The Water Cure(36)

‘You should have more variety in your diets,’ he tells us strictly. ‘Women your age. You should have red meat. Calcium. Folic acid. Your bodies have needs.’

My body does not feel good. The fruit is too sweet, he is right. It sits and curdles in my stomach. I am still finishing my meal when Llew stands up and leaves the table, his bowl and spoon lying there carelessly. He has left some juice. When everybody else has gone, I take the bowl and drink the juice myself, panicked, unable to help it.

I find my sisters in the swamp-smelling heat of Grace’s room, lying on her floor with the windows closed, the silk scarves Mother gave to us covering their bodies. It makes me start to see them lying there like that, unmoving, when I push the door open. Grace sits up, the silk falling from her face. The circles around her eyes are deepening like a bruise with every day. She observes me, does not say a thing.

‘Can I join you?’ I have to ask. She lies back down.

‘If you want,’ she says. ‘We’re meditating on a word.’

It’s an old technique used by Mother to calm us. Sometimes she would pick a word we had never heard before. It was like a treat, a small thing made of sugar. ‘Think about that,’ she would tell us. ‘Until you’re bored. Until you fall asleep.’

‘What’s the word?’ I ask. Grace sighs.

‘Tramadol,’ she says, pronouncing it slowly. ‘From the medicine cabinet.’ Her breath is sweetly bad, milk on the turn.

I move the word’s contours over and over in my mind, the sheer fabric moving out with my breath. Despite the smell of my unwashed sisters filling my nostrils, lying here is soothing. I think of the small white pills, small blue pills, the glass of water, the brown glass bottle. Our mouths open, heads heavy. Grace, after the week we spent asleep, learning to keep what she was given under her tongue, spitting it out after Mother had left and displaying it in her palm for us to see. Look, she would say. This is inside the both of you now.

Sky sits up first. She finds a pair of scissors in the drawer next to Grace’s bed and brings them to us.

‘Will you cut my hair?’ she asks me. I snip off the ends where they straggle, a centimetre or two, but she shakes her head.

‘All of it,’ she says.

I am horrified by the idea. I say no and she pleads. Without her hair, she could fall sick. King insisted that we grew it as protection. But she turns her attention instead to Grace, who says, ‘You can do what you want.’ She puts her arms around Sky. She is doing it to spite me.

‘What about what King said?’ I ask.

‘What about him,’ Grace replies. ‘We had shorter hair once. You probably don’t remember that,’ she addresses Sky. ‘But we did.’

Together they go into the bathroom and close the door. I study the chewed-up ends of my fingers. Snip-snip, go the scissors, even through the wood. When they come out, Sky’s dark hair is clipped short around her ears. I look at her with fear.

‘That’s better,’ she says. She gives a short twirl.

It makes her look a lot older, as if she has caught up with us in one leap. She turns and examines herself in the mirror of the dressing table. Grace admires her handiwork as I take one deep breath and then another.

‘You look pretty,’ Grace says. ‘The men will get ideas. Don’t let them take liberties.’

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ says Sky. She mimes retching.

‘It is disgusting,’ agrees Grace. ‘I’m glad you think so.’ They don’t look at me. My face is hot, flaming with blood.

We let her gather her own hair, sorting it into small piles, for her to do what she wants with. Offerings. Protections. Perhaps she will plant some in the garden and a new tree will push soft claws through the ground. I watch her closely for signs of sickness. Maybe I am already too late to save my own body, but I will do what I can for my sisters, despite their ingratitude. When she has finished, I am the one who walks her to Mother’s bathroom and removes the aspirin from the medicine cabinet. She opens her mouth, closes her eyes, and I put one tablet on her tongue, two, and then I put one in my own mouth too, because even though I no longer feel nauseous there is a sense of dread starting to build at the edges of my body. Something that feels like it could be a symptom, something that really started days ago when Llew was on top of me and I opened my eyes to see his own fixed grimly on the wall behind the bed, as though I were incidental, as though I could be anybody.

James finds me crying in the garden, where I thought nobody would look. Somehow I am a child again and nobody wants to go near me, nobody can cope with how badly I want to be held, or touched, or listened to, and there is nothing I can ever do about it. I crouch my body down beside one of the ruined walls and sit in the grass, still wet with dew that soaks the skirt of my dress. There is a hot ball of anger at the centre of my pain. I find a sharp rock and put it in the palm of my hand, clutch it tightly.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I hear, and freeze. James sits himself next to me, not minding the sopping wet. He places out a hand to my arm but I flinch and he withdraws it.

‘I hope we didn’t upset you girls last night,’ he says. He is always calling us you girls, but I am just a girl now, my own girl, outside. Anything could happen to me.

‘I’m not upset,’ I say.

‘You can talk to me, Lia,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong?’