I go up to the terrace afterwards, and find Grace already there. I sit next to her and she shifts but doesn’t say anything. I put on my sunglasses, draw my bare legs up to my body. When I look down at my nails and palms, they’re stained from the dye. I will think of Mother every time I use my hands today, tomorrow, until I scrub them raw.
‘How do you feel?’ she asks eventually. She is eating dry crackers, half a dozen of them left on a saucer, arranged into the shape of a half-moon. She doesn’t offer me one.
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Not sick?’ she asks. She puts half a cracker on to her tongue and leaves it there without chewing. ‘They’ve breathed all over you.’
‘You too,’ I point out.
‘Not true,’ she says. ‘I’ve made sure to stay a good distance away when they talk. It’s not difficult.’
‘Well, I feel fine,’ I say. ‘Better than ever.’ I rest my hand against my forehead, subtly. I am very slightly warmer than usual, a hint of feverishness.
‘We can’t take chances,’ she says, once her mouth is empty. ‘I want them to leave.’ She touches her stomach. ‘We don’t need them.’
‘When do you think the others will come for them?’ I ask.
She lifts her shoulders. ‘Maybe there’s nobody to come for them at all,’ she says. ‘Who would come here if they could help it?’ A small bitterness, quickly extinguished.
Would others mean even more men, coming in on boats shrouded in shadow? I want to ask her, but I am too excited, too afraid.
Staring at the sky until my vision blurs, I spot another bird. Its trail is faint; it is far away, a sharp gleam in the sky.
‘Grace,’ I whisper.
‘What now?’ she says, and I point at the strange bird’s path above us. She sits up, watches it calmly until it is out of view.
‘Well,’ she says.
‘We should tell Mother,’ I say.
‘Later on,’ she replies. ‘It’s all right.’ She is being kind now, which hurts even more. She lets down the recliner so she is completely prone and rests the saucer on her thighs, below the bump of her stomach. If she moves suddenly it will fall and break, but I don’t take it away from her and put it on the table, I just watch the faint motion of it as she breathes deeply, in and out, until I can no longer bear it.
Every time I think I am very lonely, it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.
The heat builds. Leaving my sister where she lies, I go down through the close, still house and out on to the shoreline, picking my way over shingle and scree. Something to do, anything. The sand meets the trees, marram grass giving way to the cool of birch, of pine, a transitional zone where the heat of the open sky turns into something sheltered, something secret.
I part the high grass with my hands, feel the sting of thorns, of nettles, but ignore it. There could be snakes anywhere, the dislocated yawn of their fangs. I am always alternating between invincibility and the sick fear of dying. Our whole life has centred on survival. It would follow that we are better at it than most. Arrogance, King would call this if he was alive. I still keep an eye out for anything that could be his body when I’m in the forest. A viper could have felled him. An unknown enemy could have been hiding in the trees.
Soon the high grass gives way to clearings, patches of dirt. I slow in case of traps left unsprung, and keep an eye out for the marked trees that would tell me where I can and can’t go. It isn’t long before I see the first warning tree, horizontal gouges cut out halfway up the trunk, and then I wait for a while, sitting on a tree trunk at the edge of a patch of dirt, my nerve ebbing. Flies hurl themselves at my face.
I turn at a noise, and Llew steps into the clearing. Only him. The portion of the forest we are allowed is small, after all. He must have followed me, must have seen me walk trance-like from the house, watched me on the shore. He looks above our heads at the foliage, the green light. Somewhere in the distance something chatters; bird or rodent, I can’t tell.
‘Where does the forest end?’ he asks, lounging against a tree, and I am not afraid, though aware I should be.
‘It goes over the mountains,’ I tell him. ‘But I’ll show you where we can go to.’
We walk for a short while, the notched trees growing more numerous. I feel Llew’s hand on my hair, my head, and stop so suddenly that he walks into me.
‘A spider,’ he says. ‘I brushed it off for you. I stopped it running down your neck. I saved your life.’ He takes it away slowly, lets his arm drop to his side.
Eventually we come to the first border of barbed wire. Criss-crossing over itself again and again, it is taller than Llew because King was taller than Llew and King was the one who marked it out to his own measurements, his own specifications.
‘It’s not electric?’ Llew asks me. I shake my head and he goes right up to it, touches it gingerly around the barbs and shakes it. It is rusting now. It has been a long time since I have come so close. The other side, through the wire, looks the same as our side.
‘If I ask you what this is all about, will you tell me?’ Llew says, and when I shake my head he laughs. ‘I thought so.’ He lets go of the wire, kicks it lightly with his foot.
‘Show me more,’ he asks, so I walk with him along the wire border, where it runs parallel to our territory. Soon I point up to where you can see the paint of the house in the distance, shining white, elevated slightly. We are at the back. Our feet disturb pine needles and clods of earth.
‘Could we get home that way?’ he asks me, and so we change direction. I am glad when the wire is metres behind us, then concealed by trees. Llew walks by my side, lagging just enough to make the hackles rise on the back of my neck. For a second, like coming to, I remember where we are, and that he is an animal I don’t know anything about. He seems soft and tender around Gwil, but this does not mean he is a soft and tender thing. He could have a knife in his pocket, concealed, rags to stuff into my mouth. Anything. Ways of killing I have never dreamed of.
‘Walk ahead of me,’ I tell him. He laughs in my face, stops.
‘Are you afraid of me?’ he asks. He steps closer. I can feel his breath at my hairline.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to be.’ He moves as if to take my hands in his, but thinks better of it, arms swinging back down by his sides. He turns around and starts walking again, this time ahead of me by a whole step. He whistles.
I watch him surreptitiously, think about how I could use a felled branch to hit him on the head and kill him flat. I could take a piece of the barbed wire and wrap it around my knuckles, just in case. But then ‘Hurry up,’ he calls, turning his head to me, and I obey despite myself, my feet moving as if he is in charge of them, and I want to cry all of a sudden but I know it is important not to, not in front of him, in this place.
Soon we scale the old stone wall, beyond it the incline that leads up to the back of the house, the beds that were once pristine, now a mess of unkempt roses. At the top there lies a stagnant pond where the mosquitoes foment. On the way I fall on the sloping lawn without him seeing and press my hands against the beautiful earth, the grass and leaves. I want to stay there.
By the pond he holds whole heads of flowers in his palms. He shakes out the pods of their seeds, stains pollen on his fingertips.
‘What are these called?’ he asks me again and again. I say the names that I know. Near a wall veined with ivy and honeysuckle, he pauses.
‘Romantic,’ he says. He smiles at me. The smell is too sweet. He pulls a bloom from the stone and hands it to me. ‘For you.’
I let it drop, breathe through my mouth so as not to get the smell of rot, the plants around us choking on their own juice. He hands me another flower, and this time I look at his too-large hands and take it.
‘Look,’ he says, getting to his knees behind the wall. ‘Come here.’ He has spotted something on the ground, but I can’t make out what.
When I crouch down next to him to look at it more closely, he puts his arm around me but I don’t pull away. My body is a traitor. I am also a traitor.
He leans in and presses his mouth to mine for a second. When he pulls away I see the thing on the ground is the carcass of a mouse, not long dead. I debate whether to spit his toxicity out on to the ground, but before I can make a decision he kisses me again. Then he laughs, presses his forehead to mine briefly. He stands up.
‘Poor thing,’ he says. He means the mouse. Something has ripped its throat out. He kicks a small pile of dirt and leaves over it. I wipe my lips with the back of my hand. They feel filled with blood, as if I’ve been hit in the face.
‘You can go ahead of me now,’ Llew says. ‘Who knows whether you were planning to kill me all along, trailing behind me there?’
When we reach the back of the house I lead him through the peeling ballroom doors, into the room’s shadowed interior. Nobody saw us, nobody sees us. We walk through the dim of the corridor together, the falling sun casting washes of light against the walls, and he hovers his long body a safe distance from mine. We no longer touch.
‘I’d like to be alone with you,’ he says, the same way he might say, I’d like to go for a swim.
I finally swallow the saliva collected under my tongue, imagine a dark syrup sliding somewhere towards my stomach with a calm that surprises me.
Before bed, I brush my teeth four times. When I first spit into the sink it is stippled lightly with blood. By the fourth brushing it is mostly blood, and I do not know whether it is his fault or mine, the toothbrush gouging at my mouth. Then I rinse with plain water, not wanting to risk going to the kitchen for salt and seeing anyone, gargling and gargling until every trace of toxin must surely be down the plughole. I cannot rinse the feel of it, though, and I do not want to, despite everything. When the bleeding stops, my gums are pale where I bare them but otherwise unchanged.
I should be thinking about atoning. But all I can think about is how when he kissed me for the second time he put a hand to the back of my head as if conscious of keeping me upright, and he was right, I did think I would fall, the swing of the sky as if I was on the edge of drunk, of something – and how did he know that I felt like that, how did he know to hold me upright, my tilting body, my eyes open wide?
At early dawn, I think I hear the strange bird return. Its song is an echoing call through the sky. And yet when I look there is nothing, no bird and now no sound either, though I’m sure it was not a dream. I go back to bed and hold my hands pressed very tightly between my knees and count to one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, the bones in my hands moving, a manageable pain that lulls me eventually to sleep.
My initial strategy was to adopt the men’s behaviours. I exposed myself to the bad air to try and make myself stronger, still lay on my usual park bench with my top rolled up an inch or two, exposing my ribs. I made my voice louder, so that people winced away from me. I walked with a rollicking, rolling gait.
We spied on Mother and King in the old days, their weekly dinners alone, followed by pecking at each other like birds on the sand, embracing on the recliners, followed by their move upstairs where they were not to be disturbed. The public acts of their bodies as important as the private, a demonstration to us that they were still very much in love. This ritual comforted me. It happened like clockwork, a scheduled intimacy that Mother explained was how intimacy should be, in a perfect world – never overwhelming, never lacking in joy. Small portions of love, held in the palm like a gift.
In the morning, Mother watches me watching him. Possibly she can read my thoughts, which are considering the possibilities of alone. At the end of breakfast, she makes me stay as everyone else files out.
‘You’re getting sick,’ she tells me. ‘You have to stay in solitary confinement until the afternoon.’
‘I feel fine,’ I tell her. She frowns, takes the thermometer from its case on the sideboard and offers it to me. I keep my tongue very still over the glass.
‘Like I thought,’ she says, frantic, holding it up to the light. ‘You’ve been spending too much time with them already. When will you learn to look after yourself?’
I follow her up to the bedrooms. We go into hers, not mine.
‘Meditate upon the irons,’ she tells me. ‘Sit on the floor and look at them.’
She leaves the room and locks me in behind her, so there’s no way out. I stare at the pieces of metal until my eyes water. Even I have no patience with myself, no actual interest in loving the sack of bones and guts that makes me up.
And yet – there in the garden, with the dirt caking the fabric at his knees and my body balanced on the balls of my feet, ready to fall over at any second, was something new. In a hot rush I realize that love may not be off-limits for me after all. An opportunity.
I know that without being touched I will die. I have known it for some time. It has always felt like I need more touch than the others anyway, my hands brushing over their shoulders or the tops of their heads as they shy away, because nobody is assigned to me. I am not anybody’s loved-most, have not been for some time. I have gone days, weeks, without touch and when that happens I can feel my skin thinning, I have to lay my body against grass and velvet and the corner of the sofa and rub my hands and elbows and thighs against anything until they are raw.
Later, released from confinement, I return to my room and the door snags on a scrap of paper. A note on the carpet. It’s a page torn from the Welcome Book in reception, lined in a faint gold. On one side, blue ink in cursive starts, Thank you for opening your home to me. On the other side, a black scrawl says, Meet me at the pool tonight, late. Llew.
He has been watching to see which room is mine, I realize with disbelief. I read the note five, six, seven times, then start to laugh, quietly, until I have to press my face into the pillow to stop the sound.
At evening prayers, I stare Mother right in the eye. I look at her the whole way through. She seems gratified, smiles and smiles at me. It is easy to please her, sometimes.
‘Invocations for the damaged women, for their strength and peace,’ we say.
‘Love for our sisters and our home.
‘Good health for our mother.’ She presses her palm to her chest, for emphasis.
There are new ones now.
‘We pray for protection against the bodies of men.
‘We pray for the men’s good hearts, for good intentions.’
A glass bottle is produced. We line up in a row. Mother places a dropper on our tongues, one at a time, sweetness at the roofs of our mouths. She presses her thumb over the label so we can’t read it.
‘I can’t overstate the importance of keeping your distance from them,’ she tells us, but she has been wrong before and she could be wrong again, and there is no guilt in my heart tonight, for once.
I see him illuminated from some distance away, swimming backstroke in the glowing water. I moved without sound through the sleeping house, past the bedrooms of my sisters, my treacherous heart beating loud and true. We are too visible out here at the pool, yet still I slip in next to him. He sinks underwater and I do too, opening my eyes to watch. His cheeks are full of air and he lets it out in a stream of bubbles, light blue, his face pale and reflective in the strange light. I reach out and hold on to his forearms.
‘You!’ he says quietly when we are back at the surface, breaking apart.
‘You,’ I say back.
We wrap towels around our bodies and walk on to the sand, quickly, until the house recedes into the night. Near the rock pools at the end of the beach, Llew shakes out his own towel and lays it down for me. He indicates I should sit, and so I do. I am cold, stricken with adrenaline. He sits next to me, easily, puts his arm around me again. ‘Is this all right?’ he asks.
Yes, it is all right. I try not to think of toxins leaving his mouth like a cloud, of what happens next. There is still time to stop it, but my curiosity has taken me too far now. I am pink with blood, b
est at the exercises, my body taller and stronger than my siblings. The careful marks on my thighs are a protection that surely, surely, could hold here for a little while. The water ahead of us is flat and infinite; shards of light through the sky like a dropped glass. He kisses the side of my head, his mouth landing on my wet hair, the top of my ear.
Why do I suddenly want to cry? Is it because in one fell swoop everything I’ve ever wanted has fallen upon me? I clutch for his knee, some kind of contact I have control over. I want to hold everything in the world in my arms, hold the universe itself.
Is this all right? is asked again, becomes a refrain. He is exaggeratedly gentle with me. It occurs to me I could also be a new thing, to be handled with wariness.
I think about the women and the things they described, the things I had not been supposed to hear, and about the muscles lengthening in my legs when I run, my body in motion, arms bending, torso arced. The startling joy of that movement, uncomplicated.
I am embarrassed about my dirty fingernails, the tough heels of my feet. In the end though, in the dark and the wet salt air, it doesn’t matter.
My first thought in the silence afterwards is I have survived. Victory both small and large. My appetite for touch is whetted, but he has rolled on to his back in the sand and taken his hands off me.
When or if the men arrived, King implied it would mean our home burned to the ground, our blood spilled out on the shore, diluting in the water of the pool. I decide that our parents, in their love and fear for us, must have been mistaken. They grew too old. Their hearts were withered. It was not their fault. Compassion loosens in me as if I suddenly understand everything, benevolent, as if nothing bad could ever happen again.
Yet, back in my own bathroom, it turns out that the white cotton of my underwear is bloodied, and for a few minutes I am afraid that I am dying after all. It seems out of proportion to the pain, which is small but ignorable. There is nobody I can tell or ask, so I run through other symptoms in my head, examine the skin on the backs of my hands, the jelly of my eyes. Where he put his hands – collarbone, the tops of my arms, my cheek, briefly, though I could not meet his eyes – is unmarked. The bleeding soon stops and I tentatively declare myself safe for the moment, even if I am pale in the mirror.
The Water Cure Page 7