Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 23

Miri.

Years ago, when we were still new, Leah took me out to a bar and then to another bar and then to a late-night movie where we bought popcorn and sat together in the dark. The movie was a sixties thriller; the mutineering crew of a tramp steamer set adrift on a sea of carnivorous seaweed, beset by time-travelling Spanish conquistadors, giant hermit crabs, octopuses and sharks. Every time another obviously puppeteered monster or oversized plastic snail appeared onscreen, we both shrieked with laughter. I can’t believe you’ve never seen this movie, Leah hissed, it’s so terrible. I used to watch it with my dad. In the dark, I kissed her and she tasted like popcorn. I think you’re perfect, I said, like an idiot, and she was kind and let me pretend I hadn’t said it.

We came back out into the open air around midnight and Leah gave me her coat, pulled me close by the lapels and then interrupted herself with a laugh before she could kiss me. People do this in movies, she said, but now I just feel daft. A dribble of fine gold chain around her neck, the chilly flush at the tips of her ears. You know, she said, with the portentousness of the evening’s many whiskies, I love going into the cinema when it’s still light and then coming out in the dark. Makes me think about the way a city is never the same. I mean, the way everything changes. Every night, every minute, it’s over and things will never be the same again. I put my hands over her hands, still fisted in the lapels of the coat she had given me, and made her pull me forwards. That makes no sense, I told her, and she kissed me in the street.

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The therapist sends us a bill for the session Leah missed and a note requesting clarity on whether we plan to continue. The Centre, apparently, are willing to bankroll sessions attended but not sessions skipped or rescheduled. Leah is in the bath when I get the invoice, though she has left the door unlocked, which is new. When I come in, she looks up, head back against the lip of the tub, and her skin seems to shrink and then reshape

before me – the stretch and settle of a rubbed eye, briefly off-centre, then nothing unusual at all. I sit down on the toilet seat and we regard one another for a moment.

“What are we supposed to do,” I say, at last, “about what’s happening.”

“I don’t want a doctor,” she says, anticipating my suggesting it again.

“But what if it gets worse?”

“It isn’t.”

She isn’t being unkind, or sharp, or dismissive, not like she has been recently. Her tone is perfectly reasonable, even kind. Beneath it, however, there is little enough in the way of feeling, a chilly blank where the rest of her voice as I know it should be. There is nothing of the previous night, when she dipped her head into my shoulder. Something has crested the surface between us and sunk again, the water closing over its head. She moves her hands through the water – the soft and semi-translucent blue at her hip and thigh – and I know she is only talking because I am making her talk.

“I don’t know how you can know that,” I continue, and she shrugs, a squeeze and pulse of unnatural colour around her neck and shoulders, as though water is massing beneath the upper layers of her skin.

“I feel basically OK today,” she says, then keeps talking before I can interrupt. “And when I don’t, it usually passes.”

I look at her, at the way she tries to smile and then seems to give up, ducking beneath the water and holding herself there. I look at her and feel unusually sure that the Leah of the previous night was my Leah, but that this one almost certainly isn’t. If I cut her, I’m not altogether sure she would bleed. I feel, at once, a sense of cavernous terror at being left alone and then set it aside. I reach for the plastic vase on the windowsill and ask if she wants me to wash her hair.

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When we first moved in together, Toby and Sam helped us with the boxes and afterwards sat on the floor and drank wine and ate oven pizzas off mismatched plastic plates. Sam was wearing dungarees, which was odd, as she typically didn’t dress that way. Toby tied a bandana around his forehead, made a jokingly chivalrous point of carrying the heaviest pieces of furniture. The upstairs neighbours were playing their television loudly –

a game show or a nature programme, I forget which – and we commented on this only in passing, unaware of what a permanent fixture it would turn out to be. By the time we stopped for pizza, the furniture was mostly in place, though we still had to put the bed together, still had to construct two of the three flat-pack bookcases we had bought in a panic on realising the flat didn’t come furnished as previously described. Toby uncorked a second bottle of wine, told a long story about running into Poppy at the train station, about all the issues she seemed to be having with her boyfriend Dan. Something I find incredibly boring, Sam said, is everyone’s conviction that love is different for them. Somehow harder. Do you know what I mean?

I just don’t think it’s that complicated, honestly – if you’re with the wrong person, it’s hard. It’s just another way of thinking you’re special, the way everyone does when they’re a teenager. You think you aren’t able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren’t able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. You’re not special, you’re just waiting. Toby nodded, poured wine into plastic cups. In fairness, babe, I don’t think Poppy was saying she’s unable to love. Just that she hates the way Dan eats with his mouth open.

Much of the furniture we had was my mother’s. She had died three months previously and people were still not past the point of tilting their heads to one side and nodding sympathetically when I said almost anything at all. I had brought a Welsh dresser from my mother’s house, a wine rack, a large oval mirror. The latter was a mistake – it seemed to haunt me about the flat as I tried to find a suitable place to put it, appearing at times to reflect not me but my mother’s empty house, as though on a time delay. I tapped the second knuckle of a finger lightly against the glass and it sounded like something knocking to be let in.

We had combined our books, our spices, mixed up my table salt with Leah’s jars of nutmeg and rosemary and herbs de Provence. We found we had too many table lamps, not enough cutlery. In the chaos of moving our boxes up the stairs, a full set of dishes were smashed. Do you think, Toby said over the pizza, that this is your forever place? Leah rolled her eyes at him, asked how anything could be your forever place when it was only a rental. That’s true, Toby said, suddenly narrowing his eyes at Sam, when are you going to buy us a forever place? Sam snorted, leant back on her

elbows and surveyed me upside down. Haven’t I got a bitch of a wife? she said, and laughed.

Later on, when Toby and Sam had left, we found ourselves too lazy to put the bed together and so stacked sofa cushions on the living-room floor, curled up with the new internet contract, which neither of us could make sense of, finishing the second bottle of wine. In the dark, the room was strange-shaped, shadows feeding my anxiety. I imagined us freshly moved into a place where things might walk about at night, where a knock might sound at the door at any moment, where a hand might emerge from behind the curtains to pull either one of us away. It will be fine, won’t it, I asked in the dark, and Leah locked her ankles round mine.

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I call the Centre to talk about the therapy bill and find that once again, I can’t get through. I put the phone down and think, in a blunt and ugly manner, that I do not have the patience for this. Leah is still in the bath, so I spoon table salt into a glass of water and take it through to her. She seems happy about this, drinks half of it down in a way which makes me feel vaguely nauseated, before pouring the rest into the bath. I leave her be and sit in the spare room, researching skin conditions on my phone, more out of habit than anything, until my battery dies.

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Getting married was easy – twenty minutes, in and out. When I decided I wanted to get married, I told Leah and she started crying, which I hadn’t expected. I knew you wanted to, she said, I’m not surprised, I’m just crying.

Carmen said she was quite startled to know that I’d been the one to do the asking, since I was the one with longer hair. I didn’t mean that the way it came out, she said, I meant to say congratulations, and then she hugged me very hard in a way that moved me a surprising amount. The town hall was having issues with its electrical supply thanks to a workman accidentally running a drill bit through the mains, and so the registrar had lit the room with battery-operated candles, which made everything seem more like a school play than it should have done. This is good, Leah said, mood lighting. People usually have to pay for this sort of thing. I told her to take it seriously and she smiled at me (the way her face moved, the way I had to

tip my head up a little to look at her) and said that she’d never told a joke in her life. In the candle-dark, then, we got married, and came out afterwards to gentle rain and no plans for the rest of the day, which felt like a miracle.

Leah suggested we find something to eat and walked us over the road to a place that sold burgers, her hand in my hand like something obvious, something grown from the fabric of my own body and pressing out. The afternoon was strange-coloured, inconsistent, the way the sky goes dark before a thunderstorm but the grass is still lit up and you can’t figure out where the light is coming from.

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