The Drought

by J. G. Ballard

  The man finished sipping his tea. ‘Let me explain. Perhaps you couldn’t see from up there, but all along the beach there’s a double wire fence. The army and police are on the other side. Every day they let a few people through. Behind those sheds there are big distillation units, they say there’ll be plenty of water soon and everyone should stay where they are.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Boiling and condensing water is a long job, you need cooling towers a hundred feet high.’

  ‘What happens if you climb through the wire on to the beach?’

  ‘If you climb through. The army are all right, but last night the militia units were shooting at the people trying to cross between the fences. Machine-gunned them down in the spotlights.’

  Ransom noticed Philip Jordan and Catherine standing on the pavement by the kiosk. From their faces he could see that they were frightened he might leave them when they were still a few hundred yards short of the beach.

  ‘But what about the government evacuation plans?’ Ransom asked. ‘Those beach cards and so on . . .’ He stood up when the other made no reply. ‘What do you plan to do?’

  The man gazed at Ransom with his calm eyes. ‘Sit here and wait.’ He gestured around at the camp. ‘This won’t last for ever. Already most of these people have only a day’s water left. Sooner or later they’ll break out. My guess is that by the time they reach the water they’ll be thinned out enough for Ethel and me to have all we want.’

  His wife nodded in agreement, sipping her tea.

  23

  THE FAIRGROUND

  THEY SET OFF along the road again. The hills began to recede, the road turning until it moved almost directly inland. They had reached the margins of the river estuary. The funnel-shaped area had once been bordered by marshes and sand-flats, and the low-lying ground still seemed damp and gloomy, despite the hot sunlight breaking across the dry grass. The hundreds of vehicles parked among the dunes and hillocks had sunk up to their axles in the soft sand, their roofs tilting in all directions. Ransom stopped by the edge of the road, the presence of the river-bed offering him a fleeting security. Three hundred yards away were the stout fencing posts of the perimeter wire, the barbed coils staked to the ground between them. A narrow strip of dunes and drained creeks separated this line from the inner fence. A quarter of a mile beyond the fence they could see a small section of the shore, the waves foaming on the washed sand. On either side of the empty channel dozens of huts were being erected, and bare-chested men worked quickly in the sunlight. Their energy, and the close proximity of the water behind their backs, contrasted painfully with the thousands of listless people watching from the dunes on the other side of the barbed wire.

  Ransom stepped from the car, ‘We’ll try here. We’re farther from the shore but there are fewer people. Perhaps they dislike the river for some reason.’

  ‘What about the car?’ Philip asked. He watched Ransom warily, as if reluctant to give up even the small security of the vehicle.

  ‘Leave it. These people have brought everything with them, they’re not going to abandon their cars when they’re parked on the sand.’ Ransom waited for the others to climb out but they sat inertly. ‘Come on, Catherine. Mrs Quilter, you can sleep on the dunes tonight.’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, doctor.’ Screwing up her face, she stepped from the car.

  ‘What about you, Mr Jordan? Ransom asked.

  ‘Of course, doctor.’ The negro still sat upright. ‘Just settle me on the sand.’

  ‘We’re not on the sand.’ Controlling his impatience, Ransom said: ‘Philip, perhaps Mr Jordan could wait in the car. When we’ve set up some sort of post by the wire we’ll come back and get him.’

  ‘No, doctor.’ Philip shook his head. ‘If we can’t take him in the litter I’ll carry him myself.’ Before Ransom could remonstrate he bent down and lifted the elderly negro from the car. His strong arms carried him like a child.

  RANSOM LED THE way, followed by Catherine and Mrs Quilter. The old woman fussed along, muttering at the people sitting in the hollows by their cars and trailers. Philip Jordan was fifty yards behind them, watching his footing in the churned sand, the old negro in his arms. Soon the road was lost to sight, and the stench of the encampment filled their lungs. A maze of pathways turned between the vehicles and among the dry, grass-topped dunes. Seeing the jerrican partly hidden inside his jacket, children wheedled at Ransom with empty cups. Small groups of men, unshaven and stained with dust, argued hotly with each other, pointing towards the fence. The nearer to this obstacle the higher tempers seemed to flare, as if the earlier arrivals—many of whom, to judge by their camping equipment, had been there for a week or more—realized that the great concourse pressing behind them made it less and less likely that they themselves would ever reach the sea.

  Fortunately the extension of the perimeter fence into the mouth of the river allowed Ransom to approach the wire without having to advance directly towards the sea. Once or twice he found his way barred by men with shot-guns in their hands, waving him away from a private encampment.

  An hour later Ransom reached a point some twenty yards from the outer fence, in a narrow hollow between two groups of trailers. They were partly sheltered from the sunlight by the sticks of coarse grass on the crests of the surrounding hillocks. Catherine and Mrs Quilter sat down and rested, waiting for Philip Jordan to appear. The flies and mosquitoes buzzed around them, the stench from the once marshy ground thickening the air. The trailers near by belonged to two circus families, who had moved down to the coast with part of their travelling fun fair. The gilt-painted canopies of two merry-go-rounds rose above the dunes, the antique horses on their spiral pinions lending a carnival air to the scene. The dark-eyed womenfolk and their daughters sat like a coven of witches around the ornamental traction engine in the centre, watching the distant shore as if expecting some monstrous fish to be cast up out of the water.

  ‘What about Philip and Mr Jordan?’ Catherine asked when they had not appeared. ‘Shouldn’t we go back and look for them?

  Lamely, Ransom said: ‘They’ll probably get here later. We can’t risk leaving here, Catherine.’

  Mrs Quilter sat back against the broken earth. Shaking the flies off her dusty silks, she muttered to herself as if unable to comprehend what they were doing in this fly-infested hollow.

  Ransom climbed on to the crest of the dune. However depressing, the lack of loyalty towards Philip Jordan did not surprise him. With their return to the drained river he felt again the sense of isolation in time that he had known when he stood on the deck of his houseboat, looking out at the stranded objects on the dry bed around him. Here, where the estuary widened, the distances separating him from the others had become even greater. In time, the sand drifting across the dunes would reunite them on its own terms, but for the present each of them formed a self-contained and discreet world of his own.

  Near by, a man in a straw hat lay among the dried grass, peering through the wire at the drained channel running towards the beach. A nexus of narrow creeks and small dunes separated them from the inner fence. Beyond this the recently erected huts were already filling. Several trucks stopped outside them, and some fifty or sixty people climbed out and hurried indoors with their suitcases.

  A large truck came into view past the huts and headed towards the inner fence. It stopped there, and two soldiers jumped out and opened a wire gate. Rolling forward, the truck bumped across the dunes. As its engine raced noisily, Ransom noticed a concerted movement through the camp. People climbed down from the roofs of their trailers, others stepped from cars and pulled their children after them. Fifty yards away, where the truck stopped by the outer fence, the crowd gathered some three or four hundred strong. The soldiers lowered a fifty-gallon drum off the tail-board and rolled it across the ground.

  There were a few shouts as the drum neared the fence, but neither of the soldiers looked up.
As they pushed it through the wire the crowd surged forward, drawn as much to these two isolated figures as to their cargo of water. As they climbed into the truck again the crowd fell silent, then came to and burst into a chorus of jeers. The shouts followed the truck as it crossed the open interval and disappeared through the gate. With a whoop, the drum was lifted into the air and borne away, then flung to the ground twenty yards from the fence.

  As the spray from the scattered water formed ragged rainbows in the air, Ransom climbed down from the dune and rejoined the others in the hollow. Mrs Quilter appeared from the direction of the fun fair, the straw-hatted man following her. He beckoned Ransom towards him.

  ‘You talk to him, dearie,’ Mrs Quilter croaked. ‘I told them what a marvellous doctor you are.’

  The straw-hatted man was more precise. He took Ransom aside. ‘The old Romany says you have a gun. Is that right?

  Ransom nodded cautiously. ‘Fair enough. Why?

  ‘Can you use the gun? She says you’re a doctor.’

  I can use it,’ Ransom said. ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’ The man glanced at Ransom’s grimy linen suit and then walked away to the merry-go-round, swinging himself through the antique horses.

  24

  THE BITTER SEA

  SOON AFTER MIDNIGHT Ransom lay on the crest of the dune. Around him echoed the night-sounds of the camps, and the embers of hundreds of fires smoked in the darkness. A sullen murmur, punctuated by shouts and gunfire farther along the beach, drifted across the sand-hills. Below him Catherine and Mrs Quilter lay together in the hollow, their eyes closed, but no one else was asleep. The dunes around him were covered with hundreds of watching figures. Listening to the uncertain movements, Ransom realized that there was no concerted plan of action, but that some dim instinct was gathering force and would propel everyone simultaneously at the wire.

  The lights beyond the fences had been dimmed, and the dark outlines of the huts shone in the light reflected from the waves as they spilled on to the beaches. Only the pumping gear drummed steadily.

  Above him somewhere, a wire twanged. Peering into the darkness, Ransom saw a man disappear through the fence, crawling down one of the drained channels.

  ‘Catherine!’ Ransom kicked some sand on to Catherine’s shoulder. She looked up at him and then woke Mrs Quilter. ‘Get ready to move!’

  On their left, across the channel of the river, more firing broke out. Most of the tracers flew high into the air, their arcs carrying them away across the estuary, but Ransom could see that at least two of the sentries, presumably members of the locally recruited militia, were firing straight into the trailer camp.

  Floodlights blazed down from a dozen posts along both fences. Crouching down, his arms motionless among the grass, Ransom waited for them to go out. He looked up as there was a roar from the open interval beyond the fence.

  Crossing the dunes and creeks, in full view of the platoon of soldiers on the dunes above the inner fence, were some forty or fifty men. Shouting to each other, they jumped in and out of the shallow creeks, one or two of them stopping to fire at the floodlights. Unscathed, they reached the wire, and everywhere people started to climb to their feet and run forward into the floodlights.

  Ransom reached down and took Catherine’s arm. ‘Come on!’ he shouted. They scaled the shallow slope up to the fence. A wide section of the wire coil had been removed, and they crawled through, then darted down into a narrow creek. Dozens of other people were moving along with them, some pulling small children, others carrying rifles in their hands.

  They were halfway across when a light machine-gun began to fire loosely over their heads from an emplacement below the huts, its harsh ripple coming in short bursts of two or three seconds. Partly hidden by the rolling ground, everyone pressed on, climbing through a gap cut in the inner fence. Then, ten yards from Ransom, a man was shot dead and fell back into the grass. Another was hit in the leg, and lay shouting on the ground as people ran past him.

  Ransom pulled Catherine down into an empty basin. Everywhere men and women were rushing past in all directions. Several of the floodlights had gone out, and in the flaring darkness he could see men with carbines retreating to the dunes beyond the huts. To their left the open channel of the river ran to the sea, the beach washed like a silver mirror.

  The scattered shooting resumed, the soldiers firing over the heads of the hundreds of people moving straight towards the sea. Taking Catherine by the arm, Ransom pulled her towards the opening of the inner fence. Behind them, more bodies lay among the dunes, tumbled awkwardly in the coarse grass.

  Following an empty creek, they moved away from the huts. As they crouched down to rest before their final dash to the sea, a man stood up in the burnt grass ten feet above them. With a raised pistol he began to fire across the dunes, shooting straight at the people driven back by the soldiers.

  Looking up at him, Ransom recognized the stocky shoulders and pugnacious face.

  ‘Grady!’ he called. ‘Hold off, man!’

  As they stumbled from their hiding-place Grady turned and searched the darkness below him. He levelled his pistol at them. He seemed to recognize Ransom, but gestured at him with the weapon.

  ‘Go back!’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘Keep off, we came here first!’

  More people appeared, running head down along the dry bed of the creek. Grady stared at them, his little face for a moment like an insane sparrow’s. Raising his pistol, he fired blindly at Ransom’s shadow. As Catherine crouched down on her knees, Ransom drew the pistol from his belt. Grady darted forward, his eyes searching the darkness among the clumps of grass, his small figure illuminated in the flood-lights. Ransom waited. Then, holding the butt of the revolver in both hands, he stood up and shot Grady through the chest.

  RANSOM WAS KNEELING over the little man, his own weapon lost somewhere in the creek, when a platoon of soldiers appeared out of the darkness. Lying down, they began to fire over the heads of the people farther down the creek.

  A bare-headed lieutenant crawled over to Ransom. He glanced down at the body. ‘One of ours?’ he asked breathlessly.

  ‘Grady,’ Ransom said. The lieutenant peered about, and then jumped to his feet and ordered his men back up the slope towards the huts. The firing had slackened as the main impetus of the advance spent itself, and many people were retreating back to the fences. Others had got through and were running down to the water between the huts, ignored by the soldiers farther along the beach, who let them go by.

  The lieutenant pushed Catherine behind the edge of the old sea-wall. To Ransom he shouted: ‘Take his gun and keep firing! Over their heads, but if they come at you bring one of them down!’

  The soldiers moved off and Ransom joined Catherine behind the wall. The sea was only fifty yards away, the waves sluicing across the wet sand. Exhausted by the noise, Catherine leaned limply against the wall.

  Two or three figures came racing across the flat channel. Ransom raised his pistol, but they ran straight towards him. Then the last of them appeared, Philip Jordan with the old negro in his arms. He saw Ransom standing in front of him, the pistol raised in his hand, but ran on, limping on his bare feet.

  Ransom threw away the pistol. All along the beach small groups of people were lying in the shallows as the waves splashed across them, watched by the soldiers. Some, unable to drink the water, were already climbing back on to the sand. Running after the others, Ransom saw Philip Jordan on his knees by the water’s edge, lowering the old man to the waves. Ransom felt the water sting his legs, and then fell headlong into the shallows, his suit soaked by the receding waves, vomiting into the bitter stream.

  PART TWO

  25

  DUNE LIMBO

  UNDER THE EMPTY winter sky the salt-dunes ran on for miles. Seldom varying more than a few feet from trough to crest, they shone damply in the cold air
, the pools of brine disturbed by the inshore wind. Sometimes, in a distant foretaste of the spring to come, their crests would be touched with white streaks as a few crystals evaporated out into the sunlight, but by the early afternoon these began to deliquesce, and the grey flanks of the dunes would run with a pale light.

  To the east and west the dunes stretched along the coast to the horizon, occasionally giving way to a small lake of stagnant brine or a lost creek cut off from the rest of its channel. To the south, in the direction of the sea, the dunes gradually became more shallow, extending into long salt flats. At high tide they were covered by a few inches of clear water, the narrowing causeways of firmer salt reaching out into the sea.

  Nowhere was there a defined margin between the shore and sea, and the endless shallows formed the only dividing zone, land and water submerged in this grey liquid limbo. At intervals the skeleton of a derelict conveyor emerged from the salt and seemed to point towards the sea, but then, after a few hundred yards, sank from sight again. Gradually the pools of water congregated into larger lakes, small creeks formed into continuous channels, but the water never seemed to move. Even after an hour’s walk, knee-deep in the dissolving slush, the sea remained as distant as ever, always present and yet lost beyond the horizon, haunting the cold mists that drifted across the salt-dunes.

  To the north, the dunes steadily consolidated themselves, the pools of water between them never more than a few inches deep. Eventually, where they overran the shore, they rose into a series of large white hillocks, like industrial tippings, which partly concealed the coastal hills. The foreshore itself, over the former beaches, was covered by the slopes of dry salt running down to the dunes. The spires of ruined distillation columns rose into the air, and the roofs of metal huts carried off their foundations floated like half-submerged wrecks. Farther out there were the shells of pumping gear and the conveyors that had once carried the waste salt back into the sea.