The Water Cure(52)

I cannot breathe for a second. My instincts have failed me. I was so sure I felt you dead, your body no longer transmitting to mine, the ways bodies do when they are in love. The way I could sense you from rooms away. Knew when you were returning to us across the sea. But I was wrong.

James tells me that you warned him we would be afraid. You explained there was a chance we would harm ourselves. It was the way we had been raised, with those small knives at our neck. It was so imperative that we were returned to you unhurt. The men would need to go gently, gently. Win our trust, show their vulnerabilities.

‘He wanted you to have the baby away from here,’ he says. ‘It would have been a new start.’

‘But I do not want one,’ I explain. A new start, I mean.

‘They’re on their way. They’ll be here in hours. It will not be so bad, I promise you. I’ll see to that.’ He puts out his hand to mine, but I don’t take it.

Midsummer of the year I ran away, Lia and I had discovered we liked to tan with our tops off in the old greenhouse. It was ripe with oxygen. Smashed pots everywhere. We dragged cushions from our own bedrooms to lie on, and opened up the panels in the glass roof for air. We were closed in but it was our own decision, for once. The glossy leaves of abandoned foliage sheltered our bodies. We had not yet learned that they were shameful.

Love always asks you to sacrifice something, I know that now. Always demands complicity. I think of Mother over dinner, one evening a long time ago, telling us, ‘Even if it is a failed utopia, at least we tried.’

I didn’t understand what she meant. My sisters didn’t either. She was drunk, her fringe at a jaunty angle. Earlier that day she had cut it in a rough chunk across her forehead, but we had shied away from the scissors. You had told her she looked ugly and she had cried for a long time. Her eyes were still red.

You knew what she meant, of course. When she said those words you became very still, taking up all the air with your dangerous silence. We froze in position to see what would happen next.

‘Go to bed,’ you told us. We closed the door behind us and listened, hands pressed to the wood. You were talking in a low voice. I heard Mother’s rise, then fall.

We went to bed eventually, but not before I heard the start of Mother’s crying again. She raised her voice momentarily, enough for me to hear a single phrase. ‘How long can we go on like this?’ she said. ‘How long?’

The eldest child has to be the toughest, else she will not escape the mistakes wrought upon her. The body of the eldest child is naturally a weapon. She told me that years later. ‘So you made mistakes?’ I asked. She kept looking at me, her eyes glassy. She knew what I meant. ‘I am not anybody’s weapon but my own,’ I told her.

‘Mother,’ I say, grasping for any comfort. ‘Is Mother with them? The people coming for us?’

He just looks at me, his eyes more watery than ever.

‘You killed her,’ I say, not a question. ‘You killed her.’ He bows his head.

‘It’s not like what you think,’ he says.

It had been Llew, of course.

‘King only wants you and your sisters,’ James says. ‘You’re still young, Grace.’ He pauses. ‘Thirty isn’t too old to start all over again, not by any means. If that’s what you’re worried about.’

We are your property, your rightful goods. Mother was worn out, a liability; I have replaced her. Half the age, body and mind equipped for survival. It is simple. You would explain it to us so reasonably if you were around. We would see it as the only rational act.

‘You still have so many years of your life ahead of you,’ James said. He looks at me with unbearable pity.

And too many years behind me, I want to tell him. They gather like a bank of water. Like a heavy wave. I cannot forget those years, let them break over me. I will not.

One morning we found the greenhouse splintered, the glass a shimmering blanket around wire frames. You had realized what we were doing and taken a sledgehammer to every pane. You might as well have staved in our hearts.

James goes into more detail. It was Mother’s fault, he explained. She humiliated Llew at the start, the strip-search, the denial of water. Better men than him would have nursed that seed of resentment. He could not be blamed, actually. It happened almost by accident. It was a kind of self-defence. He had underestimated his strength, underestimated the pressure of his hands, the heaviness of his swing.

‘You can understand that, can’t you?’ James asks me. ‘You can understand how that could happen, with someone like him?’

There were men who naturally caused great harm. It is built into them. You had warned us. You are one, though you would never admit it.

James and Llew had closed her eyes and put fishing weights on her body and left her out at sea, alone.

In the distant past I spoke to the damaged women, when I could. I was young. They were reluctant to give me details, instead pressing my palms with secret, useless trinkets. Textured soaps, shells on pieces of twine. I hated these offerings even more than the samplers we stitched with swollen fingers. Everything was so heavy with intention and none of it worked.

What I needed from the women was information. I knew even then that it was important to arm myself. Know your enemy. When you and Mother occasionally told us things about the world it had to be done under controlled conditions, with time for recovery. It wasn’t enough.