Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 24

Leah.

The world was different once, dry, before a century of rain that filled the oceans. Sometimes I think about this, the way that things might once have walked about the deepest places without fear of drowning. Sometimes I think of oceans rising faster than it is possible to escape them, of water drawing tight around the boundaries of the land.

Jelka sat cross-legged on the floor of the main deck and for whatever reason I imagined her sitting by a campfire. I took a torch and set it down by her feet, crouched down opposite to complete the illusion.

“Now we just need marshmallows to toast,” I said, though she only twitched her head – a quick, frustrated gesture, as though I was talking over something she was trying to hear. She was unnervingly still. Beside her, the St Brendan figurine stood with his face to the wall.

“It’s my birthday,” she said, and I looked at her through the upward beam of the torch.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. I didn’t ask how she could possibly know this either, with no way of recording the time or date, no way of knowing how long we’d been here. “We should do something to celebrate.” She nodded and didn’t say anything further. I could hear Matteo knocking about in the rear chamber, kicking his feet against the benches. He had been growing increasingly irritable, prone to interrupting his own sentences to ask if we could hear a noise, complaining it was preventing him from thinking clearly. I would hear him moving about when I was trying to sleep and think about my neighbours – mine and Miri’s – and the television they never switched off. Once, I woke to find him standing at the foot of my bunk, though when I asked him what he was doing he apologised quite genuinely and told me he must have drifted off.

“I can smell it again,” Jelka said now, gazing in a seemingly untroubled fashion into the torch beam. She was talking about the usual smell, the suppurating meat smell that had saturated all of our clothes by this point, though we washed and wrung them under the shower spray and hung them out across the benches to dry. I said nothing and Jelka continued, “I wonder

if it’s actually just us, you know. The smell. I wonder if this is how people smell, this far down.”

I thought of reminding her that we’d both noticed the smell the first time when we were still descending but found I didn’t have the energy to argue.

“And what about that sound,” she said then. “What about the talking, the words. Can you hear that?”

There was nothing, not just then – there had never been any talking – and I couldn’t picture what it was she was imagining or think of a useful thing to say. Instead I only commanded her to make a wish, the way one would on a collection of birthday candles, and then to blow on the torch beam, which she did until I switched it off.

+

I want whoever reads this to understand what they’re getting, which is mainly confusion, because I don’t know how to be clear about any of this.

In the dark, I pressed my face against the main deck window and saw nothing. The blackness seemed another colour, something less than black, altogether more devoid, more dumbfounding. I thought again about falling, imagined us tight in the grip of something that had snatched us down to the place we were already going, and then lifted my cheek from the glass and realised I didn’t know how I had come to be here. I had, it appeared, been sleeping, and now I was here.

“You too?” Matteo said, and I turned and found him standing in the doorway from the rear chamber, silhouetted wide and rolling his knuckles down along the side of his face.

“I wasn’t here,” I said, hearing the illogic of what I had said a moment after I said it, though Matteo only nodded, crossing to sit at the comms panel and look at me baldly.

“I know, buddy,” he said, and then, “D’you ever think about how we had a plan – that there were things we were supposed to be doing down here?”

I blinked at him, tried to pull to the fore of my mind an image of the Centre, the research project we had prepped for, the concept of something intended and carried out. I looked back towards the main console, the dim lights and the small carved insignia on the top of the panel: the dark squinting eye etched in metal. Matteo watched me for several seconds before leaning back in his chair and nodding.

“I know, it bothers me too. The way I don’t think.”

I tried to shake my head, to tell him that wasn’t what was happening.

Phantom fingers at the base of my skull, moving downwards: sunken thoughts. Who had said that? I remembered, but it took me longer than it should have done to dredge the name from the bottom of my mind.

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