The Water Cure(26)

‘Move your rook,’ Llew stage-whispers behind his hand as I stare, paralysed by his nearness, at the pieces.

‘That’s not fair,’ Grace says. ‘No cheating.’

‘I’ll help you when it’s your turn,’ he tells her.

‘I don’t want your help,’ she replies.

I don’t move the rook. I see that there is more ground to be gained if I move the knight, so I do, toppling the board into check.

‘Would you look at that,’ Llew says. He is still smiling. I turn away and stare at the sea, trying to find the point where I let the baby go. The supple water is forever changing. It’s almost like it never happened, which gives me hope that one day it will be like it never happened.

Mother comes for me and Grace, Sky already with her. The men watch us go but do not follow. In the blue-washed afternoon we do our stretches, bending at the waist and sweeping our fingertips to the grass. Grace sits on a bench at the side, under the magnolia tree.

Mother tells us all to lie down on the ground, even Grace. Damp earth. She tells us to close our eyes. She puts a heavy sheet over each one of us, covering us head to toe. A new thing.

‘For your grief,’ she tells us. ‘You can cry underneath that. Five minutes.’

So we do.

Afterwards I nap in my room, exhausted. And it is when I draw back my curtains, deep sleep still gumming my eyes and the sky still light, that out on the sea, between the waves, I see a floating thing that doesn’t belong to us.

On my knees at my bedside drawer, I pull out everything until I find my binoculars and then I run up the stairs and along the top corridor, until I reach the door to the terrace. My hands slip on the catch but finally I am out there, and I go straight to the railing, leaning over as far as I dare, worried it will sink before I can see it properly.

Ghost. I look at it through the binoculars, and I am almost doubled over with nausea immediately. I’m glad it’s so far away. There is no way it could reach us. It’s too large to be the ghost of the baby, bobbing and sick with its movements. I can’t look at it for long, magnified or otherwise – no longer recognizably human but more dangerous, something to wash up on our shores swollen and racked with disease.

Still, I am not the expert in these things. I run to Grace’s room, where she is napping too. She is still too pale, drained of blood, but I shake her awake anyway and I say, ‘A ghost, out on the sea,’ and she sits up as if she has been expecting it.

‘I knew it,’ she says, her voice distant. ‘I knew this would happen.’

As we walk past Mother’s room, we hear breathing. She is in there with Sky, the two of them asleep on the bed, Mother lying face down on her folded arms.

‘Don’t wake her,’ Grace instructs me. ‘She can’t see this.’ At times like these I am reminded never to doubt my sister.

We return to the terrace, but it has gone. I pull her downstairs and out to the shore, right out on the jetty, checking the water spread out before us just in case. It is nowhere to be seen.

‘Ghosts are fragile,’ Grace tells me after we have been looking for some time, passing the binoculars between us. ‘I believe that it happened.’

I am grateful.

The sun is setting properly now, long and watery clouds falling violet to the horizon. We walk back to the pool and I take off my dress, slide into the water in my swimming costume. Grace sits on the side, watching me tread water for a while, illuminated in the centre of the pool. Birds call, long and low, from the forest behind her. I close my eyes against the perfect air on my face.

‘When was the last time you played the drowning game?’ I ask her.

‘I didn’t do it the whole time I was pregnant,’ she tells me. ‘I didn’t want to hurt the baby.’ Her mouth becomes a hard line. Made brave with the love I am not used to, I wade to the side and put my arm around her shoulders, and this time she doesn’t push me away.

‘I’m sorry for what you had to do,’ she tells me.

‘I didn’t mind,’ I tell her. ‘I did it because I love you.’

She nods. ‘You’re a good sister.’

Grace lies down on the tiles and closes her eyes as I scoop shallow handfuls of water over her head to cool her down. After a short while Mother comes out to sit next to the water, Sky trailing her.

‘Well, would you look at this scene?’ she announces brightly, sitting on the edge of a recliner. Sky takes off her own dress and jumps into the water to my left, and the resulting wave narrowly misses Mother.

‘Isn’t this lovely?’ Mother says. ‘Isn’t this just like the old days?’

I duck below the water, make a lattice with my hands that Sky can step on to. I lift her up into the air, her legs shaking with the effort of balancing. She is delighted. Soon she tips forward on to me and we both collapse under the water, laughing hard, clapping as we resurface. There is a pain in my side. For a second my joy is robust, there is no killing it.

Why tell anyone else about the ghost? Why ruin the evening, the smiles wide and painful on our faces? Mother settles back into her chair, crosses her legs at the ankle. She is once again the queen of everything she surveys.





We moved in a petal formation, groups of us. Sometimes we wore earplugs. For activities like running we went two by two and stayed alert. But still my women were harmed. We passed along details of the harm across the phone lines and we wept.