The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  Boy sticks his head around the door, looks a little taken aback and I fall onto the chair, laughing. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he says. ‘We go off duty tomorrow. One month on, one week off.’

  Rain comes. Duccombe burns. Boy goes. I stay. World turns. I skulk off to my bed, out of control once more.

  Three relief guards have arrived, ill at ease. One of them is a woman and I am not sure what to make of that. I spy on her through the upstairs window, notice how her hair is scraped back off her face and pinned under her cap, how her feet look as big as the men’s in the regulation boots. She is sour-faced and brusque when she comes into the house to complete the battery beep test on my tags and I am relieved by her monosyllabic responses to my attempts at conversation. I thought I was ready for a bit of female company, but I was wrong. All three of them keep to the barn when they are not on duty, and when they are on duty they adhere to rigid routines, patrolling the boundaries, testing the alarms, inspecting the house. It is not enough to be known by three soldiers, male or female. I used to have friends, a family; I had neighbours, I had followers, for God’s sake – no irony intended. I was a person in the middle of a web. But all that was cut with one stroke of the knife, and here I am alone, my very own living Gordian knot. The worst is that I don’t know if anyone has tried to contact me or not. I grow more and more suspicious of this regime; someone out there must be thinking of me.

  Sometimes I hear people, a lorry reversing somewhere on the lane and someone shouting directions. Once I heard shots and then saw two men walking alongside the hedge which runs between the Great Nunton Lane and the old parsley farm. They had guns and every now and again they stopped and took aim and the valley cracked as they fired. Without beaters, the birds have no reason to fly, so I don’t know what they hoped to kill. Today, I can hear wedding bells ringing in the village. We didn’t have bells. We got married in a registry office, with our favourite duet from Porgy and Bess playing on a CD in the corner of the soulless room, vows and the weight of his mother’s lifelong absence sitting on Mark’s suited shoulders. I overheard Mark’s uncle saying how they had always thought Mark would take over their farm because he loved it so much as a child, spent all his holidays there with them, and then my dad agreeing with him that there was no money in farming and being a lawyer, that was the way forward for a man with a kiddie on the way, the two of them standing outside the hotel, stamping their feet and flicking the red ash into the slush.

  It snowed at our wedding, a desultory sort of snow that fell from the aimless sky that day as if it was just a way of getting rid of the leftovers, and I realised that everything Mark had ever planned was being suffocated in white.

  The peal continues to ring across the valley, but even that song is not strong enough to bring me to prayer. Births, marriages, deaths. Angie was born three months after the wedding and three years after that we sat in another soulless room hearing it confirmed that Mark would never be able to have children of his own. Neither a farmer nor a father be. They made a lot of that during the investigation, as if not being able to have your own son would make you more likely to abuse other people’s, or murder other people’s, I suppose. It seemed a ridiculous theory then, but what happens to a man who loses his dreams, not just once or twice, but over and over again?

  The bells have stopped. The silence cannot hold. It is replaced by the relief guards conducting the weekly alarm test, the siren sending the crows circling and screeching over the treetops. Even the birds fight over our fields – the robins attacking the dunnocks, the rooks nipping the wings of the buzzards in flight – but none of them can take on the helicopters. The beating of their metal blades whip up my day-sleep memories.

  The eggs were warm and perfect spheres in my cold hands. We had spoken about marking our first anniversary at The Well, but the time for celebration seemed to have passed. Even so, in my head I was planning soufflé as a special dinner, for a surprise or a salvage operation, I’m not sure which. The sound of blades slicing the morning sky made me look up and there was a helicopter hovering, a man with a camera leaning out at an angle. It made me jump, I think, and as I grabbed the post from the washing line to steady myself, I smashed the eggs, I do remember that. Then, moments later, in the kitchen, washing my hands and sponging down my trousers, Mark came in and flung the paper on the table.

  ‘Wonder Well. For Christ’s sake, look at this headline, Ruth, look at it!’

  I still have that cutting. It looks small as things of import often do when you revisit them.

  Wonder Well? It was an aerial colour photo. It needed to be, because its sole purpose was to highlight the difference between our land and that of the surrounding countryside. The land of milk and honey vs. the land of Sodom and Gomorrah. Our house was in the centre of the photo, tilting slightly and you could see the drive carving between the two top fields, although the gradient isn’t clear from above. The Land Rover is parked up by the chickens for some reason; it never was usually. I don’t know what was going on to make that necessary, maybe we’d been lugging some new posts up for the fencing because we’d lost a lot of hens to foxes around that time.

  ‘What on earth . . .?’ I stared at the photo. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t read it yet. No need to go running to your precious government adviser now, is there? The whole world will be fascinated by our back garden.’

  ‘How did the press . . .?’

  ‘The same way it always does. By sticking its snout in the gutter.’ Mark left, the door slammed and moments later I could hear the whir of the chainsaw and the scream as it bit into the logs. Mark had taken about as much as he could with the media coverage of the tribunal and this would be more than he could cope with. Although I felt keenly for him, I was also wondering how many more of his last straws I could carry before this camel’s back broke. I spread the paper on the kitchen table and began to read. The caption said that only two weeks after the disturbances at Duccombe, their investigative reporter revealed another place mysteriously unaffected by the drought: The Well. It referred readers to the full article on pages 4 and 5.

  Then the phone rang.

  It was the first of a relentless barrage of calls: The Mail, The Express, the Scotsman, Figaro, the New York Times, the Phnom Penh Post. The e-mail inbox filled as I watched it, the bold black type of the unread messages pouring down the page like an oil spill. The answer machine lived its own existence in the corner of the kitchen, dutifully recording old friends, the press, weirdos, PR agencies, until the messaging service was full. Eventually, I stormed around the house ripping plugs from their sockets, watching the blinking green lights of communication with the outside world flicker and go dead. We turned the mobiles onto silent and then when their crazed vibrating dances drove us mad, we turned them off completely. Outside, the helicopters continued to drone overhead. Mark shouted at them to fuck off and they nodded and bobbed in acknowledgement before leaving in their own time.

  Not so much a Well as a sieve. We could not keep them out. The first car jolted down the track. It brought a couple from Birmingham on their way to visit their son; set out ever so early this morning, they said, heard it on the radio, had a bit of time to spare, thought they’d come and see what the place looked like and who would have thought it? As they turned round, they met two more cars arriving: one was a local journalist, the other a water-diviner who had driven all the way from Essex, and behind them, more cars. Impotent, speechless, I hid behind the kitchen window watching Mark leaning into the drivers’ windows to talk to them, pointing at the main road and shaking his head. Strangers, all of them. If only one of them had been Angie, or a friend from London, or anyone I knew, who I could talk to, if only I wasn’t so scared of anyone and anything that came from beyond our Well.

  By four o’clock we had locked the gate at the top of the drive. The wood was slightly rotten and the bottom bar broke when we yanked it free from the long grass and weeds entangled around it. We padlocked it
to the metal post, aware that it was a feeble defence against this new army of the curious. It was the first barricade.

  The next couple of days were bitter and we lived tense from both cold and the threat of invasion. The stove in the sitting room was working overtime, we were getting through over a basket of wood a day and our last lamb to be born, a weakling, was in a cardboard box in front of the Rayburn, her head heavy compared to her unsteady legs. The ewes were still in the barn; Mark was fretting, wanting to get them and their lambs out onto the spring grass, but he was worried they might not be safe. I liked them there, protected and smelling of vigils with flasks of coffee and torches, nights spent rubbing the lambs into life, seeing our flock give birth to our future. On the third evening after the article, we had been going to relax for the first time, there had been fewer calls, fewer trespassers and we decided to make a conscious effort to toast the success of our first year as shepherds before getting a good night’s sleep.

  ‘Don’t even think about logging on,’ said Mark.

  ‘Don’t answer it.’

  We did turn on the news – The Well featured briefly, pushed to the end by a fire at one of the British Museum’s warehouses which could not be contained because of the low water pressure. Watching forced us to talk about our new state of siege. I tried to be the positive one, saying that they’d all go away, that today’s news was tomorrow’s fish and chips, as we had discovered before. Mark said that might be the case if the rest of the world wasn’t dying of thirst and had just discovered their nearest oasis. I told him not to be so melodramatic, he told me not to stick my head quite so far in the desert sand. It sounds like an Aesop’s Fable, the tale of the badger and the ostrich.

  I took my own plate to the kitchen to wash it up and stared out through the window into the darkness, my own reflection distorted in the panes and beyond that a full moon making the bare branches of the oak smooth like a skeleton. Turning on the tap, I stood watching the water run in a single stream from the tap to the white sink and down the plug. Perhaps if I left it long enough, there would be a spluttering and a coughing, then the flow would stutter before dwindling to a trickle, a drop, a nothing. Then the phone would stop ringing, we could unlock the gates and be as dry and as desperate as everyone else. But the water ran on.

  When Mark had gone to bed, I gave up pretending to cope. I took the bottle out of the fridge and my head out of the sand. I logged on. I learned a lot about online porn addicts when Mark was accused, did research about what sort of men looked at images like that and why, just so I could be doubly sure that it couldn’t be true of him, I suppose. The social science articles told me how impossible such men find it to log off and here I was in the same predicament: the laptop became a puking monster, an excretor of filth, but I could not get enough of the poison.

  Condemnationuk. A place, it boasted, where the citizens of the UK could openly condemn those who were ruining society. It was one of the most popular sites at that time, with rants and diatribes about illegal immigrants drinking all our water, videos from homemade CCTV cameras showing the children next door playing with a bucket. I would never have gone there, had it not been for the alert on my screen:

  You’re popular today on the following sites: condemnationuk, watchthis, spotthespongers, newsday, weakeningplanet, smalholderweekly, waterwater; natmeteo . . .’

  The list was endless. I went to the first.

  ‘F***ing spongers like this should be locked up and allowed to die of dehydration.’

  ‘Selfish drought-breakers.’

  ‘How stupid are these farmers? Did they really think no one would notice? Duh. People that thick don’t deserve to have lives, let alone water.’

  ‘Wait for it. It’s going to be the Good Lord who has blessed them. I bet they are perverts and paedophiles.’

  ‘No need to bet. The owner was done for kiddy porn. That’s why he left London.’

  I felt sick. If the locals didn’t know before, they would now and it wouldn’t matter how loudly we shouted from the hilltops that he was innocent; all anyone ever hears is the accusation, not the acquittal. And God knows, they hated us enough already without more fuel for their fire. I continued clicking.

  ‘This is our water, not theirs. The Government should take it over NOW. If not, we will do it for them.’

  ‘F*** off the land and DON’T COME BACK.’

  Then I reached the comment where I overdosed.

  ‘I know these people. Their daughter’s a druggy and a whore and their grandson’s a moron.’

  Who wrote that? Surely no one who knew us could write that? But if they didn’t know us, then how did they know about Angie and Lucien? All at once these people were not invisible, they materialised. I could hear them scratching at the keyboard, I could see their faces leering at me through the screen, they were crawling out of the internet and I smelled their threats as they breathed down my neck. So many of them and me on my own: I could not think of one person I could call on for help. Transfixed, I scrolled through my Contacts: Angie, Autorepair, Becky and Richard, on through Mark (office), Sophie (mob), Youth Addictions Support, Zahira . . . I hammered the keyboard with my fists, smashing the letters and symbols for what they no longer offered; over and over again I beat them, beat back the baying crowds.

  Mark must have been woken by my hysteria. When he found me, I had thrown the laptop across the room, where it had smashed a mug, but lay still alive on the floor. Between sobs, I tried to tell him that they could not be contained, that these people would get together, they would be here, smashing our windows and slaughtering our lambs – tonight – they were probably out there now and there was no one in the world who could help us. I was hard to hold, but Mark was so strong by then. His pyjama top smelled of shower gel and sleep and as he rested his chin on my head, I could feel the steady beat of the heart of a man who was now physically fit.

  ‘What do you mean, there’s no one? I’ll look after you,’ he murmured. ‘I love you. You don’t know how much I love you.’

  There was a time when I thought the risk lay in the fact that he loved me too much; now, after such a long silence, I know he loves himself more.

  Mark turned the laptop back on. ‘This stuff isn’t helpful, Ruth,’ he said. He brought up The Ardingly Well Facebook page and went straight to Settings. ‘There,’ he said. ‘One click, gone. Deleted. We can do without crap like that just making things worse.’

  Later he asked me a question. ‘What came over you to trawl through that sewage? Why didn’t you just log off when you saw what it was like?’

  Because there was a quality of connectedness for me when I was online that was both affirmative and addictive, regardless of the voltage. That is the truth. The psychiatrists talked about the third person in our marriage. Sometimes I think that person was the web.

  When Hugh comes this week, for my so-called communion, he finds me less jolly company.

  ‘It smells beautiful here,’ he says, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. He puts his weekly offering of fresh milk on the table and then pulls from his bag a bunch of early yellow roses, losing their petals and smelling of the piano room at home when I was a child. My mother was a piano teacher. Mrs Alysha Rose. Individual Piano Tuition, Beginners to Grade 8. The card in the newsagent’s was confident, but my main task as her daughter was to tell the little girls clutching brand new, bright pink music cases and their huffing mothers leaning out of 4x4s to go away because she wasn’t well. Again? they would say. Again. She devoted her life and her health to ‘giving me a little brother or sister’ by whatever means science could offer. At least that’s how she framed her quest. My father devoted his life to her and that meant working every hour God sent to finance her dream. It never happened. She died at fifty from an excess of procedures, breast cancer and a lack of meaning in her life beyond the menopause. I like to imagine her reunited with all her unborn foetuses, happy at last. The smell of rose petals and furniture polish . . . that is all it takes to bring back
her unmourned absence.

  ‘Don’t roses make people happy?’ he comments. ‘If you look in the mirror you might catch yourself smiling.’

  ‘I smashed the mirror the other night,’ I told him, wiping the cobwebs from a pottery vase and filling it with water for the roses. ‘I kept looking at this gaunt old witch who lives in there. I can’t take my eyes off myself.’

  ‘If you’ll forgive an old man for his forwardness, you’re a good-looking woman.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I was becoming like a budgerigar that spends all day on his perch, pecking at his own reflection in the hope of connecting with his own gene pool. I’ve been thinking a lot about connections,’ I add, leading him out into the orchard to the old bench. ‘Do you use the internet?’

  ‘The internet? Of course.’

  He sits; I stay standing.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I may be old, Ruth, but I’m not totally decrepit. Why?’

  ‘I miss it. I miss it and I don’t miss it.’

  ‘It brought a lot of trouble to your family, I understand.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I had my briefing papers coming here, about you and your husband. Maybe they thought the priest needed protecting against the molester for a change, rather than the other way around.’

  I laugh, in recognition of his effort. ‘It was ridiculous. At least I used to think it was ridiculous.’ I pull a bough down towards me and pick some apple blossom. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘That your husband was accused of having viewed child pornography on his work laptop. That he was suspended, fought the allegations and was found to be innocent.’