I stretch out my legs in front of me, pull my skirt above my knees. The carpet is a nauseous swirl, a pattern that was meant to mimic the forest. The skin drags and reddens, but doesn’t break. On the next go it does, springing up a beaded trail of red. One centimetre, two, three.
My body, King said, was the sort that would attract harm, the sort that wouldn’t last long elsewhere. But he really meant my feelings, spiralling out from my chest like the fronds of a sea creature. My sisters do not like to see the wounds on me, averting their eyes from the neat squares of gauze, but they understand that it’s inevitable. They would just rather not be reminded.
In my bathroom I wash the wounds carefully. Before long, the new blood stops hitting the bathtub and spidering out around the drain. I bandage myself and check my reflection.
I put everything away, then move to the window. Drawing back the curtain a little, I can see the bodies of the men down by the water from another angle. They are white slabs that have fallen from the sky and stayed where they hit, a creeping hair on their chests and limbs. They are far away from me, but still I shrink back as their heads turn. I don’t want them to see me watching them. Instead I look out to the sea, gauging the level of the swell, the fractals of the cloud cover. I try to see the ashes we left on the sand, but I am too distant and it is no longer a problem. We have contained the emergency. We have taken the necessary precautions.
Sometimes my housemates, hardier girls, brought men back to their rooms, and I couldn’t understand why they did it, whether it was recklessness or inoculation or both, and on those days I wadded a towel at the bottom of my door, poured boiling water into a basin and breathed in the steam.
By the next morning, we notice disturbances in the feminine fabric. Subtle warps, new ways of doing things. Like the men standing in the shallows with weapons they have made themselves, knives strapped to sticks that have fallen in the forest, the water lapping at their knees. Grace has not yet come to terms with their presence. She says to me, hopefully, as we watch them from our recliners, ‘It would be exciting if a shark killed them.’
Most of me, a significant most, wants to disagree. I watch how Llew lifts Gwil up by the armpits and swings him around until the child shouts, then sets him down in the shallows and ruffles his hair, batting at him to stay back. It signals something to me, something shocking and good, to see love displayed so openly, so wholly without ulterior motive. I find myself retreating inside to cry briefly in the blue dim of the downstairs bathroom, the mould-smelling hand towel pressed to my face to muffle the noise. Grace can tell when I return with my eyes red, but she does not comment. She looks away from me.
King preferred less obvious weapons than spears. He was a connoisseur of traps, of looped ropes and subterfuge. He always believed there was something offensive in overt violence. It was like asking for trouble, it disturbed things. But all that happens is that the men fill a basket with shining fish and carry it to Mother, who cooks them up. They are delicious. You can’t tell they are things that died a traumatic and writhing death.
We do our exercises out on the lawn at midday, when the sun is highest, so Mother can see us sweat. The water pours off me. I feint and roll, move my body into a cat’s stretch, hold out my arms to catch Sky under her armpits, lightly, lightly, letting go of her as soon as possible. When I turn back to the house I catch a movement at a dark window and scrutinize it as I bring my leg up behind me, grip my ankle. It’s Llew, watching us. There is no mistaking it. He freezes when he sees my eyes on him but doesn’t hide. I turn back so Mother won’t be alerted, complicit once more.
‘Press-ups,’ Mother says. We drop to the ground, we test the strength of our arms. I can do the most press-ups: I can do ten, twenty, thirty, beyond, my sisters groaning on the ground. I am doing them to tell him something about my body, but when I look back to the window he has gone.
The men have been watching us at other times. At meals they chew and stare, they roll their food around their mouths. Maybe they would eat us given half a chance. Anything is possible with these hungry-looking men. I have been consuming less, nerves twisting in my stomach. They look at our hands when we are sewing in the evening. King is not here to sell the talismans any more, but we keep making them because what else are we going to do? When Mother sees the men looking she stares back at them until they stop. I have not mastered this trick: my own eyes swerve. Llew smiles a lot. There is a kind of softness in him, I can tell.
My body, up until now, has been just a thing that bled. A thing with vast reserves of pain. A strange instrument that I don’t always understand. But something kicks in, triggered by the looking. I believe it to be an instinct, not yet sure whether it qualifies to have the word survival in front of it.
Now or never, I tell my reflection in the mirror, wearing a dress dug out from Sky’s wardrobe, inches above my knees and too tight. I walk slowly across the edge of the pool to be sure that the men will notice my approach, trying something out.
When I reach my recliner I lie on my stomach and look up surreptitiously behind my sunglasses, across the shimmering water, to where Llew rests. As I watch him he pushes his own glasses up and winks at me, before lowering them again. I bury my face in my arms. Mother has set up her recliner at the head of the pool, next to the lifeguard’s chair, drawing the line at sitting in the chair itself. She can still survey both sides of the pool, male and female. A scarf elegant around her head, skin streaked with oil.
The grand finale: I sit up, pull the dress over my head and stand for a few seconds in just my swimsuit, pretending to inspect the sky above the fringe of the forest. Heart hammering, waiting for someone to find me out, for something to strike me down, I lose my nerve anyway and cannonball into the water. Sky wails at the sudden break in the silence, Grace moving to comfort her, so when I rise to the surface they are staring baldly at me, arms around each other.
After dinner when we are on the shore as usual, under the darkening air, pouring salt on to the boundary lines, Mother slaps me in front of my sisters. Once with the back of the hand, the rings she wears on every finger catching my ear, and then with the palm for good measure. I raise my fists to hit back and scream as loudly as I can, and at once the hands of my sisters cover my face, my mouth.
‘You said no touching!’ I shout. ‘You didn’t say anything about eye contact. What else am I not allowed to look at?’
‘Don’t cause a scene,’ Mother tells me, as if she hadn’t been the one to hit me first. ‘Come with me.’
She walks back towards the house but stops before the shingle, sitting on the damp sand and indicating that we should join her. She takes our hands, even mine, though I have to share with Sky, my hand piled on the top as an afterthought. The lights of the house and the pool shine a way off.
‘I know what it’s like to be a young woman,’ she tells us. ‘I know all about what can destroy you.’
We wait for her to tell us more.
‘It’s natural, what you’re feeling,’ she says, addressing me specifically this time. ‘It’s natural to want to look.’
Grace laughs, a short laugh.
‘Stop it, Grace,’ Mother tells her. She squeezes our hands tighter. The men are somewhere inside, I don’t know where. In our corridors, breathing our air. Sitting in our furniture, leaving their trace.
‘You need a love therapy,’ she tells us. She lets go of our hands. ‘I put the Welcome Book in Grace’s room. I’ll come and knock for you when the hour is up.’
As well as the book, Mother has left scarves in Grace’s room, thin and silken fabric that falls into large squares when we shake them out. These are to cover your body, a note says. Put these on when you are sunbathing. My sisters gripe, and it’s true, it is undeniably my fault. We lie on the carpet to try them out. They are big enough to cover us from our head to our toes. I pull mine down, claustrophobic. Grace and Sky look like cocoons, only the motion of their breath, a twitch of the arm, suggesting they are alive at all.
After we tire of the scarves, we climb up on the bed and Grace begins to read mournfully from the Welcome Book, reason after reason after reason. Testament of how men hurt women. Testament of the old world. We have heard them all before, many times, but still I close my eyes against them, against the unease and gravity of their prophecy. Sky fidgets, trying to find a comfortable position, but there is no comfortable way to listen. We shudder when we think of how some of the women looked when they came to us. Like they had been bled out, their skin limp. Eyes watering involuntarily, hair thinning.
I became allergic to my husband. He refused to acknowledge how sick he was making me. He told me I was making it up, that it wasn’t possible, even when I coughed up blood, when my hair stopped up the plughole. He held me through the night and by dawn my skin was hard and red where he had touched me. And the rest of it. Leave me alone, I pleaded, can’t you do without. He bought me steroid lotion and a gauze mask that did nothing, left me breathing shallowly in the bed every morning.
‘Horrible!’ Grace says when she has read half a dozen or more. She closes her eyes for a second, exhales very slowly and deeply. It is an unusual reaction from her and I am shaken, more by this than by the words themselves. The Welcome Book is largely too abstract to scare me much, though I am certainly sad for the women and their pain, dimly aware somewhere that this pain is the tradition to which I belong.
Afterwards, we discuss first impressions of the men. Loud. Oily. Grace screws up her face in disgust. We are all comparing them to King, our only reference point, our yardstick for safe manhood. They are all shorter than him, I point out. Positive, no? Less air taken up by their bodies. Sweat always dampening the hair at their temples. I don’t mention the feel of Llew’s arm next to mine, watching the easy spread of his hands playing piano, but I am thinking it, I am thinking it and I am appalled at myself. Sky joins in with the word friendly, and Grace bristles.
‘Easy to be friendly when you want something,’ she tells her. ‘See if you think they’re so friendly when they’re cutting your throat.’
‘Grace,’ we say in protest. ‘They wouldn’t.’ She throws up her hands, doesn’t look at either of us.
When Mother has pardoned us, put her hands on our foreheads to gauge our temperatures and declared us well for now, I shower for a long time. With both hands I soap my hair, letting the suds get into my eyes as penance. I rub a thinning towel across my body and slick my legs with a thick, vanilla-scented cream that Grace gave me months ago, something King had brought back for her from his final voyage. She hadn’t wanted it. She knew I would.
Why do you care? I ask myself. Talking to myself is a bad habit I’ve picked up in the last few months as Grace has become less and less available to me, shutting herself away for long hours in the room next door, changing minute by imperceptible minute.
Now that we have been reminded of what is at stake, Mother allows the men to sit with us in the lounge. My sisters and I stay on the sofa with the sagging heart, Sky draped over Grace, me in the corner with one knee up to my chest, pretending to sew. I stab carelessly at the fabric when anyone looks at me. Really I am just watching Llew with Gwil again. Hands flickering between suits as they play cards, laying them down so quickly they blur. The boy laughs as he wins; the father punches him lightly on the arm. Softly, softly. Father, I grieve for a second, knotting my hands too tightly and letting my embroidery fall.
It turns out the love therapy has done nothing for me. Llew puts a glass of water to his mouth; a piece of dark hair falls over his forehead and he pushes it back. Closed eyes, for a second, as he swallows. I close my own. Mother and Grace knit striped things for the baby as Sky pulls a cat’s cradle of red cotton between her teeth, between thumb and forefinger. My sisters, at least, are serene.
When Llew leaves the room, I am bereft. I go to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Stupid, I tell myself. No good. But he is outside the bathroom itself in the corridor, leaning out of the window, which is open as wide as it will go. Pine mist, silhouetted against the heat of the day burning off.
Despite everything, I did sometimes dare to believe that love would come for me, that it would find me somewhere. It would come from the ocean or the air. It would wash up like the rare plastics inscribed with scraps of lettering, or I would sail to the border and somehow breathe it into me. I have always been a hopeful person. Painfully optimistic, Grace had called me once. It was supposed to be an insult.
Llew doesn’t seem surprised to see me. He raises his hand to me, moves sideways to make room. I join him at the windowsill and lean the top half of my body out. He asks about the mountains. They are barely visible through the falling cloud, past the forest, a long way away. I don’t know what to talk about, what words could be good enough to interest him. He asks if we could go and visit them, but they are full of animals that kill you and anyway there is no way to do it, so I can’t promise anything, I have nothing to give.
‘Your mother has been quite cruel to us,’ Llew tells me. ‘But you don’t mind us, do you?’ He stretches out his arms. ‘I can tell there’s not a bad bone in your body.’
A wolf almost made it to us, once. King cut its throat and strung its pelt up in the forest as a warning to other wolves. It looked like a giant bird of prey, suspended in motion. Red velvet underneath, then brown. He kept it there until it rotted, and then cut it down.
I can hear my sisters behind me in the room, talking indistinctly, probably bickering. Their voices are a reproach. I should be there with them, safety in numbers, our bodies, our witnessing, some sort of defence. The man moves his body closer to me and I also move closer, why not, why not, I cannot help myself. The warm and rising smell of his skin.
Llew turns to look at me. Half his face is in shadow, his mouth hidden.
‘You’re very beautiful, you know,’ he says.
My throat is filled with something. He reaches out to my face and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, then turns and walks back down the corridor, towards the lounge, without saying anything else.
I fetch a glass of water and drink it alone in the unlit kitchen, watching the clouds move past the moon, then go outside into the garden, turn on to the beach. I don’t stop until I feel sand under my feet and then I sit where I fall, splaying my hands into it as if to root myself. The water lies slick and still, a small garnish of foam where it hits the shore. I want Llew to come out after me, but it is impossible.
Once I kept a young rabbit in a shoebox under my bed for three weeks, and I loved it dearly, but Mother found it one morning while cleaning my room. King took the rabbit down into the garden and killed it by planting one foot on top of it, and then he pushed my face into the earth as the sky sweated above us.
Violence from my father, who after all was still a man, was a last resort. Even then my eagerness for love compromised my family. It is terrible to be that person. Mother had to fumigate my room with a heated pan of salt, glowing red. I watched from the keyhole and I can picture her now, stately in white, moving from corner to corner.
We did our best to protect each other – it was necessarily imperfect, but we did try with all our hearts. Who else would try for us? Who else would lie down in the dirt, if not our women, our mothers and daughters and sisters? We were not too proud to get down there.
When I wake, my body is useless with grief. Eventually I get up and splash my face with cold water to calm my red eyes, so Mother won’t make me use the ice bucket, won’t humiliate me in front of the men. After brushing my teeth I stuff my mouth with muslin and hyperventilate, then I put the muslin to soak in my bathtub, three inches of cold water, and let the water drain safely as I lie down on the tiles of the floor, the spare dawn light covering my body from the window.
Be good, be good, be good. A reckoning with my body. Please, just for one second, I beg my feelings, lying there, waiting for them to subside.
The men wore hunting clothes, I remember from the Welcome Book. The men stockpiled weapons in the cellars
of their homes, and practised on deer. The men of my home town, the men of my family. Fathers one and all. You could not tell the bad men from the good.
‘So some of them were good!’ I say to the air with triumph.
Afterwards, Mother is waiting for me downstairs, alone in the dining room with the remains of breakfast around her, looking out of the window. I feel a little afraid of her, the aftermath of my agitation surely tangible, but all she asks is for me to dye her hair. We change into stained and matching grey T-shirts and go to the collection of dye boxes in her bathroom, hoarded underneath the windowsill.
‘Running out,’ she says, mostly to herself. ‘Maybe I’ll try a coffee rinse next time.’ She kneels down besides the bathtub, winces at the pressure on her knees. Her feet, soles upturned towards me, are ingrained deeply with dirt. I touch the cheek of the woman on the front of the box, mix up the contents of the bottles. Squeeze the dye into my bare hands, gelatinous and black. I brace myself for another lecture, but Mother just sighs as I massage it against her scalp. She bends her neck uncomplainingly as I rinse with the shower attachment until the water comes clear, her vertebrae exposed. She is not so much precious to me as fragile. She was someone’s daughter, once. And perhaps that is what she is trying to remind me. Women together in our vulnerability, her neck presented like a breakable thing. Nothing is mentioned about the men, this time.
The Water Cure Page 6