The Water Cure(46)

Grace tries to push past him and he holds her by the arms, effortlessly.

‘Stay here,’ he says, more insistently. His fingers dig into her skin. I feel it like it’s my own.

‘I want to go to my room,’ Grace says. ‘I’m tired.’

‘You can sleep here,’ he says. His eyes slide between our faces. ‘On the couches.’

James leaves, then comes back shortly with a canteen of water, a bucket. He places them near the fireplace.

‘Goodnight,’ the men say, and before we know what is happening they leave, the click of the door as it is locked from the outside.

Grace hurls her body against it and lets out a low howl from the back of her throat.

‘So this is how it begins,’ she says, but of course it has already begun. It began for us a long time ago.

We stay awake. We keep a vigil. For the first time in months, we talk about King. We talk about Mother. I remind us of the time King caught a small shark and we ate its thick flesh, but first he hung it up in the garden, from a tree, so that he could take a good photograph as its blood stained the grass underneath. I put my hands inside its mouth, up to the wrist.

Grace reminds us of a day our parents were both drunk, a winter’s day, how they lit the fire and we opened packets and packets of foods, ate it in a picnic on the floor of the living room with our hands feral, King pouring whisky into small, patterned glasses.

‘Remember the time we hid in the attic,’ Sky says, ‘we waited in that cupboard all day long,’ and then we are back there, curled in the dark like dead flowers, because we had wanted to know how long it would take our parents to mind our absence. It took them maybe half a day; we all had limbs fizzing with sleeping blood, with the lack of our movement, yet we were able to stay so still for so long.





Everybody knew and nobody helped. It was the secret that we were all choking on. Even my mother, my sisters, my aunts. They passed it around. They said, with their eyes, why should you escape it? What makes you better than us? Can’t you see our hearts have been bleeding for years?





On the seventh day without Mother, the men unlock our door at first light. They are apologetic. Llew rubs his hand against my back even though the others can see him do it, and it kills me, the promise of being acknowledged for the first time. Nobody comments. The men bring us more food, tinned fruit cocktail, tinned pears, but it’s not quite enough. When we’ve eaten, we move to search again. I team up with Llew, my sisters with James. We return to the forest, all of us.

We can see clearly now, in the light and the heat haze. The remnants of where animals have scratched and slept, the sweeping lines of snakes that have passed through the dirt, which Llew pauses to examine. The vipers are poisonous. They will stop your heart. They will make your fingers ulcerate and drop off one by one. I can’t take my eyes away from the back of Llew’s neck, the exposed patch of vulnerable skin that has reddened from the time outside, yesterday. It is peeling, it looks painful.

It is James who finds Gwil, just past the border, when the sun is high in the sky. Llew and I hear the whistle blow, Llew’s neck snapping up as though someone has broken it. He runs without looking back.

When I see them gathered around the child, when I see his body, it is not difficult to picture what happened. The abrasions on Gwil’s legs suggest he staggered through the border in the dark, caught his skin on the barbs, but that wouldn’t have been enough to kill him. His arms and hands, torso and cheeks, have circles of red and white like targets. He is swollen, lumpish as an old pillow.

Hornets. They are native to our forest, swarming close to the ground with a great dignity. We used to run inside when they circled the lawn, staying low until they gorged themselves on sweet fruit and died or left. I picture Gwil determined, thrashing his way through the undergrowth past the border. He must have knocked against the nest and found himself overcome, the disturbed insects rising in a cloud.

The men carry Gwil’s distorted body through the trees, and they blunder, they almost fall often but they do not let us help, they make terrible noises when we make any move to touch him. We trail behind, placing our feet very precisely around stones and twigs. In the house they lay him out in Llew’s room, pushing the sheets and covers back. We stay outside the open door, watching them. The grief swells them. It catches in their chests. I know we need to get away from them. Llew is holding Gwil’s hand with both of his and holding on too tightly; I can tell even from a distance he is crushing his fingers together.

‘You frightened him,’ Llew tells us. He rounds on us. ‘You made him do it. What did you say to him?’

‘Nothing,’ says Grace, very calmly. ‘He must have just wanted to go home.’

It is mainly the truth and yet it still makes me heartsick.

Llew marches us to Grace’s room. He produces the spare bunch of keys that once lay behind the reception desk.

‘In there,’ he says. No sooner have we stepped in than he closes the door, locks it. Grace doesn’t hurl herself against it this time.

We get into the bed, and with our arms around each other we cry. When we feel too dehydrated, I am the one who gets up, fills a dusty glass with water from the bathroom and passes it around. In between the periods of weeping we listen out for the men. Grace lays out her life-guarding knife on the bedside table. ‘Just in case,’ she tells us. But nobody comes for us, nobody unlocks the door. We cannot hear the noises of the men with the blankets over our heads. Without the blankets they are very quiet, quiet enough for us to ignore, to pretend it is a trick of the wind.