The Well (10 page)

“Nope, not seen them,” she replied. “But I think they’re in – I’m sure I saw one of Becca’s friends leaving the house not long ago.”

“Hannah?” asked Sarah.

“I don’t know her name,” replied Jan, “the one with the shortish blonde hair.”

“Yep, Hannah,” said Sarah, feeling some relief. She’d not seen Hannah for weeks – maybe more – and had thought that she and Becca had perhaps fallen out. “Jan, would you mind popping round and just checking if they are OK? I know I’m fussing, but I’m just a bit worried because they’re not answering their phones.”

“No problem,” said Jan. “I’ll look now and give you a call straight back, OK?”

“That’s great – thanks Jan.”

“OK, bye.”

Leaving her front door open, Jan walked down to Sarah’s house.

The milk was still on the doorstep. She rang the doorbell. There was no answer, even after ringing four times and banging hard on the door. She moved to the front window and peered in. Everything was tidy. The house looked empty. She made her way around the back. Her cat, Marmalade, was sunning himself in the long grass at the bottom of the garden. “Hey Marmy,” she said, “You seen anyone?” Marmalade afforded her a glance before getting back to the business of the day: sleeping.

Shielding her eyes against the sun, she pressed her face up to the French windows. There was definitely no one in.

She made her way back home, picking up the warm milk on the way.
Better to take it in than let people know no one’s home
, she thought.

She put the milk into the fridge and then called Sarah, who picked up on the first ring.

“Hi Jan,” said Sarah, without waiting for Jan to greet her. “Any luck?”

“Not really. There’s no one home. I rang and knocked but no one answered. The house is tidy – I looked through the windows.” She knew Sarah well enough to realise that she would start to panic. “I’m sure they’ve just gone out, Sarah.”

Sarah was at a loss what to say. She didn’t want to overreact, but she couldn’t disguise her concern. She cursed herself for not leaving a key with Jan. “You’re probably right,” she said, knowing she’d failed to hide the uncertainty in her voice.

Jan decided that it wouldn’t help to tell Sarah about the milk,
it would only make her more worried.
“Look Sarah,” said Jan warmly. “I’ll keep an eye out. When they get back –
which they will
– I’ll give you a ring. If I don’t see them, I’ll call you later anyway, to let you know. But don’t panic. They’ll be fine. They’ll be at one of their friend’s or in town for the day. Or at the cinema, somewhere they won’t have their phones on.”

“OK Jan,” said Sarah, unsure, but a little happier. “Call me later.”

“I will. And Sarah –?”

“Yes?”

“Relax. Enjoy yourself.
They’ll be fine
. OK?”

“OK. Bye.”

Sarah slowly closed her phone. Jim put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

“No joy?” he asked.

Sarah shook her head. She recounted what Jan had told her. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t be worried, but I am.”

“It’s OK,” said Jim. “Nothing to be sorry about. They should have called or at least have their phones on. Look – they’re OK. They’ll have stayed over at a party, or gone to a friend’s or any one of a hundred other things. They know we’re away and they’ll be making the most of it.”

“You’re right. You know I can’t stop worrying. I won’t relax until I hear from Becca.”

“
And I said it’s fine
. Look, I know we had a blow-up about this, but you don’t have to pretend not to be worried. How does this sound? We’ll call again later. If there’s still no reply, we’ll set off back tomorrow, first thing. Or earlier.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind?”

Jim shook his head. The truth was, he was starting to get a little worried himself, but didn’t want to show it. “No. Of course not.” He squeezed her hand. “But trust me, they’re fine.”

10

The day dragged on. As each minute dragged past, Becca felt not only colder but also more miserable. The desperation penetrated her body deeper than the inescapable cold.

Becca had explored her surroundings as thoroughly as possible, but there wasn’t much to discover. She worked her way round the well wall, feeling carefully with her grubby fingers and looking as closely as she could in the near-dark. She explored from the waterline up to as far as she could reach, but it told her little that she didn’t already know. The well was more roughly built than she’d first thought, but not so uneven that it offered enough handholds for her to climb out. In a couple of places there were sizeable gaps between the stones, behind which she could feel packed earth.

She’d tried climbing out again. Despite her determination – and moving in slow, careful steps – she didn’t even manage to get as far as she had the first time. Handholds seemed harder to find. Her fingers trembled terribly, unable to hold her weight. Her toes kept sliding, seldom gaining a firm enough toehold on the gaps in the stones. She was much more fatigued today, she realised.

In the end, she reluctantly conceded defeat. She sat back down in the water, crushed, opposite from Matt. She wished she were braver and could continue to sit with him, but it was getting harder to think of him as a person. Whatever gave a body its life had gone – he was now just an inert carcass, too unnaturally cold and rigid to gain comfort from.

Becca’s thoughts flitted like a butterfly from one regret to the next; dwelling on one for a while before moving on to another. Naturally enough, given her circumstance, this thought pattern had begun with Matt. He was dead because of her. That last kiss had intended to be light-hearted, fun, loving, but actually she’d just been plain foolish. There were bigger regrets too: for the time together they would never share; the sex that had been so close.
Matt died a virgin
, she thought,
and
I probably will too
. More guilt, because she’d kept him at arm’s length for so long – especially when she had wanted him as much as he had wanted her. It had been a game, a tease. She wanted him, but enjoyed keeping him waiting. Now, probably more than anything else, she wished that she’d slept with him. She guessed that plenty of girls her age had slept with their boyfriends, despite their protestations. And now – well, what would it have mattered?

From Matt, she moved her regrets to Jim. Essentially a decent (if slightly dull) bloke, he’d made her Mum happy for the first time in years. Yet she’d been standoffish, perhaps not actually rude (well, not all of the time), but holding back from accepting him.
Why?
Was it just jealousy,
she thought,
because I didn’t have Mum to myself any more?

From there, the next leap was to her Mum. Not accepting Jim had made it harder for her Mum,
probably much harder
. Like the first time they’d gone away, when she’d behaved like a spoilt brat, playing on her mother’s insecurities until she’d convinced her to come home. Becca hadn’t planned to (or even really meant to) – it was just something she had done on autopilot, driven by a feeling from deep within her, the pain of no longer being her mother’s sole love.

Finally, her thoughts settled on her father. Normally, Becca seldom thought about him. But now, bizarrely, she was regretting not seeing him for so long. That had been her choice; she remembered it clearly.
Because of what he’d done.
She’d only been nine at the time – before she had insisted on being called Becca (with two Cs, not two Ks or a C and a K) and
not
Rebecca or Becky.

Her Dad, Will, had been driving home from a night away on business when another car broadsided his, putting him in hospital. He’d been hurt – at the time, Becca didn’t really know how badly, but it had been bad enough for him to be kept in intensive care for a couple of weeks.

William Richards would take months to recover, but his laptop (sadly for him) was almost undamaged, sitting as it was, in a padded case in the boot of his car. While Will was suffering his fifth day of intensive care, his ever-practical wife fired up his laptop because Stewart, Will’s boss (who was deeply apologetic and offered to do it himself) needed some spreadsheets for the monthly board meeting.
No problem
, said Sarah, who quickly found the spreadsheets and launched the e-mail program to send them to Stewart. Within the last few days’ unopened e-mails was one with the unambiguous subject line
Let’s make it the whole weekend next time.
She wasn’t prying – at least at first – but that subject line was hard to ignore. It turned out that Will hadn’t been on a business trip, after all. He’d been engaged in some extra-marital recreation with someone called Maria Kennedy.

Fuming, Sarah dug deeper into his e-mails and found that Will had been seeing not one other woman, but two. They didn’t appear to know about each other – and he saw one (Maria) more than the other (Olivia). Sarah hadn’t had even the slightest suspicion that her husband had been cheating on her.

She immediately stopped visiting Will in hospital; in fact the only time Sarah saw her husband again was a couple of weeks later. She’d had a call to say that Will was now able to sit up on his own. She had decided that it was time to pay him what he must have thought was a strangely belated visit. It was a visit that didn’t last long and turned very nasty indeed. Sarah had printed off dozens of the e-mails between Will, Maria and Olivia. She slammed them down on Will’s bed and demanded, through gritted teeth, that he explain them all to a distraught Becca – who was unused to seeing her mother so angry. Will couldn’t, so Sarah read a few out loud. Becca was young but not stupid: she soon realised what was going on. The whole visit lasted probably less than five minutes, but it felt like hours to Becca. She didn’t know what was worse – what her Dad had done, or how her mother had dealt with it. (When she was twelve, Becca had plucked up the courage to ask why her mother had done this in front of her. Sarah had replied,
Because you needed to see the man he really was
.) Sarah had led her sobbing daughter away and, not long after, she and Becca moved to the village where Sarah had been brought up.

It was almost two years before they heard from Will. Her father wanted to see Becca and, despite what he’d done, her mother agreed.
It would be wrong
, she’d said,
for her to stop him
. Becca felt otherwise. The incident with her father had changed both Becca and her mother. Her mother became less trusting and more protective. Becca had become harder, someone who could find (and stick to) a firm resolve – even when she was clearly wrong. (
Determined
, as she would often be described in school reports.
Bloody-minded
, her mother sometimes said; something she later acknowledged as a weakness and not always a strength.) No matter how much her mother had tried, she couldn’t persuade Becca to see her father. Finally, it was agreed that she’d see him ‘when she was ready’. So, Becca hadn’t seen him since that day in the hospital.

Now she realised how much she wanted to see him.
Not that it let him off the hook
, she thought. He was a shit. He’d not had to live with her mother afterwards: it had taken her years to get herself together properly. But, nonetheless, Becca missed him. Now, realising that she’d probably never see him again, the loss was awful to her. All, all, all her fault.

But at least I could see Dad if I wanted
, she thought. Matt’s mother, Christine, had died of leukaemia when Matt was twelve or thirteen. Like her own father, she was seldom referred to, so Becca hadn’t built up a clear picture of her.
She’s gone
, thought Becca.
Totally gone. Like Matt.
Becca realised that her own sense of loss was trivial compared to what Jim’s was going to be.

Miserable, Becca got up to stretch her cramped legs. She could now see reasonably well within the dark; in fact, looking up at the sunlight hurt her eyes.

Her stomach groaned. Her lips were cracked and dry. Becca had been putting off eating and drinking to conserve what little food and drink she had. She decided that she needed something. She pulled out the lighter and found the apple and the can of orange. She knew that the water would be better, but resolved to keep it for later. She opened the can and sipped a little of the orange. It tasted delicious, but seemed to run off her numb, parched lips. She carefully ate half of the apple. With each mouthful, her stomach groaned even more – somehow making her thirst and hunger worse. She drank perhaps a quarter of the orange (it was hard to tell) and then placed the can, with the apple, back on the shelf.

She looked at her hands in the flickering light. They were grimy, but also puffy, wrinkled and prune-like, as if she’d been in the bath, but much worse.

She turned the lighter off and shook it to her ear. There seemed to be plenty of lighter fluid left, but it was hard to tell.

She waited until her eyes adjusted to the dark again, wondering what she could do – if not to get out, then at least to pass the time – with only Matt to look at. She shuddered and suppressed another tear.
For fuck’s sake
, she thought,
don’t they ever run dry?
She again considered listening to music on her iPod, but that still seemed way too weird a thing to do under the circumstances.

Becca tried to dismiss another uncomfortable growing feeling. She really wanted to go to the toilet again, but this time not to pee. She was holding back but knew that this was something she was going to have to do at some point soon. And there was only one place to do it. Becca couldn’t think of anything more degrading – and the image that this created in her mind was enough to help her put off the inevitable. For now, at least.

The small amount of food and drink helped to restore her resolve. She wasn’t, she decided, going to sit here and die. She was going to get out, whatever it took.

She relit the lighter and took Matt’s bag down from the wall. She pulled out his football shirt and carefully placed it over his face. She knew that kind of thing was supposed to be respectful, but that wasn’t why she’d done it. She needed to be strong and it didn’t help seeing Matt’s dead face all the time. She replaced the bag and turned off the lighter, dropping it back into her pocket.