The Water Cure(59)

We wait for the gunshot. It comes soon. Then another. The heat amplifies the sound. Another. Our hearts. Sky puts her hands over her ears. I listen to it all.

I would still like to know your intentions. I would like to have the moment with you that Lia had with Llew, that second before I looked away where I saw him say something into her ear, last words. But then isn’t that always like a woman, to want to drag every word and sentiment over and over through the wringer, until the meaning is gone. To over-process. To be absolutely sure.

But do not follow us. Do not look for us. Do not dredge the undergrowth and the shallows, send the birds and the snakes rising from their homes with the rhythm of your feet. Do not press your ear to the ground. Do not cast messages.

The house will fall. The hair in our brushes will turn to dust, our clothes to mould. The only proof of us will be the photographs you took, the places where we crop up in your notes as impossible women, invented into being. These, too, will not last.

It used to bother me that we would leave little trace, but now I have never been more glad about anything. I will wake up in the empty mornings with the absence of you, and I will think, Glad, glad, glad, and it will ring like a bell.

Lia comes and sits down next to us. There is blood on her too, but only a little.

‘Don’t look back at him,’ she tells us, so we don’t. Precautions against further damage. Too little, too late. My eyes remain trained on the sky. No birds are singing. The air is perfect, finally. There is blood under my fingernails. I will have to fix that.





Grace, Lia, Sky


Once there was a father who thought he could protect us. But that father was not immune to all that the world demanded. We understood it would be difficult, hurtful, to recognize that the danger was in ourselves. That the safe place had been contaminated from the start.

After we wash the last blood from our bodies in Grace’s bathroom – the three of us in a bath together, shaking, cupping the water to our limbs and hair – we dress in Lia’s clothes. They fit us well enough. White, for the reflective properties. We consider ripping King’s suit into pieces, talismans to get us past the border. In the end, we want nothing that has belonged to a man. But another idea occurs to us.

We do not use the curing basin or the ballroom. Instead we return to Grace’s bathroom and fill the bathtub almost to the top, salt held in three pairs of hands, sprinkled on the surface in slow, circular motions. It falls to the bottom, twists and dissolves. We perform the water cure for the first time on each other, the only time, the way we have seen it done. We prepare for what is next the only way we know how.

Sky goes first. She kneels of her own volition at the side of the tub. She has never practised for it, but we do what we have to under the circumstances. We are gentle with each other. We let her rise, gasping from the water, without pushing it too much.

Next, Grace. Two hands on the seabird’s curve of her neck, Lia’s right hand and Sky’s left. We hold her down for slightly longer. She lets us, does not move. When she rises up from the water she feels a little faint. She admits it to us. We discuss it among ourselves, take it as a good sign.

Lia goes last. We hold her under for the longest time. Her time in the swimming pool has trained her well. The ceremony binds us, our blood running to the same tune. We have never wanted to feel Lia’s pain, but holding her under the water now, the memory of it in our mouths and eyes, the salt-sting, we let go of that selfishness. When Lia rises, she is smiling. ‘It was all right,’ she says to us. ‘It wasn’t as hard as I imagined.’

‘Goodbye to all of this,’ we say out loud as we move from room to room. Our home has not kept us safe, in the end. But it has taught us love.

On the shore, we look out to the sea. Goodbye to the ghosts. There are none swimming towards us. Goodbye to the white paint of the house, designed for reflection, for it has failed us.

Our eyes avoid Llew, lying in the same place we left him. He is our message to anyone else who might come to these shores. The message is This is no place. The message is Fuck you. We hope they will see him and tell others of the dangerous women who discovered a way to save themselves.

The new and shining women. Love slicks us from head to toe. The marks are imprinted on our bodies. We cannot lay down all of that. We wouldn’t want to, despite the ways we have been changed. Love still glows at the centre of our being.

Somewhere near the sea’s border, the edge of our vision, approaching boats. Large and white. In the air above us, a change. It is time to go.

We move through the garden, past bushes bowed with the weight of their flowers, past thorns and overgrown greenery. By the time we reach the forest, the first dark boughs shielding us from the sun, strange birds are overhead. They fly low. Lia looks up at them.

‘I’ve seen them before,’ she says. ‘But never so close.’

Keep walking, we tell ourselves. Keep walking.

We leave behind our clothes, our weapons, our loved things. We do not even take canteens to hold our water. All the objects stay behind, and we rejoice.

It is possible there are no safe places left. It is possible that we can create a new one with our rage and our love, that other women are already out there, doing the work. We are going to meet them. They will recognize us, no longer children, and hold out their arms to us. They will say, What took you so long?

Onwards and onwards, our weary feet. The sound of the birds grows, as if they are swooping lower, as if they are circling. But we are deep in the forest by now. Close to the border.