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 because 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.

“I’m still on hold,” I say, for no reason really other than to have said it. She looks at me, slow blink. In case you were wondering, I think of adding and don’t.

At around six this morning, Leah woke and immediately had a nosebleed. I’ve been sleeping in the room across the hall and so didn’t actually see this but I’ve grown accustomed to her patterns, even at this state of half remove. I’d been ready for it, had actually woken at six fifteen, in time to pass her a flannel in the bathroom, run the taps, and tell her not to put her head back. You could set your watch to it these days—red mouth in the morning, red chin, red spill into the sink.

She says, when she says anything, that it’s something to do with the pressure, the sudden lack thereof. Her blood retains no sense of the boundaries it once recognized and so now just flows wherever it wants. Sometimes she bleeds from the teeth, or rather, not from the teeth but from the gums around the teeth, which amounts to the same thing when you’re looking at her. In the days immediately following her return, blood would rise unheeded through her pores, so that sometimes I’d come in and find her pincushioned, dotted red, as if pricked with needles. Iron maiden, she’d said the first time and tried to laugh—strained sound, like the wringing out of something wet.

I found the whole thing terrifying for the first few days; panicked when she bled, jammed my shoes on and demanded she let me take her to A&E. Only by degrees did I realize she had been led to expect this, or at least to expect something similar. She pushed my hands from her face in a manner that seemed almost practiced and told me it wasn’t a problem. You can’t go out in those anyway, Miri, she said, looking down at the shoes I’d forced on without looking, they don’t match.

On more than one occasion, I begged her to let me help her and met only resistance. You don’t have to worry, she would say, and then go on bleeding, and the obviousness of the problem combined with the refusal of help left me at first frustrated and subsequently rather resentful. It went on too long and too helplessly. The way that anyone who sneezes more than four times abruptly loses the sympathy of an audience, so it was with me and Leah. Can’t you stop it, I’d think about asking her, you’re ruining the sheets. Some mornings, I’d want to accuse her of doing it on purpose and then I’d look away, set my mouth into another shape, and pour the coffee, think about going for a run.

In the bathroom, just this morning, I passed her the flannel and watched her smear her hands with Ivory soap. My mother used to say that washing your face with soap was as bad as leaving it dirty, something about harsh chemicals, the stripping down of natural oils. Everything with my mother was always harsh chemicals—she filled a binder with clippings on the cancer risks of various meat products, sent me books on UV rays and home invasions, a pamphlet on how to build a fire ladder out of sheets.

Having washed her face, Leah stepped back from the sink. She patted her face with the backs of her hands, then the palms, then abruptly curled one finger into the lid beneath her left eye, then the right, pulling down to inspect the oily sockets of her eyeballs. In the mirror, her skin had the look of something dredged from water. The yellow eyes of someone drowned, of someone found floating on her back. Be all right, she said, be all right in a minute.

Now, in the kitchen: a jumbling noise on the phone. A sudden click and another robotic voice, slightly different from the one that has been repeating that my call is important, comes on the line to demand that I enter Leah’s personnel number, followed by her rank number, transfer number, and the statement number she should have received from the Centre on final demob. The voice goes on to explain that if I fail to enter these numbers in the exact order required, I will be cut off. I do not, as I have been attempting to get through and explain, have Leah’s personnel number—the whole purpose of my calling the Centre has been to try to get hold of it. I enter all the details required, aside from the personnel number, at which point a third recorded voice comes on the line and proceeds to scold me in a tight robotic jabber, noting as a helpful afterthought that my call will now be terminated.