The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

  Broken glass in his food.

  ‘I’m a sad case, Lia,’ James tells me. He laughs harshly. ‘It’s terrible to be a man, sometimes.’

  I find it hard to believe him. It doesn’t seem that terrible, all things considered.

  The anger again, an anger I can’t call new because it feels too familiar, it feels like something that has been waiting for me all along. The women’s pain had to stick around somewhere. Captured by the topsoil, atmospheric remnants, calcifying into pebbles moved by the sea. We had eaten and breathed it, made it our own.

  Years ago, King taught us about life-guarding. Perhaps he had foreseen the men coming for us. Perhaps he knew more than he let on. I always thought of my beloved father as omniscient. Something had broken the world’s mysteries open to him, as if what we saw and knew was only a carapace, and underneath lay the true and strange heart of the universe, otherwise inaccessible.

  ‘It’s hard for me to teach you this,’ he admitted as we stood in the ballroom with three small knives at our feet. Gifts from him. ‘I thought about getting your mother to do it. But in the end, I decided it wasn’t appropriate.’

  Mother wasn’t there. She was taking a stretched-out afternoon bath, somewhere above our heads, oil floating on the water. A mask of milk and salt on her skin, to soften it. She already knew all about this.

  ‘There may be a time when the border no longer works, when the toxic air moves across the sea,’ he said. ‘There may be a time when you find yourselves bleeding from the mouth, or eyes. There may be a time when we are no longer here to protect you.’

  We picked up the knives and copied his motions. Graceful. I imagined the air cleaving, my skin parting. King held the blade to his own neck, a few centimetres away.

  ‘Like this,’ he said, and we did as he did, drawing our knives in a line once, twice, three times. ‘Easy enough.’

  ‘Easy,’ Grace agreed. His eyes flicked to her. She moved the knife one more time, then placed it carefully on the floor.

  This is what I do. I leave James hunched in his chair and go to Mother’s room. I take every iron down, placing them in the cloth bag from which they are drawn every year. The air is cooling as I walk with the irons through the garden, through sweet mulch and pooling water, the rotting things. On the way I look at the dead mouse behind the wall, its ribcage now exposed to the elements, its skull too. Help me. The forest looms. It is dark in here, dark where I belong, with the wolves and the snakes and the other loveless creatures.

  In a tree trunk that has fallen and been hollowed out with decay, I hide the irons, and I am crying now, oh, I have gone and done it. Mother will be so angry at me when she returns. She may send me away. But this is what a lack of love does to a person, I will tell her, I can explain. This is what happens when you can no longer bear it. I will tell her that all of this has been an awakening, this fever dream, this discovery. My blood glowing with the new disease. There is not much time left for me, I feel, but still I will tell her, when she returns, holding her hands with a deep compassion, that I have meant this as a reparation. I have meant this as my most sincere act of love.

  I make dinner wearing latex gloves that snap satisfyingly on to my hands. A new skin, better than the old. I am tenderly conscious of not bringing my sisters down with me, of protecting them better than I have done myself. The meal is what I can manage from the tins, the dried foods, a few crabs that James caught and smashed open. But nobody eats much. Llew does not turn up, and after our incident on the court I still shake to think of him. The cicadas drone so loudly that we close the windows, forcing them into their warping frames. My sisters chew and spit, chew and spit, complain. The skin of their elbows and knees is chapped, like mine, from sun and salt water. I keep the gloves on while I eat and nobody comments. Washing up, my hand becomes a dead claw in its soaped balloon of plastic; I fight the compulsion to hack it off with the meat cleaver.

  After dinner, the three of us are together on the terrace when the sea reveals a new ghost. Sky sees it first and she screams. She has been screaming so much since the arrival of the men that we don’t rush to her at once. But when she calls out ‘Ghost!’ we sit up on our recliners, hurry to the railing. I reach for the binoculars she has dropped, and inspect them. Grace holds Sky but she pulls away, runs to the other end of the terrace and leans over, retching.

  It is up to me to look. This ghost is closer, more recognizably human than the last one. Its skin is a washed-out blue, paler even than the baby, limbs inflated. Grace pulls at the binoculars and puts her mouth to my ear.

  ‘Is it Mother?’ she asks me. ‘Is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ I tell her. Plausible deniability. ‘I can’t tell.’ I pass her the binoculars and join Sky at the rail, heaving involuntarily all the way to the stony earth below.

  Grace looks at the ghost for a long time.

  ‘I don’t think it is her,’ she says. ‘She would come to us.’

  ‘Is it moving closer?’ Sky calls out. She is very pale.

  ‘Possibly,’ says Grace. ‘I keep losing sight of it. We’ll monitor it.’

  King once told us you can get used to anything, and it is strange how quickly the ghost becomes normal. Grace and I split the monitoring duties, so that Sky does not have to look at it again.

  ‘Where do you think it came from?’ I ask. She passes me the binoculars and I train them carefully on the air above the ghost, then the water, inching down until it fills my vision.

  ‘The sea,’ she says. ‘It’s giving up its dead.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘Because everything’s becoming ruined,’ she says. Her eyes do not move sideways to look at me, but I know what she means.

  The ghost isn’t wearing a gown we recognize as Mother’s. It doesn’t seem to be wearing anything at all. It is too far away to make out the features and, honestly, I am glad. If it is Mother, I would rather not know.

  As I watch the ghost move up and down in the surf, but not closer to shore, a fist of grief opens in my chest. There is a new wrongness in the air between us that threatens to engulf everything. This is what happens when the people you love leave you. This is what happens when the protection no longer holds.

  I have been repenting for so long, but I can’t bear the burden of this guilt much longer. Leaving Grace out on the terrace, I sit just inside the corridor, on the faded carpet. This is the wrong place for me, this endless cramped tunnel with shadows heavy at either end, and the pressing silence without Mother is terrible, I can’t ignore it any more. I retreat to one of the unused bedrooms and wait to catch my breath, thin air in shallow gulps, moving through on my hands and knees to the bathroom, where I feel momentarily safer. A place where faceless women have unloaded their own hurt, fabric dragging around their knees as they threw up bile and water, as they cried until there was no noise left to make.

  Mother. The long dresses ragged at the hem. The strands of her hair that gathered in drifts, that fell on to the tablecloth at every meal and lay there, curled in long figure of eights. She had absorbed what it meant to be an attractive, healthy woman and we witnessed her body failing her daily with the guilt of voyeurs.

  She told us all the time that she would give her life to us. I didn’t care, because I thought that was just what mothers said. Am I supposed to do the same for you, I thought with something approaching horror, because I am not sure I can.

  I have always been afraid of her ability to pull the rug out from underneath us, her capacity for cruelty and kindness in the same sentence, same action. I can see it in Grace too. It must be a prerequisite for being a mother, something that growing another person inside you does, heart and heartlessness, as though simplistic empathy has been scooped out and replaced with something more fundamental, something more likely to guarantee survival.

  James is the one who comes looking for me, again. He kneels his large body down to my level, to where I am huddled under the sink. There is panic in his eyes.

  ‘You saw it,
didn’t you?’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘We are all downstairs.’ He puts out his hands.

  The men are grim-faced, even Gwil. The three of them sit opposite us at the far end of the lounge. ‘Where did it come from?’ we ask again and again, assuming they will know more than us. Grace scrutinizes their faces with a deep suspicion.

  ‘Is it Mother?’ she asks them straight out, and the men shake their heads vehemently.

  ‘It must have come from the land,’ Llew says. ‘Something must be happening.’

  Clues, clues. The sky falling in. Earth cracking. Llew and James exchange looks.

  ‘We don’t want you to see it,’ James says. ‘We have to stay here until we know everything is safe.’

  The two men leave periodically to check, to walk around. As it starts to get dark Llew brings us water and crackers, a jar of jam with spoons, a ring-pull tin of rice pudding, then leaves again. We eat it warily, our eyes fixed upon Gwil, who doesn’t say a word. He looks up past us, at the wall behind. Grace wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

  ‘Do you want some of this?’ she says, holding out the tin of pudding. He shakes his head and she withdraws it.

  ‘Baby,’ Sky says very quietly. ‘Stupid. Why don’t you go home?’

  Grace pushes her. ‘Stop that.’

  Sky shrugs her off. ‘Why don’t you talk?’ she asks him. ‘Why don’t you stand up for yourself?’

  He closes his eyes, as if he were very old and gathering patience.

  I wonder, looking at his small and defeated face, whether he lives with the daily knowledge of the harm he could grow up to do. Whether it is there like a piece of paper folded up small around a secret word that he cannot yet understand. I wonder if Llew has caused damage to women before, and if so whether Gwil has borne witness to it, learned from it already.

  ‘Your mother,’ I say to him, the way my sisters did in the forest. He shakes his head, but I am not trying to hurt him, I am not doing it maliciously. ‘Where is she?’

  He shakes his head again, harder this time. ‘I don’t want to talk about her,’ he says. Water comes to his eyes. I move closer to him, nausea building once more. Behind me, my sisters are watchful.

  ‘Baby,’ Sky says again. ‘It’s just a question.’

  Llew loved her enough to create another person from her flesh. She loved him enough to go through what Grace did, the animal room full of blood. The proof of the love sits in front of me, more tears now in his eyes, running down his face, and I am angry, I am so jealous all of a sudden of what he means, yet another love I will never claim.

  ‘Tell us about your mother, Gwil,’ I say again. ‘Tell us about your women.’

  We gather around him. We put our hands on him to try and comfort him, his shoulders, his arms; we push him back a little. He is surely too small to do us real harm: we are suddenly giddy with this realization. We are not monsters. We are not trying to pull him apart. We are just women who want to understand.

  I should have been kinder to him. I realize now I should have loved Gwil to make Llew love me better. All the ways in which I have fallen short, all the ways I could have done better. My hands become more frantic. The child shrugs us off, hitting at us, hard enough to hurt.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he says sharply, high-pitched, and we fall back. ‘Go away.’ He stands up and goes to sit behind the sofa, his usual place. We can hear him crying and for a short while I am ashamed, but it’s not long before the sound dies down.

  Soon after he slips out of the room. We feel so bad that we let him pass without question, leaving him alone in an attempt to make it up to him, to prove that we are not creatures to be feared or hated. We play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets the last crackers, then lie down very bored on the rug, along the sofa. Grace switches on a small lamp that gilds her orange.

  I do not know how long we lie there for, but at some point we realize that it is dark and Gwil has not returned. We are too afraid to leave the room, so we wait for James to come back. He shrugs when he finds just us, deciding Gwil must have gone to find his father.

  When Llew comes back the child is not with him. My sisters and I are falling in and out of sleep, digging our nails into our palms or kicking our heels against the chairs, the floor, because to be asleep is to be defenceless. James looks puzzled. In an instant, everything changes.

  We search with the sweeping light of torches. We examine everything. The dying grass of the lawn is long under our feet, under our hands when we kneel to check beneath bushes, behind trees. Llew is silent except when he shouts his son’s name. I know enough not to touch him or go near.

  The beach is empty too, the rowing boat lonely against the jetty. The waves make small sucking sounds. The three of us exchange looks. We remember the other times we have searched.

  ‘Fuck,’ Llew says after we have checked inside the coal hatch. He kicks a clod of earth next to it, wheels around to stare away from us, up into the sky. ‘Fuck!’

  Maybe the earth has swallowed him. Maybe the earth has swallowed our mother. Maybe we are being picked off one at a time. Something has stolen into our home and eaten them alive. The absence of our mother and the absence of Gwil become the same darkness. I am very afraid. Llew is not crying but his face is hard, and there is something unfurling in him, in all of us, as we walk around the garden’s perimeter. Llew barks ‘Gwil!’ again and again. I do not have a handle on my grief, on my panic, I do not know which is mine and which is Llew’s. Love has made me self-centred, it has made me rank with greediness, I cannot think straight. When I stumble over a hard knot of wood at the outskirts of the forest, it is my sisters who lift me up from the dry earth.

  In the house we gather in the lounge again, covered in sweat and dust. My sisters and I go to leave, but Llew stands up and blocks the door.

  ‘You stay here,’ he says. ‘For your own protection.’ He looks murderous.

  Grace tries to push past him and he holds her by the arms, effortlessly.

  ‘Stay here,’ he says, more insistently. His fingers dig into her skin. I feel it like it’s my own.

  ‘I want to go to my room,’ Grace says. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘You can sleep here,’ he says. His eyes slide between our faces. ‘On the couches.’

  James leaves, then comes back shortly with a canteen of water, a bucket. He places them near the fireplace.

  ‘Goodnight,’ the men say, and before we know what is happening they leave, the click of the door as it is locked from the outside.

  Grace hurls her body against it and lets out a low howl from the back of her throat.

  ‘So this is how it begins,’ she says, but of course it has already begun. It began for us a long time ago.

  We stay awake. We keep a vigil. For the first time in months, we talk about King. We talk about Mother. I remind us of the time King caught a small shark and we ate its thick flesh, but first he hung it up in the garden, from a tree, so that he could take a good photograph as its blood stained the grass underneath. I put my hands inside its mouth, up to the wrist.

  Grace reminds us of a day our parents were both drunk, a winter’s day, how they lit the fire and we opened packets and packets of foods, ate it in a picnic on the floor of the living room with our hands feral, King pouring whisky into small, patterned glasses.

  ‘Remember the time we hid in the attic,’ Sky says, ‘we waited in that cupboard all day long,’ and then we are back there, curled in the dark like dead flowers, because we had wanted to know how long it would take our parents to mind our absence. It took them maybe half a day; we all had limbs fizzing with sleeping blood, with the lack of our movement, yet we were able to stay so still for so long.

  Everybody knew and nobody helped. It was the secret that we were all choking on. Even my mother, my sisters, my aunts. They passed it around. They said, with their eyes, why should you escape it? What makes you better than us? Can’t you see our hearts have been bleeding
for years?

  On the seventh day without Mother, the men unlock our door at first light. They are apologetic. Llew rubs his hand against my back even though the others can see him do it, and it kills me, the promise of being acknowledged for the first time. Nobody comments. The men bring us more food, tinned fruit cocktail, tinned pears, but it’s not quite enough. When we’ve eaten, we move to search again. I team up with Llew, my sisters with James. We return to the forest, all of us.

  We can see clearly now, in the light and the heat haze. The remnants of where animals have scratched and slept, the sweeping lines of snakes that have passed through the dirt, which Llew pauses to examine. The vipers are poisonous. They will stop your heart. They will make your fingers ulcerate and drop off one by one. I can’t take my eyes away from the back of Llew’s neck, the exposed patch of vulnerable skin that has reddened from the time outside, yesterday. It is peeling, it looks painful.

  It is James who finds Gwil, just past the border, when the sun is high in the sky. Llew and I hear the whistle blow, Llew’s neck snapping up as though someone has broken it. He runs without looking back.

  When I see them gathered around the child, when I see his body, it is not difficult to picture what happened. The abrasions on Gwil’s legs suggest he staggered through the border in the dark, caught his skin on the barbs, but that wouldn’t have been enough to kill him. His arms and hands, torso and cheeks, have circles of red and white like targets. He is swollen, lumpish as an old pillow.

  Hornets. They are native to our forest, swarming close to the ground with a great dignity. We used to run inside when they circled the lawn, staying low until they gorged themselves on sweet fruit and died or left. I picture Gwil determined, thrashing his way through the undergrowth past the border. He must have knocked against the nest and found himself overcome, the disturbed insects rising in a cloud.

  The men carry Gwil’s distorted body through the trees, and they blunder, they almost fall often but they do not let us help, they make terrible noises when we make any move to touch him. We trail behind, placing our feet very precisely around stones and twigs. In the house they lay him out in Llew’s room, pushing the sheets and covers back. We stay outside the open door, watching them. The grief swells them. It catches in their chests. I know we need to get away from them. Llew is holding Gwil’s hand with both of his and holding on too tightly; I can tell even from a distance he is crushing his fingers together.