The Well (38 page)

It wasn’t true. I loved Lucien from the moment I heard he was going to be.

‘And then you thought you could do a better job than me. Don’t worry, Mark’s told me everything, how you drove him out of the house, how he had to look after Lucien, feed him, bathe him, while you prayed for the rest of the fucking world. Everyone else’s favourite holy mother . . .’

Mark’s eyes met mine. Oh yes, they had been talking in the car.

‘And he told me all about how he rang up and Lucien, my son, answered your phone and was crying because he was on his own.’ She started crying herself and that was unbearable and it was almost impossible to make sense of the words. ‘You said you’d choose him. You promised. You said The Well would keep him safe, I remember you saying that, exactly that. You should have told me when I phoned if you couldn’t cope.’

‘We should never have let you go without leaving us a contact number . . .’ started Mark.

But Angie interrupted, anger now providing coherence. ‘Why did I ever think you would do a better job with him than you did with me?’

‘Angie!’ Mark moved over and took my place next to her, his hand around her shoulders. ‘Not now, let’s not go there again. Let’s talk about the funeral and then leave. That’s what you came here for.’

Standing there with a fistful of broken glass in front of the two of them all wrapped together, I couldn’t let it go unsaid, the one truth in all of this. ‘You know I loved Lucien, Angie. When you weren’t well . . .’

‘When I was off my face, when I was stoned, when I was fucked . . . say it, Mum, like it is.’

‘When you were using, I tried to be like . . .’

‘Like a mother to him.’

The bitterness eventually exhausted itself and curled up in front of the fire. We sat, the three of us, Mark and Angie on the sofa, me on the floor, back against the wall and we whispered our thoughts about the funeral so as not to reawaken it. Mark suggested the church at Little Lennisford.

‘The C of E church. It’s the only safe place because it’s the one thing none of us believe in,’ he said.

W
ord of the world outside reached me mainly via Mark and the policeman at the door. Apparently, the whole camp of followers of the Rose which had set up all along the verges of the lane – their pop-up tents tied to the hedges, snapping branches off the hesitantly budding hawthorns, the wheels of their camper vans obliterating the early snowdrops – had been cleared by the police. I had seen them, briefly, as I was driven to the police station and they had started the chant when they realised who was in the car:

‘Behold the Rose of Jericho!’

By the time I was driven back a day later, the entrance to The Well looked even more like something from a drug-induced hallucination, crowded with day-trippers some of whom came to the shrine with motorway service station roses, others who fought with the police to bang on the bonnet of the car in order to berate a child-killer. Some, I guess, came simply to dip their toe in the rippling pond of drama in the otherwise flat surface of their lives. To me, in the back of the police car, this was a virtual reality scenario in which I had no avatar.

They told me about fifty or so online followers had materialised and travelled from across the country to ‘be together at this time of
crisis’. They had been given permission to camp in the fields on the other side of the lane and who can blame the farmer who must have hoped that either their magic or their money would rub off on him. On one of the rare occasions I ventured out of the cottage, I saw the flicker of their bonfire and flares in the distance. According to the internet, they weren’t alone. Tiny tented camps had sprung up wherever there was a patch of vacant ground close to a community standpipe. The images showed women standing around braziers, handing out roses to commuters, lampposts strung with banners proclaiming the message:
The Rose because It Rains!
Some with a picture of the chosen one and the slogan ‘Innocence Personified’ written underneath.

YesterdayinParliament.com
reported that MPs struggled to express condolences, but it was clear that they neither wanted to condone the sect nor offend those caught up in the rising tide of religious fervour in the country. Instead, the MPs, while not wishing in any way to prejudice the ongoing inquiry into the tragic death of Lucien Ardingly, asked earnestly whether everything possible was being done to ascertain the reason for the continued fertility of the land at The Well; they put down questions for the Under Secretary of State for Education about the effectiveness of home–school liaison in rural primary schools and provision for the monitoring of the education of traveller children; they demanded data on social services assessments of children in informal kinship care; they asked the Minister for Gender Equality to place on record her opinion of single-sex religious cults; and they quizzed the Home Secretary about the arrangements that were to be put in place to ensure that Lucien Ardingly could be buried with dignity at a private ceremony, as the family had requested. Most of all, they wanted assurances from the Prime Minister that nothing like this would ever be allowed to happen again.

Dignity. Private. Family. How to achieve such things in those circumstances?

On the morning of Lucien’s funeral, while it was still dark, diversions were put in place around Middleton. The entire four-acre
field between the old Bridge pub and the river had been set aside for the press, who were now parked up in their vans with masts and satellite equipment. Apparently, they broadcast throughout the night. Who for? I asked the policeman stamping his feet on duty at the front door. He told me audiences were very hungry first thing in the morning. Those attending the funeral needed to be on a list of approved mourners. Even the organist needed clearance.

‘And are you going to stay the night before the funeral, here at The Well?’ asked the DI with the thankless task of making a cortège run smoothly.

‘Does it matter?’ asked Angie.

‘It’s just that it’s easier for us to protect you if you’re here – there’s a clean run with an escort down the lane to the main road and straight through to the church. If you’re still staying at the Motor Lodge at Middleton, it makes it a bit more complicated, that’s all. We can’t close the dual carriageway.’

She couldn’t stay here. No one could sleep here.

Mark made the decision. ‘I will stay with Angie in the Motor Lodge,’ he said. ‘We will drive up here early in the morning and then we can all go together to the church.’

‘Together?’ asked Angie.

Mark nodded at her, then asked the DI, ‘Will that work?’

The DI stood up also. ‘We’ll make it work, sir,’ he said.

I will sleep alone, then, I thought, tonight and for the rest of my life. The medication they’d given me wiped out both my memory and my ability to anticipate, so it was the sweep of car headlights and two slamming doors which woke me to a day which I greeted with a combination of relief and vomiting. Downstairs I could hear someone filling the kettle. I opened the shutters as my first step towards acknowledging the birth of the most deformed of mornings. Mark was sitting on the stile to First Field. Had it all gone to plan, he would have been preparing to lamb, but the barren sheep loitered around the hedges as if conscious of their purposeless existence. It was not raining, but snowing. Births, marriages
and deaths – and all of them shrouded in snow. I could almost count the flakes as they landed on the black sleeve of Mark’s coat, his turned-up collar and his dark hair holding their form for the briefest of seconds, but before I could make sense of it the flurry was over and Mark had come back into the house.

Sitting on the top stairs, I eavesdropped on my own husband and daughter.

‘You’ve got snowflakes on your hair.’

‘Is Mum up?’

The clinking of a spoon on a mug.

‘I can’t go up there again.’

Two hours, more than two hours without ceasing she had wailed in his bedroom the evening before, with Mark shut in his study and me out on the porch in the dry-eyed darkness, both in our terrible, separate silences, hearing it, before Mark had persuaded her to leave. Keening, they call it in Ireland, and that is the right word, the endless knife-sharp pain of it.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll go in a minute. There’s no need for her to wake up yet, the day will be long enough anyway.’

The spitting of the kettle, newly filled, being put back on the Rayburn.

‘Fucking mess this place.’

Tap running. Crash of pans being put in the cupboard. I imagined her scrubbing the surfaces, like me, desperate for cleanliness. I got up slowly, but the floorboards creaked under my feet.

‘That’s her.’

The tap was left running, so the pump thundered into action, summoning water from The Well. I pulled Mark’s old dressing gown around me, reluctant to get dressed, and got as far as the doorway to the kitchen. Angie ignored me. ‘Do you think if I leave it long enough, it will run out?’ she said. ‘Then that’ll be the end of it all.’

‘Your mother asked me that once.’ Mark gently prised her hands off the taps, turned them off and then hugged her as she sobbed. Only when they moved apart did I feel able to step forward.

Someone had organised a formal undertaker’s car.

‘I think Lucien would have liked it,’ said Mark, sensing Angie’s hatred of the thing. ‘He liked the idea that there was the right sort of car for the right sort of job.’

‘Remember how cross he got because the window cleaner arrived in a van that looked like the postman,’ I said.

‘When was that?’ said Angie.

‘I don’t know, love. London some time. Must have been when we were looking after him.’ Words chosen by a devil with a long-handled fork.

‘I can’t do it, Mark,’ sobbed Angie and I didn’t really know what she was talking about and what they were talking to the police about until I saw Mark helping her into the back of the unmarked escort car and calling back to me that he was sorry and it was only as far as the church, before he joined her and slammed the door. I got into the funeral car and sat on my own in the middle of the long back seat, big enough for three, four at a push. Ahead, the police motorcyclist skidded slightly on the mud at the junction of the track with the lane and the cars slowed. Then I saw them, the Sisters and not just Sister Amelia and the others, but all the Sisters from the camp over the road as well, dressed in white and lining either side of the lane. In front, Mark was leaning out of the car window and shouting, but the sound was turned down inside my coffin.

We crawled past them, each face tear-stained, each hand holding high a Rose of Jericho, each mouth moving silently in prayer. Dorothy looked as an old woman should at a time of grieving; Jack, dust and leaves falling from her Rose as her hands shook; both of them hand in hand with Eve, trying hard to stare the future in the face. Suddenly, Sister Amelia stepped out in front of us, arms outstretched, forcing the car to stop.

‘Behold a Chosen One of the Rose of Jericho!’ she cried.

The driver was blaring his horn, several police ran towards Amelia and dragged her out of the way, her long hair knotted in their hands, her white robe scuffed up to her hips and her bare feet scraping the
gravel. Some of the Sisters ran to help her, scratching at the policeman and screaming, tugging Sister Amelia’s hands; others took up the chant, louder and louder.

‘Behold a Chosen One, the Rose of Jericho! Behold the innocent!’

Hiding my eyes in my hands, I rocked back and forward in my solitary black cavern. ‘No! No! No!’ I repeated, over and over again until the rhythm of the journey told me that we had gathered speed and had left the Sisters behind. In my head I fought with Voice who wanted to come to the funeral.

The endless aisle was mine alone, Mark and Angie had walked on ahead, arm in arm and were already seated. The half-turned faces of the strangers in the congregation bloated and contorted in my sight as I passed and I heard the whispering cease and resume like the silence between waves as I was pulled towards the altar, eyeball to eyeball with the crucified Christ. I slipped apologetically into the pew to sit beside the two who were my husband and my daughter. Whatever they all thought, these people who had come to mourn, we had one thing in common, we were all ill at ease with death and religion, uncomfortable with the offer made by a thousand years of stone and stained glass. Someone had filled the plain country church with lilies and their scent blended with the smell of damp hymnbooks and polish and the low moan of the organ. Some of the travellers had come, including Charley; if anyone was going to help Angie get clean again, I thought it would be him. They had brought their kids, girls in woolly tights and long skirts with bunches of snowdrops in their hands, and boys in jeans, unable to sit still. Henni came up to Angie and said he had brought along a photo of Lucien’s bike. He thought he might stick it to the coffin with Blu Tack because Lucien would like that, to take a picture of his bike with him when he went. Angie nodded, kissing him on the head, and said it was very kind and he should do that. So the vicar and all the mourners and the policemen at the back of the church and the lady vetted and brought in to play the organ and me and Mark and Angie all watched as
Henni walked the length of the aisle in his squeaking trainers and stuck the photo of the bike to the lid of the wicker coffin.

The coffin was small, so impossibly small.

There were hymns – I am not sure who chose them. ‘Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy, whose trust ever child-like, no cares could destroy . . .’ ‘A thousand ages in your sight are like an evening gone.’ Standing up.
Gone
, said Voice. Sitting down. Kneeling down. Gone, gone, gone. Sitting up. My body a robot, my mind a black screen virus. Mark holding Angie, Angie weeping and weeping, and me, not a tear to be dragged from my dry sockets. Not even in the graveyard, where the diggers had brought in a mechanical digger the day before to help them get through the packed, dry earth; not even as they lowered the coffin; not even when Angie kissed his special duck and dropped it into the dull grave; not even when the children threw their flowers into the chasm.