The Water Cure(54)

I put the gun and the knife in my pocket. Close the curtains, get blood on them. I no longer care. Let the blood get everywhere. I turn my back on the slumped body and sit down on the floor for a long time.

What it was like to be in love with you: fucking awful, even after you revealed it was technically all right. The love of the family magnified. Except I wasn’t of your blood. Except you had raised me like your own. Except I knew no other families to compare ours with.

It was like having a permanent hangover. A pure, lightning nausea, not unlike how it would later feel to be pregnant.

‘What am I to my sisters?’ I asked you after you told me who I really was, and you said that I was still a sister but only half, that four pints of the blood in my veins was alien. That the differences would probably manifest themselves as my age increased, as the three of us stretched away from each other. I cried to find out that half of my blood was unknowable. Again, a thought that came back to me when I was pregnant: What is this inside me?

What it was like to be in love with you: the secret prayer I said in the days after your death, even as I was mourning – genuinely mourning, I promise you, because I am not totally monstrous –

Please stay away

Stay under the sea

Be gone

I’m sorry



You told me to stop calling you father, because you weren’t my father, because the parameters had changed, but I don’t think I managed it before your death. I kept slipping back into habit. I had been one of three for so long.

There was so much you and Mother kept from us about our own bodies. Let us think them incapable, weak, when nothing could be further from the truth. Kept us only in a twilight health, our bones always painful, our teeth rotting where they lay in our mouths. Vitamin pills the shape and size of thumbnails when I was pregnant. ‘Deadly for your sisters,’ Mother intoned darkly. When she turned away I was able to read the back of the packet, which said otherwise.

‘You girls are a new and shining kind of woman,’ you told me, a year before my body changed. Evening this time. My sisters and I had finally grown used to the new rhythms of the house without the damaged women. A soporific truce. You and I were out on the terrace with blankets across our knees. All had been forgiven.

Love was a rising water coming up around me. You were pointing out the stars with your large and damaging hands, explaining what each one meant. Most of them meant Caution, or Be good. Variations on these.

‘There has never been anyone like you in the world,’ you continued. Your voice was grand.

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, would I?’ I said.

The night you explained what was happening to me – your face impassive as usual, but a faint energy coming off you, an excitement – the air had seemed so beautiful and bracing. The forest shielding us. The sea letting sound and light ring out, true as a bell. I had used a stick you brought back from a voyage, floury latex gloves to protect my hands from the modern object. My own bathroom, dark, with everyone else oblivious in the lounge. Two blue lines in a box.

When I had stopped crying, I went to Lia’s room and waited for her to come to bed. I didn’t want to be alone then. Lia, with her strange eyes illuminated by the moon and no knowledge of what had come before, or what was to come.

‘You will inherit all of this,’ you told me on another evening on the terrace. ‘This is where you belong.’

We padded silently down through the sleeping house, to the kitchen, where you cut me a slice of the blood sausage that you ate late at night, men’s food, forbidden. I chewed it but it became gristle in my mouth. Swallowing was impossible. I spat it into the sink, dry-heaved. You rubbed my back. You held my hands. ‘See?’ you said, softly.

For a short while, just after she discovered you and me, Mother and I went through a phase of becoming closer. I was her daughter first; a granddaughter added to the equation. Slow-moving, not yet showing. We spent a lot of time together. She was not always openly malicious.

We sat together with our sewing, facing each other across the dining table. Occasionally we duelled with hard words, hers worse than mine. My heart wasn’t in it. My heart was elsewhere. Occasionally she would crease up her face in the way that was her version of crying, but I did not cry once.

She told me stories about her childhood that I understood were supposed to be supplication, explanation. Stories I did not want to hear, about eating hot bread with her own mother, about mingling with other children. Boys and girls. They pushed each other to the ground. It was a different time. I asked for a memory about my real father, made bold by the changes in myself, but she refused. She kept it from me because she could.

I did not want her to be a fellow woman. Sometimes she was my enemy and sometimes she was just my mother, an enemy in a different way.

Mother must have felt the fact of your aliveness like a shame, a wound. She wrote you letters – not that she had any way of sending them. I found them on the first day of her absence. I went straight to her room, alone, to see what I could find. What I could strip or use or hold between my hands and guess the meaning of. The gun. A lipstick, frosted orange, not her colour. Not anybody’s colour, I found, once I smeared it across my mouth.

I thought the letters were elaborate metaphor. Her grief failing to comprehend that you were a piece of meat by then. My heart softened. There had been romance in her, after all.

Each one ended with Do not send for the girls, or some sort of plea built upon this. I took this as her invocation against our deaths, Mother writing those words down as a prayer to the sea. A message for you to pass on, wherever you lurked, the other ghosts a shoal around you.