Our Wives Under the Sea (9)

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 apologized. 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 Jelka 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, leaned 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 flavor 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 favorite 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 behavior. 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 upward 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 nighttime 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 before running the taps again to clear the debris, little rock pool 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.