Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 20

Leah.

I don’t know who I’m writing this for, really. I think I need to explain what happened, but it’s hard when so much of it happened in the dark. I need to talk about the days, and not knowing what was a day, not knowing how to keep track or what it was that separated night from morning, not knowing how to keep ourselves from going mad.

The noise first started at night – or really what we referred to as night, since it came long enough after an equally arbitrary stretch of daytime. A sudden creak around the southmost side of the craft, a long, wide, billowing motion. It was a noise that seemed to pulse and then retract, like a beating, like the back and forth of wings, or of swimming – a noise I can’t really explain.

We had moved into the rear chamber by this point and were sitting around the table. Sometime previously, I had checked the shower in the wash stall and found it still in operation, the water running and evidently free of salt. That’s something anyway, Jelka had said when I reported this, slipping past me into the stall to turn the shower on and tilt her head back, opening her mouth. We had eaten, of a fashion, cleaned up after ourselves.

At one point, Matteo had folded down one of the bunks and settled down as if to sleep, only to get straight up again.

When the noise first came, Matteo suggested whales and Jelka argued that whales would never dive so deep.

“We don’t know how deep we are,” Matteo said and Jelka shrugged at him, pushed a hand through the hair at her temples, still damp from the shower.

“Still doesn’t mean it’s whales. I’ve never heard a whale that sounds like that.”

The noise seemed to shiver and retreat for a moment, a long wail that faded down into something more like a grinding, like the pull and give of something caught between teeth. I thought about the dark beyond the windows and said nothing, shook my head at the tingle of fright that sat poised at the base of my spine and preparing to struggle higher. The ocean,

I had to remind myself, was a place I felt safe and thinking about the ocean was the method by which I felt safest. When the noise returned, this time on the opposite side of the craft and louring inwards (leering inwards?

Swooning inwards? It’s hard, in retrospect, to assign a tone), I closed my eyes and thought about the shifting shell-soft texture of an octopus mantle, and after a while I felt better, opening my eyes again to find that Matteo and Jelka were still arguing about whether or not the noise might be a whale. I started to say something but at this point there was a rattle around the base of the craft, a hum and screech that seemed to come from somewhere against the exterior structure, beyond the lower hatch leading to the escape trunk, as though something were knocking to be let in.

There have been all sorts of “unexplained sounds” recorded in deep water, and almost all of these are actually just the sounds of glaciers calving, the aftershocks of ice sheets moving over land. Miri used to watch programmes which made much of these so-called mysteries, docu-style American deep-dives into popular phenomena which always ended on a note of jittery speculation: So is there a simple explanation, or is it something altogether more sinister? Only you can decide. Miri would grin at me at the conclusion of these programmes, nod her head very seriously and pretend to be convinced. You’re no fun, she would say when I explained to her the process of seabed gouging, the sounds emitted when the keel of an iceberg drifts into shallower water and scrapes along the bottom of the sea. Yeah, she would nod, or maybe it’s octopus people like the show said.

All of which is to say that sounds, in deep water, are not unexpected, and often far more easily explained than you’d think. We weren’t scared, is what I’m really trying to say here. We had far more pressing things to be alarmed about and which were as yet unexplained.

Pushing back her bench, Jelka stood and walked over to the lower hatch, tapped her toe against the hand-wheel and frowned. The escape trunk sat at the base of the craft and operated in a manner similar to any airlock, sealed off from the main body of the ship and designed to match the air pressure on the outside, which would allow the outer door to be opened. In our current situation, of course, it was completely useless, as opening the outer door to deep-sea water-pressure would result in whoever was in the escape trunk being instantly crushed. This was not an expedition which had ever anticipated any one of us going outside. Our brief had been strictly to observe and map any life we encountered, not to collect or take back. Even

so, there could be no theoretical harm in opening up the inner hatch to check what was down there, whether some piece of machinery had come loose or something in one of the drain valves was causing the sound that continued to wail up through the floor. Jelka tapped her toe against the hand-wheel a second time, tilted back on one heel and stepped away, still frowning downwards.

“Don’t be daft,” she said, though no one had said anything, and shortly after this she came back to the table and sat down with her back to the hatch.

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