The Water Cure(29)
‘Let’s go to Mother’s room,’ she suggests. ‘It’s nicer.’
We re-examine our mother’s clothes in the cupboard, smelling of antiseptic and the lavender she takes from the garden. Then we turn to the cabinet in her bathroom, the brown bottles of medicines, the pills in white cardboard boxes with red lettering. Tramadol. Olanzapine. Diazepam. Grace reads them out with a grimace, with a flourish. The words mean nothing to us. The three of us check under the bed, making Sky stick her arm into the shadows. She draws back a sleeve of dust. We count the pairs of underwear in Mother’s drawers and open her bedside cabinet to find a pair of tweezers, the dead stub of a votive candle, nothing more.
‘When will she come back?’ Sky asks when we have finished our inspections and laid ourselves on the bed in a row.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, staring up at the ceiling, the clouded lamp in its bronze fitting.
‘Soon,’ Grace assures her. ‘Soon.’
The rain returns, grows worse. The energy builds in my chest. My sisters fall asleep in the faltering light. When I know they won’t wake, I get up and walk down the corridor to my own bedroom, my own bathroom. I left the window open and rainwater has sluiced the tiled floors, the walls. When I close it, I see the waves are bigger than usual. Their saline residue will be on the windows of the lounge, the dining room’s glass doors. One day they will overwhelm us, water moulding our carpets and warping the parquet, leaving tidemarks on the wallpaper. But I hope to be long gone by then.
It’s too stormy for the drowning game but my feelings will not wait, my body is aching to be submerged, so I turn on the taps, stripping off my clothes as the water runs. I test the temperature, wanting it tepid, somewhere between the air and the sea. When the tub is full enough I climb in, lean back and go under in one sharp movement. Below the surface, the sound of the storm cuts out.
Loneliness must have changed my body over the years. I think about my heart blown out of shape and unfit for the job, made of the knotted purple veins that river Mother’s calves. Dark water in the channels of my brain, a stiffness in my hands. My lungs, red and wet, the air pressed out of them.
Soon I run out of breath. My thoughts become a flat line of light. I wait a second past the point where I know I can’t stand it any more and then I burst up through the water gasping – and I have survived again, I have survived, and my heart is singing and my eyes are dark and the wind outside seems quieter, drowned out by the pitch of my own blood in my ears.
I stay in the now-cold bath for some time, rejoining my sisters once I feel ready. They are still asleep. The indigo circles under Grace’s eyes are back, and Sky is pallid too now. Something is wrong with us, something has always been wrong with us. I find the space I am allowed and move back into it. Either side of me, my sisters murmur before lapsing back into sleep. I breathe shallowly, pain under my ribcage, hair wet. I wait for Mother’s return with great patience, but she hasn’t arrived by the time I hear the men calling us in chorus for dinner, two low voices and Gwil raising his own reedy voice for the first time, as if he is not so weak any more. I wake my sisters and we walk together through the quiet of the house, where I can pretend we are one, before we step into the lighted space of the dining room.
One last flare of joy, after dinner, before I go to sleep. A small bunch of flowers from the garden on my pillow. Violet and yellow, the petals growing limp already. I want to keep them but make myself press them down into my bin and hide them with a drift of tissue paper, for secrecy’s sake, for safety.
I mourned him gracefully for three months, before a postcard arrived. It had a woman dressed in a frilled dress on the front, tomato-red. I’m alive, don’t worry about me, it said on the back. My hands started to violently shake so I disposed of the poisonous object in the incinerator at once, taking care not to breathe in the smoke.
The second day without Mother, the shore is strewn with incredible amounts of flotsam. Rope and seaweed. Large rocks and small, the sand partly washed away. The three of us pick through it, looking for anything valuable. We retreat only when Sky finds a milky jellyfish, which we think for a terrible moment is a ghost or part of one, and reminds us that without Mother’s presence we are endangering ourselves in every waking moment of the day. We shake a little once we find a part of the beach that feels safe, and cry a little too, putting our hands on each other’s shoulders, my sisters even touching mine.
‘Let’s go to the perimeter,’ Grace says when we have recovered, sitting cross-legged on the sand. She picks up a pebble near her foot and aims it at the water, but it falls just short. ‘Maybe there is someone who will help.’
Who? I don’t ask, but we go with her. She picks up more pebbles and puts them in her pocket. In the forest we step very carefully through the foliage. At the border, before we can stop her, Grace throws the pebble as hard as she can past the barbed wire.
‘Is there anyone out there?’ she shouts. I put both my hands on her mouth and she resists, pulls us both down to the floor. Sky shields her head, but nothing happens. No movement in the leaves, the trees.
‘Why would you do that?’ I say to her once we have stood up, breathing hard.
She shakes her head. ‘You love them. You love the men.’
Outrage. I put her in a headlock. We blunder too close to the wire, face certain death, and only then do we stop.