Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 30

Leah.

I don’t know how long the next bit took, so let’s call it three days. I woke to St Brendan at the foot of my bunk – not on the floor but actually in amongst the covers. When I sat up to ask Jelka why she had done this, I found she was not in the rear chamber with me and shortly afterwards Matteo came through from the main deck to say that she was not there either. We found her in the wash stall, under the showerhead in her clothes with her face turned upwards, mouth open to drink the water. “What are you doing,”

Matteo asked her, in a voice that did not seem to expect a response.

I brought her out of the wash stall and sat her on my bunk in her wet clothes. She seemed sharp beneath my hands. I wanted to push her hair around, pull it away from her face. What are you doing, I wanted to ask her.

“I’m tired of hearing it,” she said to me then, grasped my wrist and looked at me the way people do when they’re drunk and about to tell you a secret. (Miri leaning towards me across the table in a bar – our third or fourth date – a sweet slur, I’ve been thinking about you, a bit. I bite the tips of my fingers and I think about you.) “I’m tired of hearing it,” Jelka said, “and I don’t hear it so badly when I’m in there.”

I let her hold my wrist and look at me as if she was willing me to understand. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” she said. “I know you’d have to hear it, a little bit – if you tried. The big sound, like the ocean, that’s just a distraction. There’s something else, if you listen properly, if you try —”

And then Matteo ruined everything by pushing me aside and slapping her, hard, across the face – and that was the first day.

The second day was the second day because at some point I woke up to it. I jogged several laps around the rear chamber the way I had taken to doing to prevent my legs from shaking when I stood up too fast. It was back by then, the whaling sound, the familiar curling, ooming, and I thought about what Jelka had said about it being a distraction from something else. I did not listen, closed my eyes and jogged in circles around the space I knew by heart. I ate something from the chest freezer, I thought about Miri and I

went through to the main deck, where I found Matteo sitting in his circle of torches and a panel on one of the main control boards smashed across its centre, three buttons cracked as though they had been hit with some force.

One of the torches in Matteo’s circle, I noticed, was also cracked across its reflector, but I found I was too tired to comment on any of this, so I only sat with my back against the comms panel and looked towards the window until he started to speak.

“Did you ever think that maybe this is just a dead part,” he said, after a moment, “I mean, not that we’re not in the ocean but that we’ve somehow fallen down into some part of it that died however many years ago and now there’s nothing here at all.”

I didn’t look at him, kept my eyes trained on the window. (Miri placing her hands either side of my face to shake me when I drifted away from the thread of a conversation. Are you there? Or is this person a replicant?) “When I went ice fishing with my dad,” Matteo said, holding up his hand with its missing fingers as if to remind me, “it was so still and bleak – temperatures below freezing, of course – but you still knew there was life down there, just under the ice. When you cut a hole, baited the hook, you were already anticipating the frenzy, the thing below that was ready to fight you when you tried to pull it up. This doesn’t feel like that,” he said, and I wanted to tell him that I disagreed, that I felt certain we were still somewhere where something else existed alongside us, that there had to be something here that we simply couldn’t see. I felt, as I often did, an agony at the emptiness, of wanting to see where we were and assess it for myself, but I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like Jelka. I stared out of the window, willing something to blink back at me, and then I closed my eyes and thought about the book about the Trieste and the Challenger Deep that I had borrowed so often from my father: its turquoise cover, talismanic in the fact that it was the same colour as my lunchbox, the same colour as the toothpaste my mother used, the same colour as the single fleck in my father’s right eye.

When I came back through to the rear chamber some time later, Jelka had once again been in the wash stall and I found her wet and clothed and leaning up against the table, staring at the floor. I didn’t ask her what she was doing, only moved towards the worktop to make a cup of tea. I felt rather than saw her reach out for me and dodged her, drew back my elbow and edged towards the sink. At that moment, I felt unable to tolerate the

thought of her asking me once again if I heard some noise I couldn’t hear. I feel bad about that now. Of everything, this is the thing that makes me feel worst.

The third day came in two parts, which I will call morning and evening, though there was little enough to differentiate them beyond what will shortly become obvious. I did my jog around the rear chamber and then found something to eat, trying my best to keep my mind along lines that did not seem calculated to hurt it. I had been recollecting a lot of things in Miri’s voice, just recently, my memory throwing up some snippet of conversation and then refusing to fill in the blanks (all Miri, all things she had said in the past that my brain had held on to without any obvious reason: I don’t think that kind of thing necessarily makes a person smarter / problem is I think I’ve been trained to think of Catholicism as a sort of winnable game, like a computer game / the ubiquity of a straight woman reading an ee cummings poem at a wedding). Jogging kept my mind temporarily clear, and so I did it, sometimes for what seemed to be hours simply running in circles in my bare feet and uniform. My father had always told me it was better to keep busy, that there could always be something to do if I looked for it. Things didn’t crawl from the sea for the very first time, he had joked, for you to pay them back loafing around idle.

I remember a sensation of damp – a wet pressure along the surface of my skin like the imprint of a finger dipped in water. A directionless quality to everything, though nothing moved except me in circles. At some point, Matteo came through from the main deck, rubbing his eyes and telling me he’d dreamed the comms panel came online while he was sleeping. “They were all there,” he said, and did not offer to explain who he meant, “it came online and they were all still there.” It was at this point that the door to the wash stall opened and Jelka emerged, advancing on him quickly. Once again, she was fully clothed and wet from the shower, and she placed her hands on either side of his head, pushing him back against the table so he yelled.

“I told you to listen,” she said, and sounded extremely measured, all things considered, “I just want you to listen like I told you.”

She was holding his face so tightly that I could see the skin turning white beneath her fingers. He grunted, pushed back against her but seemed unable to dislodge her, bending back against the table as she held on to his head.

“I can’t stop it now,” she said, “it’s all I can hear any more. I know I’m not supposed to respond but I can’t help it. It’s like there’s something on the inside,” she pressed her thumbs upwards into his temples, “like water condensed on the inside of my brain and I can’t wipe it away. Ghosts don’t speak,” she said, again, the way she had before, “but something is speaking to me.”

I don’t remember what Matteo’s face did at that moment; all I remember is her hands and the white of his skin as her fingers crept in towards the corners of his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’ll pray if you want me to.”

She said nothing to this, only paused for a long time before releasing him, looking at him with an expression which could have meant anything but which I took as proof that Matteo had said the right thing.

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t I make us some coffee,” and things must have been all right for a while after that because the next thing I remember, Jelka was asleep in her bunk and Matteo was eating at the table as though nothing had happened.

“It’ll be all right now,” I remember Matteo saying, and I didn’t ask him what he was basing that on, although oddly enough when I went over to Jelka’s bunk some time later to tuck the bedclothes up around her shoulders, she said the exact same thing. “It’ll be all right now,” she said, and I bent down to pick up her figurine of St Brendan from where he had fallen on the floor.

The second half of the day went like this.

I was asleep, not in my bunk but on the main deck, which is why I didn’t see all of it. I woke to a crash and to Matteo yelling, and when I came through to the rear chamber he was beating on the lower hatch leading to the escape trunk – through which, I came to understand, Jelka had just disappeared.

Escape trunks are a feature on most submarines and operate as a failsafe in medium-depth waters, where the pressure of the ocean outside is intense but should nonetheless still be survivable if a person is able to exit in the correct diving gear. One climbs through an inner door which is then sealed tightly, before engaging a switch which partially floods this closed-off section without needing to drown the entire craft. As the chamber floods, the air is simultaneously pressurised until it matches the pressure of the ocean against the outer doors, though a bubble of air remains at the top of

the chamber to allow the person inside to continue to breathe. Once the pressure in the chamber is equal to the pressure outside, the outer doors can be opened and one can theoretically swim to safety. Of course, this is all predicated on the pressure outside not being such that the doors opening would result in one being instantly crushed.

I remember we tried the hand-wheel that opened the hatch and found it immovable. I remember we beat on the door, though I don’t remember much of what we said. She had gone out, as Matteo would explain to me only later, while he was in the wash stall, she had been sitting at the table beforehand as if nothing was wrong. I remember the light above the hatch blinking on, to indicate the trunk was being flooded. I remember the clattering on of the internal mechanism that would cause the air in the chamber to change. I remember, too, the brief silence before the sound of the external doors opening, and then the rush of the water – miles and miles of it on top of our heads.

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