Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 14

Leah.

I’ll tell you something: for someone who likes the water, I’ve never been particularly keen on the dark.

We sat together and stared at the torches, at the thin central reeds of the filaments which left white lines across the backs of my eyes.

“We submerged at noon,” Jelka said at one point, gesturing to her wrist, “but my watch is broken. It’s stopped on two forty-five.”

It was hard to tell much in this regard by any normal method; none of us were very hungry, or very thirsty, or showing much of an impulse to sleep. I had no watch and neither did Matteo, and without power, all the dials and meters and timepieces ranged around the main console were less than useless.

“Could have been days,” Matteo said and then shook his head in the manner of someone trying to get water out of their ears, “but that’s not really a helpful thing to say, is it?”

“Is it strange,” I asked, “that we haven’t seen anything yet?” They looked at me and I gestured my head towards the window without moving my eyes from the lights. “However long we’ve been here, I mean, and we haven’t seen a thing.”

Matteo laughed, the sound metallic against the ceiling of the craft.

“Well, I don’t know what you expect to see, buddy, just staring at that

torch for hours.”

I nodded, shrugged.

“That’s fair enough, I guess, but you haven’t seen anything either.”

Deep-sea fish are not fish in a way that the average person would recognise. Having evolved to deal with the dark and the pressure, they sprout feelers from unfamiliar places, grow great gulping jaws that overspill the circumference of their bodies, produce their own creeping chemical light. Instead of relying on gas for buoyancy, many deep-sea species simply roll through the water like jelly, unencumbered by an inner or outer skeleton, their bodies made up of compounds of such low density that the pressure of surrounding water poses no threat at all. Some of my favourite

deep-sea fish are also some of the strangest looking: the frilled shark, generally considered a living fossil, with its thirty-odd rows of needle-like teeth; the faceless cusk, which appears to have almost no features at all beyond two pairs of nostrils and a large and bulbous snout. Many deep-sea creatures also have a tendency to gigantism, though this is not a topic on which, so far, there has been a great deal of study. Suffice it to say, there has been a noted tendency in crustaceans and cephalopods retrieved from the deep ocean to be of far greater than usual size, though suggested explanations for this range from lower temperatures to food scarcity and are not generally agreed upon.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the deep sea might be dark, but that doesn’t make it uninhabited. It certainly was strange that however long it had been since we stopped sinking, we had not seen a single thing beyond the glass.

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