The Water Cure(21)

Soon the high grass gives way to clearings, patches of dirt. I slow in case of traps left unsprung, and keep an eye out for the marked trees that would tell me where I can and can’t go. It isn’t long before I see the first warning tree, horizontal gouges cut out halfway up the trunk, and then I wait for a while, sitting on a tree trunk at the edge of a patch of dirt, my nerve ebbing. Flies hurl themselves at my face.

I turn at a noise, and Llew steps into the clearing. Only him. The portion of the forest we are allowed is small, after all. He must have followed me, must have seen me walk trance-like from the house, watched me on the shore. He looks above our heads at the foliage, the green light. Somewhere in the distance something chatters; bird or rodent, I can’t tell.

‘Where does the forest end?’ he asks, lounging against a tree, and I am not afraid, though aware I should be.

‘It goes over the mountains,’ I tell him. ‘But I’ll show you where we can go to.’

We walk for a short while, the notched trees growing more numerous. I feel Llew’s hand on my hair, my head, and stop so suddenly that he walks into me.

‘A spider,’ he says. ‘I brushed it off for you. I stopped it running down your neck. I saved your life.’ He takes it away slowly, lets his arm drop to his side.

Eventually we come to the first border of barbed wire. Criss-crossing over itself again and again, it is taller than Llew because King was taller than Llew and King was the one who marked it out to his own measurements, his own specifications.

‘It’s not electric?’ Llew asks me. I shake my head and he goes right up to it, touches it gingerly around the barbs and shakes it. It is rusting now. It has been a long time since I have come so close. The other side, through the wire, looks the same as our side.

‘If I ask you what this is all about, will you tell me?’ Llew says, and when I shake my head he laughs. ‘I thought so.’ He lets go of the wire, kicks it lightly with his foot.

‘Show me more,’ he asks, so I walk with him along the wire border, where it runs parallel to our territory. Soon I point up to where you can see the paint of the house in the distance, shining white, elevated slightly. We are at the back. Our feet disturb pine needles and clods of earth.

‘Could we get home that way?’ he asks me, and so we change direction. I am glad when the wire is metres behind us, then concealed by trees. Llew walks by my side, lagging just enough to make the hackles rise on the back of my neck. For a second, like coming to, I remember where we are, and that he is an animal I don’t know anything about. He seems soft and tender around Gwil, but this does not mean he is a soft and tender thing. He could have a knife in his pocket, concealed, rags to stuff into my mouth. Anything. Ways of killing I have never dreamed of.

‘Walk ahead of me,’ I tell him. He laughs in my face, stops.

‘Are you afraid of me?’ he asks. He steps closer. I can feel his breath at my hairline.

‘No,’ I say.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to be.’ He moves as if to take my hands in his, but thinks better of it, arms swinging back down by his sides. He turns around and starts walking again, this time ahead of me by a whole step. He whistles.

I watch him surreptitiously, think about how I could use a felled branch to hit him on the head and kill him flat. I could take a piece of the barbed wire and wrap it around my knuckles, just in case. But then ‘Hurry up,’ he calls, turning his head to me, and I obey despite myself, my feet moving as if he is in charge of them, and I want to cry all of a sudden but I know it is important not to, not in front of him, in this place.

Soon we scale the old stone wall, beyond it the incline that leads up to the back of the house, the beds that were once pristine, now a mess of unkempt roses. At the top there lies a stagnant pond where the mosquitoes foment. On the way I fall on the sloping lawn without him seeing and press my hands against the beautiful earth, the grass and leaves. I want to stay there.

By the pond he holds whole heads of flowers in his palms. He shakes out the pods of their seeds, stains pollen on his fingertips.

‘What are these called?’ he asks me again and again. I say the names that I know. Near a wall veined with ivy and honeysuckle, he pauses.

‘Romantic,’ he says. He smiles at me. The smell is too sweet. He pulls a bloom from the stone and hands it to me. ‘For you.’

I let it drop, breathe through my mouth so as not to get the smell of rot, the plants around us choking on their own juice. He hands me another flower, and this time I look at his too-large hands and take it.

‘Look,’ he says, getting to his knees behind the wall. ‘Come here.’ He has spotted something on the ground, but I can’t make out what. When I crouch down next to him to look at it more closely, he puts his arm around me but I don’t pull away. My body is a traitor. I am also a traitor.

He leans in and presses his mouth to mine for a second. When he pulls away I see the thing on the ground is the carcass of a mouse, not long dead. I debate whether to spit his toxicity out on to the ground, but before I can make a decision he kisses me again. Then he laughs, presses his forehead to mine briefly. He stands up.

‘Poor thing,’ he says. He means the mouse. Something has ripped its throat out. He kicks a small pile of dirt and leaves over it. I wipe my lips with the back of my hand. They feel filled with blood, as if I’ve been hit in the face.