The Well Read Free Page A

and, oh my God, everything. I am a toddler again. I want to run after them and hold onto their legs and ask them why, when, how, who. I am in my own house, but I have no idea how I am going to live.
    Bedtime. It seems I am going to have to force myself to go upstairs. My fingers remember where the light switches are, but I prefer the dark. I find my way to my bed and, still fully dressed, slide stiffly between the sheets and the duvet which do not smell of prison, but do not smell of home either. Even though it is cold, I leave the shutters open just so I can see the moon over Montford Forest. I will lie here and ask The Well what it thinks of the dayjust gone and we will reach our conclusions. I will count the sheep I have lost as a way of avoiding sleep, because sleep avoids me. I will compose letters to the ones who are no longer here, because they are no longer here. They no longer hear. I like that pun. I will allow myself the pleasure of the occasional pun. Mark, for instance. I say his name very loudly to confirm his absence. Mark my words. Marking time. And despite the silence, despite the fact that only a wall separates me from the fathomless emptiness of a dead child’s bedroom, I am suddenly knocked sideways with happiness because I am back.
    I wonder if it will rain.

 
    S tiff in my stale clothes, I wake. I could lie here all day, all week, all year and the hairs on my skin would grow through the wool of my sweater, like the tendrils of ivy through a green knitted jumper, dropped in a wood. The sun would make its rounds, from the fairground picture above the bed, to the chest of drawers, to the blue, painted mirror and back again and I would still be here, thinking and getting thinner, until one day I would have found the answer, but by then there would be nothing left of me, just an imprint, the shell of a tall woman as brittle, straight and empty as the hollow stalks of the Queen Anne’s lace that lines the drive in summer . . .
     

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    Click. ‘A little piece of paradise on the banks of the Severn . . .’
    Click. ‘Want to get away from it all? Look no further than this 3 bed, 2 recep . . .’
    Click. ‘Looking for a project? Turn this barn into your castle and be lord of all . . .’
    That’s how it started. Mark and I in London, hunchbacked slavesto the laptop, squabbling over control of the mouse, believing that the bricks and mortar and land just a virtual second away would eradicate the bickering and divisions which had increasingly become our coat of arms after twenty-two years of marriage.
    ‘It can’t be that hard to find somewhere,’ said my colleagues at school.
    ‘With the price you’ll get for this . . .’ said our neighbours.
    Moving out of London, living off the land, that was the dream. It always had been Mark’s dream, but he had mortgaged it for me and, although he never put it this way, he was calling in the debt. He had paid out for so long and now he was bankrupt, whereas I had been investing and accumulating in people and work and ways of living that to sell out now seemed, at the very least, daunting.
    Standing like a child on tiptoe at the edge of the diving board, I wanted to jump and yet was terrified of jumping; I wanted to grasp the handrail and walk back down and yet the cold concrete world at the bottom was also slippery with fear. To plunge into a new, freshwater pool, live with a different energy in a world unpolluted by hatred, to come up for air at last, like Mark I was in love with the idea of getting away from it all and starting again in the country. But if we slipped, it would be a long, long way to fall and we would be far away from anyone familiar who might throw us a lifeline. As far as Mark saw it, it was the right thing to do at the right time. I was an inarticulate advocate and found it strangely hard to voice my worries in the face of his enthusiasm, not to mention his desperation. His central thesis was