The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I hear, and freeze. James sits himself next to me, not minding the sopping wet. He places out a hand to my arm but I flinch and he withdraws it.

  ‘I hope we didn’t upset you girls last night,’ he says. He is always calling us you girls, but I am just a girl now, my own girl, outside. Anything could happen to me.

  ‘I’m not upset,’ I say.

  ‘You can talk to me, Lia,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I just cry harder. He sits and waits, and eventually, despite myself, I manage to say, ‘My sisters.’

  ‘What about them? Have you fallen out?’ he asks, very gently. I wipe my eyes.

  ‘Oh, Lia,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He pauses. ‘But you’re old enough to be your own person. It’s not healthy to be so dependent on your sisters, at your age.’

  I am ashamed.

  ‘I used to hate my brother,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘I wanted to kill him sometimes.’ I am silent suddenly, thirsty for knowledge, for anything about Llew. ‘And then he got sick. Very sick. We were still children. I thought he was going to die.’

  I try to think about Llew ill, small and vulnerable, but I cannot imagine him as a child. Instead my mind recalls the fluctuations in Grace’s body through the years, always less hardy than mine. Two fevers, one severe enough for fasting diets, for salt in a line at the door frame of her room. A ballooning ankle, wasp-stung, the poison far from the heart. None of it preparation for the final change in her body.

  ‘It made me realize what being brothers meant,’ James continues, watching me. ‘I never lost that, even when he recovered. You can’t disregard blood, can you?’ He pauses. ‘So this will pass, whatever it is. I know it.’

  You don’t know anything, I want to tell him. My blood is disregardable, despite what he thinks, and yet everything I am belongs to them, if they want it. I want to laugh. I want to gesture at the world around me, the house, the forest, the garden falling away behind us. There are no parallels, I want to tell him. Some things will never pass.

  He gives me a small and satisfied smile, gets to his feet, brushes the grass and dirt from his trousers. ‘Why don’t you come with me, back inside? You’ll get too hot out here.’

  ‘Mother,’ I say. ‘I have to watch for Mother.’

  He sighs again, but nods. ‘If you insist.’

  Sky has a nightmare. Dozing on the terrace in the long afternoon light, we watch her arms jerk and twitch. Her mouth open in an O of pain, her newly shorn hair. I do not say I told you so to Grace, despite the temptation. My sister lies with her knees bent, sunglasses on, rubbing Mother’s forbidden oil thoughtfully on to her legs and arms.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Sky tells us when she wakes, sweating and alert, to see us staring at her. ‘But I don’t know of what.’ There is a long silence.

  ‘I think you should do a therapy,’ Grace says. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  Sky shakes her head.

  ‘I think it will help,’ Grace continues. She looks at me. ‘Lia?’

  I do not want to hurt my sister again. I feel the sweat gathering at my sides, under my dress.

  ‘Please,’ Sky says. ‘I don’t want to.’ She twists the fabric of her towel between her hands and screams, a sharp, child’s noise, a too-young noise, until we move to put our hands over her mouth. Grace holds the back of her hand against her forehead. Sky rolls dramatically on to the ground, looks up at us from there to gauge our reaction.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Grace says. ‘I think it’s the best option.’ She moves to her knees and holds both Sky’s trembling hands in her own.

  When we were younger, Mother encouraged me to have a favourite toy, a thing carved by King from driftwood. One day she gave it to Grace while I was watching and said, ‘This belongs to her now.’ Later there was a period when they would give me more at mealtimes, systematically, keeping it up for days. Grace watched my plate, unblinking, and I defended it from her with my body.

  We reacted each time, slapping each other hard around the face or pulling out whole locks of hair or gripping each other tight until our nails burst small red moons against the skin. Those parental interventions, strange experiments with our hearts, stopped at some point, like a childhood game might have, not long before Sky came along. I don’t know who stopped them, but I know that sometimes when I wheeled around mid-fury, locked together with my despised and beloved sister, I caught King and Mother looking at us like we were unrecognizable, like we were no longer their children. It hurt us very much to see that look but we soon forgot about it, absorbed again in how it felt to hate and love and hurt each other, the new things, the old things.

  We gather glass after glass from the kitchen, making several trips, and lay them out on the floor of Mother’s bathroom. Passing through her empty bedroom, it still feels like she is just downstairs; there is only the hint of staleness in the air if you breathe closely. The last photograph of our family is still on the mantelpiece, an accusation, missing King like a portent, although he has never been in the photographs; he was always the photographer. When I open her bottom drawer, looking for a bolt of muslin we can use if needed, I find the other group portraits. Mother’s hair expands, falls past her waist, recedes to her ears. My sisters and I grow tall suddenly, like trees. In my favourite, Grace is sitting on Mother’s lap. She is staring right into the camera on its tripod. I cover the photos in Mother’s underwear, the lace with the holes in and shimmering, flesh-coloured elastic. I would like to crawl under her bed and stay there for a minute or two, in the dark and the dirt, but there is no room for me.

  One row of glasses contains salt water, the other row fresh water, as cold as the tap will run. Grace counts out the measures. We step around them, careful not to spill anything. Sky sits keening next to the toilet, her knees up to her chest. Grace massages her temples with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Give me strength,’ she says. ‘Stop acting like such a baby.’

  I hand Sky the first glass, salt water, and she makes a face as she sips at it, before unexpectedly swallowing the whole lot. She squeezes her eyes shut. Grace hands her another and she does the same, before turning to the toilet and throwing up. Her hands grip the toilet seat. One of the empty glasses is knocked over by her foot.

  ‘Enough,’ I tell Grace, who is holding another glass of salt water.

  When Sky stops, turning back to us weakly, I hand her a tumbler of the good water. She drinks this with no problem, then a second and third in quick succession, waves away a fourth. We are kinder to her than Mother or King would be, and do not force her to drink it. Instead we clear space on the floor, balancing tumblers on the cistern, the counter, the edge of the bath, the windowsill. She stretches out her body, her face wet. We have done our duty. I walk out and leave my sisters sitting there, the light refracting over and over through the liquid and the glass.

  In my own bathroom, later, I inspect all the new bruises that have bloomed on my skin since the men came. I hadn’t noticed them happening at the time, but here they are. Perhaps there is a virus ripening inside my blood. Cells bursting with their own fruitfulness. Love as a protest within my body. Or perhaps it’s just that I am unused to touch, am out of practice. Bodies do not lie. This all acts as proof that he has touched me here, here, here. I pinch the back of my forearm, an unmarked spot, with satisfaction.

  I am still there when Llew comes in, without knocking, and catches me looking at myself, at the faint shadows on my arms, my legs, at the patch of gauze halfway up my thigh.

  ‘Sometimes you terrify me,’ he says. But he is smiling, so it is fine.

  If Mother returns, it will mean the end of love. It will mean no more of the long line of him against the sheets, a faded blue towel across his body. He has just showered. There is a small group of moles by his knee that I press my thumb to, a tangle at the nape of his neck in the damp hair.

  Limit your exposure to the men, or find the one who doesn’t wish you harm. I overheard that on
ce, passed from one damaged woman to another, an urgent, murmured conversation I was not supposed to witness. It’s the men who don’t even know themselves that wish you harm – those are the most dangerous ones. They will have you cower in the name of love, and feel sentimental about it. They’re the ones who hate women the most.

  We have been so careful. We have been so good. But this time, when he slips out of the door as usual, he pauses for a second. ‘Hello, Grace,’ he says.

  ‘Hello,’ I hear her say, voice sour.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asks. I shut the door quickly, stay close to it.

  ‘Fine,’ she replies. ‘Just fine.’

  I hear his footsteps disappear and think we may have got away with it, but soon there is a knock. I do not let my body move. Grace tells me, ‘I know you’re in there, I know it, I know it,’ her voice the hiss of air escaping a balloon, but I refuse to respond.

  ‘I heard you,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t fucking born yesterday.’

  No, I mouth to the white-painted wood, knotted like a muscle. Please. My eyes fill with shameful water.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ my sister asks me as I wait there. She tells me my body is now in grave danger. ‘And your thoughts,’ she says. ‘Don’t they feel jumbled? Don’t they feel diseased?’

  Yes, they do, but then what’s new, I long to hiss back. Will you deny me even this happiness? But I don’t need to ask to know that she would.

  A change of tack. Her voice becomes mournful. She points out that I could be bringing something terrible upon us.

  ‘Have you noticed signs? You might be contagious.’

  I worry a loose tooth in the bottom of my jaw with my tongue.

  ‘Let me in,’ she asks. ‘I can take your temperature.’ It is a trick.

  ‘Go away,’ I whisper. I sit on the carpet with my back to the door and look towards the bed, the sheets a mess. They might even still be warm. I want to wrap them around myself until I suffocate.

  In the end she goes, but not before slamming her fist into the door and then crying at the pain in her hand, which is also my fault, and telling me that she’s disappointed in me, that there’s a real chance I am failing them.

  ‘You’re a selfish bitch,’ she says finally. Her footsteps move down the corridor, unhurried. We do not use that word on each other. I would rather she had hit me, got me right in the bottom of the stomach, much rather that than this word.

  I hawk up phlegm and spit in the bathroom, brush my teeth frantically, repent repent repent, but already I know there is no staying away from him, I am a helpless animal, I am dead even as I walk.

  I run away from the house, down the beach, the entire length of it, and nobody is around to see me – maybe they are watching from the windows but I don’t care, I cannot care. My feet are bare and throw the sand up with every step. Forcing myself to go faster, I threaten to turn over on my ankle but right myself and sprint harder as penance, harder. The pain grows in my chest but it is only my lungs, an honest pain, not the treacherous one in my heart. I wait for the exhilaration but it doesn’t come.

  Near the rock pools I finally let myself stop. When I catch my breath, I stand as close as I dare to the ocean and scream out across it, holding the shapeless call until my voice peters out. The sound does not come back to meet me. My hand goes to my throat and I feel the hum of arterial blood somewhere above the tenderness of my voicebox.

  The things I have done come back to haunt me. Small pulses of shame behind my closed eyes.

  ‘Hurt Grace, or Sky will have to.’ Again on the beach, tools and muslin and my sisters, obedient, waiting for me to do what I had to do. I would prefer a million times to be hurt over hurting them. Grace lay down obediently in the sand, pulling her hair over one shoulder.

  Even then her resentment must have been building as I wadded up the muslin and held it against her mouth and nose, her eyes dark and flickering over the white cloth, a blame that was inescapable. You know I have no choice, I tried to transmit through my hands, through my thoughts. She showed no reaction at first, but by the end she was biting viciously through the cloth. I knew it was involuntary. I knew I would be doing the same.

  Then, once Grace was recovering, it was time for me to hurt Sky. Maybe it was just a test of my loyalty, a test of how adequate was my love for my sisters, my love for her. Well, it was abundant, I would have told her if she had just asked. Love enough to make you sick.

  For Sky, Mother made me rub a piece of sandpaper against the top of her arm, a place that wouldn’t get infected. And I did it so that Grace wouldn’t have to do it, so Grace could sleep that night and nights thereafter, Sky begging me not to even as her skin goose-pimpled with blood. ‘Please, Lia,’ she asked, closing her eyes. ‘I’ll do anything.’ She let out a high noise from between her teeth, a constant pitch, like a stinging insect. It was unbearable. Afterwards she lay flat on the sand next to Grace as Mother bandaged her arm, holding it high above her so it would not be contaminated with sand or dirt. I went away and threw up into the sea, as usual. Light, light, light. The water washed it away at once.

  The nights after hurting my sisters were always my worst. I made sure my physical suffering matched theirs, so I wouldn’t be left behind. I stood next to the window without any lights on, my thighs stinging, gauging the sea’s reaction. A dull harmony of pain, three notes reaching out across the water like a beacon. I could feel it reach the border, the signal finding purchase.

  If we were to spit at them, they would spit back harder. We expected that – we were prepared for it even. What we didn’t expect was their growing outrage that we even dared to have moisture in our mouths. Then outrage that we had mouths at all. They would have liked us all dead, I know that now.

  On the fifth day without Mother, my body starts to fail me. When I wake up I am drowning, but it is not water covering my face. Nosebleed. My pillow is spattered with red. It slides into my mouth. I pinch the fleshy part of my nose as I hold myself up above the sink in my bathroom. When I grit my teeth, they are covered in it too.

  My nightgown is ruined. I step into my bathtub still wearing it, spray myself with hot water before pulling it off, letting the fabric cuff around my ankles. The bleeding stops. I say a frantic prayer for my own health to the water, something about please and sickness and don’t let my sisters know. I wring the nightgown out and wrap it in a brown paper bag, then another, then put it in a drawer.

  What will happen if I have to crawl into the forest, my body a thing stricken, a thing radiating disease? Will my sisters stand over me among the foliage, or will they just watch me go, their bodies silent and upright on the terrace?

  The women who stopped coming to us, they had known love too. They were in retreat from that, and from the world. We watched their personal acts of repair, both physical and spiritual. It was beautiful to see, Mother pointed out. A woman becoming whole again. It’s true that, after the water cure, their bodies had a new solidity, as if somebody had redrawn their outlines. Their eyes were clear, ready to return.

  That they have stopped coming could mean the world has improved, or that it is worse than ever. That they are dying on distant shores in their dozens, hundreds, thousands. That they are living lives of violence, their bodies shaped by it, their words painful, the air a jagged mess in their throats. I hope it is the first answer. I wish for them a cool equilibrium, lives of harmony. Muslin cocooning their faces, powerful talismans to ward off danger. Men who will be good to them. Whose bodies are not too fearful.

  Llew is morose by the pool. He drinks from a brown glass bottle, raising it to me when I approach his recliner. ‘Found them in the cellar,’ he tells me. ‘Try it.’ I take a sip, warm and fizzing in my mouth. I spit it on to the floor automatically, comically, but he does not find it funny. ‘Don’t be disgusting, Lia,’ he says. ‘What a waste.’ His tone is dark.

  I lie silently on the recliner next to him for a while. My body feels anchored to his, pointless without his presence.
Eventually he rises and heads inside, and I follow his lead. He sighs. ‘Are you my shadow now?’

  I would like that, actually, but I don’t tell him so.

  His mood lifts slightly when we are out of the blazing sun, when we are looking at each other in the kitchen among the steel and tiles. He has something he wants to show me, in his room. Something that will cheer me up. ‘Because you’re not yourself either,’ he tells me, ‘I can tell,’ and it is good to be seen but also terrible. I wait outside his room in the corridor, picking at my nails. He calls me in.

  ‘Ta-da,’ he announces, spinning in a circle. He is wearing King’s white linen suit, the same one, stiff lemony blooms under the arms. In the light from the window I can see his eyes are red. It is a little too long in the arms but otherwise fits perfectly. Even the buttons do up. I step back.

  ‘You don’t think this is funny?’ Llew asks me. ‘Come on.’ He looks down at himself. ‘Look at me! It must have belonged to a guest. A real character.’

  The suit flatters him. I can picture him standing with his feet firmly planted on the wood of the terrace, a softer time. Looking out to sea, waiting for something, analysing the signs of the waves. Oh, this man that I love.

  ‘It is funny,’ I say eventually.

  If not the protective suit, with its years of weathering, then what could Mother have worn? Her whole body wrapped in muslin so she would be padded should she fall, bolts of it stuffed into her mouth? I don’t want to think about it.

  We go together to my room without discussing it, the routine of the past days, but when I lift up my dress he barely sees me, instead falling heavy on to the bed, the suit now forgotten. He becomes difficult again.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to,’ he tells me.