the difference between our land and that of the surrounding countryside. The land of milk and honey vs. the land of Sodom and Gomorrah. Our house was in the centre of the photo, tilting slightly and you could see the drive carving between the two top fields, although the gradient isn’t clear from above. The Land Rover is parked up by the chickens for some reason; it never was usually. I don’t know what was going on to make that necessary, maybe we’d been lugging some new posts up for the fencing because we’d lost a lot of hens to foxes around that time.
‘What on earth . . .?’ I stared at the photo. ‘What’s it about?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t read it yet. No need to go running to your precious government adviser now, is there? The whole world will be fascinated by our back garden.’
‘How did the press . . .?’
‘The same way it always does. By sticking its snout in the gutter.’ Mark left, the door slammed and moments later I could hear the whir of the chainsaw and the scream as it bit into the logs. Mark had taken about as much as he could with the media coverage of the tribunal and this would be more than he could cope with. Although I felt keenly for him, I was also wondering how many more of his last straws I could carry before this camel’s back broke. I spread the paper on the kitchen table and began to read. The caption said that only two weeks after the disturbances at Duccombe, their investigative reporter revealed another place mysteriously unaffected by the drought: The Well. It referred readers to the full article on pages 4 and 5.
Then the phone rang.
It was the first of a relentless barrage of calls: The Mail, The Express, the Scotsman, Figaro, the New York Times, the Phnom Penh Post. The e-mail inbox filled as I watched it, the bold black type of the unread messages pouring down the page like an oil spill. The answer machine lived its own existence in the corner of the kitchen, dutifully recording old friends, the press, weirdos, PR agencies, until the messaging service was full. Eventually, I stormed around the house ripping plugs from their sockets, watching the blinking green lights of communication with the outside world flicker and go dead. We turned the mobiles onto silent and then when their crazed vibrating dances drove us mad, we turned them off completely. Outside, the helicopters continued to drone overhead. Mark shouted at them to fuck off and they nodded and bobbed in acknowledgement before leaving in their own time.
Not so much a Well as a sieve. We could not keep them out. The first car jolted down the track. It brought a couple from Birmingham on their way to visit their son; set out ever so early this morning, they said, heard it on the radio, had a bit of time to spare, thought they’d come and see what the place looked like and who would have thought it? As they turned round, they met two more cars arriving: one was a local journalist, the other a water-diviner who had driven all the way from Essex, and behind them, more cars. Impotent, speechless, I hid behind the kitchen window watching Mark leaning into the drivers’ windows to talk to them, pointing at the main road and shaking his head. Strangers, all of them. If only one of them had been Angie, or a friend from London, or anyone I knew, who I could talk to, if only I wasn’t so scared of anyone and anything that came from beyond our Well.
By four o’clock we had locked the gate at the top of the drive. The wood was slightly rotten and the bottom bar broke when we yanked it free from the long grass and weeds entangled around it. We padlocked it to the metal post, aware that it was a feeble defence against this new army of the curious. It was the first barricade.
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
