The Well (7 page)

‘What’s going to happen to us?’ I asked Mark, hugging my knees tight as I watched the news. The question was a familiar one; I had asked it before when we were under a different sort of attack in London, but Mark didn’t seem to hear the echo.

‘Not that,’ he said, aiming the remote at the television and silencing it. ‘They won’t force us from The Well. They wouldn’t dare now. They’ll be looking for some sort of agreement. We’re in a stronger position, because of Duccombe, even if we have to go all the way to court.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m off to bed!’ I damped down the fire, gave Bru a biscuit and kissed him goodnight.

Mark was partially correct. The official attack on us abated, but
the locals were fighting a far more vicious war. Bru had been out hunting and failed to appear for his supper. We stayed out as dusk turned to dark, calling him, banging a spoon against his metal bowl, convinced that any moment now he would rustle up through the brambles, exhausted from hunting, slinking towards us with his tail wagging, expecting a scolding for being out late. We left the back door open for him. Mark said he’d be home, but I slept badly, creeping downstairs in the middle of the night, hoping I’d touch his soft body in the dim light, asleep by the Rayburn, or believing I could hear the click of his paws on the floorboards, coming upstairs to let us know he was safe. Mark felt the emptiness of the cottage as soon as he opened his eyes. He woke me and we dressed quickly in thick jumpers and boots and separated out over the fields to resume our search, our legs making slow work in the heavy mud, our shoulders hunched against the gusting easterly wind. Caught on barbed wire, stuck down a badger set, hit by a car – I went through all the possibilities. I wondered if he could have been shot as a sheep worrier, spotted in the distance, out amongst the pregnant ewes, but it seemed unlikely when the only people out on the land would have been the Taylors and they would recognise him. I beat the boundaries of The Well, praying that we would find him, calling his name over and over and over again. Someone told me later that if you’re searching you should not call relentlessly, because although the frantic clamour might seem purposeful at the time, it’s actually only ever in the silence that you can hear the cries for help.

It would not have made any difference for Bru. He was lying amongst the sodden leaves and dead wood, camouflaged by the undergrowth and the detritus of the winter wood, soft feathers of a white pheasant resting like snow on the mould and the mulch around him. One front leg was bent at the joint with the soft paw towards me, the other straight, just like they used to be when he was twitching and dreaming in front of the fire. His head was stretched out before him at an unnatural angle, his eyes were open, but there was no love left in them. He was unmarked, undamaged,
as perfect as he had ever been. I might have wished he was just injured, prayed that he would lift his head, convinced myself that his ribs were moving with the rhythm that signifies breath, swore blind that there was a twitch in his tail when he saw me – although I might have and I did wish all of those things, there was no point, because he was dead.

Maybe people do fall on the bodies of those they love and weep into their stiff, cold hair, but I hardly dared to touch him. I shouted for Mark. I ran to the edge of the wood and screamed. He was too far away. I stumbled back, but there was no hurry. Bru was still there, nothing had changed, he was dead. How, it was not clear. Finally, I found the courage to feel the velvet of his ear between my fingers and stroke the long length of his young body, but there was no injury that I could feel. As I cried, I tried to lift him and as I tried to lift him, I cried. He was heavy. Fifteen bags of sugar; I was weighing my dead dog in bags of sugar. And awkward, rigid. He slipped from my circled arms and thudded to the ground and I had to start all over again, trying to be gentle, as though I were trying not to wake him. George’s is a wild wood, long neglected; nobody has thinned the trees for generations and the undergrowth, left to its own devices, has become tight and mean. The brambles pulled their knives and the roots raised their boots to trip me unawares. It was impossible to climb the fence carrying him, so I had to drop him over the wire. He landed as if he was worth nothing. Mark, I called again and again, I’ve found him, I’ve found him. When I was just within sight of the house, he saw me, came running, took Bru and laid him in front of the Rayburn, gently placing his beautiful, black and white head on a cushion and we clung to each other, worldless.

The vet said it must have been deliberate, almost certainly a dead bird laced with a restricted strychnine-based pesticide, and he advised us to trawl the woods and dispose of any more bait.

Mark dug the grave in grim silence, forcing the spade into the earth as if he could root out the pain, but I wept, noisily and
helplessly. He said we had to wrap his body in plastic so the badgers would not disturb him, although how he knew such a thing about burials I’ve no idea. There were some rolls of polythene in the shed left over from the work on the barn roof, but I could not bring myself to fetch one. Then I struggled to help Mark fold the awkward sheeting over Bru’s stiff legs, couldn’t find the end of the tape to seal it over his dry muzzle, couldn’t control the scissors. I heaved from the bottom of my stomach; I did not know death smelled so rancid. We buried Bru at the top of the garden, the non-judgmental member of our family, who loved us unconditionally and who healed us, just by being between us.

Bru’s death felt catastrophic to me. Inside the house, in the daytime, on my own, his loss tripped me up at the bottom of the stairs where he used to wait for us in the morning and got under my feet in the kitchen when I was cooking; the loneliness got under my skin when I sat in the silence and listened for him barking to be let back in.

In the evenings, there were just the two of us again, our only company the unspoken memory of nights in West London with the front door double-locked and the security lights on in the driveway going on and off for no known reason.

Outside, at night, it was fear which rustled the hedges and slammed the stable door unexpectedly behind me.

‘It’s as if someone has poisoned everything,’ I said. ‘Just to know there are people out there who hate us that much.’

However much they hated us, Mark hated them even more in return. I had never seen hatred in his eyes before that time.

Someone told me once how quickly it becomes difficult to picture the dead. That has not proved to be the case for me: the dead are with me always – but the living? Angie I can see clearly, her absence is so painful that her presence in my mind is almost tangible. With
Mark, I struggle to recall his face. There remains an Impressionist’s portrait of him, or maybe a Cubist version, with disconnected parts of him, lying against each other in conflict on the canvas: the hint of his half-Greek missing mother in the sallow complexion, the thick, dark hair, the straight lips where I used to rest my fingers, those eyes, those deep-set, brown eyes. But these things do not make a face, maybe because he has not visited me once since the funeral, maybe because I fear what I may see reflected in those eyes. I cannot hear his voice either and I dare not imagine what he might say if he were to speak. And then there’s Sister Amelia who I can see and not see. Her hologram is always flickering just out of reach; she conjures herself up whether I want to remember her or not.

I pull the blanket up over my head and hide.

B
oy stands at the kitchen door and says something about needing to check the monitor. He doesn’t exactly knock, but at least he hesitates – unlike the others. ‘Boyish enthusiasm’ springs to mind, a cliché, but true in his case, I imagine. His eyes smile a lot, even when he is supposed to be looking serious, and he has thin, dislocated limbs a bit like a yearling. He must be over six foot, but even so he can’t quite reach, so he drags a chair across the room to the corner where one of the cameras is mounted, climbs up and removes a wire.

‘I thought you might want to know,’ he begins, ‘that the shrink has called. He was asking if your medication needed to be increased.’

‘The answer is no,’ I tell him, biting my black fingernails.

Still on the chair, he looks down at me, the battery in his hand, his head at a ludicrous angle against the beam, squashing his spiky blond hair. ‘It’s just that if they think you’re not taking it, then they’ll move to a patch or injections. You’re still sectioned, and apparently they can do that whether you want it or not.’ He pauses and turns his attention back to the monitor, as if a little embarrassed. ‘I thought it was your right to know, that’s all.’

He reaches up to reconnect the wire.

‘I’d better get washed and dressed then,’ I say.

He steps down, turns his back to the camera and makes a thumbs up sign. ‘Good idea,’ he mouths and leaves.

It occurs to me that I smell, but there’s no one here to tell me. Anyway, for some reason, this boy soldier seems to have risked something for this unwashed woman and his warning energises me to take control. I wrestle my mind into logic: I do not want to be medicated or hospitalised because I need to be here and I need to be able to think; I need to stay here, because here is the only place I am ever likely to find out what happened; there are things which were never found here which mattered – like the jumper, the rose, the truth.

Only when I have found the truth will my sentence be over.

I must therefore take control.

Having won the debate with myself, I plan an assault, concentrating on Anon, because being devoid of personality he seems the weakest of the three. The guards have requisitioned Mark’s study and he is in there on his own, feet on the table, dealing a hand of Patience and when I stand in the doorway, he swings his boots to the ground, knocking the cards onto the floor. I never did like heavy-set men.

‘Is there a problem?’

Bending down, I pick up the run of spades and lay them out on the table. ‘Eight, nine, ten, Jack, King, Ace. You’re missing the Queen.’

‘I never get it to work out,’ he says, shuffling the cards back into one pack. ‘I usually end up cheating on myself.’

He sounds faintly American, but I am sure it’s just that he thinks the role he has been given is an American soldier sort of part.

‘Sunday today, isn’t it?’ I ask.

‘Sure is.’

‘I’ve been thinking I’d like to go to church.’

Silence. All three of them have been well schooled in being non-committal; maybe that’s module one in the policy, practice and psychology of internment.

‘You know,’ I persist, ‘to take communion. I think that must be one of my human rights, the right to worship, don’t you?’

Anon pulls out a cigarette, seems to remember my house rules and puts it away again. ‘You can ask, I guess. I’ll get a request sheet sent over.’

‘And I’d like to visit the woods. I assume that’s not a problem?’

‘Depends on which wood and what you plan on doing there.’ Anon takes his jacket off the back of the chair.

‘Wellwood,’ I offer helpfully, ‘the wood at the bottom of First Field.’

The blank look doesn’t fool me. They have a map of The Well which Three spread out in front of me on my second day, wanting to ensure that I was clear about where I was and was not allowed to go. They know what has happened where in the history of this land.

Anon looks at his watch, looks at me, looks out of the window.

‘One minute,’ he says and leaves the house via the back door. I can hear him, calling over to Three, saying he needs a word. Three has some authority over the other two, although as yet I don’t quite understand the rankings. Anon calls him Sarge, but whether that’s part of the script he’s written for himself or a real reflection of Three’s status, who knows. She wants to go to that pond, Anon is saying and Three is replying, but they are walking away like a pantomime duo, little and large, and it seems from the words I can catch that they do not agree: arse-licker, grave, fucking, shithole, old, then rather oddly, boo to a goose. That makes me smile.

Later, Boy lollops over to the house with some papers in his hand – marching was never going to be his thing. ‘You’re going to need to fill out these,’ he says, ‘the pond is beyond the current agreed limit.’

‘Do I put both requests on the one form? The fields and the priest?’

‘You seriously want to see a priest? I was surprised. I wondered if it was some sort of joke on Adrian’s part.’

‘No joke and yes, I do.’

‘That’s what he said. So, I brought two forms over. If it was up to me . . .’

Those six words are a windbreak where cowards hide during a storm. I let him stew for a few moments and with his complexion, he blushes easily. I am a vindictive old cow.

He breaks the silence. ‘It’s quite straightforward.’ He is showing me which boxes to fill in. Not many people have stood this close to me recently and I can smell the soap he uses for shaving, breathe in the maleness which saturates his cotton shirt.

‘The usual bureaucratic crap. Date, name, signature,’ he says. As he puts the papers down, his hand touches mine accidentally and after he has left, I examine my hand as if this brief moment of contact might have left an imprint in the shape of normality on the flesh.