Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 13

Miri.

Leah and my mother never met for a number of reasons, most conveniently because by the time Leah and I were serious enough for the issue to arise, my mother was already quite ill. Leah was good about this, for the most part; rarely asked and didn’t seem to take offence. When I visited my mother at her house, before I moved her, I often came away afraid of insane things, spent days afterwards terrified of the ceilings falling, of being bitten, of something crawling up my leg – and Leah was patient with this the way I ultimately came to see as central to the whole of her. In the nights directly following my visits, I would fall asleep in often unexplainable panic and Leah would soothe me, tell me she had me, press her hands into the small of my back. She discovered it was easy to calm me down by repeating words whose shapes I found appealing, muttered redolent and pelt and chicanery until I fell asleep.

On occasion, and typically out of nowhere, I would wonder whether this level of patience would hold out, should a test ever prove I was likely to develop the same condition as my mother. On occasion, I would look in the mirror and consider the briskly diminishing fact of myself, hold my hands to the sides of my face as if preventing collapse. Would you look after me, I found myself wanting to ask and unable to do so, the request tangling back on itself, coming out as would you pass the gravy, would you change the channel, would you look at this. For a long time, it failed to occur to me that I was not, in fact, the only person this could happen to. I would look into the mirror and imagine that only I could be in any sense finite.

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I don’t realise until well after the fact that I haven’t been expecting to get through to anyone actually able to help me. The phone calls to the Centre have simply established themselves as routine, akin to hair-brushing, to running my finger across my teeth and calling them clean. The morning it works, I am already planning the rest of my day: idle pile-up of tea and spoons and gummy vitamins, unread emails and post left unopened and

linens changed, salt hidden, residue scrubbed from the sides of the bath. At the table: two plates, the crusts of bread rolls with their insides picked out, a pitcher of day-old water growing a skin. We haven’t spoken about the previous night, though the bed in which Leah sleeps has dried and her behaviour seems largely unaffected. I have googled and found the results mostly unhelpful: reasons for vomiting clear liquid – do you have acute gastroenteritis? Have you drunk too much water? Have you been making yourself sick?

Leah is locked in the bathroom, humming something that might be a song I recognise but almost certainly isn’t. I am listening to the sound of the taps, to the sound of her humming, and thinking for whatever reason of the clutter of my mother’s bathroom shelves: the cold cream and Jungle Formula and the Blue Grass perfume that she always kept in its box with the turquoise and cream Celtic lettering. The space around us is a claw half grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish it these days, that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.

I am staring out of the window when the hold music cuts in mid-chorus and a voice comes online, asking me in businesslike fashion how it is they can help me today. Automatically, I start to recite the numbers – rank number, transfer number, and so on, and so on – but the voice interrupts to assure me they already have all the details they need.

“I’m sorry if it’s been a bit of a process,” the voice adds, in a tone that could convey almost any emotion, “getting in touch with us.”

The upstairs neighbours are playing a soap opera on the television, a woman screaming in a voice that tries and fails to convince that this isn’t what she’d wanted at all.

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I remember a time that Leah went away. Not the time, but a point long before she was working for the Centre, a point at which expeditions were still infrequent – brief dives off the coast of Scotland, weeks abroad on fishing trawlers, research trips to places I could find on a map. The way I remember it is this: late September, washed-down dregs of a liquid summer.

The seasons always change more swiftly on the water, the light on the sea autumnal long before the chill has reached the city, and I was far from the city that day, having travelled miles to see Leah off. The afternoon they left,

I watched from the viewing deck along with three or four of the other wives, one of whom complained of being cold until a staffer from the rig offered her a life jacket in a bid to shut her up. Colder on the water, she said, over and over again, should have thought of that, should have brought something warmer.

I remember the slip of the craft across the water, long metal nose and sculpted conning tower, the way it seemed to dip and slink, eel-like, white lights along its spine and finial. I watched it float, not bobbing, seeming less to sit upon the water than to hang within it, half submerged and threatening to sink. I remember turning to the woman on my right and saying I wasn’t sure a ship like that could possibly withstand the ocean’s weight on top of it, that the crew would all be crushed, that we ought to speak to someone.

This woman, I forget whose wife she was, only smiled at me, took my hand and said that first timers always felt like this. You expect them to come back looking like Flat Stanley, she said, and I told her I wasn’t a first-timer and asked her who Flat Stanley was and she asked if I’d really never read those books and in the ensuing conversation I moved my eyes away from the water long enough to miss the ship going down. By the time I looked back there was nothing – bob of gulls upon an undisturbed surface, gentle sense of something pooling in my wrists as if my heart had momentarily stopped.

Now the thing is, from everything I know and everything I have otherwise experienced, it seems unlikely that the ship could have gone down that quickly, and certainly not with such minimal disturbance on the top. But even so, this is what I remember, and short of getting in contact with the other wives on board the viewing deck that day, none of whose names I even recall, there is no way of checking this scenario for accuracy.

What I remember, then, becomes what happened: Leah leaving like the summer from the ocean, not by degrees but all at once.

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The last time she went away was different – for one thing, I wasn’t there.

After the Centre threw their going-away party I went home and Leah didn’t and that night I dreamed auroral colours and woke at three to a white rubbernecking moon at the window, which I chose not to find unsettling.

Three weeks is not a long time. One can wait three weeks for a parcel and think very little of it. For a while, I tightroped a careful normality,

considered calling friends and asking them to entertain me, did my work and listened to the neighbours’ television and broadly speaking didn’t think of much at all.

When three weeks had passed and Leah did not return, the Centre called to tell me there had been a delay. How exactly can a submarine be delayed, I asked – imagined underwater toll roads, found myself on the precipice of a laugh. It was nothing, so they said, to be concerned about. Provisionally, the vessel was stocked for several months, the oxygen would continue to replenish. But it won’t be several months, will it? The voice on the end of the line assured me it would not.

I went to the movies alone on a Tuesday lunchtime, lined my wallet with contraband sweets which I ate in the dark; unscrewed each from its polythene wrap with a noise that would have been thrillingly antisocial had there been anyone there to annoy. Afterwards, I moved through the city the way one might in bad weather, though the day was clear and my head bent down against nothing. There was, as of course I now know, something terribly wrong already, but I question how much I really understood then, what significance I can attach to a bad day, to an upset stomach. In general, I was unsure of how to behave. The Centre called again to tell me there was nothing to worry about and I tried to ask questions but found it difficult to argue with the brightness of the voice on the line. OK thank you, I remember I said, somehow unable to summon the bad manners required to protest against such meaningless reassurance, I really am grateful you called. I was, I remember, anxious not to offend the person whose updates were broadly unhelpful but who might, I imagined, quite easily stop calling if I said the wrong thing.

At the two-month mark, I wondered briefly about joining a support group for military wives and dismissed this, consulted noticeboards in the newsagents but found only choirs and Addicts Anonymous, a phone line for smokers and a book group for women with GAD. I lifted up flyers that had been pinned in such a way as to obscure older ones, imagined pulling a card from some hidden place and holding it up to the light: Wife Under The Sea?

Here’s the number to call. In the end, I took a flyer advertising cleaning services at a knockdown rate and left the newsagent without buying anything.

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This is not to say that I didn’t keep busy. I was still working then, of a fashion, still keeping up with Carmen, who I apprised only a little of what was going on. I had been alone before, after all; I knew the ways in which time knit together, the hours of television and cans of soup and sleeves of dates it takes to make up a day. Leah’s friends would call at irregular intervals – most frequently Toby or Sam, both of whom had become my friends over the intervening years since our first dinner party. We talked fairly often and I filled my days this way, texted Sam about the books she was reading, kept up a string of messages with Toby over the programmes playing on the neighbours’ television, a topic that never ceased to fascinate him. Do you think, he had said to me once, that they’re running some sort of illegal operation up there and the television is just to drown out the noise?

For whatever reason, I was vague about the situation, told Carmen and Sam that Leah was delayed but that it was nothing to worry about, that she’d be back in a month at most. So OK, Sam said, don’t you think that you’d like to come eat with us this evening? I told her I’d love to, really, but that a friend was away for the weekend and I’d promised to look after her cat. After hanging up, I wondered why I’d said this, crossed to the fridge and peered in at the expired tubs of Chinese food, at the net bag of lemons turning black.

In the mornings, I’d go for a run, give up at some halfway point and buy a coffee, walk back with the sweat drying cold on my arms. I was tired, sore-jawed, sore-boned in the evenings. I wrote my grant applications, emailed clients, watched television, bought a cheap pair of boots online.

Sometimes, I imagined calling the Centre and didn’t. Overall, I don’t believe I looked as concerned as I could have done.

This is not an attempt to sound callous. What you have to understand is that, unpleasant or not, all of this had more or less happened before.

Trawlers were often delayed and dives were often extended, in the same way that evening trains to the city were cancelled by hail or by somebody caught on the tracks. It was all work, with all the usual delay and frustration. More than once, Leah had been held up without explanation, had wound up home belated and weary and smelling of salt. Sometimes I think you prefer it down there, I had said to her, holding her face in my hands and wondering whether I meant it to sound like a joke or reproach, you go so deep you forget you’re supposed to come back.

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I went to a party held by Leah’s friends – Poppy from the long-ago dinner party gesturing in a manner I assumed to be self-deprecating around the generous loft apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Dan. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I went. I had never much warmed to Poppy, to her aggressively changeable hairdo and her way of talking over the ends of other people’s sentences like the music that plays to keep acceptance speeches short. It’s possible, I suppose, that the fact of three months without Leah was working on me harder than I wished to recognise. On occasion, I would crawl under my desk at noon and sleep through my lunch break. I felt more certain than usual that something was off about the colour of my tongue. Company, in whatever form, suddenly seemed more appealing than it had done. Prior to leaving the house I had smoothed my fingers across my eyebrows to flatten them and watched the rain of dead skin with some consternation. How long, I asked myself, had it been since I’d last washed my face?

The music was loud. A blur of conversation between unfamiliar people and Sam somewhere at my side, poking my hip with a finger to make me move. In the kitchen, Poppy argued with Dan about something to do with the texture of the dip he was making. Sam found a bottle of wine, pinched three plastic cups from a sideboard and poured one out for each of us, nestling her cup inside the empty third which she was saving for whenever Toby arrived. I looked at her hands around the two cups and missed Leah, hard – missed the fact of saved spaces, of saying something in unison, of turning to one another afterwards as if to say thank god it was you. I blinked, found that Sam was saying something to me. You should drink that, she repeated, you look a little white. I said nothing to this, imagined my mouth was filling with water, wished I could escape to a bathroom and check on the colour of my tongue.

Sometime later, Leah’s friend Allegra, who had been at that first dinner party, came over to ask me how I was. She was wearing tennis shoes and a long white sweater and I remember wanting to tell her I liked this outfit and then feeling certain she wouldn’t care to know what I thought. She sat beside me on the windowsill and asked me how I was, which no one had exactly done up to this point. I told her it was difficult and she nodded at me, tipped her plastic cup against mine. I hear you, she said, and I

wondered idly why she and Leah had never dated. You know you can call me if you need to talk about anything, she said, even if you just want to have a whine. It’s really shitty, I know. I thanked her for this, feeling briefly warm in a way I would forget about almost immediately afterwards. That’s really nice of you, I said, and then, This wine is disgusting.

When I got home, I found a message from the Centre on my answering machine, suggesting – in a voice that seemed to glance at its watch – that I try not to worry, that it was all going exactly to plan. I played the message over several times, imagining I heard another voice in the background, perhaps instructing the caller on what to say.

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I started losing time a little. The Centre still called, but a little less frequently. I thought about trying to find them several times around this point, searching futilely through their website for an address or any contact information besides their switchboard. Summer slunk into the brickwork, bloating the building outwards, pressure in the walls. The space above the oven swelled and leaked some viscous substance like a body pierced between its ribs. I began to grow delinquent with my emails, sleeping poorly and at badly chosen times of day. Is this normal? Sam texted, and I had to think for longer than I care to admit before realising she meant the length of Leah’s absence. They say it’s all standard, I replied. Did you know that submarines are able to produce their own indefinite supply of air? The only limitations are the amount of food on board, or sustaining some sort of major technological defect. I had looked this information up online some moments earlier and hoped quite keenly that she didn’t realise this.

I found an online group for women who liked to roleplay that their husbands had gone to space. I’m not entirely sure how this came about, though I believe it was probably a by-product of my fruitless search for a support group that really spoke to me. I spent several days moving through the message-boards, reading conversations between women about their fantasy husbands, learning forum slang, not posting anything. MHIS [my husband in space] was a common acronym, as was BS [before space], EB [earthbound] and CBW [came back wrong].

MHIS was such a loving partner, a typical post might run, a friend and helpmeet, a wonderful father, but ever since he came back things have been

different, I wonder if he’s CBW.

Six years and counting on MHIS, might run another, I know us EB wives all have it tough but sometimes I worry I don’t have the natural reserves of patience it takes to make it. It can be very hard just to wait for the end of his MTM [Mission to Mars] without so much as a message to let me know he’s safe. Most of the time it’s easiest not to think about him at all.

Beneath each post would run scores of comments: women feeding in with their own fictitious experiences of husbands lost to impossible missions, husbands orbiting the moons of Jupiter, husbands strewn across space. After a while, I started to wonder whether the thrill of the fantasy wasn’t so much the thought of their husbands returning as the part where they wished them away.

New here, I typed once, EB, looking to talk. I lingered over this message for several minutes but ultimately chose not to post it, finding that none of the acronyms fitted me well enough to bother.

I imagined my mother’s symptoms and read them into the way that I swallowed, the way that I shaped my words. I fell prey to patterns of terrible thinking, imagined myself crowded with cysts, with cancer, growing an untreatable skin. I went to the doctor several times, detailing imaginary ailments, and was asked whether there was anything causing me anxiety. I’ve always been like this, I wanted to say, it’s just that she made it better. The doctor explained that hypochondria’s very insidiousness lay in its creeping logic, in the ways it purported to make sense. It’s very easy to locate one symptom and then go in search of another, to knit them together in a way that will satisfy almost any diagnosis. If you’re experiencing fatigue, vision problems and tingling hands, the logical conclusion is multiple sclerosis. To a hypochondriac, any other inference smacks of little but refusal to look at the facts. Try, the doctor said, to be a little less logical.

Sometimes symptoms just happen, we don’t really know why.

The weather was changing, wet and bulbous and warm. One day, I sat in the window of the bedroom all afternoon and watched the flying ants foam the glass, collecting in the tip of the guttering and overflowing, falling to the gravel drive below. That night, around ten or eleven o’clock, the phone rang but the person on the line refused to speak when I answered. The number that flashed on the phone display looked to be that of the Centre, but no prompting would persuade the caller to speak and after four minutes of silence I once again heard the dial tone. After this, I sat on the floor of

the kitchen and thought about Leah, about the shape of her feet and the way she spoke about her father, the special voice she used to talk to cats, her kind frown, her intonation, her fingernails. I thought about the time we kissed at the movies and a guy jerked off behind us and I complained to the management. I thought about fucking her on the floor of her uncle’s bathroom when we were staying over before a wedding. I thought about the way she often liked me to tell her what to do in bed. I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved. You can, I think, love someone a very long time before you realise this, notice it in the way you note a facial flaw, a speech impediment, some imperfection which, once recognised, can never again be unseen. Are you just now realising that people die, Leah had said to me when I voiced this thought, tucked up beside her on the sofa with my knees pressed tight into the backs of hers. Not people, I had said, just you.

At the start of the fourth month of Leah’s absence, I witnessed a fracas on the message-board for wives of imaginary spacemen. One woman accused another of failing to treat her fantasy with due courtesy and the thread quickly descended into a frenzy of recrimination about how one wife’s imaginary trauma stacked up against another’s.

MHIS HAS BEEN GONE FOR SEVEN YEARS, one woman posted, MTP [Mission to Pluto]. NO SIGN. NO CONTACT. NOTHING. CREW PRESUMED DEAD. NO HOPE OF RESCUE. THINK ABOUT THAT BEFORE YOU TELL ME MY STORY IS “CONTRIVED”.

I just think, another woman posted in response, that if you were really so cut up about your husband’s absence you wouldn’t be posting details here the way you do.

Check the community guidelines, a third woman, apparently fancying herself site cop, added to the discourse. Don’t come for other people’s stories. Offer the same respect you would expect. “Have Grace In Space”.

She says there’s been no contact but she posted just last week about her husband sending her one last message while orbiting Pluto, a fourth inserted herself at this point, we’re not saying it’s a bad story, we’re saying just try to be consistent.

I read this thread in its entirety over the course of about an hour. Once I’d finished, I drank several glasses of wine in quick succession and typed in the comment box that Pluto was no longer a planet. fURTHERMORE, I added, unaware I had clicked on all caps, iF YOU PEOPLE DON’T WANT

YOUR HUSBANDS THEN WHY DO YOU GO TO THE TROUBLE OF MAKING THEM UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Directly after posting this, I closed my laptop and dialled the number I had for the Centre. The call went straight to voicemail, so I left a message I now remember very little about.

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I dreamed a lot during that time and in uneasy colours – pale water leaking from the cupboard, the notches from an unfamiliar spine strewn cold across the windowsill. One night, I dreamed a congregation: fifty women in formal hats declaring themselves the acolytes of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament of Our Wives Under the Sea. The church was tall, a plunging upward streak of ceiling that leered into the distant vaulted rafters, then fell beneath our feet to corresponding depths. I sat with legs curled up inside a pew and peered into the vast abyss which should have been the floor, the chancel, aisle and transepts. The space beneath us seethed with almost- movement – dark surge of something otherworldly. The woman who had once asked me about Flat Stanley stood up towards the altar, arms out, her hair flowing oddly upwards. The convocation raised their hands in imitation and I looked towards the front, expecting a song, a benediction, a prayer for those long lost. The USS Johnston, said the woman at the altar, is the deepest shipwreck thus far located, at over twenty thousand feet. The known wreckage pieces consist of two turrets, a propeller shaft and propeller, two funnels, a mast and several unidentified pieces of debris. At the point of sinking, only one hundred and forty-one of the vessel’s three hundred and twenty seven-strong crew were saved. At least ninety managed to disembark the vessel before she sank, but were never seen again. There was a murmur in the congregation, a sound which I was slow to recognise as Amen.

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In the fifth month, I began to assume she was dead, which made things both easier and harder. I felt nothing and then utterly kneecapped by it, wanted so desperately to know what her last thought had been and whether it had been about me. I called Sam crying but when pressed at first could only say that the cat I’d been looking after had died. Oh sweetheart, she said – the warm midnight weight of her voice, distant rustle of duvet covers – you

know my mother used to tell me that cats know when it’s time to go. We had one when I was little, and one day when she was about sixteen we couldn’t find her anywhere, assumed she’d run off. Anyway two days later we found her, all curled up in a box of picnic rugs in the shed at the bottom of the garden. She just knew it was time to take herself off, you know?

In response to this, I kept on crying and told her I’d made it up, that I didn’t know why I’d said that thing about the cat.

I know that, sweetheart, she said to me, I had a feeling. Her voice was thick but she kept talking and I think I loved her for that.

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