Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

Author:Julia Armfield [Armfield, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

Miri.

I run beside the canal in the early mornings and afterwards I usually go to the cafe near the municipal leisure centre, where I drink two coffees in quick succession before heading back. There is a man at the cafe by the leisure centre who has on at least three occasions written his number down on my receipt when I’ve paid for my coffees. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps doing this when at no point has it yielded results – perhaps he believes that as yet I simply haven’t noticed, perhaps he’s just a sexual predator – but either way, he does it again this morning as I hand over my change. I am briefly annoyed at the whole situation, briefly alarmed, and then it occurs to me that all I need to do is tell him I have a girlfriend (which is not true, I have a wife, but people seem to find that cute in a way they don’t when I just say girlfriend). I look at him for several seconds, holding my coffees in both hands and not saying anything, and then I say to him, abruptly, “Please stop doing that,” and leave without taking my receipt.

This happened once, a long time ago: Leah and I on an early date and a man in between us at the bar, forcing a leg between our stools with the forward-thrusting motion of someone preventing an elevator door from closing. Are you sisters, he had said, and she told him yes and then kissed my open mouth.

+

Leah is in the bathroom, the sound machine playing, the phone ringing. My bad tooth is aching, though I’m doing my best to ignore it. Our quarterly water bill is in the region of twelve times above average and I have no clear idea of how we’re going to pay it.

I’ve been going through the papers from Leah’s transfer to the Centre, trying to make sense of a number of things I thought I already knew. I am unsure, for instance, of exactly when it was that Leah’s job became obscure to me, when I stopped knowing what it was she was doing on a daily basis while still assuming I did. I am thinking, again, about the going-away party, about the people there I didn’t know. I am thinking about a man Leah described in joking terms as “The Boss”, as though she were referring to Bruce Springsteen, pointing out a man in pressed jeans and a sports jacket who didn’t make a speech when others did, but afterwards ate a total of twelve cocktail sausages from the buffet table and apologised when he jostled me en route to the salad bowl. I remember him the way I think you often remember unimportant things: too clearly and in too much detail. The way your memory will relinquish important things yet conjure the bright sense of a boring landscape or a throwaway conversation, so I remember the dark upward sweep of his hair and the etched insignia on his ring, like the lines of an eye.

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