The Water Cure(44)

I make dinner wearing latex gloves that snap satisfyingly on to my hands. A new skin, better than the old. I am tenderly conscious of not bringing my sisters down with me, of protecting them better than I have done myself. The meal is what I can manage from the tins, the dried foods, a few crabs that James caught and smashed open. But nobody eats much. Llew does not turn up, and after our incident on the court I still shake to think of him. The cicadas drone so loudly that we close the windows, forcing them into their warping frames. My sisters chew and spit, chew and spit, complain. The skin of their elbows and knees is chapped, like mine, from sun and salt water. I keep the gloves on while I eat and nobody comments. Washing up, my hand becomes a dead claw in its soaped balloon of plastic; I fight the compulsion to hack it off with the meat cleaver.

After dinner, the three of us are together on the terrace when the sea reveals a new ghost. Sky sees it first and she screams. She has been screaming so much since the arrival of the men that we don’t rush to her at once. But when she calls out ‘Ghost!’ we sit up on our recliners, hurry to the railing. I reach for the binoculars she has dropped, and inspect them. Grace holds Sky but she pulls away, runs to the other end of the terrace and leans over, retching.

It is up to me to look. This ghost is closer, more recognizably human than the last one. Its skin is a washed-out blue, paler even than the baby, limbs inflated. Grace pulls at the binoculars and puts her mouth to my ear.

‘Is it Mother?’ she asks me. ‘Is it?’

‘I can’t tell,’ I tell her. Plausible deniability. ‘I can’t tell.’ I pass her the binoculars and join Sky at the rail, heaving involuntarily all the way to the stony earth below.

Grace looks at the ghost for a long time.

‘I don’t think it is her,’ she says. ‘She would come to us.’

‘Is it moving closer?’ Sky calls out. She is very pale.

‘Possibly,’ says Grace. ‘I keep losing sight of it. We’ll monitor it.’

King once told us you can get used to anything, and it is strange how quickly the ghost becomes normal. Grace and I split the monitoring duties, so that Sky does not have to look at it again.

‘Where do you think it came from?’ I ask. She passes me the binoculars and I train them carefully on the air above the ghost, then the water, inching down until it fills my vision.

‘The sea,’ she says. ‘It’s giving up its dead.’

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Because everything’s becoming ruined,’ she says. Her eyes do not move sideways to look at me, but I know what she means.

The ghost isn’t wearing a gown we recognize as Mother’s. It doesn’t seem to be wearing anything at all. It is too far away to make out the features and, honestly, I am glad. If it is Mother, I would rather not know.

As I watch the ghost move up and down in the surf, but not closer to shore, a fist of grief opens in my chest. There is a new wrongness in the air between us that threatens to engulf everything. This is what happens when the people you love leave you. This is what happens when the protection no longer holds.

I have been repenting for so long, but I can’t bear the burden of this guilt much longer. Leaving Grace out on the terrace, I sit just inside the corridor, on the faded carpet. This is the wrong place for me, this endless cramped tunnel with shadows heavy at either end, and the pressing silence without Mother is terrible, I can’t ignore it any more. I retreat to one of the unused bedrooms and wait to catch my breath, thin air in shallow gulps, moving through on my hands and knees to the bathroom, where I feel momentarily safer. A place where faceless women have unloaded their own hurt, fabric dragging around their knees as they threw up bile and water, as they cried until there was no noise left to make.

Mother. The long dresses ragged at the hem. The strands of her hair that gathered in drifts, that fell on to the tablecloth at every meal and lay there, curled in long figure of eights. She had absorbed what it meant to be an attractive, healthy woman and we witnessed her body failing her daily with the guilt of voyeurs.

She told us all the time that she would give her life to us. I didn’t care, because I thought that was just what mothers said. Am I supposed to do the same for you, I thought with something approaching horror, because I am not sure I can.

I have always been afraid of her ability to pull the rug out from underneath us, her capacity for cruelty and kindness in the same sentence, same action. I can see it in Grace too. It must be a prerequisite for being a mother, something that growing another person inside you does, heart and heartlessness, as though simplistic empathy has been scooped out and replaced with something more fundamental, something more likely to guarantee survival.

James is the one who comes looking for me, again. He kneels his large body down to my level, to where I am huddled under the sink. There is panic in his eyes.

‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ he says.

I nod.

‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘We are all downstairs.’ He puts out his hands.

The men are grim-faced, even Gwil. The three of them sit opposite us at the far end of the lounge. ‘Where did it come from?’ we ask again and again, assuming they will know more than us. Grace scrutinizes their faces with a deep suspicion.

‘Is it Mother?’ she asks them straight out, and the men shake their heads vehemently.

‘It must have come from the land,’ Llew says. ‘Something must be happening.’