The Water Cure(3)

Grace and I could go together when we first started. King held us both under the water with ease. He only invented the drowning dress later, when we became bigger, our limbs harder to manipulate. My sister was small for her age, and when I was twelve and she fourteen we overlapped, a year of being exactly the same size, before I overtook her. I remember this as the golden year, the year of my double. We wore identical swimming costumes that Mother had sewn by hand, red with a bow at the left shoulder. Our lungs started to develop the capacity of grown women, so that we could hold a note for a long, long time. We could blow our emergency whistles for what felt like whole minutes.

My feelings are limping, wretched things. Underwater, staring at the stained tiles, I scream as loudly as I can. The water kills the sound. Opening my eyes, I turn on to my back and watch the sun through the water, a rippling orb of light. It is at times like these that I can imagine holding myself down until the water floods my lungs, that I realize it wouldn’t even be so hard. The real trick is how and why we continue surviving at all.

My chest starts to hurt, but I stay under until the static creeps at my vision, and then I claw to the surface. I stagger out of the water, fall on the recliner and wait as the feeling subsides. A deep gratitude floods my heart.

Part of what made the old world so terrible, so prone to destruction, was a total lack of preparation for the personal energies often called feelings. Mother told us about these kinds of energies. Especially dangerous for women, our bodies already so vulnerable in ways that the bodies of men are not. It was a wonder that there were still safe places, islands like ours where women can be healthful and whole.

‘We’ve cracked it,’ King told us in the first days of the drowning game. Inventing a new therapy always put him in an expansive, joyful mood. He whirled Mother around in his arms, her shoulder blades tight against his hands, feet off the floor. Day of happiness! We ate a whole packet of chocolate wafers to celebrate, only slightly stale, dipped in goat’s milk.

The air did become lighter; small seabirds came to our home, hovered around the garden, the pool, and sang to each other. Yet beyond the forest, beyond the horizon, the toxin-filled world was still there. It was biding its time.





Grace, Lia, Sky


In the heady days without our father, we let our bodies sprawl. We no longer breathe into jars so King can test our toxin levels, our lips clamped around the glass. Mother relies instead on circumstantial evidence. On our temperatures, our pulse, the slick and pimpled paleness of the insides of our cheeks. She prescribes double rations of tinned meat, kelp boiled down in the pan. She browns the Spam in oil to fool us into thinking she has killed Lotta without our permission, taking a crowbar to her tensile skull down by the beach. ‘Cruel!’ we shout at the top of our voices once we’ve established the goat is not dead after all.

Mother often talks about the possibility that one day we will kill her in her sleep, if we don’t cause her death indirectly from a heart attack, because daughters are hard-wired for betrayal. How we feel about this statement varies.

‘How much do you love Mother today?’ we ask each other, one by one, lying in the dying grass of the garden or on the beach, burying each other’s feet in the sand. The answers come with no hesitation.

‘Two per cent.’

‘Forty per cent.’

‘One hundred and twelve per cent.’





Grace


Mother senses our disquiet, decides to resume order. She lists the chores on a large blackboard in the kitchen, propped up against the yellowing tiles of the wall behind the counter. We erase the words with our hands as we complete them, in no hurry.

Making up our beds with hospital corners, flat and true. Opening the windows and doors on calm days to let the unstirred air in. Cleaning the surfaces in the kitchen with dilute bleach and vinegar, carrying buckets upstairs, sluicing each en suite in turn. Strengthening the salt barriers at the end of the shore, around the pool. Feeding and milking Lotta. Wiping the windows of the sea spray that webs them. The repetition kills me. Every time I rinse my vinegar-pruned hands I ask myself, Is this all there is now? Just let me lie in the long grass at the end of the garden. Let me sleep through the rest of my days.

Before chores we perform our morning exercises. We stand in a row on the wet lawn, our backs to the heavy ballroom doors. If the weather is not good we retreat to the ballroom itself, the sound of our exercises echoing on the parquet. I am not allowed to do the dangerous ones any more.

Instead I watch as Lia and Sky are left to fall and crumple into the grass. They know what’s coming, but still they scream if they make contact with the ground. Mother stuffs the muslin into their mouths to fell the sound. The key thing is that they are falling. There is no hesitance in their limbs. The nature of the game means that they do not always fall: they are caught more often than not. Mother wraps her arms around them and staggers, moves backwards.

Lia and I have been mistaken for twins in the past, but when I watch my younger sisters now I notice how their eyes are identical, their eyelashes sparse and pointed around pale blue irises.

‘You should be relieved,’ you said as I cried in front of you for what would be the final time. I was not relieved then and I am not relieved now. The dead weights of them, falling backwards in front of me. All you were ever doing in the last days was making me unknown to myself. Revealing thing after useless thing.