The Water Cure(8)

These days I am thinking a lot about your approach to life-guarding, your declarations that you would fell anyone if necessary, in the name of love. And even during the bleaker nights I can hear how the baby inside me sings, or seems to. Popping and amniotic, like the calls of dolphins.





Lia


On a hushed evening following a hushed day, Mother takes us into the ballroom and leads Grace on to the small stage at its far end. ‘Your sister is to have a baby,’ she tells us. We applaud and march our feet on the floor to drum up noise, but we make too much of it and Grace winces.

‘Where is it from?’ Sky asks.

‘Grace asked the sea for one,’ Mother tells us, her hand hovering at the end of Grace’s braid. ‘She has been lucky.’

I stare at Grace until she meets my gaze. How dare she.

Later I climb over the rail of the terrace and pull myself up to sit on the roof itself, the edges of the slate tiles digging into my thighs, and I watch the dark sea. I ask and ask, but there is no answering call inside my own body. The waves remain the same, the thinning evening air does not stir. It is possible I want it too much, the way I want everything.

When we were younger, Grace and I played a game called Dying. It involved folding your body over and wadding your eyes up tight. It involved shaking. I was always the one who died – of course I was – so I lay in front of my sister as she threw salt on me.

‘We told you not to go out in the world!’ Grace would shout in an imitation of Mother. ‘What did you wear?’

Just my body. Just the gown.

‘You’re shrinking now,’ said Grace, strictly. ‘Your lungs have burned up. Your eyes are drying out. Soon you will disappear.’

Please.

When I walk past Grace’s room later on, I see her lying unmoving on her stomach, the soles of her feet filthy against white linen. I think for a second that she is dead, but when I call she kicks her feet listlessly, assures me that she is very much alive.





Grace, Lia, Sky


Time without our father becomes stretching, soft. Sugar melted in the pan and drawn into something new before hardening, contracting. There are many days which bleed into each other. The sun in the sky seems closer to us all the time.

Incidences of joy like playing hide-and-seek together, on a rare raining day. Water rinsing the walls of the house, pouring to the drains. From the tall glass doors of the ballroom we watch it pooling on the ground, and filling empty burnt-earth pots that once held small, fragrant trees. Then we move to conceal our bodies. We discover each other wrapped in a velvet curtain, in the old industrial oven, unused for decades, petrified grease caking its ceiling, or behind furniture or doors, waiting patiently for a long time.

Sometimes we become mildly sick, headaches or stomach cramps, and if one sister is sick it’s like we are all sick, so we rally our efforts into healing. The afflicted sister lies on the bed and we brush her hair, administer the small white pills that King brought back encased in cardboard and bubbles of foil. When the sister is better, we cheer. Look what we did, we tell each other. Look how we fixed you.





Grace


I go down to the forest whenever I can shake my sisters off. The only place I can find a degree of calm is among the sightless trees, their shadow.

Slipping from the house and across the lawn, I move stealthily through the ornamental beds, past rocks marking out the borders of vegetable patches we no longer maintain. The green beans stopped growing years ago, but the tomatoes, nearer the house, have taken on a life of their own. Their fruit falls and attracts stinging insects. A jam of dirt, overblown globes and seeds.

Down at the end of the garden, I pull up my skirt and climb over the low wall. This is where the forest begins. There is no birdsong, only the dry-skin noise of the leaves. On the other side, I run my hands along the stones of the wall until I find the right one and pull it out. Matches, wrapped in cloth to keep them from damp. A small lighter that belonged to you, yellow plastic. I try it out experimentally on a pile of dead twigs, the liquid inside low, but it still works. For a second I remember how your hands looked moving the flint, the flame rising up, and something passes over me. I do not cry. Fuck you, I mouth to the air instead. It makes no reply. Where is your ghost when I need it?

There is barbed wire in the forest, deeper than I dare to go. Should anyone arrive on the island, it serves the same purpose as the buoys out in the bay, marking out a clear message. Do not enter. Viewed from another angle, Do not leave. I imagine the smoke drifting over it, a defiant signal. But I am too far away, and I stamp it out within minutes. I wonder what it would be like to set the whole forest on fire, to see everything curl up and blacken. But this small blaze is as much as I would dare to do. There is no real danger. The woods will always have the coolness of shadow, dark and wet underneath the boughs.

Beside the pool in the afternoon, Lia will not stop talking at me about you, the word remember repeated on the wind like an incantation. She idolized you.

The desperation in her voice is unbearable. Eventually I slap her and she almost falls, then comes back up towards me with her hands ready to fight. I lean back.

‘I’m not going to hit you!’ she tells me, horrified at the idea, despite her automatic fists. They are just a reflex. ‘Not in your condition!’

I go inside to sit in the cool alone, but I slam the door behind me too hard and the ancient chandelier falls from the ceiling in a plume of plaster dust. Glass ripples out over the floor. I scream and scream until everyone else is standing around me, staring, too dumbfounded by my reaction even to run for muslin to stop up my mouth.