The Well (42 page)

‘Get out! Amelia! Amelia, there’s a fire!’ Her voice screeched like a little owl across the night.

Behind her, the others had fled their caravans and were stamping on the fire trails like Victorian pictures of savages, etched in black and white, with colour added later, semi-naked humans leaping in the flames of their heresy, beating the ground with coats and blankets in a frantic choreography.

Eve was shouting ‘Water! Get water!’ and running with a plastic container in each hand towards the tap. There was not enough water in the world, not even at the rain-blessed Well, to quench a fire such as this.

Ah, at last – Amelia. Dorothy was grabbing her, shouting at her to jump, not to step on the metal, then they were down on the smouldering grass and the two women with their heads bowed and their hands over their mouths hunched away from the flaming caravan which had opened its home to the red stranger at the door and invited him in to rape and plunder at will. The explosion of the first gas canister blew them off their feet. I forgot about the
gas. There will be another explosion, I thought. There were two canisters. Run, Dorothy, run. The second caught them just as they scrabbled as far as the other Sisters. How they huddled in fear, so close to their altar.

There was Eve. The water from the tap was pouring over the top of the carrier, running over her feet, trickling its way as a moonlit stream down the hill, in and out of the tufts of grass, inching towards the blazing camp. But Eve was not staring at the fire; she was pointing at me, screaming to someone, anyone.

‘It’s Ruth, up there, it was Ruth . . .’

There was Jack, safe then, taking Eve by the arm and dragging her down the hill, but no one could tackle this inferno. The metal had become so hot that it was crying out as it contorted into impossible shapes of agony, sometimes screaming like an animal in pain, sometimes folding in on itself in silent submission. Acrid smoke blossomed out of the van, dressed up for a night out in lurid, chemical colours, sparks like bling glittering the nightclub. The Sisters had now surged towards the hub and were heaving at the bricks blocking the wheels, but Amelia stood aside, arms high above her head, holding the Rose aloft. The Rose would burn well.

Blue lights to the side of me. Two fire engines, bumping over the rough ground towards me – toys I would buy for Lucien to put at the bottom of his stocking – the crew, helmets and gloves and ladders, all Lego men. The men locked their plastic arms around Amelia’s bare shoulders and pushed her away until she was nothing more than a woman, wrapped in a blanket, standing on the sidelines of an episode of
Casualty
.

Blue lights behind me now. A figure was running up the hill towards the track, picked out in the headlights, waving his arms as two ambulances drew to a halt, a police van behind them. They left their engines running. The police got out of the van wearing bullet-proof vests like an American thriller. On those programmes they have a word for what they’re doing: spreading out.

The play had unfolded much as I thought it would, from my
seat up in the gods: the cast were minimised humans on the giant stage of earth, air, fire and water. It was all reduced to this.

‘Ruth!’

They called again and again, but I did not reply.

‘I need you to reply, Ruth, to know you can hear me. Can you hear me, Ruth?’

I could hear them, but I did not need words any longer.

The man’s voice was like the rustle of a bag of sweets in the row behind, irritating but irrelevant to the main action. Two, three men were very close to me. The clouds pulled back the curtains on the moon and their shadows lengthened around me.

They took my body up the hill, but I left my eyes behind, watching. The Sisters saw what was happening; they were surging forwards into the searchlights, stretching out their arms as if they could reach me, falling on the ground, weeping. ‘Ruth!’ they cried, ‘Chosen one of the Rose.’

Their arms directed me forwards, my head swivelled round to look back, below, in the sodden, emptied camp. Amelia was alone, still holding the Rose aloft above the embers.

The doors of the ambulance open. The play is finished. We are outside the theatre.

I scream. ‘Stop them!’

I am all fury and physical rage, but they have a great many hands to hold down my limbs. The needle slides into my arm. The waters close over my head.

S
o it was that The Well waved goodbye to me, standing with hands on hips, watching me taken off, drugged and deranged, by men in uniform. Then, not much more than two months later, when the world and its justice had had its day with me, The Well watched me return, peeped through the kitchen window at the prison van bouncing down the drive, observed the guards releasing the handcuffs, then opened the front door for me, made my bed for me, welcomed me home and kept me here for one hundred and twenty-seven days so far, tucked up tight like a long-stay patient, unwilling to make predictions about a prognosis for my particular disease.

Anon’s shadow blocks the evening sunlight which was lighting up the straw as I am forking manure, ready to bring the cow in for the evening milking. There is real pleasure in my new duties and routines and real resentment when it is disturbed. ‘Do you want something, Anon? I wasn’t aware that you were keen on cowpats?’

Anon keeps a safe distance. ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger. The gardener wants a word about the vegetable plot, asked me to let you know, that’s all.’

Propping the fork up against the wheelbarrow, I pause. ‘The gardener? Do you mean Boy?’

Anon laughs a lot at his own joke; he has put on so much weight doing his indolent job at my bountiful Well that his belly shakes. ‘That’s the one,’ he says and plods off, wheezing and coughing and calling behind him. ‘He’s out there now.’

It seems a strange message, unusual enough to make me leave the stable and go to the fence in the orchard. I call over to Boy, ‘I gather you’ve got a problem?’

Boy turns quickly and jumps to his feet, sees me, looks around, beckons me in. ‘You’ll need to take a closer look,’ he says. ‘I hope Anon has gone in.’

‘I don’t garden, Boy, you know I won’t come in.’

‘It will be worth it, I promise,’ he says.

Reluctantly, I push the little wooden gate, remembering how it sticks at halfway open, halfway closed, because we put the hinges on the wrong way round all that time ago and I stand like a foreigner amidst the rows of orange-flowering runner beans. ‘Well?’

Boy slips me a letter. It says it is for a Mr and Mrs A. Ranger at an address which is unfamiliar to me. But the handwriting, that I do recognise, the looping R is the same as the way it used to be written extra large on birthday cards, with the rest of the words tailing away. If proof were needed of Boy’s loyalty, then this would be it; he did post the letter to Mark and he has with him a reply.

‘That’s my parents’ address,’ Boy is explaining. ‘I slipped a note in with your letter, telling Mark that was the best way to get a reply to you if he didn’t want it opened. Mum’s old-fashioned, no emails for her. She still writes to me every couple of weeks and sends stuff. I asked her to forward it on, if a reply ever came.’

There will be time enough to thank him, but at this moment, I am drawn to the handwriting, thinking how forensic pathology would be able to tell me how he was feeling when he wrote it, maybe even where he was, the pollen in the air caught in minute samples on paper, sealed in the glue on the envelope, which he must have licked. I sit myself down slowly on an old log. Of all the places
to read a reply from Mark, here I am, in his beloved garden, at my feet tiny fragments of glass still glinting in the mud, the shell of the greenhouse behind me.

Now I have only these words.

So he is alive – and well, as the cliché goes. And my Angie, nothing terrible has happened to Angie. Nothing else, that is. I re-read those lines again and again. ‘She is safe’, ‘she is not ready’ and ‘we are close’. Where does that leave me? At The Well, of course. I remember Boy is there.

‘Read it.’ I offer it to Boy.

‘You want me to?’

‘Yes.’

He wipes the mud from his hands on his jeans and takes the letter. I watch his face while he reads, the way he turns over, flicks back, shakes his head.

I want a second opinion. ‘What do you think?’

‘What do you mean, what do I think?’

‘What is he trying to say?’

Boy passes me back the letter and runs his hands through his hair. ‘There’s nothing new in what he says, is there? I mean, I Googled some stuff when I was on leave, picked an internet cafe where I could use a different account, but to be quite honest, it wasn’t worth it. Mark, Hugh, me, none of us have come up with anymore outside The Well than you have stuck here.’

‘So what’s he saying?’ I repeat, although the answer is clear to me.

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’ Boy picks up the spade and jabs it into the soil.

‘Yes, you do, Boy.’ I fold the letter over again and again. There’s something about only ever being able to fold a piece of paper six times, no matter how big it is to start with, everything always ends
up in the same impossible conundrum. ‘Hugh, now Mark, it’s clear, everyone thinks it was me. That’s what he’s saying.’

‘I think he wants you to think that it was you. What’s always puzzled me is why don’t you ever think it was him?’

He waits for me to answer, but I am exercising my right to remain silent, so he continues. ‘You do think it was him, don’t you? Sometimes, anyway. It’s just you don’t dare say it out loud.’

Shaking my head, I tell Boy he just doesn’t understand: this was Mark, a gardener like him, this was what he loved; I wave crazily at the ordered ranks of courgettes. Mark wasn’t mad, he wasn’t evil, he wasn’t violent . . .

‘So what happened to the greenhouse?’ Boy looks pointedly at the ruin.

‘I drove him to that. Before we came here, he was different, he was . . .’ I falter.

‘A paedophile?’

I have to get out of this garden. At the gate, I turn round and tell Boy. ‘I never believed he was a paedophile!’

‘Then.’

The monosyllable takes its place in this outdoor theatre of a courtroom, the implicit question raises its eyebrow at the bench, but stays silent.

Boy follows me out of the garden, catches me, takes the letter from my hand and pushes it out of sight into his pocket. We walk as far as the front of the cottage; there is no one around and we continue our legal wrangling by the back door.

‘Ruth, I could argue, objectively, that he was all those things. And – no, let me go on – and who else would Lucien have gone with? He had the chance to dump the green jumper, the wet clothes, the rose necklace, on his early morning trip to buy a newspaper, which you yourself said was totally out of character.’