LITMIR.BIZ

      The next couple of days were bitter and we lived tense from both cold and the threat of invasion. The stove in the sitting room was working overtime, we were getting through over a basket of wood a day and our last lamb to be born, a weakling, was in a cardboard box in front of the Rayburn, her head heavy compared to her unsteady legs. The ewes were still in the barn; Mark was fretting, wanting to get them and their lambs out onto the spring grass, but he was worried they might not be safe. I liked them there, protected and smelling of vigils with flasks of coffee and torches, nights spent rubbing the lambs into life, seeing our flock give birth to our future. On the third evening after the article, we had been going to relax for the first time, there had been fewer calls, fewer trespassers and we decided to make a conscious effort to toast the success of our first year as shepherds before getting a good night’s sleep.

      ‘Don’t even think about logging on,’ said Mark.

      ‘Don’t answer it.’

      We did turn on the news – The Well featured briefly, pushed to the end by a fire at one of the British Museum’s warehouses which could not be contained because of the low water pressure. Watching forced us to talk about our new state of siege. I tried to be the positive one, saying that they’d all go away, that today’s news was tomorrow’s fish and chips, as we had discovered before. Mark said that might be the case if the rest of the world wasn’t dying of thirst and had just discovered their nearest oasis. I told him not to be so melodramatic, he told me not to stick my head quite so far in the desert sand. It sounds like an Aesop’s Fable, the tale of the badger and the ostrich.

      I took my own plate to the kitchen to wash it up and stared out through the window into the darkness, my own reflection distorted in the panes and beyond that a full moon making the bare branches of the oak smooth like a skeleton. Turning on the tap, I stood watching the water run in a single stream from the tap to the white sink and down the plug. Perhaps if I left it long enough, there would be a spluttering and a coughing, then the flow would stutter before dwindling to a trickle, a drop, a nothing. Then the phone would stop ringing, we could unlock the gates and be as dry and as desperate as everyone else. But the water ran on.

      When Mark had gone to bed, I gave up pretending to cope. I took the bottle out of the fridge and my head out of the sand. I logged on. I learned a lot about online porn addicts when Mark was accused, did research about what sort of men looked at images like that and why, just so I could be doubly sure that it couldn’t be true of him, I suppose. The social science articles told me how impossible such men find it to log off and here I was in the same predicament: the laptop became a puking monster, an excretor of filth, but I could not get enough of the poison.

      Condemnationuk. A place, it boasted, where the citizens of the UK could openly condemn those who were ruining society. It was one of the most popular sites at that time, with rants and diatribes about illegal immigrants drinking all our water, videos from homemade CCTV cameras showing the children next door playing with a bucket. I would never have gone there, had it not been for the alert on my screen:

       You’re popular today on the following sites: condemnationuk, watchthis, spotthespongers, newsday, weakeningplanet, smalholderweekly, waterwater; natmeteo . . .’

      The list was endless. I went to the first.

       ‘F***ing spongers like this should be locked up and allowed to die of dehydration.’

       ‘Selfish drought-breakers.’

       ‘How stupid are these farmers? Did they really think no one would notice? Duh. People that thick don’t deserve to have lives, let alone water.’

       ‘Wait for it. It’s going to be the Good Lord who has blessed them. I bet they are perverts and paedophiles.’

       ‘No need to bet. The owner was done for kiddy porn. That’s why he left London.’

      I felt sick. If the locals didn’t know before, they would now and it wouldn’t matter how loudly we shouted from the hilltops that he was innocent; all anyone ever hears is the accusation, not the acquittal. And God knows, they hated us enough already without more fuel for their fire. I continued clicking.

       ‘This is our water, not theirs. The Government should take it over NOW. If not, we will do it for them.’

       ‘F*** off the land and DON’T COME BACK.’

      Then I reached the comment where I overdosed.

       ‘I know these people. Their daughter’s a druggy and a whore and their grandson’s a moron.’

      Who wrote that? Surely no one who knew us could write that? But if they didn’t know us, then how did they know about Angie and Lucien? All at once these people were not invisible, they materialised. I could hear them scratching at the keyboard, I could see their faces leering at me through the screen, they were crawling out of the internet and I smelled their threats as they breathed down my neck. So many of them and me on my own: I could not think of one person I could call on for help. Transfixed, I scrolled through my Contacts: Angie, Autorepair, Becky and Richard, on through Mark (office), Sophie (mob), Youth Addictions Support, Zahira . . . I hammered the keyboard with my fists, smashing the letters and symbols for what they no longer offered; over and over again I beat them, beat back the baying crowds.

      Mark must have been woken by my hysteria. When he found me, I had thrown the laptop across the room, where it had smashed a mug, but lay still alive on the floor. Between sobs, I tried to tell him that they could not be contained, that these people would get together, they would be here, smashing our windows and slaughtering our lambs – tonight – they were probably out there now and there was no one in the world who could help us. I was hard to hold, but Mark was so strong by then. His pyjama top smelled of shower gel and sleep and as he rested his chin on my head, I could feel the steady beat of the heart of a man who was now physically fit.

      ‘What do you mean, there’s no one? I’ll look after you,’ he murmured. ‘I love you. You don’t know how much I love you.’

      There was a time when I thought the risk lay in the fact that he loved me too much; now, after such a long silence, I know he loves himself more.

      Mark turned the laptop back on. ‘This stuff isn’t helpful, Ruth,’ he said. He brought up The Ardingly Well Facebook page and went straight to Settings. ‘There,’ he said. ‘One click, gone. Deleted. We can do without crap like that just making things worse.’

      Later he asked me a question. ‘What came over you to trawl through that sewage? Why didn’t you just log off when you saw what it was like?’

      Because there was a quality of connectedness for me when I was online that was both affirmative and addictive, regardless of the voltage. That is the truth. The psychiatrists talked about the third person in our marriage. Sometimes I think that person was the web.

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