The Water Cure(19)
‘Easy to be friendly when you want something,’ she tells her. ‘See if you think they’re so friendly when they’re cutting your throat.’
‘Grace,’ we say in protest. ‘They wouldn’t.’ She throws up her hands, doesn’t look at either of us.
When Mother has pardoned us, put her hands on our foreheads to gauge our temperatures and declared us well for now, I shower for a long time. With both hands I soap my hair, letting the suds get into my eyes as penance. I rub a thinning towel across my body and slick my legs with a thick, vanilla-scented cream that Grace gave me months ago, something King had brought back for her from his final voyage. She hadn’t wanted it. She knew I would.
Why do you care? I ask myself. Talking to myself is a bad habit I’ve picked up in the last few months as Grace has become less and less available to me, shutting herself away for long hours in the room next door, changing minute by imperceptible minute.
Now that we have been reminded of what is at stake, Mother allows the men to sit with us in the lounge. My sisters and I stay on the sofa with the sagging heart, Sky draped over Grace, me in the corner with one knee up to my chest, pretending to sew. I stab carelessly at the fabric when anyone looks at me. Really I am just watching Llew with Gwil again. Hands flickering between suits as they play cards, laying them down so quickly they blur. The boy laughs as he wins; the father punches him lightly on the arm. Softly, softly. Father, I grieve for a second, knotting my hands too tightly and letting my embroidery fall.
It turns out the love therapy has done nothing for me. Llew puts a glass of water to his mouth; a piece of dark hair falls over his forehead and he pushes it back. Closed eyes, for a second, as he swallows. I close my own. Mother and Grace knit striped things for the baby as Sky pulls a cat’s cradle of red cotton between her teeth, between thumb and forefinger. My sisters, at least, are serene.
When Llew leaves the room, I am bereft. I go to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Stupid, I tell myself. No good. But he is outside the bathroom itself in the corridor, leaning out of the window, which is open as wide as it will go. Pine mist, silhouetted against the heat of the day burning off.
Despite everything, I did sometimes dare to believe that love would come for me, that it would find me somewhere. It would come from the ocean or the air. It would wash up like the rare plastics inscribed with scraps of lettering, or I would sail to the border and somehow breathe it into me. I have always been a hopeful person. Painfully optimistic, Grace had called me once. It was supposed to be an insult.
Llew doesn’t seem surprised to see me. He raises his hand to me, moves sideways to make room. I join him at the windowsill and lean the top half of my body out. He asks about the mountains. They are barely visible through the falling cloud, past the forest, a long way away. I don’t know what to talk about, what words could be good enough to interest him. He asks if we could go and visit them, but they are full of animals that kill you and anyway there is no way to do it, so I can’t promise anything, I have nothing to give.
‘Your mother has been quite cruel to us,’ Llew tells me. ‘But you don’t mind us, do you?’ He stretches out his arms. ‘I can tell there’s not a bad bone in your body.’
A wolf almost made it to us, once. King cut its throat and strung its pelt up in the forest as a warning to other wolves. It looked like a giant bird of prey, suspended in motion. Red velvet underneath, then brown. He kept it there until it rotted, and then cut it down.
I can hear my sisters behind me in the room, talking indistinctly, probably bickering. Their voices are a reproach. I should be there with them, safety in numbers, our bodies, our witnessing, some sort of defence. The man moves his body closer to me and I also move closer, why not, why not, I cannot help myself. The warm and rising smell of his skin.
Llew turns to look at me. Half his face is in shadow, his mouth hidden.
‘You’re very beautiful, you know,’ he says.
My throat is filled with something. He reaches out to my face and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, then turns and walks back down the corridor, towards the lounge, without saying anything else.
I fetch a glass of water and drink it alone in the unlit kitchen, watching the clouds move past the moon, then go outside into the garden, turn on to the beach. I don’t stop until I feel sand under my feet and then I sit where I fall, splaying my hands into it as if to root myself. The water lies slick and still, a small garnish of foam where it hits the shore. I want Llew to come out after me, but it is impossible.
Once I kept a young rabbit in a shoebox under my bed for three weeks, and I loved it dearly, but Mother found it one morning while cleaning my room. King took the rabbit down into the garden and killed it by planting one foot on top of it, and then he pushed my face into the earth as the sky sweated above us.
Violence from my father, who after all was still a man, was a last resort. Even then my eagerness for love compromised my family. It is terrible to be that person. Mother had to fumigate my room with a heated pan of salt, glowing red. I watched from the keyhole and I can picture her now, stately in white, moving from corner to corner.
We did our best to protect each other – it was necessarily imperfect, but we did try with all our hearts. Who else would try for us? Who else would lie down in the dirt, if not our women, our mothers and daughters and sisters? We were not too proud to get down there.