The Water Cure(45)

Clues, clues. The sky falling in. Earth cracking. Llew and James exchange looks.

‘We don’t want you to see it,’ James says. ‘We have to stay here until we know everything is safe.’

The two men leave periodically to check, to walk around. As it starts to get dark Llew brings us water and crackers, a jar of jam with spoons, a ring-pull tin of rice pudding, then leaves again. We eat it warily, our eyes fixed upon Gwil, who doesn’t say a word. He looks up past us, at the wall behind. Grace wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘Do you want some of this?’ she says, holding out the tin of pudding. He shakes his head and she withdraws it.

‘Baby,’ Sky says very quietly. ‘Stupid. Why don’t you go home?’

Grace pushes her. ‘Stop that.’

Sky shrugs her off. ‘Why don’t you talk?’ she asks him. ‘Why don’t you stand up for yourself?’

He closes his eyes, as if he were very old and gathering patience.

I wonder, looking at his small and defeated face, whether he lives with the daily knowledge of the harm he could grow up to do. Whether it is there like a piece of paper folded up small around a secret word that he cannot yet understand. I wonder if Llew has caused damage to women before, and if so whether Gwil has borne witness to it, learned from it already.

‘Your mother,’ I say to him, the way my sisters did in the forest. He shakes his head, but I am not trying to hurt him, I am not doing it maliciously. ‘Where is she?’

He shakes his head again, harder this time. ‘I don’t want to talk about her,’ he says. Water comes to his eyes. I move closer to him, nausea building once more. Behind me, my sisters are watchful.

‘Baby,’ Sky says again. ‘It’s just a question.’

Llew loved her enough to create another person from her flesh. She loved him enough to go through what Grace did, the animal room full of blood. The proof of the love sits in front of me, more tears now in his eyes, running down his face, and I am angry, I am so jealous all of a sudden of what he means, yet another love I will never claim.

‘Tell us about your mother, Gwil,’ I say again. ‘Tell us about your women.’

We gather around him. We put our hands on him to try and comfort him, his shoulders, his arms; we push him back a little. He is surely too small to do us real harm: we are suddenly giddy with this realization. We are not monsters. We are not trying to pull him apart. We are just women who want to understand.

I should have been kinder to him. I realize now I should have loved Gwil to make Llew love me better. All the ways in which I have fallen short, all the ways I could have done better. My hands become more frantic. The child shrugs us off, hitting at us, hard enough to hurt.

‘Leave me alone,’ he says sharply, high-pitched, and we fall back. ‘Go away.’ He stands up and goes to sit behind the sofa, his usual place. We can hear him crying and for a short while I am ashamed, but it’s not long before the sound dies down.

Soon after he slips out of the room. We feel so bad that we let him pass without question, leaving him alone in an attempt to make it up to him, to prove that we are not creatures to be feared or hated. We play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets the last crackers, then lie down very bored on the rug, along the sofa. Grace switches on a small lamp that gilds her orange.

I do not know how long we lie there for, but at some point we realize that it is dark and Gwil has not returned. We are too afraid to leave the room, so we wait for James to come back. He shrugs when he finds just us, deciding Gwil must have gone to find his father.

When Llew comes back the child is not with him. My sisters and I are falling in and out of sleep, digging our nails into our palms or kicking our heels against the chairs, the floor, because to be asleep is to be defenceless. James looks puzzled. In an instant, everything changes.

We search with the sweeping light of torches. We examine everything. The dying grass of the lawn is long under our feet, under our hands when we kneel to check beneath bushes, behind trees. Llew is silent except when he shouts his son’s name. I know enough not to touch him or go near.

The beach is empty too, the rowing boat lonely against the jetty. The waves make small sucking sounds. The three of us exchange looks. We remember the other times we have searched.

‘Fuck,’ Llew says after we have checked inside the coal hatch. He kicks a clod of earth next to it, wheels around to stare away from us, up into the sky. ‘Fuck!’

Maybe the earth has swallowed him. Maybe the earth has swallowed our mother. Maybe we are being picked off one at a time. Something has stolen into our home and eaten them alive. The absence of our mother and the absence of Gwil become the same darkness. I am very afraid. Llew is not crying but his face is hard, and there is something unfurling in him, in all of us, as we walk around the garden’s perimeter. Llew barks ‘Gwil!’ again and again. I do not have a handle on my grief, on my panic, I do not know which is mine and which is Llew’s. Love has made me self-centred, it has made me rank with greediness, I cannot think straight. When I stumble over a hard knot of wood at the outskirts of the forest, it is my sisters who lift me up from the dry earth.

In the house we gather in the lounge again, covered in sweat and dust. My sisters and I go to leave, but Llew stands up and blocks the door.

‘You stay here,’ he says. ‘For your own protection.’ He looks murderous.