The Well
Authors: Catherine Chanter
Published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Catherine Chanter, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 360 7
Export ISBN 971 1 78211 607 3
For Simon, Christopher, Jeremy and Jessica
Oh fair enough are sky and plain,
But I know fairer far:
Those are as beautiful again
That in the water are;
The pools and rivers wash so clean
The trees and clouds and air,
The like on earth was never seen,
And oh that I were there.
— A. E. Housman,
A Shropshire Lad
Contents
T
he Well has won me back. Tonight will be my first night under house arrest. First of how many? I scarcely dared hope they would allow me to return, yet when it came to the last night in the unit, I clung to the comfort blanket of my sleeping pills and section order, desperate to stay. Security. National security. Secure accommodation. An insecure conviction. It may keep me in, but all the security in the world will not keep the ghosts out; if I am home, they will be also.
In between the nightmares I have been daydreaming my way through three months of enforced idleness: picturing myself escorted from a prison van into the house; running my fingers through the dust on the half-moon table we were given for a wedding present; picking up the photo of the three of us, taken the first day we ever saw the place, me crumbling the damp earth between my fingers and laughing. I thought I might throw open the bedroom windows, listen to the insistent buzzard, stare out over the cracked hills and wonder how it came to this. I thought I would turn on the taps and watch the water stream down the drain, like liquid silver, lost. Things I knew I would not do: pray, write, work the land.
I do not follow that script. In the end, something rather bustling and pragmatic takes over. Maybe it is nerves. I am conscious from
the moment that we pull out of the gates that my mouth is dry and I am picking at the sides of my fingernails as I used to when I was a child. I can’t see of course; the windows are blacked out. I wonder if there is a sack under my bench seat, ready to pull over my greying hair and gaunt eyes, just as you see with rapists and paedophiles, when the absence of a face makes them more, not less terrifying, only the hands that strangled the child or the legs that ran down the alley visible to the waiting press.
Are these the palms of a saint or a sinner? I scratch my hands over and over again, hoping they will wake up and tell me.
Even the ruling that I am to be sent back is to be kept
sub judice
, as they say. I like that phrase. Underneath the justice. If you can only limbo long enough, then the law is upheld and everyone is happy.
‘If we’re prepared to act within the Rapid Processing Regulations, they’ll reach a settlement. All we have to do is withdraw our intent to sue the government for illegal occupation, and then they’ll let you serve out your sentence under house arrest. Deal done.’ That’s what my lawyer told me. I asked him what was in it for the state and he talked about overflowing prisons and adverse publicity, drought and scientific research. I interrupted him, asked what was in it for me. It sounded so simple, his answer.
‘You get to go home to The Well,’ he said.
The first part of the journey from the women’s wing seems slow and takes place against a soundtrack of sirens. Petrol rationing has solved the capital’s traffic problems, but no one seems to have told the traffic lights. Then the feel of the journey changes to the relentless flat, forward impetus of the motorway heading north. I know that route so well and once we exchange the straight line for the swerves and lurches which take you over the hills and down into the valley, my breathing slows and I feel the saliva run again against
my sandpaper tongue. Fifteen minutes for the long slow climb past Little Lennisford church; twenty-five minutes before meeting the stretch of flat, straight road beside the poles of the hop fields (the last chance to overtake, as we used to say); forty minutes and the sharp right-hand turn past Martin’s farm, grinding up through the hairpin bends, through the gears, through the clouds as often as not, to the brow of the hill, to the top of the world. Then at last, the swing to the left down the quarter mile of unfenced, rough track which leads through my fields to The Well.
‘Nearly there now.’
The guard’s words are unnecessary.
The van is going too fast for the potholes. Surprising they haven’t done anything about them, but then again, we never got round to it either. It takes the wearing down of water to grind holes in stone and The Well wore her puddles like a badge of honour. We are stopping. The grille is pulled back.
‘We’ll just be a couple of minutes while we check everything. You OK back there?’
It is kind of them to ask, but not clear to me how I am meant to answer. That I am totally at ease with being brought back to my own notorious paradise in a prison van?
‘I’m fine. Thank you.’
I sit very still. Part of me doesn’t trust the ruling even now. Bizarre ideas from old war films tug at the rubber mat under my manacled feet and I see myself taken from the van, led to my dear oak tree and shot there, falling in a crumpled heap among last year’s desiccated acorns and the sheep shit. The soldiers are getting out now, slamming the doors behind them.
‘It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?’ That is the woman with the Birmingham accent. ‘It’s just like they said, just like on the webpage.’
‘What is?’ The driver. I could tell from his choice of music on the journey that he had no insight.
‘This is. It’s like going back three years. Green fields. When did you last see grass like that?’
So, my fields are still green.
New voices. Greetings. Slightly formal. Then a younger man talking.
‘You should talk to the locals. They say it’s true what it said in the papers. When she was here, it rained; when they arrested her, it stopped.’
‘Where did it happen then?’ asks the driver.
‘Down in the woods.’
‘I’m with those who think the old bag’s a witch not a saviour.’
‘Quite a sexy old witch, all the same.’
They must be moving towards the house because I can’t catch the rest of their conversation. The knowledge of the space outside is somehow suffocating me inside and I feel nauseous. Not now, I think. No more of these visions, no more drownings. Sweat breaks out on my forehead; I try to raise my hand to wipe it away, forgetting the weight of the handcuffs. I too am being pulled under the surface. I am not mad. I put my head down between my knees to stop myself fainting and the darkness of the van slowly steadies itself, the thick water recedes and I become myself again, just as the footsteps grow louder on the gravel and the back doors of the van are opened.
‘Home at last!’ she says. ‘Out you get!’
There is no blinding flash of sunlight, rather the washed-out blue of an early April afternoon merges with the bleak interior of the van in the way that paints on a palette mix in water and reach a grey compromise. I try with some difficulty to get out, stooping under the low roof of the van, holding my handcuffed wrists in front of me like some bizarre posture of prayer.
‘Tell you what,’ says Birmingham woman, ‘sit on the edge here and I’ll take those off you. Home sweet home! Hope someone’s done the washing up. That’s all I ever want when I get back in the evening.’ She punches various codes into the keypads attached to my limbs.
The driver has joined us now. ‘Bet you don’t get your lily-white hands all damp and dirty in the sink.’
‘Tell you something, have to now. The dishwasher used to cost a fortune on the water meter. Still, every cloud has a silver lining, as they say, washing up’s about the nearest I get to a bath nowadays.’ She fiddles with my unattractive ankle bracelet. ‘This one stays on, it’s what we call the home tag.’
I am sitting on the edge of the back of the van, childlike, my legs not quite touching the ground, and when I am free, I feel each of my wrists in turn and then stand uncertainly and take a few steps away from the guards. In front of me, the stone front of the house stands even and steady; it is my spirit level. I turn, and then I am facing my fields which rise up and fall away before me, their hedges like ley lines, feeling the contours, the forests like velvet folded into the valleys. A hand takes my elbow. I shake it off, but follow the guard to the front door all the same. We don’t use this door, I am about to say. We use the back door, kicked off our mud-clodded boots on the tiled floor there, once; hung the fishing rods on the hooks above the raincoats there, once. We. Me and Mark. Me and my ex. Front door. Back door. River. Ex. Words.
‘This is as far as it goes for us,’ says the driver. ‘Job done. I expect your new friends will introduce themselves once we’ve signed everything,’ and he waves towards three armed young men in uniform who have appeared at the fence between the house and the orchard and are standing with their backs to us, pointing towards Wales. That was one of the reasons they agreed to house arrest, apparently, the fact that there were government soldiers here already, keeping watch over their crops by night.
‘It must be good to be home,’ comments the guard and I nod because I am trying hard to be human, just as she is. She waits until her companion strolls over to the soldiers before continuing in a quieter voice, ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. You are a special woman for it to have happened like this.’