The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  Screeching of ducks. Flapping of unseen wings above my head. Rustling. I can’t see clearly in this half-light. The dry muffle of weight on dead leaves. Something larger than a squirrel or a fox. I am on my feet and as watchful as a blind man. A glimpse of something pale against the charcoal trunks – and then it is gone and there is no sound and I struggle to think of what there is so white in a wood such as this at night: a badger, the tail of a roe deer, an owl? Whatever it is, it is still there, the other side of the pond and it is moving again, unevenly, stealthily, but crashing now, snapping branches, brazen, advancing towards me. I am reaching for a stick, brandishing it in front of me, looking behind me, whether or not to run, where to hide. I am right to be afraid. It is Amelia.

  A rough beast slouching out of the thicket, breaking free of the thorns clutching her back, standing upright in the clearing opposite me, a wild and bedraggled thing, Amelia, her long white robe mud-stained, her auburn hair tangled, but I can make out her face and it is the face of a woman I know, Amelia. The clearing is in uproar, with every living thing taking flight. With both hands I lift the stick while stepping back, tripping on the log, trying to keep my balance. I have never met a murderer before and I am afraid, rapidly processing information, response, hypothesis, reaction: she is a killer, she probably knows I know she is a killer, she may want to hurt me, she looks unwell, I can run faster than her, I can get help, she will be caught, I will be safe.

  ‘Ruth. My Ruth, you have come at last.’ She speaks my name as she always has, so that it lasts a long time, so quietly it draws me closer.

  And for all that fight or flight, she is still Amelia, my Amelia.

  ‘Ruth. You can’t think that I would ever want to hurt you. You, you’ve meant everything to me.’

  She would never have wanted to hurt me.

  She is coming slowly towards me. I lower the stick and it falls from my hands so they are free to embrace her. We hold each other for a long time. My eyes are closed, I feel her hair, her hand is hot against my back, our breath heaves heavily together, slows, steadies. We step apart, she is smiling, thanking the Rose; I am bewildered by what I have just done. I cannot make sense of myself or of her, the state she is in, the fact that she is here at all.

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘The same way as before. Your daughter let me in.’

  Angie hadn’t mentioned her. I shake my head at her. ‘That must be a lie, Amelia. Don’t lie to me, please.’

  ‘I’ve never lied to you, Ruth. The truth is all that has ever mattered to me. The truth and the Rose, they are indistinguishable.’

  The Rose. After all that has happened, she is still talking about the Rose. I move away from her, sit back on the log, feel myself rocking, staring at the mud and the moss at my feet. I cannot make anything out of it. ‘Then how?’ is all I manage to say and I wait for her reply, but I do not look at her.

  ‘I didn’t know if I would be let in if I came on my own, I didn’t know if you’d see me, so I followed Angie. She took me by surprise, breaking in through the wood, but she was always was so irrational, wasn’t she? As soon as I slipped through the breach in the fence after her, I knew that I wouldn’t go up to the house, I would let her tell you her stories and I would just wait for you here to tell you the truth. I knew you would come eventually.’ I hear her move and then see her, kneeling down and splashing her face with the water of the Well pond. ‘All I had to do was wait and pray,’ she says.

  ‘That was hours ago.’ I am aware that my body is shaking even if my voice is not. The thought that she was here at The Well without my knowing turns my earth to quicksand.

  ‘I wasn’t going to come at all, I was weak. I was tested and I almost failed. But I was helped by a friend, the Rose spoke to me through her and she persuaded me it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Who?’

  Still kneeling, Amelia is pulling something slowly from the front of her robe. ‘She never really understood the internet, the blog, the Twitter account – all that went over her head. Hers is an old-fashioned faith, but no less strong for that,’ she says.

  I don’t know who is she talking about. Her riddles always caught me and even now she reels me in.

  ‘Sister Dorothy,’ she says, getting to her feet, holding up a blue airmail envelope.

  I stand as well. ‘Let me read it. I have been waiting so long for a letter from her.’ After all this time, Dorothy wrote to Amelia and not to me, and I am once again the outsider, on the edge of their worship circle. It seems unlikely, but here she is, Amelia, and here it is, a letter. Not unlikely – unbearable. A thought occurs to me. I hold out my hand over the distance between us. ‘It’s addressed to me, isn’t it? Give it to me, Amelia.’

  ‘No, she didn’t reply to you, Ruth. I think she was worried about the men you had surrounded yourself with. It was right she wrote to me instead.’

  Amelia’s face is impossible to read in this funeral parlour of a wood. ‘I tried to get in touch with her. I thought she might help me . . .’ I begin.

  ‘She told me all about your desperate search for answers. Priests. Ruth, the Rose was always there for you, you shouldn’t have forgotten that. But she said, how did she put it . . .’ Now Amelia is fumbling behind the tree, her hands find a small sackcloth bag which rattles as she reaches inside, then there is the rasp of a match striking a box and she lights a candle; she was prepared to worship and to wait. The flame flares up and illuminates her eyes, which seem huge, and it catches beads of sweat on her cheeks as she reads. ‘The Sisters of the Rose believe in the power of telling the truth.’ No, don’t interrupt, Ruth, let me get to the end of the letter.’ The light cowers away from her as she speaks, then steadies itself. ‘I could reply to Ruth but all I could give her would be the further agony of suspicion and unreliable evidence. You, Amelia, are the only person who can free her from the pain of unknowing because you are the only one who knows the truth.’ She moves towards me, as if to let me read it for myself. ‘She still believes, Ruth, until I read that I had almost forgotten who I was. But Dorothy reminded me. I am the one who knows the truth.’

  Amelia holds the candle to the letter, the flames reach her fingers and then she drops it so it falls to the ground where it curls up and dies. I am dizzy, I cannot see properly. I have not felt darkness more impenetrable than this and then I feel her touch as she stops me from falling and guides me back to sitting. I can smell her, the familiar lavender on pillows, but something else, something sour like the sheets stripped off the bed from a sick child, and when I raise my head she is standing very close to me.

  ‘You think she still believes?’ I am wondering out loud, taking Dorothy’s words apart, trying to read the meaning and the purpose in them.

  ‘Of course she still believes. We all do, you too, Ruth. This is just your time in the wilderness.’

  She towers over me. I have to look up to her to ask. ‘And did Dorothy know what happened here?’

  ‘Don’t torture yourself. Dorothy loved you, respected you. If she could have helped you, she would have done. She didn’t need to know everything about Lucien.’

  His name, spoken by her. Her tongue has seduced me in many different ways and I have my guilt to own in that. But to hear it now, curled around his consonants, lingering over his vowels, the time has come to cut it out. ‘But I do need to know, Amelia. Even if I hate you for it, I need to know.’

  A barn owl screeches from deep within the Wellwood; somewhere, maybe in Hedditch or further away, a rival answers back. She sits down beside me. ‘Hate, love, the back of the same circle, Ruth. You are shivering. It’s getting cold. Let me hold you.’

  ‘Don’t come any nearer, I can’t trust myself.’

  ‘You never could. It’s not me you’re trusting, trust the Rose. Take my hand.’ Grandmother’s footsteps, blindman’s buff, her hand lifts slowly towards my face, filthy nails stretch towards my cheek, the palm turns outwards and she strokes my skin with the back of her clammy fingers,
once, twice. I flinch, turning my head away, and feel the fondling feather-light and razor-sharp; my eyes close at the pain of it which is hollowing me inside out. She leans in to whisper to me, that hand now following my neck, tracing the line of my collarbone. Those same hands. I do not consent. Suddenly, all thought is gone. I am no more and no less than a somatic nervous system, the hippocampus knows this woman well and every nerve in my body screams no. Legs push me to standing, hand hits her, slaps her, arms push her, teeth would bite her if they could, eyes see the shape of her rise, fall, stumble and ears register the slump of her onto the dead ground.

  She lies motionless for so long, I wonder if I have really hurt her. The candle and her body transform this meeting into a wake. That would be her parting gift. Her body lies face down amongst the dull leaves. I creep forward, my heart loud in my head, I crouch down and there, yes, I can see the rapid, shallow rise and fall in her shoulders and in the silence of the overheated night, I can just hear the rasp of breath. Finally, like some mythical animal, she wakes. With one arm at a time, she places her wrists bent against the mud and pushes her body back onto her haunches, rocks a little, kneels up.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask how I did it, why I did it?’ she whispers.

  She is licking her lips, her face is ashen. She retches. She is suffering. I could hold her beautiful hair away from her sickness, rest my hands on her heaving shoulders. She suddenly looks so weak, but now she is scrabbling again for the bag, shaking it. It rattles and I catch a glimpse of white enamel and realise she has a mug. She crawls towards the pond, dips it in the water, drinks and drinks and retches and drinks again. When she has slaked her thirst, she gives thanks to the Rose for the water and offers me the cup.

  When I shake my head and refuse her communion, she sags, apparently exhausted, and I have a moment to think. Now I understand what Dorothy has done for me. She created this moment, produced and directed this scene from afar, her letter auditioned Amelia for the part and she took it. I know my lines, I just need to get over the stage fright and speak them.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  The sound of the water being poured back from the mug into the Wellspring is loud, but the silence is even louder. Slowly, very slowly, she stands, the last drops fall from the cup and the candle goes out.

  ‘Why?’ I repeat, but the question frightens me and I move away from her answer, around the other side of the pond which is less familiar to me. I don’t know where the roots lie or where the badgers’ sets open beneath your feet.

  She follows me, calling. ‘Because of how the Rose meant it to be. Because it was the truth. Because of you.’ She catches up with me, but stops short of my arm’s length and drops her voice, pushing her sentences out one by one. ‘I’m not a murderer, Ruth. Does the world count God a child-killer because he sacrificed his only son?’ She swallows, wets her mouth, labouring her words. ‘I didn’t kill Lucien, Ruth, I freed him. He didn’t suffer. I gave him more than you could ever give him. When the water closed over him, that was the moment The Well was free, and like the Rose of Jericho he was dead but then he lived, he flowered. Happy, Ruth, he is so happy now, I know. The Rose loves me for that.’ Again, she has to pause, again she struggles to breathe. ‘And you. The Rose loves us both.’

  Amelia plunges into the black font that is the Wellpond and it resists her, slapping the mossed stones in anger at the disturbance. ‘Today is the day of the Assumption.’ She cups the water, scoops it, throws it into the air over and over again, but this is a sunless chapel, there is no light to catch the falling drops and this time, there is no rainbow. ‘And you, you were free, Ruth, to be who you are meant to be, to be with the Rose, with me.’ Like a decaying statue in a fountain, lit by an uncertain moonlight, she stands with her arms raised in the air, her head pulled back by the river of her hair in that familiar ecstasy.

  ‘O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall she be, that rewards thee as thou hast served us.

  ‘Happy shall she be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’

  As if someone has cut the strings, it is suddenly over and she lurches and slugs herself back out of the pond, leaving a wet trail glistening, a pale hump sludged with mud from the pond floor and smeared with weed. She has no weapons left; I am still standing.

  ‘Amelia, he was just a little boy.’ I look down at her, all drama gone, just the one fact left. ‘That wasn’t right. By the laws of any God, that cannot have been right.’

  She reaches out to grasp my ankles, but I am too quick.

  ‘And do you know what? I don’t know what happened to me when I met you, what I felt for you, but I can tell you this, it was never love.’ It cannot be hate now either, I think, as I listen to her sobbing, otherwise there will be nothing left of me. I squat down beside her. ‘Amelia,’ I start, ‘we were all mistaken . . .’

  But she is not listening to me. She is staring through me, into the gloom. She interrupts me. ‘Look at them all coming, between the trees.’

  There is no one there, no one at all. Not even the sound of anyone.

  Amelia continues to call and point. ‘They are all coming because they believe. The Rose of Jericho is flowering for them. Do you still believe in me?’

  Ignore her, I tell myself, this is all madness, but she repeats her question again and again, becoming more and more agitated, reaching for me, grasping, clutching.

  ‘Do you still believe?’

  The fear I felt when I first saw her returns. I need help, I need the guards down here, but if I go to get them, even if I go just far enough up the hill to scream for them, she will be gone when they arrive. She will have slid back under the surface and no one will believe me that she was ever here at all. It seems impossible that she could escape, but everything she has ever done has been impossible.

  In the empty space left by her hallucinations and my indecision comes a strange warbling, a foreign, primeval sound like night-frogs or crickets in a hot climate. I can sense that Amelia is also unnerved and that the two of us are transfixed by this high, insistent song. It is not clear where it is coming from. It has moved. First above our heads, then silent, now there it is again. Whatever it is seems to be on the boundary fence which divides The Well from the rest of the world and its persistent call rises and falls without ceasing, like a siren. There it is, it is a bird, taking wing, silhouetted against the moon which has arrived like a visitor at the edge of the wood and I know from its flight song, the hawkish pitch and the glide that this is the nightjar, returned, the Puck of a bird, the goatsucker. It is gone. Instantly, I know what I must do. In an instinctive act of faith, I run at that space, at the fence, I thrust my tagged wrists through the barbed wire, the electric shock thumps me and throws me onto my back, my head hits the ground, there is blood and gashes on my arms, but even through this pain and confusion I can hear the one thing that matters: across the fields, through the night, the alarms are screaming for attention.

  Dizzy, disoriented, I use a low branch to pull myself to my feet. She is still down. ‘It’s over, they’re coming now.’ The sickness recedes and rises again and although my blood is dripping onto the rust-brown of last year’s leaves, I have found a sort of unfamiliar strength. I shout, ‘You’ll be arrested.’ I see her future, it is pathetic and its pathos feeds my reeling bitterness. ‘I’ll tell you what will happen then. You’ll serve your time in prison, but not like this,’ I throw my arms out to the forest, ‘not like my beautiful prison. You’ll have a toilet bolted to the floor and dinner on a plastic tray.’

  She is laughing; I am right, so I am crying. The forest has never heard such a cacophony: two women, by a pond, in the darkness.

  ‘You’ll be nobody in there, Amelia. For years. Forgotten. No visitors. A nobody.’ I continue my damnation of her, but I am not sure she can hear me. My voice is weakening, my head spinning, but although I seem to be losing control, I am not imagining it, there is shouting. The guards. Two minutes at the most, they’ll be here
. Has she taken some drug, to be like this, laughing so loudly, so sick? They are approaching, the beams of their torches are sweeping between the trees, lighting her up, darkening her again – now you see her, now you don’t. They will take her away and I will never see her again.

  I realise that what I really want to do is to come face to face with her one last time. I trip over branches and stones to reach her before they do, I fall on her, bind my wrists with her long, wet hair, raise her head, pull her sick face close.

  I spit at her lips. ‘Judas.’

  The clearing was filled with light so hard I had to turn away, and behind the light were the shapes of the guards, guns raised, commanding, demanding that I freeze, that I stand apart, that I let go. It is not that easy. I cannot let go. Out of the shadows, a boy steps forward as if to help, but I call out, ‘No!’ I will let go. One by one, I extract my blood-stained fingers until her hair falls free and I am left staring at the auburn strands in my hand which are all that is left. I have let go. We both get to our feet.

  ‘This,’ I say, ‘is Sister Amelia.’

  There is confusion – Amelia says nothing, I have nothing left to say. Boy is explaining that Anon has brought only one set of handcuffs, which I suppose were meant for me, but on Three’s instructions he moves towards Amelia.

  ‘Wait!’ she commands and Anon steps back. Of course. She bends low. I step back. The men are tense. She is breaking off the ends of small branches from the undergrowth behind her, quite methodically, almost like a woman picking flowers for her table. She stands back up, very slowly; she is high again now, like she used to be, she has presence again now, like she used to have at those times of prayer and worship and I see it in the way we are all still and I feel it in the way we are all waiting for her next move. I am left in the wings, all the lights are on her, setting her hair on fire against the white marble of her face and neck, shining through her wet robe and illuminating her breasts, her ribs, her thighs. She picks berries from the branches, brings them to her lips, kisses them with her eyes closed and then smiles at me, holds the kiss out to me, unfurls her long fingers and offers me the fruit. I clasp my bleeding fists together, keep my dry mouth tight. I know what grows at The Well and where.