Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 9

Miri.

I stand beneath the spray of the shower and scream for twenty minutes. I’m all right, for the most part. It is only on occasion that I feel the need to scald myself down to the marrow, sugar-scrub my thighs until I bleed in streaks and clog the drain with the expendable parts of me. I have spent the morning on the phone, shuttlecocking back and forth between recorded voices, the majority of whom desire a number I cannot provide and the rest of whom want me to know that my call is important. Around noon, I moved the phone from my ear and smashed it some seventeen times into the wall before dropping the remnants and going to fetch a dustpan. Leah had been sitting on the sofa but looked up at this outburst. For a moment, I imagined a kind of re-emergence, Leah as I knew her stepping out from behind the baffle of this person and asking me what the fuck I had done. This didn’t happen, so after I had cleaned away the pieces of the telephone, I told her I was going to take a shower and that after that I would see about getting a replacement.

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I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster: OK, so, you’re saying he likes long walks, you’re saying she’s a Capricorn, skip to the end. It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.

The thing about Leah as I knew her was that every so often when I was pissed off and sitting on the sofa, she would grab my legs and start to pedal them, chanting tour de France tour de France until I laughed. The thing about Leah was that nine times out of ten she couldn’t bring herself to be unkind about anyone, but then three times a year would say something so

blisteringly cruel about someone we knew that she’d clap both hands to her mouth and turn in a circle as though warding off evil. At a point perhaps six months after we’d first started seeing each other, she read a book in which a pair of lesbians emailed each other meaningful lines of poetry and shortly afterwards she asked if this was the sort of thing we should be doing too. If you ever send me poetry, I texted her, I’ll cut your tits off, and over the course of the next week and a half she emailed me every poem from The Complete Works of Wilfred Owen, signing off every email with a winking face and a heart.

She told me once that when she was young she would imagine herself with scales that grew beneath the membranes of her skin – a flaking layer of silver-blue between her bones and the surface of her body that would prevent her from becoming waterlogged if she were ever to drown. I used to think of her like this, before we fucked or when she rolled over towards me in the night; about hands pulling her down beneath black water, about scales growing over her eyes.

She taught me to swim because I couldn’t, held on to my waist and buoyed me along. If I wanted to teach you the way I was taught, she was always saying, I’d hold you under. We’d go to the lido in the mornings and sit in the cafe afterwards, damp in our clothes and eating bacon sandwiches and Leah fishing ice out of her Diet Coke.

She invited me to a dinner party with her friends from university: a guy called Toby who lived in a basement flat masquerading as a flat-pack furniture emporium with his much more attractive girlfriend, Sam; a couple of lesbian marine biologists called Allegra and Jess who weren’t a couple but had been at some storied prior time; a benignly boring guy called Dan and his loudly bisexual girlfriend Poppy who had backcombed her hair like a televangelist and seemed to leave lipstick marks on literally anything that came within a yard of her mouth. I remember that night the way one remembers pivotal things, although in truth nothing earth-shattering happened. I found I liked Toby and Sam far more than I had expected to; they told jokes that weren’t at one another’s expense, did a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf bit that mostly involved slopping wine about and insulting each other before bursting out laughing. Haven’t I got a bitch of a husband, Sam asked me, winking, vamping up her voice like Liz Taylor. I remember someone put on Edge of Seventeen and Toby danced around the kitchen with Jess, mouthing along to the words. Someone had brought Lillet and

Jess made Vespers in an assortment of plastic tumblers. There was a vegetarian lasagne, pork chops and a bowl of mushrooms cooked in port, none of which went together. At one point, Allegra leaned across the table towards me and asked if I didn’t think Leah looked exactly like Jean Seberg in Breathless. They’d studied on the same course at university and apparently this resemblance was something that all of their classmates had noted. I looked at Leah, currently ferrying cutlery over from the counter – Leah with her short hair and her swimmer’s body, the way she moved about the kitchen. I don’t know who Jean Seberg is, I thought of saying, instead nodding my head and saying, Yes she does actually, wow I’d never thought of that before. Someone upset a glass, which spilled its contents before shattering across the kitchen floor, and I was relieved it hadn’t been me. I like the idea of living in the city, Jess said, but I think it’s just because I hate the idea of being anywhere where I can’t immediately locate any other gay people. Sam opened a bottle of red wine from the Co-op and someone asked if there was anything for dessert. If you say pavlova I’m going to fucking kill myself, Dan said – actually the only thing I remember him saying all night – I don’t know why people think pavlova is an acceptable thing to serve just because you’re having a dinner party. Across the table, Leah winked at me, and I thought in an unwonted flash that I utterly adored her. What’s wrong with pavlova? Toby asked, looking hurt. Someone put on an Ella Fitzgerald compilation. Have you not been with a woman before, Poppy said to me at one point, red-wine mouthed and leaning towards me with the affect of someone who might have designs on my tonsils. Have you? I asked and she burst out laughing. Oh honey, you know how people are like “I’m gay for Jennifer Aniston, I’m gay for Gillian Anderson”, well I’m straight for Dan.

At the end of the night, Allegra came towards me, bearing down in a gesture I couldn’t immediately read and which made me lean back in my chair a little further than I’d intended. I haven’t come to embrace you, she said, you’re just sitting on my jacket. I turned red and fished the jacket out from under me, handed it over without managing to find something intelligent to say.

You’ll have to come back, Sam said, hugging me tight and whispering something which I think was intended to be conspiratorial but, since she was rather drunk, was unfortunately only incoherent. Walking to the bus stop together, I told Leah what Poppy had said and she snorted, leaning into

my side with a force that knocked me off balance and which I found I rather enjoyed. Oh yeah, she said, grabbing my hand and dragging me into a run as the bus rounded the corner, Poppy’s all right, she just likes people to know.

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“I still don’t understand,” Carmen says, “why you need a landline.”

We’re waiting in line at Argos and I can’t be bothered to explain to her that I don’t need a landline at all, I just need an excuse to be out of the flat.

“It came with the place,” I tell her, “you know how it goes. You break it, you bought it.”

“Euripides Eumenides,” she replies, and then says it again when I pretend not to hear her. Carmen read Classical Civilisation when we were at university and is at constant pains to remind everyone of this, despite the fact that when pressed she could tell you very little, these days, of what it was she actually studied. Like everyone, most of Carmen’s higher education seems to have leaked out of her around her mid to late twenties, replaced in the main by methods of treating black mould, by passwords and roast chicken recipes and the symptoms of cervical cancer and thrush.

Once we’ve bought a new phone, we walk down towards the canal and Carmen has to stop several times to rattle a stone around in the toe of her shoe. Why don’t you take the shoe off, I want to say to her, and take the stone out, but my head feels sickish and heavy with the promise of oncoming weather, and anyway what difference would it make.

“When I broke up with Tom,” Carmen says, “it was hard because for so long afterwards I felt like I was still in it, d’you know what I mean? Like he’d moved on and I was still in this relationship all by myself.”

“When you broke up with Tom,” I say, “you threw all his clothes out onto the street.” Carmen looks at me like this is hardly the point.

“What I’m saying is, the pain is in the aftermath, more than it is the break.”

“Well we haven’t broken up,” I say. “But thank you.”

Carmen is wearing her glasses today and they give her eyes a near- telescopic exaggeration. We walk along the towpath sandwiched between the canal and the fenced-off gardens of the houses that back onto the water and she asks me what it is I’m worrying about.

“She’s been away so often before,” she says to me without waiting for an answer but in the kind of voice that strains to make it clear she’s open to unpleasant confidences, “even before this time, I mean. I know it’s for her job or whatever but I can imagine it’s frustrating. It’s hard to navigate a relationship like that – everything always working to her schedule.

Especially this time, with how long it took, with how long it was supposed to take. The world doesn’t revolve around her, around when she decides to be home, you know?”

OK, I think of saying, but that’s not the point. The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all.

Of course, I haven’t actually given Carmen many details, which does make things harder to explain. Carmen might know that Leah was only supposed to be away for three weeks but she doesn’t know how Leah has been behaving, for the most part I think because I’m too exhausted by the prospect of her comparing it to something that Tom used to do. I remember when I was with Tom and he’d play Red Dead Redemption all day and eat Pringles and not put his shoes away, so believe me I know what you’re going through. This, I suppose, is unfair of me. Carmen’s my friend – my best friend, I sometimes worry – and I’m supposed to want to share my miseries with her, to grasp her hand and confide all the blandly conventional problems that pepper my day as much as anybody else’s. I do love her, I think in the main for her familiarity, for the way she demands to see me where other old friendships have fallen by the wayside, the victims of mutual inattention. She is a good friend, in as much as she is a present friend, or at least a friend who likes to make plans. And yet too often I find myself stoppered by unwillingness to admit to basic frustrations, to look at her across a coffee shop table and respond to her humdrum admissions with a straight me too. Carmen talks about her bad dates, about arguing with her brothers, about hating her next-door neighbours for always allowing their children to kick balls against the dividing wall, and I listen and I nod and I give her advice and I tell her things are fine with me, that I really can’t complain. I suppose, in the main, this comes from a wish to appear in control, if not to say superior. I hate and have always hated her insistence on comparing Tom to Leah, and perhaps I have allowed this feeling to bleed too freely into everything else, allowed myself to clam up around the

possibility of shared experience. Really, no one should feel as paralysingly superior as I do around Carmen, around a lot of people, especially given that in many ways I have little enough to back this feeling up. It’s a failing, and one I am aware of. Carmen is patient with me, I think, or perhaps she simply doesn’t recognise my behaviour as rudeness, accepts my role as a good listener as synonymous with being a good friend. Leah always used to say that I was kind, but I’ve never felt at all convinced of that. You’re interested in people, she would say, you like to hear about their siblings, and I would tell her I wasn’t sure that was the same as being kind to them.

“Miri?”

I realise I have not spoken in several minutes and Carmen is looking at me with a keenness which is at least forty per cent real, though unquestionably assisted by the magnification of her eyes behind her glasses.

“It’s all OK,” I say vaguely, hoping this answers whatever question it is I have been asked, “I’m just tired, you know?”

This, at least, is something true, something I feel I can give to her. Over the past few weeks, exhaustion has settled in the arches of my feet, in the small of my back.

“I hear you,” Carmen says, reaching out to touch my arm and then changing the subject to some issue she’s been having in getting her passport renewed. The day has turned suddenly nauseous – smell of sulphur from a backed-up drain – and I look towards the canal and wish this city were not veined with water like the lines on the back of a hand.

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