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.
The only time I felt something very different to this was when we saw the sea lung. It was a term Leah taught me, that day in fact, grasped my hand and kissed it and told me that “sea lung” was an ancient term once used by sailors to describe the slough of ice that forms on the surface of the ocean when the air changes temperature rapidly enough to freeze water thrown to the surface in choppy weather. The effect created is that of a sort of floating platform—a spread of barely solid water like a vast and drifting jellyfish that sailors once took to be some organ of the sea’s internal structure come loose and straining skyward.
I still remember it: a drifting anomaly of matter, solid and yet not quite so, spread out beyond the doom bar. I remember the sensation of my feet on solid ground and my hand in Leah’s solid grasp and the disconcerting sight of something almost solid farther out. It seemed, from a distance, to be something one could conceivably walk on, though of course in reality if you set foot on it, it would immediately give way to the water beneath. I turned to Leah and felt an odd sort of relief, despite her hand around mine, to find her still with me, to find she had not moved farther up the beach to search for cowrie shells and left me teetering in this uncertain place. The sea lung moved very slightly, leading me to feel that the ground I stood on might be moving, too, might be less substantial than I assumed. I pressed my free hand to my chest and wondered how solid that could really be, how tangible anything about me might really be. Standing on the edge, I could feel it. The chill of the air, aching to become something else.