The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  ‘So did we.’

  ‘Oh come on, Mark, you know what I mean.’

  ‘I can see she’s a very powerful woman,’ he acknowledged, flicking through his seed catalogues, ‘but that doesn’t make her right.’

  The other sisters had their own stories. Eve gave up a penthouse apartment in a converted warehouse and her thriving PR business; Jack left her violent partner; Dorothy said goodbye to her lovely grandchildren in Canada. They gave up money and friendships and ways of ordering the knives and forks in long familiar table drawers because of Sister Amelia. They became the Sisters of the Rose of Jericho because of Sister Amelia. And I became one of them also, initially wading in slowly, until one evening I found that I could no longer touch the bottom and to go back was more difficult than to go over.

  Certain episodes of worship stand out in my memory. Early on, there was one evening when I got down there to find Sister Amelia distant and already absorbed in prayer, on her knees before the plain wood altar which they had made from logs and on which sat the little wooden box which contained the dry Rose of Jericho. Her head was thrown back, almost as if her hair was pinning her to the ground behind her, almost as if she was in pain; her long neck stretched on the rack and her eyes closed, her thin, brown arms hung from her sides as if disconnected. The others were waiting, dressed like her, not in their usual jeans and sweatshirts, but in simple, grey cotton shifts which I had not seen before. It unified them in simplicity and humility. They did not offer me a gown and I felt put out, excluded from their enlightenment and envious of their peace, one hand in the pocket of my trousers, the other fiddling with the beads around my neck which struck me as gaudy. I still have those beads. They are not gaudy at all, they are pale glass and fragile, but context is everything.

  The next night I stayed away, a toddler waiting to see if someone will chase after her. Amelia did not come looking for me, so I gave in and went to her, joining their prayer circle. Again, Amelia was praying apart, again we waited for her; the nuns were still in a way I could not be, shifting from foot to foot as if movement reminded me of myself, flicking my hair back behind off my face, scratching the insect bite on the inside of my elbow. Finally, Sister Amelia rocked back onto her heels, paused and then rose in one fluid movement. The spirit of the Rose was welcomed and I willed myself to feel her move me also and there she was: a tightness of breath, a sense of my own heart beating like the wings of a hummingbird, the fingertip touch of a whisper on my spine. It was, as Amelia said, a beginning.

  Amelia schooled me in the discipline of worship. She reminded me how to notice my breath, how to abandon thinking, chanting in her low voice, guiding my senses through my own body, noting how the earth received my feet, the strength in my calves, the tension in my thighs reaching into my womb, the emptiness in my stomach, the rise and fall of my breathing and the thread in my neck that reached to the sky and directed my eyes to the sun. Through this and through the singing, I felt a growing sense of release, a little stronger every time, and I returned to the house each night lighter, light-headed maybe. But release was not enough, she said, and one evening as the prayers drew to an end, Sister Amelia moved to a new, unfamiliar phase of worship, her voice shaking.

  ‘Behold, look on this woman for the Lord hath blessed her.’

  Sister Amelia looked straight at me, through me. Each of the Sisters dropped to their knees, their heads falling on the ground, arms in front of them.

  ‘Behold, look on this woman for the Lord hath blessed her. Behold, look on this woman, who is the fifth woman.’

  Amelia fetched the box from the altar and lifted the lid. ‘Behold the Rose of Jericho.’

  I felt a great wind rush me, it took my breath. I swayed like a sapling in the eye of the storm of their belief. I fell to the ground. When I was ready to stand again, I felt faint and Sister Amelia held me and I knew such peace, such certainty that for the first time in over a year, I knew I could stay at The Well and live.

  She was always raising the stakes, Sister Amelia. When we read together as a group, we talked with her, responded to her challenges and pondered her pronouncements. When she was not with us, we talked about her endlessly, agreed that she was a life-affirming woman. And when she was just with me, the two of us walking and talking as we often did, leaving the others preparing the dinner or sweeping out the caravans, then she was irresistible.

  ‘How do you see your future with Mark?’ she asked once. We were following the tractor paths through the winter wheat, the plants brushing our bare legs. ‘It’s like this, Ruth,’ she continued, ‘like this.’ She bent down and picked up one of the young shoots. ‘We are so fragile,’ she said, ‘so vulnerable to disease.’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘Are you frightened of him?’ she asked.

  ‘No, of course not! He’s stressed at the moment, that’s true, he’s more volatile, but frightened of him, never.’

  She let the silence undermine my protestations before continuing. ‘Mark will leave one day, he must. I worry about what will be left when he is gone. He will have taken what he wants and left nothing but stubble.’ She snapped the stem and let the broken stalk fall from her hands.

  ‘You’ve got that wrong,’ I replied, ‘it’s me that wants to leave, he’s the one who wants to stay.’ But even as I said it, I realised that equation no longer balanced.

  The path between the fields narrowed and we walked on, single file, me behind Amelia until we reached the brook at the boundary of The Well.

  Even our stream was shallow and in places quite dry, because it had not rained for a week or so at The Well. I had even secretly begun to wonder if the drought had finally come to us. Did I hope that might be true, even then? Maybe. It is difficult to tell what is now and what was then. Nevertheless, rain or no rain, the hedgerow which followed the stream was still thriving, with ragged robins and sweet violets deep in the moss bank and the briar rose tangling from the boughs of the May blossom. Amelia behaved as if all this was hers, as if she knew everything.

  ‘Look at the hawk!’ she said, pointing to the sky.

  ‘That’s not a hawk,’ I said, reclaiming my world. ‘Much rarer than that! It’s a nightjar. Mark pointed him out to me the other night and we’ve been tracking him. He looks like a hawk, but notice how he flaps and then glides, flaps and then glides – there, he’s gone!’

  ‘The nightjar is a troublemaker,’ said Amelia. ‘Mythology says he sneaks into people’s places at night and steals the things that are precious to them. Sucks the goats’ milk dry – that’s his name, goat-sucker! And then,’ she said, pointing at the fence below the willow, ‘there’s the wren!’

  ‘I do know a wren when I see one!’ I replied.

  ‘Ah! But what do you see when you see a wren?’ she asked, but did not wait for my reply. ‘Some people see the traitor bird whose song betrayed St Stephen – that’s why they stone the wrens to death on 26 December.’

  ‘How horrible, I didn’t know that,’ I admitted, then added a little maliciously, ‘you’ve scared him off with your stories.’

  Amelia wasn’t listening to me. ‘But do you know what I see when I see a wren? I see the divine, the king of birds, a messenger between this world and that of our Mother!’

  ‘I do know that sailors carried a wren’s feather as a charm against drowning,’ I said.

  ‘The Well is full of messages and warnings,’ she said, ‘you must learn to read them. The wren warns me about Mark.’

  It was my turn to challenge her. ‘So tell me what they say. What is it about him that makes you worried?’

  ‘He eclipses your spirit.’

  But I didn’t feel eclipsed by Mark; if anything, he was the one retreating behind the clouds. As Mark made fewer and fewer demands on me, Sister Amelia wanted more and more, and it occurred to me, for the first time, that she was jealous. I told her that I was changing my mind about some things.

  ‘Talk to me about it,’ she said. ‘God speaks to me through you,
Ruth. I shall call you my little wren. I want to listen.’

  ‘We have our problems, Mark and I, that’s obvious. But you must understand how difficult this is for us. I know he probably seems bad-tempered and narrow-minded, but he’s not. He’s very thoughtful. He says science will never be enough on its own, he admits that, but he has never dismissed outright what you believe, he says . . .’

  Amelia raised her hand to my mouth and silenced me. ‘Listen to yourself, Ruth. He says this, he says that. This is not the voice of the Rose; this is not your voice.’

  I felt her hair on my bare shoulders as she leaned in towards me. I think about that now, the two of us, sitting on stones at the edge of the stream, her fingers on my lips, my hand on her wrist. I am cross-legged, with her leaning towards me, eyes meeting, averting, retouching. Gently, I lowered her hand from my mouth and released it.

  ‘Can’t I speak for myself?’ I asked.

  Sister Amelia sat silent for a long time. I could not tell if she was thinking or praying or regretting the move she made. I think she was praying; whatever else I may feel about what happened between us, whatever else I may know now about things she did later, whatever else she may have done that I do not know about yet, I believe that then she believed and that was her only motivation.

  Finally she spoke. ‘I have never told anyone else this. The first time the Rose appeared to me, I believed I was the only one she was looking for, the chosen one, because I was arrogant then and couldn’t see beyond myself. Then came the others, but we were still not complete. Then, when we heard about The Well, everything fitted. You, Ruth; Brigitta, like the order where we were staying; Rose, your maiden name. I was just being asked to prepare the way and, if I’m honest, I wanted to be more than the prophet. This is a very hard to thing to say, Ruth,’ she took my hand again and held it tighter this time, ‘but you are also chosen, your self must be subsumed by the Rose. You can’t have attachments to other people. Your attachment must be to the Rose. You will not have a voice of your own. But I don’t pretend for one moment that it is an easy thing – to be a chosen one.’

  That was the first time she used those words. Chosen one. I wonder about Amelia. Not Dorothy. Eve? I never really felt comfortable with her, but nothing more. Jack? She loved playing with Lucien and used to talk about how she wanted kids of her own one day. No, it always comes back to Amelia, if any of them. Some facts I know; I researched them before they took me away and learned them by rote so they could not be confiscated. Ten years ago, there were over a thousand men suspected of murder, barely more than a hundred women. So the odds are against it being her – or me for that matter. But then, most children are murdered by their parents, and if not their biological parents, then someone acting in that capacity, which swings the odds back again, the finger pointing to Mark or me. At this stage, I am the lowest common denominator. But I can recite another paragraph: ‘Killings of children by a natural parent are committed in roughly equal proportions by mothers and fathers, but where the child is killed by someone other than a parent, males strongly predominate.’ Mark, then. Spin the arrow. Amelia. Again, spin it again. Ah, me.

  At the very idea, I vomit.

  Hugh answers none of my questions. I don’t understand this. What would it cost him? I dare not ask Boy: he seems to be avoiding me, as much as it’s possible for a guard to avoid his prisoner. I am also embarrassed and yet I would not undo that moment for anything. To have been desired by a man, to have felt desire for a man, that was so special, it was as if someone lost had been found. But the adolescent flutter is over. I am old enough to be his mother, I tell myself, and that should be my role, protecting him from himself, from me, from The Well, making no demands on him that I would not make on my own child. For a moment I am so idealistic that I envisage I might be, once again, altruistic.

  In practice I cannot ask Boy anyway. The chances are the internet here is monitored and he could never safely use it on my behalf. The more I look back, the more I don’t know. Aspects of my ludicrous sentence have become ordinary, like the monotonous diet based on some government-approved shopping list cut and pasted week after week or the hours spent listening to the CD Boy’s mother sent me, the ten great truncated classics anaesthetising the room, all the difficult bits cut out. But I am parched; my thirst for answers is obsessing me, swelling my throat and making the veins in my head throb even as the rain continues to fall. I can dream up solutions, mirages with the name I need written on water, but when I arrive, there is only shifting sand and a dry wind. Wind can drive you mad, I know, and I am so close again to insanity it would not take much. The guards are outside and I resolve to talk to them, but as soon as I am through the back door, I go back to check it is closed. Not locked – it’s not for me to own the keys any longer – but closed. Sometimes, when I am not sure of anything, I have to go back five times. Today it is only twice.

  ‘I would like to discuss communications.’ I approach Three and Boy who have their heads stuck under the bonnet of their Land Rover. I know it’s not broken. They have been turning the engine on and off and listening to it in much the same way that I listen to that CD – it is something to do. On hearing my voice, Boy turns quickly and bangs the back of his head on metal. When he lifts his hand to his hair, it comes away bloody.

  ‘Shit!’

  I want to say, sit down, let me see how deep it is, part his cropped, spiky hair and tell him it’s nothing to worry about.

  Three wipes his hands on an old piece of cloth which I recognise as part of one of the curtains Mark and I had in the house in London. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I said I would like to discuss communications.’

  Boy is leaning against the passenger seat, testing his head, leaving it all to Three.

  ‘Communications with whom exactly?’

  ‘Post, primarily. Amongst other things.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘Post, to start with.’

  ‘We could discuss post, if you want to. We could make an appointment. I’ll make a record of a formal interview, if you like. Give you a copy of my notes. It would be a short meeting, though, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you haven’t had any post, have you? It would be hard to spin out a full agenda around the fact that no one appears to want to write to you.’

  I look at Boy for support, but he is staring at the ground.

  Three notices. ‘Soldier? Don’t tell me you forgot to deliver the post when you popped round for one of your chats with Ruth?’ Three folds the oily cloth neatly, smoothes the crease. ‘Funnily enough, we were chatting just the other afternoon about that film, The Postman Always Rings Twice, weren’t we, Boy?’ He smirks as he emphasises the name. ‘Doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen it. The title is fairly self-explanatory. But we’re not here for Film Club. You wanted to talk about the post. Shall we make a time? Do you have your diary with you?’

  The words are cackling like jackdaws, disorientating me. ‘I do not have the addresses of everyone I would like to write to. I would like to request permission to e-mail my contact list – or some of them and you could view it, edit it if needs be – simply to inform them that I am allowed to receive post and to remind them of my address.’

  Slapping the Land Rover bonnet, Three doubles up laughing. ‘Sorry.’ He makes a show of wiping his eyes. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. Not professional, but do you really think they could have forgotten your address?’

  In the same way that a child writes to Father Christmas at the North Pole, anyone, anywhere could probably scribble my name on the front of an envelope and send it to The Well, England, and it would get here. As I retreat to the house, Three calls after me. ‘I also have some issues around communication which need to be addressed.’

  I look back. Boy has gone.

  ‘I may need to make some changes to your permissions. Let’s talk later.’ Three slams the door of the Land Rover and, wiping his hands, smirks at me.

  There used
to be a woman somewhere out in the Far East who was under house arrest. From time to time her case would appear on the news, prompted by protest marches or elections. It didn’t occur to me then that the photo of this resolute and passionate woman must have been from the archives. No one could have eyes like that after twelve years staring at walls. If you took a picture of me now, after just twelve weeks, even if it was taken somewhere open, like in the garden, then once developed you would see the white roses, the gate half open behind me, the handle of the wheel-barrow jutting into the bottom left-hand corner by mistake, the fallen branch on which I am sitting, but there would be little trace of me, just the hint of a blur, as if the photographer was trying to convince you that ghosts have faces.

  What is it doing to me, this peculiar imprisonment? Sometimes, I pause halfway up the stairs, close my eyes and stretch out my arms so my flat hands push against the damp walls on either side of me. Then I weaken and softly, so softly, feel the flaking skin of paint peel from under my fingertips, an explorer in the primeval cave of my own history, searching for signs of earlier civilisations. At other times, if it is a clear night, I wait here at this kitchen table in the dark until the moonlight is shining straight through the window behind me, creating for five minutes only a silver screen all of my own on the wall in front of me. Once, the shadow of a glove which I’d hung from the nail on the window sill grew grotesque and threatening and reached for the hairs on the back of my neck and I thought to myself, this is a strangling hand. Another time, the silhouette of one of the guards patrolling outside the cottage came to life in a black and white story, and I told myself, there is a puppet who knows me well. But tonight was the worst: an owl swept low over the house and a sudden great spread of wings flew in and feathered the room. With animal instinct I covered my face to protect myself from its beating and I covered my ears so I could not hear it haunting me. I am a caveman, entertained by shadows. One day, I have to believe, one day, I will turn round and that will be the day I have the answer. But for now, all I can do is look at the wall and call it home.