The Happiness Well
O'Donnall took me to Pontoon Four where the accident had happened. It was the first time I'd been to the well. The substance in the steel liners was exactly the colour I expected—luminous cornflower yellow. But the consistency was not the blobby, custard-like goo I'd imagined as a child—it was disappointingly thin, like a consommé.
O'Donnall showed me where he'd slipped in, pointing to the loose perimeter rail now cordoned off with danger tape. Finger scrapes in the slime on the edges of the tank indicated where his fingernail had torn off in his panic to escape. I looked at his hand, the bandaged finger.
The dark brown cloud O'Donnall caused to appear in the well was now a brooding presence in the middle of the yellow pond. Over on another pontoon, a group of men in suits and fluorescent waistcoats looked worried. Chins were stroked, heads were shaken, curses muttered. One man was taking photographs. Another had a long pole that he kept prodding into the centre of the dark, misty shape as if that might change something.
My job was to find out three things: how it had happened, why O'Donnall had been allowed to work at the well whilst he was unhappy, and how to put things right.
I leaned on the rail and listened to O'Donnall explain what happened. A slight Cumbrian accent flavoured his sentences, lending his conversation a jolly, rural feel. I could see how he had gotten away with it for so long.
He'd been ashamed about how he felt and kept putting off telling his local area coordinator. One of the reasons he hadn't told anyone was because he was three-fifths of the way through a community samba coaching course that he'd waited five years to join. Samba tutors were well-respected in his local area forum, and he had wanted to do this ever since he was a child. But he knew that the people at the local area activity hub wouldn't wish to have a depressed man teaching samba drumming. Consequently, no one but O'Donnall himself knew how miserable he felt. And because his shift supervisor didn't know, O'Donnall had not been removed from his duties at the well. O'Donnall hadn't realised how important it was that unhappy people didn't contaminate the contents of the pond. He hadn't, until now, comprehended the enormity of the predicament.
The brown stain seemed to grow darker as we stared at it. Newspapers claimed it was expanding as well, and they appeared to be right. Light brown feelers crept out from its centre into the yellow liquor around it. Since its inception, near the edge where O'Donnall fell in, it had floated into the middle, but it was now moving towards the edge again and getting close to a little scarf of bubbles that O'Donnall explained was the main outlet pipe. I looked at the structures around the pond. Dozens of tubes and pipes climbed over each other, up and out, through to the monitoring and distribution centres. Arrows on the pipes indicated the direction of flow. Beneath us, the main feed pipe throbbed as it topped off the pond from deep inside the earth.
I made some diagrams and asked a few questions of the other men. Then I asked O'Donnall to take me to the distribution room. Amidst control desks bristling with knobs, levers, and slide controls, he explained how each monitor and distributor managed around a hundred individuals, and how sudden surges in demand such as a newborn baby, or a new job, or a new relationship, meant they constantly had to reduce the flow to other members of the community. The main job of the monitor and distributor was to maintain an equilibrium, wherever possible.
Back home I sat in the kitchen tent and looked at the diagrams. I could hear my ex-wife reading stories to the foster children in the tent next door. My step-mother-in-law sat on the tent floor, playing with the new kittens—six of them, all waiting to be allocated homes. One of the kittens, a fat creature with a sneaky, sarcastic face, scampered over to me and nipped at my bare toes. I reached down and stroked its head whilst I thought about the well and the dark menacing shape waiting to engulf us. It would be like the cold shadow of a continent washing over us.
I decided to make a model of the well. A washing-up bowl represented the main steel liner, and plastic drinking straws stood in for pipes. Over the next few evenings, I worked on the model, perfecting it and perfecting it. Every now and then I rang O'Donnall to clarify an aspect of its construction. It had to be right, because this was the most important job I had ever undertaken. Soon I had a scale model of the plant. I filled it with yellow paint thinned with turpentine and allowed this to settle for a while. Then I spilled in a blob of treacle and watched its behaviour as it floated on the surface. It wasn't long before the treacle began to insinuate itself into the yellow paint.
I crossed the community garden and went to the phone tent where I rang O'Donnall. He wasn't in, but he rang me back an hour later.
"Where have you been?"
"I've started a new samba group. One of my own."
"But you've only done three-fifths of the training."
"It's the important three-fifths, don't worry."
I hung up. O'Donnall was useless. He just didn't seem to understand what he'd done.
I returned to my tent to find my second cousin waiting outside with a letter from the well company.
I read the letter slowly, on my own, with the television off and the radio on low.
After the message sank in, I placed the letter on my lap and looked out the open tent flap, over to the community bar. No music came from the bar, no laughter, no shouting, no clack of pool balls, no din from the heavy metal band that sometimes rehearsed there. The well company had stopped everything in their efforts to head off a surge. I imagined that in every local area forum, in every tent, people were sitting alone, thinking about the well and the creeping, spreading stain.
I went into the kitchen tent. My step-mother-in-law was feeding the kittens their special kitten food, and I watched her for a time. I could hear my ex-wife in the next door tent reading stories to the foster children, the same stories she always read.
I looked back at the model; the yellow water was completely black.
I left the kitchen tent and went into the tent next door. The foster children looked up at me. They were surprised to see me in their tent at this time of day. My ex-wife read stories, never me.
"I want to read the stories tonight," I said and took the book from my ex-wife's hand. "Please."
"Isn't he rude, girls?" my ex-wife said.
"Sorry," I said, "but tonight, I need to read."
"But you don't know how to read, Mr. Flash," one of the foster children piped up. "You can't do the voices."
"I certainly can," I said in a low growly bear's voice that made them laugh.
My ex-wife raised her eyebrows, then laughed and left the room.
I selected a pile of books from the floor and set them on my knee. "Tonight I am going to read you every single storybook in the tent," I said.
"Mr. Flash! Mr. Flash! Yes, yes, yes. Thank you, Mr. Flash. But don't we have to go to sleep?"
"You can go to sleep whenever you want to, but I will carry on reading the stories and you will still hear them, even while you're asleep. So you'll have nice dreams about stories and magic lands."
"I like those dreams."
"Okay, then."
I began to read. I read about Postman Pat, Burglar Bill, the three Billy Goats Gruff, everything. I read and read, doing all the voices and sound effects I could manage. My pace grew faster and faster, and the pages whipped through my fingers. Soon the foster children were fast sleep, but I carried on reading. I became happier and happier the more I read. I was dizzy, drunk with joy. I imagined the poor monitors and distributors back at the well trying to balance the supply, and the dark stain moving inexorably towards the scarf of bubbles around the outlet pipe.
When I'd read every single book, I returned to the kitchen tent and played with the kittens. I would play and play until the kittens and I were completely exhausted.
Copyright 2006 by David Gaffney
