Our Wives Under the Sea (5)

We were still descending when the system went out and already too deep to evacuate. Our CO2 scrubbers, for whatever reason, appeared to have remained intact, but with no way to control the ballast tanks, there was nothing we could do but continue to drop.





MIRI


I hold the phone to my collarbone and yell for Leah. I don’t typically like to raise my voice, but the sound of running water has taken on the ubiquity of traffic in our flat and I have to shout sometimes just to make myself heard. The woman on the line has asked to speak to the authorized personnel directly, as she cannot deal with me on Leah’s behalf.

“But I have all the numbers,” I say, “you know the reason I’m calling—why can’t you just deal with me?”

It has taken six separate attempts on six different days to get through to a real person, and the elation of this has unfortunately led me to overestimate the extent to which a real person is actually going to be able to help.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the real person says now. “I can only speak about company matters with the authorized personnel.”

I open my mouth, close it, try again.

“But she’s my wife. I have all her details. What if I just pretended to be her. Would that be OK?” The real person makes an awkward little noise.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” The sound of running water continues. I consider shouting for Leah again and don’t.

“I could put the phone down and call you back and do a different voice, if you liked? I’ll say it’s Leah from the start, that way you won’t get into trouble. You just tell anyone who asks that I’m her and it’s fine, I swear.”

There is a curious noise on the line—I can’t tell if the real person is sighing or crying or eating a sandwich.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Miri.”



* * *



A thin needling rain, like someone is throwing pins from the rooftops. On the sofa, Leah pours cherry Coke into a plastic glass patterned with hamburgers and then does not drink it, glides her fingers down the skin of her left arm. She is silvered over, oystered at her elbow creases and around the neck. This is something I noticed when she first came back and wasn’t sure how to bring up, though she pointed it out herself before too long: Look at this, and this, they told us to expect some stuff like that.

It’ll go away, she says, not so much to me as to herself. Just another reaction, a thing to be dismissed, like the bleeding, like the way she sometimes sleepwalks to the bathroom and holds her head under the water, having first filled the bath to a point just shy of overflowing. She doesn’t know that the first time I noticed the change in her skin, I was so alarmed that I called 111 and hung on the line for thirty minutes, only for someone to finally come on and ask if I’d ever heard of impetigo.

“You don’t need to look at me like that,” she says now, still moving her fingers along the skin of her arm. “I can feel your look,” she adds when I open my mouth to say something. “But you don’t need to. It’s OK.”

“I’m not looking at you in any special way,” I say, in a voice that aims for a joke and misses. She gives me a sideways look, starts to smile and then doesn’t entirely.

“OK,” she says. “So you’re not looking at me. My mistake.”

The conversation, brief as it is, is a welcome break in the silence, though the silence resettles shortly afterward, somehow heavier than before. I have found myself trying to escape this new lack between us, grown conscientious about my running, lingering hours in the supermarket, pointlessly deliberating over brands of detergent, scrutinizing tubs of yogurt and butter and butter substitute. Occasionally, I will tell Leah I’m leaving the flat to complete a specific activity and instead simply walk to some fixed point and stand there until I get bored enough to return. I don’t think I’m even particularly clever about this. You said you were going to the gym, she’ll say to me sometimes, but you didn’t take any kit with you. I’ll tell her she misheard me and she will accept it, going back to staring at a point on her inner arm or to running the taps in the kitchen until the sink fills up.

In the supermarket, then. Carmen squints at cans of chopped tomatoes, raises and lowers packets of differently shaped pasta. She has left her glasses in the office and can’t see the number of fingers I’m holding up if I stand more than a foot away.

“What’s this?” she asks, holding up a parcel of orecchiette. “Is this the one that looks like ears?”

We’ve been friends since university but her eyesight only really started to deteriorate over the past year or so. It went downhill so suddenly that she went to the doctor about it, make-believing brain tumors, gray shadows on X-ray printouts of her skull. This has always been the chief point over which our friendship has endured—the hypochondriac back and forth of two women with too much time on their hands. We’ve talked each other down from any number of ledges—from Carmen’s meningitis panic to my generalized fears around cancer and Alzheimer’s and diseases I’m concerned I might catch or inherit—though when Carmen’s eyesight started failing I was too busy to help her as much as I should have, and I feel that between us a little now.

“So how’s it going?” she asks later, the two of us folded over coffees, our hair identically greased by the rain and fizzing out around our temples. The café is one we visit often, and familiarity has become a key concern for Carmen, just lately. I watch her fumble her way to the counter and back, her long hands running over the Perspex cake cabinet, twin smears that will need to be wiped away.