The Water Cure(43)

It occurs to me that I have never heard him say the word love out loud. This could be the moment when he will say it. He releases his grip on me and his hand comes towards my face; I feel his knuckles stroke my cheek, gently. The moment passes.

They leave me on the court. I throw mouldering tennis balls against the ground until my arm aches; I kick the mesh until I am bored of my own melodrama. The sky darkens with rain. When I go inside I come across James alone in the lounge, sitting on the sofa. I flick the light on, then back off. I watch him from where I stand.

‘Drink?’ he asks, holding up a bottle. ‘Bit early, I know.’

‘That stuff will kill you,’ I say.

‘Everything will kill you,’ he tells me, taking a sip from his glass, which is crowded with ice. He has everything he needs to keep him comfortable, but it seems to be doing him no good. ‘When you get to my age, you’ll stop caring about your body.’

‘You’re not that old,’ I say. He’s not, it’s true, I recognize with surprise. Hair covers both their chins now, and while James’s is greyer than Llew’s, it’s not a huge difference.

‘Too old for all of this,’ he says into his glass. He looks directly at me. ‘Are you happy? I’m interested to know.’

Something surges up in my throat, and he sees it. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he says. ‘Here. Sit down.’ He pats the cushion next to him and I sit on the edge.

‘You poor girls,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘Alone here for so long.’ He puts his hand on my back, delicately. An idea comes to me. ‘Well. We can protect you now, can’t we?’

I shuffle my body closer to his, lean my head on his shoulder. He is warm and smells of brine. He has been kind and good to me. When I kiss him, it’s not dreadful at all. He returns it. He puts his hands on my face, my neck, my shoulder, but then he stops, he shakes his head and stands up.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Don’t you want to?’ I ask. ‘Was it bad?’ I grope for the rough knuckles of his hand. He looks stricken.

‘Lia,’ he says, taking his hand away. He sits down heavily on a chair across the room. ‘Of course I want to. You’re lovely.’ He stares at his knees. ‘It wouldn’t be right. We’re not here for that.’

‘But I want to,’ I say, made bold, made desperate.

‘We have a duty of care,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I just can’t.’

I stare at the floor as James pinches the bridge of his nose and think of other ways I could hurt Llew.

A trap rigged up in the forest to break his ankle, his arm, his neck.

Lure him into the sea.

Broken glass in his food.

‘I’m a sad case, Lia,’ James tells me. He laughs harshly. ‘It’s terrible to be a man, sometimes.’

I find it hard to believe him. It doesn’t seem that terrible, all things considered.

The anger again, an anger I can’t call new because it feels too familiar, it feels like something that has been waiting for me all along. The women’s pain had to stick around somewhere. Captured by the topsoil, atmospheric remnants, calcifying into pebbles moved by the sea. We had eaten and breathed it, made it our own.

Years ago, King taught us about life-guarding. Perhaps he had foreseen the men coming for us. Perhaps he knew more than he let on. I always thought of my beloved father as omniscient. Something had broken the world’s mysteries open to him, as if what we saw and knew was only a carapace, and underneath lay the true and strange heart of the universe, otherwise inaccessible.

‘It’s hard for me to teach you this,’ he admitted as we stood in the ballroom with three small knives at our feet. Gifts from him. ‘I thought about getting your mother to do it. But in the end, I decided it wasn’t appropriate.’

Mother wasn’t there. She was taking a stretched-out afternoon bath, somewhere above our heads, oil floating on the water. A mask of milk and salt on her skin, to soften it. She already knew all about this.

‘There may be a time when the border no longer works, when the toxic air moves across the sea,’ he said. ‘There may be a time when you find yourselves bleeding from the mouth, or eyes. There may be a time when we are no longer here to protect you.’

We picked up the knives and copied his motions. Graceful. I imagined the air cleaving, my skin parting. King held the blade to his own neck, a few centimetres away.

‘Like this,’ he said, and we did as he did, drawing our knives in a line once, twice, three times. ‘Easy enough.’

‘Easy,’ Grace agreed. His eyes flicked to her. She moved the knife one more time, then placed it carefully on the floor.

This is what I do. I leave James hunched in his chair and go to Mother’s room. I take every iron down, placing them in the cloth bag from which they are drawn every year. The air is cooling as I walk with the irons through the garden, through sweet mulch and pooling water, the rotting things. On the way I look at the dead mouse behind the wall, its ribcage now exposed to the elements, its skull too. Help me. The forest looms. It is dark in here, dark where I belong, with the wolves and the snakes and the other loveless creatures.

In a tree trunk that has fallen and been hollowed out with decay, I hide the irons, and I am crying now, oh, I have gone and done it. Mother will be so angry at me when she returns. She may send me away. But this is what a lack of love does to a person, I will tell her, I can explain. This is what happens when you can no longer bear it. I will tell her that all of this has been an awakening, this fever dream, this discovery. My blood glowing with the new disease. There is not much time left for me, I feel, but still I will tell her, when she returns, holding her hands with a deep compassion, that I have meant this as a reparation. I have meant this as my most sincere act of love.