Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 21

Miri.

I knock on the bathroom door, then wander through to the bedroom where I stand for a minute, picking things up and putting them down again, drawing my toe in circles through the carpet of hair that has formed over the actual carpet. I haven’t been cleaning in here – it feels so specifically Leah’s space now – and everything seems unpleasantly furred over and unwashed. I have always been neater than Leah, although in the old days, much of this was simply due to my being at home more consistently. I wore it as a badge of honour nonetheless, picking up abandoned glasses with a sigh and ferrying them to the dishwasher. I don’t really think it’s that hard, I used to say a lot, and she would apologise and fill the kitchen sink with soap suds, and really, now I think about it, what an absolute waste of life.

I don’t realise that Leah has emerged from the bathroom and is standing behind me until I half turn catch her shadow in the corner of my eye and

jump.

“Fucking hell.”

She doesn’t move, only frowns at me briefly before crossing to the bed and sitting down. I think about being cold in the mornings, about pushing my feet down beneath the bedsheets and finding hers. I think about Leah taking off her make-up in bed, the blurry crescents of mascara across the cotton discs that she would ball on the bedside table.

“Come over here,” she says, and I’m surprised but do as I’m told. I sit beside her on the bed and let our shoulders brush, then lean away again, this gentle touch and then removal. I feel for a moment that I understand the whole bright dailiness of our life before this: the morning glances at the bathroom sink, the spit of toothpaste, the cramp and comfort of our hall and living room and kitchen – understand it and also understand that it is gone.

I lean away and she doesn’t follow me, clamshelled in her dressing gown and scratching idly at the inside of one arm.

“I was thinking that it’s unfair of me,” she says, “to hog this bedroom when it isn’t only mine.”

I say nothing and she nods as though I have.

“I was thinking,” she says, “that you can have it if you want. I don’t mind switching.”

I look at her, think of saying, I don’t think switching would make a difference, think of saying, Why don’t you just sleep in the bath – you spend enough time there as it is, say none of this.

“I’m fine,” I tell her, and she nods and continues to scratch at her arm.

I’m surprised when she leans back against me, her towelling shoulder touching mine again, her head dipping into the crook of my neck and holding there. I don’t know what to say to this, really. It isn’t that we haven’t touched since she came back – between one thing and another, I’ve touched her often, though this has chiefly been in the form of blood mopped up and hair held back as she vomited water. This is different. I find it difficult to remember the feeling of reciprocation, difficult to locate the muscle memory required of me. I let my head tilt sideways, touch my cheek to the top of her head, find that I badly want to cry.

“I think,” she says, “that there’s something that’s seriously wrong with me. I keep thinking about Jelka. I keep thinking about what we thought we were doing down there.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, but she only shakes her head.

She is still scratching at the inside of her arm and this time she shows me, pulls the sleeve of her robe back further than I have seen in forever, reveals the changing texture of skin, the rubbed-raw glint of something unfamiliar.

“What’s that?” I ask and she shakes her head, pulls up her other sleeve, then parts the floor-length folds of the dressing gown to show me her legs, pulls the cord at the waist and shows me everything. It is not at all what I expected, all those times when I looked at the scuffed-off particles of matter in the bathtub and imagined her flayed and fraying beneath her clothes. It is something else, and I don’t know what to call it or what to say. I look at her and think, briefly, of the strange oyster sheen of her underarms and elbow creases in the first long weeks of her return, of the way she had shown me and said, with a bland sort of certainty, that she’d been told it would go away. I think too about the way she had bled, from the face and the gumline, so many mornings of bleeding that have since petered out, as though there might be no more blood to lose.

Now, from mid-calf to upper thigh, along her sides and then across her breasts and up along her arms to mid-forearm, she is at first surf-white, uncertain, and then changing as I look at her, white to blue to green – her

skin a drifting texture, somehow unmoored, as though it only floats upon the surface of her flesh.

“I think we need to get you to a doctor,” I say, in a useless tone that she seems barely to register.

“I don’t feel very good,” she says, as though I haven’t spoken, and now that I have seen her I know that her voice is not the same, but rather a voice that seems to drown in air, unused to oxygen. “I think,” she says, “that there was too much water. When we were down there. I think we let it get in.” I look at her and see the way her eyes appear to spill their irises, the way the pulse throbs hard in her throat and at her wrists as if in answer to some failing inner rhythm.

A bright knife of memory: my mother, holding her hands out flat in front of her. The tremor that wouldn’t subside when she willed it, the finger and thumb that wouldn’t respond to her efforts to pinch them together. I feel wrong, she had said – her voice clear in a way it increasingly seemed not to be – and I’d registered the impulse to throw my arms around her, to struggle against whatever was happening, to tell her I’d make it all right.

“I think,” I say to Leah, “I think we should take you back to the bathroom,” and I don’t know why I say this, really, except that when the bathtub has been filled and I have eased her down into the water, she seems less troubled. She ducks her head, the throbbing at her throat and wrists recedes from view. I kneel beside the bath and watch her shift herself, the pull and shrink of skin around her knees and ankles, the colour taking on new shades – first white, then blue, then something else. I look around the bathroom and think about nothing, really. Stupid things. The way I always used to floss and brush and mouthwash where Leah only brushed. The way I used to sit on the edge of the bath and read to her and drink beer while she washed her hair with water poured from a plastic vase, because she preferred it to standing up in the shower. The way she never managed to wash the conditioner out of the tops of her ears.

I look at her now and know what has been true since she returned: this change, this dragging tide beneath her surface. I watch the water dribble from the corner of her mouth and do not know whether it is simply bathwater or something spilling from inside. I take a flannel and wipe her, gently, cup her head and wonder what it is I feel beneath my palm that isn’t hair or skull but something other.

I used to imagine the sea as something that seethed and then quietened, a froth of activity tapering down into the dark and still. I know now that this isn’t how it goes, that things beneath the surface are what have to move and change to cause the chain reaction higher up.

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