The Well by Catherine Chanter Page B

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 aboutAngie 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 trawlthrough 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.
     

    When Hugh comes this week, for my so-called communion, he finds me less jolly company.
    ‘It smells beautiful here,’ he says, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. He puts his weekly offering of fresh milk on the table and then pulls from his bag a bunch of early yellow roses, losing their petals and smelling of the piano room at home when I was a child. My mother was a piano teacher.
Mrs Alysha Rose. Individual Piano Tuition, Beginners to Grade 8.
The card in the newsagent’s was confident, but my main task as her daughter was to tell the little girls clutching brand new, bright pink music cases and their huffing mothers leaning out of 4x4s to go away because she wasn’t well. Again? they would say. Again. She devoted her life and her health to ‘giving me a little brother or sister’ by whatever means science could offer. At least that’s how she framed her quest. My father devoted his life to her and that meant working every hour God sent to finance her dream. It never happened. She died at fifty from an excess of procedures, breast cancer and a lack of meaning in her life beyond the menopause. I like to imagine her reunited with all her unborn foetuses, happy at last. The smell of rose petals and furniture polish . . . that is all it takes to bring back her unmourned absence.
    ‘Don’t roses make people happy?’ he comments. ‘If you look in the