LITMIR.BIZ

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the human condition.

      The reality of house arrest sinks in. I lie here, my sheet a shroud, wondering how long it will be until the end. I will not write. Music slaps like the tide on my mind. To start with, I was wandering a lot, understanding a little more about why caged animals pace, picking at the food my keepers left on the table, but now I stay in bed. I do not take my medication. Drifting through these days on a river of memories, rarely pulling into the bank, sometimes a light flickers in the distance reminding me that I need supplies to stay alive, but it all seems a long way inland and I push off again and rejoin the current of the past.

      Yesterday I saw a local newspaper that one of the guards had chucked out. ‘Welcome Home for Well Worshipper!’ read the headline, with a picture of women with roses lining the Lenford Road and a white prison van passing. I scrutinise their faces, none of the Sisters are there. We had one year here before The Well made the headlines for the first time. Our first year, my blue remembered hills and one remembered summer.

      We sold our house so easily, it slid through our hands to a couple like us, pregnant with plans for the future – only half our age – and spent our last Christmas there with Angie, who was, as they say, ‘in a good place’, if sticking to your script can be described that way. We gave Lucien the blue bike, telling him we would take it with us to The Well so he could play with it there when he came to stay. It must be rusting in the barn, unless the police took it away as part of their investigations. The last Christmas, the last day of term and the last day of work. And then the stupid lasts: the last book club; the last night in with a takeaway from the Balti House and the ten o’clock news on the television, in the sitting room which had been the stage set for so many acts; the last night out, roaring drunk and hysterical with laughter, with the girls at the George and Dragon (because the girls had stuck with me through it all and what was I going to do without them?). The last of the obscenities spray-painted on the garage door and the last of the headlines in the local press and the last of the sideways glances in the queue at the checkout. Swings and roundabouts.

      As we worked our way through the house preparing for the move, we sorted out the last twenty years. The books, for a start: Mark’s unloved law manuals; novels I used to teach at school which had seemed cutting edge at the time and now looked dated and pale; travel guides to places where we had been on holiday with Angie – in a baby carrier in Morocco, in a pushchair in Granada, on the seat on the back of a bike in Normandy, nowhere to be seen in Rome. There were books on how to adopt, which we never did, and how to manage difficult children, which we never mastered, and how to stay married, which somehow – goodness knows how – we did. I showed that cover to Mark, who had come down from the loft with a boogie board and a moth-eaten sleeping bag.

      ‘Shall we keep it?’ I laughed.

      ‘We’ve made it this far and God knows against the odds,’ he said. ‘Bin it.’

      As a teenager, working as a waitress in a hotel as a holiday job, I used to be able to recognise the couples who had finally managed to leave work on time, get a babysitter, find the money, make a reservation and get out for a night together. They would sit at one of the highly prized tables for two, looking out over the famous view of the gorge, having survived everything the day could throw at them separately, totally at a loss as to how to make it through the evening together, their hands touching across the white tablecloth, seeking the reassurance that they still loved each other. Well, I thought to myself as I sealed the boxes with tape, took the black bags to the dump, we have made our booking.

      We moved on the first day of the cruellest month. Angie and Lucien were meant to turn up on our last morning in London to wave us goodbye.

      I checked my phone.

      ‘She’s not coming. You can never rely on her. Come on, we need to get going.’ Mark, sitting in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers on the wheel, the packing cases in the vans and me, standing like a plastic figure in an empty dollhouse.

      ‘Two more minutes?’ I pleaded.

      As I was driven away – rather, as we were driven away – I craned my neck. There was still no sign of her and the street was empty as if someone had just wiped our story from the whiteboard.

      That evening, after the removal men had gone and we had done all we could for the first day in our new home, he gave me two presents: the first was the glass heron – even then it seemed impossibly fragile, its beak as sharp as an icicle, its neck a script in italics; the second was a bottle of vintage champagne which we had been given some time ago in London and had agreed we would put away until our silver wedding anniversary.

      ‘You don’t think we’re jumping the gun? We only hit twenty-two last month,’ I laughed.

      ‘Who cares? We’re never going to have a bigger reason to celebrate than this.’

      I wiped my hands on my jumper. ‘A bottle of fizzy piss breaks the bank now. That stuff must be worth a fortune. Besides, I’m not exactly dressed for the occasion.’

      ‘You’ve no idea how beautiful your bum looks in your dust-covered leggings with your particularly appealing unkempt hair,’ he replied, digging out a couple of beer glasses from a packing box.

      ‘Not to mention your unintentional designer stubble.’ He looked gorgeous to me at that moment, in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt covered in grime, the tight-suited man well and truly consigned to the charity shop.

      ‘Come on, outside,’ he called.

      She hadn’t texted. I put the phone down before Mark could catch me checking it.

      He balanced the glasses on the fence post under the oak and popped the cork, sending lambs scuttling out onto the cold hillside.

      ‘To us!’ said Mark.

      ‘And to The Well!’

      It was bitter outside so we finished the rest of the bottle in bed, like we used to when we first fell in love, and suddenly it all felt right, I really believed we had left the worst of it behind and the future, like my screensaver, was green and blue and beautiful. I embraced my reclaimed, revitalised man, my husband, my Mark.

      You have no new messages, the phone said.

      It was the best year, our foundation year. We had spent hours and hours in London timetabling the dream and agreed that we should take year one slowly, learn a little, live the idyll. The Taylors, the neighbouring farmers mentioned by the agent, were a sort of umbilical cord to the unfamiliar world of our new rural community, lending us equipment and expertise with equal generosity. Our first lambs came from Tom Taylor, skidding down the ramp into the field and looking as bewildered by the beauty as we had on our arrival; I was so bewitched by their innocence I almost failed to close the gate in time and Mark, more familiar with office paraphernalia than trailers, struggled to fix the bolts. We were city-weak and street-feeble in those days. Then there was Bru, our beautiful puppy, one of the litter from Tom’s border collie bitch; he became our therapy dog from the moment he bounced into our lives and chewed my gloves until the moment he was gone, taking his healing powers with him.

      This is something I can hardly admit to myself, but there were times in London when the sight of Angie at the door had made me want to close the curtains and pretend I was out, but when we moved to The Well, if I had had a Union Jack, I would have run it up the flagpole to show we were at home in our castle, I would have instructed the guard to throw open the gates for her. She finally came to stay, just for a few weeks before the festivals began, and it was Tom who showed Lucien how to feed the orphan lambs with a bottle, holding on tight with both hands as they tugged at the teats. Getting the hens in at night, that was another of Lucien’s favourites, a lengthy and ridiculous pastime which involved us flapping more than the birds. We got battery hens which needed rehoming, but their experience of prison seemed to have left them wholly incapable of dealing with the outside world; they were decidedly resistant to being shut up and ill inclined to ever lay eggs again. But it was fun.

      Every morning, Mark used to stand in the doorway with his mug of coffee and point at the distant hills. ‘No one,’ he used to repeat like a mantra, ‘no one for miles and miles and miles.’ Company

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