The Water Cure(17)
‘Oh, girls,’ Mother says as she watches the crisped seaweed and wood burn. There is a deep mournfulness to her voice. ‘It’s not a good sign.’
Her eyes flick to me briefly and I feel the lemon-twist of guilt, the sourness. I know what that look means.
I don’t want to play the drowning game with the men lying splayed by the pool as if they were dead, so I go to my room instead and close the door behind me. On the other side of my bed, furthest from the door, I sit on the carpet. Nobody can see me here. I open the bedside drawer and pull out sharp quartz, flint, the razor blades I have stolen from Mother and King’s bathroom cabinet. I choose a blade, even though I’ve been worrying about them running out without King’s trips to the mainland. We are noticing shortages in other areas too. I am rationing my soaps, cutting them into cubes with a paring knife. Only the salt will last, harvested from shallow tubs of seawater left to dry under the sun.
I stretch out my legs in front of me, pull my skirt above my knees. The carpet is a nauseous swirl, a pattern that was meant to mimic the forest. The skin drags and reddens, but doesn’t break. On the next go it does, springing up a beaded trail of red. One centimetre, two, three.
My body, King said, was the sort that would attract harm, the sort that wouldn’t last long elsewhere. But he really meant my feelings, spiralling out from my chest like the fronds of a sea creature. My sisters do not like to see the wounds on me, averting their eyes from the neat squares of gauze, but they understand that it’s inevitable. They would just rather not be reminded.
In my bathroom I wash the wounds carefully. Before long, the new blood stops hitting the bathtub and spidering out around the drain. I bandage myself and check my reflection.
I put everything away, then move to the window. Drawing back the curtain a little, I can see the bodies of the men down by the water from another angle. They are white slabs that have fallen from the sky and stayed where they hit, a creeping hair on their chests and limbs. They are far away from me, but still I shrink back as their heads turn. I don’t want them to see me watching them. Instead I look out to the sea, gauging the level of the swell, the fractals of the cloud cover. I try to see the ashes we left on the sand, but I am too distant and it is no longer a problem. We have contained the emergency. We have taken the necessary precautions.
Sometimes my housemates, hardier girls, brought men back to their rooms, and I couldn’t understand why they did it, whether it was recklessness or inoculation or both, and on those days I wadded a towel at the bottom of my door, poured boiling water into a basin and breathed in the steam.
By the next morning, we notice disturbances in the feminine fabric. Subtle warps, new ways of doing things. Like the men standing in the shallows with weapons they have made themselves, knives strapped to sticks that have fallen in the forest, the water lapping at their knees. Grace has not yet come to terms with their presence. She says to me, hopefully, as we watch them from our recliners, ‘It would be exciting if a shark killed them.’
Most of me, a significant most, wants to disagree. I watch how Llew lifts Gwil up by the armpits and swings him around until the child shouts, then sets him down in the shallows and ruffles his hair, batting at him to stay back. It signals something to me, something shocking and good, to see love displayed so openly, so wholly without ulterior motive. I find myself retreating inside to cry briefly in the blue dim of the downstairs bathroom, the mould-smelling hand towel pressed to my face to muffle the noise. Grace can tell when I return with my eyes red, but she does not comment. She looks away from me.
King preferred less obvious weapons than spears. He was a connoisseur of traps, of looped ropes and subterfuge. He always believed there was something offensive in overt violence. It was like asking for trouble, it disturbed things. But all that happens is that the men fill a basket with shining fish and carry it to Mother, who cooks them up. They are delicious. You can’t tell they are things that died a traumatic and writhing death.
We do our exercises out on the lawn at midday, when the sun is highest, so Mother can see us sweat. The water pours off me. I feint and roll, move my body into a cat’s stretch, hold out my arms to catch Sky under her armpits, lightly, lightly, letting go of her as soon as possible. When I turn back to the house I catch a movement at a dark window and scrutinize it as I bring my leg up behind me, grip my ankle. It’s Llew, watching us. There is no mistaking it. He freezes when he sees my eyes on him but doesn’t hide. I turn back so Mother won’t be alerted, complicit once more.
‘Press-ups,’ Mother says. We drop to the ground, we test the strength of our arms. I can do the most press-ups: I can do ten, twenty, thirty, beyond, my sisters groaning on the ground. I am doing them to tell him something about my body, but when I look back to the window he has gone.
The men have been watching us at other times. At meals they chew and stare, they roll their food around their mouths. Maybe they would eat us given half a chance. Anything is possible with these hungry-looking men. I have been consuming less, nerves twisting in my stomach. They look at our hands when we are sewing in the evening. King is not here to sell the talismans any more, but we keep making them because what else are we going to do? When Mother sees the men looking she stares back at them until they stop. I have not mastered this trick: my own eyes swerve. Llew smiles a lot. There is a kind of softness in him, I can tell.