The Water Cure(55)

I’m sorry I made you leave, said another one, but I hadn’t read too much into that at the time. I knew survivor’s guilt when I saw it.

The first time I hit you, you laughed. My nails took off a small amount of the skin on your cheek. There was no blood.

‘You’re like your mother,’ you told me. ‘Vicious.’

You were right, she was vicious. Left her fingernails to grow long, filed them to a point and painted them in too-bright colours. She had been behind the more sadistic therapies. Whether she truly believed in being cruel to be kind, or whether she just secretly hated us, I cannot quite decide.

For a while I thought she might have poisoned you and dragged your body out to the forest somehow. Her tears were fake, an empty gesture. The others were taken in by them when you had gone.

Through it all, she told us she loved us so often that it became its own violence, something it was impossible to turn down.

And every day, the border of the world drawing closer to us. And every day having to look into Mother’s face and pray for her health, for her heart, despite everything that had been done to us. And done to her.

Somehow, downstairs. Walking towards the sound of music, into the ballroom, a person playing badly. Lia. She watches me for a second across the piano, then stands up. I call her name, once, twice.

‘What have they done to you?’ she asks. She is shaking. I look down at myself, the blood staining my dress and forearms, and find that I can’t speak.

We find Sky in the kitchen, foraging in a cupboard, her body half-concealed. Lia and I put our hands upon her. Together we move as one up to Lia’s room.

The emergency flares in our limbs. Blood pulsing. My extremities cold. James could have contaminated me. Who knows what disease the men truly carry. Who knows what Lia now glows with inside her bones. The blood is hardening on my dress already. In the dark of the corridor, my sisters swallow the news without question, not even a why.

You blamed my early exposure to the outside world for why I never grew tall like the other sisters, remained small like Mother. It was also why I sometimes had attacks of breathlessness as a child. A squeezing in my chest, a vestigial sense of doom. These have improved as I’ve aged. You were satisfied with how well your therapies had worked.

I watch my sisters move now. They walk in front of me, feet stumbling as they process the new information, what it will mean for us. Fear makes me cough. If we stop moving it will gather in our joints, I know. It will fill our lungs, and we will seize up or die.

When we reach Lia’s room I watch as my sisters take it in turns to vomit into the en suite’s toilet, neatly, to get some of it out. Fingers down the throat. I wash my hands in the sink once they’re done, the blood pinkening the water. A smear of it near my mouth that I wipe off with a damp tissue.

‘Llew will find out what I’ve done,’ I tell them when I return to the bedroom. My sisters sit on my bed, vigilant and pale. ‘We need to decide what to do.’

We could kill him and keep ourselves safe.

We could leave immediately, let Llew find James’s body, hope that we would be long gone.

We could walk into the ocean with our hands linked and know it was over, that it was finally over and would always be over.

We could beg for Llew’s forgiveness, beg him to protect us from you.

We could wound him grievously to keep him loyal.

We could pretend it was nothing to do with us.

We could forgive him.



I take Lia’s hands as we list the options. It has been a long time since I have touched her for more than a second. They are thinner than I remember, her temperature low.

‘He will never forgive us,’ I say, as gently as I can.

There is silence. Lia puts her fingers in her mouth and chews at the cuticles. When she puts her hands into her lap they are bleeding quite a lot. She looks at them in surprise and goes to the bathroom to rinse them under the taps again.

‘We have to kill him,’ I tell Sky while Lia is out of the room. A deep weariness comes across me. She stares at me, but nods. I place my weapons on the bedspread between us. I am afraid of her suddenly, of how accepting she is of this. At what it reveals about the life that we have lived. Maybe it is just that she is no longer the baby. Maybe she is perfectly equipped for the world, the way you planned all along.

When Lia comes out, we put our arms around her.

‘No,’ she tells us. ‘No, no, no.’ She tries to push us away. ‘We can’t.’

‘It’s the only way,’ I tell her.

‘I love him,’ she says, uselessly.

‘We can’t do it without you,’ I say.

I watched Lia with the men from the window, the day I first realized something was happening between her and Llew. She lay barely clothed between them, light glinting dangerously off the pool by their feet. They let the toxic words fall out of their mouths with no care for what they could do to her. At the time I had thought, Sister, have you no initiative? Sit underneath the parasol, at least. Could she not submerge herself in the water? Could she not have kept some distance? It made my hands shake to watch them. The inexcusable lack of caution.

Always watching and waiting, when it came to my sister. Half of my blood. Even before I knew this, I sometimes felt closer to the damaged women than to my own family. My feet had walked on their land. I worried I was beyond saving. I worried it would not take much to tip me over the line.