The Water Cure(35)
I am the first to drink from my cup, everyone watching me. It tastes good. They have used plenty of powder, and some of the grains have not dissolved. They stick behind my teeth, leaving a sweet film on my lips.
They coax us into the lounge. At first the men sit at the opposite side of the room, but soon they come over to where we huddle, all three of them. They plant their bodies too close to us. We can feel the heat spreading from them, warming our own skin.
‘We’ve been talking, you know,’ James says. He shares a look with Llew, who nods. ‘You could come with us, when we’re picked up. Wouldn’t you like that?’
‘No,’ says Grace. We move our heads in agreement with her.
‘Don’t throw the idea out yet,’ Llew said. ‘If your mother doesn’t return – if she’s left you for good – we’ll protect you.’
‘She hasn’t left us,’ says Grace.
‘Of course, of course,’ says Llew. His voice is the voice of a person trying not to scare us.
‘You have your whole lives ahead of you,’ adds James, and I look at him and hate the quivering set of his mouth, the peeling skin at his nose.
‘They’ll come for us,’ Llew explains. ‘And we could bring you along. We would hate to leave you here alone.’
‘We won’t be alone. Please stop talking,’ says Grace, placing her hands over her ears. Llew takes them and moves them to her lap, and the three of us stiffen.
‘Don’t be so childish,’ he says. I hate that he has touched her, and move my shoulder closer to his body to get more contact.
‘Just think about it,’ says James. ‘Think about it.’
‘We wouldn’t survive,’ says Grace.
I try to meet Llew’s eyes, to give him a signal that I want this, that I want to stand with him in a new world the way we have spoken of, but he is not looking at me. His eyes are fixed out of the window, where the sea is a breathing animal.
He stays in my room that night, the first time. We don’t discuss it, but when the dark of the night has deepened, when I have been lying there for a while, the door opens. He comes in and he pushes me with both his hands from the centre of the bed, whispers, ‘Move up.’ He doesn’t close his arms or legs around me, doesn’t do any of the things we normally do, just curls up with his back to me, his body close and hot. Soon his breathing dulls. I put my hand out to the back of his head, take hold of a palmful of his hair. Skull fragile underneath. I could kill him here, if I wanted. I put my lips to his shoulder, very gently, so that he will not feel it.
In the night I wake up briefly and his body is shaking. I drape my arm across his stomach, bury my face into his neck. Possibly he is crying. As soon as I touch him, the shaking stops. He doesn’t say anything. He could be embarrassed, or my touch could have mended him. I prefer the second option. I prefer the idea that my body, as the object of love, has a power I could never have dreamed of.
It was no one big thing but many small things. Each one chipped away at me. By the end, I felt skinless. My cuticles bled. I was aged immeasurably. I felt terrible that I had so little in reserve, that the other women could cope. It felt like I had failed them.
On the fourth day without Mother, I wake to the empty bed. My first action is to pull the covers off, to inspect the sheets feverishly for proof Llew was there at all. There are dark hairs on the pillow, shorter than mine. I bury my face into it, but we are all using the same soaps, unlabelled, slabs of carbolic salmon-pink and fat in the palm. I look for salt hardened on the pillowcase to prove that he was crying, but my search is inconclusive. More hairs on the sheet, the faint scent of his sweat.
My stomach turns without warning. I strip the bed and pile the sheets in the middle of the floor. I run a bath so hot that sitting down in it is almost unbearable, but I do it anyway. I think of the phrase pain threshold like it’s a vault you jump. I have forgotten to open the window and steam fills the room in no time.
Quickly, before I lose my nerve, I make two minor, conciliatory slices in my thigh, a centimetre each. It is hard sometimes to tell which marks on my legs are from the summer I grew four inches, and which are the marks that keep us safe. The historical unwieldiness of my body is everywhere. Now there are new shames and new dangers, like the way I have made noises, lost control, begged Llew to do things to me in ways that make me glad of the water’s pain. The vaporous bath pinkens around me.
I drink a lot of water, to protect myself against those things I am doing with him. One pint, two, swallowed along with air, too quickly, standing at the sink. My stomach swells underneath my dress. I imagine the water cleaning my blood and lie down for a second on the balding velvet couch in the lounge while it works on me, listening to the sound of my body recalibrating.
Without Mother no bread is being made, the goat isn’t giving up her milk, we are too scattered to keep the house in order. Breakfast leaves everyone hungry. The tins are vanishing swiftly, and Llew insists we open four of them. Peach slices, prunes, fruit cocktail, condensed milk that we spoon directly into our mouths. He doesn’t give me any sign that the night before even happened when he turns up with Gwil in tow. The sweet food is making him sick, he tells us. He takes the opener off me because I am working through the tins too slowly, his own hands twisting them open in seconds.
‘My teeth are about to fall out,’ he says, opening up his mouth to demonstrate. Gwil copies him. Both sets of teeth are hard and wolfish as usual, whereas ours do blacken at the backs of our mouths, me and my sisters’. The wet, red holes of the men’s throats make me nauseous.