Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 19

Miri.

I run beside the canal in the early mornings and afterwards I usually go to the cafe near the municipal leisure centre, where I drink two coffees in quick succession before heading back. There is a man at the cafe by the leisure centre who has on at least three occasions written his number down on my receipt when I’ve paid for my coffees. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps doing this when at no point has it yielded results – perhaps he believes that as yet I simply haven’t noticed, perhaps he’s just a sexual predator – but either way, he does it again this morning as I hand over my change. I am briefly annoyed at the whole situation, briefly alarmed, and then it occurs to me that all I need to do is tell him I have a girlfriend (which is not true, I have a wife, but people seem to find that cute in a way they don’t when I just say girlfriend). I look at him for several seconds, holding my coffees in both hands and not saying anything, and then I say to him, abruptly, “Please stop doing that,” and leave without taking my receipt.

This happened once, a long time ago: Leah and I on an early date and a man in between us at the bar, forcing a leg between our stools with the forward-thrusting motion of someone preventing an elevator door from closing. Are you sisters, he had said, and she told him yes and then kissed my open mouth.

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Leah is in the bathroom, the sound machine playing, the phone ringing. My bad tooth is aching, though I’m doing my best to ignore it. Our quarterly water bill is in the region of twelve times above average and I have no clear idea of how we’re going to pay it.

I’ve been going through the papers from Leah’s transfer to the Centre, trying to make sense of a number of things I thought I already knew. I am unsure, for instance, of exactly when it was that Leah’s job became obscure to me, when I stopped knowing what it was she was doing on a daily basis while still assuming I did. I am thinking, again, about the going-away party,

about the people there I didn’t know. I am thinking about a man Leah described in joking terms as “The Boss”, as though she were referring to Bruce Springsteen, pointing out a man in pressed jeans and a sports jacket who didn’t make a speech when others did, but afterwards ate a total of twelve cocktail sausages from the buffet table and apologised when he jostled me en route to the salad bowl. I remember him the way I think you often remember unimportant things: too clearly and in too much detail. The way your memory will relinquish important things yet conjure the bright sense of a boring landscape or a throwaway conversation, so I remember the dark upward sweep of his hair and the etched insignia on his ring, like the lines of an eye. I remember the way he stepped back politely to give me space and asked if I’d enjoyed the party, and I remember too the way that shortly afterwards he departed without ceremony and no one commented on the fact that he had gone. We are prouder than ever before, a woman from the Centre declared into a microphone, of all we as a company have achieved, and more certain than ever before that we stand at the vanguard of further discovery. We know already that life exists everywhere, even in the places as yet inaccessible, and we know too that that life has things to teach us and must be sought out.

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I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain. I see her impatience in the skin of my neck, her anger in the way my hands move. I see her when I press my tongue into the inside of my cheek with irritation yet refuse to do anything to make a situation better. I see her when I assume people are worse than they turn out to be.

When my mother used to smile, a rarity, the skin at the sides of her mouth rippled back like a stone thrown into water. In physical terms, there is nothing to a smile: twelve to thirteen muscles, give or take. Teeth only optional. I read somewhere, probably online, that a Duchenne Smile denotes contraction of the zygomatic major muscle in conjunction with the orbicularis oculi, otherwise known as smiling with the eyes. A smile is voluntary and typically brief, lightning split across the face. It costs you almost nothing, but my mother nonetheless trained herself almost entirely out of it, believing it puckered the skin and loosened the facial muscles.

Frowning, too, and raising the eyebrows were both things that she avoided, citing magazines that advised against yawning too widely, ironing her index fingers over the places where undue emotion had caused the skin of her forehead to crease. What remained was an impassivity – white lines about the underside of her lip that she smoothed away with cold cream. She spoke from the centre of her mouth, patched the creases that formed around her eyes with concealer the colour of crafting glue. When she swallowed, her throat moved as if in protest at her face’s immobility, swelling and contracting with such force that her head was not infrequently thrown back.

When she became ill, much of this self-imposed rigidity was lost; my mother’s face untethered but suddenly uncontrolled. She became prone to involuntary facial and bodily spasms, struggled to regulate her body’s speed, its movement through space, its sudden dislocating stops. It became crueller, unwatchable. She ceased to obey herself, her jaw hanging loose and then tightening, skin buckling up in ways she could no longer prevent. I saw it and felt sick. When I went to visit her, I found it increasingly difficult not to imagine the two of us breaking down and turning to dust, just at slightly different paces. Her first and then me. Don’t you dare, she said to me once, though her speech was caught up in the back of her throat as if somehow half digested, don’t you dare look at me that way. I didn’t know how I was looking, so I looked at the floor and shortly after that I went home.

Things I remember: my mother, eating honey on toast, commenting on the number of fat people she had seen at the supermarket; her juicing machine, its blades fanned upwards; the way she wrote my name on the insides of my school shoes; the tight white trick of her hair, at once blonde and grey and silver; the first frightened slip of her memory, before we knew what was wrong and she called her neighbour’s cat Cassandra, though the neighbour’s cat had no name and Cassandra was the name my mother had once thought of giving me; her wrists, her hands and the way she drew them into her sleeves as though insulted; her Tae Bo videos; the strange sleepwalking manner in which she occasionally stood at the kitchen counter and stirred her index finger round the peanut-butter jar; the sound of her opening up a crab at the breakfast table, the gills and digestive organs strewn between the plates; the fact that she was always thinner than me and worked at it; her feet; the gentle grasp and then drop of a hug that I’d initiated; the sunhat she kept on the phrenology head in the hall; her blue

eyes and smell like eiderdown; the fact she died during the two minutes silence in November, the lack of care she gave to the plans of others extending even to the Armistice; her contradictory stance on almost everything; the time when I was seven and she leaned out of the window of her car to shout at a boy who’d called me a bitch on the playground; the fact of her face behind my face; the way she asked about Leah only twice and then stopped asking; her fingernails embedded in me, far past the point of safe removal.

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The phone rings too late to be good news, though when I pick it up the news is nothing and no one is speaking at all. This has happened a couple of times in recent weeks and each time the call is from a private number. In the morning, I call Carmen and ask whether she was trying to get in touch with me the night before.

“Not me,” she says, “and anyway, you have my number – if it was me calling, you’d know.”

“Well were you maybe calling from a private number and you just didn’t

notice?”

“No, definitely not.”

“But are you absolutely sure?”

“I didn’t call you last night, Miri, I was watching the pottery show. Then I went to bed.”

Carmen is obsessed with a television show where a group of contestants construct clay and pottery likenesses of different celebrity guests and are judged in terms of accuracy, artistic merit and level of offence caused to the celebrity in question. I’ve never watched it, although I have occasionally heard my neighbours watching it. I couldn’t say, on the strength of this, whether it’s a show I’d recommend.

“I’m worried about you, Miri,” Carmen is saying now, “you’re beginning to sound a bit Joan Crawford.”

I tell her I’m fine, that last night’s call was probably just from an insurance company, or someone jerking off. Carmen asks if I want to come round and watch reruns of the pottery show with her but I tell her I have to look after Leah and hang up.

“Did you know,” Leah says when I turn to look at her, “that seabirds eat more plastic relative to their size than any other animal in the ocean.”

She is sitting on the sofa, face tilted towards the windows, and when I ask what she’s talking about she doesn’t answer. I come over and sit beside her on the sofa, wonder about trying to take her hand. She is swaddled in her floor-length dressing gown, hunkered down, the wishbone span of her shoulders beneath the terrycloth. I find I want to measure her, get up and fetch a length of measuring tape from the kitchen, bring it back and kneel

on the sofa at Leah’s side.

“Come here,” I say and she looks at me.

When we decided to get married, I took the same tape measure to gauge Leah’s ring size and having done so, decided to measure all of her, wrapping the metal strip around her waist and her upper thighs and the place where one bicep was bigger than the other, measuring the line of her clavicles and the distance between each fingertip and the floor. I noted each of these measurements down on a piece of paper and kept it, joking that it would allow me to reconstruct a perfect imitation Leah, should I ever happen to lose her. Of course, I ultimately just ended up losing the paper with the measurements. Somewhere, between throwing out old furniture, between an afternoon’s innocuous clean-up, it simply passed out of existence the way things will do and it never even really occurred to me to mind.

I measure Leah again now – the limited parts I can reach outside the dressing gown – wrap the strip around her wrists and upper throat and forehead, take the length of her collarbone and the distance between her nose and cheekbones and chin. I am thinking about the sides of the bath as I do this, about the indeterminate matter which I find myself scrubbing at day after day, about a certain mutability in Leah’s stride and looks and presence, a certain ebbing, about the way I don’t always hear her when she comes into the room. I note everything down, but having done so I find I can’t tell whether these new measurements mean anything – whether Leah is smaller or lesser or different – since I don’t remember the measurements I took before.

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The therapist agrees to see us over Skype, as Leah had been complaining more often about a lack of sensation in her feet and fingertips and doesn’t want to make the trip. I tell the therapist I’m finding it difficult to take things seriously, that I’m finding it difficult to act as though any of what’s happening is real.

“You’re finding it difficult to connect,” she says, and writes something down, and then the internet connection on her end stutters like the punchline to a lazy joke. “I should say,” she adds when her picture readjusts, “that I really would find it easier to speak to the pair of you. This kind of therapy can’t work when only one of you is present.”

I explain to her that Leah is in the bathroom, has been in the bathroom with the door locked since the previous evening, in fact, which is new.

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