Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 18

Leah.

I had slept, and when I had, I had dreamed about Miri. I saw the warm dark, the changing light of the aquarium at which I had worked in my teens. In the dream, Miri held my hand by the Open Ocean tank, pulled me down onto a viewing bench and kissed me just beneath my collar. I love it here, she said, I love the way it moves. I opened my mouth to tell her about all the different species she could find in the tank and she shook her head, clapped her hand to my lips. Don’t do that, she said, though my mouth was already leaking water. I had woken shortly after that. I didn’t want to sleep again until I had to.

Time passed. I don’t know how much or how quickly. We changed the batteries in the torches and ate because there was food in the lockers and we knew we ought to eat it. At some point, Jelka lay down on the floor of the main deck and went to sleep. Matteo sat by the comms deck, idly pressing and repressing the transmission button, and at one point began to whistle Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies again. I sat on the floor beside Jelka, stretched my legs out and thought about showering. They had made a big fuss of the wash stall, the first time they showed us around the craft; a woman from the Centre throwing open the door to present us with the sink, the toilet and shower head like someone on a home makeover show revealing a lavish ensuite. The distillation system is state of the art, the woman said, rubbing a cuff across the shower dial like you might do with a new car. Brings the water in from the outside and purifies it.

Maximum efficiency, as much fresh water as you need. No Navy Showers here – theoretically you could keep the shower on for hours without encountering problems. Turn the tap on in the sink too, if you like. Have a party! I had nodded at her, watched her continue to buff at the shower dial for several seconds before moving back into the rear chamber.

Now, on the floor of the main deck, I turned the image of the shower dial over in my mind. If the shower still worked, then we still had fresh water. If we still had fresh water, then things were not quite critical yet. It occurred to me that, given the COscrubbers were still running, there was every2

chance the water-distillation function was still operational too. I decided to note this as a positive, though I delayed the act of actually getting up and checking until it was absolutely necessary. No reason to think the worst until it was actually happening.

Propped up beside my legs, Jelka was frowning in her sleep. I wasn’t sure why we hadn’t gone through to the rear chamber, which was altogether more comfortable. Perhaps we assumed that the second we did, the comms deck would spring to life, unnoticed, and that whoever was calling for us would assume we were lost and switch off.

Matteo was technically the engineer, though all three of us had been trained to a level that we ought to have been able to fix whatever was wrong. The problem, of course, was that nothing was wrong, aside from the fact of the obvious. We were all breathing normally, there was no indication that the craft was failing to bear up to external pressure. As Matteo had already found, there were no obvious faults, no flashing lights, no jams in the system. The craft had slowed itself down prior to impact with the ground, as though following a command it should no longer have been capable of following. Aside from the fact that we were unable to move in any direction and unable to communicate, it was really a ten out of ten maiden voyage.

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Have you ever heard of the Tektite Habitat? This was an underwater laboratory and living station designed and built round about the late nineteen-sixties as a base from which to study marine life. Closely resembling a pair of connected grain silos, it sat at seabed level at Great Lameshur Bay and was used in preparation for NASA’s Apollo missions from early 1969, when the moon landing was just months away. In the main, NASA used the base to study the behaviour and psychology of small crews living in extreme close quarters and the biomedical responses to long stretches spent in oxygen-controlled conditions, not unlike those of a spacecraft. Several teams were sent down to live for ten- or twenty-day stretches underwater, though my favourite among these has always been the team led by Sylvia Earle – a renowned biologist and explorer – which also happened to be the first all-female saturation dive team in history. I read about this in my father’s diving almanac and again in a book I once stole

from his study called A Hundred and One Deep Sea Dives of Note. In a team consisting of four scientists and one engineer, Earle’s crew spent two weeks underwater, documenting marine plant-life while at the same time being studied themselves, both for their behaviour in insolation and, in a frankly unavoidable way, for their choice of swimwear. They called us the aquababes, Earle said once, in an article I cut out and kept, the aquanaughties, all sorts of things. On emerging from the water, they were an immediate media sensation, with the focus squarely on their wetsuits and bikinis and really the inescapable Bond Girl sexiness of the whole thing, of these women and their underwater lair.

Among the many things my father collected, he had a stash of old New Yorker magazines, dating back as far as 1972. He kept these in a series of old wine crates which he stacked in his garage and periodically allowed me to root through, I assume to get me out of his hair. I was thirteen when I found a copy from July 1989 that contained a profile of Sylvia Earle.

Entitled “Her Deepness”, it was a detailed rundown of a long and wildly impressive life of deep-sea exploration, and I immediately whisked it away to read. One of my favourite parts of the article, the whole of which I read seven or eight times in the space of one weekend, was when Earle talked about the Tektite Habitat, explaining that the Washington review committee in charge of selecting teams to man the station hadn’t actually expected women to apply at all. There were still some remarkably prudish attitudes in Washington in those days, she said, and the people in charge just couldn’t cope with the idea of men and women living together under water. It was seemingly for this reason, really more than any desire to push the envelope, that the first female dive team was born. It makes sense when you think about it, my father said when I brought the article to him, actually a pretty neat solution to a problem. Really they should take this into account with space exploration too. No chance of crewmates getting involved with each other when it’s all women – no distraction, no nookie, no silly buggers.

Clever in its way.

I said nothing to this, although later on I lay and thought about these women, imagined myself a crewmate aboard the Tektite – the ghostly shoals of fish beyond the bubbled portholes, the tangled kelp, the stillness, the sudden scuds of light.

Now, on the floor of the main deck, I thought about this again, tried to remember the longest any team had submerged on the Tektite, the longest it

was advisable to submerge.

“Do you smell it?” Jelka said and I looked down at her, unsure of how long she had been awake.

“Smell what?” Matteo said, though his expression did not match the question, as though he already knew the answer. It was the smell of something burning, of meat straight off the bone.

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