The Water Cure(5)

As far back as I can remember, these damaged women drifted through our lives. They arrived with possessions wrapped in sacking, plastic bags, large leather cases that cracked at the seams. Mother would greet their boats at the jetty, looping rope around the moorings.

In reception the women wrote their names and reasons for coming in the Welcome Book while Mother found them a bed. They rarely stayed longer than a month. They ran their hands over the front desk, fake marble but still cold to the touch, in what I now see was a kind of disbelief. At the time we waited in the dark, high up on the stairs, balling dust from the carpet between our fingertips. We weren’t supposed to go near the women when they were newly arrived from the mainland with their toxic breath and skin and hair. We fought the urge to make a commotion, to make them turn around and look up at us with their red-rimmed eyes.

You, too, stayed far away from the women, at least at the start. Acclimatization was necessary. They sat waiting with their hands pressed between their knees and their eyes on the floor. They had been through so much, though we had no comprehension of what.

The work started at once. There was no use in letting the body falter longer than necessary. In the dining room Mother laid out two rows of glasses on one of the polished circular tables. Buckets on the floor. We were not supposed to watch.

The women drank the salt water first, their faces pained. They threw up repeatedly into the buckets. Their bodies convulsed. They lay on the floor but Mother helped them up, insistent. They rinsed their mouths, spat. Then they drank from the second row, glass after glass of our good and pure water, the water that came from our taps like a miracle, the water that the sprinklers cast out in the early dusk like a veil across the garden. The water we ourselves drank by the pint first thing every morning, Mother watching our throats as we swallowed. The women took it into themselves. It was a start. The water flamed their cells and blood. Soon the glasses were all empty.

Once Lia and I saw a damaged woman run down the shore towards the jetty. We watched her from the window, waiting for Mother to follow, the way we knew she would if we tried to escape. The woman had bare feet and her hair was the bloom of a dandelion, whipping in the sea wind as she moved her head from side to side. I never knew her name, but something within me now thinks it might have been Anna or Lanna, a soft sound, a name ending with a kind of call. She found her own boat and we saw her get in, we saw her fumble with the motor-string, we saw her leave. She sailed in a curved line across the bay, soon out of our sight. We waved, pressed our hot hands against the glass. We did not know much, yet somewhere we knew that we were watching the beginning of the end.





Lia


Grace’s stomach grows, filling with blood or air. I notice it first when she is in her swimsuit, sunbathing next to me. I stare at her through my sunglasses until she realizes, bunches a towel across her body despite the heat. At first I think it is a disease, that she is dying. The stomach swelling comes with a deep exhaustion, Grace falling asleep where she sits, circles imprinted under her eyes.

It affects me. For once I am able to keep my distance, she doesn’t have to push me away when I get too close to her. I hurt myself more often in an attempt to make some unspoken bargain, line up strands of my hair on the white linen of my pillowcase as votive offerings, but her body still changes. I send out small pleas when I am drowning myself, when I am sponging the blood from my legs. Save my sister! Take me instead!

‘Thinking yourself uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism,’ King had always reminded me, when I went to him crying because nobody loved me any more.

I will probably do anything, I tentatively promise the sea, the sky, the dirt.

‘Fetch Grace a glass of water,’ Mother tells me. ‘You make the dinner tonight.’

I go out to harvest herbs from the garden, spot a small black snake sunning itself on a patch of scrubbed earth. Normally I would scream, but this time I find a branch that has fallen, hit the snake until it’s burst open like something cooked too long. I throw salt on its pulp and wash my hands in bleach solution. The skin of my two index fingers peels, both hands. Good enough yet? I ask nobody.

After we eat, my sister retches in the corner of the lounge. She runs out of the room and down the corridor towards the bathroom, her bare feet an urgent slap on the parquet. When she comes back, her face is like the moon. She lies down right there on the floor, choosing the rug with the tassels in front of the empty fireplace.

I worry that my biceps aren’t strong enough to dig her grave and if not me, who will? I worry that I will catch it. I pinch my nose and gargle salt water until my eyes run.





Grace, Lia, Sky


Mother is stricter than King at first, but she does relax over time. In the evenings she trickles a small amount of whisky into her glass and drinks it out on the terrace, looking over the rail to the pool below, the treetops just out of reach. We join her out there, and sometimes she tells us about how we arrived, the story of how we came to be.

She tells us about Lia, a stone in her stomach dragging her body down. She tells us about Grace, bundled in white. She tells us about Sky, as yet unimagined but already there, somewhere, in the two that came first. In the dust of the stars above them, or planted in their hearts like a seed. King drove the boat, watched out for dangers, while Mother held Grace in her arms, the burden of two small lives. Another boat was tethered behind, low in the water and almost overladen with belongings, with hope. Neither Mother nor King looked back across the waves, the world shrinking to a flat line, a smear of light and smoke. This was a promised place, is how she tells it. A place that was hers from the start.