The Water Cure(20)

When I wake, my body is useless with grief. Eventually I get up and splash my face with cold water to calm my red eyes, so Mother won’t make me use the ice bucket, won’t humiliate me in front of the men. After brushing my teeth I stuff my mouth with muslin and hyperventilate, then I put the muslin to soak in my bathtub, three inches of cold water, and let the water drain safely as I lie down on the tiles of the floor, the spare dawn light covering my body from the window.

Be good, be good, be good. A reckoning with my body. Please, just for one second, I beg my feelings, lying there, waiting for them to subside.

The men wore hunting clothes, I remember from the Welcome Book. The men stockpiled weapons in the cellars of their homes, and practised on deer. The men of my home town, the men of my family. Fathers one and all. You could not tell the bad men from the good.

‘So some of them were good!’ I say to the air with triumph.

Afterwards, Mother is waiting for me downstairs, alone in the dining room with the remains of breakfast around her, looking out of the window. I feel a little afraid of her, the aftermath of my agitation surely tangible, but all she asks is for me to dye her hair. We change into stained and matching grey T-shirts and go to the collection of dye boxes in her bathroom, hoarded underneath the windowsill.

‘Running out,’ she says, mostly to herself. ‘Maybe I’ll try a coffee rinse next time.’ She kneels down besides the bathtub, winces at the pressure on her knees. Her feet, soles upturned towards me, are ingrained deeply with dirt. I touch the cheek of the woman on the front of the box, mix up the contents of the bottles. Squeeze the dye into my bare hands, gelatinous and black. I brace myself for another lecture, but Mother just sighs as I massage it against her scalp. She bends her neck uncomplainingly as I rinse with the shower attachment until the water comes clear, her vertebrae exposed. She is not so much precious to me as fragile. She was someone’s daughter, once. And perhaps that is what she is trying to remind me. Women together in our vulnerability, her neck presented like a breakable thing. Nothing is mentioned about the men, this time.

I go up to the terrace afterwards, and find Grace already there. I sit next to her and she shifts but doesn’t say anything. I put on my sunglasses, draw my bare legs up to my body. When I look down at my nails and palms, they’re stained from the dye. I will think of Mother every time I use my hands today, tomorrow, until I scrub them raw.

‘How do you feel?’ she asks eventually. She is eating dry crackers, half a dozen of them left on a saucer, arranged into the shape of a half-moon. She doesn’t offer me one.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Not sick?’ she asks. She puts half a cracker on to her tongue and leaves it there without chewing. ‘They’ve breathed all over you.’

‘You too,’ I point out.

‘Not true,’ she says. ‘I’ve made sure to stay a good distance away when they talk. It’s not difficult.’

‘Well, I feel fine,’ I say. ‘Better than ever.’ I rest my hand against my forehead, subtly. I am very slightly warmer than usual, a hint of feverishness.

‘We can’t take chances,’ she says, once her mouth is empty. ‘I want them to leave.’ She touches her stomach. ‘We don’t need them.’

‘When do you think the others will come for them?’ I ask.

She lifts her shoulders. ‘Maybe there’s nobody to come for them at all,’ she says. ‘Who would come here if they could help it?’ A small bitterness, quickly extinguished.

Would others mean even more men, coming in on boats shrouded in shadow? I want to ask her, but I am too excited, too afraid.

Staring at the sky until my vision blurs, I spot another bird. Its trail is faint; it is far away, a sharp gleam in the sky.

‘Grace,’ I whisper.

‘What now?’ she says, and I point at the strange bird’s path above us. She sits up, watches it calmly until it is out of view.

‘Well,’ she says.

‘We should tell Mother,’ I say.

‘Later on,’ she replies. ‘It’s all right.’ She is being kind now, which hurts even more. She lets down the recliner so she is completely prone and rests the saucer on her thighs, below the bump of her stomach. If she moves suddenly it will fall and break, but I don’t take it away from her and put it on the table, I just watch the faint motion of it as she breathes deeply, in and out, until I can no longer bear it.

Every time I think I am very lonely, it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.

The heat builds. Leaving my sister where she lies, I go down through the close, still house and out on to the shoreline, picking my way over shingle and scree. Something to do, anything. The sand meets the trees, marram grass giving way to the cool of birch, of pine, a transitional zone where the heat of the open sky turns into something sheltered, something secret.

I part the high grass with my hands, feel the sting of thorns, of nettles, but ignore it. There could be snakes anywhere, the dislocated yawn of their fangs. I am always alternating between invincibility and the sick fear of dying. Our whole life has centred on survival. It would follow that we are better at it than most. Arrogance, King would call this if he was alive. I still keep an eye out for anything that could be his body when I’m in the forest. A viper could have felled him. An unknown enemy could have been hiding in the trees.