The Well (5 page)

Slowly, she climbed up the wall, sometimes having to waste time by moving sideways because there were no handholds above. She lost track of time, engrossed and focused on her task. Her fingers and toes hurt enormously. The muscles in her arms, legs, shoulders and neck protested.

Then Becca stopped. As much as she searched, she couldn’t find another handhold – not above, nor to the left or right. Hanging on the wall was agony and she allowed herself to relax, just a little. She gathered her strength and looked again: nothing. She felt a combination of failure and of having been cheated.
There has to be something, somewhere
, she thought. No matter how much she looked and felt, there was nothing. Carefully, she looked down, holding on tightly in case she lost her balance. She’d not climbed as far as she thought: perhaps just ten feet.

It was high enough to feel exposed.
A fall from this height could do some real damage
, she thought.
I could easily break a leg
.
Christ I was lucky
, she realised.
I fell much further without getting more than a few scrapes
. Becca’s fear came back, stronger than ever. This was the end of the line; there was no way to climb higher. No way at all. Worse still, she couldn’t simply drop back down. She’d have to climb – and that was going to be even harder than the climb up.

Becca looked up, blinking at the sunlight. She took a deep breath and screamed as loud as she could, “Help! Help! Help me!”

She waited, but couldn’t hear any reply from above. In her heart, she knew that even if she screamed for several minutes, the response would be the same.

Becca felt crushed and considered jumping down. It was risky, but it would be quick. She dismissed the thought. “Shit,” she said, through clenched teeth. Her determination grew again.
I won’t fall,
she thought. She started to climb backwards and immediately slipped, but managed to just hang on. She took a few moments to compose herself, panting, her heart pounding. Then she began to climb down.

As she had thought, going down was even harder than climbing up. It took ages to find any handholds – and she couldn’t reach as far downwards as she could upwards, so progress was much slower. But she took her time and tried not to panic. She’d been climbing down for perhaps fifteen minutes when she realised that her body was about to give in. Her hands were shaking and she was having real difficulty hanging on to the wall. She looked down. She was perhaps five feet from the water.
It will have to be enough
, she thought
.
She pushed herself from the wall, trying to clear where Matt was sitting, and braced herself for a rough touchdown.

She landed on her feet, pain again shooting up from her ankle, and fell backwards into the well wall. She hit the stones hard with both her spine and the back of her head, struggling briefly to avoid falling over.

“Shit!” she said.
God that was hard,
she thought.
And I was only a few feet off the ground.

Becca wasn’t a quitter, but she felt for certain that climbing out wasn’t an option. Again, she considered just how damned lucky she’d been when she fell in.
Not like Matt.
With that thought, she checked on Matt again, squatting beside him. He was breathing noisily, each inhalation shallow, laboured and almost a gargle.

“Shit!” she said again, this time between her teeth.

She sat down in the water next to him, wheezing for breath. Where she wasn’t hurting from the fall, she was aching from the climb. As she brought her breathing under control, she briefly contemplated waking Matt and telling him what had happened. She decided against it. Best he rested.

After about half an hour, she stood, and considered her injuries.

She knew that she had been hurt in the first fall, but she’d been too concerned about Matt to pay much attention to her own injuries. She pulled the lighter from her pocket and snapped it on, then ran it over herself to see how badly she was hurt.

First, she noticed her fingers holding the lighter. They were grimy, filthy, Dickensian fingers that didn’t even look as if they belonged to her. She shook her head and continued to look herself over. Her left arm seemed fine. She transferred the lighter to her left hand to get a better look at her right arm, which really hurt. Her right forearm sported a long scrape – deeper than just the top layer of skin, but not too deep. Although it was covered with blood, it didn’t seem to be bleeding now. Her skin on her knees had been rasped away and they looked raw, but they didn’t hurt as badly as they looked. Her left shin had a six-inch-long scrape on it, but the skin was mostly unbroken – although it looked as if it were turning a nasty dark colour.
Probably bruising.

She leaned against the wall and bent her left leg up while reaching down. She felt inside her sock. Her ankle was very tender to her touch. She moved it gently. It hurt enormously, though perhaps a little less than it had.

She stood again and twisted around to see the injury on her side, but couldn’t quite. She felt around with her hand and winced: it was very sore, but again the skin didn’t seem broken. She didn’t have any way of seeing the top of her head, but it was very sore under the gentle touch of her fingers. It felt wet – it could be blood, but then she was soaked from head to toe. She looked at her fingers in the light: it was blood.
At least it’s out of the water where it should heal
, she thought.

Dry. Nothing’s any good if it’s wet,
she realised, and started to scoop up their belongings. It was hard working with one hand, while using the other to hold the lighter.

Her bag contained her swimsuit, towel and swimming goggles; like Matt’s they were within a supermarket carrier bag, but wet nonetheless. The bag also contained her exercise books (English, science and history), a copy of Jane Eyre, a calculator, pencil case (filled with pencils and pens), a small half-empty bottle of water, an apple and a bag of crisps (which she had saved for the walk home), her plastic sandwich box (empty apart from some crumbs), her iPod and its headphones. She pressed the iPod. Bizarrely, it still worked.

She placed the iPod, headphones, water bottle, apple and crisps into the largest of the gaps in the wall. She hung her towel and her jumper on one of the protruding stones where perhaps they could dry. The rest she returned to her bag, which she then hung from another of the stones; not likely to dry, but out of the way.

Matt’s bag offered up his sports kit and towel, exercise books (English and French), his art sketchbook, a can of fizzy orange and a chocolate bar. She placed the can and the chocolate in the gap. The sports kit, condoms and school books she returned to the bag, though she spent a moment looking through the sketchbook. As she already knew, Matt’s drawings were pretty good. Art was one of the few subjects at which he did well, but he kept his work mostly to himself, as if embarrassed by his ability. She hadn’t seen most of these drawings and paused at one which seemed to be of her, sitting in a window, reading a book. She ran her fingers slowly along the wet paper.
He probably drew it when I thought he was watching television.

She felt tears roll down her cheeks again. She pushed the sketchbook into the bag, which she then hung alongside hers.

Reluctantly, she flipped off the lighter to save fuel. The well became a black void again. She felt around for the recess and placed the lighter with the rest of her things.

Then she sat down next to Matt. She felt for his hand and closed hers around it. He mumbled slightly, but otherwise didn’t respond. Her eyes could see only dark, but the smells in the well were rank. Now that she’d stopped moving, the water seemed very cold; the walls very close. Something moved quickly across the top of her head. She brushed it away and shivered.

She pulled herself as close as she could to Matt, sharing the little warmth and time they had, sobbing to herself, not wanting to disturb him.

7

Thomas Randle closed the door gently behind him and dropped the security chain into place. He reached to both the top and bottom of the door, drawing the two bolts home. Randle believed that in a world where nearly everyone says one thing while thinking another, you couldn’t be too careful – and there were few things, or people, in which Randle trusted.

He stowed his plastic high-visibility jacket, cap and road sign in the tiny cupboard, pressing the reluctant door closed against the bulging mass of coats. Shuffling into the living room, he flicked on the light. The low-wattage bulb’s dull yellow glow only just illuminated the grubby flat. Randle’s flat was tiny: a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, each room smaller than the last. It was all he could afford. He’d completed two tours of Northern Ireland before being sent home, useless and almost lame, with a military pension that only just kept him going. Although his leg had improved to the point where it was a bearable disability, moving at anything other than a steady walking pace was forever beyond him. Before the bomb, he had a life and career; every year thereafter it seemed he had progressively less. His cramped flat was just one more thing to resent at the end of three decades of disappointment, dissatisfaction and rejection.

In films and on television, life alone was often characterised by an untidy coffee table covered with takeaway boxes; Randle had no space for a coffee table and could only occasionally spare the money for a pizza. It had taken him almost four years of scrimping and saving to muster enough money for one of the cheapest computers money could buy – and still he could only connect to the Internet courtesy of his neighbour’s unsecured wireless router. Of course, people find money to fund the things that are dearest to them. Randle was no gourmet: to him food was fuel, not pleasure – so he’d eat the cheapest beans and spend years saving pennies if it bought him closer to the things he wanted the most. Randle had found that technology provided salvation from social exclusion. With his computer, he could roam the world as an anonymous voyeur, indulging himself without the sanctimonious judgement of others. His camera had provided further gratification: although his photographs were innocent in composition, they were of girls he saw every day, real flesh you could almost touch – and that somehow made them more powerful than stateside pornography. He was a good enough photographer to make himself indispensable at school events: trusted by teachers, children and parents – some of whom even paid for his work.

Sure, his acquisitions had taken sacrifice – but what didn’t? Life was a haul. A long haul. Some people had things handed to them. Some people had to take what they could. Randle had been given little and took even less – but his days as an onlooker were drawing to a close, and he knew that he was getting ready to take.

Randle rubbed Becca’s scrunchie between thumb and forefinger, feeling its texture. He held it up to look at it, adjusting his glasses to see it more clearly. The fine, dark hairs caught within its elastic were even more precious than the item itself. They were hairs that had been on
her
head,
part of her:
alive
.
Something she might have brushed out. Something her mother might have stroked. Something that could have been spread out on a pillow, around her head, that a lover could look down on.
The thought made him hard.

Randle had a box of keepsakes. He’d had it for years. It contained things that had been dropped, discarded – or, in some cases, stolen. Not many things. A hair slide. A school tie. Exercise books. A well-thumbed copy of
The Hobbit
. A purse: with money, photographs and a front door key. A swimsuit and towel that had, until today, been the best of his collection. Many nights he’d held the towel and imagined it rubbing a young girl dry; stroked the swimsuit knowing it had been against a naked body. But he didn’t know to whom they had belonged – they’d just been left in a plastic bag – and knowing the owner would have made touching them so much better. The apparently far more innocent scrunchie, with its prized hairs, belonged to someone he knew; someone he could name; someone he had photographed. Many times.

Becca had been easy to photograph. She was at every swimming event or competition and frequently won. He took the pictures: of her preparing to dive in the pool, diving in, swimming, receiving an award and, his personal favourite, her wet body as she climbed out of the pool. Until today, she was just one of many girls he photographed, but the physical link provided by the scrunchie made her special.

His girls were filed away, by name where he knew them. He even had separate albums for several of the girls (including older albums for girls who were now grown and married). As top performer within the school, Becca had a larger album than most. Building a collection of photographs of her hadn’t been difficult. Becca’s slight unease when he’d photographed her had made her more special: their connection was more real because she
almost
saw the real him.

This gave Randle a problem. Should he keep the scrunchie with his other physical artefacts, or store it with his pictures of Becca?

No contest
, he decided. The scrunchie belonged with the photographs. It wasn’t just a piece of random junk, it was a real, physical link between two people. It was the first time he’d combined photographs and possessions.

Even with storage space at a premium, half of his wardrobe was given over to his girls. He shuffled boxes around to clear an entire shelf – a first for any one person.

He reached for a flat-pack cardboard box and popped it into shape. He placed Becca’s two photo albums and newspaper scrapbook inside it, along with her scrunchie. It felt good; very good; very
right
. He located a black marker pen and wrote on the side of the box:
REBECCA RICHARDS.
Then he slid the box into place on the empty shelf, just for the pleasure of seeing where it belonged in his thirty-year collection. It was the culmination of years of desire; decades of watching and waiting.