The Well by Catherine Chanter Page A

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 thepositive 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