The Water Cure(50)

It was the motion of the falling rather than the trauma of the event that drew me back to the memory. My body was in what felt like perpetual motion in those days. A loop of garden and beach and pool, my hands flexing, standing up to stretch. I could not stay still. Yet that particular gesture, the beauty of it. To fall and then to stop.

In the days afterwards, Lia and I secretly pulled a mattress on to the floor in one of the empty rooms and experimented for hours. We climbed up on to stools and let our bodies go. But our movements were too propulsive. We were too eager.

It was years before I thought to ask you: What the fuck was all that about? You told me that I must have been mistaken, that nobody had fallen. Children were prone to drama and invention. Whenever I tried to open a window upstairs, they were painted shut. And you told me, well, yes, they were painted shut to protect the babies, the small and dangerous people hell-bent on dying, on pushing stones down their throats or burying themselves alive. Which is to say, it was all for me.

For maybe a year, I found I could believe the windows had always been shut. That the woman had been a trick of the light. But it was after that day that the women started to be turned away when they reached us. And one day the memory opened up again, despite your efforts, and that time I let it.

My plan was to call my own baby Magnolia, after my favourite tree in the garden. It blooms rarely. For the last two or three years it has been properly dying. The day when we will have to take the chainsaw to it isn’t far off.

I would have held my daughter to my chest in a length of swaddling fabric. Strapped her to my back for when the emergency came. For when the tides rose. For when the sky fell.

I keep the gun under my pillow since Mother left, along with my knife. Every morning I touch the metal, familiarize myself with the mechanisms. It is cold and undeniable in my hands. I took it out to the terrace once, an afternoon when everybody else was in the pool below me. With my elbows propped up on the pillows of a recliner, I picked the men off one by one. I put four or five imaginary bullets into Llew’s body alone. It helped.

With Lia and Llew gone, James tells us to come with him. We follow him up to the terrace. ‘Air,’ he tells us. ‘We need air.’ I cannot disagree with that. James lies down on a recliner and puts his hands over his face. He does his ugly man’s crying with no regard for us. I am essentially compassionate, so I let him get on with it. On the table next to his body are the binoculars left from the ghost sighting. I notice something out on the sea, a boat. Sweeping the ocean with the lenses, I see the face of my own sister. Llew touches her. He puts his big and dreadful arms around her. There is nothing I can do.

I have no memories of the old world, though you always insisted I did. You spoke of them as a kind of shrapnel – damage lodged in my heart and body that nobody else could see. I never had any interest in remembering really, but you didn’t think this important.

You explained to me, one day when we were alone, when Mother was somewhere below, probably taking a nap: you had saved all you could. That is, we had proved ourselves the only ones worth saving.

When the building is burning, you rescue your loved-most. I knew this. But for a father, you explained, it is never so simple.

James sits up, squints out to sea once he sees me watching.

‘Give me those,’ he orders for the first time, gesturing at the binoculars. I don’t want to, but I relinquish them. He looks through them for thirty seconds or so, then lowers them.

‘As I suspected,’ he says. ‘Well, it’s done now. The damage is done.’

Sky wants to look too, but he shakes his head. He throws the binoculars on to the floor. The lenses crack, but my sister and I do not flinch. I am interested in his new and proprietary violence. Finally, inevitably, he’s showing what he really is, his face crumpling the way yours had started to do in the last days, like the effort of his muscles holding his expression together is unbearable. I watch him very calmly. I am assessing my next move.

He puts his hands on my wrists and looks earnestly down to where his dirty fingernails rest against my veins. I let him do this, though it repulses me.

‘I want to tell you some things,’ he says. ‘I need to tell someone. I’m sorry that it has to be you, but who else can I tell?’

I invite the confessionals of men. I am not a stranger to them. Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women. This is one of the things you taught me about love. ‘All right,’ I tell him, the way I told you.

‘Let’s go inside,’ I say. ‘Let’s go to my room. But Sky has to stay here.’

He nods. Sky protests, but I still her with a look. I hope she has the sense to hide.

For the last couple of days I have been composing a constant eulogy to our world. Goodbye, trees. Goodbye, grass, brown and dying. Goodbye, sea and sand. Goodbye, rocks. Goodbye, birds. Goodbye, mice, lizards, insects. I know, somehow, our time is drawing to a close. The sky above us is burning out. The borders will no longer hold.

With James walking ahead of me, I carry on with my litany. Goodbye, wallpaper. Goodbye, sweet light of late afternoon. Goodbye, carpet. Goodbye, ceiling and crumbling plaster. Goodbye, doors.

James moves in a shuffle as if something is causing him a lot of pain, one hand clasped loosely to his chest.

In my room, he makes his confessions. The dust swirls through the light, and the open windows bring in the smell of the sea. He starts with irrelevancies. He starts with things I already know or have guessed. ‘I kissed Lia,’ he tells me after a while. He swallows. ‘Or she kissed me, but I didn’t stop it right away. I wanted to do it.’