The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

  ‘King considers your life here a failure,’ James tells me. ‘King has decided a fresh start is best for all involved.’

  I do not know what he means. Our lives are our lives.

  James is crying again, hopeless, as if realizing that his confessions have not made anything better. Nothing will make him feel better.

  ‘I have told you too much,’ he says. He grasps for me. I close my eyes for one second.

  ‘We will not go,’ I tell him. ‘You don’t know what kind of man King is.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Oh, believe me, I do. And I’m sorry.’ He cries too hard to speak for a second. ‘I am truly sorry for what we’ve done to you and yours.’

  Shuffling closer, I put an arm around him. He holds on to me as if drowning. With one hand I touch his back lightly, and with my other I feel under my pillow. My hand moves over the gun, finds the knife. It is so sharp that I have cut my finger before accidentally and barely noticed. As clean as a wound can get. It is the quieter option, the one that feels right. I am surviving, the way you taught me.

  His head is still on my shoulder, my dress wet as he sobs. There is a new ruthlessness in me, or maybe it has always been there, waiting for the emergency – maybe you were the one to see it first, were right about us all along. I raise my hand.

  It is strange, the things that prepare you. When I put the blade to his neck and press, aiming for just under the ear, dragging down under the jaw, I might have thought about you lifting the chickens by their feet and swiping the knife across their throat. They struggled and you laughed at them, doing it down on the shore so the sea would rinse the blood, take it as a gift. The rest of the birds with feathers patched, gathered in fear.

  I might have thought about skinning rabbits. One clean slit from throat to tail. Their wet bodies like the inside of fruit. We stopped eating them because of the high levels of toxins. Rabbits could go beyond the border and return.

  Instead, I think about the dark rooms where you tried to save me. Wipe my traumas clean. Your large hands at my head, feeling my skull for memories, for things I shouldn’t know. Speculative, planted, real. A wheeled machine made of metal that leaked smoke. A sky with tall buildings crowding up into it. A pale woman fallen on the terrace, her blonde hair meshed over her face.

  I think about my sisters, lining up with me and Mother for our annual portrait. You, hefting the box of the camera on to a tripod. You, developing the photo in that tiny bathroom, the light shut out, basin full of chemicals. You, holding me in there sometimes, tightly and too tightly, in the pitch-black. Nobody was to disturb the man at work. I liked it, the too-tightness, though I am not a person used to liking anything. The photo placed ceremoniously in the lounge. No man documented. The man’s role is to make the document. The necessary curating of our lives.

  I think about being drowned in the pool with Lia, back when we were the same person, split down the middle like the heart of a tree. Sick with dread every night when it started happening. Lia’s face in front of mine as we were held down. Lia reaching out to hold my hands, to stop me thrashing. She always coped better. Things were easy then. We belonged to each other. There was no question of what love went where.

  One final thought: the three of us in my room, full of water, stomachs distended. Our collective boredom a hum over our bodies. Lia had just started hurting herself in earnest. We were supposed to be grateful.

  It is messy. It is very terrible. He reels back from me in horror. It is not like how Mother had told us it would be. Every other death has happened offstage. And now here I am, confronted with the absurdity of it.

  I put the gun and the knife in my pocket. Close the curtains, get blood on them. I no longer care. Let the blood get everywhere. I turn my back on the slumped body and sit down on the floor for a long time.

  What it was like to be in love with you: fucking awful, even after you revealed it was technically all right. The love of the family magnified. Except I wasn’t of your blood. Except you had raised me like your own. Except I knew no other families to compare ours with.

  It was like having a permanent hangover. A pure, lightning nausea, not unlike how it would later feel to be pregnant.

  ‘What am I to my sisters?’ I asked you after you told me who I really was, and you said that I was still a sister but only half, that four pints of the blood in my veins was alien. That the differences would probably manifest themselves as my age increased, as the three of us stretched away from each other. I cried to find out that half of my blood was unknowable. Again, a thought that came back to me when I was pregnant: What is this inside me?

  What it was like to be in love with you: the secret prayer I said in the days after your death, even as I was mourning – genuinely mourning, I promise you, because I am not totally monstrous –

  Please stay away

  Stay under the sea

  Be gone

  I’m sorry

  You told me to stop calling you father, because you weren’t my father, because the parameters had changed, but I don’t think I managed it before your death. I kept slipping back into habit. I had been one of three for so long.

  There was so much you and Mother kept from us about our own bodies. Let us think them incapable, weak, when nothing could be further from the truth. Kept us only in a twilight health, our bones always painful, our teeth rotting where they lay in our mouths. Vitamin pills the shape and size of thumbnails when I was pregnant. ‘Deadly for your sisters,’ Mother intoned darkly. When she turned away I was able to read the back of the packet, which said otherwise.

  ‘You girls are a new and shining kind of woman,’ you told me, a year before my body changed. Evening this time. My sisters and I had finally grown used to the new rhythms of the house without the damaged women. A soporific truce. You and I were out on the terrace with blankets across our knees. All had been forgiven.

  Love was a rising water coming up around me. You were pointing out the stars with your large and damaging hands, explaining what each one meant. Most of them meant Caution, or Be good. Variations on these.

  ‘There has never been anyone like you in the world,’ you continued. Your voice was grand.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, would I?’ I said.

  The night you explained what was happening to me – your face impassive as usual, but a faint energy coming off you, an excitement – the air had seemed so beautiful and bracing. The forest shielding us. The sea letting sound and light ring out, true as a bell. I had used a stick you brought back from a voyage, floury latex gloves to protect my hands from the modern object. My own bathroom, dark, with everyone else oblivious in the lounge. Two blue lines in a box.

  When I had stopped crying, I went to Lia’s room and waited for her to come to bed. I didn’t want to be alone then. Lia, with her strange eyes illuminated by the moon and no knowledge of what had come before, or what was to come.

  ‘You will inherit all of this,’ you told me on another evening on the terrace. ‘This is where you belong.’

  We padded silently down through the sleeping house, to the kitchen, where you cut me a slice of the blood sausage that you ate late at night, men’s food, forbidden. I chewed it but it became gristle in my mouth. Swallowing was impossible. I spat it into the sink, dry-heaved. You rubbed my back. You held my hands. ‘See?’ you said, softly.

  For a short while, just after she discovered you and me, Mother and I went through a phase of becoming closer. I was her daughter first; a granddaughter added to the equation. Slow-moving, not yet showing. We spent a lot of time together. She was not always openly malicious.

  We sat together with our sewing, facing each other across the dining table. Occasionally we duelled with hard words, hers worse than mine. My heart wasn’t in it. My heart was elsewhere. Occasionally she would crease up her face in the way that was her version of crying, but I did not cry once.

  She told me stories about her childhood that I understood were supposed to be supplication, explan
ation. Stories I did not want to hear, about eating hot bread with her own mother, about mingling with other children. Boys and girls. They pushed each other to the ground. It was a different time. I asked for a memory about my real father, made bold by the changes in myself, but she refused. She kept it from me because she could.

  I did not want her to be a fellow woman. Sometimes she was my enemy and sometimes she was just my mother, an enemy in a different way.

  Mother must have felt the fact of your aliveness like a shame, a wound. She wrote you letters – not that she had any way of sending them. I found them on the first day of her absence. I went straight to her room, alone, to see what I could find. What I could strip or use or hold between my hands and guess the meaning of. The gun. A lipstick, frosted orange, not her colour. Not anybody’s colour, I found, once I smeared it across my mouth.

  I thought the letters were elaborate metaphor. Her grief failing to comprehend that you were a piece of meat by then. My heart softened. There had been romance in her, after all.

  Each one ended with Do not send for the girls, or some sort of plea built upon this. I took this as her invocation against our deaths, Mother writing those words down as a prayer to the sea. A message for you to pass on, wherever you lurked, the other ghosts a shoal around you.

  I’m sorry I made you leave, said another one, but I hadn’t read too much into that at the time. I knew survivor’s guilt when I saw it.

  The first time I hit you, you laughed. My nails took off a small amount of the skin on your cheek. There was no blood.

  ‘You’re like your mother,’ you told me. ‘Vicious.’

  You were right, she was vicious. Left her fingernails to grow long, filed them to a point and painted them in too-bright colours. She had been behind the more sadistic therapies. Whether she truly believed in being cruel to be kind, or whether she just secretly hated us, I cannot quite decide.

  For a while I thought she might have poisoned you and dragged your body out to the forest somehow. Her tears were fake, an empty gesture. The others were taken in by them when you had gone.

  Through it all, she told us she loved us so often that it became its own violence, something it was impossible to turn down.

  And every day, the border of the world drawing closer to us. And every day having to look into Mother’s face and pray for her health, for her heart, despite everything that had been done to us. And done to her.

  Somehow, downstairs. Walking towards the sound of music, into the ballroom, a person playing badly. Lia. She watches me for a second across the piano, then stands up. I call her name, once, twice.

  ‘What have they done to you?’ she asks. She is shaking. I look down at myself, the blood staining my dress and forearms, and find that I can’t speak.

  We find Sky in the kitchen, foraging in a cupboard, her body half-concealed. Lia and I put our hands upon her. Together we move as one up to Lia’s room.

  The emergency flares in our limbs. Blood pulsing. My extremities cold. James could have contaminated me. Who knows what disease the men truly carry. Who knows what Lia now glows with inside her bones. The blood is hardening on my dress already. In the dark of the corridor, my sisters swallow the news without question, not even a why.

  You blamed my early exposure to the outside world for why I never grew tall like the other sisters, remained small like Mother. It was also why I sometimes had attacks of breathlessness as a child. A squeezing in my chest, a vestigial sense of doom. These have improved as I’ve aged. You were satisfied with how well your therapies had worked.

  I watch my sisters move now. They walk in front of me, feet stumbling as they process the new information, what it will mean for us. Fear makes me cough. If we stop moving it will gather in our joints, I know. It will fill our lungs, and we will seize up or die.

  When we reach Lia’s room I watch as my sisters take it in turns to vomit into the en suite’s toilet, neatly, to get some of it out. Fingers down the throat. I wash my hands in the sink once they’re done, the blood pinkening the water. A smear of it near my mouth that I wipe off with a damp tissue.

  ‘Llew will find out what I’ve done,’ I tell them when I return to the bedroom. My sisters sit on my bed, vigilant and pale. ‘We need to decide what to do.’

  We could kill him and keep ourselves safe.

  We could leave immediately, let Llew find James’s body, hope that we would be long gone.

  We could walk into the ocean with our hands linked and know it was over, that it was finally over and would always be over.

  We could beg for Llew’s forgiveness, beg him to protect us from you.

  We could wound him grievously to keep him loyal.

  We could pretend it was nothing to do with us.

  We could forgive him.

  I take Lia’s hands as we list the options. It has been a long time since I have touched her for more than a second. They are thinner than I remember, her temperature low.

  ‘He will never forgive us,’ I say, as gently as I can.

  There is silence. Lia puts her fingers in her mouth and chews at the cuticles. When she puts her hands into her lap they are bleeding quite a lot. She looks at them in surprise and goes to the bathroom to rinse them under the taps again.

  ‘We have to kill him,’ I tell Sky while Lia is out of the room. A deep weariness comes across me. She stares at me, but nods. I place my weapons on the bedspread between us. I am afraid of her suddenly, of how accepting she is of this. At what it reveals about the life that we have lived. Maybe it is just that she is no longer the baby. Maybe she is perfectly equipped for the world, the way you planned all along.

  When Lia comes out, we put our arms around her.

  ‘No,’ she tells us. ‘No, no, no.’ She tries to push us away. ‘We can’t.’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ I tell her.

  ‘I love him,’ she says, uselessly.

  ‘We can’t do it without you,’ I say.

  I watched Lia with the men from the window, the day I first realized something was happening between her and Llew. She lay barely clothed between them, light glinting dangerously off the pool by their feet. They let the toxic words fall out of their mouths with no care for what they could do to her. At the time I had thought, Sister, have you no initiative? Sit underneath the parasol, at least. Could she not submerge herself in the water? Could she not have kept some distance? It made my hands shake to watch them. The inexcusable lack of caution.

  Always watching and waiting, when it came to my sister. Half of my blood. Even before I knew this, I sometimes felt closer to the damaged women than to my own family. My feet had walked on their land. I worried I was beyond saving. I worried it would not take much to tip me over the line.

  I thought of Lia and Llew standing among the trees, face to face, or lying down in any place they could find, and I was jealous, not because of him, but because of what it felt like to be seen. To be known. So I closed my eyes and lived through her for a second, tried to spark up the dormant connection of our minds with something approaching guilt.

  Thumb to the cheekbone. Palm cupping the ear. The birds, their jittery song. Cicadas, the background thrum of the sea, oppressive heat. Llew is quiet. He understands that seduction has to happen if he is going to get her to risk her life. That the light has to touch down in the right place. The heart must be willing. The heart must be a traitor.

  But we are all traitors in some way. Once Llew was sitting next to me and he put a hand on my knee when nobody else was in the room. I lifted it up at once and he replaced it. It wasn’t funny. I lifted up his hand again and scratched him, hard. And he was shocked. His eyes, narrowing, told me he wasn’t a person used to failing.

  I stuck closer to Sky than usual after that, surprised her with my attentions. I thought I saw him appraise her once, a quick consideration – eyes from head to toes. That was enough for me. Yet when I told her not to be alone with him, she looked horrified at the very idea. Lia was the only one who was not a
fraid. Or more accurately, she was a person made brave, made desperate, by necessity, and finally I can understand this.

  I can see how it went. What else was there for me to do besides observe, watch my sisters as they changed around me? Llew keeping close to Lia, trailing her movements in the dim evening light, through windows as we stretched. The reaction started with his arrival. It was inevitable, unstoppable.

  Then the boredom. I could sense it radiating off him as the heat built, in the insolence of his body as he lay by the pool. He pulled away from her. He stopped his looking. Lia had proved a disappointment. She was just like every other woman. Eager and tender-hearted. That knot of grief in her chest begging to be undone.

  It is not a crime, to lose interest. Perhaps even he did not recognize the particular cruelty of his actions.

  The anger of the women seemed a force from outside them. It was an anger that welled up deep in their chests. Without it, they would not have been able to survive. I personally have always welcomed it. The moments of power. The burning in my stomach.

  Be angry, I wanted to tell Lia. She moved around the house in an underwater trance. I recognized it too well. She couldn’t see that I was trying to protect her. She couldn’t see that Llew was nowhere near perfect, that he was just slippery-eyed and opportunistic. In her strangeness, she deserved far more than the ordinary. Even I, knowing nothing about anything, knew he was ordinary. Knew he should be trembling in front of her. Don’t be grateful! Be angry! Be tough! I knew she was capable of it. It made his reduction of her all the worse. To see my sister like that, weak, when in many ways she is the strongest of the three of us.

  I still remember the love therapy when I was ordered to hold a flaming candle against my palm for as long as I could. But the smell of the melting wax terrified me. I was not used to feeling or showing terror. I remember you and Mother looking at each other as I cried and trembled, as if you had isolated something.

  Lia took the candle instead. That year, she was my loved-most, and I was hers. The irons had aligned. Double the love. Double the luck. She hesitated only a little before moving her other hand to the flame. We all watched as the fire licked at her skin and the wind moved the sand over our bare feet. One thousand and one. One thousand and two. One thousand and three.