use their power, physical or emotional, for personal gain. At the time, it seemed a trait inherent to their personality, but now as an adult, I wondered if it had been something they’d learned at home. I was never a great wielder of power, but occasionally, I was the person against who that force was directed. It took me too many years to find my voice and assert myself.  In the current situation, the asphalt pressed hard into my skin. I felt pathetic and disgusted with myself all over again.

 

My husband had an entirely different approach.

‘Nah, you’ve got to go about it in a different way. Alfie’s likely just…strategic; probably not a bad kid,’ he said, to which I snorted.

My husband used his incisors to tear open three packets of Match Attax that he’d bought on the way home. He spread out the contents and picked out five of the most luminescent and valuable players.

The next morning, B— headed off to school with the new high-value cards and my husband’s plan to exchange them for Mesut Ozil.

In the afternoon, B—  returned triumphant, holding the reclaimed card up to the sky when he met me at the school gates.

 

That evening, my phone screen lit up with a series of notifications.

 

[WhatsApp] Are you following what’s happening in Thailand??

 

The chat was made up of my closest friends from high school and called Heathers after the movie. We were spread across three countries now, in various stages of wrangling careers and children.

The day before, a group of twelve adolescent Thai boys and their 25-year-old assistant coach had ridden their bicycles from a soccer field to the Tham Luong cave system in far North Thailand. The team was called the Wild Boars, and one of the boys, known as Night, was celebrating his sixteenth birthday. While they explored, heavy monsoon rains had broken, flooding the tunnels that led to the larger caverns and blocking the exit routes. It was the head coach who found the backpacks and bicycles lined up outside the mouth of the cave, he alerted the local authorities. Soon, much of the world’s media was covering the story.

On the BBC news, the presenter had to explain the nature of tropical downpours.

‘It’s not like rain we have here,’ the female anchor said. ‘The rain can start suddenly and bucket down for days or even weeks.’

Before we moved to England, I’d looked up the average annual rainfall of the shire where we planned to live and was surprised to find it was only about half of what falls from the sky in Sydney. The Thames Valley rain is mostly a fine drizzle, liquid dust that fell on my coat without penetrating it. The coverage of monsoonal rains on the news made me intensely homesick: for the shape of palm trees being battered in a storm, venturing out into the aftermath to find branches and leaves littering the streets, the smell of ozone.

~

My husband was an intensive care doctor who’d spent time working in an underwater medicine unit. Inside recompression chambers, where the atmospheric pressure was artificially high, he treated people with severe infections, and divers with the bends. He understood, probably better than most, the challenge of getting the boys and assistant coach out of the cave.

‘It’s a disaster,’ he said, reading the front page of the newspaper over breakfast.

‘But they can get them out…right?’ I said.

‘How? That kind of technical diving, using rebreathers…that’s hard even for experienced divers.’

‘Can they drill in from the top?’

He shrugged. ‘They sure as hell can’t leave them in there. The monsoon season goes until November, that’s six months away.’

 

[WhatsApp] I read today the local farmers are lending the rescue team their pumps.

One of the Heathers wrote, followed by three sobbing emojis.

 

Four days after the Wild Boars went missing, two British cave divers traversed the four-kilometre stretch of underwater tunnels and voids and found them on a rock ledge. They laid a guidewire, bolted into rocks along the way, so that others could follow the path in poor visibility. From then on, expert technical divers could reach the players and coach, then return to the cave opening. Food and water were brought in. The team remained stuck inside.

 

[WhatsApp] The parents all wrote a letter to coach Ekk…no one blames him.

More emojis.

~

That Saturday, The Guardian published the rescue plan. The professional team consisting of the Royal Thai Navy Seals and divers from China, Belgium, Scandinavia, the UK, USA and Australia would import diving gear for all the boys and coach Ekk. They would be fitted with wetsuits, masks, flippers, gas tanks and regulators then taught how to free dive in the cave where they were stranded. After they were trained, they would dive out with the more experienced guides.

‘This is crazy,’ my husband said, reading the story as he ate his toast. ‘This isn’t the kind of diving you can learn in a couple of days. It’s not like when you go on holiday and learn in a resort pool. If things go wrong, you can’t just look up and swim back to the surface.’

The way he explained the dive made it sound more like a three-dimensional labyrinth than any simple descent. The pathway out meant diving in muddy water so brown it could barely be seen through. The divers would have to progress through tunnels completely submerged, squeezing through small spaces between rocks. The escape route was not straight up; it moved in all directions. I tried to picture the boys fitted out in their gear, the gas tanks strapped to their backs as they moved towards an opening, through archways, up inclines and down ridges. Their arms out in front, trying to feel their way forward. In my mind, the caves folded in on themselves, like Escher lithographs.

~

‘Yes, Chelsea! Charlie loves Chelsea!’ B— exclaimed as he sorted through a new packet of cards.

He had a new strategy for trading. He only took to school the cards he was willing to trade in the front pocket of his backpack. He had a folder now with plastic sleeves, with small compartments holding his precious foils and his keepers. Mesut Ozil sat snuggly in the top right hand of the first page, wearing his red and white Arsenal kit in the midst of running, focussed intently on the ground in front of him. Safe.

At night, after B— was asleep, my husband flicked through the folder.

‘It’s strange, he’s not collecting just high-value cards…or a particular team…,’ he mused.

‘He trades with the other boys, exchanging the cards he has from their favourite teams,’ I explained. ‘He’s using the cards to make friends.’

~

 

[WhatsApp] The first Wild Boar is out!!!

 

I read the message in the morning in my work tearoom. After lunch, there was another message.

 

[WhatsApp] There’s four boys out now!

[WhatsApp] Did they dive out?

[WhatsApp] Don’t know, they’re taking them to hospital.

 

~

The watching world found out later what really happened: the boys and their coach did not, in fact, dive out. That story was a smoke screen. The rescue team kept re-arriving at the fact that trying to move young, scared, novice divers through such a complex operation would be disastrous. What concerned them most, what they returned to again and again, was the risk of overwhelming anxiety. The type of fear that might cause a child to fight against the rescue, to remove their mask and tank.

To yank and scratch and lash—the dangers of a full-blown underwater panic attack.

In the end, the rescue mission far more resembled a medical procedure than any kind of sport. On the day selected boys were to be retrieved, they were fasted from 6:00 am. They received a tablet of alprazolam, a short-acting benzodiazepine to keep them calm. They also took atropine to dry out secretions from the mouth and nose. Then they received an intramuscular injection of ketamine, a sedating anaesthetic and hypnotic that I’d heard referred to as a horse tranquiliser. Once they were unconscious, they were laid on their backs. Their hands and feet were bound, positive pressure face masks were applied that pushed oxygen into their lungs with minimal effort. The gas tanks were actually attached to their chests. The players and coach were rescued with their consent but without any requirement for their active exertion. They were bound parcels, prepared for ferrying across the Styx.

The first ketamine dose was not enough to last the whole distance. Depending on their height, weight and metabolism, the boys would wake up at varying stages of the return. They would open their eyes and jerk. The rescuers carried top-up doses of ketamine. The needles were pushed through neoprene wetsuits, into the upper outer thighs, down in the mud of the sump. The whole operation was outrageous. It was a solution far from perfect, steeped in pragmatism, but it was the only one available.

~

Richard Harris and Craig Challen were the two Australian divers involved in the Tham Luong rescue. The former was an anaesthetist, the latter a vet. They devised the plan of sedating the team with ketamine and diving them out as inanimate objects.

After the mission was over, I watched their interviews on YouTube. I discovered they had undertaken another cave rescue together seven years earlier, in a place West of Mount Gambier. They went to find a diver called Agnes Milowka, who liked to challenge herself by exploring new systems, to see how far and deep she could go, beyond where any person had ever been before. The two found Agnes in an underwater vault, where she’d squeezed between tight gaps in the surrounding rock. She had tried to get back the way she came and became disorientated, struggling and kicking up dirt. In her efforts to return, she took off her supportive gear and tanks. In the end, she ran out of oxygen.

They found her, but I couldn’t figure out if she was floating or sinking.

It perplexed me that a person so knowledgeable about mixes of gas, navigation, weight, and time had not set a safety catch. There was no buddy waiting at the top. No time threshold after which someone would go in after her.

What boundaries do extreme athletes set between themselves and the natural environment, or are they all limitless?

That story never really hit the lay press. How the first emergency mission Harris and Challen undertook ended, like most cave rescues, with the retrieval of a dead body.

~

‘Tomorrow I want to take my Match Attax folder and all of my cards.’

It’s Sunday, the start of the new week, and I secured my son into his car seat.

‘Do you think that’s a good idea? Remember a few weeks ago some of your favourite cards went missing?’

‘Yeah, but I know who that was now. Alfie admitted to me that he took them.’

I raise my eyebrows, assuming I’d won this argument.

‘Mama,’ he looks at me, locks his gaze with mine and puts his pudgy hand on my forearm, the way he used to do for comfort when he was much younger. ‘Alfie sometimes steals football cards, but he’s still a good friend.’

~

I try to sleep that night, but my mind turns repeatedly to the children in the cave, lying prone with tanks on their chests, sedated as they are moved out through silt-laden water, mud and improbability. I see their viewpoint as the first dose of ketamine wears off, as they slipped into consciousness. As they woke and felt their wrists and ankles tied—did they feel less rescued than captured? Through eyes open only a crack, the cave lit by flashlights, the echoing sound of unfamiliar voices.

Their small, lean bodies cocooned, the humility with which they surrendered their agency, my own son lying in his bed.

They had made it out alive: all twelve boys and the coach.

I think about how part of growing up is learning how and who to trust. Realising our human need for inter-connectedness, that no matter how strong or prepared we feel, we will find ourselves in situations that reveal our vulnerability. How in playgrounds, workspaces and wild places, our survival and well-being depend on others, even if we prefer they didn’t, and our ability to put what of ours that is sacred into their hands.


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