The Water Cure(6)

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.