Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 7

Miri.

There was a cocktail party to celebrate their going away: white wine and Twiglets held in a hotel conference room by the Centre for Marine Inquiry and three men in turquoise suits playing bossa nova music on a platform near the door. I spent much of the night caught up in interminable conversation with a man who specialised in seaweed (specialised in what sense I wasn’t sure; he introduced himself as such and I didn’t care to probe). Which one is yours, he asked at one point, gesturing towards the group stood furthest from the buffet as though asking me to identify my jacket from a pile. Leah was standing at the outer edge of the group, holding a glass and talking in a tone that seemed flushed through with bright authority, though I wasn’t close enough to hear what she was actually saying. Her dress was white and clung to her like sealskin. She didn’t often wear dresses, though when she did it always seemed she chose the ones that looked like something else: cocoons and folded paper, carapaces, wetsuits, wings. Like an insect that mimics something else, at a distance it could often be hard to tell quite what it was that you were looking at. Dressing for formal events, I often thought of her like this: sheathing herself with the intent to deflect. She didn’t much enjoy being looked at. There’s a lot of it about, the seaweed specialist said when I pointed Leah out and explained what we were to each other. My brother’s wife has a sister, you know. Same thing.

The venue was overbright, my mouth raw from hot coffee drunk too quickly sometime that afternoon. A strange atmosphere – something like tension in the walls, in the way people spoke to each other. I felt stripped of too many of my senses, concerned about my rhythm, about the exact small sequence of movements required to put my hand on Leah’s arm. Earlier in the evening we had fought, I forget about what exactly. Certainly not about her going away or any reservations I might have had about the trip. If it were possible now to look back and feel at least secure in the fact that I had predicted something, noted some foul planetary alignment and spoken my fears aloud, that might be of some comfort. As it was, I suspected nothing.

Leah had gone and returned many times before and I had no reason to presume this trip would be any different. What we’d argued about had been something banal, impossible to recall and easy enough to guess at: Leah never wiping the surfaces down unless prompted, Leah never giving me two seconds just to stare into space without asking me what I was thinking.

Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud. It would, perhaps, be easy enough to claim that Leah’s impending departure was what prompted me to pick fights unnecessarily and often, but to be perfectly honest I’m not certain that’s what it was. Often enough it’s occurred to me that fighting is simply something I’m given to, like picking at my cuticles. Whatever it was we fought about, the climax was loud, fraught and quickly forgotten. We had never been very committed fighters – bit and scratched and then grew bored, too quick to appease and to declare ourselves the ones at fault. The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.

That night, the fight sat between us like something sore and satisfying – tender pulp of a fresh-pulled tooth. The sense of something better off removed. I felt good to have scrapped and apologised. Moving around the party, I registered the ache between us and felt grateful, irritable, loved her easily. She brought me a glass of something, pulled my hair from where it had slipped down the neck of my dress, kissed my temple and snorted when a woman from the Centre introduced herself, despite having already spoken to me several times that night. I’m sorry, the woman said when Leah pointed this out to her, one of those nights. It’s all blah blah blah, hi hi hi, bullshit bullshit bullshit. Leah explained that the two of them would be crewmates on the forthcoming expedition, that they had actually worked together before. I nodded and smiled and asked if she was looking forward to the trip. As much as anyone looks forward to a long commute, the woman replied and Leah huffed a laugh, kept an arm around my shoulders. Jelka thinks she’s such a scream, she said to me and the woman shrugged and asked me what I did for work. I remember the way it felt to stand with the two of them, the way people turned to look at them, occasionally interrupting our conversation to shake their hands. It’s like you’re famous, I teased at one point and Jelka made a face. That’s just what these people are like, she said, raising an eyebrow at Leah. Weird. Weird people. Haven’t I

said this since we came to work here? Leah laughed, leant more heavily into my side. You just like being mean about people, she said, there’s nothing wrong with them at all.

At the end of the night, there were toasts, well-wishes for the expedition, joking exhortations not to stay away too long. A woman waxed lyrical on advances in technology, on the research opportunities opened up by the Centre’s commitment to modernity. The atmosphere, though convivial, seemed shot through with something unidentifiable – strange sensation, almost a flavour in the air. During the toasts, I saw several people from the Centre standing with hands clasped in front of them or under their chins, the way you might expect to witness at a church event. I stood with Leah and registered a sense of unzipping, turned my head into her neck and whispered that I was sorry about the fight.

+

I am reading a book I found in a charity shop, flipping through in the hopes of encountering notes made by previous owners, which is one of my favourite things to do. Leah used to buy me books chosen purely on the strength of this, presenting me with copies of Das Kapital and Middlemarch with inscriptions scrawled across their title pages by people I will never meet. For Doreen, without apprehension. For Jack, on his birthday and despite his behaviour. The book I am reading is a textbook on human anatomy, coffee-stained and sticky to the touch, long chunks of text irregularly underlined at points referring to nerve endings and dormant human tissue, as though the previous owner had been using it to build a monster in a shed. “Structurally,” I read aloud to myself, for no other reason than because it is underlined, “there are three classes of sensory receptors: free nerve endings, encapsulated nerve endings, and specialized cells. Free nerve endings are simply free dendrites at the end of a neuron that extend into a tissue. Pain, heat, and cold are all sensed through free nerve endings.”

Leah has been in the bathroom for upwards of two hours, running the taps and listening to her sound machine, which fills the flat with a foaming swell of noise. I haven’t asked her to come out this morning; I rolled over and refused to get up when I heard her at the sink at quarter past six. Only today, I told myself, pulled the pillow over my face and promised I would

get up and help tomorrow. I have yet to get used to the spare room, puddle my clothes on the carpet with the affect of one returned to a childhood home for Christmas and reluctant to do any washing. There are glasses piled on the table beside the bed, sour with night-time water, dust, drowned spiders. I have taken several books from their old spot in the bedroom and use them to hold the door ajar at night. I didn’t take possession of the spare room immediately on Leah’s return but rather moved across in a strop one night when Leah had kept me awake sleepwalking back and forth between bedroom and bathroom, lying down only to get up again. I had intended to stay in the spare room only one night and yet somehow never moved back.

This is something I am, for the moment, not willing to examine too closely.

Sometimes in the dark, I imagine I hear Leah knocking on the wall that separates us, neat little knocks that request not entry but only conversation.

Not real, of course, but something to occupy my mind when my home seems to fill with water and I find myself without the correct materials to plug the gaps.

I have read the majority of the book on anatomy by the time I hear the bath begin to drain, the door open, and Leah padding out and back into the bedroom – wet feet on carpet, door click and then quiet. I get up, the way I always do, and move across the corridor to scrub at the bath with the sponge I keep beneath the sink. I have found that since returning, Leah is prone to ring the bath with a scrim of some curiously viscous material, oddly gritty when rolled between finger and thumb and pinkish in the white bathroom light. When I look at it, I think of tide pools filled with spiny creatures, scrub at it hard before running the taps again to clear the debris, little rockpool remains of something that might be shell or might be skin or might be something else entirely. I squeeze the sponge out in the sink and stow it, wander back to the spare room and think about doing some work.

+

People grow odd when there’s too much sky – they lose the sense of land around them, think themselves into floating away. When my mother was dying I wanted her moved somewhere other than where she was, wished her away from the wide bright vista that spilled into her room every morning, sending her – as I felt at the time – undeniably mad.

The house was built into a cliff-side over the water, offering wide-open views across the tops, from the Dufflin copse that covered the headland to the Davey elms that lined the ridge. The trees around her house were always bent down stomach-ached in the wind, her windows smeared with the bodies of insects that hurled themselves against the glass in search of respite from the weather. She had lived by the sea for some seventeen years, largely alone except for when the nurse became essential. The medication eased involuntary movements, but increasingly there arose a danger of choking, of falling, of not being able to climb the stairs. She refused almost every aspect of my help, the way women will when they’ve been bred to accept little more than the basest civility. Patronising, my mother used to say, when her hairdresser made a joke that veered towards the familiar, when a friend invited her to join her divorcees’ coffee morning – so she’s saying I’m the kind of sad act who needs to hang around with other sad acts and weep into my tea until it’s time to go home? Well no thank you, chum, I’m quite happy on my own. It was very easy to offend my mother. Rather in the way that it’s very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable. Visiting her brought with it the implication that you regarded her as lonely, failing to visit her was an insult all its own. Birthday presents bore about a fifty-fifty chance of misconstrual. My mother: poring over a book on French revolutionary history, pulling a pair of jade earrings from a box, pursing her lips for a second and nodding – I see, as though she quite understands the insult.

Typically, when I visited, we spoke on only very general topics: my hair, the weather, what it was exactly that I did for work again. I loved her hard and at a distance, which made it easier to do, experienced brief but powerful compulsions to hug her and almost never did. She was ill for a long time – a white-knuckled, unbecoming illness that was also, as it happened, frequently passed down from parent to child. I sent my mother flowers and boxes of Jaffa Cakes and visited her less often than was kind. Towards the end of her illness, it became too difficult for her to live on her own and she was moved into full-time hospice care. I remember the day I moved her out – a sky like scalded milk, the smell of something burning. I remember the slip of skin between her knuckles, her white-blonde hair, the heavy jewellery of bones too clear beneath the surface.

But perhaps not this just yet, actually. I’m not sure I have the stomach for it.

+

The sofa again, and Leah talking the way she does – not at me but at some point to the general left of me, soliloquizing at the wall.

“Some people,” she says, “think the granite floor of the Pacific was torn away to make the moon. Darwin’s son, actually. He said that. That when the earth was young it rotated very quickly – it went so fast that part of it flew off into space and the Pacific is the scar it left behind.”

“Cool,” I say, “I’m trying to watch television.”

I sit where I am and don’t look at her. She is wearing a tank top that shows the strange silvered places in her underarms and around the base of her neck and I no longer feel much compelled to comment on this. I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it’s easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.

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