The Water Cure(30)

‘How dare you touch me,’ my sister says, and her voice is poison.

The three of us sit down on the leaf-strewn dirt. I catch my breath, stare at Grace. After a short time she reaches into her pocket and draws out a roll of white cloth, part of an old sheet. She passes one end to me, unwinds it and gives the other end to Sky, and we hold it taut as she rips it into smaller rags with her knife. She ties them to branches and even, daringly, one to the border itself, a part less rusted than the rest. So Mother can find her way back, she explains. Or so allies, other women, can swell our ranks. Because surely they are out there, somewhere.

‘We should have done this earlier,’ Grace says as she ties the knots. ‘We should have done this when King died.’

Sky shivers. Mother does not use the word died. Only gone. Grace spots this.

‘Died, died, died!’ she says. ‘Say it, Sky. Go on. King is dead.’

‘King is dead,’ Sky says, doubtfully. She picks up a stick and draws a line in the dirt.

‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’ Grace says. She ties the last scrap of fabric and surveys her handiwork.

We move to the terrace to establish a watch for Mother. I monitor the sea through binoculars until my vision fizzes at the edges and I have to lie down with my palms pressed over my eyes. Another sister takes up the watch instead. We pass the time like that for a while.

Sometime in the afternoon I hear music coming from the ballroom, faint, and asked to be excused. Grace moves her shoulders almost imperceptibly. ‘Suit yourself,’ she says. Her eyes are trained elsewhere.

Llew is playing something mournful this time. He turns and smiles when I enter, pauses with his hands still on the keys.

‘I was hoping you would hear,’ he says.

He stands up, closes the lid of the piano and walks over to me, putting his hands either side of my face in the way I am getting used to.

This time when we are in my room I pull at his left ear with my nails, testing a reaction. I bite neatly with my jaw. It doesn’t make him angry, but there’s a slight extra pressure in the weight of his body. I am seeking places of weakness, just in case. ‘Hey,’ he says eventually, indulgently. ‘You’re hurting me.’

Good, I think.

He touches my hair. My heart swells like a broken hand to twice its size, the same sort of tenderness.

Love only your sisters.

When Llew leaves me, I go to Mother’s room and sit on her bed for a while, staring at the irons. It is the chore of the one without love to keep them shining, free of dust. I haven’t been doing it often enough. Mother keeps a tin of polish, a cloth, in her dressing table. I take them out and get to work.

I don’t bother spending much time on King’s. The living need the love more: I can make my own judgements here. When it comes to Mother’s, though, I take extra care, picturing her out there on the ocean with water in the boat’s floor, her body bent over as the air assaults her like a wave. Two days.

Invocation for good health for our mother.

I touch every one of the irons like a dare before I leave the room.

Maybe Mother will just stay away for a while. Maybe the way I am feeling will wear off, a dream or an ache, powerful only because I am not used to getting what I want. It’s possible that by the time she returns I could be myself again. If I am good.

So I take my own temperature, score vigorously at my ankles in a warm bath. I have survived this long alone, haven’t I. But my starved feelings, tamed into listlessness, still flower up in my chest.

New prayer: Let me grow tired of this. Please, I think, my pulse nervous and rebounding. Soon.

There is a blood moon. I walk to the end of the jetty and lie there against the wooden boards to watch it. I want to be alone with it, the orb seeming close enough to touch. The ponderous water below my head hushes my ears. I feel sick with the number of symbols we are swimming against, with how porous the borders of sky and sea and land feel all at once.

This is a time to be with my sisters and I know I should fetch them, draw them by the hands and bring them to watch, so we can sit silent on the planks and think about what is coming. I want only to be alone but in the end they come anyway; the white shapes of them moving along the jetty to me, heavy cotton shawls wrapped around their bare shoulders. They lay themselves down next to me without speaking and I go to sit up, but Sky catches my arm. ‘Stay,’ they ask me, one after the other. ‘Please.’ Soft and knowable once more. They can switch it on and off at will.

We look up towards the sky, reach up our arms and our hands, and we pray the way that Mother taught. The air is dusky around us.

We almost don’t hear James approach, but the creak of the boards behind us gives him away, makes us sit up. Watery eyes, sallow skin. I’ve looked at Llew so much that looking at James is a disappointment. I wonder if he sees me and my sisters as distinct or as three branches of the same tree, indistinguishable apart from slight variations in height, in the curl and hue of our dark hair, backlit by red.

‘Do you know why the moon is like that?’ he asks us. His voice is hoarse, nervous. He clears his throat.

‘It’s a blood moon,’ Grace says.

‘It’s just dust,’ James tells her. ‘Dust in the atmosphere.’ We don’t reply. He fidgets with an item around his neck.

‘What’s that?’ asks Sky.

‘This?’ said James, pulling it out. He holds it up towards us. ‘It’s a rosary.’ A silver cross on beads.