Our Wives Under the Sea (23)

There is something, the therapist says, to be said for letting go of anger. There is something, I tell her in a voice she immediately terms unproductive, to be said for not staying away six months when your operation terms stipulated only three weeks.

It was difficult, in the morning before therapy, to persuade Leah out of the house. She no longer enjoys the process of dressing, finds fabric painful next to her skin, and groans at the prospect of shoes, of walking. On coming home again, I find that a toenail has come clean off inside her walking boots, although she seems unaware of this and moves to sit on the sofa. Without quite knowing what I’m doing, I move over to the sink and spoon a small measure of table salt into a glass of water for Leah to drink.



* * *



I’m uncertain of the time and therefore uncertain of whether or not it’s entirely appropriate for Sam to be here. She’s been knocking for several minutes, apparently, and the neighbors had to let her into the building, though there is no sign of them now and their television just switched from a soap opera to the news.

“I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do.”

She’s brought food, for some reason, wrapped a chicken in tinfoil, producing it from the depths of her bag with an awkward expression. “This looked less strange in my head,” she says. “I just thought it might be nice.”

It’s a bad day, Leah dragging herself about the flat like a grappling hook, catching on the furniture. I take the chicken and ask whether there’s any chance of a rain check.

“She’s a bit under the weather,” I say, like some smiling kidnapper in a horror movie, chatting benignly to the mailman. “I don’t want to make anything worse.”

“I read about this thing,” Sam says, “decompression sickness. I say I read about it, I mean I googled it, which I guess is reading. It affects scuba divers, pilots, astronauts—anyone who works in compressed air. Apparently, nitrogen bubbles form in the blood and the tissues and things when the pressure decreases. When they come up, I mean, from underwater. It causes dizziness, apparently—rashes, fatigue, amnesia, even personality changes. Mad stuff. I don’t know why I’m telling you this really. I just thought—you’ve been saying she’s not been well, she’s been having trouble adjusting, and I just wondered whether it was something that someone could help with? I mean, not that you wouldn’t have thought of that—if it was that. Obviously. I’m not trying to diagnose. It’s just you haven’t told me much and I thought it would be nice to check. Or not nice but, you know, helpful.”

The chicken is hot through the tinfoil and I consider dropping it, consider telling her to fuck off, consider telling her to come in and deal with whatever it is I am failing to deal with.

“I’m sorry,” she says, when I don’t say anything. “I really am the biggest dick on the planet.”

We both look at the chicken between us, juice trickling out of a gap in the tinfoil onto the floor.

Much later, after she’s left and I’ve gone back to doing nothing very much from the region of the sofa, she texts me.

I’m sorry, she says, I shouldn’t have brought you a fucking chicken. I should have brought you a coffee and asked if you wanted to talk.



* * *



“I don’t think this is OK,” I say, on my own, in the bathroom, to nobody. I am scouring around the edge of the bath with a sponge and the scrim that comes away with each stroke is pinkish, less granular than it has been in previous weeks, as though something about it is growing thicker. I try not to get it on my fingers. I’m uncertain of whether or not this matter has any correlation to Leah, to the size or to the shape of her, like a layer removed. She has taken to wearing a large floor-length toweling dressing gown around the flat and it’s difficult to get a clear idea of how she looks underneath it, whether this is a shedding or a breaking down.

Look at this, I want to say, imagine holding the sponge to her face and asking for an explanation. I imagine asking her to tell me what the problem is, I imagine asking for a hug. My Leah wouldn’t be like this, I want to tell her. She wouldn’t be so silent, she wouldn’t leave an inch of herself behind whenever she took a bath.

It is still comforting, of a fashion, to think about my Leah, though such thoughts come attendant on the usual wave of grief that my Leah is not who I have with me now. My Leah was funny and strange and predominantly wore men’s underwear. My Leah chewed hangnails loudly and knew the name of every actor yet never remembered the words to a song. My Leah took me out to the beach near the nuclear power station where she’d used to go walking with her father—haar fog in January, too cold and too early for anyone to be there but us. I took my shoes and socks off and cut my feet to pieces on oyster shells trying to seem willing as I ran down to the water. It was that morning that we saw the sea lung, a squint of ice in my throat like a splinter, like something come loose from the air and lodged in my flesh.

I have always thought the edge of the water is somehow particularly cold—a strange almost-place that seems perceptibly to dip in temperature. It is something Leah has always put down to the shifting of the air between two elements, the chilly liminality of water and earth. Standing at the place where one fades into the other, I have always been sure that I feel it: the sudden confusion. The air drawing taut between one stage and another. Looking out across the water and feeling my feet connected to something more solid than the plunging uncertainty beyond, I have always felt weighted, literal, a tangible creature connected to the earth.