The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

  The very next day when we wake, we find our mother gone.

  Sky is the one to discover Mother absent from the kitchen, from the garden, from the lounge. She lets out a great wail, calling our names until we run in with our hands up and our minds automatically listing the nearest weapons, the heavy objects, the best way to roll the bone of your knee into a person’s stomach or nose.

  Person, not woman. New kinds of defensiveness come to us as we run, words and images swimming up through our minds as though they were there, latent in us all along, waiting for something to call them – the musk of Llew’s armpit, the visible veins of James’s forearm, even Gwil’s flat, pale child’s body walking back and forth through the garden – and here we are with our own new violence, which we do not need and cannot use in this breathless, clenched moment. All we can do is comfort Sky, hold her shaking body so tightly that we cannot feel our own shaking.

  We picture Mother in white. We picture her with cloth in her mouth and bundled at her extremities, more than King had needed, much more. We picture her out on the last slip of sea before she moves beyond sight in the pre-dawn, looking back to the house in the mist, her daughters treacherously asleep.

  We think it might be a test, not unlike the other acts of endurance we have undergone through our lives, so we walk around the house, calling until our voices are gone. Opening cupboards that have been closed for years, finding nothing but old brooms and the acrid smell of mice. Peering inside the chest freezer and the fridge, both large enough to hold a woman. Hauling open the coal cellar, a small hatched enclosure around the back of the house, though the leftover dust and darkness make us shudder. Nothing.

  ‘We did see your mother, earlier,’ Llew tells us down by the pool, where we find him doing press-ups by the side of the water. I am thrilled, secretly, to see him move, to catalogue it alongside his other movements. He stops when we are next to him, stands and looks down at us, panting slightly. His hair is sticking up, his eyes tired. ‘She set off before dawn, knocked on our door on the way. She didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘You should have woken us,’ Grace says. ‘She never goes to the mainland. Never. It was always King.’ King, whose body could withstand whatever atmospheric poisons we keep in check here.

  ‘We didn’t do the breathing exercises,’ Sky says, but Llew just shrugs.

  ‘I just know that she took the motorboat,’ he tells us.

  We go down to the shore and, sure enough, only the rowing boat is left.

  ‘Why didn’t you go? Or James?’ Grace asks. ‘You would be faster.’

  ‘You really want us gone, don’t you?’ says Llew, unbothered. ‘Well, I don’t want to leave Gwil yet. He’s still weak. Besides, our people are coming for us, and it’s best for us to stay tight, for now. We agreed it all with her.’

  We look at the lone boat where it is moored up, tiny in the distance.

  ‘Your mother,’ he says, chuckling a little, shaking his head. ‘She’s an admirable woman. I think you’re underestimating her.’

  ‘So you’re friends now?’ Grace asks, hard-faced. ‘Why would she leave us with you?’

  ‘She should have told us,’ Sky says, kicking a pebble down the beach, and then another.

  Llew throws up his hands. ‘Well,’ he says, glancing at me. ‘You’re the ladies of the house for now. I suppose that means you’re in charge of the rules.’

  ‘We should carry on as normal,’ Grace says. ‘She could come back at any time.’

  Llew gazes out to sea, his hand cupped against the light. ‘You’re grown-ups now,’ he says, turning back to us. ‘Do what you want.’

  Back in the dining room we sit at our usual places, taking things in. Sky rearranges the cutlery into geometric patterns. Grace looks out through the window to the empty beach and does not tell Sky to stop.

  ‘A break from Mother,’ Grace says eventually, and she starts to laugh, because hasn’t this been our undared-for dream, us sisters together? Sky and I join in, hysterical. Once we calm ourselves we eat yesterday’s bread spread with the last honey, a crystal mess at the bottom of the jar. The men come in just as we are finishing and we lift our hands to them. James is gripping Gwil’s shoulders. They are all in a good mood. Llew meets my eye, winks.

  I should search further for Mother with my sisters, but the opportunity to be alone with Llew is too good to miss. Some excuse, any excuse. She could arrive home at any time, I tell myself, it is not yet an emergency, and even through my elation I am angry at her for leaving without telling us. Llew is not in the lounge, the swimming pool, the forest. Eventually I find him on the old tennis court, hitting mouldy balls against mesh grown soft with rain and age. He does not jump when I step inside his field of vision, but instead reaches down for a racquet and throws it to me without missing a beat. We play for a short time in the sticky heat, my body feeling heavy, deliberate. Soon he looks at me, then puts his own racquet on the floor. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says. He rests a hand lightly where my spine meets my neck, the fragile knot of bone.

  In my room, the air under the high ceiling charged with dust, he tries to talk to me about why we are here, but when I explain that we are just keeping ourselves safe, in retreat from the danger that extends to the very atmosphere itself, he goes quiet. Stop talking, Lia. I have said too much. Instead we kick off the blankets to the floor, the satin coverlet with the fussy embroidery, shining bumps meant to emulate flowers. We take off our clothes in the afternoon heat.

  When he has finished touching me, we share more about ourselves. He is more talkative than I have ever seen him, and I am overjoyed. Everything I hear, I try to match. I arrange myself into it with ease.

  ‘What do you like?’ I ask him.

  Tomatoes, green fruits, the ocean in the morning, he says.

  ‘I don’t like mussels,’ I say, a scoping, a sounding. The shrivelled purse of them, like the dead hearts of birds or frogs.

  ‘Oh, but I love them,’ he tells me.

  Slight panic in my chest. ‘I don’t hate them,’ I retract. ‘But there are other things I would rather eat.’

  I go into my bathroom for a glass of water, take a little time away from him in the spirit of caution, the spirit of being a responsible woman, sticking my face out of the window to reach air he hasn’t breathed. I am taking too long. I panic that he will go, bored of me and my words, other things to attend to. But when I open the door he is still there. The cover is pulled up to his waist and he looks, in the gloom, as if he has been cut in half.

  I debate the sort of small accident I could orchestrate that would keep him close to me. Broken foot, maybe. I could drop a glass bottle, have him step on the shards. I consider the solid lines of his form. No, his is the type of body that heals almost immediately, otherwise known as a man’s body.

  ‘What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?’ I ask. I think again about that rabbit under King’s foot, the salted earth in my mouth and nostrils.

  ‘My father died,’ he says. ‘Like yours. Years and years ago. Gwil had only just been born.’

  ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ I ask next.

  ‘No, you first,’ he says, so I tell him about the baby. His eyes widen in alarm. He tells me it was not my fault, then repeats it.

  ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’ I ask him, after. Be worse than me.

  ‘Everyone’s killed someone,’ he tells me. But I have not.

  ‘You would love the mainland,’ Llew says after a period of silence. ‘I think you really would love it.’ He sits up and looks around: the ugliness of the wallpaper, faded with age and sunlight; the plush of my bed’s padded headboard, a sickly pink. ‘This isn’t a place for young women. You’re not the type to be shut away.’

  ‘I could come with you,’ I say.

  He smiles. ‘You could. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’ He reaches out to my face.

  Love might be able to protect me there the way it has protected me here. Love could for
m itself into a barrier against my tongue and airways like the mouthguard King brought back for Grace to stop her body from grinding her teeth down, the susurration of her jaw a night-time sound to join the sea. New loves, new protections, new forms of life-guarding. I don’t know what this love is capable of, but as I study his face – angles, the soft curl of lips, his eyes closed now – I believe it could do anything.

  In the garden, alone, I pull up white flowers with my hands, cutting the stems with my fingernails. Sap spills out and stains my skin a yellowish green. I shred the petals, turn over on to my back, cross my hands across my heart and pretend that I am dead for a few seconds. The sun burns on my eyelids.

  Through the euphoria, I remind myself to be cautious. I know that I have the emotionality of women on the land. If I were there, it would draw men to me like a beacon. It’s important to keep this from Llew, so that he knows I am a person he can love, not a person he will feel compelled to hurt. These are the kinds of things that Mother and King taught us about love outside the borders.

  Somewhere distant in my mind, I know I should be doing something. Taking the rowing boat as far as it could take me, bailing out water all the way, and under the strain of the air watching through binoculars for the outline of Mother returning to us. I got her as my loved-most this year. That gives me some sort of responsibility. But I do not go.

  Instead I move to the pool, where Sky and Grace lie on recliners angled specifically to get the best view out to sea, heads touching, arms linked. Their faces ask Where have you been? but I refuse to feel guilty. The men and Gwil are grouped around the other end of the pool. They seem to be talking seriously, so I don’t want to interrupt them, but Llew looks over to me and he waves, calls out my name. I wave back. He watches me walk over to a mint-striped recliner near my sisters, picking the one that is cleanest, hitching my pale skirt up over my knees. It is easy to slip my sunglasses on to my face and the straps down my shoulders and to settle back, to feel his gaze on me like water, like a thing I deserve.

  It’s not long before we become too hot lying there under the midsummer sun but we don’t move, we are languid and paralysed after the morning’s shock. Even at the approach of evening the air is stagnant; deep purple clouds gather and still the heat has not broken. We stay out until the first fat drops of rain hit us and then we run inside together. Standing in the lounge with our faces flushed, my sisters pull their dresses on over their swimsuits as the men watch. Grace’s stomach is soft and round where the baby stretched her body.

  The men offer to make dinner. Grace is reluctant but eventually she agrees. When the rain eases, they send Gwil out to fetch oysters and shellfish, and through the open windows we hear him whooping as he runs down the beach. The three of us retreat to Grace’s room automatically, like we have done so many times before, sprawling over her bed, but almost immediately she sits up, restless, something occurring to her.

  ‘Let’s go to Mother’s room,’ she suggests. ‘It’s nicer.’

  We re-examine our mother’s clothes in the cupboard, smelling of antiseptic and the lavender she takes from the garden. Then we turn to the cabinet in her bathroom, the brown bottles of medicines, the pills in white cardboard boxes with red lettering. Tramadol. Olanzapine. Diazepam. Grace reads them out with a grimace, with a flourish. The words mean nothing to us. The three of us check under the bed, making Sky stick her arm into the shadows. She draws back a sleeve of dust. We count the pairs of underwear in Mother’s drawers and open her bedside cabinet to find a pair of tweezers, the dead stub of a votive candle, nothing more.

  ‘When will she come back?’ Sky asks when we have finished our inspections and laid ourselves on the bed in a row.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, staring up at the ceiling, the clouded lamp in its bronze fitting.

  ‘Soon,’ Grace assures her. ‘Soon.’

  The rain returns, grows worse. The energy builds in my chest. My sisters fall asleep in the faltering light. When I know they won’t wake, I get up and walk down the corridor to my own bedroom, my own bathroom. I left the window open and rainwater has sluiced the tiled floors, the walls. When I close it, I see the waves are bigger than usual. Their saline residue will be on the windows of the lounge, the dining room’s glass doors. One day they will overwhelm us, water moulding our carpets and warping the parquet, leaving tidemarks on the wallpaper. But I hope to be long gone by then.

  It’s too stormy for the drowning game but my feelings will not wait, my body is aching to be submerged, so I turn on the taps, stripping off my clothes as the water runs. I test the temperature, wanting it tepid, somewhere between the air and the sea. When the tub is full enough I climb in, lean back and go under in one sharp movement. Below the surface, the sound of the storm cuts out.

  Loneliness must have changed my body over the years. I think about my heart blown out of shape and unfit for the job, made of the knotted purple veins that river Mother’s calves. Dark water in the channels of my brain, a stiffness in my hands. My lungs, red and wet, the air pressed out of them.

  Soon I run out of breath. My thoughts become a flat line of light. I wait a second past the point where I know I can’t stand it any more and then I burst up through the water gasping – and I have survived again, I have survived, and my heart is singing and my eyes are dark and the wind outside seems quieter, drowned out by the pitch of my own blood in my ears.

  I stay in the now-cold bath for some time, rejoining my sisters once I feel ready. They are still asleep. The indigo circles under Grace’s eyes are back, and Sky is pallid too now. Something is wrong with us, something has always been wrong with us. I find the space I am allowed and move back into it. Either side of me, my sisters murmur before lapsing back into sleep. I breathe shallowly, pain under my ribcage, hair wet. I wait for Mother’s return with great patience, but she hasn’t arrived by the time I hear the men calling us in chorus for dinner, two low voices and Gwil raising his own reedy voice for the first time, as if he is not so weak any more. I wake my sisters and we walk together through the quiet of the house, where I can pretend we are one, before we step into the lighted space of the dining room.

  One last flare of joy, after dinner, before I go to sleep. A small bunch of flowers from the garden on my pillow. Violet and yellow, the petals growing limp already. I want to keep them but make myself press them down into my bin and hide them with a drift of tissue paper, for secrecy’s sake, for safety.

  I mourned him gracefully for three months, before a postcard arrived. It had a woman dressed in a frilled dress on the front, tomato-red. I’m alive, don’t worry about me, it said on the back. My hands started to violently shake so I disposed of the poisonous object in the incinerator at once, taking care not to breathe in the smoke.

  The second day without Mother, the shore is strewn with incredible amounts of flotsam. Rope and seaweed. Large rocks and small, the sand partly washed away. The three of us pick through it, looking for anything valuable. We retreat only when Sky finds a milky jellyfish, which we think for a terrible moment is a ghost or part of one, and reminds us that without Mother’s presence we are endangering ourselves in every waking moment of the day. We shake a little once we find a part of the beach that feels safe, and cry a little too, putting our hands on each other’s shoulders, my sisters even touching mine.

  ‘Let’s go to the perimeter,’ Grace says when we have recovered, sitting cross-legged on the sand. She picks up a pebble near her foot and aims it at the water, but it falls just short. ‘Maybe there is someone who will help.’

  Who? I don’t ask, but we go with her. She picks up more pebbles and puts them in her pocket. In the forest we step very carefully through the foliage. At the border, before we can stop her, Grace throws the pebble as hard as she can past the barbed wire.

  ‘Is there anyone out there?’ she shouts. I put both my hands on her mouth and she resists, pulls us both down to the floor. Sky shields her head, but nothing happens. No movement in the leaves, the trees.

/>   ‘Why would you do that?’ I say to her once we have stood up, breathing hard.

  She shakes her head. ‘You love them. You love the men.’

  Outrage. I put her in a headlock. We blunder too close to the wire, face certain death, and only then do we stop.

  ‘How dare you touch me,’ my sister says, and her voice is poison.

  The three of us sit down on the leaf-strewn dirt. I catch my breath, stare at Grace. After a short time she reaches into her pocket and draws out a roll of white cloth, part of an old sheet. She passes one end to me, unwinds it and gives the other end to Sky, and we hold it taut as she rips it into smaller rags with her knife. She ties them to branches and even, daringly, one to the border itself, a part less rusted than the rest. So Mother can find her way back, she explains. Or so allies, other women, can swell our ranks. Because surely they are out there, somewhere.

  ‘We should have done this earlier,’ Grace says as she ties the knots. ‘We should have done this when King died.’

  Sky shivers. Mother does not use the word died. Only gone. Grace spots this.

  ‘Died, died, died!’ she says. ‘Say it, Sky. Go on. King is dead.’

  ‘King is dead,’ Sky says, doubtfully. She picks up a stick and draws a line in the dirt.

  ‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’ Grace says. She ties the last scrap of fabric and surveys her handiwork.

  We move to the terrace to establish a watch for Mother. I monitor the sea through binoculars until my vision fizzes at the edges and I have to lie down with my palms pressed over my eyes. Another sister takes up the watch instead. We pass the time like that for a while.

  Sometime in the afternoon I hear music coming from the ballroom, faint, and asked to be excused. Grace moves her shoulders almost imperceptibly. ‘Suit yourself,’ she says. Her eyes are trained elsewhere.

  Llew is playing something mournful this time. He turns and smiles when I enter, pauses with his hands still on the keys.