Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 22

Leah.

Matteo slept, and then I did, and when I did I dreamed in an odd, compressed fashion as though there were too much water on top of me for my thoughts to move about in their usual way. I dreamed about long corridors and about my own spine and about Miri drawing a finger down my neck and then stopping, and when I woke my vision had retracted to a couple of pinholes and everything took several minutes to adjust. We tried the comms panel again and again, we took apart the main deck piece by piece in search of what had gone wrong. We discussed unreasonable ways of orchestrating a rescue, imagined exerting enough pressure on the hull that the craft began to roll, imagined causing a controlled explosion whose aftershocks might be seen from the surface. We sat, sometimes, as though unintroduced at a dinner party, each waiting for the other to offer their name. On occasion, I would wake from sleeping to find Jelka muttering to herself in the kitchen or the wash stall or the doorway to the main deck and it would take me seconds to get it clear in my head that she was praying.

“Your God,” Matteo said to her once, “has put us in a shitty situation.”

His voice had taken on a tone of disbelief that seemed to follow him about our shared space, a disbelief that stoppered up the other aspects of his personality and made him curt and difficult. “I want,” he said a lot, “to eat some normal food. I want a cocktail olive and a pizza and a pack of Melba toasts. I want to stretch my legs. I want to see some fucking weather.” I wanted to tell him that of course I felt that way as much as he did, but it seemed unkind, too nagging in a desperate situation. I wanted to tell him that of course I felt afraid, but it seemed too unlucky to say the thing out loud.

I came to regard my role onboard as something akin to peacemaker, although Matteo and Jelka were never exactly fighting, only scratching about one another in a manner I sought to defuse. I tried to fill silences, told stories to drown out the madness of the situation. “Once a month,” I said, “when I was little, my father would pack up the Volvo, throw me into the passenger seat and take me out to the beach. We didn’t do much when were

there, we’d just collect pieces of sea glass and cowrie shells. We’d walk the length of the beach, marking our progress via these beach huts which ran along the top of the sands. You could tell how far you’d walked by the colour of the beach house you were looking at. The hut painted peach marked the midway point between car park and headland, the hut striped white and blue was the three-quarter point, and so on. When we’d walked far enough, we’d go down to the water and eat sandwiches and look for beached barrel jellyfish. There always seemed to be so many – they’re pink when you see them in the water but they always go blue when they wash up on shore. Thing is there’s basically nothing to a jellyfish. Almost all of what you picture when you picture a jellyfish is actually just water, this thin skin and then this hood around its reproductive organs and its digestive system.

Basically the second a jellyfish is washed up, it starts to die because the water starts to evaporate. It only takes a few hours in the sun.”

“Yes I know all of that,” Jelka interrupted, “but thank you for the biology lesson.”

I looked at her, blinked, looked away. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was a story I was more used to telling Miri. In my head, I think I’m often telling Miri stories, logging away information or things I’ve seen in order to tell her about them later. Even trapped as I was down there, I was still doing this: taking everything in with one eye on how to recount it. I think I’ve trained myself to look at things this way, as if for her as well as me.

Although now, writing this, I’m not sure I really want her to know about it.

I can’t say whether this is a story I actually want to tell.

The noise had retreated since the first time but returned again, intermittently and then often. It became possible to tell one time period from another, only by virtue of when the noise sounded and when it stopped. Sometimes I would fall asleep in silence and wake to the noise, sometimes vice versa. When it came, it winnowed out around the sides of the craft, creaked like floorboards, like straining rope, like something wrapped around our hull and pressing inwards. Sometimes I thought about what it might be but more often I didn’t.

Once, I came through to the main deck to find Matteo with his cheek against the window, not looking outwards, staring at the floor. When I asked him what he was doing he told me he’d been trying to get cool, gestured to the cheek not touching the window as if inviting me to touch. “I don’t feel hot,” he said when I asked him, “I just feel weird – you know the feeling

right before your leg falls asleep.” There was nothing beyond the window, the way there was always nothing. It made me feel restless, anxious to see something move. This was meant to be a research trip, I wanted to grumble, how are we supposed to conduct research on something we can’t see. The water was directionless in its blackness, moving no visible way. It was difficult, particularly if you looked for too long, to imagine there was water around us at all.

We ate a lot of concentrates, drank purified water. There was more of everything than we had expected; at one point I unearthed a bottle of wine in one of the food lockers, though I stowed it away as soon as I found it.

Deceptive, this space, the woman from the Centre had told us when she showed us around, rapping her knuckles against one of the lockers.

Designed that way. Space efficiency – you’ll be shocked how much you can stow. She had spoken like that about everything, the way you might try to sell someone a car. The lighting, she said, was designed to enhance vitamin D metabolization. The ceilings, she said, were designed to give the greatest possible illusion of space. Unsinkable, she said, tapping her toe against the bulkhead and then correcting herself. I mean, not unsinkable, obviously.

Time passed. However little happened to hurry it along, it still passed.

Days, weeks, I couldn’t tell you. We ate and slept and tried the comms panel. Jelka and I did jumping jacks in the rear chamber, kicked our knees up to our chests to get the blood flowing, lay down and bicycled our legs in the air. It felt important, in a dull way, to remain active, important to tidy away after eating, important to remain awake until it became absolutely necessary to sleep again. Sometimes, Matteo would draw a great grid of dots on a piece of paper and convince one of us to play Dots and Boxes.

Sometimes, Jelka would sit with her legs up on one of the benches and stare into space for what felt like hours at a stretch. It’s insane, of course, that we did so little, insane how little it occurred to us to do. Certainly we were trapped but in retrospect it’s still hard to imagine the kind of lethargy that seemed to grip us. I can’t explain it, except to say that inaction felt obvious, a decision already made by someone else. The basic truth of the situation occurred to me only as if shouted across some great distance and barely heard. I felt afraid, of course – but, beneath this, still in some sense quietly removed. I suppose a body has to find a way to cope with panic. I don’t know how this works. Panic, as I’ve said, is a waste of oxygen.

I thought about Miri, sometimes. Tried not to because of the very particular ache it summoned and then did it anyway. I thought about Miri describing the type of cat she’d like to adopt, about Miri brushing her hand over my hair in the way she often did. When I couldn’t think about Miri any more, I gave up and thought instead about the imprints of deliquesced jellyfish, the brown and pink remainders – only imprints – fading to nothing on a white expanse of shore.

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