The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

  In the days afterwards, Lia and I secretly pulled a mattress on to the floor in one of the empty rooms and experimented for hours. We climbed up on to stools and let our bodies go. But our movements were too propulsive. We were too eager.

  It was years before I thought to ask you: What the fuck was all that about? You told me that I must have been mistaken, that nobody had fallen. Children were prone to drama and invention. Whenever I tried to open a window upstairs, they were painted shut. And you told me, well, yes, they were painted shut to protect the babies, the small and dangerous people hell-bent on dying, on pushing stones down their throats or burying themselves alive. Which is to say, it was all for me.

  For maybe a year, I found I could believe the windows had always been shut. That the woman had been a trick of the light. But it was after that day that the women started to be turned away when they reached us. And one day the memory opened up again, despite your efforts, and that time I let it.

  My plan was to call my own baby Magnolia, after my favourite tree in the garden. It blooms rarely. For the last two or three years it has been properly dying. The day when we will have to take the chainsaw to it isn’t far off.

  I would have held my daughter to my chest in a length of swaddling fabric. Strapped her to my back for when the emergency came. For when the tides rose. For when the sky fell.

  I keep the gun under my pillow since Mother left, along with my knife. Every morning I touch the metal, familiarize myself with the mechanisms. It is cold and undeniable in my hands. I took it out to the terrace once, an afternoon when everybody else was in the pool below me. With my elbows propped up on the pillows of a recliner, I picked the men off one by one. I put four or five imaginary bullets into Llew’s body alone. It helped.

  With Lia and Llew gone, James tells us to come with him. We follow him up to the terrace. ‘Air,’ he tells us. ‘We need air.’ I cannot disagree with that. James lies down on a recliner and puts his hands over his face. He does his ugly man’s crying with no regard for us. I am essentially compassionate, so I let him get on with it. On the table next to his body are the binoculars left from the ghost sighting. I notice something out on the sea, a boat. Sweeping the ocean with the lenses, I see the face of my own sister. Llew touches her. He puts his big and dreadful arms around her. There is nothing I can do.

  I have no memories of the old world, though you always insisted I did. You spoke of them as a kind of shrapnel – damage lodged in my heart and body that nobody else could see. I never had any interest in remembering really, but you didn’t think this important.

  You explained to me, one day when we were alone, when Mother was somewhere below, probably taking a nap: you had saved all you could. That is, we had proved ourselves the only ones worth saving.

  When the building is burning, you rescue your loved-most. I knew this. But for a father, you explained, it is never so simple.

  James sits up, squints out to sea once he sees me watching.

  ‘Give me those,’ he orders for the first time, gesturing at the binoculars. I don’t want to, but I relinquish them. He looks through them for thirty seconds or so, then lowers them.

  ‘As I suspected,’ he says. ‘Well, it’s done now. The damage is done.’

  Sky wants to look too, but he shakes his head. He throws the binoculars on to the floor. The lenses crack, but my sister and I do not flinch. I am interested in his new and proprietary violence. Finally, inevitably, he’s showing what he really is, his face crumpling the way yours had started to do in the last days, like the effort of his muscles holding his expression together is unbearable. I watch him very calmly. I am assessing my next move.

  He puts his hands on my wrists and looks earnestly down to where his dirty fingernails rest against my veins. I let him do this, though it repulses me.

  ‘I want to tell you some things,’ he says. ‘I need to tell someone. I’m sorry that it has to be you, but who else can I tell?’

  I invite the confessionals of men. I am not a stranger to them. Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women. This is one of the things you taught me about love. ‘All right,’ I tell him, the way I told you.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ I say. ‘Let’s go to my room. But Sky has to stay here.’

  He nods. Sky protests, but I still her with a look. I hope she has the sense to hide.

  For the last couple of days I have been composing a constant eulogy to our world. Goodbye, trees. Goodbye, grass, brown and dying. Goodbye, sea and sand. Goodbye, rocks. Goodbye, birds. Goodbye, mice, lizards, insects. I know, somehow, our time is drawing to a close. The sky above us is burning out. The borders will no longer hold.

  With James walking ahead of me, I carry on with my litany. Goodbye, wallpaper. Goodbye, sweet light of late afternoon. Goodbye, carpet. Goodbye, ceiling and crumbling plaster. Goodbye, doors.

  James moves in a shuffle as if something is causing him a lot of pain, one hand clasped loosely to his chest.

  In my room, he makes his confessions. The dust swirls through the light, and the open windows bring in the smell of the sea. He starts with irrelevancies. He starts with things I already know or have guessed. ‘I kissed Lia,’ he tells me after a while. He swallows. ‘Or she kissed me, but I didn’t stop it right away. I wanted to do it.’

  I do not comment. I fetch him a glass of water for his cracked voice, and when he drains it I walk to the bathroom and fetch him another, meeting my own eyes in the mirror as the water from the tap fills the glass. Keep him talking, I tell myself. Stay away, I tell my sisters, wherever in the house they might be.

  ‘The world is not what you have been told,’ he says after the second glass. He is reckless now, as if the water has triggered something in him, strengthened his resolve somehow. He speaks as if from a long way away. ‘I mean, the world is very terrible, but you have been told a number of things that are untrue.’

  I ask about the women, with their dying lungs and shrinking skin. I saw the proof of them with my own eyes, swept their hair from the ground, burned bloody handkerchiefs. He shrugs.

  ‘It’s not for me to disregard their pain,’ he says. ‘They are in the minority. There are mysteries everywhere. Sicknesses wherever you go.’

  ‘But you can’t deny that men are killing women?’ I say.

  ‘Well, no, I can’t. But it’s not like you think.’

  So tell me, I think, impatient.

  We would be able to go outside, he tells me: the gauze masks that women sometimes wear are only affectations. All of it is smoke and mirrors, overreaction. We would be able to eat the food without it sticking in our gullets, without it radiating bile through our guts. We would not be poisoned by the world, if that’s what we are worried about. We could be women like any other, taking the usual precautions. Yes, the risk of violence upon us is higher. Even he as a man can’t disregard that! Can’t lie to us about it! But also: we could lounge by poolsides there too. And we could meet others. Other women. Men, too. Maybe fall in love, if we wanted to? He says it like that, as a question, almost hopeful. As if that will be the draw, the sweetening of the deal.

  Love was a great educator over the last years, and especially those last months, with you. It taught me first of all that women could be enemies too. Past, present and future. To my own horror I found myself awake late, pacing my room. Had to look away when you kissed Mother, extravagantly, on the cheek at breakfast. My sisters were safe territory, but I still saw them through a vision changed. I saw for the first time that there would be women who took what I wanted, and so I became more protective of myself. I changed alone, spent time in meditation, pushing the gifts you gave to me under the bed, hoarding them so the others would not know.

  It also taught me that loss is a thing that builds around you. That what feels like safety is often just absence of current harm, and those two things are not the same.

  James is still talking about the life that is open to us. How we could explore vistas of mountain and
lake and shore. The countries beyond this limited coast. We could wear shimmering fabrics. Walk in crowds with the evening air hot on our faces, the smell of food and smoke. For the first time James speaks with authority. The world has not been kind to him, I can tell, yet he loves it anyway. It is a man’s place. His survival is implicit, a survival taken for granted.

  He is more and more animated. ‘Look, where you are, it is one specific part of the world. There is so much more of it. And not even that far away, either. It would take you a long time to get through the forest. But if you go around the sea, well, it takes no time at all to get out of the bay.’

  I have always believed our home to be an island. A healing place, untouched, something skipped over and forgotten. A geographical miracle. But it is mainland, like everywhere else. It is just another part of the coarse, toxic earth. You lied to us about this. And so what else?

  The shock is physical, reverberating in my fingers, my arms. But James does not notice it. Instead he stops talking, stands up and goes to the window. He becomes calmer, remembering the world like that. He rests his forehead against the glass.

  ‘We made contact,’ he says as he looks out towards the sea. ‘We found a way. They’re coming.’

  ‘And what about us?’ I ask. Already I have been thinking about where we can hide. Where we will wait it out while the men prepare themselves to leave. They can take what they want. The silver cutlery, heavy in the palm. Your notes. They can pull Gwil’s body from the soil. They can raze the house, for all I care.

  ‘Grace,’ he says, turning around. ‘You and your sisters. We’re taking you too.’ He sits on the floor. ‘King is alive. He is the one who sent us.’ He looks up at me. ‘Everything has been for you, all along.’

  But I didn’t ask for any of this, I told myself in the mirror sometimes after the women had all left, and then again after you had disappeared, I have never fucking asked for this. I would hold my breath and think about the time I walked through the forest until the border came upon me, how I stepped over the wire without hesitation. My sisters did not know.

  You found me very soon. I didn’t go far. Blundering and ill-equipped, a person who had never tried to escape before. The idea had not occurred to me until then. The pits of my footprints swelling with the dismal autumn rain. Hair plastered to my face, my neck and shoulders bare in my nightgown. I thought you might kill me there. I was an admittance of failure. Something about me was changing, was going to a place you could not follow. Yet you were able to lift me in your arms and you carried me back, though I hit at your face, tried to gouge your eyes out. You put me down at that, and tied my hands.

  That was how I learned the true meaning of your old mantra, The love of the family justifies all.

  I cannot breathe for a second. My instincts have failed me. I was so sure I felt you dead, your body no longer transmitting to mine, the ways bodies do when they are in love. The way I could sense you from rooms away. Knew when you were returning to us across the sea. But I was wrong.

  James tells me that you warned him we would be afraid. You explained there was a chance we would harm ourselves. It was the way we had been raised, with those small knives at our neck. It was so imperative that we were returned to you unhurt. The men would need to go gently, gently. Win our trust, show their vulnerabilities.

  ‘He wanted you to have the baby away from here,’ he says. ‘It would have been a new start.’

  ‘But I do not want one,’ I explain. A new start, I mean.

  ‘They’re on their way. They’ll be here in hours. It will not be so bad, I promise you. I’ll see to that.’ He puts out his hand to mine, but I don’t take it.

  Midsummer of the year I ran away, Lia and I had discovered we liked to tan with our tops off in the old greenhouse. It was ripe with oxygen. Smashed pots everywhere. We dragged cushions from our own bedrooms to lie on, and opened up the panels in the glass roof for air. We were closed in but it was our own decision, for once. The glossy leaves of abandoned foliage sheltered our bodies. We had not yet learned that they were shameful.

  Love always asks you to sacrifice something, I know that now. Always demands complicity. I think of Mother over dinner, one evening a long time ago, telling us, ‘Even if it is a failed utopia, at least we tried.’

  I didn’t understand what she meant. My sisters didn’t either. She was drunk, her fringe at a jaunty angle. Earlier that day she had cut it in a rough chunk across her forehead, but we had shied away from the scissors. You had told her she looked ugly and she had cried for a long time. Her eyes were still red.

  You knew what she meant, of course. When she said those words you became very still, taking up all the air with your dangerous silence. We froze in position to see what would happen next.

  ‘Go to bed,’ you told us. We closed the door behind us and listened, hands pressed to the wood. You were talking in a low voice. I heard Mother’s rise, then fall.

  We went to bed eventually, but not before I heard the start of Mother’s crying again. She raised her voice momentarily, enough for me to hear a single phrase. ‘How long can we go on like this?’ she said. ‘How long?’

  The eldest child has to be the toughest, else she will not escape the mistakes wrought upon her. The body of the eldest child is naturally a weapon. She told me that years later. ‘So you made mistakes?’ I asked. She kept looking at me, her eyes glassy. She knew what I meant. ‘I am not anybody’s weapon but my own,’ I told her.

  ‘Mother,’ I say, grasping for any comfort. ‘Is Mother with them? The people coming for us?’

  He just looks at me, his eyes more watery than ever.

  ‘You killed her,’ I say, not a question. ‘You killed her.’ He bows his head.

  ‘It’s not like what you think,’ he says.

  It had been Llew, of course.

  ‘King only wants you and your sisters,’ James says. ‘You’re still young, Grace.’ He pauses. ‘Thirty isn’t too old to start all over again, not by any means. If that’s what you’re worried about.’

  We are your property, your rightful goods. Mother was worn out, a liability; I have replaced her. Half the age, body and mind equipped for survival. It is simple. You would explain it to us so reasonably if you were around. We would see it as the only rational act.

  ‘You still have so many years of your life ahead of you,’ James said. He looks at me with unbearable pity.

  And too many years behind me, I want to tell him. They gather like a bank of water. Like a heavy wave. I cannot forget those years, let them break over me. I will not.

  One morning we found the greenhouse splintered, the glass a shimmering blanket around wire frames. You had realized what we were doing and taken a sledgehammer to every pane. You might as well have staved in our hearts.

  James goes into more detail. It was Mother’s fault, he explained. She humiliated Llew at the start, the strip-search, the denial of water. Better men than him would have nursed that seed of resentment. He could not be blamed, actually. It happened almost by accident. It was a kind of self-defence. He had underestimated his strength, underestimated the pressure of his hands, the heaviness of his swing.

  ‘You can understand that, can’t you?’ James asks me. ‘You can understand how that could happen, with someone like him?’

  There were men who naturally caused great harm. It is built into them. You had warned us. You are one, though you would never admit it.

  James and Llew had closed her eyes and put fishing weights on her body and left her out at sea, alone.

  In the distant past I spoke to the damaged women, when I could. I was young. They were reluctant to give me details, instead pressing my palms with secret, useless trinkets. Textured soaps, shells on pieces of twine. I hated these offerings even more than the samplers we stitched with swollen fingers. Everything was so heavy with intention and none of it worked.

  What I needed from the women was information. I knew even then that it was important to arm myself. Know your enemy
. When you and Mother occasionally told us things about the world it had to be done under controlled conditions, with time for recovery. It wasn’t enough.

  The more I learned, the more I realized that even being physically removed from it wouldn’t save us. The violence came for all women, border or no border. It was already in our blood, in our collective memory. And one day the men would come for us too.

  That was the source of the anger. Stronger in the damaged women, but it was also there in us. The potentiality. I still scream in my sleep. So does Lia, though I have never told her. It’s not like cruelty has not been wrought upon us.

  With every new discovery I found myself looking at you with new eyes, you who had renounced the world, you who claimed to put your love of women above all things. Possibly you were hurting me already, in the name of love. I was not sure at that time how it would manifest in me.

  It didn’t take long to find out. Pains in my abdomen, the metallic taste in my mouth. I had always slept on my front like a child, but my chest became too painful. I thought I was dying for some time.

  I want to know everything about the men now, for the first and only time. I look at James’s sodden red face and want to know his histories, his heartbreaks. The refracting decisions that brought him, them, here. I picture the two brothers tussling in dirt, Gwil’s age. I want to discover what turned them into themselves. I want to know how I could become heartless too.

  ‘Tell me how you know King,’ is all I can say in the end. The puzzle that sent these men from you to us.

  It was nothing special. They knew you from decades ago. You inspired terror in your time. If you were a certain kind of man, you could have five hundred lives. You could shake them all off like dead skins.

  I expect to learn it was Llew’s doing that brought you here, but no. It was James who owed you the favour. Llew had just come along. You had been very gracious about it. He was not keen to see his older brother killed. It was an act of love too. If there is one thing we know, it is acts of love. This does not make me feel better.