‘I was hoping you would hear,’ he says.
He stands up, closes the lid of the piano and walks over to me, putting his hands either side of my face in the way I am getting used to.
This time when we are in my room I pull at his left ear with my nails, testing a reaction. I bite neatly with my jaw. It doesn’t make him angry, but there’s a slight extra pressure in the weight of his body. I am seeking places of weakness, just in case. ‘Hey,’ he says eventually, indulgently. ‘You’re hurting me.’
Good, I think.
He touches my hair. My heart swells like a broken hand to twice its size, the same sort of tenderness.
Love only your sisters.
When Llew leaves me, I go to Mother’s room and sit on her bed for a while, staring at the irons. It is the chore of the one without love to keep them shining, free of dust. I haven’t been doing it often enough. Mother keeps a tin of polish, a cloth, in her dressing table. I take them out and get to work.
I don’t bother spending much time on King’s. The living need the love more: I can make my own judgements here. When it comes to Mother’s, though, I take extra care, picturing her out there on the ocean with water in the boat’s floor, her body bent over as the air assaults her like a wave. Two days.
Invocation for good health for our mother.
I touch every one of the irons like a dare before I leave the room.
Maybe Mother will just stay away for a while. Maybe the way I am feeling will wear off, a dream or an ache, powerful only because I am not used to getting what I want. It’s possible that by the time she returns I could be myself again. If I am good.
So I take my own temperature, score vigorously at my ankles in a warm bath. I have survived this long alone, haven’t I. But my starved feelings, tamed into listlessness, still flower up in my chest.
New prayer: Let me grow tired of this. Please, I think, my pulse nervous and rebounding. Soon.
There is a blood moon. I walk to the end of the jetty and lie there against the wooden boards to watch it. I want to be alone with it, the orb seeming close enough to touch. The ponderous water below my head hushes my ears. I feel sick with the number of symbols we are swimming against, with how porous the borders of sky and sea and land feel all at once.
This is a time to be with my sisters and I know I should fetch them, draw them by the hands and bring them to watch, so we can sit silent on the planks and think about what is coming. I want only to be alone but in the end they come anyway; the white shapes of them moving along the jetty to me, heavy cotton shawls wrapped around their bare shoulders. They lay themselves down next to me without speaking and I go to sit up, but Sky catches my arm. ‘Stay,’ they ask me, one after the other. ‘Please.’ Soft and knowable once more. They can switch it on and off at will.
We look up towards the sky, reach up our arms and our hands, and we pray the way that Mother taught. The air is dusky around us.
We almost don’t hear James approach, but the creak of the boards behind us gives him away, makes us sit up. Watery eyes, sallow skin. I’ve looked at Llew so much that looking at James is a disappointment. I wonder if he sees me and my sisters as distinct or as three branches of the same tree, indistinguishable apart from slight variations in height, in the curl and hue of our dark hair, backlit by red.
‘Do you know why the moon is like that?’ he asks us. His voice is hoarse, nervous. He clears his throat.
‘It’s a blood moon,’ Grace says.
‘It’s just dust,’ James tells her. ‘Dust in the atmosphere.’ We don’t reply. He fidgets with an item around his neck.
‘What’s that?’ asks Sky.
‘This?’ said James, pulling it out. He holds it up towards us. ‘It’s a rosary.’ A silver cross on beads.
‘What’s it for?’ she asks again.
‘For praying,’ James says. ‘For protection. You girls pray, don’t you?’ He smiles quickly, uncertain.
‘We do,’ says Grace.
‘We could all pray now. Together,’ he says. ‘If you like.’
‘No, thanks,’ I say.
‘No,’ says Grace. ‘But you can stay here for a while with us.’
We shuffle up to make room for him. James seems uncomfortable. We fix our eyes upon him. For once, we have the upper hand definitively. I can feel it in my chest. We could do things to hurt him. He might not fight back; he might not know how to protect himself against us. Some of the higher waves send a gentle spray up on to our skin.
‘Is Mother back yet?’ Sky asks him.
‘No,’ James tells her. ‘It’s just a matter of time, though. She’ll arrive tomorrow, I expect.’
Sky slumps against Grace, disappointed. Grace kisses her on the forehead, smooths back her hair.
‘The journey can take a few days, with King.’ She pauses. ‘Took a few days. So it’s all right. No cause for panic.’
James nods.
We fall silent at the sight of a shooting star above us. I follow it with my eyes until it winks out of view, long past the point where it interests everyone else. One star among a million; a moon refracted in its own honey, plumed by dust. It is so far away, but I want to reach into the sky and pull it down regardless. I want to hold it in my hands, to break it apart and make it mine.
The closest I ever got to one of the damaged women was sitting in the sauna, a long time ago, back in the days when it still worked. I couldn’t have been older than ten, eleven. It was rare to be left unsupervised with one of them. It could not have been an accident. She shuffled around, coughing. Like most of the women, her body seemed run-down, a creature unable to flourish. I watched her very carefully, the way I would have watched something that had limped out from the forest. I was over-warm, but she used her hands to scoop water on to the heated element with a shiver. My healthy child’s body sweated with ease. Occasionally she let out a faint moan or cry. I pretended not to hear.
What must it be like, to live in a world that wants to kill you? Where every breath is an affront? I should have asked her that day about how it felt. Occasionally she still pressed muslin to her mouth, but there was no blood that I could see. Her painful eyes, when they fixed on me, made me nervous.
That evening, we all gathered in the ballroom. One of the other women had been deemed ready for the water cure, her body practised and open. King sat on a chair pushed to the wall, behind the piano, which made a physical barrier between him and the women. There were four or five of them, most of whom had stopped flinching at the sight of him, but he was chivalrous about keeping his distance.
Mother entered the room after the rest of us were all seated. She went straight to the woman and placed a hand on her shoulder, a signal for her to rise, and brought her to the front. The large curing basin waited there, full of water, the ever-present jar of salt on the floor next to it. Mother filled both hands with the salt and sprinkled it on the surface in a spiral pattern, her movements graceful. More salted and viscous than the sea, something closer to our own blood. The woman kneeled down with difficulty and the gathered fabric of her blue gown sighed. Mother clasped her hands and put them on the back of the woman’s neck as she slowly pressed her face into the water. All the lamps along the wall were blazing.
Time passed and passed. The woman’s body was compliant at first, but soon her own hands, pressed to the floor, began to twitch, then flail. She was trying to push herself up. The water rose over the sides of the basin as the woman struggled, soaking the front of Mother’s dress. Mother did not react. We waited, our breath caught in our mouths. And then, as always, just past the point when we were sure it would be over, she was pulled up, strawberry-flushed and gasping. She reeled almost over to the floor, supported at the last minute by Mother’s arms. Mother wrapped a small white towel around her shoulders, as tenderly as if she were one of my sisters.
The cured woman stood and the others got to their feet and clapped fervently. And we, the sisters at the back, clapped too. Our father just watched, sti
ll seated, understanding that the atmosphere did not belong to him. That edge of hysteria, the sense of being saved. The woman cried as she came back to her seat, the towel trailing in her hand. It could have been joy, or shock, or both. I wonder now if she felt the difference already. If somewhere within her there lived a kernel of new strength, and whether this strength would mark her out visibly on the mainland or whether she would just live with the knowledge of it inside her, perfect and luminous.
I knew so little at the time of what she had endured, that damaged woman, though I discovered it all much later from the Welcome Book. Why didn’t the men do anything? I wondered, when I finally knew the truth. Why didn’t they make things easier? But back then, watching her walk away from the curing water of the basin, I didn’t know anything about power, or love, or taking what you can just because you can. Why should I, it wasn’t something that had been laid out for me yet, it wasn’t necessary information. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know,’ said Mother. At the time, that was good enough for me.
Stupid to meet a stranger but I was still convinced by the intrinsic goodness of people, I was so innocent, and I had not been exposed to the world very much. I didn’t understand how rapidly things had changed, how all that had been needed was permission for everything to go to shit, and that permission had been granted. I didn’t know that there was no longer any need for the men to hold their bodies in check or to carry on the lie that we mattered.
On the third day without Mother I wake early. It is a very clear day, the promise of intense heat later. I stand on the terrace, breathing the salt air off the silent bay. Below me, something breaks the surface of the swimming pool. I move to the rail and see a figure in a long white gown – the drowning dress, I realize, with its weights and embroidery. She breaks the surface. It is Grace, her hair loose in dark ropes around her shoulders. I am too far away to see the expression on her face.
As I watch, she swims to the shallow end and takes in deep gulps of air, resting against the side for a few seconds. Then she goes back into the deeper water and holds herself under again. I count the seconds. She surfaces desperately. She pulls herself under again. It does not seem to be giving her the satisfaction that it gives me, no end point, no closure.
Her movements become more furious, not less. She is making up for lost time, maybe, her body once more her own, to use as she wants. I stop watching after the third time, ashamed. I let her do what she needs to do.
I am standing in the centre of the kitchen. Sea air comes in from the open door. The scent of citrus fruits, though we have not grown them for a while. The landscape stopped supporting them: thinning of the soil, vestigial minerals. We used to cut the oranges and lemons into medicinal segments. We would give them to the damaged women, to wedge in their mouths and hold there for a long while, letting the juice pour down their chins, their throats. Sometimes we did it to each other too.
Llew is a shadow against stainless steel, against the cracked white paint heavy with dust. He tucks both his arms around my waist, his chin resting on my head, having entered the room out of nowhere. I am being held and I am not used to holding. Nobody has seen us, and I can’t tell if I want to be caught or not. It would be disaster, yet at least someone would bear witness, would confirm that this is real, that this is happening to me. But he lets go at the sound of footsteps. Grace enters the kitchen and stops at the sight of us, but his hands are not on me now, there is still no proof. Love can be that slippery: the difference between touching and not-touching, fallible memory, my skin forgetting already. He raises his palms to her, puts his hands where she can see them. ‘Good morning to you both,’ he says, his first words of the day to her and to me.
I think a lot about what it could all mean. Significance hangs around him like cloud. Every cough, every glance is telling me something. Hands, again. This time laid out on the breakfast table with white cotton cloth showing in the space between his fingers, sitting next to me as Grace ladles out fruit. His knee nudges mine; he lingers when everybody else has drifted back to the kitchen to wash up. It is not an accident. He takes me by the arm, pulls me up the stairs. ‘Come on,’ he says. He is overjoyed by my body. It’s like he, too, has never seen one before.
New dangers, though, coming to the surface like the bubbles of soap. His breath has a copper bitterness. It fills the room as he sleeps for a few minutes in my bed, breathing hard through his mouth. I turn away from it. Again I want to hurt him, want to save his life or to ruin it, something, anything, I have not decided. I want him to leap for my approval like a fish, body twisting, and I want to be the one who dictates the terms, but when I try, small stabbing gestures towards intimacy, he doesn’t react enough. He pulls my own hair over my mouth.
Afterwards we walk back down to the sea and I point to the horizon, and he goes in up to his ankles despite the danger. I am so close to going in after him, a lifetime of instinct already overridden. I hold firm, on the shore, watching for his body to be pulled under. But I don’t kid myself. I am saved only because he is not asking me directly, not holding out his hand and imploring.
I lie on the men’s side of the pool now. I have discovered that it’s all right for me to be close to them, that my body feels no different really. My eyes do not redden. My ears do not bleed. But my sisters won’t join me, even when I ask. Grace doesn’t bother to answer; she just stares at me with a maddening half-smirk, then looks away. So I leave them out on the terrace and take my towel down to the pool, positioning a recliner between James and Llew. James includes me in his small jokes, which I do not understand, but I smile anyway.
Llew goes inside and returns with drinks on the enamel tray that Mother uses when we are sick or confined. It is some kind of alcohol mixed with juice from a tin. Sudden flashback: Mother and King clawing at each other in large love, small rage, like something from a half-remembered dream. I close my eyes for a second, gather my composure. The dream is the days which hang in front of me, smooth and opaque as a skin on hot milk. I do not want to think too clearly, to see too closely.
Llew touches my foot when James looks away. I lie on my front so that the sun can hit my back and both of them are watching me, I can tell, and the confirmation of my existence makes me self-conscious. James touches me too, on the arm, paternally. ‘You’re our friend, aren’t you?’ he says. ‘Our little friend.’ His speech is slurred. I do not feel afraid of them.
Llew pulls at my hair when James slips into the water, wraps it around his hand. ‘Beautiful,’ he says into my ear. He bites my neck and I start laughing hysterically, so that James pauses and stands up, watches us with water streaming down his body, but doesn’t say anything.
Previous long days at the pool, days with and without love. King pushing athletically through the water, length after length, skin burnishing even as we watched. We couldn’t swim if he was swimming: he became impatient at how slow we were. I cried, sometimes, behind my sunglasses where nobody could see. The damaged women stayed inside, generally. They only really trusted the air in the early morning, the dusk, when it was easy to breathe.
When James goes inside for a glass of water, Llew puts out his hand to me, closes it around my forearm. The air is bone-dry, heat catching in my throat. He kisses me open-mouthed with his sunglasses still on, sunglasses I recognize as King’s, then jumps into the pool. I follow him blindly. Under the sun-warmed water I turn somersaults, over and over and over. Llew holds me under by my legs and I do not struggle to get to the surface, I leave my body weightless and inert, thinking, Do what you want do what you want do what you want.
There is a commotion at the surface as I lie suspended, joyful. Llew is thrashing at the water. He lifts me up in his arms and I respond immediately, wrapping my own around his neck, but when I break the surface he is panicked. James is standing on the side of the pool, staring.
‘I thought there was something wrong,’ Llew shouts, letting go of me. ‘Why did you do that? I thought I had drowned you.’ He stands up in the wate
r, leans over me. His voice becomes louder. ‘Do you know what that looked like? Was that some sort of joke?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. I forgot myself. It was peaceful, to be held under by him like that. Unchangeable stasis, the light filtering through.
‘Calm down, Llew,’ James says. ‘There’s no harm done, is there?’
Llew falls back, lets himself sink up to his neck in the water. ‘Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again,’ he says to me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to him, climbing out of the water. I do not like the new way he is looking at me, as if I have revealed something about myself it would have been better to keep hidden.
Before long, James falls asleep in the sun, his arm flung across his face to shade him. I watch the movement of his whistling breathing, his reddening skin.
‘Let’s go to the forest again,’ Llew says in a stage whisper. He has forgiven me and I am stupidly grateful. He throws one of my sandals at me and I almost catch it, almost fall over as I put it on. ‘Quickly!’ He glances at James. ‘Before the old fucker wakes up.’
As we walk down the pebbled ground towards the forest, I look back to search for Grace’s face at a window, but I would not be able to see her anyway: the glass reflects the glare outwards and there are too many panes to count. She could be behind any one of them.
In the forest itself we head for the border until we are sure we can’t be seen. We are uncomfortably close to it, for me at least, but I have to trust him to protect me, something that’s getting easier all the time. Llew has brought his towel but the twigs and rocks stick through. I am on my hands and knees and I know that bruises will come up almost immediately, that I am thin-skinned and woundable, and somewhere within me I like this, the proof, the map of this new joy. It is hard to keep my balance, the alcohol affecting how the forest holds itself, how I hold myself.
Afterwards, I am very happy. The leaves of the forest murmur around us as though they are happy too. It is good to be in love, to have the whole world on your side. I lie on the towel as Llew walks around nearby, throwing rocks, inspecting leaves. Even in the shade, the breeze, the heat is almost unbearable. It is warmer since their arrival, I know I am not imagining it.
The Water Cure Page 10