Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 3

Miri.

She’s been home three weeks and I’m mostly used to everything. In the mornings, I eat and she doesn’t and then I answer emails for half an hour and ignore her wandering back and forth with wads of toilet paper wedged along her gumline to absorb the blood. I write grant applications for non- profit organisations for a living, and I’ve always worked from home, which never bothered me particularly until she went away and forced me into closer proximity with myself. Now that she’s back – now I’m used to her being back – I can’t decide whether to register her presence as relief or invasion. I make heavy weather over glasses left half empty on windowsills, over the bin not being taken out. I have near-constant mouth ulcers and complain about unhoovered floors. At night, I dream I grit my teeth so hard that they break off like book matches.

The people who live above us keep the TV on at all times. Even when I know they’re both out, at work or at the movies, the noise bleeds through the ceiling – downward drip of talk, of title music, spilling down the wall like the damp that speckles into mould around the chimney breast.

Sometimes, if I listen very closely (sometimes, if I stand on a chair), I can make out the show that’s playing upstairs and tune our television to the same channel, which negates the irritation a little. They seem to favour game shows and programmes about people tasked with falling in love with each other in exotic locations for money. I enjoy these too, I suppose, enjoy their fabulism, the lunar tones of teeth. Contestants on a show I often watch in tandem with the neighbours have to stare into a stranger’s eyes for four minutes, uninterrupted, as studies have apparently shown this is the amount of time it takes to fall in love. This often seems to work, at least for the duration of the episode, though once a male contestant threw his chair back after two minutes and walked off set, later stating that something he saw in his partner had unnerved him. I’m less fond of nature documentaries and tend not to bother matching my channel to the neighbours’ when they switch these on. One evening, I fell asleep on the sofa and woke to the unusually clear sound of a voice narrating a programme on California

pitcher plants from the floor above me: Foraging insects are attracted to the cavity – or mouth – formed by the cupping of the leaf and are hastened down into the trap by the slippery rim kept moist by naturally occurring nectar. Once caught, the insect is drowned in the plant’s digestive juices and gradually dissolved. This was some months after Leah was first absent, when the phone calls from the Centre were still semi-regular – the kindish, professional-sounding voices telling me they were doing all they could. I remember I lay on the sofa and listened to the show for several minutes before reaching for the remote and aiming it at the ceiling.

Leah used to go up there sometimes, knock on the door late at night and ask them to turn it down. They were nice, she would tell me when she came back, brushing her hands together to indicate a job well done. Very apologetic about it, I like them. They left the TV on at night to keep the cat company, they’d turn it down, no harm no foul. The noise from the television never altered but I don’t think Leah even particularly minded this.

Going up there seemed, to her, to be almost the whole point of the exercise, telling the neighbours to turn it down more important than the turning down itself. After she went away, I quickly became grateful for a noise I had previously regarded as irritating. Sunday mornings I would stand on the kitchen table and listen to soap opera music, to upbeat voices selling nasal sprays and Golden Syrup and non-stick Teflon pans.

“I can’t stand this,” Leah says suddenly. She’s been sitting in the corner of the room for upwards of an hour, chewing on the collar of her jumper in an odd, reflexive gesture, like one might gnaw at a hangnail. I ask her what she means and she doesn’t say anything, only gesturing upwards as the noise from the neighbours’ television fades from the closing credits of a programme to a splash of advert music in a frantic major key. I go upstairs and hammer on the door but the neighbours don’t answer, the noise of the television oddly quieter in the corridor than it seems in the flat below. It occurs to me that I have never actually laid eyes on the neighbours, that the whole time we’ve lived where we live I’ve taken their presence as a given on the basis of evidence that is, at best, circumstantial: the footsteps and the muffled music, scrape of furniture being moved around at night. I never asked Leah a single thing about the neighbours, never once after any of the times she went up to ask them to turn it down. Is that odd, I start to wonder to myself and then disregard the question. It barely matters, after all, since my issue is not so much with my neighbours as it is with their TV.

I’m only gone a total of six minutes but by the time I get back, Leah has moved from the corner of the living room and is locked in the bathroom, running both the taps. This isn’t entirely unusual. Quite often these days I will wake at odd hours and hear the bathtub being filled. 4am, grey twitch of morning in the sky about the telephone wires and water running in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the room where the washer-dryer sits. More than once, I have come in to find Leah sitting on the edge of the bathtub, staring into the water with the fixed expression of someone barely awake.

She is, as I often think at these moments, deliberating whether or not to get in, though at other times I interpret her expression as something more uneasy – the look of a person who has let their gaze drop too deep and now can’t seem to retrieve it.

Standing outside the bathroom, I think of knocking, think of asking her to let me in. I imagine I can hear the water spilling down across the floor, pooling thick across the lavender linoleum. She has, it appears, taken the electric box she uses to sleep into the bathroom, the one that arrived in the post, no return address – a parting gift from the Centre – along with a pair of decompression socks and a book of aphorisms bound in PVC. I hear her turn it on, hear the shiver of sound it produces – swell and oom of something spilling, something seething, judder and groan of something building to a roar.

+

A long time ago, we met. I think that’s important – the fact of a meeting, the fact I remember a sense of before. Meeting implies a point before knowing, a point before Leah and I became this fused, inextricable thing. We used to make a game of remembering, elbowing each other about it: d’you remember the time I sent flowers when you were living in another city, d’you remember teaching me to swim, d’you remember the time we went out for my birthday and you spilled water all over the table and the waiter looked at us like we’d crawled from a hole in the ground. Every couple, I think, enjoys its own mythology, recollections like notecards to guide you round an exhibition: Fig. A. Portrait of the couple dancing at a colleague’s Catholic wedding. Fig. B. Charcoal sketch of the couple fighting over who said what at a cokey dinner with acquaintances (note fine lines beneath completed sketch, indicating places where the artist has repeatedly erased

and redrawn). Things are easy enough to recall, in isolation. Scenes appear complete unto themselves: the time we went to the fancy dress party, the time someone stole my wallet in a club, the time our train carriage got stuck underground for an hour and forty-five minutes and Leah kept hold of my hand until we started to move. You can wander the exhibition this way, picking favourites, placing dots by the frames of the pictures you most want to keep. Trickier is the task of pulling the pictures together, of connecting the points in a way that makes tangible sense. I remember the first time we kissed, the first time we slept together, the first time she told me she’d once seen her father appear at the foot of her bed as a ghost. I remember fucking – or the abstract sense of fucking – the fact of doing it often and cheerfully, though with little recollection of one time over the next. I remember the first time she went away, the first time I travelled to see her off. I remember the last time – the fact that she was supposed to be gone for three weeks and disappeared for six months, the fact that none of us knew what had happened, the way the Centre called several times to give out contradictory information before ceasing to call at all. All of this is easy enough, at close range – bright flashes, a relationship borne out by evidence, the bits and pieces that make it a fact. What is harder is stepping back far enough to consider us in the altogether, not the series of pictures but the whole that those pictures represent. I don’t particularly like to do this. Stepping back too far makes me dizzy – my memory, like something punched, reeling about with its hands clapped over its face. It is easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light.

So in pieces, then: a long time ago, we met.

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