The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

  Llew lies down in the shadow next to me, and I move over, rest my head on his stomach. He touches my face absent-mindedly, putting his fingers briefly inside my mouth, cupping them under my chin. I bring up the outside world, and he asks me, bored, what I want to know, but I can’t say out loud, What did it feel like to have a child? Will you have more children? What was it like for you to be young? What does it feel like to have a man’s life, and a man’s body, that solid mass? What are other men like? What does it feel like to go beyond the border? Does the air stretch the skin of your face? Does it damage your body? Do you think about dying too?

  ‘God, it’s boiling,’ he says. I push myself up on my forearms, purse my lips and blow on to his face. He keeps his eyes shut, moves his lips faintly into a smile, and suddenly I am sick to my stomach.

  ‘Anything,’ I say.

  ‘Why do you care so much?’ he asks.

  ‘I just want to know,’ I say, and my eyes start to water.

  ‘Are you crying?’ he asks, without opening his eyes.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I have a headache.’ I lie down so that the water won’t course down my face. Old trick, learned so early I don’t remember when. Perhaps it is a human trick, something I was born with.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he says, finally looking at me properly. ‘I hate it when women cry. It’s manipulative.’ He gets to his feet. ‘Go inside and take an aspirin,’ he says, pulling me up too.

  ‘You want to watch that,’ he adds. ‘You want to take care of yourself better.’ He puts both hands on my shoulders and kisses me briefly on the forehead. And I wonder how much he knows about the effect his body could have on mine, whether he is taking his own precautions.

  We are heading back to the house when we hear voices. Just my sisters, but they are making a commotion, the noise dipping and ebbing. Llew looks at me, unsure, but only for a second.

  ‘They’ll be playing a game,’ I say. We walk into the next clearing.

  My sisters are standing in front of something, and they are jeering. It’s darker here, the leaves bunched close together so the light cannot get through. Rocks coated in moss like tongues, leaves fruiting with mould. They don’t hear our approach.

  ‘Where is your mother?’ Sky asks, her back still to us. ‘Where is she?’ She reaches out and shakes a branch, carelessly. Birds crash out into the leaves above them.

  ‘Why aren’t your men looking after her?’ Grace joins in. ‘Why aren’t you?’

  ‘You must have left her all alone,’ says Sky.

  ‘What would she think if she knew?’ says Grace.

  Llew walks swiftly in front of them and my sisters start, fall back. He takes Gwil’s arm. His face is tear-stained, trousers only half done up.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ he asks, voice dangerous. Grace stands her ground.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, chin up. ‘We just found him alone in the woods.’ She looks at Gwil. ‘Sneaking around, doing the things that men do.’

  Gwil turns away from them, hangs his head. He wipes his eyes with the back of his arm.

  ‘You leave him alone,’ Llew says.

  ‘Or else what?’ Grace asks, smiling. But when he takes a step closer to her she moves away from him, despite her bravado.

  ‘Being cruel to a child. It’s terrible,’ he says. ‘If you were a man I would have hit you without thinking about it.’

  ‘Good thing I’m not, then,’ Grace says, and his hands rise, but then fall back to his sides.

  My sisters and I leave the men among the trees. Both of them are jittery, euphoric. We have survived another thing. And what is a boy if not a hurtable man, a safe version? Something has been proved, something established.

  But we are still fragile, and we are not allowed to forget this. In the evening I am woken from a nap by Grace pulling at my hair, slapping me around the face until I raise my hands, until I roll out of the bed, and when I look at her I see how red she is, how hysterical.

  ‘Mother,’ she says breathlessly, stopping her assault for a second. ‘Mother!’

  ‘What?’ I ask her, forgetting about my ringing ears. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘She’s still gone!’ Grace shouts at me.

  Sky runs into the room, clawing at her face and keening until I find some muslin from my drawer and wrap it around her mouth, her throat. It does not still her voice.

  It overtakes me then, the fear, and my knees buckle, and I start to scream too. Because suddenly it is real: Mother is gone.

  ‘She’s not coming back,’ Sky says hoarsely, and Grace slaps her hard – she never hits Sky, we are gentle with her, we are mindful of her – and so then I hit Grace to remind her she is no longer untouchable, she is no better than us. Grace looks at me, raises her hand to her face.

  Then, at the doorway, presence felt before seen: the men. They come into the room and I instinctively make to push them out, but let my hands drop before I reach them. We need to stand out on the lawn and let our bodies fall to the ground, or be caught in each other’s arms; we need to push ourselves under the water over and over again.

  ‘Mother,’ gasps Sky, moving the muffler from where I have wrapped it, wet with her spit and tears. ‘Mother.’

  ‘Girls,’ says James. He looks taken aback by our force. ‘Please don’t be like this. She’ll be back soon. I know she will be. Maybe even tonight. She must have got caught up in the port. Or stayed for dinner.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Grace shoots at him. ‘Why should we trust you?’

  And he gives the only possible answer. ‘What choice do you have?’

  My eyes are drawn as usual to Llew, who looks horrified to see us like this, enough to make me feel ashamed. He refuses to meet my eyes. Gwil is the only one not bothered by our hysterics. He is watching us with an expression of intense interest, with something approaching glee.

  ‘It’s the same thing over and over,’ Sky says, and she is sobbing openly now. ‘You keep saying the same things, but where is Mother? When will she be back?’ She sits on the floor without warning, as if her knees have given way.

  ‘Please,’ says James, as if we were hurting him. ‘Come downstairs with us. Let us look after you.’ He moves to comfort Sky, but she shuffles away from him on her hands and knees, leaves him standing with his arms outstretched.

  ‘Right, enough of this,’ Llew says. He claps, then looks at us expectantly. ‘Come on.’

  The fight has gone out of us. After some hesitation, Sky stands up. We follow the men down the stairs, holding hands, united in defeat.

  The dining room is a mess, cookbooks and plates, empty bottles and packets strewn around. The men do not live lightly on our territory. I look sideways at Grace, but she doesn’t seem to notice. My hands itch to gather everything into piles, to tip it into the sink and get the water running, but I don’t want to join the men in the kitchen, their voices bright as they jostle verbally with each other. Instead we open the tall doors as wide as they go and crowd on to the sill, feeling the night air cool our faces.

  ‘Think how angry Mother would have been to see that,’ Grace says, and we all make quick guilty chirrups that are not really laughing. She would hate such a scene. She would have punished us without a second thought.

  James comes into the dining room carrying a tray that has three china cups on it. He places it and we watch the steam rise up warily.

  ‘Cocoa,’ he says. ‘Just powder and water, I’m afraid.’ He makes an apologetic gesture. Llew joins us. Neither of them mentions my sisters tormenting Gwil in the woods.

  I am the first to drink from my cup, everyone watching me. It tastes good. They have used plenty of powder, and some of the grains have not dissolved. They stick behind my teeth, leaving a sweet film on my lips.

  They coax us into the lounge. At first the men sit at the opposite side of the room, but soon they come over to where we huddle, all three of them. They plant their bodies too close to us. We can feel the heat spreading from them, warming our own skin.
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  ‘We’ve been talking, you know,’ James says. He shares a look with Llew, who nods. ‘You could come with us, when we’re picked up. Wouldn’t you like that?’

  ‘No,’ says Grace. We move our heads in agreement with her.

  ‘Don’t throw the idea out yet,’ Llew said. ‘If your mother doesn’t return – if she’s left you for good – we’ll protect you.’

  ‘She hasn’t left us,’ says Grace.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ says Llew. His voice is the voice of a person trying not to scare us.

  ‘You have your whole lives ahead of you,’ adds James, and I look at him and hate the quivering set of his mouth, the peeling skin at his nose.

  ‘They’ll come for us,’ Llew explains. ‘And we could bring you along. We would hate to leave you here alone.’

  ‘We won’t be alone. Please stop talking,’ says Grace, placing her hands over her ears. Llew takes them and moves them to her lap, and the three of us stiffen.

  ‘Don’t be so childish,’ he says. I hate that he has touched her, and move my shoulder closer to his body to get more contact.

  ‘Just think about it,’ says James. ‘Think about it.’

  ‘We wouldn’t survive,’ says Grace.

  I try to meet Llew’s eyes, to give him a signal that I want this, that I want to stand with him in a new world the way we have spoken of, but he is not looking at me. His eyes are fixed out of the window, where the sea is a breathing animal.

  He stays in my room that night, the first time. We don’t discuss it, but when the dark of the night has deepened, when I have been lying there for a while, the door opens. He comes in and he pushes me with both his hands from the centre of the bed, whispers, ‘Move up.’ He doesn’t close his arms or legs around me, doesn’t do any of the things we normally do, just curls up with his back to me, his body close and hot. Soon his breathing dulls. I put my hand out to the back of his head, take hold of a palmful of his hair. Skull fragile underneath. I could kill him here, if I wanted. I put my lips to his shoulder, very gently, so that he will not feel it.

  In the night I wake up briefly and his body is shaking. I drape my arm across his stomach, bury my face into his neck. Possibly he is crying. As soon as I touch him, the shaking stops. He doesn’t say anything. He could be embarrassed, or my touch could have mended him. I prefer the second option. I prefer the idea that my body, as the object of love, has a power I could never have dreamed of.

  It was no one big thing but many small things. Each one chipped away at me. By the end, I felt skinless. My cuticles bled. I was aged immeasurably. I felt terrible that I had so little in reserve, that the other women could cope. It felt like I had failed them.

  On the fourth day without Mother, I wake to the empty bed. My first action is to pull the covers off, to inspect the sheets feverishly for proof Llew was there at all. There are dark hairs on the pillow, shorter than mine. I bury my face into it, but we are all using the same soaps, unlabelled, slabs of carbolic salmon-pink and fat in the palm. I look for salt hardened on the pillowcase to prove that he was crying, but my search is inconclusive. More hairs on the sheet, the faint scent of his sweat.

  My stomach turns without warning. I strip the bed and pile the sheets in the middle of the floor. I run a bath so hot that sitting down in it is almost unbearable, but I do it anyway. I think of the phrase pain threshold like it’s a vault you jump. I have forgotten to open the window and steam fills the room in no time.

  Quickly, before I lose my nerve, I make two minor, conciliatory slices in my thigh, a centimetre each. It is hard sometimes to tell which marks on my legs are from the summer I grew four inches, and which are the marks that keep us safe. The historical unwieldiness of my body is everywhere. Now there are new shames and new dangers, like the way I have made noises, lost control, begged Llew to do things to me in ways that make me glad of the water’s pain. The vaporous bath pinkens around me.

  I drink a lot of water, to protect myself against those things I am doing with him. One pint, two, swallowed along with air, too quickly, standing at the sink. My stomach swells underneath my dress. I imagine the water cleaning my blood and lie down for a second on the balding velvet couch in the lounge while it works on me, listening to the sound of my body recalibrating.

  Without Mother no bread is being made, the goat isn’t giving up her milk, we are too scattered to keep the house in order. Breakfast leaves everyone hungry. The tins are vanishing swiftly, and Llew insists we open four of them. Peach slices, prunes, fruit cocktail, condensed milk that we spoon directly into our mouths. He doesn’t give me any sign that the night before even happened when he turns up with Gwil in tow. The sweet food is making him sick, he tells us. He takes the opener off me because I am working through the tins too slowly, his own hands twisting them open in seconds.

  ‘My teeth are about to fall out,’ he says, opening up his mouth to demonstrate. Gwil copies him. Both sets of teeth are hard and wolfish as usual, whereas ours do blacken at the backs of our mouths, me and my sisters’. The wet, red holes of the men’s throats make me nauseous.

  ‘You should have more variety in your diets,’ he tells us strictly. ‘Women your age. You should have red meat. Calcium. Folic acid. Your bodies have needs.’

  My body does not feel good. The fruit is too sweet, he is right. It sits and curdles in my stomach. I am still finishing my meal when Llew stands up and leaves the table, his bowl and spoon lying there carelessly. He has left some juice. When everybody else has gone, I take the bowl and drink the juice myself, panicked, unable to help it.

  I find my sisters in the swamp-smelling heat of Grace’s room, lying on her floor with the windows closed, the silk scarves Mother gave to us covering their bodies. It makes me start to see them lying there like that, unmoving, when I push the door open. Grace sits up, the silk falling from her face. The circles around her eyes are deepening like a bruise with every day. She observes me, does not say a thing.

  ‘Can I join you?’ I have to ask. She lies back down.

  ‘If you want,’ she says. ‘We’re meditating on a word.’

  It’s an old technique used by Mother to calm us. Sometimes she would pick a word we had never heard before. It was like a treat, a small thing made of sugar. ‘Think about that,’ she would tell us. ‘Until you’re bored. Until you fall asleep.’

  ‘What’s the word?’ I ask. Grace sighs.

  ‘Tramadol,’ she says, pronouncing it slowly. ‘From the medicine cabinet.’ Her breath is sweetly bad, milk on the turn.

  I move the word’s contours over and over in my mind, the sheer fabric moving out with my breath. Despite the smell of my unwashed sisters filling my nostrils, lying here is soothing. I think of the small white pills, small blue pills, the glass of water, the brown glass bottle. Our mouths open, heads heavy. Grace, after the week we spent asleep, learning to keep what she was given under her tongue, spitting it out after Mother had left and displaying it in her palm for us to see. Look, she would say. This is inside the both of you now.

  Sky sits up first. She finds a pair of scissors in the drawer next to Grace’s bed and brings them to us.

  ‘Will you cut my hair?’ she asks me. I snip off the ends where they straggle, a centimetre or two, but she shakes her head.

  ‘All of it,’ she says.

  I am horrified by the idea. I say no and she pleads. Without her hair, she could fall sick. King insisted that we grew it as protection. But she turns her attention instead to Grace, who says, ‘You can do what you want.’ She puts her arms around Sky. She is doing it to spite me.

  ‘What about what King said?’ I ask.

  ‘What about him,’ Grace replies. ‘We had shorter hair once. You probably don’t remember that,’ she addresses Sky. ‘But we did.’

  Together they go into the bathroom and close the door. I study the chewed-up ends of my fingers. Snip-snip, go the scissors, even through the wood. When they come out, Sky’s dark hair is clipped short around her ears. I look
at her with fear.

  ‘That’s better,’ she says. She gives a short twirl.

  It makes her look a lot older, as if she has caught up with us in one leap. She turns and examines herself in the mirror of the dressing table. Grace admires her handiwork as I take one deep breath and then another.

  ‘You look pretty,’ Grace says. ‘The men will get ideas. Don’t let them take liberties.’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ says Sky. She mimes retching.

  ‘It is disgusting,’ agrees Grace. ‘I’m glad you think so.’ They don’t look at me. My face is hot, flaming with blood.

  We let her gather her own hair, sorting it into small piles, for her to do what she wants with. Offerings. Protections. Perhaps she will plant some in the garden and a new tree will push soft claws through the ground. I watch her closely for signs of sickness. Maybe I am already too late to save my own body, but I will do what I can for my sisters, despite their ingratitude. When she has finished, I am the one who walks her to Mother’s bathroom and removes the aspirin from the medicine cabinet. She opens her mouth, closes her eyes, and I put one tablet on her tongue, two, and then I put one in my own mouth too, because even though I no longer feel nauseous there is a sense of dread starting to build at the edges of my body. Something that feels like it could be a symptom, something that really started days ago when Llew was on top of me and I opened my eyes to see his own fixed grimly on the wall behind the bed, as though I were incidental, as though I could be anybody.

  James finds me crying in the garden, where I thought nobody would look. Somehow I am a child again and nobody wants to go near me, nobody can cope with how badly I want to be held, or touched, or listened to, and there is nothing I can ever do about it. I crouch my body down beside one of the ruined walls and sit in the grass, still wet with dew that soaks the skirt of my dress. There is a hot ball of anger at the centre of my pain. I find a sharp rock and put it in the palm of my hand, clutch it tightly.