Our Wives Under the Sea (15)

We stood in the rear chamber for a long time, just looking around, unsure of what it was we were hoping to see. After a while, I registered a vague rumbling, a gentle sense of alteration in the floor beneath me, which I couldn’t identify until Matteo pointed out that we were slowing down.





MIRI


I typically think it’s easiest to feel warm when a part of us is cold. I lie in bed with my feet uncovered and try to feel this, chase a sensation of something up my leg and lose it. It’s getting on for autumn and Leah has been back nearly two months—thin colorless light in the morning and spiders all over the house. The neighbors play American football on the television at odd hours and Leah runs the taps and I think about my mother more than is usual.

The morning before her funeral, I’d taken six Nurofen together with a spill of cooking brandy and the combination of the two had set off a curious Doppler effect whereby sensations seemed to strike me out of order: the smell of food before I tasted it, the feeling of my glass in my hand long after the realization that I’d dropped it. The reception was held at my aunt’s, as my mother’s house was too far out to be practical, not to mention in partial disrepair. I remember very little of the event, though I know that at one point Leah took me outside onto the back porch and told me we ought to stay there a while. I’m sorry, I remember saying, although in response to what I’m not sure, sometimes I just say these things. I don’t really know why. I remember standing where I was and the light hitting me in pieces, first my face and then the back of my hands, my chest, the underside of my jaw. I remember the cold, and looking down into my aunt’s garden and then across a banked slate wall into the garden beyond, where a man was burning waste with a can of kerosene held at shoulder height. I remember staring down into the smoke, an odd, druidic thing, flames stark in the white afternoon. The man had piled leaves and cardboard boxes, barrels rotted out and green with mildew—a thick-bodied bulk of a bonfire, tapering up into a spindle that smoked and spat out ash. It had been easy to imagine, though I knew it wasn’t wise, a human form at the center of this conflagration. Quite easy to imagine the corporeal something taking shape among the ashes—barrels blurring into rounded shoulders, the toothless brooms and buckets shucking off their clarity and re-forming as the possibilities of necks and heads and melting human faces. I want to go inside now, I remember saying to Leah but she shook her head and said we could go around the front of the house and stand there for a while, if the bonfire smell was bothering me.



* * *



Having fitted the new phone, I have no choice but to use it. I program the Centre into the handset’s automated dial function, so that now I only have to key in a single digit to kick-start the day. In the mornings, I slice thin-skinned Meyer lemons into water and pretend a breakfast for Leah from only this, place the glass on a tray and hope the offering doesn’t come across as sarcastic. Cold water with lemon is one of the few things I have found she will reliably drink, though occasionally I have caught her spooning table salt into the mixture and have taken the glass away. When she eats anything at all, she eats salted things, which makes me worry, appears to crave olives and anchovies, licks the blood that seeps from her gums in the early mornings. Some days, I imagine her lunatic on salt water, vainly try to slip oranges into her diet, crush raspberries with the flat of a knife and imagine sneaking them into her toothpaste. When I was a child, my mother taught me about scurvy, and ever since I have pictured it leering out at me with the prevalence of the common cold. I picture Leah’s symptoms, convince myself that her bleedings and sheddings might all be put down to a simple lack of vitamin C. Early symptoms, I read from my phone screen, hidden under the covers like a teenager texting a crush, include weakness and tiredness, sore hands, arms, and legs. Without treatment, decreased red blood cells, gum disease, changes to hair, and bleeding from the skin may occur. I look at Leah and try to imagine the conversation: me leaning across the table to tell her, Darling, I think you have scurvy, and Leah nodding her head, looking up and saying, Yes I think I do, thank goodness you pointed it out.

I am falling behind on my work, find it difficult to sit without sweating, without standing up again, convinced there is something on my chair. Overtired, sweat crescents yellowing the underarms of shirts. My inbox is scrambled over with inquiries, clients scuttling to express their displeasure as fast as they can recognize a crisis. Please send reassurance that you have started work on the grant proposal, one client has started messaging upward of three times a day. I eat canned ravioli and try to remember what it meant to be concerned about an unpleasant tone in an email. Somewhere in the flat, Leah is running the taps again.

We have a fight about this, several mornings later; Leah sitting at the kitchen table and looking at the toast I’ve set before her, at the orange I’ve placed beside it, at the kiwi fruit and raspberry jam.

“No, I don’t want this,” she says, and so I tell her I don’t want to pay my half of the water bill this month, and we go on from there. She behaves like a houseguest, I tell her, like a person who’s blown into my home and sat down like she belongs. She says she doesn’t know what to say to me. Say anything, I want to scream, say I knew what I signed up for when you went away, say you told me the deal, that you gave me all the information. Say it was my choice, to be OK with it, that it’s not your fault you went away for so long. Say it was my choice to move into the spare room. Say it’s my choice to come into the bathroom every morning when I know what it is that I’ll find.