The Water Cure(32)
On the third day without Mother I wake early. It is a very clear day, the promise of intense heat later. I stand on the terrace, breathing the salt air off the silent bay. Below me, something breaks the surface of the swimming pool. I move to the rail and see a figure in a long white gown – the drowning dress, I realize, with its weights and embroidery. She breaks the surface. It is Grace, her hair loose in dark ropes around her shoulders. I am too far away to see the expression on her face.
As I watch, she swims to the shallow end and takes in deep gulps of air, resting against the side for a few seconds. Then she goes back into the deeper water and holds herself under again. I count the seconds. She surfaces desperately. She pulls herself under again. It does not seem to be giving her the satisfaction that it gives me, no end point, no closure.
Her movements become more furious, not less. She is making up for lost time, maybe, her body once more her own, to use as she wants. I stop watching after the third time, ashamed. I let her do what she needs to do.
I am standing in the centre of the kitchen. Sea air comes in from the open door. The scent of citrus fruits, though we have not grown them for a while. The landscape stopped supporting them: thinning of the soil, vestigial minerals. We used to cut the oranges and lemons into medicinal segments. We would give them to the damaged women, to wedge in their mouths and hold there for a long while, letting the juice pour down their chins, their throats. Sometimes we did it to each other too.
Llew is a shadow against stainless steel, against the cracked white paint heavy with dust. He tucks both his arms around my waist, his chin resting on my head, having entered the room out of nowhere. I am being held and I am not used to holding. Nobody has seen us, and I can’t tell if I want to be caught or not. It would be disaster, yet at least someone would bear witness, would confirm that this is real, that this is happening to me. But he lets go at the sound of footsteps. Grace enters the kitchen and stops at the sight of us, but his hands are not on me now, there is still no proof. Love can be that slippery: the difference between touching and not-touching, fallible memory, my skin forgetting already. He raises his palms to her, puts his hands where she can see them. ‘Good morning to you both,’ he says, his first words of the day to her and to me.
I think a lot about what it could all mean. Significance hangs around him like cloud. Every cough, every glance is telling me something. Hands, again. This time laid out on the breakfast table with white cotton cloth showing in the space between his fingers, sitting next to me as Grace ladles out fruit. His knee nudges mine; he lingers when everybody else has drifted back to the kitchen to wash up. It is not an accident. He takes me by the arm, pulls me up the stairs. ‘Come on,’ he says. He is overjoyed by my body. It’s like he, too, has never seen one before.
New dangers, though, coming to the surface like the bubbles of soap. His breath has a copper bitterness. It fills the room as he sleeps for a few minutes in my bed, breathing hard through his mouth. I turn away from it. Again I want to hurt him, want to save his life or to ruin it, something, anything, I have not decided. I want him to leap for my approval like a fish, body twisting, and I want to be the one who dictates the terms, but when I try, small stabbing gestures towards intimacy, he doesn’t react enough. He pulls my own hair over my mouth.
Afterwards we walk back down to the sea and I point to the horizon, and he goes in up to his ankles despite the danger. I am so close to going in after him, a lifetime of instinct already overridden. I hold firm, on the shore, watching for his body to be pulled under. But I don’t kid myself. I am saved only because he is not asking me directly, not holding out his hand and imploring.
I lie on the men’s side of the pool now. I have discovered that it’s all right for me to be close to them, that my body feels no different really. My eyes do not redden. My ears do not bleed. But my sisters won’t join me, even when I ask. Grace doesn’t bother to answer; she just stares at me with a maddening half-smirk, then looks away. So I leave them out on the terrace and take my towel down to the pool, positioning a recliner between James and Llew. James includes me in his small jokes, which I do not understand, but I smile anyway.
Llew goes inside and returns with drinks on the enamel tray that Mother uses when we are sick or confined. It is some kind of alcohol mixed with juice from a tin. Sudden flashback: Mother and King clawing at each other in large love, small rage, like something from a half-remembered dream. I close my eyes for a second, gather my composure. The dream is the days which hang in front of me, smooth and opaque as a skin on hot milk. I do not want to think too clearly, to see too closely.
Llew touches my foot when James looks away. I lie on my front so that the sun can hit my back and both of them are watching me, I can tell, and the confirmation of my existence makes me self-conscious. James touches me too, on the arm, paternally. ‘You’re our friend, aren’t you?’ he says. ‘Our little friend.’ His speech is slurred. I do not feel afraid of them.
Llew pulls at my hair when James slips into the water, wraps it around his hand. ‘Beautiful,’ he says into my ear. He bites my neck and I start laughing hysterically, so that James pauses and stands up, watches us with water streaming down his body, but doesn’t say anything.
Previous long days at the pool, days with and without love. King pushing athletically through the water, length after length, skin burnishing even as we watched. We couldn’t swim if he was swimming: he became impatient at how slow we were. I cried, sometimes, behind my sunglasses where nobody could see. The damaged women stayed inside, generally. They only really trusted the air in the early morning, the dusk, when it was easy to breathe.