The Water Cure(53)

The more I learned, the more I realized that even being physically removed from it wouldn’t save us. The violence came for all women, border or no border. It was already in our blood, in our collective memory. And one day the men would come for us too.

That was the source of the anger. Stronger in the damaged women, but it was also there in us. The potentiality. I still scream in my sleep. So does Lia, though I have never told her. It’s not like cruelty has not been wrought upon us.

With every new discovery I found myself looking at you with new eyes, you who had renounced the world, you who claimed to put your love of women above all things. Possibly you were hurting me already, in the name of love. I was not sure at that time how it would manifest in me.

It didn’t take long to find out. Pains in my abdomen, the metallic taste in my mouth. I had always slept on my front like a child, but my chest became too painful. I thought I was dying for some time.

I want to know everything about the men now, for the first and only time. I look at James’s sodden red face and want to know his histories, his heartbreaks. The refracting decisions that brought him, them, here. I picture the two brothers tussling in dirt, Gwil’s age. I want to discover what turned them into themselves. I want to know how I could become heartless too.

‘Tell me how you know King,’ is all I can say in the end. The puzzle that sent these men from you to us.

It was nothing special. They knew you from decades ago. You inspired terror in your time. If you were a certain kind of man, you could have five hundred lives. You could shake them all off like dead skins.

I expect to learn it was Llew’s doing that brought you here, but no. It was James who owed you the favour. Llew had just come along. You had been very gracious about it. He was not keen to see his older brother killed. It was an act of love too. If there is one thing we know, it is acts of love. This does not make me feel better.

‘King considers your life here a failure,’ James tells me. ‘King has decided a fresh start is best for all involved.’

I do not know what he means. Our lives are our lives.

James is crying again, hopeless, as if realizing that his confessions have not made anything better. Nothing will make him feel better.

‘I have told you too much,’ he says. He grasps for me. I close my eyes for one second.

‘We will not go,’ I tell him. ‘You don’t know what kind of man King is.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘Oh, believe me, I do. And I’m sorry.’ He cries too hard to speak for a second. ‘I am truly sorry for what we’ve done to you and yours.’

Shuffling closer, I put an arm around him. He holds on to me as if drowning. With one hand I touch his back lightly, and with my other I feel under my pillow. My hand moves over the gun, finds the knife. It is so sharp that I have cut my finger before accidentally and barely noticed. As clean as a wound can get. It is the quieter option, the one that feels right. I am surviving, the way you taught me.

His head is still on my shoulder, my dress wet as he sobs. There is a new ruthlessness in me, or maybe it has always been there, waiting for the emergency – maybe you were the one to see it first, were right about us all along. I raise my hand.

It is strange, the things that prepare you. When I put the blade to his neck and press, aiming for just under the ear, dragging down under the jaw, I might have thought about you lifting the chickens by their feet and swiping the knife across their throat. They struggled and you laughed at them, doing it down on the shore so the sea would rinse the blood, take it as a gift. The rest of the birds with feathers patched, gathered in fear.

I might have thought about skinning rabbits. One clean slit from throat to tail. Their wet bodies like the inside of fruit. We stopped eating them because of the high levels of toxins. Rabbits could go beyond the border and return.

Instead, I think about the dark rooms where you tried to save me. Wipe my traumas clean. Your large hands at my head, feeling my skull for memories, for things I shouldn’t know. Speculative, planted, real. A wheeled machine made of metal that leaked smoke. A sky with tall buildings crowding up into it. A pale woman fallen on the terrace, her blonde hair meshed over her face.

I think about my sisters, lining up with me and Mother for our annual portrait. You, hefting the box of the camera on to a tripod. You, developing the photo in that tiny bathroom, the light shut out, basin full of chemicals. You, holding me in there sometimes, tightly and too tightly, in the pitch-black. Nobody was to disturb the man at work. I liked it, the too-tightness, though I am not a person used to liking anything. The photo placed ceremoniously in the lounge. No man documented. The man’s role is to make the document. The necessary curating of our lives.

I think about being drowned in the pool with Lia, back when we were the same person, split down the middle like the heart of a tree. Sick with dread every night when it started happening. Lia’s face in front of mine as we were held down. Lia reaching out to hold my hands, to stop me thrashing. She always coped better. Things were easy then. We belonged to each other. There was no question of what love went where.

One final thought: the three of us in my room, full of water, stomachs distended. Our collective boredom a hum over our bodies. Lia had just started hurting herself in earnest. We were supposed to be grateful.

It is messy. It is very terrible. He reels back from me in horror. It is not like how Mother had told us it would be. Every other death has happened offstage. And now here I am, confronted with the absurdity of it.