The Water Cure(47)

When Sky has fallen asleep, Grace turns to me. Her feet are freezing against my shins. ‘You’re always warm,’ she tells me. ‘Even now.’ The insinuation of change. I want to tell her, It’s still me. Soon the pillow between us is wet.

‘We’re going to die,’ she says in my ear.

‘Don’t say that,’ I tell her, but it hangs above us, it has a ring of certainty. We are silent for a while.

‘The baby was a boy, wasn’t it?’ she says, not a question but a statement. I breathe in, breathe out. I don’t need to tell her yes.

‘Maybe men can’t survive here,’ she says. ‘Maybe that’s how we are truly protected.’ A note of hope in her voice. I close my eyes.

‘Grace,’ I say. ‘Grace. Do you think Mother is dead?’

She doesn’t answer immediately.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t.’ She turns over to face me. ‘Not after everything she’s done.’

‘Where do you think she is?’ I ask.

‘I think she’s lost,’ Grace says. ‘I think passing the border weakened her. I think she’s out on the sea. Hurt, maybe. But still coming for us.’

Sky wakes up. ‘Mother,’ she weeps. ‘Mother.’

Shush, we tell her, shush. We shift around so that she moves into the middle, between me and Grace. We stroke her hair.

‘She is still coming back,’ Grace says. ‘She will be here tomorrow. She will sail back over the sea, and the men will leave. They will go, and we will never see them again.’

We wrap our arms around her. Soon she falls back into exhausted sleep.

‘What do we do now?’ I ask Grace very quietly, once I feel Sky’s breathing slow.

‘We wait,’ Grace tells me. ‘For as long as it takes.’

Sky stays in the bed as Grace and I take it in turns to listen at the door, to shove at it with the force of our bodies. I try to pick the lock with a hairpin and do not succeed. I open every window in the room, in the bathroom, to hear what we can. The air, the reminder that the world still exists, is a shock.

Around midday, we hear the men speaking and moving past our room. We freeze, we make no noise, but their footsteps pass without interruption. From the window we watch as they carry Gwil’s body across the beach underneath us, wrapped in a sheet. The shape of him dips and rises. Both men look terrible, even from a distance. James almost trips, but Llew is steady, a shovel strapped to his back. They move out of sight.

‘They’re taking him to the forest,’ Grace says.

I have had dreams before of women lying underneath the dirt and leaves, but not for a long time. The speculation of my treacherous mind.

A long time afterwards, the noise stops and the men return the way they came, grim and streaked with dirt. They must have rubbed their grimy hands into their eyes, down their cheeks.

The end is coming. We feel it like electricity, like the start of a migraine. When I part the curtains I am amazed not to see the water full of limbs. It is just the sea, as usual. A little rougher, perhaps. In Grace’s bathroom I hit my elbow into the tiled wall, watch an inky bruise come up in the mirror.

I say a prayer for Sky, with her small and pliable movements, the way she came into the world and fitted so easily around us. I say a prayer for her collection of rocks and small animal bones, for the spray of her laugh, for her tan lines, for the dead sheaves of her cut hair, wherever she left it.

I say a prayer for Mother, for her hoarse voice and hands which never stopped moving, for her scented oils and eyeliner and insomnia, the menthol lozenges she held in her mouth like a bad word.

I say a prayer for King, wherever he is now. A prayer for his sincerity, a prayer for the holes in his T-shirts and the strange food he served up on the nights when it was his turn to prepare dinner, combinations designed to make us grow strong and healthful, tomatoes smeared with honey and oil, too much oil, they swam in it.

I say a prayer for the damaged women, for their thinning hair and cracked lips and offerings, for their rare arms around me during group prayer, for their distended stomachs filled with water and their wet clothes clinging to their bodies and their pain, their incomprehensible pain, which is now mine too.

A prayer for the baby, which would have been one of us; a prayer for its life, the small space of it that never got to happen. The prayer for the baby is just I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry. I pinch the bridge of my nose. My eyes in the mirror are red.

And I say a prayer for Grace, for her cold body and cold hands and cold heart, for her success where I have always failed, for the dirt behind her ears, for her hair filling my hands when I plait it, for her brutal honesty, for the animal smell of her body, for her distance. I say a prayer while wondering how I could ever have thought that we were two parts of the same person, knowing I would do anything to go back there, to be there with her again, our hands clasped tight, held under the water by our father, and the light ribboning around us. I could have died there with her face close to mine and her pursed mouth and it would have been all right, it would have been a small mercy, but our father always brought us back to the surface, lifted us up into the sunlight and hot air as we coughed the water from our mouths.

Sometime during the long, sweltering afternoon there is a knock on Grace’s door, then the sound of it being unlocked. We all look at each other.

‘Hello,’ says Llew when I answer it. He is grey-faced but calm, wearing a clean shirt of King’s. He peers behind me, into the room.