The Water Cure(4)

We move on to the next exercise, Mother rolling hard, varnished balls for us to swerve away from or catch in our hands, red and blue. She aims to crack them into the bone of our ankles. We have to remain alert to escape the quick explosions of pain. Not me, not any more. I only join in with the stretching and even this makes my back hurt. I have to furl myself up slowly and put my hand in the small of it, and Mother notices.

‘Do you need to rest?’ she asks me without interrupting her own bending, her body a shivery, wasted thing. ‘You shouldn’t overdo it.’

‘I’m fine,’ I tell her, but I don’t go back to stretching. Mother raises her arms with no comment. I see all the veins standing out along them. She is showing off to me, I think. She is demonstrating that even her old body is painless, superior to mine.

When the exercises are over I put my arms around her to make up for my thoughts. Sky joins our embrace, her cheek against my upper arm. Lia stays where she is, doing extra stretches, interlinking her hands and pushing the air away from her. I feel bad that she can’t join in our circle. Mother switches her eyes over to where Lia moves and I can tell she is feeling bad too, but there’s nothing I can do.

My bed used to be placed next to the wall, Lia’s mirroring it in her own room. But as we grew older I started to feel uncomfortable being hemmed in from any angle. Now the bed has to be in the centre of the room. Lia moved hers too, copying me. Sometimes I press my ear against the wall to listen to her breathing, though I would never admit it.

Tonight, I hear her crying. She cries the way she does when it is just us sisters, the three of us alone, and I am surprised. So it isn’t for show, that sound pressed from deep in her throat. My own eyes stay dry and I don’t go to her, even though I could.





Lia


Strong feelings weaken you, open up your body like a wound. It takes vigilance and regular therapies to hold them at bay. Over the years we have learned how to dampen them down, how to practise and release emotion under strict conditions only, how to own our pain. I can cough it into muslin, trap it as bubbles under the water, let it from my very blood.

Some of the early therapies fell out of favour, and the fainting sack was one of these. King disdained it as archaic. Also, we turned off the sauna years ago to preserve electricity and without the sauna it didn’t work. That was a shame in some ways. I enjoyed the dizziness, the rush of my uncooperative body dissolving into nothing.

We use electricity so carefully these days because of the blackouts. They happen most often in the height of summer; the rooms become cavernous after sundown, dotted here and there with the light of candles. I thought this might be a clue to what was happening beyond our borders, but Mother said that she and King orchestrated it themselves, that it was just another part of their plan to keep us safe.

Our fainting sacks were made of a heavy weave, not muslin but not quite burlap. They had once held flour or rice, Mother unstitching the fabric then re-stitching it into the right shape, carefully embroidering our names on to the front. On therapy days she would lead us out in single file, through the kitchen door to the old sauna hut at the edge of the forest, its panels splintering amid flourishing weeds. We held out our arms, naked except for our underwear, and stood motionless while Mother guided our limbs through holes in the rough fabric. She sewed us into the sacks right up to the top of the neck. Then we were carried into the sauna, locked in, and given a small glass bottle of water each that quickly became warm as blood.

Soon the sacks were soaked through with our sweat, our own personal salt water. We grew dizzy and lay down on the benches lining the walls. I finished my water first, because I had ‘poor self-control’, as diagnosed repeatedly and sadly by Mother and King. As I sweated out the bad feelings, a lightness came over me. I would allow myself to lick the skin of my forearm once, twice; a reluctance to let my pain go.

Gradually, one by one, we each lost consciousness. When Mother came to rouse us, splashing water on our faces, we shuffled unsteadily on to the lawn together. We were glistening, our hair wet. We lay on our fronts on the grass, the damp fabric chafing at us. She took a pair of scissors to each sack, cutting right down to the bottom along the seams. When we were well enough to stand, we shed the stiff, cooling fabrics to our feet like a skin.





Grace, Lia, Sky


Some of the beds in the abandoned rooms are arranged strangely, left by women long gone. Women who preferred to sleep by windows, or who wanted to keep their eyes trained on the door at all times. Women who were plagued by visions, whose hearts pained them in the night.

We are lucky, because we have been exposed to minimal damage. We remember what those women looked like when they came to us. But we also remember the effect the therapies had on them. How their bodies strengthened until they were finally ready to undergo the water cure.

We only bother to make up our own beds now, stripping the sheets and blankets from the others for our use, so the mattresses lie naked and fleshy on their frames.

‘Do you miss the women?’ Mother asked us once. To her we answered, ‘No.’ Only later, alone, admitting to ourselves, Yes, maybe a little.





Grace


In the lengthening time after your death, I think about the other people who have left us. All women, sickened and damaged when they arrived, cured when they departed. There is a different quality to your absence. A heaviness to it, a shock at its centre. The house is emptier than it has ever been before.