I fell into the well. I cracked my head. I saw stars.
It did not occur to me then that I had succeeded, in a sense, in my plan. What I saw were lights, strange, inchoate and bizarre. It was only later that I connected the visual symptoms of that fall and impact with the stylised stars and planets I was used to seeing drawn in a cartoon panel whenever a comic character suffered a similar whack. At the time I was at first just dazed, then frightened I was going to drown, then relieved that the water beneath the bucket was so shallow, then finally both angry at you for letting me fall and afraid of what Mother would say.
High above, you looked over the edge of the well, a silhouette. So outlined, I could see you carefully holding your hair out of contact with the stone wall and the bucket’s rope. You called down, asking if I was all right.
I filled my lungs and opened my mouth to speak, to shout, and then you called again, a note of rising panic in your voice, and with those words stopped mine in my throat. I sat there, thinking for a moment, then slowly slumped back, lying sprawled in the bucket, saying nothing but closing my eyes and opening my mouth slackly.
You called once more, your voice full of fear. I lay still, eyelids cracked enough to watch you through the foliage of lashes. You disappeared, calling out for help.
I waited a moment, then scrambled to my feet, pulling down on the chain until it became rope and exhausted the supply at the wooden cylinder attached to the handle on the well-head. My skull seemed to buzz but I felt unharmed. I pulled on the rope and stuck my feet out to gain purchase on the grimy stones of the well’s throat. I was young and strong, the rope was new and the well only as deep as the moat’s level was from the courtyard. I quickly hauled and pushed my way to the top, then pulled myself over the edge and landed on the courtyard cobbles. I could hear raised, alarmed voices coming from the castle’s main door. I ran the opposite way, down to the passage under the old guard chamber leading to the moat bridge, and hid in the shadows there.
Mother and Father both appeared along with you and old Arthur; Mother shrieked, flapping her hands. Father shouted down and told Arthur to haul on the winch handle. My mother walked round and round with her hands to her mouth, circling the well. You stood back, looking pale and shocked, gulping and wheezing for breath, watching.
‘Abel! Abel!’ Father shouted. Arthur laboured at the winch handle, perspiring. The rope creaked on its drum, taking some weight at last. ‘Damn, I can’t see . . .’
‘This is her fault, hers!’ Mother wailed, pointing at you. You looked at her blankly and played with the hem of your dress.
‘Don’t be stupid!’ Father told her. ‘It’s your responsibility; why isn’t the well-cover locked?’
A terrific thrill ran through me then; I experienced a sensation I would only later be able to identify as something close to sexual, orgasmic, as I watched on while others fretted, laboured, panicked and performed for me. My bladder threatened to embarrass me and I had to clench my stomach around a ball of joy at the same time as I crossed my legs and pinched my still hairless manhood to prevent a further wetting of my pants.
Some other servants and Father’s mistress appeared, crowding around the well as Arthur brought the empty bucket to the surface. My mother’s wails filled the courtyard. ‘A torch!’ my father shouted. ‘Fetch me a torch!’ A servant ran back into the castle. The bucket was perched on the wall, dripping. Father tested the rope. ‘Someone may have to go down there,’ he declared. ‘Who’s the lightest?’
I was bowed in the shadows, still trying not to wet myself. A fire of fierce elation filled me, threatening to burst.
Then I saw the line of drips I’d left, from well to where I now stood. I looked in horror at the spots, dark coins of dirty well water fallen from my soaking clothes on to the dry grey cobbles; two or three for every pace or so. At my feet, in the darkness, the water had formed a little pool. I looked back into the courtyard, to where an even greater crowd had assembled, almost obscuring Father, who was now shining a flashlight down into the well and instructing servants to hold up jackets over his head so that the day’s brightness would not dazzle him while he peered into the gloom.
The drops I had left shone in the sunlight. I could not believe that nobody had seen them. Mother was screaming hysterically now; a sharp, jarring noise that I had never heard from her or from anyone else before. It shook my soul, suffused my conscience. What was I to do? I had had my revenge on you - though you’d seemed only a little worried, I’d noticed - and you had already been partially blamed, but where did I go from here? This had quickly become more serious than I’d anticipated, escalating with dizzying rapidity from a great prank born of a brilliant brainwave to something that - I could tell, just from the number and seniority of adults losing their composure - would not be put to rest without some serious, painful and lasting punishment being inflicted on somebody, almost certainly myself. I cursed myself for not thinking this through. From crafty plan, to downfall, to wheeze, to calamity; all in a few minutes.
The plan came to me like a lifebelt to a drowning man. I gathered all my courage and left my hiding place in the passageway shadows, coming staggering out and blinking. I cried out faintly, one hand to my brow, then yelled out a little louder when my first cry went unheeded. Somebody turned, then all did; shouts and exclamations went up. I stumbled on a little further as people rushed towards me, then collapsed dramatically on the cobbles just before they got to me.
Sitting up, comforted, my head in my weeping mother’s bosom, my hands held and rubbed by separate servants, I went ‘Phew’ and said ‘Oh dear’ and smiled bravely and claimed that I had found a secret tunnel from the bottom of the well to the moat, and crawled and swum along it until I got out, climbed up the bridge and tottered, exhausted, through the passageway.
To this day I think I was almost getting away with it until Father appeared squatting in front of me, his expression dark, his eyes stony. He had me repeat my story. I did so, hesitating, no longer quite so sure of myself. Had I said I’d climbed out via the bank? I meant the bridge. His eyes narrowed. Thinking I was plugging a gap, in fact only adding another log to my pyre, I said that the secret passage had fallen in after me; there wouldn’t be any point in, say, sending somebody down to look for it. In fact the whole well was dangerous. I’d barely escaped with my life.
Looking into my father’s eyes was like looking into a dark tunnel with no stars at the end. It was as though he was seeing me for the first time, and as though I was looking down a secret passage through time, to an adult perspective, to the way the world and cocky, lying children’s stories would look to me when I was his age.
My words died in my throat.
He reached out and slapped me, hard, across the face. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, boy,’ he said, investing more contempt in those few words than I’d have thought a whole language capable of conveying. He rose smoothly to his feet and walked away.
Mother wailed, screaming incoherently at him. Servants looked confused, some gazing at me with troubled expressions, some looking after him as he walked back into the castle. His mistress followed, taking you by the hand.
Arthur, whom I thought old then but who was not really, looked down from the space in the crowd Father’s exit had created, his expression regretful and troubled, shaking his head or looking like he wanted to, not because I had had a terrifying adventure and then been unjustly disbelieved and harshly struck by my own father, but because he too could see through my forlorn and hapless lie, and worried for the soul, the character, the future moral standing of any child so shameless - and so incompetent - in its too easily resorted-to lying. In that pity was a rebuke as severe and wounding as that my father had administered with his twin handfuls of fingers and words, and in as much that it confirmed that this was the mature judgement of my actions and my father’s, not some aberration I might be able to discount or ignore, it affected me even more profoundly.
I began to cry. And began to cry not with the shallow
, hot and easy tears of childish frustration and rage, but with my first real adult anguish, with a grief by myself deflowered of petty childhood concern; great sobbing heartfelt tears of sorrow - not now just selfishly for my own narrow sense of advantage or annoyance, because I’d been found out or because I knew some protracted punishment probably awaited, though there was that too - but for my father’s lost belief and pride in his only son.
That was what racked me, spread upon the castle’s stones; that was what gripped me like a cold fist inside and squeezed those cold and bitter tears of grief from me and could not be comforted by Mother’s soothing strokes and gentle pats and soft cooings.
Later, Mother still declared that she believed my story, though I suspect that she only said so to deny my father his last convert, to frustrate his will; another spurious victory in the decades-long campaign they waged against each other, at first mutually besieging and betraying in the castle, later apart. She agreed I needed to be punished, though to save face she asserted it was for going down the well in the first place. (My claim that I’d fallen somehow, that even my original descent had all been an accident had been contradicted by you, my dear, revealing an unfortunate respect for the truth.)
And so I was sent to my room for the first night of many, with nothing but school books for company and a prisoner’s rations.
My exile brought one incalculable benefit, one utterly unlooked for bonus which would, years later, maturing, be consolidated.
You came to my room, having persuaded a servant to let you in with a pass key, so that you might apologise for what you said was your part in my offence. You brought a little pink cake you’d taken from the kitchens and hidden in your dress. You knelt by my bed. A single bedside lamp lit my tear-swollen cheeks and your wide, dark eyes. You handed me the small cake two-handed, with a near comical reverence. I took it and nodded, eating half of it in one munching gulp, then popping the rest into my mouth.
You stood up then with a strange gracefulness and lifted your dress to expose flesh from sock-top to navel. I stared, mouth stopped with a sugary pink pulp. You tucked your dresshems under your chin, then reached under my bedclothes and took my nearer hand, guiding it gently to the downy cleft between your legs, and held it there, pressing and softly rubbing back and forth. Your other hand closed around my genitals, then began to pull and stroke my sex. Moistened, encouraged, my fingers slipped into you, startling me both with that upward swallowing and with the heat discovered. I too swallowed, the pink mouthful of cake reflexively gulped.
You kneaded both of us, then, while I lay, still amazed, paralysed by the novelty of what was happening, by this next latest and most bizarre reversal of fortune. I was afraid to react, hesitant to will any action at all lest whatever astounding (and so surely of necessity precarious) combination of circumstances had brought this unexpected rhapsody about be upset by the smallest contrary deed of mine.
Guiding my engulfed fingers with a quicker, stronger beat, you shuddered suddenly, sighed, and in a moment, withdrew my hand and patted my wrist. You let your dress down, pulled the covers back, then knelt and took me in your mouth, sucking and bobbing, hair tickling my thighs.
I simply stared. Perhaps it was just that surprise, maybe - more likely - it was simply that I was still too young. In any event, there was, on that dry run, no climactic surge of joy and no issue either in the time we had. The tickling, bobbing, sucking went on for a little while until the servant, grown nervous of being discovered, knocked at the door and cracked it to mutter a warning. Letting it plop out of your mouth like a glistening lollipop, you kissed my own pink swelling, then covered it and walked with calm daintiness away; the door opened and closed for you and I was left alone.
Or not quite; I unrolled the bedclothes again to gaze upon my new but now slowly waning friend. I plucked experimentally at it as I sniffed my curiously scented fingers, but my manhood went down simply of its own accord, and I would not fully see its like again until that day the wind and rain ambushed me in the muddy woods.
You, my dear, would not witness the spectre you’d raised for a second time until our tryst on the castle’s roof, a decade later, one warm night, above a party.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The well’s black water stinks; a soil-sweat perfume that for all its rankness seems as though it should at least be warm and enveloping, but instead is cold and sharp. I catch a hint of human odour, too, indicating that wine and food, vomited up to fall down here, have mingled with urine to create still more pungent tones to accompany the hole’s own earthy scent.
I sniff back blood from my nose; the noise is loud inside the closed metal helm. I try to rise but feel paralysed by cold. I wonder how long I have lain here. I tip my head, clanging the helmet against the side of the shaft as I try to see the summit of the well. Light. Light through the perforations of the helmet, perhaps. Or not. I blink, and the view swims. My neck aches. I lower my head and still see the lights.
Seeing stars again, I lie back in the castle’s gutted heart, its night-braided reaches holding me encupped, its stealing coldness infecting me, and feel myself part of its choking debris; another scattered mote, cast first to the quicker elements and then the ground, rolled along a course, a road, a bed I have no choice in determining, nor any way of leaving.
I am cells; no more, I think. This present assemblage - bones, flesh and blood - is more complicated than most such gatherings to be found on the world’s rude surface, and my quorum of sense-holding plasm may be greater than other animals can muster, but the principle’s the same, and all our extra wisdom does is let us know the truth of our own insignificance more fully. My body, my whole dazed being, seems like little more than a pile of autumn leaves, blown and bunched by a swirling wind and trapped, corralled by a chance of ancillary geography into a localised drift. Of what greater consequence am I than that temporary heap of leaves, that collection of cells, collectively dead or dying? How much more do any of us signify?
Yet still we do ascribe a greater pain and joy and weight of import to ourselves than to any mere clump of matter, and feel it too. We seduce ourselves with our own images, perhaps. The leaf dryly tumbling along the road is not really like a refugee.
We carry the silt of our own memories within us, like the castle’s loft-stored treasures, and we are top-heavy with it. But ours is geological in its profundity, reaching back through our shared histories, blood-lines and ancestries to the first farmers, the first hunting band, the first shared cave or nested tree. By our wit we look further back, and out, so that we bear the buried stripes of all our planet’s earlier geology in the strata of our brains, and contain within our bodies the particular knowledge of the explosion of suns that lived and died before our own came into being.
The deeper silt implies the grander flow, and I cannot fully join the rubble underneath, not while I breathe and think and feel. My bones could lie here comfortably enough - just minerals, cold things, ‘stuff ’ - but not the man who thinks of this eventuality.
From this sunk hole I once thought to see the depths of heaven, to look into the past that is the ancient light of stars, and just so now, lowered to a heightened understanding, by my tormentors aided, I think I see the way into the future. From here, with this new perspective, I believe I view the castle whole, its plan spread out above me, transparent and confirmed, the earth made unopaque, revealing the building’s stones raised from the land into the commerce of the rain and air.
Here is the house militant, a blocked-in enterprise huddled round a private, guarded void, its banners and its flags flown flagrant to the vulgar, following winds; a mailed fist prevailing against all levelling air.
Seminal, germinal, I lie there; something mud-bound, land-bound, evolving, and quite undismayed both by the burden of the abysmal past compressed beneath and by the columnar weight of atmosphere above bearing down, each together squeezing me, forcing me, tributary, to a greater, crasser surface.
But now is now, now is demand,
and I must act.
I try to shrug or scrape the helmet off, but fail. I decide to free my hands first.
I struggle, numb with cold, attempting to undo myself. I bend my fingers and try to find purchase on the tied length of rough-textured bell-pull securing my hands. I tug and haul and wriggle my wrists inside their bindings.
A noise, above.
I look up into darkness, and am pissed upon; the urine patters down upon me, softly clanging off the helmet and hissing into the water. It is barely warm, cooled almost to the same chill as the well’s still water by its passage down the cold air of the well’s throat. Some shouts, and then, with a start that has my elbows jerk in beside my body, something solid hits the helmet and splashes into the water. Laughter, above; more shouts, fading then returning. Then the sound of retching.
Sickness, this time. It feels warmer than the urine. Its acrid stench rises up around me. Mostly wine, I think. More laughter, and then silence.
I continue to struggle with the bonds round my wrist. I think that if I could only see properly, even in the near darkness, I might succeed. But I need my hands to release me from the helm. I try, instead, to stand inside my little bucket, thinking that I might be able to nudge the helmet off once I can better wedge it against the side of the well. That fails too, my legs refusing to work.
I set back to work on my bonds. They have become wet and slick; my fingers slip on their greasy surface. Finally, I feel something come loose on the outside of the knot, but twist my wrists and reach with straining fingers as I might, I cannot pull on it.
I flop back, exhausted, lights in front of my eyes again. I think I miss out on a little time again.