The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

  Once I was caught opening one of the magazines. Mother had left them in their bags on the old reception desk, distracted momentarily by some domestic emergency. Sky saw me reading it and screamed with true fear for me, bringing the others running. Though I didn’t make it past the second page I was still required to wear latex gloves for the rest of that week in case I contaminated anyone, and I was banned from dinner for the rest of the week too. My sisters brought me discs of sweatily buttered bread and dry fish that they had hidden in their laps. Grace accompanied her offerings with strict words about how stupid I was; Sky brought hers with sincere guilt about raising the alarm. I forgave her easily because the scream was proof of concern, of love, the same way she would have screamed had a viper been raising its head, fangs bared towards my outstretched hand.

  Grace, Lia, Sky

  A piece of paper pinned to the corkboard in reception is headed simply Symptoms.

  Withering of the skin.

  Wasting and hunching of the body.

  Unexplained bleeding from anywhere, but particularly eyes, ears, fingernails.

  Hair loss.

  Exhaustion.

  Trouble breathing. Tightness of the throat, the chest.

  Agitation.

  Hallucinations.

  Total collapse.

  There is no hiding the damage the outside world can do, if a woman hasn’t been taking the right precautions to guard her body. Mother could always tell from the first moment a new woman arrived how ill she was, whether she was beyond saving, and she would shake her head at the futile hostility of the world, the impossibility of it all. It wasn’t their fault that their bodies were unequipped.

  ‘We have young girls,’ she would tell the newcomer from behind a muffler, the muslin bunched over her lips. Perhaps the woman was just agitated. A nosebleed might have afflicted her on the crossing, blurred drops of blood still lingering at her sleeve from where she had dragged it across her face. ‘Please wait down on the beach, just to be sure.’

  Sometimes all they needed was a few hours of the new air to improve. From the window as they rested on the shore, heads pillowed on their luggage, we could almost see their strength replenishing, the way it did with King when he returned to our land. We watched their shoulders straighten, the shaking of their bodies subside.

  Grace

  There is a violence to our eulogizing. We are making something of you that you never consented to. We are turning you into something else: a man finally overcome by the world. I know you would not want to be remembered that way. Thinking about you is akin to dragging your bloated ghost to shore. And why would we want to keep bringing that back?

  Lia creates a shrine. Her hands do not shake as she arranges photographs and cowrie shells, even as her eyes leak. I let her have the comfort and do not comment, just look at the tattered photo that is you and Mother on your wedding day, a flower crown, the white suit when it was newly purchased.

  Shrines are banned, Mother writes in yellow chalk one morning, the chalkboard propped near the breakfast table so we can’t ignore it. Stay present. Stay with me.

  These days I am thinking a lot about your approach to life-guarding, your declarations that you would fell anyone if necessary, in the name of love. And even during the bleaker nights I can hear how the baby inside me sings, or seems to. Popping and amniotic, like the calls of dolphins.

  Lia

  On a hushed evening following a hushed day, Mother takes us into the ballroom and leads Grace on to the small stage at its far end. ‘Your sister is to have a baby,’ she tells us. We applaud and march our feet on the floor to drum up noise, but we make too much of it and Grace winces.

  ‘Where is it from?’ Sky asks.

  ‘Grace asked the sea for one,’ Mother tells us, her hand hovering at the end of Grace’s braid. ‘She has been lucky.’

  I stare at Grace until she meets my gaze. How dare she.

  Later I climb over the rail of the terrace and pull myself up to sit on the roof itself, the edges of the slate tiles digging into my thighs, and I watch the dark sea. I ask and ask, but there is no answering call inside my own body. The waves remain the same, the thinning evening air does not stir. It is possible I want it too much, the way I want everything.

  When we were younger, Grace and I played a game called Dying. It involved folding your body over and wadding your eyes up tight. It involved shaking. I was always the one who died – of course I was – so I lay in front of my sister as she threw salt on me.

  ‘We told you not to go out in the world!’ Grace would shout in an imitation of Mother. ‘What did you wear?’

  Just my body. Just the gown.

  ‘You’re shrinking now,’ said Grace, strictly. ‘Your lungs have burned up. Your eyes are drying out. Soon you will disappear.’

  Please.

  When I walk past Grace’s room later on, I see her lying unmoving on her stomach, the soles of her feet filthy against white linen. I think for a second that she is dead, but when I call she kicks her feet listlessly, assures me that she is very much alive.

  Grace, Lia, Sky

  Time without our father becomes stretching, soft. Sugar melted in the pan and drawn into something new before hardening, contracting. There are many days which bleed into each other. The sun in the sky seems closer to us all the time.

  Incidences of joy like playing hide-and-seek together, on a rare raining day. Water rinsing the walls of the house, pouring to the drains. From the tall glass doors of the ballroom we watch it pooling on the ground, and filling empty burnt-earth pots that once held small, fragrant trees. Then we move to conceal our bodies. We discover each other wrapped in a velvet curtain, in the old industrial oven, unused for decades, petrified grease caking its ceiling, or behind furniture or doors, waiting patiently for a long time.

  Sometimes we become mildly sick, headaches or stomach cramps, and if one sister is sick it’s like we are all sick, so we rally our efforts into healing. The afflicted sister lies on the bed and we brush her hair, administer the small white pills that King brought back encased in cardboard and bubbles of foil. When the sister is better, we cheer. Look what we did, we tell each other. Look how we fixed you.

  Grace

  I go down to the forest whenever I can shake my sisters off. The only place I can find a degree of calm is among the sightless trees, their shadow.

  Slipping from the house and across the lawn, I move stealthily through the ornamental beds, past rocks marking out the borders of vegetable patches we no longer maintain. The green beans stopped growing years ago, but the tomatoes, nearer the house, have taken on a life of their own. Their fruit falls and attracts stinging insects. A jam of dirt, overblown globes and seeds.

  Down at the end of the garden, I pull up my skirt and climb over the low wall. This is where the forest begins. There is no birdsong, only the dry-skin noise of the leaves. On the other side, I run my hands along the stones of the wall until I find the right one and pull it out. Matches, wrapped in cloth to keep them from damp. A small lighter that belonged to you, yellow plastic. I try it out experimentally on a pile of dead twigs, the liquid inside low, but it still works. For a second I remember how your hands looked moving the flint, the flame rising up, and something passes over me. I do not cry. Fuck you, I mouth to the air instead. It makes no reply. Where is your ghost when I need it?

  There is barbed wire in the forest, deeper than I dare to go. Should anyone arrive on the island, it serves the same purpose as the buoys out in the bay, marking out a clear message. Do not enter. Viewed from another angle, Do not leave. I imagine the smoke drifting over it, a defiant signal. But I am too far away, and I stamp it out within minutes. I wonder what it would be like to set the whole forest on fire, to see everything curl up and blacken. But this small blaze is as much as I would dare to do. There is no real danger. The woods will always have the coolness of shadow, dark and wet underneath the boughs.

  Beside the pool in the afternoon, Lia will not stop talking
at me about you, the word remember repeated on the wind like an incantation. She idolized you.

  The desperation in her voice is unbearable. Eventually I slap her and she almost falls, then comes back up towards me with her hands ready to fight. I lean back.

  ‘I’m not going to hit you!’ she tells me, horrified at the idea, despite her automatic fists. They are just a reflex. ‘Not in your condition!’

  I go inside to sit in the cool alone, but I slam the door behind me too hard and the ancient chandelier falls from the ceiling in a plume of plaster dust. Glass ripples out over the floor. I scream and scream until everyone else is standing around me, staring, too dumbfounded by my reaction even to run for muslin to stop up my mouth.

  ‘This house is going to kill us,’ I tell Mother. She has no qualms about hitting me in the face then, condition or no condition.

  Lia

  Two dark purple fingertips on my left hand, from being submerged in ice. The dead big toenail of my left foot also.

  The comma from a paperclip I held in the flame of a candle, pressed against the baby skin of my inner upper arm.

  The starburst at the back of my neck where Mother once sewed my skin into the fainting sack. Two stitches. She did it on purpose, and yet somehow the blood when I ripped them out was my fault. I want to die every time I think about it.

  Bald patch near the nape of my neck, size and smoothness of a thumbnail. That wound belongs to King, who pulled the hair out with his own hands.

  Large red stain on my right thumb. This is the thumb I press to the hob when I am cooking. It helps.

  Water mark on my flank. Mother poured the hot kettle on me. I screamed bloody murder. I punched her square in the jaw and she just grinned, a pink-tinged grin, because I had caught her lip against the teeth but caused no mortal harm.

  Grace, Lia, Sky

  When the damaged women saw King for the first time they often recoiled. Man. But our mother explained that here was a man who had renounced the world. Here was a man who recognized the dangers. Here was a man who put his women and children first.

  Away from the toxins, a man’s body could swell and develop unchecked. That was why King was so tall. We thought the hair on the top of his head might grow back too, but it turned out that was a damage that could not be reversed.

  ‘What are men beyond the border like?’ we asked him.

  Eventually he gave us an answer. He spoke of perverse appetites. He spoke of bodies grown strong despite the toxic air, men like trees grown against the wind, knotted, warped. Some thrived on the poison; it was like their bodies had learned not just to overcome, but to need it. He spoke of danger. Men like that tracked around the toxins carelessly. You would feel the effect in their breath, the touch of their hands. Men like that would break your arm without thinking. ‘Like this,’ he had said, demonstrating on us, clasping both fists around each of our forearms in turn and making as if to snap. We felt the bone threaten to give, stayed calm. ‘And worse.’

  Grace

  The season turns about five months after your death and there comes a higher tide than usual, water pressing up against the coastline. An annual occasion. The sea rushes forward to cover the jetty, engulfing the shore and swelling right up to the pebbles on the shingle line. Mother consulted the almanac a week ago so we knew it was coming. We gather in the lounge to watch the swollen moon from the window. The light feels purifying.

  I think about the things that have washed up to us on previous high tides. Squat catfish the size of my arm, rotten as a blister. Jellyfish full of poison. Other things that we were not allowed to see, things that meant the beach needed to be cordoned off, our curtains closed. Tides dredge and bring forth. The world comes nearer to us.

  ‘Careful, girls,’ Mother instructs us. She is letting us watch for now because it is beautiful. Because of the light’s quality. When I glance to my side I see Lia’s eyes wet with tears. Sky’s eyes are closed, and I close my own eyes too, picture my heart flipping in my chest. Underneath that I picture the baby, lying still. Even through closed glass the air smells of pine and salt. It almost burns.

  The next day comes house arrest as Mother patrols the shore. She puts on King’s white linen trousers, the fabric falling over her feet, a muslin veil hanging down from a wide-brimmed hat to cover her face. It looks elegant. She will check the tideline, the shallows, even the edge of the forest, though the water never rises that far. She locks the front door behind us. We lag in reception, watching her pass through the door, watching the handle turn, the click of the key. The world outside seems to glow with a new and clean light.

  We go to the lounge. Mother has let down the curtains but not the blackout blinds that cut out sunlight completely. Lia goes to the window, but Sky calls out ‘No!’ with such fear that she doesn’t have the heart to push it. Instead she comes back and kneels on all fours so that our little sister can ride her like an animal, even though Sky is really too big for that now. They move mournfully around the room, Lia dipping her head so her dark hair reaches the floor, gathers there like a rope being let down. In the end they lie on the carpet and stick their limbs into the air, moving them around.

  ‘Woodlouse,’ Lia says as she watches the movement of her arms and legs, slow, controlled. It was our old game. ‘We are stuck and cannot get up.’

  Soon Mother comes back to tell us we are safe again, but we decide to keep all the windows and doors closed anyway, just in case. Mother nods at our caution. ‘You are doing so well,’ she tells us, taking off the hat. The muslin trails to the ground. ‘I am so proud of you.’

  Lia

  Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced. These things sit inside us like the misshapen pearls we sometimes prise from oysters. Fear calcifies in our veins and the chambers of our hearts. Pain is a currency like the talismans we sewed for the sick women, a give and take, a way to strengthen and prepare the body. ‘You think you know pain,’ Mother used to say. ‘You don’t know anything, you have no idea.’ And then the love of the family, a balm that keeps our airways soft and wet, a thing to keep us drawing breath.

  There has always been the worry that I would catch something of Grace’s trauma, because she was exposed young, at the age when any trace of toxin would cause immeasurable harm, whether or not she remembered it. Mother and King were traumatized too in their own ways, but they spoke of adulthood like a mantle, something that repelled.

  Scream therapy then, in the early days, was supposed to tap our feelings out of us, allow us to expel the excess through the mouth. Up on the terrace on a windy day, we stood in the air. King still had some of his hair back then, nestling at the ears. I remember him being a giant, remember the wind bending me and Grace. Mother wore earplugs and held her arms around us, supporting us in the hot gusts. King held a stick that he called a conducting baton. He stood a few feet away from us, no earplugs, all the better to check we were screaming with the correct cadence, with sufficient enthusiasm.

  ‘Scream from the chest,’ he had told us. ‘Low down. None of that throat-screaming. Not through the nose.’

  We did. The air came out of our mouths, heavy, full.

  ‘Louder!’ shouted King. The wind was taking the sound away. I would never be able to scream loud enough. I launched my voice with all my force and felt unendurably happy. I had been waiting my whole short life to feel that way.

  ‘Now move to a throat scream,’ he told us, lifting the baton higher. We adjusted how the air was being expelled. The shrieking was high-pitched now, a noise of terror rather than of fierce joy. The baton moved from side to side, Grace screaming more powerfully, and then me. My voice cracked slightly. Our mouths were dry.

  ‘One final push,’ King encouraged us. ‘One last go. Give it all you’ve got.’

  A pause, a breath. We gathered ourselves and then we let loose, we opened our mouths as
wide as they would go and the blood flooded my face, there was no more air. My cheeks were wet with unexpected tears. It was such a relief, to do that. It was such a relief.

  Grace, Lia, Sky

  Without our father, it is very hard not to think about things going wrong. Years ago we saw something forbidden – something that washed up in a storm, one of the times when Mother had locked us in the house and drawn the curtains tight. But there are so many rooms here, so many windows. When she went outside we simply found another room at the top of the house, and through the glass we saw the lump that Mother and King were digging a hole for. What could only be a ghost, fat and blue. It had been a woman, was now the nightmarish memory of a woman. It was undoubtedly toxic and yet we could not look away.

  Mother was surrounded by the damaged women and they were crying hysterically, all of them. But King did not cry. He was grim and resolute. As we watched he covered the ghost with a sheet and drove the shovel into the sand like it was an enemy he was killing.

  Grace

  I am walking towards your grave when I notice the browning of the leaves. It’s too early for the summer death of the greenery. I move through the forest carefully, noting other changes. When I come to the border, I can see it has rusted badly, some parts almost broken.