The Water Cure(39)
The things I have done come back to haunt me. Small pulses of shame behind my closed eyes.
‘Hurt Grace, or Sky will have to.’ Again on the beach, tools and muslin and my sisters, obedient, waiting for me to do what I had to do. I would prefer a million times to be hurt over hurting them. Grace lay down obediently in the sand, pulling her hair over one shoulder.
Even then her resentment must have been building as I wadded up the muslin and held it against her mouth and nose, her eyes dark and flickering over the white cloth, a blame that was inescapable. You know I have no choice, I tried to transmit through my hands, through my thoughts. She showed no reaction at first, but by the end she was biting viciously through the cloth. I knew it was involuntary. I knew I would be doing the same.
Then, once Grace was recovering, it was time for me to hurt Sky. Maybe it was just a test of my loyalty, a test of how adequate was my love for my sisters, my love for her. Well, it was abundant, I would have told her if she had just asked. Love enough to make you sick.
For Sky, Mother made me rub a piece of sandpaper against the top of her arm, a place that wouldn’t get infected. And I did it so that Grace wouldn’t have to do it, so Grace could sleep that night and nights thereafter, Sky begging me not to even as her skin goose-pimpled with blood. ‘Please, Lia,’ she asked, closing her eyes. ‘I’ll do anything.’ She let out a high noise from between her teeth, a constant pitch, like a stinging insect. It was unbearable. Afterwards she lay flat on the sand next to Grace as Mother bandaged her arm, holding it high above her so it would not be contaminated with sand or dirt. I went away and threw up into the sea, as usual. Light, light, light. The water washed it away at once.
The nights after hurting my sisters were always my worst. I made sure my physical suffering matched theirs, so I wouldn’t be left behind. I stood next to the window without any lights on, my thighs stinging, gauging the sea’s reaction. A dull harmony of pain, three notes reaching out across the water like a beacon. I could feel it reach the border, the signal finding purchase.
If we were to spit at them, they would spit back harder. We expected that – we were prepared for it even. What we didn’t expect was their growing outrage that we even dared to have moisture in our mouths. Then outrage that we had mouths at all. They would have liked us all dead, I know that now.
On the fifth day without Mother, my body starts to fail me. When I wake up I am drowning, but it is not water covering my face. Nosebleed. My pillow is spattered with red. It slides into my mouth. I pinch the fleshy part of my nose as I hold myself up above the sink in my bathroom. When I grit my teeth, they are covered in it too.
My nightgown is ruined. I step into my bathtub still wearing it, spray myself with hot water before pulling it off, letting the fabric cuff around my ankles. The bleeding stops. I say a frantic prayer for my own health to the water, something about please and sickness and don’t let my sisters know. I wring the nightgown out and wrap it in a brown paper bag, then another, then put it in a drawer.
What will happen if I have to crawl into the forest, my body a thing stricken, a thing radiating disease? Will my sisters stand over me among the foliage, or will they just watch me go, their bodies silent and upright on the terrace?
The women who stopped coming to us, they had known love too. They were in retreat from that, and from the world. We watched their personal acts of repair, both physical and spiritual. It was beautiful to see, Mother pointed out. A woman becoming whole again. It’s true that, after the water cure, their bodies had a new solidity, as if somebody had redrawn their outlines. Their eyes were clear, ready to return.
That they have stopped coming could mean the world has improved, or that it is worse than ever. That they are dying on distant shores in their dozens, hundreds, thousands. That they are living lives of violence, their bodies shaped by it, their words painful, the air a jagged mess in their throats. I hope it is the first answer. I wish for them a cool equilibrium, lives of harmony. Muslin cocooning their faces, powerful talismans to ward off danger. Men who will be good to them. Whose bodies are not too fearful.
Llew is morose by the pool. He drinks from a brown glass bottle, raising it to me when I approach his recliner. ‘Found them in the cellar,’ he tells me. ‘Try it.’ I take a sip, warm and fizzing in my mouth. I spit it on to the floor automatically, comically, but he does not find it funny. ‘Don’t be disgusting, Lia,’ he says. ‘What a waste.’ His tone is dark.
I lie silently on the recliner next to him for a while. My body feels anchored to his, pointless without his presence. Eventually he rises and heads inside, and I follow his lead. He sighs. ‘Are you my shadow now?’
I would like that, actually, but I don’t tell him so.
His mood lifts slightly when we are out of the blazing sun, when we are looking at each other in the kitchen among the steel and tiles. He has something he wants to show me, in his room. Something that will cheer me up. ‘Because you’re not yourself either,’ he tells me, ‘I can tell,’ and it is good to be seen but also terrible. I wait outside his room in the corridor, picking at my nails. He calls me in.
‘Ta-da,’ he announces, spinning in a circle. He is wearing King’s white linen suit, the same one, stiff lemony blooms under the arms. In the light from the window I can see his eyes are red. It is a little too long in the arms but otherwise fits perfectly. Even the buttons do up. I step back.