Free The Well by Catherine Chanter

now. The spring sun moves in millimetres across the sky and I am beside myself with dread and hopeful expectation.
    Finally Boy bangs on the window. ‘Post,’ he says as he comes in. I can imagine him as someone’s son, or holding out a birthday card for a girlfriend. ‘Read it.’
    ‘I fear the Greeks,’ I say and am surprised when he replies.
    ‘I’m not bringing any gifts. Not on my wages.’
    These children must be part of the new breed of ‘community conscripts’, much disputed in Parliament but introduced in the face of the drought on that most tenuous of premises that ‘needs must’. He is probably doing his stint after university and there is no reason why an army private shouldn’t be quoting Virgil nowadays, but I have become predatory and recognise in him not only a possible source of conversation, but a potential source of information from the outside world. Right now, though, I am consumed with anticipation about the letter and am torn between ripping it open and a more reverential approach which would allow the moment to last.
    The Rev. Hugh Casey has written from The Pumphouse, Middle Sidding, to say he has been contacted by the Prison Welfare Division in relation to my request to see a priest. He is pleased to let them know that it would be a pleasure to visit. Not Angie. Not Mark. Not Amelia. Disappointment punches me in the stomach.
    ‘It’s good news isn’t it? This priest bloke will come on Sunday.’
    ‘This Sunday then.’ I don’t want any of them, even Boy, to know how much I have lost track of times and dates.
    ‘Yep. Two days. Be a bit of an event for us all. Perhaps we should have a party.’ Boy clicks his fingers and reggaes his way around the kitchen. ‘Red red wine . . .’ he croons. I think he’s one of those people who can’t tolerate other people’s unhappiness and feels a personal responsibility to cheer them up. I manage to laugh just because I feel sorry for him: he has his work cut out for him here.
    This must be a boring posting for three young men. No doubt their mothers are pleased that they are safe in the English countryside, with running water and the task of guarding some inoffensive crops and keeping a middle-aged nutcase in a field, rather than out on guard duty, firing off rubber bullets at protestors or policing the marches which I am sure must have continued – the motivated and the mad stamping their thirsty way up and down Whitehall, demanding rain. The news used to be on constantly in the dayroomat the unit, blaring from the TV hung too high on the wall: pictures of soldiers guarding the reservoirs, the lakes in Cumbria, the building sites where the first desalination plants are under construction, or shots of the RAF, droning overhead in their helicopters, sights trained ready for unscheduled activity on the ground – an old woman with a bucket, a black kid with a hose, a group of men rigging an illegal pump next to an unauthorised factory. These jobs carry a lot more risk than this one, I am sure. Here the risk is of insights into one’s own dry soul and that has never worried anyone’s mother unduly.
    Needing to do something to wash away the taste of abandonment, I hold up a mug and he says please.
    Small talk. That will help. ‘It must be quite boring for you here,’ I begin.
    ‘The job description’s pretty dull,’ he admits, ‘but the location, now you can’t call that boring. The science of it, if you like.’
    ‘What science?’
    ‘We were recruited because we’ve all got science degrees of some sort. Typical army. They thought, oh, he’s got a degree in particle physics, he’ll be good at taking rain gauge readings, although of course it hasn’t actually rained since we got here.’
    ‘And have you? Got a degree in particle physics?’
    ‘I did a geography degree,’ he tells me. ‘This is my payback year. They were asking for science graduates and then when they found a bunch of us, they pulled out the ones who would be