Our Wives Under the Sea
Julia Armfield
For Rosalie, on dry land and elsewhere
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
—Moby-Dick ELLEN BRODY: There’s a clinical name for it, isn’t there?
MARTIN BRODY: Drowning.
—Jaws
Sunlight Zone
MIRI
The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness. Unstill is the word Leah uses, tilting her head to the side as if in answer to some sound, though the evening is quiet—dry hum of the road outside the window and little to draw the ear besides.
“The ocean is unstill,” she says, “farther down than you think. All the way to the bottom, things move.” She seldom talks this much or this fluently, legs crossed and gaze toward the window, the familiar slant of her expression, all her features slipping gently to the left. I’m aware, by now, that this kind of talk isn’t really meant for me, but is simply a conversation she can’t help having, the result of questions asked in some closed-off part of her head. “What you have to understand,” she says, “is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.”
We are sitting on the sofa, the way we have taken to doing in the evenings since she returned last month. In the old days, we used to sit on the rug, elbows up on the coffee table like teenagers, eating dinner with the television on. These days she rarely eats dinner, so I prefer to eat mine standing up in the kitchen to save on mess. Sometimes, she will watch me eat and when she does this I chew everything to a paste and stick my tongue out until she stops looking. Most nights, we don’t talk—silence like a spine through the new shape our relationship has taken. Most nights, after eating, we sit together on the sofa until midnight, then I tell her I’m going to bed.
When she talks, she always talks about the ocean, folds her hands together and speaks as if declaiming to an audience quite separate from me. “There are no empty places,” she says, and I imagine her glancing at cue cards, clicking through slides. “However deep you go,” she says, “however far down, you’ll find something there.”
I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.
* * *
It’s three o’clock and I’m tilting the phone receiver away from my ear to avoid the hold music, which appears to be Beethoven’s Battle Symphony played on a toy synthesizer. The kitchen is a junkyard of coffee cups, drain clogged with tea bags. One of the lights above the cooker hood is flickering—muscle pulse in the corner of my vision like a ticking eyelid. On the counter, the following: an orange, half-peeled; two knives; a plastic bag of bread. I haven’t yet made lunch, pulled various items out at random about an hour ago before finding myself unequal to the task. Stuck to the fridge, a sheet of paper with the shopping list scratched down in purple Biro: milk, cheese, sleep aid (any), sticking plasters, table salt.
The hold music buzzes on and I probe around the inside of my mouth with my tongue, feel the gaps in my teeth the way I tend to do when I’m waiting for something. One of my molars is cracked, an issue I have been ignoring for some weeks be cause it doesn’t seem to be hurting enough to warrant a fuss. I draw my tongue up over the tooth, feel the rise and split where the break runs along the enamel. Don’t do that, I imagine Leah saying—the way she used to do when I rolled my tongue between my teeth in public—you look like you forgot to floss. Most nights, though I don’t mention this to Leah, I dream in molars spat across the bedclothes, hold my hands beneath my chin to catch the teeth that drop like water from the lip of a tap. The general tempo of these dreams is always similar: the grasp and pull at something loose, the pause, the sudden fountain spill. Each time, the error seems to lie in the fact that I shouldn’t have touched my fingers to the molar on the bottom left-hand side. Each time: the wrong switch flicked, my curiosity rewarded by a rain of teeth, too many to catch between two palms and force into my mouth again, my gums a bald pink line beneath my lip.
The line sputters, a recorded voice interrupting the music to tell me for the fiftieth time that my call is important, before the Battle Symphony recommences with what feels like renewed hostility. Across the room, Leah sits with her hands around a mug of water—a curious warming gesture, the way one might cradle a cup of tea. She hasn’t drunk anything hot since returning, asked me not to make my coffee too near her, since the smell from the percolator now seems to make her gag. Not to worry, she has said more than once, it’ll sort itself. These things usually do. Sensations are difficult still—touch painful, smells and tastes like small invasions. I’ve seen Leah touch her tongue to the edge of a piece of toast and retract it, face screwed up as if in response to something tart.