The Water Cure Read online

  ‘I’m fine,’ I tell her, but I don’t go back to stretching. Mother raises her arms with no comment. I see all the veins standing out along them. She is showing off to me, I think. She is demonstrating that even her old body is painless, superior to mine.

  When the exercises are over I put my arms around her to make up for my thoughts. Sky joins our embrace, her cheek against my upper arm. Lia stays where she is, doing extra stretches, interlinking her hands and pushing the air away from her. I feel bad that she can’t join in our circle. Mother switches her eyes over to where Lia moves and I can tell she is feeling bad too, but there’s nothing I can do.

  My bed used to be placed next to the wall, Lia’s mirroring it in her own room. But as we grew older I started to feel uncomfortable being hemmed in from any angle. Now the bed has to be in the centre of the room. Lia moved hers too, copying me. Sometimes I press my ear against the wall to listen to her breathing, though I would never admit it.

  Tonight, I hear her crying. She cries the way she does when it is just us sisters, the three of us alone, and I am surprised. So it isn’t for show, that sound pressed from deep in her throat. My own eyes stay dry and I don’t go to her, even though I could.

  Lia

  Strong feelings weaken you, open up your body like a wound. It takes vigilance and regular therapies to hold them at bay. Over the years we have learned how to dampen them down, how to practise and release emotion under strict conditions only, how to own our pain. I can cough it into muslin, trap it as bubbles under the water, let it from my very blood.

  Some of the early therapies fell out of favour, and the fainting sack was one of these. King disdained it as archaic. Also, we turned off the sauna years ago to preserve electricity and without the sauna it didn’t work. That was a shame in some ways. I enjoyed the dizziness, the rush of my uncooperative body dissolving into nothing.

  We use electricity so carefully these days because of the blackouts. They happen most often in the height of summer; the rooms become cavernous after sundown, dotted here and there with the light of candles. I thought this might be a clue to what was happening beyond our borders, but Mother said that she and King orchestrated it themselves, that it was just another part of their plan to keep us safe.

  Our fainting sacks were made of a heavy weave, not muslin but not quite burlap. They had once held flour or rice, Mother unstitching the fabric then re-stitching it into the right shape, carefully embroidering our names on to the front. On therapy days she would lead us out in single file, through the kitchen door to the old sauna hut at the edge of the forest, its panels splintering amid flourishing weeds. We held out our arms, naked except for our underwear, and stood motionless while Mother guided our limbs through holes in the rough fabric. She sewed us into the sacks right up to the top of the neck. Then we were carried into the sauna, locked in, and given a small glass bottle of water each that quickly became warm as blood.

  Soon the sacks were soaked through with our sweat, our own personal salt water. We grew dizzy and lay down on the benches lining the walls. I finished my water first, because I had ‘poor self-control’, as diagnosed repeatedly and sadly by Mother and King. As I sweated out the bad feelings, a lightness came over me. I would allow myself to lick the skin of my forearm once, twice; a reluctance to let my pain go.

  Gradually, one by one, we each lost consciousness. When Mother came to rouse us, splashing water on our faces, we shuffled unsteadily on to the lawn together. We were glistening, our hair wet. We lay on our fronts on the grass, the damp fabric chafing at us. She took a pair of scissors to each sack, cutting right down to the bottom along the seams. When we were well enough to stand, we shed the stiff, cooling fabrics to our feet like a skin.

  Grace, Lia, Sky

  Some of the beds in the abandoned rooms are arranged strangely, left by women long gone. Women who preferred to sleep by windows, or who wanted to keep their eyes trained on the door at all times. Women who were plagued by visions, whose hearts pained them in the night.

  We are lucky, because we have been exposed to minimal damage. We remember what those women looked like when they came to us. But we also remember the effect the therapies had on them. How their bodies strengthened until they were finally ready to undergo the water cure.

  We only bother to make up our own beds now, stripping the sheets and blankets from the others for our use, so the mattresses lie naked and fleshy on their frames.

  ‘Do you miss the women?’ Mother asked us once. To her we answered, ‘No.’ Only later, alone, admitting to ourselves, Yes, maybe a little.

  Grace

  In the lengthening time after your death, I think about the other people who have left us. All women, sickened and damaged when they arrived, cured when they departed. There is a different quality to your absence. A heaviness to it, a shock at its centre. The house is emptier than it has ever been before.

  As far back as I can remember, these damaged women drifted through our lives. They arrived with possessions wrapped in sacking, plastic bags, large leather cases that cracked at the seams. Mother would greet their boats at the jetty, looping rope around the moorings.

  In reception the women wrote their names and reasons for coming in the Welcome Book while Mother found them a bed. They rarely stayed longer than a month. They ran their hands over the front desk, fake marble but still cold to the touch, in what I now see was a kind of disbelief. At the time we waited in the dark, high up on the stairs, balling dust from the carpet between our fingertips. We weren’t supposed to go near the women when they were newly arrived from the mainland with their toxic breath and skin and hair. We fought the urge to make a commotion, to make them turn around and look up at us with their red-rimmed eyes.

  You, too, stayed far away from the women, at least at the start. Acclimatization was necessary. They sat waiting with their hands pressed between their knees and their eyes on the floor. They had been through so much, though we had no comprehension of what.

  The work started at once. There was no use in letting the body falter longer than necessary. In the dining room Mother laid out two rows of glasses on one of the polished circular tables. Buckets on the floor. We were not supposed to watch.

  The women drank the salt water first, their faces pained. They threw up repeatedly into the buckets. Their bodies convulsed. They lay on the floor but Mother helped them up, insistent. They rinsed their mouths, spat. Then they drank from the second row, glass after glass of our good and pure water, the water that came from our taps like a miracle, the water that the sprinklers cast out in the early dusk like a veil across the garden. The water we ourselves drank by the pint first thing every morning, Mother watching our throats as we swallowed. The women took it into themselves. It was a start. The water flamed their cells and blood. Soon the glasses were all empty.

  Once Lia and I saw a damaged woman run down the shore towards the jetty. We watched her from the window, waiting for Mother to follow, the way we knew she would if we tried to escape. The woman had bare feet and her hair was the bloom of a dandelion, whipping in the sea wind as she moved her head from side to side. I never knew her name, but something within me now thinks it might have been Anna or Lanna, a soft sound, a name ending with a kind of call. She found her own boat and we saw her get in, we saw her fumble with the motor-string, we saw her leave. She sailed in a curved line across the bay, soon out of our sight. We waved, pressed our hot hands against the glass. We did not know much, yet somewhere we knew that we were watching the beginning of the end.

  Lia

  Grace’s stomach grows, filling with blood or air. I notice it first when she is in her swimsuit, sunbathing next to me. I stare at her through my sunglasses until she realizes, bunches a towel across her body despite the heat. At first I think it is a disease, that she is dying. The stomach swelling comes with a deep exhaustion, Grace falling asleep where she sits, circles imprinted under her eyes.

  It affects me. For once I am able to keep my distance, she does
n’t have to push me away when I get too close to her. I hurt myself more often in an attempt to make some unspoken bargain, line up strands of my hair on the white linen of my pillowcase as votive offerings, but her body still changes. I send out small pleas when I am drowning myself, when I am sponging the blood from my legs. Save my sister! Take me instead!

  ‘Thinking yourself uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism,’ King had always reminded me, when I went to him crying because nobody loved me any more.

  I will probably do anything, I tentatively promise the sea, the sky, the dirt.

  ‘Fetch Grace a glass of water,’ Mother tells me. ‘You make the dinner tonight.’

  I go out to harvest herbs from the garden, spot a small black snake sunning itself on a patch of scrubbed earth. Normally I would scream, but this time I find a branch that has fallen, hit the snake until it’s burst open like something cooked too long. I throw salt on its pulp and wash my hands in bleach solution. The skin of my two index fingers peels, both hands. Good enough yet? I ask nobody.

  After we eat, my sister retches in the corner of the lounge. She runs out of the room and down the corridor towards the bathroom, her bare feet an urgent slap on the parquet. When she comes back, her face is like the moon. She lies down right there on the floor, choosing the rug with the tassels in front of the empty fireplace.

  I worry that my biceps aren’t strong enough to dig her grave and if not me, who will? I worry that I will catch it. I pinch my nose and gargle salt water until my eyes run.

  Grace, Lia, Sky

  Mother is stricter than King at first, but she does relax over time. In the evenings she trickles a small amount of whisky into her glass and drinks it out on the terrace, looking over the rail to the pool below, the treetops just out of reach. We join her out there, and sometimes she tells us about how we arrived, the story of how we came to be.

  She tells us about Lia, a stone in her stomach dragging her body down. She tells us about Grace, bundled in white. She tells us about Sky, as yet unimagined but already there, somewhere, in the two that came first. In the dust of the stars above them, or planted in their hearts like a seed. King drove the boat, watched out for dangers, while Mother held Grace in her arms, the burden of two small lives. Another boat was tethered behind, low in the water and almost overladen with belongings, with hope. Neither Mother nor King looked back across the waves, the world shrinking to a flat line, a smear of light and smoke. This was a promised place, is how she tells it. A place that was hers from the start.

  Grace

  Different parts of the body submerged mean different things. Different temperatures, too. Ice-bucket therapy for hands and feet, where energies concentrate. Crucial to take the heat of feeling out of ourselves. Naturally cold, I am rarely prescribed it. Icy little fish, your pet name for me. Former pet name.

  Lia has a day where she can’t stop crying, and she doesn’t try to hide it. On the contrary she sits in my bed even though I don’t want her there.

  ‘You’ll poison the air,’ I tell her, irritated.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she says, bunching the duvet around her feet. It’s a very hot day. I can see every speck of dust where it twists against the floral wallpaper, the light. Her cheeks are too red. She is fractious, always so difficult.

  Mother fills up the ice bucket, half ice, half water. The four of us are in her bathroom. Mother is in her bad-day uniform: King’s old grey T-shirt and leggings with holes at the knee. We are all in our nightgowns; we didn’t bother getting dressed today. Lia is still crying. She puts her hands in the bucket voluntarily. She wants to feel better. For a second I am moved. ‘Good girl,’ Mother murmurs. She keeps her hands on Lia’s wrists as my sister closes her eyes and grimaces. Sky drums her hands on the floor, a mosaic of blue and white, does not take her eyes off Lia’s face. Her movements become quicker. ‘Stop that, Sky,’ Mother says. Lia’s own hands move in the bucket, the clumsy sound as she stirs the ice. I watch the colour recede from her face. Air greenhouse-still, browning foliage laid on the windowsill. We are forever bringing flowers inside and forgetting about them, a failure to care about anything other than ourselves.

  Later, I go to the pool with Sky. Her body is not a burden to her, and I am jealous. She lies by the pool with her arms flat to her sides, face obscured by the sunglasses you brought back from the mainland. Her skin does not prickle like mine, too tight. There is nothing sloshing and mysterious inside her. When I sit down she puts her arm around me at once and I do not mind it. Her touch is easy and thoughtless. Sometimes when Lia grasps for me it is like we are both being tortured.

  I’m surprised Mother has not appeared yet. Normally if my sisters and I are by the pool she can’t bring herself to leave us alone. She does not go in but instead lies by the water, inert under a glistening layer of the tanning oil we aren’t allowed to use. If we’re swimming she will get as close as she can to the water without touching it. We can’t even escape her there.

  Sky takes off her sunglasses and stands up. ‘Watch,’ she says. ‘I’ve been practising.’ She walks to the end of the diving board and meets my eyes, waits until I nod, and then throws herself up into the air. She turns a somersault and hits the water cleanly. She wants nothing from me but my admiration. I give it, because if this world belongs to anybody it is her.

  ‘That was a good one,’ I say. She flops back next to me, examines the new spider veins of my legs with a sad noise. The twelve years between us are heavy with the things that a body can do or have done to it. Heartburn leaves a tidemark at the back of my throat every time I eat. My back freezes and tells me enough. I can tell she is fascinated and afraid. It has been a while since she has grown at all.

  She shifts on to her stomach to let the light catch her back. Fists up her hands in the way that I remember from when she was a baby, when she was carried everywhere in her trailing white sacks with the ceremony of a gift. And I am happy for a minute, here, with my sister, her blameless body reminding me that not everything is in vain.

  Lia

  Once every three months or so, King went out into the world to fetch supplies. It was a dangerous journey that required careful preparation of the body, so he developed an ingenious system of short sharp inhales and long exhales to propel the mainland air as far away as possible. His face became red as he practised in the ballroom and we joined in solemnly, panting in solidarity; the slatted morning sun falling over us, the curtains of the stage drawn back so that we faced its dark mouth. One of us daughters always fainted. Sometimes it was two or all of us. When that happened, King would become agitated. ‘You see?’ he would tell us as we surrounded the fallen sister, as we flicked water against skin. ‘You see how quickly you’d die out there?’

  On the day itself he would pack the boat with food and water for the journey, with the cross-stitched talismans we created, red and blue thread embroidered on remnants of old bed sheets. The patterns were abstract and mysterious, and he sold them to the husbands and brothers of sick women on the land, who saw hope or magic in the dreamy repetitions of our hands.

  King prepared himself by dressing in a white linen suit that was slightly too small, soiled despite Mother’s attempts to wash it, the underarms stained yellow. ‘Function over style,’ King told us a long time ago. Nothing else that fitted him was reflective enough. He wrapped white cotton around his hands and feet and took wide lengths of muslin to clutch against his mouth.

  We all gathered at the shore to cast him off, watching as he walked slowly down the jetty. Crying was allowed on those days because it was our father, and he was taking responsibility for our lives. We looked back behind us at our home, a home kept safe by this and other such actions, and our gratitude almost hurt. King raised his hand to us once he was safely in the boat. When he started sailing we began the breathing exercises again with extra vigour, heads and hearts light. We lifted up our arms. Were we imagining it, that haze on the distant ocean, that barrier he had to cross? Perhaps.

 
Soon he would be out of sight. He went in a straight line for a while and then turned right until he had left our bay. We knew his lungs were robust enough to filter out some of the toxins, even if his large body became weakened by the air’s assault. When Mother started crying we all patted her with our hands.

  There was no formal dinner on the leaving days. Instead we ate crackers, the last of the tins, Mother opening more than usual because new things were coming to us: household objects, and food that would keep, sacks of rice and flour and sometimes hard pieces of enamel jewellery that King would place in Mother’s palm and she would fold her fingers over. Gallons of bleach in blue canteens. Our own specific requests: soap, bandages, pencils, matches, foil. I always asked for chocolate and was always refused, but I tried every time. Magazines for Mother, handed over in three layers of paper bags and handled lightly by us sisters, who were forbidden to read them.

  The journey took three days. One day to reach the mainland, one day spent there, and back on the third. On King’s return date, we waited all day. In the morning we helped Mother prepare a Welcome Back meal, our fingers raw and quick against stained plastic chopping boards as we cut onion until it looked like rice, the transparent scatter of it browning in the pan. We concentrated on the chopping with our entire hearts, and when we had finished one onion we would look up before starting the next, gazing out of the large windows that took up most of the kitchen’s far wall, searching for the speck of his body.

  At dusk we would finally spot the boat and arrange ourselves on the shore to greet him. He returned to us reduced, and it was important for us to hide that it was difficult to see this, so we made sure to keep smiles fixed upon our faces no matter how red his eyes, the hair already covering his chin without his usual routine of a dawn shave, a pre-dinner shave. He always smelled foul. Luckily he never wanted us to touch him upon his return, not even Mother. We unloaded the boat as he dragged his body upstairs to soak in the tub, to let the scum of the outside world fall away. By the time he came back down for dinner he was a little livelier, although with deep circles under his eyes, like someone had taken a chisel to his face. And by the next day he would be back to normal, his regular size, though he still kept his distance for a few days, in case he’d brought something back, and so we were reminded of how easily damaged we were. As if we could forget it.