Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 17

Miri.

I didn’t date as a teenager, missed the boat due in part to an excess of panic.

At the age of thirteen I became obsessed with venereal diseases, misunderstood my way into a locked box from which I then spent the rest of my teens attempting to extract myself. At some point, I had come to understand that somewhere at the core of sex as an activity lay the possibility not only of illness but specifically of bodily harm and this conviction, once formed, proved difficult to shake.

My school years consisted predominantly of sweating through my shirts and obsessing over physical contact. I spent hours mentally constructing the pressure of a hand on my knee, pressed the crease of my thumb and forefinger into the side of my neck to simulate kissing, comprehensively failed to learn how to masturbate. I thought confusedly and often of a girl who sat in front of me in Geography, imagined us becoming close friends, so close that everyone else in our year was jealous. I neglected to deal with the hair on my upper lip whilst ritualistically waxing my underarms upwards of six times a month. I thought a lot about the men from the movies I enjoyed but mostly in the context of their being eaten by sharks or falling from high buildings or otherwise breaking apart. At the age of eighteen, for reasons unknown to me now, I allowed a boy named Jeremy Fox to kiss me at an end-of-term party and afterwards spent several weeks imagining him biting my arm until the blood came, which of course he hadn’t done. At the age of twenty-two, I kissed a boy at a university bar whose name I forget but whose methods I still remember: hard yank to the back of my neck and all his teeth at once, as though he were using me to floss with. The men I kissed were typically of middle height, dark-haired and gently anodyne. I worked my way up to the giving of occasional hand- jobs and even more occasional blowjobs and panicked for weeks afterwards about what I might have caught. I refused to have penetrative sex with any of them, imagined sex as a kind of battering, and after a while they went away with little in the way of hard feelings. At the age of twenty-four, I went on an internet date with a man who kissed me hard against the railing

of a bridge and told me conversationally that he was a Dom, but then grew upset when I told him to stop pulling my hair. I don’t feel safe with you, he said and didn’t call me again. When I told this story to Leah, years later, she told me he couldn’t have been the right kind of Dom. They can be hard to find, she said, took the inside of my wrist and kissed it, then smiled when I told her I thought I’d said to keep her arms above her head. Maybe he was just sensing that the two of you weren’t compatible.

Sex with Leah was a key and a lock, an opening up of something I had assumed impassable, like a door warped shut by the heat. Joy in the fact of pleasure, in the fact of my own relief. When we fucked, I felt myself distinct from my previous versions; the frenzied me, the panicked me, the me who had imagined herself poisoned by something she had never even done. I don’t think, Leah said to me once, that the problem was really you.

She was lying beneath me – her light hair, her strong chin, the way she had of widening her eyes when I came too close as if to encompass the whole of me better – and when I made a questioning noise she kissed the side of my face. I just mean, she said, that being afraid of sex isn’t typically anyone’s fault, it’s just a question of circumstance.

The last time before she went away (the last time full stop), I pushed her into the mattress and held her there, pressed my palm into the indent of her throat and then released, and then pressed again. (Hold my throat when I come, she had said to me once, that way you can feel the noises before I make them.) It was light still – forgetful afternoon, charmed hour before the coming on of evening. The going-away party was scheduled for the next night. Shall we pretend I’m going to war, she said, and I laughed and bit the insides of her thighs the way she liked me to and later on she kissed me and crooked her fingers inside me, twisted them round almost a hundred and eighty degrees, the way we had discovered, through trial and error, was the only way that worked. I remember her legs, the smudge of green bruises, synthetic citrus smell of her underarms. I remember the way that her hair rose static from the crown and then fell again. I remember the way that she looked at me, the open surge of her gaze, like I was something she’d invented, brought to life by the powers of electricity and set down there, in the last of the light.

+

Carmen is eating toast, tells me I should see somebody about that look on my face.

“Chronic bitch face is naturally distinct from resting bitch face, you know. It’s like a whole different ball game when you can’t turn it off.”

She’s had some good news about her eyesight, might be eligible for experimental surgery that will aim to reverse the degeneration. She squints at a triangle of toast through her glasses, spreads her free hand beside it.

“My hand looks like toast. Everything looks like toast,” she says and pushes away from the table to order another coffee at the counter.

When she gets back, she is bearing a coffee for me as well as one for herself. She sets it down in front of me as a sort of peace offering.

“I’m sorry I said that about your face,” she says, quite earnestly, gesturing to her own eyes, “what do I know anyway?”

It occurs to me that I ought to apologise to her, though for what I’m not quite sure. I feel angry at nothing, ashamed at myself for using her as one of my few escapes from the flat. I look down at the coffee she’s brought me, its chocolate-dusted heart already sinking into the foam. I think about Sam and wonder why everyone seems so set on bringing me coffee.

Later on, back home, I become briefly convinced that Leah has vanished.

I move from room to room, checking wardrobes, opening drawers and upsetting piles of clothes from the armchairs on which I’ve allowed them to gather. I check the latch of the bathroom window, stare for several unhinged seconds at the drain in the base of the sink, but then there she is, of course, standing in the bathroom doorway in her floor-length dressing gown as though nothing has happened, and I can’t understand how I missed her.

+

“I wonder, Miri,” says the therapist, “whether you have properly taken the time to imagine what it is your wife has been through. There is a difference, of course, between understanding and forgiving and I don’t believe one necessarily prompts the other, but it might be easier for you to cope with the fact of now if you choose to contend with the truth of before.”

The therapist is tall and straight, both in the sense of her sexuality and in the sense of her everything else. When she makes notes during the session, her handwriting rises and falls without listing; her talk is long and thin; she stirs her coffee with the flat of a knife.

“I don’t understand,” I reply, looking at the side of Leah’s face with an attempt at frankness that I hope is mirrored in my tone, “because she never tells me anything. I know you went away and I know you stayed longer than you meant to and I know you must miss it now, or else why do you run the taps all night and carry your soundbox everywhere you go? Problem is I don’t know what it is you miss, I don’t know what it is at all.”

“What is it you imagine,” Leah says to me, though her eyes are now on the therapist, “what is it you imagine when you think about where I was?”

I look at her for a long moment before pushing myself up out of my chair and crossing to the bookshelf by the door. I take the thickest book I can find from the shelf and carry it back to the coffee table, pull a slip of paper from my own handbag and hold it up for a moment before sliding it between the very last page of the book and the back cover. Then I allow the whole heavy weight of the three hundred or so preceding pages plus front cover to fall shut. The slip of paper sticks out between the final page and back cover like a bookmark and I think of how I felt on the viewing deck years ago, when she left not for this last trip but for another, the thing I wished I’d said louder: I’m not sure a ship like that can take the whole of the ocean on top of it, I’m not sure they can all go down that deep and not be crushed.

“This is how I imagine it,” I say and watch as Leah’s eye travels slowly from the therapist to rest upon the book with the little strip of paper crushed beneath the weight of its pages.

We have to catch the bus back from the therapist’s office and on the journey back, Leah nearly loses her footing climbing up to the top deck, claiming afterwards that she suddenly lost sensation in her hands.

“Just the fingertips,” she says when I press her, allowing me to take hold of her hands and examine them, though after a moment the feeling appears to become too much for her and she pulls them away. She is dressed in loose trousers, a long-sleeved shirt with a high collar. Beneath her shirt, the bones of her shoulders swing the way a hanger will when knocked inside a wardrobe. When she talks, her tongue is white, indented with toothmarks, though in truth these days she talks less and less.

+

When Leah was gone, when I became convinced that she had died and no one had thought to tell me, I grew briefly obsessed with a website for

people whose loved ones had disappeared. It was better and worse than the message-board for the wives of imaginary spacemen, in as much as the conversation was typically less ridiculous but the stories universally worse.

The people who posted were mourning the losses of lovers and siblings, parents in the throes of dementia who had wandered away from secure facilities, sisters who had run off in stolen hatchbacks, friends who had simply vanished, the way that people often do. I say mourning, though of course the abstract of grief is different without a body, without a point from which to hang the solid object of one’s pain. Does anyone else find the possibility of the comeback kind of worse than the idea of death, someone posted, not that you don’t want them to return but rather that that’s the tormenting thing: the thought that they might do.

Something I learned very quickly was that grieving was complicated by lack of certainty, that the hope inherent in a missing loved one was also a species of curse. People posted about children who had gone missing upwards of fifteen years ago and whose faces were now impossible to conjure, about friends who had messaged to confirm a meeting place and then simply never showed up. In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve. Deus ex machina – the missing loved one thrown back down to earth. Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person – but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.

It’s not grief, one woman posted, it’s more like a haunting. Her sister had disappeared two decades previously, run away or otherwise removed via the back door of their childhood home when she was fifteen years old. There was no proof that anything bad had happened, the woman typed, no proof of anything at all. They told us hope wasn’t lost so often that it became impossible to live with it. It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real – one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.

I found I liked this woman, read her updates with particular interest and scrolled the website in the early morning, as this appeared to be her

favourite time to post. More than once, I found myself building up to writing her a message, typing sentences that I then deleted, refashioned, deleted again.

I used to hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and before the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse.

I didn’t send this message, specifically because it seemed to imply that my views had changed, when they hadn’t.

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