Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 28

Leah.

Things broke down – I think that’s fair to say. Not that this happened suddenly, but my recognition of what was happening still came on in the sudden way things tend to in a crisis. Things were bad, but fine, and then they weren’t fine and I’d missed some crucial point by which to fix them.

We were trapped, and Jelka was suddenly hearing things that Matteo and I couldn’t hear and there was nothing I could think of to do that didn’t involve first rising to the surface and then looking around for help.

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Jelka on the main deck, with her cheek against the window. Jelka in the rear chamber, leaning down towards the hatch. Matteo pulling her away, at first with concern but increasingly with something more like impatience.

“You’re giving me the creeps,” he said.

The shower running in the wash stall and no one using it. I turned it off, told them to be more careful, though both claimed not to have left it on.

The noise sometimes waking me, sometimes coming when I was already awake. I held my hands before my face and counted fingers, recollected dreams I’d had at seventeen, of webbing growing down past the knuckle and gill-slits in my neck.

Jelka standing with her back to me, looking out towards the dark. The main deck lit by torches lined up along the central console.

The feeling in my legs after I fell asleep and woke again – like pins and needles.

Matteo flinging a plate against the wall and then apologising for it.

“Let’s talk about this, reasonably,” I said, then found myself unable to continue.

Jelka’s figure of St Brendan turning up in strange places: in the shower tray, in the chest fridge, standing guard beneath my bunk. “I hate that fucking thing,” Matteo said, “feels like it’s watching me.”

I ate something from the stores and wondered how much could possibly be left, wondered why it hadn’t started running out yet.

I went into my pack and found the postcard Miri had bought me, the image of a tangerine-coloured octopus. Pamela – Giant Pacific Octopus – estimated age between 3 and 4 years old.

“Who are you again?” Matteo said, when I came to join him at the table.

“Only kidding,” he said, but then asked me why it was we were here.

“I won’t speak to you,” Jelka’s voice in the dark, in her bunk with the blanket thrown up over her head. “This isn’t me speaking to you now.”

I sat on the main deck and thought again about Sylvia Earle, about something she had said in an article I’d cut out and treasured. Our understanding of the universe, so she said, comes from the ocean: It has taught us that life exists everywhere, even in the greatest depths; that most of life is in the oceans; and that oceans govern climate. Perhaps because we’re so terrestrially biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realise that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean. I had my back to the window as I thought this and found myself suddenly unable to bear the oppressive blank of space beyond the glass.

Where are you all, I wanted to scream, overcome with a sudden vivid grief at the thought of this nothing – no strange deep-ocean creatures, no bioluminescence, no life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.

I chewed my tongue to keep from talking and listened to the noise outside the craft.

Matteo dragged Jelka up by her arm, up and away from the hatch where she had been crouching. “I’m sick of this,” he said and she pulled her arm

away too hard and overbalanced, grabbed the air and fell. “I can’t take any more of this fucking behaviour,” he snapped and reeled back as if to kick her, and I pushed myself between them, pushed him away, and he pushed me back and I thought help, once, sharply, and wanted Miri even though she was smaller than me.

“I’m sorry,” he said to me later, holding his frostbitten hand out to take my elbow, passing his other hand over his face. “I’m sorry, buddy, I’m so fucking sorry, I don’t know what’s going on.” I shook my head at him, wanted to hug him but couldn’t quite remember how. Jelka was back where she had been, by the hatch with her head pressed downwards, and it seemed easy enough to imagine that nothing had happened at all.

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There’s a point between the sea and the air that is both and also not quite either. Does that make sense? I’m talking about the point at the very top of the ocean that is constantly evaporating and condensing, where water yearns towards air and air yearns towards water. I think about this sometimes, that middle place, the struggle of one thing twisting into another and back again.

I was asleep, which is why I missed what happened. I woke to Jelka screaming and Matteo seeming both to be pushing her up and pushing her away from him. He told her she was fucking crazy, repeated it and repeated it and she fell down and started sobbing and I wasn’t sure what was going on, so couldn’t really do anything except push myself between them again and hope things would start to make sense. Matteo wouldn’t explain, only told me he couldn’t be where he was and crashed away to the main deck, leaving me with Jelka. I asked her what had happened but she refused to speak to me, remaining where she was on the floor of the rear chamber, pressing her head down towards the escape hatch, grinding her forehead into the metal. I sat down beside her and I thought about everything I had hoped to do, the things I had wanted to study and see and the trappedness of everything, the darkness, the lack. This isn’t the ocean, I thought to myself, once and very clearly, I just wanted to see the ocean, and then for a long time after that I thought nothing because I realised it would be easier.

“I was trying to make him listen,” Jelka said, after a very long time of saying nothing, and I nodded as though this was what I had expected her to say. “I know I shouldn’t be listening,” she said, “I know I’m not supposed to respond, but I can’t stop it now. I hear it all the time. I thought if he would listen with me, it would make it easier. Do you hear it, Leah? The voice – whatever it is – do you hear it?”

She was looking at me now, sitting up and gripping my arm, and I could see the shape of her jawbone, like something I could remove from the rest of her skull with only a minimum of effort.

“I don’t,” I told her, helplessly, “because there’s nothing to hear.”

Much later, I left Jelka in her bunk and went through to the main deck, where I found Matteo sitting in a circle of torches. “I read a story once,” he told me, “about a paranormal detective who spent a night in a haunted room, and as long as he was inside this ring he’d created, this ring of protective objects, nothing could get at him.” I asked him if I could come inside the circle and he shook his head at me. “Nothing personal, buddy,” he said and looked like he meant it, “I’d just rather you didn’t, right now.”

The sound was back, the surging and retreating, a whirring, whistling, rending sound that I knew wasn’t all that Jelka heard.

“What do you think it is we’re here for,” Matteo asked me and I looked at him inside his circle and felt unsure of what to say.

“I don’t think they told us the truth,” he said, when I didn’t answer him, and I shrugged and looked towards the windows, the way I often did, listening to the sound as it whaled itself around the craft and trying to imagine what it was Jelka could hear speaking in its place. “I mean,”

Matteo said, “we both know this, don’t we? They shipped us off with so much food on board. The comms went out before the system died, like they switched us off externally. We know all this, we know this.”

I nodded, shrugged again, tried to imagine how I would have felt, when I was used to feeling anything. I thought about Pamela, wondered if I would still remember her name if I didn’t have a postcard to remind me. I thought of the upwards curl of her arms, the way she boiled up out of the water to reach for me. I thought of the shock of her strength, the first time, the way she had gripped me from right wrist to elbow as one of the keepers pulled at my shoulder and told me I’d just made a friend.

“I feel like we’re waiting for something,” Matteo continued, “or experimenting with something. I don’t feel like this is a research trip. Don’t

you think? Feels more like being dropped in a tank at feeding time and waiting for the sharks to come out.”

I nodded, understanding what he was saying but somehow unable to get my mind off the octopus, the tight but forgiving press of a creature strong enough to break my bones and yet choosing not to.

“They said it was a research trip,” said Matteo, “do you remember that?

Because sometimes I feel like I don’t, like I’m forgetting.”

“I don’t think it’s that important,” I said, but didn’t mean that so much as that there were other things, more important things, that I felt in danger of forgetting.

“She’s hearing things that aren’t there,” he said, after a pause, “I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Neither do I,” I said, and after that I went to sleep for a long time on the floor next to Matteo’s circle of torches. I dreamed in pieces, shapes and shards of broken pictures: I dreamed about the octopus, knew her name and then forgot it, and I dreamed about Miri, except her face was different and something was off about the way she moved, on all fours rather than upright, and not towards me but somehow to the side. And I dreamed that it was the ocean after all, that I was in the ocean, but not the ocean as I knew it. I dreamed that it was a different part, something older and deeper, and I dreamed that there were things there with me, in the dark.

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