Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 32

Leah.

Here are some things I find quite interesting: 1. The tides are the natural response of water to the gravitational pull of the moon and sun. Just as the moon will rise a certain number of minutes later every day, so high tide in most areas will be correspondingly later also.

The difference between a high and low tide will be at its greatest at full or new moon, as this is the point at which the earth, the sun and the moon are in line and most in concert, with gravity consequently exerting its greatest strength upon the sea.

2. There is no concrete theory as to the origin of the phrase “the seven seas”, although it appears in various ancient Sumerian, Indian and Roman texts, apparently as far back as 2300 BC.

3. There are very possibly more historical artefacts in the ocean than in all of the world’s museums, although more often than not I do wonder whether this is simply something people say, rather than a quantifiable fact.

4. Most of the earth’s natural wonders owe their existence to bodies of water, in some way or other. Niagara Falls and its gorge, for example, date back to the Silurian period when a vast recess of the Arctic sea moved southwards and deposited dolomite beds along what would in time become the Niagara escarpment. Millions of years later, water released from melting glaciers came plunging over the edge of this escarpment, wearing away at the shale beneath the dolomite and creating what you would now recognise as the falls and its gorge.

5. There is actually very little similarity between the chemical make-up of ocean water and river water, with the various compositional elements of each present in almost entirely different proportions. In rivers, for instance, you’re likely to find something like four times as much calcium as chloride, whereas the exact opposite is the case for the sea. This difference is likely to be due to the number of ocean-dwelling animals that use calcium salts to build their shells and exoskeletons. Almost everything that lives in the ocean is also made up of the ocean, to some degree, rather like the way we

inherit mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, and our cells likewise hang around in our mothers’ bloodstreams for years after we’re born.

These are all things that I know, but none of this is really important. I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realise now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.

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Matteo went down into the escape trunk once it had closed again, when the drain valve had expelled the residual water from the compartment. I didn’t go down with him to look. When he came back, his face was odd, unpleasant. His hands were wet, as though he had run them across the still- damp interior of the compartment. I went to fetch a towel from the shower stall and dried his hands for him, and afterwards I made coffee, and afterwards he fell asleep. As he slept, I went out onto the main deck and looked towards the windows, willing something to appear and seeing nothing, the way I always saw nothing, and this briefly felt worse than the fact of what Jelka had done.

Later on, I found St Brendan of Clonfert in my bunk again and I held him up underneath the kitchen lights to look at him, his sculpted beard and the miniature galleon he cradled in one arm. I remembered Jelka leaning back to tell me a story – the trials of St Brendan, recounted over any number of nights on assignment years ago: He meets Judas, one night during his voyaging. It’s a subject you see a lot on stained-glass windows, actually, paintings, things like that. He travels for months on end, encountering demons, sea monsters, every kind of creature you can imagine, and then one night he comes upon a man chained to a pillar of rock, in the middle of the sea – just there, just there in the ocean like this great, tall fang rising from the waves, this thing that shouldn’t be there, a man at the mercy of the elements. So St Brendan calls out to him and he learns that the man is Judas – Judas who gave Jesus up for dead, Judas the failed apostle – and St Brendan learns that Judas is there because the way in which the Lord chooses to show him mercy is to free him from his torments, to free him from hell on Sundays and Holy Days, and cast him adrift on the ocean, where he can at least feel the wind on his face. I always like that part of the story. St

Brendan stays all night, until Judas’ respite from his torments is over, and then he has to go on.

At some point, the sound started up again, only this time, when it did, I heard the voice inside it. I mean by this, of course, that I heard the voice that Jelka had told us about, the voice I hadn’t heard before, the voice she had claimed couldn’t possibly be a ghost.

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