Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 11

Miri.

I typically think it’s easiest to feel warm when a part of us is cold. I lie in bed with my feet uncovered and try to feel this, chase a sensation of something up my leg and lose it. It’s getting on for autumn and Leah has been back nearly two months – thin colourless light in the morning and spiders all over the house. The neighbours play American football on the television at odd hours and Leah runs the taps and I think about my mother more than is usual.

The morning before her funeral, I’d taken six Nurofen together with a spill of cooking brandy and the combination of the two had set off a curious Doppler effect whereby sensations seemed to strike me out of order: the smell of food before I tasted it, the feeling of my glass in my hand long after the realisation that I’d dropped it. The reception was held at my aunt’s, as my mother’s house was too far out to be practical, not to mention in partial disrepair. I remember very little of the event, though I know that at one point Leah took me outside onto the back porch and told me we ought to stay there a while. I’m sorry, I remember saying, although in response to what I’m not sure, sometimes I just say these things. I don’t really know why. I remember standing where I was and the light hitting me in pieces, first my face and then the back of my hands, my chest, the underside of my jaw. I remember the cold, and looking down into my aunt’s garden and then across a banked slate wall into the garden beyond, where a man was burning waste with a can of kerosene held at shoulder height. I remember staring down into the smoke, an odd, druidic thing, flames stark in the white afternoon. The man had piled leaves and cardboard boxes, barrels rotted out and green with mildew – a thick-bodied bulk of a bonfire, tapering up into a spindle which smoked and spat out ash. It had been easy to imagine, though I knew it wasn’t wise, a human form at the centre of this conflagration.

Quite easy to imagine the corporeal something taking shape amongst the ashes – barrels blurring into rounded shoulders, the toothless brooms and buckets shucking off their clarity and reforming as the possibilities of necks and heads and melting human faces. I want to go inside now, I remember

saying to Leah but she shook her head and said we could go around the front of the house and stand there for a while, if the bonfire smell was bothering me.

+

Having fitted the new phone, I have no choice but to use it. I programme the Centre into the handset’s automated dial function, so that now I only have to key in a single digit to kick-start the day. In the mornings, I slice thin-skinned Meyer lemons into water and pretend a breakfast for Leah from only this, place the glass on a tray and hope the offering doesn’t come across as sarcastic. Cold water with lemon is one of the only things I have found she will reliably drink, though occasionally I have caught her spooning table salt into the mixture and have taken the glass away. When she eats anything at all, she eats salted things, which makes me worry, appears to crave olives and anchovies, licks the blood that seeps from her gums in the early mornings. Some days, I imagine her lunatic on salt water, vainly try to slip oranges into her diet, crush raspberries with the flat of a knife and imagine sneaking them into her toothpaste. When I was a child, my mother taught me about scurvy and ever since I have pictured it leering out at me with the prevalence of the common cold. I picture Leah’s symptoms, convince myself that her bleedings and sheddings might all be put down to a simple lack of vitamin C. Early symptoms, I read from my phone screen, hidden under the covers like a teenager texting a crush, include weakness and tiredness, sore hands, arms and legs. Without treatment, decreased red blood cells, gum disease, changes to hair and bleeding from the skin may occur. I look at Leah and try to imagine the conversation: me leaning across the table to tell her, Darling, I think you have scurvy, and Leah nodding her head, looking up and saying, Yes I think I do, thank goodness you pointed it out.

I am falling behind on my work, find it difficult to sit without sweating, without standing up again, convinced there is something on my chair.

Overtired, sweat crescents yellowing the underarms of shirts. My inbox is scrambled over with inquiries, clients scuttling to express their displeasure as fast as they can recognise a crisis. Please send reassurance that you have started work on the grant proposal, one client has started messaging upwards of three times a day. I eat canned ravioli and try to remember what

it meant to be concerned about an unpleasant tone in an email. Somewhere in the flat, Leah is running the taps again.

We have a fight about this, several mornings later; Leah sitting at the kitchen table and looking at the toast I’ve set before her, at the orange I’ve placed beside it, at the kiwi fruit and raspberry jam.

“No, I don’t want this,” she says, and so I tell her I don’t want to pay my half of the water bill this month, and we go on from there. She behaves like a houseguest, I tell her, like a person who’s blown into my home and sat down like she belongs. She says she doesn’t know what to say to me. Say anything, I want to scream, say I knew what I signed up for when you went away, say you told me the deal, that you gave me all the information. Say it was my choice, to be OK with it, that it’s not your fault you went away for so long. Say it was my choice to move into the spare room. Say it’s my choice to come into the bathroom every morning when I know what it is that I’ll find.

“I don’t think,” I say instead, “that you’re eating the right things.”

“Is that it,” she says to me, then abruptly takes up the orange and throws it against the wall. It hits the brickwork with the wet cottony sound of an internal organ. I watch the orange roll across the floor and think about laughing, picture some soft internal part of Leah skittling over the kitchen tiles and vanishing beneath the fridge.

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Leah worked at the aquarium as a teenager. It was the sort of dirty- glamorous history I loved about her, an image I wanted to roll around in – my Leah with her shag-cut hair at seventeen, feeding dolphins in a wetsuit cut off at the knees. I never knew her at this age, of course, though I’ve seen pictures. She showed me a sleeve of them once, early on, passing a hand over her face when I laughed at her dyed black hair, her nose ring and her over-tweezed eyebrows. I was just trying something, she said, my mum hated the hair dye so I did it even though it looked terrible, you know. In one photograph, a teenaged Leah crouches by a tall cylindrical tank containing what she identified to me as a giant Pacific octopus named Pamela. We were pals, she said, in a voice that I thought seemed to strive for offhandedness, did you know they taste with their skin? Octopuses, I mean. In the old days, I used to enjoy this, Leah’s seemingly never-ending

list of useless facts, acquired from a teenagerhood spent changing the water in clownfish tanks and encouraging children to handle spiny creatures in the touch pools. She told me a story once that I often thought about afterwards, replayed for myself like a favourite movie. Leah, aged eighteen: letting a girlfriend into the aquarium one night after hours, sharing vodka shaken up with supermarket lemonade and kissing on the floor beside the Open Ocean tank in view of reeling schools of yellowfin tuna, of sardines and moon jellies and stingrays, of copper rockfish and hammerhead sharks. She had, so the story went, stuck intrepid hands down the girl’s bootcut jeans and afterwards taken her into the octopus room to meet Pamela, though on doing so she had found the creature had died in her tank sometime in the late afternoon.

When I returned to this story later, I would superimpose an eighteen- year-old me over the top of the girlfriend, scribbling her out and sketching my lines in more permanent ink. In this edited version, we would kiss – eighteen-year-old Leah and me – and then afterwards she’d take me to the octopus room, rap her fingertips on the glass cylinder, and Pamela wouldn’t be dead. She would rise up out of some corner and shiver towards us, pulsing flex of a parasol opening and closing, the mantle and suckers and the head like something primed to burst. She would feel her way across the side of the tank and in this scene (or dream, or version) I would know, because of my astonishing ability to know such things, that she had intended to meet me, that for any other girlfriend she would have died but that for me she had waited. I would splay my hand against the glass and imagine I felt the great gelatinous give of her body, the folds and spongy inner membranes, the secret place where her three hearts beat out blueish copper blood. All quite fantastical, of course. By the time I was eighteen, Pamela was dead and I had yet to kiss a girl.

I got so depressed when she died, Leah told me once. It wasn’t really my job to look after her, you know, I was just a volunteer, but sometimes when the senior staff were feeding her they’d let me touch her. They’d open the top of the tank and she’d sort of boil up towards you, all these arms wrapping up around yours, all these suckers, and then she’d just sort of hold you there, look at you. She didn’t try to pull me into the water, exactly, but it could be difficult to get her to detach until she was ready. She’d hold me there, my chest up against the edge of the tank, sort of bent over and

staring down at her. And then she’d let me go. They said she liked me – I don’t know if that was true, but it was nice.

Leah had long been a martyr to gifts that centred octopuses in some fashion. The same way that anyone who makes the mistake of committing to an animal will receive chicken or elephant or dolphin-themed gifts every birthday and Christmas for the rest of their lives, so Leah was constantly writing notes to thank people for octopus jewellery and octopus trinket dishes and cake forks with octopus handles that were semi-impossible to hold. I had, for the most part, made a point of avoiding this trope, except once, on Leah’s thirtieth birthday, when I gave her a sleeve of promotional postcards from the aquarium at which she’d once worked. It was something I’d found quite by chance, on an eBay listing, a book of branded cards, at least fifteen years old, each labelled “The Stars of Our Show” and showing images ranging from the aquarium’s single giant sea turtle to the otter tank and the dolphins and the penguin exhibit. The last card but one showed a tangerine-coloured octopus, its left eye swivelled towards the camera, its tentacles thrown up above its head as though tumbling downwards through air, rather than water. The printed label at the bottom left-hand corner of the card read: Pamela – Giant Pacific Octopus – estimated age between 3 and 4 years old. I had given the cards to Leah and she had cried about them and kissed me, and I’m really only telling this story now because it makes me look good, and because Leah always took the postcard of Pamela with her on work trips after that.

When we met, Leah was working in research and conservation for a facility that specialised in the protection of coastal and deep-sea ecosystems. This was before the Centre – long before it even existed, in fact, which often surprises people. I think it has something to do with the name, the Centre for Marine Enquiry, a blandness that implies longevity, a patrician sense of having always been there, of being a long-established institution, which of course it is not. As it was, Leah didn’t move to the Centre until many years after we met, having worked the full span of her twenties for the same small operation. On an early date, she poured olive oil, dipped bread, told me a story about a company she’d once hoped to work for which specialised in applying the physical adaptations of underwater species to industrial innovation. They had engineered a new type of door handle that mimicked the structure of shark skin and made it more difficult for germs and viruses to attach. Shark skin is basically made

up of millions of tiny teeth, she said, pouring wine, talking with her mouth full. They’re called “dermal denticles”, isn’t that great? Practically speaking, a shark’s skin is almost as likely to do you damage as its mouth is.

It didn’t really end up being my area – I’m more straight biology – but I still love the idea of finding a way to harness odd little things like that to do some kind of service. We ate Russian beef stew with dill and talked the way people do on early dates, extravagantly confessional, every statement an attempt at some self-defining truth: I’m the type of person who cries at movies, I’m the type of person who works better alone. After the restaurant, we drank Dark and Stormys at a bar unfamiliar to either of us, talked about favourite meals and favourite places. The night was wet, air close and flannel-damp, reports of ball lightning hitting the power lines some half a mile from my home. I’m a Catholic, I said at one point, so I believe in punishment but not reward. When we kissed – first kiss, wet-palmed, tongues stickled with ginger – I thought about shark skin and pushed my hand into the space where Leah’s shirt had pulled free from her waistband.

The next morning, I woke too early, my bedroom window filled with sharp segments of light.

+

I’m not sure what the sound is at first, and then I am sure, and then it is Leah screaming. It is a Wednesday, or possibly a Thursday, and I am not awake except in the parts of me required to jackknife out of bed. The scream seems wrong at first, garbled up into something other. It takes me several moments to recognise this interference as Leah’s sound machine – her screams half drowned by the swelling, the oozing, the sinking noise, like a mouth forced open and leaking something thick. It’s dark, and I can’t find the light switch, and the noise is louder in the corridor, louder still towards the barrier of Leah’s bedroom door. I reflect, in some faraway part of myself, that every horror movie begins like this: no lights and a voice in the darkness, feet tangled in bedclothes, a knocking hand left aloft as the door swings back. I push the door, take in the room that used to belong to both of us. Leah is there, and the bed is soaking, and it takes me longer than it should do, even in darkness, to realise the water is coming from her. As I stand in the doorway, she screams and keeps on screaming, apparently unaware of my presence, and the sound is only interrupted when her body

contorts, convulses, and she vomits a shower of water across the bed. I’m not sure what happens after this, only that the screaming proves to have been almost entirely unconscious, as when I shake her awake it stops and she stares at me, mouth swollen with salt, and she doesn’t seem to know me at all.

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