…the taxi driver has decided to tell us a story. It's good advice for a struggling writer never to refuse a story. Of course, by adopting this policy one suffers a lot of dross, but even if it fails to inspire, at the very least it reminds one that the bar is fairly low.
This one is called St Anne’s Well.
*
My Auntie Anne lives in her childhood home. She hasn't been there continuously - she returned after my grandmother died, almost three decades ago now. One day, when I was about seven, we were on our way over to visit her at the start of the summer holidays, and my mother said: "Now that you're being prepared for first holy communion, I think I should take you to St. Anne's well". I wasn't paying very much attention when she said it. She used her logical tone, and having grown accustomed to her logically intoning all kinds of magical, spiritual notions, I didn't discern anything strange about this suggestion. I was quite absorbed in contemplation of what was sure to be the highlight of our visit: Auntie Anne was going to make a new dress for my doll.
The wonderful thing about Auntie Anne's tenancy in Grandma's house (though she owns a third of it, she pays rent to her sisters for the rest) is that my Grandmother last decorated it in the 1970s, and Auntie Anne hasn't changed anything. A cacophony of disagreeable patterns and colours have been transfigured through membership of a diverse ecology of garishness. There isn't time to dwell on the ugliness of the carpets when the curtains and wallpaper clamour just as loudly for horrified attention. The result is sort of a kaleidoscopic joke. A funhouse. A gorgeous mess. Back then it felt to me like nowhere else in the world.
Upon arrival, Auntie Anne administered tea and biscuits with a military efficiency sitting squarely at odds with the bohemian clutter that had taken over everywhere you looked. I was impressed that she was able to operate her sewing machine with so little room available for her elbows, and that she avoided accidentally stitching several foreign objects into her textile work. The clothes she made for my doll were truly splendid - better cut than anything she wore herself. The cloth was carefully selected after a long and serious discussion with me about Perpetua's demands, and came from a large cigar box filled with carefully rolled fat quarters of silk and heavy velvet, brocade and taffeta.
Perpetua, my doll, was one of those cheap, hollow dolls you buy for a couple of pounds on street markets. Over several months of compulsively tracing them with my fingers, I had worn smooth the rough seams along her legs and torso. Auntie Anne expressed a liking for her immediately, on the basis of what she called her "stricken" face. Barbie, said Auntie Anne, looks like she's been drugged, but my doll bore an expression of heightened awareness. The name Perpetua was Auntie Anne's suggestion, after the early Christian martyr who had been careful to maintain her modesty while being gored by a wild heifer. "Her face is that of a woman who knows she is mortally wounded, yet proceeds to adjust her tunic".
I'm still a little moved when I remember the contrast between Perpetua's cheap, dented limbs, her sparse nylon hair, and the sumptuous gowns and lace blouses and shimmering chemises that were turned out by Auntie Anne's expert hands. Perpetua wore them with dignity, and I think even she quite forgot her humble origins within the tired injection mould of a grim Chinese factory.
It was only when we were ready to say our goodbyes, and I was about to thank my aunt one more time for the beautiful velvet gown she had made, that my mother said we would go to the end of the garden. She led me to the ornamental wishing well in the shade of the goat willow. "St Anne's well", she said. I frowned and hesitated, before trying to form an encompassing question. My mother beamed eagerly. Thence the story...
My mother and Auntie Anne, and their two elder sisters, grew up in that house. My mother was the youngest, and seldom heard. In actual fact, she was hardly quiet, but was often left to her own devices on account of Anne's antics, which consumed the bulk of available domestic attention. The eldest two, the twins, Iris and Pat, benefited greatly from Anne's deviancy. With their parents fully distracted by the problem child, they were able to engage in a clandestine life of which most girls in their mid-teens can only dream.
It was the nuns living in the annexe to the priest's house who came up with the scheme - Sister Dorothy and Sister Marie. It was the solid, severe Dorothy who noticed Anne's fidgety, restless tendencies during Mass, and approached Granny with the suggestion that Anne undertake the duties of an altar server. Though quite aghast at the prospect of letting Anne loose in the vicinity of the church's critical apparatus, Granny was disinclined to refuse. Not only was Sister Dot quite intimidating, but Granny could not bring herself to invite further judgment by intimating the full extent of Anne's behavioural deficiencies; That she had to keep her eyes constantly peeled for signs of her daughter's misdemeanours; That, upon that very morning, she had had to confiscate a bottle of cochineal originally destined for the holy water by the church door.
In spite of her profound unease, Granny said it was a wonderful idea, and suggested that perhaps there would be room up on the altar for my mother as well. She reassured herself with the notion that Anne's activities could be more efficiently monitored by virtue of the new arrangement. Granny would sit eyes forward for a change, with a clear view of her daughter's employment. Nonetheless, my mother was given a sober briefing too, to be alert to any signs of trouble.
For several weeks my mother waited with great expectation, for firecrackers in the the thurible, perhaps a spring and tissue paper snake in the tabernacle. Nothing. Anne sometimes swayed a little, as she stood with the oversized leather bound mass book balanced on her head for the priest to read, but that was often the way when a child is left holding that kind of weight aloft. It really did seem that the plan was working.
Until one Sunday in early December.
The family (minus Iris and Pat, who were, as usual, otherwise engaged) arrived at the little brick box church of St Wulstan's under a dense grey sky. As the first gobbets of sleet slapped down upon the hard, patchy turf of the carpark, the church filled with well wrapped bodies, and condensation soon lay thickly on the cold frosted glass of the narrow windows. My grandparents took their usual pew, two rows from the front. Mother and Auntie Anne got ready for mass and lingered by a halogen heater in the vestry, Anne's surplice resting gently on the grille. She glanced down occasionally to see if it was yet alight.
The back door burst open and Father Matthew effected an ungainly entrance, sleet hanging in his thinning hair, his round face red with cold. Hurriedly gathering his vestments, he advised the girls to brace themselves against the hostile conditions for the short walk around the side of the church to the main door. Over-warmed as they were by the heater, and sweating quite uncomfortably under too many layers, the freezing rain struck their rosy, exposed cheeks with aggressive incongruity. As they tumbled through the main doors a certain giddiness infected the three, and forgetting all else, servers and priest alike succumbed to the giggles. They then waited grinning in the porch for the warbling of the electric organ to signify the beginning of the mass.
The giddiness quickly subsided. A calm soon reigned and, my mother noticed, so too did a certain drowsiness affecting the priest and several members of the congregation. Most had chosen to retain their fully buttoned winter coats, in spite of the warm air flowing from the storage heaters lining the little church. Even Granny, for all her enduring dedication to anxious scrutiny, appeared heavy lidded.
The mass proceeded as normal, punctured visually by the sudden jerk of a head whenever a drowsy parishioner denied sleep its final victory. My mother, in her altar server role, was responsible for ringing a clutch of bells when the wafers and wine were raised during the consecration. The effect of this sound on those who had just succumbed to the soporific conditions was dramatic - so dramatic in one case that the proceedings were interrupted. Though Mary Tulley was during waking hours hard of hearing, it seemed that in the hinterland between wakefulness and sleep, the sound of a bell acquired the power to violently startle her. As Father Matthew groggily raised the chalice and intoned the words, "do this in remembrance of me", my mother duly rang the bell, and frail old Mrs Tully launched herself into the middle of the aisle, emitting a cry of anguish. Father Mathew blinked uselessly as the less decrepit of Mrs Tully's neighbours stooped to assist her.
There must be some centre in Auntie Anne's brain primed to respond to an opportunity without being burdened by any form of contemplation. Perhaps her unconscious mind was already putting together the necessary pieces for the flawless execution of a plan, of which she herself was barely aware. Before Father Matthew could feebly mutter thanks to Mary's assisters, Anne had swiped the open chalice containing the consecrated host. Swiftly tucking her alb and surplice into her waistband, she replaced the weighty lid. With one hand tightly gripping the stem, and the other atop to steady the unwieldy motion of the loaded cup, she darted through the vestry door and out through the back of the church.
My mother saw Granny's reaction. She was completely still, but no longer sleepy. A look of uncomprehending dread had taken over her face. It was only when Sister Dorothy flew past her, leaping onto the raised altar platform and out of the church via the vestry, shouting something about devilry, that she rose to her feet and stalked after her. Sister Marie scurried behind. Then my Grandfather came forward, took my mother's hand, and patted Father Matthew's shoulder, and the three of them hurriedly followed the nuns and my Grandmother into the street. Others in the congregation who had remained awake and witnessed the incident sat in awkward silence that no-one quite knew how to break.
Anne's red alb was easy to spot turning the corner by the house, and then in flashes through the leggy privet that lined the front garden. She left the side gate open, and the two nuns and my Grandmother were the first to enter the back garden after her. What they saw there elicited a gasp from my Grandmother. Sister Marie Crossed herself, and Sister Dorothy, with fixed, blazing eyes, drew her right index finger across her throat. Anne was standing by the ornamental well, staring back at her pursuers. She held the chalice lid in one hand, and with the other she was tipping the contents of the cup into the well.
Father Matthew nearly collided with sister Dorothy as he came through the gate. Surveying the scene, he announced with uncharacteristic decisiveness, "stop, Anne! That's solid silver! Thank goodness you didn't drop it." He strode towards her with his arm outstretched to receive the empty chalice. Anne froze. "Father!" came sister Dorothy's voice, slowly rising to a cracked crescendo. "Now is not the time to be thanking goodness! Have you not seen what this wretched child has done?"
"What have you done?" asked the priest, cautiously. Anne opened her mouth and took a breath.
"The wayward, wicked little heathen has dropped our Saviour's body down a hole! That's what she's done! And by God, she will pay!" Sister Dorothy now strode purposefully towards the end of the garden. Granny followed, perhaps concerned that Sister Dot's notion of payment might involve Anne's going the way of the lost wafers. Sister Marie skipped alongside, and in her high, fluttering voice she mounted an effort to calm Dorothy's ire. "The well is only an ornament. It's shallow! Perhaps we can retrieve the host without too much difficulty?"
My grandfather and my mother hastened to join the group around the well. "I'm afraid," said my grandfather, "though ornamental, it is not indeed so very shallow".
Four consternated faces turned towards him.
"Henry", said my Grandmother, "do you mean to say there is a deep hole under this well?"
"Yes dear".
"How deep?"
"It's hard to say. I should think quite deep".
"And you dug it yourself?"
"Yes, dear".
There were a few beats' silence before Sister Dorothy's voice boomed. "What are you waiting for, you unholy clot! Get me a shovel! Get a ladder! Get a torch! Get a move on!"
And so the brick surround, the pitched roof, the rope and bucket were all unceremoniously wrenched from the earth in which they had been sitting undisturbed since my mother was a very little girl, playing games about fairies and wishes and drowned pussy cats. Sister Marie held my grandfather's battery torch aloft under a dark noontime sky. Sister Dorothy, emitting the gruff staccato shouts of a marauding bull terrier, dug down to widen the hole. Auntie Iris and Auntie Pat sauntered out of the kitchen in their dressing gowns to see what could possibly have drawn such a crowd to the end of the garden, their surly eyes widening at the sight of the muddy nun descending slowly into the hydrangea bed. No-one uttered a word. After about half an hour a faint cry rose up from deep in the earth. "Pornography! Prophylactics! What in God's name is that diabolical stench? Get the ladder down here now! And send the bucket!"
Sister Dorothy filled the bucket with sodden rubbish and slick mud, and tugged on the rope so violently to request its retrieval that sister Marie nearly joined her in the mire below. Then the ladder was extended and carefully lowered, and this time it was my grandfather who nearly succumbed to Sister Dorothy's powerful tug. The nun emerged moments later, soaked and filthy, and, after staggering onto the lawn, she fell to her knees. "Oh Father, I'm sorry, it's knee deep. I fear there is no certain way to recover the blessed sacrament". For a moment she looked as though she might succumb to tears, but in an instant her colour returned and she pointed a black finger at the now pallid Anne. "You! You beast! You devil! How could you commit this wicked, wicked act!"
After Sister Dorothy had been convinced to allow Anne safe passage to her bedroom, where she was to await a suitably severe punishment administered by her parents (as opposed to representatives of the Roman Catholic church), it was decided that the contents of the bucket should be returned to the well. Sister Dorothy's initial summary of the well's contents had been a fair representation, evidenced by the bobbing monstrosities in the bucket, and Iris and Pat were keen to return to their rooms to avoid conversing on the subject with my grandparents. Grandad returned his ladder to the shed, while sister Marie began to push the earth back into the hole. Father Matthew remained silent on the matter for some weeks. Eventually he wrote to the bishop, who in turn wrote to the Archbishop. Rumour has it that the case made it to the desks of some of the junior staff in the Vatican. In any case, the advice came back to the bewildered small town priest to reinstate and then consecrate the well.
"And so here it is today," said mum. "Though it was indeed a terrible thing that your Auntie did, she was only young, and she has dutifully returned to occupy the house and maintain a vigil on the well..."
"Nonsense," said Auntie Anne, who only then made her presence known, after taking in some untold portion of my mother's story. "I like this house for its view of the gasworks. I intend, one day, to haunt it.”