There was a small charred hole in her palm for the next month. It wept yellow water and Mother washed it with antiseptic twice a day. Lia didn’t cry once.
There is much I owe my sister.
Lia and I are the only ones to go downstairs, looking for Llew. We insist Sky stays behind. The gun is too heavy in my hand. There is no sound or sign of him. He could be hiding already, could have sensed the change in the atmosphere. Lia shakes next to me. There is no way to make this easy for her.
In the dining room, I rest the gun on a white-clothed table and flex my hands. We move to the doors to search for his shape on the water, on the beach. Between the kitchen, reception, the dining room, the ballroom, there are too many doors into this house, more than we could cover even if Sky were here too. Think, I tell myself. Think.
‘Maybe he’s in the pool,’ Lia suggests.
‘No,’ we hear a male voice behind us say, and of course we turn to find Llew holding the gun in his hand, eyes on us.
Maybe he did tremble in front of her, in private, when there was nobody to see, nobody to pretend for. I cannot pass judgements on the love of other people. I have done a lot of wrong.
Long afternoons in her room. My sister’s wide, unpretty smile. I only imagined them to see if I could visualize harm being done to her. And I tried to recall how Llew went around afterwards. Whether he walked like someone falling in love. Because you did. Your steps slowed. Your eyes became heavy, you became forgetful. That’s when I knew we were in trouble, a trouble deeper than I could have dreamed of.
‘Are you going to explain why you’re carrying this around?’ Llew asks. He is smiling. He is a fucking piece of work.
‘Just in case,’ I say. I meet his eyes. I want to spit on the ground in front of him.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Where’s James? I can’t find him anywhere.’
We are silent.
‘Where’s James, girls?’ he asks again, much louder, no longer smiling, and I am sick of him – I am sick of the men, of how they reduce us, how even now I am cowering.
Lia and I move closer to each other. I want our bodies to be doubled so we can strike him down. His own body moves a step closer to us, then another, and his hands on the gun are practised, steady, and in that steadiness I can see the appeal of him for the first time, I cannot blame Lia entirely for what she has done.
Refrain of the man, universal: This is not my fault!
See also: I absolve myself of responsibility.
And: I never said that. You can’t take the actions of my body as words.
It is Sky who saves us. It will always be a woman who saves us, we know that now. The protections of men are only ever flimsy and self-serving. She followed us after all and she sees what Llew is going to do and she lifts the vase high over her head. We do not see her until he has crumpled.
The images are like flashes of light. The shift. His face slackening, the thud of the vase where it falls to the floor and cracks, but does not shatter. It is good to see him on the ground where he belongs. We breathe, recover ourselves. We do not think about what almost happened. Sky finds twine in the kitchen and we tie him up, ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist. He remains unconscious as we drag him out of the house and down to the shore. Sand catches in his clothes, his hair. There is something rising in us, and I am glad. I want to stop for a moment and let it wash over me.
The protocol in this instance is the life-guarding that we have been taught. A subservience, a kindness. An acknowledgement that during times of violence, it is always worse for the women.
‘If men come to you, show yourself some mercy,’ you said. ‘Don’t stick around and wait for them to put you out of your misery.’
But now here is Llew, powerless on the sand. Our parents have revealed themselves as fallible already. I am loath, when we have come so far, to draw a knife across my own throat.
A new kind of life-guarding, then, a ritual that we own. Neutralization of his body, its power. A reclaiming of our shores. Suddenly things become very clear to me.
His eyes open and he fixes them upon me, but though I return his stare I do not address him.
Instead I half-turn to Lia, keeping my gaze on the man at my feet. ‘Fetch the salt.’
The most surprising thing love taught me was that I wouldn’t do anything differently, despite it all. I would not have said no to you. I would not have turned away early mornings of light, the smell of ozone and rain through the window. I would not have given away the days, alone, of me and the baby. Kicks against my lungs and liver. The baby said Stay alive more compellingly than anything I have ever known.
Sudden love, when gifted to a habitually unloved person, can induce nausea. It can become a thing you would claw and debase yourself for. It is necessary to wean yourself on to it, small portions. I doubt very much Lia has been doing so.
I stare at Llew, writhing against the sand, as we wait. I hope he can read my thoughts. They say: Llew, I knew someone like you. I know you think we are nothing. I know you come from a world where we would already be dead. I know you are a man who wants to kill women, because that is every man, even the ones who claim to love us. But your body will not save you here. You are no longer in your territory. This belongs to us. It always will.
We sisters have always been cruel in our own way, but I believe our cruelty is allowable. It kept us alive, it helps us to put things right. It has been helpful to look at it as a margin of error, morality-wise.
We throw the salt upon him, handful upon handful, and he makes little reaction, blinking under our actions. It stills him; he is baffled. Then we move in and we start to kick at him. It feels good to hurt him finally, his solid and implacable body. But it is not long before I hand the gun to my sister.
‘You’re the one who has to do it,’ I tell Lia.
She takes the weapon and looks at it with trepidation. Llew watches her, breathing fast.
‘You’ll be one of us again,’ I tell her. It is a low blow, and it is the truth.
The last act of love I will demand from her. I know that if she cannot do this, she is lost to us for ever.
Llew’s final crime was unforgivable, and I wonder if he felt that in himself. I am being charitable here by assuming that killing would change him. I am imagining him opening his eyes afterwards and seeing us as if for the first time.
Maybe it was guilt that distanced him. Waves of it waking him in the early morning, the remembrance of the thing he had done.
I imagine our home becoming too real to him. No longer a holiday from his life. No longer pool and shore and salt and my sister, suntanned and uncomplicated in afternoon rooms. Just a house falling apart. No paradise. The ceilings stained with water. Dust gathering on shelves, in corners. Three women moving around it, lost, where once there had been four. Having done that was not power. It was not fun. It had never been fun.
Lia is trembling. She stares at him and her eyes are very large, as if there might be something else she can see in him if she looks close enough. It is hard to stay away from the things that could be the end of who you are, I know.
It comes back to me now. The first time we saw the men. The three of them on the sand, opening up the world. Dirt imprinted on their skin. Strangeness after strangeness. Squinting towards the light, towards our faces. Could it have gone any other way? No, I think, watching them together on the sand. How he cringes from her, there. One way only. Us or them.
We feel our mother’s absence in ourselves, there on the beach. Suddenly the violence of her loss is pathological. It throws our own disposability into relief. Llew’s hands around her throat are also your hands. They are the hands of every man.
The falling woman was not the first death. I do not know if my sisters remember the woman who never raised her head from the basin. Mother’s hands at the back of her neck until it was too late, the small, frantic movements dying away, the damaged women standing up from their chairs one by one. It was not Mother’s fault, you explained to everyone,
once you had regained control over the room. The woman had not been ready to take the cure. Her body proved unfit. It was her own fault.
We were told we would never receive the water cure ourselves. Our bodies didn’t need it. I realized much later that this also meant we would never leave.
Long before the days of the cure, you came for our books. Lia and I had learned to read with them: intelligible romances, comedies, thicker books with blocks of print. Lia was reading too swiftly, enjoying it too much. Fine electricity webbing my sister’s brain. The quickness of her sentences gave you pause. You left only the recipe books, lined up on a shelf, their images like living things. Sky never really learned to read, thanks to your actions. Meanwhile, Lia and I taught each other bouillabaisse and sous-vide and truss so that we would not forget. In the absence of red meat, our lips swallowed words. We were eating a lot of peanut butter, jarred dulce de leche. Foods energy-dense and blameless.
Then you came for our hair. Mother kept it cut just beneath our shoulders, lining us up in the ballroom when the season changed and shearing the ends. Mine was the thickest. It curled underneath but not on top. The damaged women were stealing the hair, going through our bins. They were doing it for their own protection, but you put a stop to all that. We could not cut it or give it away to anyone. It tangled around our waists within what felt like months. I used to wake up and think it was down my throat, a hand or a snake, killing me.
Finally you came for our hearts, which had started to vibrate in our bodies like red and pulsing lights. They panicked you. You knew they were signals beaming outwards. You knew they would be the death of us.
I would lie on my stomach for hours, waiting for my feelings to scorch the ground beneath me. You thought we were in need of more drastic therapies. Stricter ways of measuring our loves.
So we portioned it out in finite acts. A kiss to the cheek was worth this much. I could hardly spare a hand placed to the small of the back, a slow glance, a smile. Languorous with it. Spiteful. I would give it all away if I could go back. I would touch my sister until her limbs grew black and blue.
When I went into Mother’s room just before Gwil’s death, I saw that somebody had taken the irons down. All I felt was relief. Finally, finally, there was nothing to tie me to you. Not even my blood, which I didn’t have to look at or acknowledge anyway. I could just leave it to do the dirty work in my body.
‘Can you tell me why you don’t love me?’ Lia asks him, very quietly.
‘I do,’ he says, eyes watering. ‘I do.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she says. ‘But I’m interested to know why not.’
‘Please,’ he says.
She pauses. ‘You really hurt us,’ she says.
I am so weary of the small and large deaths of my heart.
Despite myself, memories of you that knock me over: small tendernesses. Both my hands held in yours. Gift after pointless gift. A hairband. A china swan, palm-sized. White chocolate that coated the inside of my mouth. Relics.
First time, in the dark light of the study. Nobody would come in. Cot bed in the corner where you slept, alone, during times of great productivity. I was drunk on sharp white wine, and nervy. So were you. A long time coming. Looks and words, your presence in the corner and at the doorway.
Only harm can come of this, I thought afterwards, staring at my face in the mirror of my bathroom. The elation felt dangerous. A bright and skittering ripple inside my stomach, my ribs. It made my hands shake so hard that I could not brush my hair, the hundred ritual strokes each night that Mother had taught us. I had to sit down on the floor. Then I had to lie down against the cold tiling, supine, as if love were a force like gravity. A thing to keep me close and crawling on the ground. I am going to do myself great harm.
In these last days, I found a blood-sodden nightgown at the back of Lia’s drawer. It looked and smelled like something evil dug up from the ground. At first I didn’t know why she had hidden it there. Then I thought about how pale she has been recently, and about the rings around her eyes, and with a deep sorrow I thought, Not you, but there was no surprise in it, I had known it was coming.
Maybe the men had been drawn to her from a long way away. Maybe her own body had signalled them to the shore, a haze of light in the air above our home, and they had lifted their heads and howled at the sky with joy to think of us, the girls, helpless under their hands, before they had even seen our faces.
Lia presses her face close to Llew’s, but I cannot be sure if she is praying or talking. I can no longer look at her, at them. My face is wet, suddenly.
I feel we should go away and lie down for a long time, somewhere with the smell of ferns, bodies of calm water. I see it, somewhere, a far way off.
I hope, if by any chance you learn of this, it leaves the worst possible taste in your mouth. My sisters are still of you. It has always been that we are what you made us, and so our survival is a tacit endorsement of you, however much we might hate that. But our lives are our lives.
I take Sky’s hand and we turn away, walk towards the house, pausing at the edge of the beach. We sit on the wet sand and watch as each wave rushes towards our feet. On the horizon, flat light falls behind cloud.
We wait for the gunshot. It comes soon. Then another. The heat amplifies the sound. Another. Our hearts. Sky puts her hands over her ears. I listen to it all.
I would still like to know your intentions. I would like to have the moment with you that Lia had with Llew, that second before I looked away where I saw him say something into her ear, last words. But then isn’t that always like a woman, to want to drag every word and sentiment over and over through the wringer, until the meaning is gone. To over-process. To be absolutely sure.
But do not follow us. Do not look for us. Do not dredge the undergrowth and the shallows, send the birds and the snakes rising from their homes with the rhythm of your feet. Do not press your ear to the ground. Do not cast messages.
The house will fall. The hair in our brushes will turn to dust, our clothes to mould. The only proof of us will be the photographs you took, the places where we crop up in your notes as impossible women, invented into being. These, too, will not last.
It used to bother me that we would leave little trace, but now I have never been more glad about anything. I will wake up in the empty mornings with the absence of you, and I will think, Glad, glad, glad, and it will ring like a bell.
Lia comes and sits down next to us. There is blood on her too, but only a little.
‘Don’t look back at him,’ she tells us, so we don’t. Precautions against further damage. Too little, too late. My eyes remain trained on the sky. No birds are singing. The air is perfect, finally. There is blood under my fingernails. I will have to fix that.
Grace, Lia, Sky
Once there was a father who thought he could protect us. But that father was not immune to all that the world demanded. We understood it would be difficult, hurtful, to recognize that the danger was in ourselves. That the safe place had been contaminated from the start.
After we wash the last blood from our bodies in Grace’s bathroom – the three of us in a bath together, shaking, cupping the water to our limbs and hair – we dress in Lia’s clothes. They fit us well enough. White, for the reflective properties. We consider ripping King’s suit into pieces, talismans to get us past the border. In the end, we want nothing that has belonged to a man. But another idea occurs to us.
We do not use the curing basin or the ballroom. Instead we return to Grace’s bathroom and fill the bathtub almost to the top, salt held in three pairs of hands, sprinkled on the surface in slow, circular motions. It falls to the bottom, twists and dissolves. We perform the water cure for the first time on each other, the only time, the way we have seen it done. We prepare for what is next the only way we know how.
Sky goes first. She kneels of her own volition at the side of the tub. She has never practised for it, but we do what we have to under the circumstances. We are gentle with e
ach other. We let her rise, gasping from the water, without pushing it too much.
Next, Grace. Two hands on the seabird’s curve of her neck, Lia’s right hand and Sky’s left. We hold her down for slightly longer. She lets us, does not move. When she rises up from the water she feels a little faint. She admits it to us. We discuss it among ourselves, take it as a good sign.
Lia goes last. We hold her under for the longest time. Her time in the swimming pool has trained her well. The ceremony binds us, our blood running to the same tune. We have never wanted to feel Lia’s pain, but holding her under the water now, the memory of it in our mouths and eyes, the salt-sting, we let go of that selfishness. When Lia rises, she is smiling. ‘It was all right,’ she says to us. ‘It wasn’t as hard as I imagined.’
‘Goodbye to all of this,’ we say out loud as we move from room to room. Our home has not kept us safe, in the end. But it has taught us love.
On the shore, we look out to the sea. Goodbye to the ghosts. There are none swimming towards us. Goodbye to the white paint of the house, designed for reflection, for it has failed us.
Our eyes avoid Llew, lying in the same place we left him. He is our message to anyone else who might come to these shores. The message is This is no place. The message is Fuck you. We hope they will see him and tell others of the dangerous women who discovered a way to save themselves.
The new and shining women. Love slicks us from head to toe. The marks are imprinted on our bodies. We cannot lay down all of that. We wouldn’t want to, despite the ways we have been changed. Love still glows at the centre of our being.
Somewhere near the sea’s border, the edge of our vision, approaching boats. Large and white. In the air above us, a change. It is time to go.
The Water Cure Page 18