The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

‘Why not?’ I ask.

  ‘I just don’t feel like it,’ he says.

  ‘Please,’ I say, angry all at once, scared somewhere underneath it.

  ‘Oh, Lia,’ he says, misinterpreting me, reaching out to cup my chin in his palm. ‘Don’t. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  It works, anyway. He hesitates at times, as if wondering whether he is going too far.

  ‘Keep going,’ I say to him during those pauses – once, twice, three times – and so he does, his hand tight around my throat.

  Afterwards, I feel dizzy. My body is tied in a knot, heart pushed up to my throat. When I kneel at the toilet, nothing comes up. He sits on the edge of the bathtub, watching me retch.

  ‘Don’t go getting pregnant on me,’ he says. He sounds nervous.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you mean, what?’ he says.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, standing up slowly.

  ‘You’re taking precautions, aren’t you?’ he asks.

  I think of the water gulped in pints, the wounds on my legs, the hot water, the showers. ‘Yes,’ I say, overcome with tenderness suddenly at this proof of his care for me.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Well, we probably should have discussed this earlier. But if you’re being careful.’ He scratches at the back of his neck.

  My vision strobes, a split second of darkness. I am still dizzy, still confused, unwilling to put the pieces together.

  ‘I’m going to lie down,’ I tell him. I hope he will stay with me, but he turns off the light and closes the door as he leaves, no kiss, just one small gesture of the hand.

  I remember Mother keening on the floor of the kitchen, King still alive then. Her arms were around her knees; her body was in the foetal position. The moonlight made her hair look like water, spilling out from its ties. And me, mute, standing there thinking, Use a blanket, use anything, why are you lying down there when there is a warm bed somewhere above you, when there are people with their arms open for you? Anger too, because she was loved. Mother, there is really no need. But now I can understand why you would lie down there, why you would seek out a place that is hard and cold.

  It’s James, not Llew, who hovers above me when I wake. I have slept until dinner time. ‘I was sent to get you. Come on,’ he says. The air is thick with my sleep, curtains closed. I see him take in the disorder, the things strewn around.

  ‘Where’s Llew?’ I ask, single-minded.

  ‘Downstairs, doing something or other,’ he says. ‘He said you were feeling poorly earlier. Are you still dizzy?’

  I look into his concerned face and nod.

  ‘Keep hold of me for a second, then,’ he says. I grasp his arm as I rise up. ‘Ah. You need to put some clothes on though,’ he adds, averting his eyes, and I realize I am just in my underwear, that I pulled off my clothes somewhere in the dead expanse of afternoon. I don’t care particularly about him seeing me like this. The damage has long been done. He locates my dress on the floor, a puddle of linen.

  ‘Turn around and put your arms up,’ he tells me. ‘I won’t look.’

  The cool fabric passes over my head, down my body. I wonder for a second if I want him to touch me, or if it’s just that I want to be touched by anyone. When he entered the room, for a few seconds in the gloaming light he could have been Llew. I am used to compromises.

  ‘That’s better,’ he says, doing it up at the neck. ‘You’re decent now. Fit for company.’ He gives me a kind pat on the shoulder.

  ‘When will Mother be back?’ Sky asks Grace at dinner, fretfully. I push cold tinned peas around my plate and use the back of my fork to crush them, slowly, into a paste.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ says Grace, after a pause.

  ‘Do you promise?’ Sky asks.

  I wait for Grace to say yes, but instead she stands up. She is still holding her cutlery. Looking at it with something approaching wonder, as if she has no idea where it came from, she throws it down to the floor. It clatters on the parquet. She walks out. We watch her go. James springs up to follow her.

  ‘Leave her,’ I warn him. I move to pick up the fork and knife myself, crawling on the ground under four silent gazes. Sky stands and follows our sister. I stay.

  The men talk vigorously to each other. They have all gained colour in their cheeks, on their arms. Gwil seems like a different child, no longer lank and wistful. He taps out a tune with his knife on the edge of his plate, and neither Llew nor James tells him to stop it, engaged in their conversation about someone they know from elsewhere, some other man. I don’t care about any other man. Gwil stares at me, daring me to make him stop, then taps louder. I want to throttle his small throat, but I don’t.

  After dinner I open door after door, searching for my sisters. They are not in the lounge, not in their bedrooms, not in Mother’s room. Eventually I find Sky alone in one of the unused rooms a few doors down from mine, stretching in the light by the window. Her short hair is still a shock to me. She doesn’t seem like one of us any more, but then maybe I am the one who has changed irrevocably, has taken in the new love. Maybe we were never three branches of the same tree, three girls intertwined.

  ‘Where is Grace?’ I ask. Sky gestures at the closed en-suite door.

  ‘She’s taking a bath,’ she tells me. ‘Go on in, if you like.’

  I knock at the door and Grace’s low voice tells me to enter. She is almost totally submerged, a fine froth of bubbles covering her entire body, beading her dark hair. It is cut short like Sky’s now, I can see as she moves up in the water, exposing her whole head. The curtains are closed. When I sit on the edge of the bath and dip my hand in the water, it is cold. Her toenails, breaking the surface, are painted cerise, like Mother’s were.

  ‘Sky painted them for me,’ Grace says when she sees me looking. ‘She’ll probably do yours, if you ask.’ She moves back under the water, sending it splashing up the side.

  ‘Your hair,’ I say uselessly, conscious of my own lying heavy down my back. Grace puts a hand to her head.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Sky was right. It’s a lot more comfortable like this.’ She points to the metal wastepaper bin in the corner. ‘It’s all in there. You can look at it if you want.’

  I do not want.

  ‘The water’s cold,’ I tell her instead.

  ‘I prefer it that way,’ she says. ‘It’s too hot anyway.’ She fixes her eyes on me. ‘Have you noticed how much warmer the men have made it?’

  ‘It’s coincidence,’ I say weakly, not even believing myself. Water runs off my skin in the night like something doused. Mosquito bites rise behind my knees and ankles. I am weary, so weary, of moving this body around through the haze.

  ‘Bullshit,’ she says cheerfully. ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway. Not now. Let the whole world melt, for all the difference it will make. Let the whole thing fall apart.’ A little water trickles over the lip of the bath, pools on the tiles. She sinks her head under the milky surface and I watch anxiously until she rises up again with a deep breath, hair slicked against her scalp.

  ‘We’re not doing anything wrong,’ I tell her.

  ‘You’ve betrayed us,’ she says simply.

  ‘It’s not true,’ I say. I know that it is.

  ‘Lia,’ she says. ‘He is dangerous.’ She buries her head unexpectedly into her wet hands for a second but does not cry.

  ‘Don’t think you’re the only one suffering,’ Grace says, raising her face back to mine. She is so beautiful. Whatever she is feeling, it is not written upon her the way it is upon me. And I think, for a second, about the first time my father placed a sharp object in my hand. How using it made a deep and terrible sense, because my blood was even redder than my sisters’ blood. It ran thicker. My feelings were as physical, as measurable, as the pulse at my neck.

  ‘I’ve decided to forgive you, though,’ she says after a long pause. ‘I know you need my help.’

  I cry at that. I do, I do.

  ‘First things first,’ she says. ‘Protect
your body from now on.’

  How, I ask, salt water running into my mouth.

  She tells me I can add vinegar to my bath, bicarbonate of soda. I should salt the water at the very least, have it as hot as possible, hotter than is pleasant.

  ‘No more babies,’ she says. ‘They never came from the sea, of course.’

  I stare at her. I realize what Llew was telling me earlier. I realize, finally, what she really means.

  ‘Do not ask me about that,’ she says, reading my thoughts. ‘Not ever.’

  So I don’t. My hair, I ask instead, falling out where I pull at it. And my ears, and my eyes, and my heart.

  ‘Just don’t look too closely,’ she says. ‘Try to have less direct contact. Touch him through his clothes, if you must.’

  I am stricken.

  ‘If you can’t, you can’t,’ she says, resigned. ‘You’re the one who will suffer most.’

  Truce.

  Shifting in the water, Grace seems to take me in as if for the first time, as if I had just walked in. She stares at my legs, and I pull the skirt of my dress down.

  ‘I often think that Mother and King were very cruel to you.’ She touches my hand with her own. ‘I wish things could have been different.’

  Perhaps it is not too late. I ask her if we can go to Mother’s room, the three of us, and she appraises me from the water, drawing her knees up to her chest.

  ‘All right,’ she says, reaching a hand out to me. ‘Help me up.’

  The skin of her fingertips is pruned and furrowed against my own. I hold out the towel for her to step into, notice the fragile ridge of her hipbones under her still-swollen stomach. We are weakening.

  In Mother’s room we stand in front of the irons. The blank iron, shining and shameful.

  ‘Why don’t we pick again?’ I ask my sisters. ‘With Mother not here. Why don’t we just get the men to join us, pick with them?’ I look around at them, gauging support for the idea. ‘Or even just the three of us pick?’

  They remain quiet. It’s natural to avoid the broken thing, to distance yourself from it.

  ‘I really don’t think it will solve anything, Lia,’ Grace says finally. My chest aches. I cough to try and relieve it.

  ‘Well, that’s that, then,’ I say, and we leave the room as quickly as we entered. Grace puts her arm around Sky’s shoulders so easily, her wet skin leaving the back of her dress transparent. The soaked fabric is thin and blue, and for a second I think of a ghost, the loose pucker of limbs. I have to shake my head to get the image out.

  I decided I would take matters into my own hands, that I too could be vengeful. I would make him dissolve with fear like an aspirin in the glass, I would have him fall to the ground and beg me for mercy. Why not? There was only me, my women wanted no part of the plan. They told me I would die trying. I told them I didn’t care. And I didn’t.

  On the sixth day without Mother I go straight outside after waking, not bothering to eat. There’s no one around as I move through the corridors, and for a second I permit myself the fantasy that a boat has come, that everyone else has been taken up on it. But it’s only enjoyable because it’s not real. If the last year has taught me anything, it is that being alone is corrosive. I am a person unable to handle it.

  I collect a long fingertip of dust from the lip of a vase, a solitary object on the mantelpiece in the hall. It is empty except for a wasp dying in its own sound, vibrating dully against the porcelain. Suffer, I mouth at it.

  Somewhere in the night, alone in the bed once more, I woke up and realized there is nothing I wouldn’t do for him. It felt very simple with no other thoughts, without the detritus of everyday sensations, preoccupations. A reminder of how straightforward love can be, sometimes, when it all falls into place.

  I find Llew playing tennis with Gwil, and I sit cross-legged on the sandy dirt outside the court, picking at my nails, listening to the sound of them batting the ball back and forth. Gwil’s shouts of ‘Yes!’, Llew’s answering laugh. He must be letting the boy win. Dust stipples my feet in my sandals. I dig my nails into my shin, near to my ankle, so it looks like an insect or a snake could have bitten me. It seems like for ever before the two of them come out of the court, both sweating. Llew gives Gwil a slap on the hand, arms raised high, and turns to me.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asks, the smile on his face falling a little. Gwil swats his racquet around, listening to us.

  ‘I just thought I’d come and find you,’ I say, self-conscious. ‘To see if you wanted to do something.’ I do not say anything, we can do anything you want, not in front of the child, though if he was not there I might fall to my knees on the ground and beg.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’ He turns to Gwil. ‘Another game?’ The child nods. As they walk back on to the court, I run behind them. When I grab hold of Llew’s arm, he stops.

  ‘Please,’ I say, my mouth dry. ‘Please. You don’t understand.’ He tries to draw his arm away, but I cling on. He pushes me once, then again, more forcefully, but I do not let go.

  ‘Don’t move!’ I tell him, too loudly. ‘Please.’ I can feel love slipping past me like a fast breeze. Like draining water. I am ready to humiliate myself, if that is what it takes. He pushes me a third time and I fall back, stagger hard to the ground. I am on my knees after all. Gwil looks at me in alarm.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Llew asks me, rubbing at his arm.

  ‘Nothing!’ I say. ‘But stay with me. Stay.’ I get up, lunge for him again, but he just steps back further.

  ‘Can you not, in front of the boy?’ Llew demands. ‘Can you please be normal for a second?’

  I do not know why loving like everyone else is so unnatural to me. Llew holds up his hands, beckons for Gwil to shelter behind him, as if I am dangerous, as if I am repulsive. Maybe I am. He must know, I think, as if in a trance. He must be able to tell what is going on, even at his age. He’s still a man. This is still all his to come, his heritage, his right.

  ‘This is all getting a bit much, isn’t it?’ says Llew, attempting to be kinder, to defuse the situation. ‘What has got into you?’ A small pause. I understand that he is trying to shame me for my need, but unfortunately for him and for me I am totally shameless in this regard, I will demonstrate my need over and over for anyone who asks. I would take my strange and incapable heart out of my chest if I could, display it, absolve myself of responsibility.

  When I slap him, hard, in the face, his first reaction is surprise.

  ‘You just hit me,’ he says, feeling out the damage, which is minimal. ‘Didn’t think you had it in you.’

  Gwil drops the racquet. He runs to the other end of the court, bleats for someone to come and help, but nobody is around.

  I try to lash out at Llew again but he grasps my wrists, holds them tight to immobilize me.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘I’ve had just about enough of all this.’ He shakes me. ‘Pull yourself together.’

  The mark my body has left on his is fading already. My whole strength has barely any effect. My anger cannot touch him, cannot even be taken seriously. He is moving away from me all the time.

  ‘We had a good thing going on, I know. But I don’t fucking belong to you,’ he tells me as I give up the struggle and stand there before him, cowed, staring at him with stinging eyes. He still holds both of my wrists painfully, my palms grazed. I cannot move and I do not want to. ‘I don’t think I’ve done anything to give you that impression.’

  It occurs to me that I have never heard him say the word love out loud. This could be the moment when he will say it. He releases his grip on me and his hand comes towards my face; I feel his knuckles stroke my cheek, gently. The moment passes.

  They leave me on the court. I throw mouldering tennis balls against the ground until my arm aches; I kick the mesh until I am bored of my own melodrama. The sky darkens with rain. When I go inside I come across James alone in the lounge, sitting on the sofa. I flick the light on, then back off. I watch him fr
om where I stand.

  ‘Drink?’ he asks, holding up a bottle. ‘Bit early, I know.’

  ‘That stuff will kill you,’ I say.

  ‘Everything will kill you,’ he tells me, taking a sip from his glass, which is crowded with ice. He has everything he needs to keep him comfortable, but it seems to be doing him no good. ‘When you get to my age, you’ll stop caring about your body.’

  ‘You’re not that old,’ I say. He’s not, it’s true, I recognize with surprise. Hair covers both their chins now, and while James’s is greyer than Llew’s, it’s not a huge difference.

  ‘Too old for all of this,’ he says into his glass. He looks directly at me. ‘Are you happy? I’m interested to know.’

  Something surges up in my throat, and he sees it. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he says. ‘Here. Sit down.’ He pats the cushion next to him and I sit on the edge.

  ‘You poor girls,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘Alone here for so long.’ He puts his hand on my back, delicately. An idea comes to me. ‘Well. We can protect you now, can’t we?’

  I shuffle my body closer to his, lean my head on his shoulder. He is warm and smells of brine. He has been kind and good to me. When I kiss him, it’s not dreadful at all. He returns it. He puts his hands on my face, my neck, my shoulder, but then he stops, he shakes his head and stands up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’ I ask. ‘Was it bad?’ I grope for the rough knuckles of his hand. He looks stricken.

  ‘Lia,’ he says, taking his hand away. He sits down heavily on a chair across the room. ‘Of course I want to. You’re lovely.’ He stares at his knees. ‘It wouldn’t be right. We’re not here for that.’

  ‘But I want to,’ I say, made bold, made desperate.

  ‘We have a duty of care,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I just can’t.’

  I stare at the floor as James pinches the bridge of his nose and think of other ways I could hurt Llew.

  A trap rigged up in the forest to break his ankle, his arm, his neck.

  Lure him into the sea.