Now I have intimacy, now intimacy is gone again, a damp weight of absence. And suddenly I am lonelier than ever before, a sharp hurt worse than actual pain. I replay the event in my head. I am thinking of every single act of his body, how even in the pain there was something needful and familiar, a slow piecing of myself together. My analysis is lacking; there are too many gaps. For a second I think about asking my sisters. But then I realize, with a deep and exhilarating terror, that I have gone beyond them here. I have a knowledge that they do not.
One thing I know for certain is that he is stronger than he has let on so far, a lot stronger than me. I was the strongest before, in that small window between King’s death and Llew’s arrival, the holiday without men. For a second, I am bereft.
It is only when I leave the bathroom and move to my bed that I discover something terrible is happening to Grace. Through the wall, the dying noises of an animal, a bird caught in the canopy. For a second I am afraid to go and see what the matter is, but then I remember that she is my sister, that her life is my life, and even though her door is closed and we allow each other those small privacies, guard them because Mother thinks them irrelevant, I push until it opens. My sister is sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed, her body folded in on itself. The bedding is soaked, streaked with bright red. The baby is coming. She bares her teeth at me, and I know to run.
The whole time I am sprinting down the corridors towards Mother I am conscious of Grace’s pain, that white vortex of it binding me to her, and somewhere there is joy that she can’t be rid of me so easily, that our sisterhood goes deeper than anything she can control. Llew is forgotten, the solid and sleek lines of him nothing against my unrecognizable sister, an animal now, on the ground. I clench my nails into my palms to feel my own pain, as if through that I could understand her better. There is no going close to it, even I know that, but I’m trying. When I inspect my palms I have left moon-shaped hooks in my skin, and I am thankful.
Every day I walked past him and every day he shouted at me across the traffic and every day I wilted under it. Headphones and scarf wound over my ears. He made his shouts louder. He came right up to me so I could lip-read. I fantasized about killing him daily. It felt incredibly good.
Mother has been preparing. Buckets for hot water, armfuls of sheets and towels. New prayers and new words, bassinet and post-partum. When I shake her awake, she doesn’t need the emergency explained. I help her carry the towels, the pillows, a pair of scissors and a penknife to Grace’s room. We knock on Sky’s door. We do not tell the men, and we lock Grace’s door from the inside.
‘The baby,’ Grace tells me, as if nobody else is around. ‘I had dreams about the baby. That it was a boy. And worse.’ The pain moves through her visibly, like a current. ‘I dreamed the baby had no mouth,’ she tells me. ‘I dreamed we buried him in the forest.’
‘Less of that,’ Mother says, as if she has seen it all before, and maybe she has. ‘When you’re holding your daughter you’ll forget everything.’
Daughter, daughter, daughter. She is coming from a long way off, bathed in light. We are impatient to meet her.
‘Help me,’ Mother commands. ‘We need to turn Grace.’
We immediately put our hands and arms out to take her weight. I think of all the times we prayed to the sea, how those times were practice for disaster, and how much her heavy body feels like that disaster we have awaited.
Mother ties up her hair. There is a thumbprint of blood in the hollow of her neck.
The contractions are plentiful now, and they make Grace’s body do things she hasn’t given it permission to. Her limbs judder as she looks at me.
‘I hope I die,’ she tells me, and then she makes eye contact with Mother. ‘I hope I finally fucking die.’
‘Less of that,’ Mother says once more, her hands merciless. Grace shuts her eyes, water moving down her face.
And then the night has fallen properly and here it is, after one last outburst from Grace, her voice a ragged howl: a thing covered in blood, soundless, on a long rope. Mother touches its mouth. She sponges the blood from the frog-like body, and underneath the skin is blue in the lamplight. Grace lies there, panting, limp.
Mother lowers her mouth to the baby’s face, tries to blow air into its lungs. It’s not long before she gives up. She takes the scissors and cuts the string, wraps the baby in a blanket, puts her into my arms.
‘Can I see her?’ Grace asks. Mother nods at me and I take the small body over to the top of the bed. Grace looks and then turns her head to the side, tears leaking from her eyes.
‘Take it away,’ she says.
Before today, Sky was the only baby I had known. Raw as a shrimp, and loud. She put her hands inside our mouths, scratched at our gums with her small fingernails, wanted to see and know everything. Even when she grew long-limbed and sentient, when her own thoughts came out of her mouth like a shock to her as much as to ourselves, we could not lose that knowledge of her as an infant, that first impression. Grace had come to me fully formed, or rather I had come to her, any distance needing to be established, fought for. Sky was different. It is hard to deny her anything, wanting as we do to keep her small and safe, knowing that she is entirely of this world, that Mother and Grace and even my own tiny body, rocking inside Mother’s, did not escape the other one completely. Sky’s blood is irreproachable, essentially toxin-free, whole.
Sky and I go into the darkened bathroom, carrying the motionless baby before us. I close the door behind and we sit on the cold tiles while I try to think what to do. My hand tracks blood on the door, on the light switch. Sky rests on the edge of the bathtub as I wash the baby with my own hands. She has been quiet, obedient, throughout the whole thing, making herself useful. She watches me, expressionless, as I unwrap the blanket stealthily, half-expecting to find fins. What I find is almost worse: it is a boy, even though Mother said that would be impossible. I wrap the baby back up, tighter still, before Sky can see.
This baby has no name. It is unlucky to pick names before the birth, Mother had told us. Unlucky to place that weight on such a small thing.
‘Let me hold it,’ Sky asks. I worry about upsetting her, but when I pass the bundle over, very gently, she kisses its small face with no hesitation. Together we smooth down the hair of its head, still wet.
On the other side of the door, we hear Grace’s voice rising up, a cry out, and then quiet. We wait to be told the coast is clear. It takes a long time and my arms hurt, but I don’t put the baby down until Mother opens the door and holds out her arms for it and tells us to come in. Grace is sleeping. We move past the shape of her in the gloom, just one lamp in the corner to see by, sheets over her head, into the corridor. Mother closes the door behind us without saying another thing. The men, wherever they are, know not to make any sound.
The second we reach my room I insist Sky gets into the tub, sitting down with her and spraying the water over our skin and hair as hard as I can wrench the tap. Sky turns away from me as I rinse her long hair and rub a palmful of suds into it. When we are clean enough she curls herself at the bottom of my bed, asleep almost immediately. The ceiling above us is high and open, the air stale. I watch her for a while as the sky outside starts to lighten once more and the halo of water from her wet hair spreads outwards, revealing the tracery of the mattress underneath.
One day I looked at my husband and I thought, Would you knock them down? Would you stand up with your arms raised if they came for me? Coming for me was a thing I considered often, though the ‘they’ was hazy, it changed all the time. Once I had thought this bad thought, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought it when he was asleep and I was awake. No, I realized one day. He would lie down and let them.
Mother opens my door without knocking in the early morning, her face ruinous with exhaustion. She meets my eyes, silently motions for me to join her in the corridor. Her hand comes out to touch my face, just for a second. I can see myself in her, the bird-like plane of he
r cheekbones. ‘How much do you love your sister?’ she asks, and when I outstretch my hands wide to indicate this much, she nods. She leans into my ear and asks me, quietly, to do something for her.
First I splash my face with cold water in the bathroom’s grey light.
‘Why was it a boy?’ I ask her, made brave by her request.
She says that it wasn’t. No ambiguity. And so that is it.
I carry the baby close to me, through our home and out on to the beach, afraid to unwrap the bloodstained cloth. Despite my frantic washing I can sense that there is still blood on me too – I can smell it, I can feel it – and I am afraid that one day there will be a stain we can’t get out, and that will be it for us, the marking of the end. I am afraid somewhere in myself of the sweat belonging to Llew that I let dry on me, toxic dirt I have not washed off me yet, and I realize that this is the first time I’ve thought of him in hours.
Please let me live a clean and blameless life. Please let nothing touch me again, except for him, for without him I will surely die, is the prayer I say as I carry the baby away from our home for ever.
It is important to concentrate on anything but the coldness at the heart of the blankets, hardly bigger than the glass paperweight I salvaged from an empty room once.
I place the wrapped-up baby at the bottom of the boat. It isn’t hot yet, there is crisp dawn fog where the horizon meets the sea, but I row hard. Normally I would be afraid, but there is no room for that now. My body still aches from last night. I know that disaster can take place despite everything, that there are no guarantees. The sweat drips into my eyes so that the light refracts, and for a second the world explodes around me, and I welcome it. I go as close to the line of buoys as I dare, the water utterly still, and I cradle the baby one last time.
‘I’m giving him back to you,’ I tell the sea. There is no answer as I lower my arms into the water up to the elbow. The small parcel falls down through the water. Burial at sea. The only honourable option.
Halfway back to shore I judge it safe to stop for a second, and there I draw in the oars and cry harder than I have ever cried before. Harder than after the first razor-shell cut, than the time I fractured my ankle in a fall, than the time I fell asleep in the sun for hours and sunburn burst my skin open and Mother poured salt water over it to stop infection taking hold in my body. I press my hands to my eyes and make a noise that scares me, curl myself up to make the grief more manageable. Our home looms from the shore, and for the first time in a long time, maybe the first time in my life, I do not want to return. But I think about the rest of my family, waiting for me. I think about Llew; maybe he is waiting too. And so I do return.
After lunch, Grace is recovered enough to come down to the lounge, my hand hovering at her elbow as we walk the corridors together. Afternoon light unspools around our feet. The men are there too, the three of them slumped in chairs. They have discarded glasses half full of water on the side tables that must carry traces of their saliva and sweat, shoes kicked off where they sit, shoes and clothes that belonged to King.
‘How are you feeling?’ James asks, sombre. He gets up and puts a hand out to Grace, who takes it eventually. He places his other hand on top of hers. ‘We were so sorry to hear the news.’
‘I’m feeling bad,’ Grace tells him. She will not play along.
‘Well,’ James says. ‘That’s natural.’
I stand next to the window, open it wider. Grace brings over a chessboard and we set it up on a table where we can feel the breeze. Gwil watches us, his eyes quick and alert, as if expecting us to make some violent movement. For a second I do want to throw the chessboard on to the floor, a hard laugh threatening to come up through my throat. Llew sits there, sensing something, and reaches out a hand to his son. ‘Come here, Gwil,’ he says. ‘You’re in the way.’ He pulls him into a quick, one-armed embrace, then lets him go.
‘We made coffee,’ James says. ‘Have some.’
I pour a cup for the two of us to share from the cooling cafetière, sugaring it thickly. Grace drinks without complaint. James stares out at the sea, while Llew pulls up a chair to our chess game so he can watch. Gwil joins him but loses interest quickly, gets down on his hands and knees behind the sofa.
‘Move your rook,’ Llew stage-whispers behind his hand as I stare, paralysed by his nearness, at the pieces.
‘That’s not fair,’ Grace says. ‘No cheating.’
‘I’ll help you when it’s your turn,’ he tells her.
‘I don’t want your help,’ she replies.
I don’t move the rook. I see that there is more ground to be gained if I move the knight, so I do, toppling the board into check.
‘Would you look at that,’ Llew says. He is still smiling. I turn away and stare at the sea, trying to find the point where I let the baby go. The supple water is forever changing. It’s almost like it never happened, which gives me hope that one day it will be like it never happened.
Mother comes for me and Grace, Sky already with her. The men watch us go but do not follow. In the blue-washed afternoon we do our stretches, bending at the waist and sweeping our fingertips to the grass. Grace sits on a bench at the side, under the magnolia tree.
Mother tells us all to lie down on the ground, even Grace. Damp earth. She tells us to close our eyes. She puts a heavy sheet over each one of us, covering us head to toe. A new thing.
‘For your grief,’ she tells us. ‘You can cry underneath that. Five minutes.’
So we do.
Afterwards I nap in my room, exhausted. And it is when I draw back my curtains, deep sleep still gumming my eyes and the sky still light, that out on the sea, between the waves, I see a floating thing that doesn’t belong to us.
On my knees at my bedside drawer, I pull out everything until I find my binoculars and then I run up the stairs and along the top corridor, until I reach the door to the terrace. My hands slip on the catch but finally I am out there, and I go straight to the railing, leaning over as far as I dare, worried it will sink before I can see it properly.
Ghost. I look at it through the binoculars, and I am almost doubled over with nausea immediately. I’m glad it’s so far away. There is no way it could reach us. It’s too large to be the ghost of the baby, bobbing and sick with its movements. I can’t look at it for long, magnified or otherwise – no longer recognizably human but more dangerous, something to wash up on our shores swollen and racked with disease.
Still, I am not the expert in these things. I run to Grace’s room, where she is napping too. She is still too pale, drained of blood, but I shake her awake anyway and I say, ‘A ghost, out on the sea,’ and she sits up as if she has been expecting it.
‘I knew it,’ she says, her voice distant. ‘I knew this would happen.’
As we walk past Mother’s room, we hear breathing. She is in there with Sky, the two of them asleep on the bed, Mother lying face down on her folded arms.
‘Don’t wake her,’ Grace instructs me. ‘She can’t see this.’ At times like these I am reminded never to doubt my sister.
We return to the terrace, but it has gone. I pull her downstairs and out to the shore, right out on the jetty, checking the water spread out before us just in case. It is nowhere to be seen.
‘Ghosts are fragile,’ Grace tells me after we have been looking for some time, passing the binoculars between us. ‘I believe that it happened.’
I am grateful.
The sun is setting properly now, long and watery clouds falling violet to the horizon. We walk back to the pool and I take off my dress, slide into the water in my swimming costume. Grace sits on the side, watching me tread water for a while, illuminated in the centre of the pool. Birds call, long and low, from the forest behind her. I close my eyes against the perfect air on my face.
‘When was the last time you played the drowning game?’ I ask her.
‘I didn’t do it the whole time I was pregnant,’ she tells me. ‘I didn’t want to hurt the baby.’ Her mou
th becomes a hard line. Made brave with the love I am not used to, I wade to the side and put my arm around her shoulders, and this time she doesn’t push me away.
‘I’m sorry for what you had to do,’ she tells me.
‘I didn’t mind,’ I tell her. ‘I did it because I love you.’
She nods. ‘You’re a good sister.’
Grace lies down on the tiles and closes her eyes as I scoop shallow handfuls of water over her head to cool her down. After a short while Mother comes out to sit next to the water, Sky trailing her.
‘Well, would you look at this scene?’ she announces brightly, sitting on the edge of a recliner. Sky takes off her own dress and jumps into the water to my left, and the resulting wave narrowly misses Mother.
‘Isn’t this lovely?’ Mother says. ‘Isn’t this just like the old days?’
I duck below the water, make a lattice with my hands that Sky can step on to. I lift her up into the air, her legs shaking with the effort of balancing. She is delighted. Soon she tips forward on to me and we both collapse under the water, laughing hard, clapping as we resurface. There is a pain in my side. For a second my joy is robust, there is no killing it.
Why tell anyone else about the ghost? Why ruin the evening, the smiles wide and painful on our faces? Mother settles back into her chair, crosses her legs at the ankle. She is once again the queen of everything she surveys.
We moved in a petal formation, groups of us. Sometimes we wore earplugs. For activities like running we went two by two and stayed alert. But still my women were harmed. We passed along details of the harm across the phone lines and we wept.
The Water Cure Page 8