It is eight o’clock precisely. I have been awake for a while, watching a brash red fox strut the hedge. No hunt now, no shotguns; even the slamming of the barn door does not make him run. He looks over his shoulder and saunters off into the labyrinth in the wood. Three comes into view, followed by Boy. Pulling on a jumper, I run downstairs, hope and fear as always fighting it out in conflicting hypotheses. Boy and Three are already in the kitchen; the creases in Boy’s trousers are sharper, the buckle on his belt shines just that little bit brighter. Three does not even remove his cap. He hands over to Boy, as he puts it, and Boy in a voice which I do not recognise delivers the news that I have been dreading: that I am once again to be confined to the house. There was no point in asking why, but Three commands Boy to explain anyway.
‘The original terms of the House Arrest Order specified under section 3 (f) that if anyone thought . . .’
‘Language, soldier, language. Read from it if you can’t resist the temptation to render everything civilian.’ Three hands Boy a printout, with a section highlighted, then props himself up on the table as Boy begins to read through the pages of the fine print.
‘In circumstances where the senior officer in charge, or in his absence, such officer as may have been temporarily delegated the role of the senior officer or any other officer taking on those responsibilities as part of duties as described in the Armed Services (Drought Emergency Amendment) Act, whether that Officer or soldier be a member of the Armed Forces, or the Territorial Services or Her Majesty’s Emergency Drought Relief Community Conscripts . . .’
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ I make to leave the kitchen and go back upstairs, but Three blocks my way.
‘You’re not leaving.’
‘Get off! I’ll do what I want.’ I try to push past, banking on the belief that Three will not physically intervene, but I am wrong. He seizes my right arm, bends it round behind my back and pushes me onto a chair and holds onto my flesh just a little too long. ‘Nice. I see what you mean, Boy.’
‘You can’t do this!’
Boy does not meet my eyes. Three lets go of me as if I was infectious. ‘This is just the problem, isn’t it, Ruth? That you have come to forget that you are a prisoner of Her Majesty’s Government, that you were tried and convicted of serious crimes. That in a time of national crisis you sought to manipulate the water supply for your own benefit and that you are still under suspicion for the murder of your own grandson . . .’
‘That is not true.’
‘That you are under house arrest and that you cannot, I repeat, cannot do what you like. That is the whole point of locking people up. That and letting the rest of us sleep easy in our beds. Soldier, continue reading the prisoner the amended terms and conditions of her house arrest.’
There is no sign in Boy’s voice that he is anything other than a conscript – it is a pilotless drone. When they have left, I stand in the shower and try to wash Three’s fingerprints from my wrist, and then I return to bed. There is nowhere else to go.
What price a night on a bench, star-gazing with a teenage guard? Six pieces of silver. An orchard, a field, a forest, a sky.
Twenty-four hours in bed and now I expect Three will send for the shrink again, that will be his next kick. Twenty-four hours makes it Sunday. I dress, but get back into bed to wait. At last I hear him. Hugh is back. He finds me mentally frail, I find him physically weak; combined we are human. With characteristic understatement, he describes his stroke as a minor blip, says his daughter is fussy and grumbles that nobody nowadays knows how to milk a cow. Now I am downstairs with him, me curled up like the old woman I am on the sofa, him in his armchair, I realise how deeply pleased I am to see him, how unconditional his visits are.
‘The vegetable garden is looking good,’ he offers. It seems he has not been told.
‘I found out it was Boy’s work,’ I explain. ‘Apparently he wants to be a landscape gardener when he grows up so he’s landed on his feet. Come to the only place in the country where you can still choose that as an apprenticeship.’
‘I’ve seen some beautiful gardens in the desert,’ says Hugh, reaching for the mug, then, after something of a pause, ‘What made you change your mind?’
‘About the gardening?’
‘About the gardening.’
‘I hadn’t changed my mind. I didn’t garden. Now, even if I wanted to, I can’t. I’ve left it too late. They’ve changed the perimeters and I’m not allowed out of the house.’
He nods. ‘I thought they might,’ he says, in a voice lacking in indignation. I suppose his parishioners have told him much worse in the past; he must have seen much worse in his time in Africa – mine is a tedious, inconsequential suffering in the greater scheme of things. Hugh’s chest is rising and falling slowly, each breath a deliberate commitment, the pauses between some words are long and I wonder if his speech has suffered a little as a result of his stroke.
‘I haven’t asked about you,’ I say and reach over, putting my hand on his arm. ‘I am sorry. I am something of a Robinson Crusoe here. I have forgotten how to think about other people. How are you?’
‘You’re telling me you haven’t found a Man Friday yet?’
‘No, I’ve found nothing. No footprints in the sand, no empty canoes. This is pretty much what the guide book says, a real-life desert island.’
Hugh smiles and answers my original question. ‘I am fine, very few after-effects really. My left arm isn’t quite what it was and my speech – have you noticed? I find it a little trying at times, but I don’t need to preach any longer, at least not to anyone except you.’
I am desperate to ask him about the internet, but the electronic eye is blinking in the corner and I am weighing up the serious risk of them banning Hugh’s visits against my addiction to information.
I opt for ambivalence. ‘How’s the research going?’
‘My search produced no matches, as they say. Lots of references, discussion, that sort of thing, but not exactly what I’m looking for.’
The disappointment I would have expected to feel at his evasiveness, at the fact that he has turned up empty-handed, is not here because I am so relieved he is back with me and that he is well. Looking at this fat, old priest and knowing the comfort he brings me, I understand that this is what ministry looks like: no virtual prayers, but rather the offer of one man to take on the suffering of another; no thousands worshipping online, but a few, waiting in line for a quiet communion, their feet shuffling on flagstones worn by a thousand years of faith; no icons to download, but a cross. No visions, for all I know, probably no voices either, no obvious replies or advice from on high, a room full of quite ordinary sorrow, shared.
Not so the Sisters. I had been on the Rose site often enough with them when I was at the caravans, following their links to texts and readings, watching Sister Amelia write the ‘Thought for the Day’, listening to Eve record the Sisters singing and then enhance the meditative chants until it sounded like a choir and then put it as a link to worship together. At home, I avoided using it. Mark had been on the site once and lost his temper when he saw photos of The Well uploaded with pictures of his hayfields and captions about the Blessed Land.
‘What gives them the right to act as if they own this place?’
Me responding that nobody owns this place, Mark, we are just guardians. Him tearing a framed photo of us standing in front of the cottage off the wall and smashing it on the tiles on the kitchen floor and shouting, there, we never bought it, we don’t own it, I don’t spend fourteen hours a day farming it, it’s nothing to do with us, it belongs to your sodding nuns. Me, later, rescuing the picture and hammering the nail back into the crumbling plaster.
The day after the service at the Wellspring, Sister Amelia invited me into the hub, said she had something she wanted to show me. The hub was the caravan which acted as the engine room of the spiritual spaceship, wires trailing to the solar charger, print-outs of spreadsheets weighted down with ‘The Song of Solomon’ and with Eve as the chief engineer in communication with earth in front of the laptop. Next to her, sitting on the stool, her hair piled up in a bun, her legs crossed, the first three buttons on her white blouse left undone, Sister Amelia could almost have been in any office, anywhere, tapping out the hours in a heat wave until a five o’clock drink in a little local wine bar with a terrace in the centre of some airless city. She asked Eve to move over so that I could see, put in her password and brought up SistersoftheRoseofJericho.com. The image of me, held by the water of The Well and showered by the fragments of a rainbow dominated the page. I felt my cheeks, my jawbone, my neck and then grasped my hands together. Yes. That was me.
‘Over three thousand hits this morning alone. Watch the counter.’
In the corner of the screen the figure which recorded the number of hits was clicking relentlessly upwards even as we watched. It had a life of its own. Impossible to think it had any connection to me, impossible to think that each of those numbers represented a person in another place watching me on a film on a computer.
‘The word has spread, Ruth. She is moving through the world on the unseen byways of the internet, the spirit is breathing through us. They are waiting to hear from you, Ruth. You must talk to them.’
‘Me? How?’
I think now that if I had been driven to stadiums, called up to address crowds of thousands crying and chanting in their desperation for an answer, interviewed by the press, and featured on breakfast TV, then it might have become clearer to me what I was getting into. But, and it is no excuse, it was all so distant. These thousands were not gathered before me as real people, placing their hope in me – they were site subscribers, paid up online members sitting on their own in their soporific offices and sterile bedrooms, checking their BlackBerrys whilst travelling to hospital appointments on late buses, scratching at their gravel gardens with redundant trowels. We could copy and paste them, delete them, store their details, accept or reject their bids for salvation with a click of the mouse. I may have been the chosen one, but I was a novice in this free-market, religious economy.
Eve wasn’t. She put her PR experience to good use. ‘I’m suggesting we live-stream at dusk. People will have left work and it’s more atmospheric.’ She examined a chipped nail and corrected herself. ‘What I mean is that sometimes it’s easier to focus on what matters.’
Emboldened, I showed them the writing which had poured from me the night before.
‘Super. We’ll upload it immediately,’ said Eve. Sister Amelia said she should read it first, to see if anything needed . . . Needed what? Amending? Correcting? No. What strength, what conviction I had. This was the word of the Rose. It had been dictated to me and could not be improved. I put the poetry on the table and left them in the tense silence to read it.
The second blog was no less visionary.
Next I am shown the earth under a footprint of gold.
Come closer.
This is not something you can see from standing.
Lie like a child on your flat stomach.
Rest your chin on your hands and attend the soil.
Write the name of Rose in the earth with your finger.
If the land is bare, it is because you have not attended.
Attend to what is written in the dirt.
Attend to your fires, to the burning effigy,
a guy with no revolution in his mind.
The thumb of the believer strikes the flint.
The breath of the believer blows the flame.
And in the conflagration I see the hand that saves me,
seed, pale and pooled on the leaves of a dandelion,
and a Rose which unfurls and spreads its dryness to the sky
ready for the soft water to touch, for the flowering.
Hugh is a natural listener. Not for him classes in mirroring body language or non-judgemental affirmative silence. He makes no comment, but simply asks ‘May I?’, and I get up and pass him the notebook, reflecting that there are words that still seem to belong here, the gentle words like leaves and seed. It is hard to think that those other violent insurgent words ever found their home at The Well, this quiet land, keeper of a history of sorts, home to woodpeckers and buttercups.
‘So that was the famous First Incantation?’ asks Hugh, turning the pages, one by one, slowly.
It was. It had a life of its own, that poem. It defined what was to become the Dusk Worships, the familiar prayer position of the faithful, the writing of the Rose in the soil, the practice of meditating on a handful of dust. But more dangerous than any of those, the hatred of men, the burning of male effigies and the fire-fuelled protests against the men in the government that it provoked. I should undergo a second baptism and take the name of Herod.
Hugh flicks back through the notebook and seems to re-read one page. ‘This hatred of men, Ruth, it’s so intense. Was it men as a species? What about Mark?’
‘Mark was more like a toddler than a man by then,’ I replied.
‘What about young Lucien then? He would have grown up.’
‘But he didn’t, did he?’
Hugh does not respond, but quotes instead from my notebook. ‘We are dry women, but when we kiss the Rose, our lips are touched with dew and we flower also. If men were so bad, Ruth, did you find compensation, shall we say, in the love of women? Even an old high-church Irishman like me can see how that could happen.’
‘You know the history of mysticism better than me, I suspect.’
‘You give me too much credit.’ Hugh waited patiently.
Having taken back the writings from him, I look around the room for a suitable place to put them and, not seeing anywhere, throw them in the basket by the stove where we have always put everything that needed burning. ‘I’ve told you before, there are more questions than answers here. Besides, I’m not sure the line between spiritual and physical ecstasy has been agreed by the Royal College of Psychiatry – or by the Pope for that matter.’ Hugh doesn’t reply, but nods instead, shifting a little uncomfortably in his chair. I take him a cushion. ‘It wasn’t just another country, Hugh, it was another planet. These were just words, hieroglyphics on A4 lined paper.’
We sit for a few minutes, the thick stone walls of the cottage now a barrier, forbidding entry to the rustle of the breeze or the hum of thunder flies. ‘I did write them. There must have been a part of me that created them. What happened to them all, do you think?’
Hugh looks over to me. ‘Who? The words?’
‘The faithful. The ones who bought the T-shirts and downloaded the hymns.’
‘The same as has happened to you. Conviction, dereliction, maybe the restoration of hope. Because, despite this whole clamp-down, Ruth, I detect a little more hope in you, nowadays, compared to my first visit at least.’
‘That’s because you’re back,’ I said.
‘T-shirts? Did they really buy T-shirts?’ Hugh asks suddenly.
‘Oh yes, and more. Mugs, biros, calendars with pictures of The Well for every month of the year – even pants for all I know. Some of it was shipped out from the site; other items, like the T-shirts, Eve said was contracted out, so somewhere I presume there’s a warehouse full of fakery. You could take a look on eBay, Hugh! See if you can’t bring me a fridge magnet with my face on it next time you come. It could act as a reminder for me in case I should ever think of believing in anything again.’
‘What happened to the money, do you think?’ asked Hugh.
‘That I don’t know. People subscribed and donated. Eve talked about all that with Amelia. I think she liked to think there were things not shared with me. Amelia did try to persuade me to buy out Mark’s share, for the Sisters to form a charity and buy the whole thing. But that was later. There must have been a lot of money for her to be talking like that, but I never really got involved.’
‘So many unknowns.’ He is turning the pages of his Bible carefully, scanning the verses, until it seems he reaches what he has been searching for. ‘Time is running out for us, winged chariots and so forth. Do you mind if I read from this?’
‘Carry on.’
‘Ecclesiastes. Nothing about a handful of dust. Something much more useful to remember in life. I think of it almost every time I walk over the hill there.’
‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance . . .’
‘That’s one bit of the Bible I do know,’ I say.
‘You know it and you don’t know it,’ he replies.