The Water Cure
Sophie Mackintosh
For Annys and Beverley, my sisters
I
* * *
FATHER
Grace, Lia, Sky
Once we have a father, but our father dies without us noticing.
It’s wrong to say that we don’t notice. We are just absorbed in ourselves, that afternoon when he dies. Unseasonable heat. We squabble, as usual. Mother comes out on the terrace and puts a stop to it by raising her hand, a swift motion against the sky. Then we spend some time lying down with lengths of muslin over our faces, trying not to scream, and so he dies with none of us women bearing witness, none of us accompanying him.
It is possible we drove him away, that the energy escaped our bodies despite our attempts to stifle it and became a smog clinging around the house, the forest, the beach. That was where we last saw him. He put a towel on the ground and lay down parallel to the sea, flat on the sand. He was resting, letting sweat gather along his top lip, his bare head.
The interrogation begins at dinner when he fails to turn up. Mother pushes the food and plates from the table in her agitation, one sweep of the arm, and we search the endless rooms of the house. He is not in the kitchen, soaking fish in a tub of brine, or pulling up withered potatoes outside, inspecting the soil. He is not on the terrace at the top of the house, surveying the still surface of the pool three floors below, and he is certainly not in the pool itself, for the sound of his splashing is always violent enough to carry. He is not in the lounge, nor the ballroom, the piano untouched, the velvet curtains heavy with undisturbed dust. Moving up the staircase again, a spine through the centre of the house, we check our rooms individually, our bathrooms, though we know he will not be there. From our scattered formation we come together to search the garden, search deeper, sticking long branches into the pond’s green murk. Eventually we are out on the beach and we realize one of the boats has gone too – a furrow in the sand where it has been pushed out.
For a moment we think he has gone for supplies, but then we remember he was not wearing the protective white suit, we did not do the leaving ceremony, and we look towards the rounded glow of the horizon, the air peach-ripe with toxicity. And Mother falls to her knees.
Our father had a big and difficult body. When he sat down, his swimming shorts rode up and exposed the whiteness of his thigh where it was usually covered. If you killed him, it would be like pushing over a sack of meat. It would require someone much stronger than us.
The father shape he leaves behind quickly becomes a hollow that we can put our grief into, which is an improvement in a way.
Grace
I ask Mother if she had noticed any sickness in you. Any hint of your body giving way. She says, ‘No, your father was in fine fettle.’ Dark turn. ‘As you well fucking know.’
Your body was not completely all right. Of course I would see that where she would not. I noticed a slight cough, mixed up a honey tincture for you the day before you died. Boiled nettles from the end of the garden, where we dump our rubbish and leave things to rot. My hands blistering as I pulled them from the earth in flat afternoon heat. You drank it straight from the saucepan. Sunburnt throat moving under the metal. We were sitting in the kitchen together, two stools pushed close. Your eyes were watery. You did not touch me. On the counter, three sardines spilled their guts.
‘Are you dying?’ I asked you.
‘No,’ you said. ‘In many ways, I have never been better.’
Lia
Confirmation comes in the shape of his bloodstained shoe washed up high on the shore. Mother finds it, but we don’t salt it or burn it the way we would with other dangerous waste. ‘This is your father!’ she screams at me when I suggest it. So instead we pull on latex gloves and we all touch the blood patch on the shoe, and then we bury it in the forest. We fling the gloves into the shoe’s open grave and Mother fills it in with a shovel. I cry on to Grace’s shoulder until the flesh of it shows through the material of her dress, but she only stares into the canopy above us with dry eyes.
‘Can you feel something, for once?’ I whisper to her later in the dark, sharing her bed without asking permission.
‘I hope you die in the night,’ she whispers back.
Often Grace is repelled by me. I don’t have the luxury of being repelled by her, even when her breath is sour and a gentle scum of dirt clings to her ankles. I take whatever contact I can get. Sometimes I harvest the hair from her brush and hide it under my pillow, when things get very bad.
Grace has a deep fascination with a pair of black patent sandals that one of the women left behind years ago. She straps them on from time to time even though the soles flap loose, the leather scales and flakes. One morning she puts them on and lies face down in the sweating dew, right in the middle of the garden. When Sky and I find her, roll her over with our hands, she is motionless for thirty seconds or more. Her eyes are fixed. Her first movement is to rend at her hair, and we join in like it’s a game, but it turns out it’s a cue that I didn’t even know I was waiting for. Then we are all just useless there on the lawn, already painfully overgrown, waiting for Mother to find us.
Because we are new to mourning, Mother is panicked. There are no therapies for this unknown crisis. But she is a resourceful woman, ardently repairing the broken her entire life. More than that, she was a woman at our father’s side, absorbing and refining his theories. Her hands are bloodless when she lays them upon us. Soon a solution is found.