The Well Read online

  All tethers were cut. I lost myself in hours and hours of obsessive searching online, believing if I followed enough links that somewhere out there in the billions of bytes of information must be the truth about that night. Compass-less in a maze of irrelevant information, I would wake up and find myself on a blog from Japan, written by a grieving mother whose son had been decapitated by a monster with a samurai sword; on a message board for victims of crime in Adelaide, South Australia; on a site which boasted more than ten thousand images of dead children. How I got to these places, I don’t know; leaving them was even harder. I returned again and again to the social networking page which had sprung up in Lucien’s name, featuring a photo of him from when he was travelling with Angie, standing in a dry river bed, building a tower of pebbles. Over three thousand messages had been left on his page. Once I started to read them, I could not stop and I would wake some hours later, the laptop out of battery, me out of my mind.

  Finally, I decided to face my own demons. I brought up the site of the Sisters of the Rose and scrolled down to Sister Amelia’s blog.

  Pray for the Chosen One, for the Judas preyed on her!

  He pretended to minister to her!

  He offered her food, but starved her!

  He gave her his hand in marriage, but isolated her from those who truly loved her!

  Like all men, he pretended to nurture, but sought to conquer!

  He spoke the language of science and was deaf to the word of God!

  I clicked on a date from earlier in the week.

  Sisters of the Rose, do not believe the propaganda you are reading in the world’s press. The prophet is never recognised in her own country! The authorities would have you believe that a Chosen one is guilty, but I know, we know she loves like a woman. And the authorities would have you believe that the Rose commands the Sisters to rid The Well of boys, but I know, we know only a man would have the poison in his mind to kiss a child, then kill him. Pray, Sisters of the Rose, that the Judas of The Well will be unmasked!

  It dawned on me it was Mark they were talking about and I seemed to hear his voice, before the funeral, protesting: ‘I can’t live with people saying I am a child-killer.’ His voice is cracking. ‘I loved Lucien. He was very special to me.’ I was worried he might kill himself, but he didn’t, did he?

  I sat captivated by an image of me at The Well on the screen, my hands cupped and water falling through them like diamonds, my eyes closed in ecstasy. Me and yet not me. A virtual me. A version of me. I clicked on the link to my ‘Word of the Day’, expecting the last entry to be the day before Lucien’s death, but my writings had apparently continued.

  Friday: These things I know, sisters – that the boy I loved is with the Rose and that the drought in my heart will be touched by rain!

  Saturday: Why do the Mothers allow such suffering? The child orphaned in the Tsunami asks the waves. The boy who has lost his sister to malaria asks the mosquito. The wife widowed by a bomb in a bus asks the politicians. Mothers, why such suffering? I have no answer, but only to say that just as each of you suffers and has known suffering, so do I! I suffer with you!

  Sunday: Be ready, Sisters, for soon I will issue an invitation. The rain falls more strongly than ever! Be ready, Sisters, and stay awake for the calling!

  I did not write this drivel. I was not certain of much, but I was certain of that. The only person who could have written it – tried to impersonate me – was Sister Amelia. I had read enough of her missives over time to recognise her prose anywhere, all first person and exclamation marks. Pulling on an old coat from the back passage, I struck out across the field until I reached the single oak where I had first seen the Sisters all those months ago. Beneath me, the caravans were like the pale humps of grotesque sheep perverting my pastures. There was a light on in Sister Jack and Sister Eve’s van and I imagined them reading the Song. I could go down there, I thought, and join them, stepping into the warmth and sickly smell of the Calor gas heater. Jack would make me a mug of camomile tea; Eve would shift up on the little bench seat so I could squeeze in, and nothing much would have changed. We would talk. Was their faith still strong? Surely their paradise must have withered and rotted as mine had. Perhaps that’s what they were doing down there, in their cells – planning their escape. My eyes were drawn to the hub, where although there was no candle, there was the recognisable white stare of the computer screen, and I thought of Sister Amelia now as a guard, not a guardian, directing the blinding searchlight of her campaign into every corner of each woman’s doubt. It occurred to me that what she was doing in there was quite possibly typing up my so-called ‘Word for the Day’.

  The only thing that mattered to me was to stop her. Stumbling down the hill in the dark, faster and faster, I slipped on the wet grass. I got up again, though my ankle was painful and my head swam for a second. I hurtled on, the ground pounding up through my legs until I burst through the door and into the suffocating hub. Amelia was there, her hair loose, lying back against the pillows on her bed, with the laptop propped up on her bare knees and her man-sized shirt hanging loose and low over her bare breasts, her photo of the two of us Blu-tacked to the wall beside her.

  ‘Ruth, you’ve come. I knew you would come back to me.’

  Amelia was laughing, rising towards me, when I flung myself on the bed, snatched the picture and tore it in two, grabbed the laptop and threw it across the tiny space so it hit the table and landed on the floor. I got off the bed, picked it up and hit the delete button over and over again. ‘Gone! Gone!’ I screamed.

  Then Eve was in the doorway, her hands at her face. ‘What’s wrong?’ she cried.

  ‘This is,’ I screamed, tearing paper from the printer and screwing up the pages. ‘You are.’

  Amelia stood, rigid, her face now inscrutable.

  ‘You are,’ I repeated, pointing at Amelia directly. ‘You are a liar, a spin doctor!’

  Amelia spoke slowly. ‘I think I know. It must be the “Word of the Day”.’

  ‘Which I didn’t write, did I, Amelia?’

  Amelia closed the door firmly behind Eve, to keep the warmth in, she said, so that the others would not be disturbed. ‘They’re very exhausted,’ she explained, ‘spiritually this has been a tiring time for all of us.’

  ‘Go on, admit it. Tell Eve. You wrote it and made it all up.’

  ‘No!’ Amelia’s voice was harder, but no louder. ‘We prayed, Ruth. All of us. Not just me. Eve will say the same. It was all of us. We act as one.’

  Eve sat down on the bench seat, trying to get the table to collapse to make more room, but I had bent the hinges and it hung like a broken wing. She nodded. ‘We prayed, Ruth, so that the Rose would give us your words, because you had been silenced. Amelia and I together, we prayed.’

  ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I said.

  Eve looked at Amelia, who nodded, so she continued. She said the Sisters knew that Mark was acting as a barrier; he refused to let any of them visit me after Lucien’s death. And not just visit, she said, they baked for me every day, they poured healing herbs into bottles and left them for me, to help me sleep, Jack had written me a poem – but they thought Mark threw them away.

  ‘Where is Jack?’ I asked. ‘Has she left?’

  ‘She is not well,’ Eve explained. ‘She became so stressed after everything, her problems returned – banging her head, cutting her arms, crying all night. Usually Sister Amelia nurses her in her caravan, giving her rhubarb root to calm her. The rest of us pray for her, but we don’t visit.’

  ‘And where’s Dorothy?’

  ‘Resting.’

  ‘But to go back to what you were asking,’ Amelia said, closer now, sitting straight-backed on the end of the bed, ‘we also knew that nothing of what you wanted to say to us, to all the Sisters of the Rose waiting across the country, that none of that was being communicated either.’

  ‘And it was important we didn’t lose momentum,’ said Eve. ‘So we prayed; the rai
n fell, the Rose flowered and I wrote the words: it was as if someone else was holding the pen, giving me the text and we were up and running again. It was a miracle.’

  I sat down next to her. Misguided they may have been, but what evidence did I have that she – either of them, any of them – had ever done anything other than try to love me and look after me when I needed help. Amelia softened, ran her hand down my back and under my jacket, resting it warm on my lower back.

  ‘We’re glad you’ve come back to us, aren’t we, Eve?’ She rested her head on my shoulder and her hair lay on my shoulders like a prayer shawl. ‘I know how hard it has been for you. But we will help you through it, that’s what sisters do.’ She brushed my hair from my face. ‘And now there’s just us at The Well, Ruth, women free to worship, we will find peace, I promise you. We mustn’t squander what the Rose has given us.’

  Amelia poured over me like water, but I was a cold stone. My hands stayed in my pockets and in there I could feel the remnants of our dream: baler twine for tying up gates, tacks for nailing wire to posts in the sheep run, pellets of chicken feed, a tissue for wiping the tears from my eyes when walking against the east wind.

  I stood up, feeling the space where her head had been, the print of her palm tattooed on my flesh. ‘I’m going to write my own piece for today, Amelia, and this is what I am going to say. There is no Rose. There is no chosen one. There is no second chance. There are nails and wood and tears. You have whipped up a storm on this strange plot of earth and yes, you are the siren at the centre of it all.’

  Dorothy was waiting outside, at the bottom of the steps. I ignored her and went past Amelia’s caravan where I caught sight of a hand moving the curtains, nothing more, and pitied Jack her captivity. Dorothy made as if to follow me; she started calling as if she had something to say to me, and when, breathless, I reached the oak, I saw that she had come part-way up the hill behind me, but had now halted, looking after me as if caught in the indecision of purgatory. Behind her, the other two were stoking up the fire, embracing each other in the smoke. I did not look back again. I looked up at the stars instead, my mind made up.

  For once I was methodical in my madness. I took the key from the ring by the Rayburn, the matches from the mantelpiece in the sitting room and the torch from the back passage. Once outside, I undid the padlock on the shed and shone the light over the toolbox, the coils of rabbit wire and tins of half-used paint. In the corner, the beam picked out a pair of stilts we had given Lucien for his fifth birthday, standing like dismembered legs in the shadows. I reached my hands through the cobwebs and picked up a plastic aeroplane with a broken wing, pushed the propeller and watched it spin and then held it to my nose as if it might smell of his faith that it would fly. The plane launched, glided and came to rest lightly on fishing nets. In its place, I took a full five-litre can of petrol and a dustsheet covered in splashes of blue paint left over from the time we decorated his bedroom, shortly after we first moved in.

  Those things I carried, with difficulty, to the single oak: the matches, the dustsheet and the petrol can. The lights in the caravans were out now, although the fire flamed a little more strongly than before. They must have built it up to light their prayers, to reassure themselves that they could see the world clearly, even in this very dark darkness – Amelia probably told them that the dereliction of the saints was the forerunner to glory. They were going to know glory now.

  It was a work of art I created in the camp and, like most art, it was meticulous, hard work. I dragged three bales all the way from the stack and broke them into segments. Then I spread the hay from their fire in the centre of the camp out in spokes to the circle of caravans, dousing it as I went, the sour smell of the petrol cancelling the sweetness of the hay. The last of the trails led to Amelia’s caravan. It was not enough. Slinking beneath her caravan like a fox in a henhouse, I ripped up the sheet – dust and flakes of paints danced in the torchlight. Then I soaked the strips of white cotton in petrol. If the tearing of the cloth did not wake her, then surely the smell of the diesel would; if not that, then the ringing when I knocked a bucket against the Calor gas bottle; if not that, then the glare of my intent as I struck the matches. The cloth would not catch. I took the screwed-up paper from my pocket and lit that, holding it so the flame licked upwards, fanned by the night breeze, burning my wrist, then I placed that under the floor of the caravan. One end of the sheet flirted with the flame and caught fire, illuminating piles of cardboard boxes stored on bricks on the bare earth beneath the van, boxes which I assumed contained roses and leaflets, T-shirts and posters, probably pictures of me. I wriggled out from underneath the van, then ran to the centre of the camp and pulled the hay into the embers at the edge of the campfire.

  There was no more to do. I climbed as far as the oak, leant against the hard trunk and imagined a field of grass, emptied of all of them, and just me here at The Well, living out my sentence, alone. As, indeed, it has come to pass.

  If it would just burn. At first there was only smoke, curling up from under Amelia’s caravan. I was worried the fire would go out and was on the point of going back down to relight it when I saw the flame licking up and down the side of the metal like a pole dancer. Without warning, my home-made medieval hell was suddenly unleashed in an orgy of wild dance and destruction, fanned by the oxygen of hatred and the whip of the wind. At the same time, in the centre of the camp, the spokes of my wheel of hay caught fire and the orange sparks ran along the trails like scorched rats.

  It was beautiful – caught on the film of my memory as a still shot – at the top of the dark night, the stars, the silhouette of the bare oak and down in the dip, a flaming rose.

  Dorothy. That was surely Dorothy, running past Eve’s caravan, banging on the door and screaming. She lurched towards Amelia’s, reached the steps and didn’t hesitate. The fire rising up through the gaps in the iron must have melted the soles of her rubber boots with its hot tongues. Not Dorothy. I never wanted to hurt her. And where was Jack, was she still sleeping in Amelia’s caravan? I watched Dorothy reaching out for the handle, pulling her hand away but then wrapping the sleeve of her jumper over her fingers and shaking the door violently.

  ‘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.