Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 15

Miri.

“Let’s be serious,” the therapist says, “I don’t think that either of you are listening hard enough.”

When she says this, she is talking about me.

“All right,” I say, “I’m listening,” but this apparently demonstrates my tendency towards belligerence and we have to start the exercise again.

The therapy is free, bankrolled by the Centre on the understanding that further assistance will be forthcoming, although they are somewhat hazy on the details. This was the main thing I managed to sort, on finally getting through to someone on the phone. I tried to mention other things, tried to talk about the obvious changes in Leah, tried to ask for an explanation, but the voice on the line was implacable in the face of my questioning, assuring me several times that prolonged dives could throw up all kinds of issues and that I shouldn’t be too concerned. We call it the resurfacing glitch, the voice said, so cheerfully that I felt almost churlish for asking. It’s so common, more common than you’d think.

To begin, the therapist shows us a series of inkblot cards and asks us to say what we see in each butterflying shape.

“A genie,” I say, “an ice-cream scoop. Was the Rorschach test not widely discredited around the mid-sixties? An enchilada.”

“What I see,” Leah says, looking hard at each shape, “is an eye, and an eye and an eye and an eye and an eye.”

The therapist lays her cards face down on the coffee table and makes a series of notes in a ring-bound pad before asking me how I feel about my mother. When I say that I’m not quite sure how that could be relevant, she explains that she takes a “deep listening” approach to couples therapy, adding that childhood experience could often be a root of dysfunction in adult relationships.

“What we’ll do here together,” she says, “is connect the dots.”

I am, apparently, too given to the process of blame. I have allowed blame to settle over me like a weather system, swelling damp inside the curve of my forehead and setting my teeth electric. The therapist tells us to ask each

other questions, insists that the silence between us can be broken by something as simple as one of us opening our mouths. I write my questions on index cards as though I am revising for a test and then fold them away somewhere where Leah won’t see. Why, I write, did you go if they’d told you to expect all this. What, I write, was so fascinating down there that you didn’t come back.

There is something, the therapist says, to be said for letting go of anger.

There is something, I tell her in a voice she immediately terms unproductive, to be said for not staying away six months when your operation terms only stipulated three weeks.

It was difficult, in the morning before therapy, to persuade Leah out of the house. She no longer enjoys the process of dressing, finds fabric painful next to her skin and groans at the prospect of shoes, of walking. On coming home again, I find that a toenail has come clean off inside her walking boots, although she seems unaware of this and moves to sit on the sofa.

Without quite knowing what I’m doing, I move over to the sink and spoon a small measure of table salt into a glass of water for Leah to drink.

+

I’m uncertain of the time and therefore uncertain of whether or not it’s entirely appropriate for Sam to be here. She’s been knocking for several minutes, apparently, and the neighbours had to let her into the building, though there is no sign of them now and their television just switched from a soap opera to the news.

“I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do.”

She’s brought food, for some reason, wrapped a chicken in tinfoil, producing it from the depths of her bag with an awkward expression. “This looked less strange in my head,” she says, “I just thought it might be nice.”

It’s a bad day, Leah dragging herself about the flat like a grappling hook, catching on the furniture. I take the chicken and ask whether there’s any chance of a rain check.

“She’s a bit under the weather,” I say, like some smiling kidnapper in a horror movie, chatting benignly to the mailman. “I don’t want to make anything worse.”

“I read about this thing,” Sam says, “decompression sickness. I say I read about it, I mean I googled it, which I guess is reading. It affects scuba-

divers, pilots, astronauts – anyone who works in compressed air. Apparently nitrogen bubbles form in the blood and the tissues and things when the pressure decreases. When they come up, I mean, from underwater. It causes dizziness, apparently – rashes, fatigue, amnesia, even personality changes.

Mad stuff. I don’t know why I’m telling you this really. I just thought – you’ve been saying she’s not been well, she’s been having trouble adjusting, and I just wondered whether it was something that someone could help with? I mean, not that you wouldn’t have thought of that – if it was that.

Obviously. I’m not trying to diagnose. It’s just you haven’t told me much and I thought it would be nice to check. Or not nice but, you know, helpful.”

The chicken is hot through the tinfoil and I consider dropping it, consider telling her to fuck off, consider telling her to come in and deal with whatever it is I am failing to deal with.

“I’m sorry,” she says, when I don’t say anything, “I really am the biggest dick on the planet.”

We both look at the chicken between us, juice trickling out of a gap in the tinfoil onto the floor.

Much later, after she’s left and I’ve gone back to doing nothing very much from the region of the sofa, she texts me.

I’m sorry, she says, I shouldn’t have brought you a fucking chicken. I should have brought you a coffee and asked if you wanted to talk.

+

“I don’t think this is OK,” I say, on my own, in the bathroom, to nobody. I am scouring around the edge of the bath with a sponge and the scrim that comes away with each stroke is pinkish, less granular than it has been in previous weeks, as though something about it is growing thicker. I try not to get it on my fingers. I’m uncertain of whether or not this matter has any correlation to Leah, to the size or to the shape of her, like a layer removed.

She has taken to wearing a large floor-length towelling dressing gown around the flat and it’s hard to get a clear idea of how she looks underneath it, whether this is a shedding or a breaking down.

Look at this, I want to say, imagine holding the sponge to her face and asking for an explanation. I imagine asking her to tell me what the problem is, I imagine asking for a hug. My Leah wouldn’t be like this, I want to tell

her. She wouldn’t be so silent, she wouldn’t leave an inch of herself behind whenever she took a bath.

It is still comforting, of a fashion, to think about my Leah, though such thoughts come attendant on the usual wave of grief that my Leah is not who I have with me now. My Leah was funny and strange and predominantly wore men’s underwear. My Leah chewed hangnails loudly and knew the name of every actor yet never remembered the words to a song. My Leah took me out to the beach near the nuclear power station where she’d used to go walking with her father – haar-fog in January, too cold and too early for anyone to be there but us. I took my shoes and socks off and cut my feet to pieces on oyster shells trying to show willing as I ran down to the water. It was that morning that we saw the sea lung, a squint of ice in my throat like a splinter, like something come loose from the air and lodged in my flesh.

I have always thought the edge of the water is somehow particularly cold – a strange almost-place that seems perceptibly to dip in temperature. It is something Leah has always put down to the shifting of the air between two elements, the chilly liminality of water and earth. Standing at the place where one fades into the other, I have always been sure that I feel it: the sudden confusion. The air drawing taut between one stage and another.

Looking out across the water and feeling my feet connected to something more solid than the plunging uncertainty beyond, I have always felt weighted, literal, a tangible creature connected to the earth.

The only time I felt something very different to this was when we saw the sea lung. It was a term Leah taught me, that day in fact, grasped my hand and kissed it and told me that “sea lung” was an ancient term once used by sailors to describe the slough of ice that forms on the surface of the ocean when the air changes temperature rapidly enough to freeze water thrown to the surface in choppy weather. The effect created is that of a sort of floating platform – a spread of barely solid water like a vast and drifting jellyfish that sailors once took to be some organ of the sea’s internal structure come loose and straining skywards.

I still remember it: a drifting anomaly of matter, solid and yet not quite so, spread out beyond the doom bar. I remember the sensation of my feet on solid ground and my hand in Leah’s solid grasp and the disconcerting sight of something almost solid further out. It seemed, from a distance, to be something one could conceivably walk on, though of course in reality if you set foot on it, it would immediately give way to the water beneath. I turned

to Leah and felt an odd sort of relief, despite her hand around mine, to find her still with me, to find she had not moved further up the beach to search for cowrie shells and left me teetering in this uncertain place. The sea lung moved very slightly, leading me to feel that the ground I stood on might be moving too, might be less solid than I assumed. I pressed my free hand to my chest and wondered how solid that could really be, how tangible anything about me might really be. Standing on the edge, I could feel it.

The chill of the air, aching to become something else.

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