Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 29

Miri.

The woman across from me is tall in a way I’m not used to and worries at the skin of her upper lip so hard that at one point during our conversation she has to pause to press a paper napkin to the centre of her mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, “it’s a disgusting habit,” and I nod and hand over my own napkin because I’ve done this to myself so many times before.

We’re in the cafe I often visit with Carmen and I wonder in a way that passes in and out of my mind like a flickering light how long it’s been since I last checked in with Carmen.

“Do people keep trying to bring you coffee?” the woman across from me asks, when she returns from the counter bearing two cups of tea and a slice of depressed-looking apple cake. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s just my experience. When I told people what had happened, at the beginning, everyone just seemed to want to keep me extremely well caffeinated all the time, as if I would want to be particularly awake for all of this, you know?”

Her voice is oddly formal, with an accent I cannot quite place, and it occurs to me that she must look similar to Jelka, except that I cannot for the life of me remember what it was that Jelka looked like. We met once, of course, at the reception the Centre held before they left, but I remember little of her and can only impose the image of this stranger over the top. Her name is Juna, something she has to tell me twice and pronounces with a J that bends into the shape of a Y. She is taller than me, better kept, blue veins forking at her wrists like roots, and she is my age, I think, or slightly older, though various things about her make it difficult to be sure.

“Six extra shots, my friend used to say,” and she is talking to me still, rolling her eyes up in a way that seems at once friendly and impersonal, as if this is a story she would just as happily tell in the office. “He’d bring me these enormous coffees, these buckets of the stuff, and I’d think to myself, Six extra shots and I’ll be on the ceiling. I shouldn’t complain though, I know,” she adds and hitches up one sleeve and then the other with an odd, precise gesture which is not at all interesting except I have never met a person who moves in exactly this way, “having people to be kind to you is

so important, but it’s also incredibly irritating. It’s hard to find the balance of what you’re actually able to accept without wanting to hit someone.”

I nod, sip my tea and wonder what it is I’m doing here. I hadn’t been keen on leaving Leah, had half considered calling Sam to come and watch her while I was gone, before thinking that of course I couldn’t, that there was somehow no way of bringing a third party into the situation at this late stage. Instead, I had left Leah in the bath with the TV on but as far away from the water as possible, turned her sound machine onto its middle setting and told her I would be back as soon as I could. I had almost abandoned the plan of meeting Jelka’s sister, telling myself several times even as I dressed that morning and even as I put on my shoes to leave that I ought to call and cancel, that I was in fact just about to do so, that that was the very next thing I would do.

“Thank you for the tea,” I say now, mainly for the sake of saying something, and Juna nods at me, takes a forkful of apple cake and pulls a face.

“This is horrible,” she says, and continues to eat it, which amuses me enough to make me sit up a little. “I’m very happy you agreed to meet me,” she adds, curiously formal again, gummed with apple cake, “I know how things can be.”

“It’s OK,” I say and she nods, looks at me frankly for a moment.

“I’m sorry I called so early,” she says, “when I called you, I mean, I called early. I didn’t plan to, but I wasn’t sleeping well and I took a chance that you weren’t either. I thought it would be good to speak,” she says, though she has already said this several times, on the phone and then again when I first arrived at the cafe and found her waiting there. “My sister and your wife—” she says, “do you say wife, actually? I’m sorry, I wasn’t sure.”

I’m bewildered by this, nod, and she adjusts her sleeves again. “OK,” she says, “my sister and your wife were on the dive together, as you know.”

“I know, we met,” I say, “your sister and me. Just once, at the party before they went away. I don’t think you were there.”

I’m not sure if this is an interruption, though she doesn’t behave as if it is. She nods her head, cracks the knuckle of her index finger beneath her thumb in a gesture which seems somehow conversational.

“I’ve been putting off getting in touch with you for a long time,” she says, “and I wasn’t even sure how to reach you at first or what it was I was

supposed to say. I’ve been doing a lot of saying the wrong thing, recently, and I’m trying not to do that so much—”

“Did you call me all those other times?” I ask, and this is definitely an interruption – sharp tines of her fork coming down on the table – “Someone’s been calling me at weird hours,” I say, “they never answer when I pick up the phone, though I don’t always pick up the phone any more.”

“No,” she says, not unkindly, “I called you once, and you answered me.”

I look at her, focus in close on her collarbones, on the bright coral beads at her neck. She has the look of someone correctly joined together, well oiled, unlikely to collapse. When I interrupt, she doesn’t raise an eyebrow, only crosses one leg over the other and nods into the moment. She is someone who eats the disappointing cake she has ordered for herself, someone who allows me to throw the conversation off its hinge.

“I had some calls,” I say, “I’ve been having them forever, like before Leah came back, even – and I thought they were from the Centre but now I just don’t know. Did you see their website’s disappeared?”

I don’t know why I’m talking like this. It’s been a while since I spoke to anyone who wasn’t Leah, a while since I did anything but sit by the bath watching television, and soft-boil eggs, and stir salt into glasses of tap water. Across the table, Juna is still nodding, tilts her head one way and then the other in a manner which may be understanding or may simply be an effort to work out a kink.

“Yes, I saw that too,” she says, “I’d been expecting it. I’ve been trying to talk to some people, you see, looking into some things. I think I know what the phone calls you’ve been getting might have been about, but really I think it’s best if you let me go from the beginning.”

Her skin, I notice, is foundation-smeared to an optical illusion of smoothness that, on closer inspection, only thinly covers its pits and scars. I understand the formality of her gestures a little more in relation to this, the way she pulls her sleeves away from her wrists to prevent unintentionally staining the fabric with make-up, the way she tilts her chin upwards every fifteen seconds as though remembering to keep her skin away from her collar. I am still considering her skin when she speaks again and the meaning of her words takes a moment to sink in.

“I need to tell you that my sister is dead,” she says, “and I need to tell you what I know.”

+

My face feels stiff, as though I’ve washed it with hand soap, and the tooth that has sat curiously dormant at the back of my jaw for however long has spontaneously resumed aching. I am in the kitchen, and Leah is in the bathroom, and I don’t know how long I’ve been here or how long it’s been since I returned home, but the sunlight is peeling away from the kitchen worktops like paper torn in strips. I let Juna speak for a while and then told her I’d had enough, but that maybe she could phone me, at some other time, on some other day, and then I left without paying for my tea and had to double back when I realised. It’s fine, Juna said when I almost ran into her outside the cafe, I’ve paid for it. Least I can do. And then she walked me part of the way home while telling me a very long and frankly incomprehensible story about an older couple she knew who appeared to have had polyamorous affairs with half of the people she knew in the city.

You know when two people are fifty, she said, and not at all interesting but somehow their open marriage has consumed the lives of everyone around them? I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this story. I think I’m just trying to make noise.

Now, in the kitchen, I appear to have made myself another cup of tea despite having had one at the cafe. Leah’s sound machine is making a strange, juddering noise, as though something has come loose in its inner machinery and is causing the usual noise to sound arrhythmically and somehow off centre. I stand with my back to the counter and sip at the tea I do not want and try to play back everything Juna said to me. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, she said several times, I thought seeing your face would make it easier. Or maybe your seeing my face would make it easier, I don’t know. Her sister was dead, she told me, and the Centre had at first given her contradictory information, then seemed to start screening her calls, then appeared to close up shop altogether. She had been forced to find things out for herself, she told me, had things she needed to show me. I cut her off when I should have allowed her to talk for longer and she told me she understood. I didn’t want you to be alone, trite as that sounds, she said, we can talk again, if you would like to.

I think about all of this now with a peculiarly glassy sensation, as though I might raise my hand to my face and find it made of some hardened material, as though my thoughts once closely inspected might turn out to be

equally so. I am thinking about all of this when the sound machine abruptly shuts off in the next room and Leah makes a sound halfway between a cry and a loud exhalation and I realise she is standing in the doorway to the hall, naked and still wet, and that one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semi-solid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. When it bursts, it falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white and I put a hand over my mouth and nose as though anticipating a smell.

OceanofPDF.com