The Water Cure(28)
When he has finished touching me, we share more about ourselves. He is more talkative than I have ever seen him, and I am overjoyed. Everything I hear, I try to match. I arrange myself into it with ease.
‘What do you like?’ I ask him.
Tomatoes, green fruits, the ocean in the morning, he says.
‘I don’t like mussels,’ I say, a scoping, a sounding. The shrivelled purse of them, like the dead hearts of birds or frogs.
‘Oh, but I love them,’ he tells me.
Slight panic in my chest. ‘I don’t hate them,’ I retract. ‘But there are other things I would rather eat.’
I go into my bathroom for a glass of water, take a little time away from him in the spirit of caution, the spirit of being a responsible woman, sticking my face out of the window to reach air he hasn’t breathed. I am taking too long. I panic that he will go, bored of me and my words, other things to attend to. But when I open the door he is still there. The cover is pulled up to his waist and he looks, in the gloom, as if he has been cut in half.
I debate the sort of small accident I could orchestrate that would keep him close to me. Broken foot, maybe. I could drop a glass bottle, have him step on the shards. I consider the solid lines of his form. No, his is the type of body that heals almost immediately, otherwise known as a man’s body.
‘What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?’ I ask. I think again about that rabbit under King’s foot, the salted earth in my mouth and nostrils.
‘My father died,’ he says. ‘Like yours. Years and years ago. Gwil had only just been born.’
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ I ask next.
‘No, you first,’ he says, so I tell him about the baby. His eyes widen in alarm. He tells me it was not my fault, then repeats it.
‘Have you ever killed anyone?’ I ask him, after. Be worse than me.
‘Everyone’s killed someone,’ he tells me. But I have not.
‘You would love the mainland,’ Llew says after a period of silence. ‘I think you really would love it.’ He sits up and looks around: the ugliness of the wallpaper, faded with age and sunlight; the plush of my bed’s padded headboard, a sickly pink. ‘This isn’t a place for young women. You’re not the type to be shut away.’
‘I could come with you,’ I say.
He smiles. ‘You could. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’ He reaches out to my face.
Love might be able to protect me there the way it has protected me here. Love could form itself into a barrier against my tongue and airways like the mouthguard King brought back for Grace to stop her body from grinding her teeth down, the susurration of her jaw a night-time sound to join the sea. New loves, new protections, new forms of life-guarding. I don’t know what this love is capable of, but as I study his face – angles, the soft curl of lips, his eyes closed now – I believe it could do anything.
In the garden, alone, I pull up white flowers with my hands, cutting the stems with my fingernails. Sap spills out and stains my skin a yellowish green. I shred the petals, turn over on to my back, cross my hands across my heart and pretend that I am dead for a few seconds. The sun burns on my eyelids.
Through the euphoria, I remind myself to be cautious. I know that I have the emotionality of women on the land. If I were there, it would draw men to me like a beacon. It’s important to keep this from Llew, so that he knows I am a person he can love, not a person he will feel compelled to hurt. These are the kinds of things that Mother and King taught us about love outside the borders.
Somewhere distant in my mind, I know I should be doing something. Taking the rowing boat as far as it could take me, bailing out water all the way, and under the strain of the air watching through binoculars for the outline of Mother returning to us. I got her as my loved-most this year. That gives me some sort of responsibility. But I do not go.
Instead I move to the pool, where Sky and Grace lie on recliners angled specifically to get the best view out to sea, heads touching, arms linked. Their faces ask Where have you been? but I refuse to feel guilty. The men and Gwil are grouped around the other end of the pool. They seem to be talking seriously, so I don’t want to interrupt them, but Llew looks over to me and he waves, calls out my name. I wave back. He watches me walk over to a mint-striped recliner near my sisters, picking the one that is cleanest, hitching my pale skirt up over my knees. It is easy to slip my sunglasses on to my face and the straps down my shoulders and to settle back, to feel his gaze on me like water, like a thing I deserve.
It’s not long before we become too hot lying there under the midsummer sun but we don’t move, we are languid and paralysed after the morning’s shock. Even at the approach of evening the air is stagnant; deep purple clouds gather and still the heat has not broken. We stay out until the first fat drops of rain hit us and then we run inside together. Standing in the lounge with our faces flushed, my sisters pull their dresses on over their swimsuits as the men watch. Grace’s stomach is soft and round where the baby stretched her body.
The men offer to make dinner. Grace is reluctant but eventually she agrees. When the rain eases, they send Gwil out to fetch oysters and shellfish, and through the open windows we hear him whooping as he runs down the beach. The three of us retreat to Grace’s room automatically, like we have done so many times before, sprawling over her bed, but almost immediately she sits up, restless, something occurring to her.