The Drought

by J. G. Ballard

  Hendry stood up. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’ He led the way out on to the deck. ‘Where is it? That one down there?’ Shaking his head, he started back for his cabin. ‘Doctor, what are you playing at?’

  Ransom caught up with him. ‘Judith and I have been talking it over seriously, Captain . . . it’s been selfish of us living alone, but now we’re prepared to join the settlement. You’ll soon need all the help you can get to bring in the sea.’

  Hendry hesitated, embarrassed by Ransom’s pleading. ‘We’re not short of water.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s true, in the immediate sense, but a year or two from now—we’ve got to think ahead.’

  Hendry nodded to himself. ‘That’s good advice.’ He turned in the door to his cabin. For a moment the old Hendry glimmered faintly in his eyes. ‘Thanks for the offer of the water. Look, Charles, you wouldn’t like it in the settlement. The people have given too much. If you came here they’d drain you away.’

  Reflectively he patted the carcass of a small shark hanging in the sun outside the cabin. The shrivelled white face gaped sightlessly at Ransom.

  29

  THE STRANDED NEPTUNE

  RESTING ON THE RAIL, Ransom pulled himself together. Much as he despised himself for trying to ingratiate his way into the settlement, he realized that there were no other means. However, even these appeals to past sentiments were wearing thin. Hendry’s prompt refusal meant that he was acting on a decision already reached by the other captains.

  Yet a sense of inner conviction still sustained Ransom. The fleeting sunlight warmed his face, and he looked down at the drab hutments below, almost glad that he was not coming to live out the rest of his life there. Somewhere, God alone knew how, he would find a way out of his present purgatory. This vague feeling had kept him going since the day he arrived at the beach, as if he had never fully believed in the reality of the sea. At a time of drought, water was the last yardstick to use. Their ten years at the coast had proved that much.

  The look-out stood by the gangway, watching Ransom as he drummed on the rail. Ransom went over to him.

  ‘Where’s Captain Jordan? Is he here?’

  The man shook his head. ‘He’s over in the cliffs. He won’t be back till afternoon.’

  Ransom looked back at the distant hills, debating whether to wait for Jordan, the last person who could influence his admission to the settlement. Almost every afternoon Jordan went out to the hills above the beach, disappearing among the sand-dunes that spilled through the ravines. Ransom guessed that he was visiting the grave of his foster-father, Mr Jordan. The old negro had died a few days after their arrival at the beach, and Philip had buried him somewhere among the dunes.

  As he stepped past the look-out, the man said softly: ‘Miss Vanessa wants to see you.’

  Nodding to him, Ransom glanced up and down the deserted hulk of the ship, and then crossed to the port side. The look-out’s feet rang softly on the metal rails of the bridge, but otherwise this side of the ship was silent.

  Ransom walked along the empty deck. A rusty companion-way led to the boat-deck above. Most of the life-boats had been smashed to splinters in the bombardment, but the line of officers’ cabins was still intact. In one of these small cubicles behind the bridge, Vanessa Johnstone lived by herself.

  Ransom reached the companion-way, then stopped to glance through a damaged ventilator. Below was the central chamber of the ship. This long, high-ceilinged room had been formed when the floor dividing the passenger lounge from the dining-room below had rusted out. It was now the Reverend Johnstone’s combined vestry and throne-chamber.

  A few oil-lamps flared from brackets on the wall, and cast a flickering submarine glow on to the ceiling. The shadows of the torn deck braces danced like ragged spears. The floor of the chamber was covered with mats of dried kelp to keep out the cold. In the centre, almost below Ransom, the Reverend Johnstone sat in an armchair mounted in the bow section of his old motor-launch, the craft from which Johnstone had led the first assault on the freighter. The conch-like bowl, with its striped white timbers, was fastened to the dais of the bandstand. On the floor beside him were his daughters, Julia and Frances, with two or three other women, murmuring into their shawls and playing with a baby swaddled in rags of lace.

  Looking down at the two daughters, Ransom found it difficult to believe that only ten years had elapsed since their arrival at the beach. Their faces had been puffed up by the endless diet of herring and fish-oil, and they had the thickened cheekbones and moon-chins of Eskimo squaws. Sitting beside their father, shawls over their heads, they reminded Ransom of a pair of sleek, watchful madonnas. For some reason he was convinced that he owned his exclusion from the settlement to these two women. The proponents above all of the status quo, guardians and presiding angels of the dead time, perhaps they regarded him as a disruptive influence, someone who had managed to preserve himself against the dunes and salt flats.

  Certainly their senile father, the Reverend Johnstone, could now be discounted as an influence. Sitting like a stranded Neptune in the bowels of this salt-locked wreck, far out of sight of the sea, he drooled and wavered on his throne of blankets, clutching at his daughters’ hands. He had been injured in the bombardment, and the right side of his face was pink and hairless. The grey beard tufting from his left cheek gave him the appearance of a demented Lear, grasping back at the power he had given to his daughters. The difference was that Johnstone no longer knew where that power lay. His head bobbed about, and Ransom guessed that for two or three years he had been almost blind. The confined world of the settlement was limited by his own narrowing vision, and sinking into a rigid matriarchy dominated by his two daughters.

  If any escape lay for Ransom, only the third daughter could provide it. As he reached the deserted boat-deck of the freighter, Ransom felt that the climb had carried him in all senses above the drab world of the settlement.

  ‘Charles!’ Vanessa Johnstone was lying in her bunk in the cold cabin, gazing through the open door at the gulls on the rail. Her black hair lay in a single coil on her pale breast. Her plain face was as smooth and unmarked as when she sat by the window of her attic bedroom in Hamilton. Ransom closed the door and seated himself on the bunk beside her, taking her hands. She seized them tightly, greeting him with her eager smile. ‘Charles, you’re here—’

  ‘I came to see Hendry, Vanessa.’ She embraced his shoulders with her cold hands. Her blood always seemed chilled, but it ran with the quicksilver of time, its clear streams darting like the fish he had chased at dawn. The cold air in the cabin and her white skin, like the washed shells gleaming on the beaches in the bright winter sun, made his mind run again.

  ‘Hendry—why?’

  ‘I . . .’ Ransom hesitated. He had visited Vanessa at intervals during the past years, when her illness seemed about to return, but he was frightened of at last committing himself to her. If she opened his way to the settlement he would be cast with Vanessa for ever. ‘I want to bring Judith here and join the settlement. Hendry wasn’t very keen.’

  ‘But, Charles—’ Vanessa shook her head, one hand touching his cheek. ‘You can’t come here. It’s out of all question.’

  ‘Why?’ Ransom took her wrists, surprised by her answer. ‘You both assume that. It’s a matter of survival now. The sea is so far out—’

  ‘The sea! Forget the sea!’ Vanessa regarded Ransom with her sombre eyes. ‘If you come here. Charles, it will be the end for you. All day you’ll be raking the salt from the boilers.’

  Half an hour later, as he lay beside her in the bunk, the chilled air from the sea blowing over him through the port-hole, he asked: ‘What else is there, Vanessa?’

  He waited as she lay back against the white pillow, the cold air in the cabin turning the black spirals of her hair. ‘Do you know, Vanessa?’

  Her eyes were on the gulls high above th
e ship, picking at the body of the great swordfish hanging from the mast.

  30

  THE SIGN OF THE CRAB

  HIGH ABOVE the dunes, in the tower of the lightship, Ransom watched Philip Jordan walking among the salt-tips on the shore. Silhouetted against the white slopes, his tall figure seemed stooped and preoccupied as he picked his way slowly along the stony path. He passed behind one of the tips, and then climbed the sand-slopes that reached down from the ravines between the hills, a cloth bag swinging from his hand.

  Sheltered from the wind by the fractured panels of the glass cupola, Ransom for a moment enjoyed the play of sunlight on the sand-dunes and on the eroded faces of the cliff. The coastal hills now marked the edges of the desert that stretched in a continuous table across the continent, a wasteland of dust and ruined towns, but there was always more colour and variety here than in the drab world of the salt flats. In the morning the seams of quartz would melt with light, pouring like liquid streams down the faces of the cliffs, the sand in the ravines turning into frozen fountains. In the afternoon the colours would mellow again, the shadows searching out the hundreds of caves and aerial grottoes, until the evening light, shining from beyond the cliffs to the west, illuminated the whole coastline like an enormous ruby lantern, glowing through the casements of the cave-mouths as if lit by some subterranean fire.

  When Philip Jordan had gone, Ransom climbed down the stairway and stepped out on to the deck of the lightship. Beyond the rail a single herring circled the tank—Grady had come to demand his due while Ransom was at the settlement and the prospect of the dismal meal to be made of the small fish made Ransom turn abruptly from the shack. Judith was asleep, exhausted by her altercation with Grady. Below him the deck shelved towards the salt-dunes sliding across the beach. Crossing the rail, Ransom walked off towards the shore, avoiding the shallow pools of brine disturbed by the wind.

  The salt slopes became firmer. He climbed up towards the salt-tips, which rose against the hills like white pyramids. The remains of a large still jutted through the surface of the slope, the corroded valve-gear decorating the rusty shaft. Ransom stepped across the brown shell of a metal hut, his feet sinking through the lace-like iron, then climbed past a pile of derelict motor-car bodies half-buried in salt. When he reached the tips he searched the ground for Philip Jordan’s foot-prints, but the dry salt was covered with dozens of tracks left by the sledges pulled by the quarry workers.

  Beyond the salt-tips stretched the open ground that had once been the coastal shelf. The original dunes had been buried under the salt washed up from the beach during the storms, and by the drifts of sand and dust blown down from the hills. The grey sandy soil, in which a few clumps of grass gained a precarious purchase, was strewn with half-buried pieces of ironwork and metal litter. Somewhere beneath Ransom’s feet were the wreck of thousands of cars and trucks. Isolated bonnets and windscreens poked through the sand, and sections of barbed-wire fencing rose into the air for a few yards. Here and there the roof-timbers of one of the beach-side villas sheltered the remains of an old hearth.

  Some four hundred yards to his right was the mouth of the drained river, along which he had first reached the shore ten years earlier. Partly hidden by the quarry workings, the banks had been buried under the thousands of tons of sand and loose rock slipping down into the empty bed from the adjacent hills. Ransom skirted the edges of the quarry, making his way carefully through the waste-land of old chassis and fenders thrown to one side.

  The entrance to the quarry sloped to his left, the ramp leading down to the original beach. In the face of the quarry were the half-excavated shells of a dozen cars and trailers, embedded in the gritty sand like the intact bodies of armoured saurians. Here, at the quarry, the men from the settlement were digging out the car shells, picking through them for tyres, seats and rags of clothing.

  Beyond the quarry the dunes gave way to a small hollow, from which protruded the faded gilt roof of an old fairground booth. The striped wooden awning hung over the silent horses of the merry-go-round, frozen like unicorns on their spiral shafts. Next to it was another of the booths, a line of washing strung from its decorated eaves. Ransom followed one of the pathways cut through the dunes to this little dell. Here Mrs Quilter lived out of sight of the sea and shore, visited by the quarry-workers and womenfolk of the settlement, for whom she practised her mild necromancy and fortune-telling. Although frowned upon by the Reverend Johnstone and his captains, these visits across the dunes served a useful purpose, introducing into their sterile lives, Ransom believed, those random elements, that awareness of chance and time, without which they would soon have lost all sense of identity.

  As he entered the dell, Mrs Quilter was sitting in the doorway of her booth, darning a shawl. At the sound of footsteps she put away her needle and closed the lower half of the painted door, then kicked it open again when she recognized Ransom. In the ten years among the dunes she had barely aged. If anything her beaked face was softer, giving her the expression of a quaint and amiable owl. Her small body was swathed in layers of coloured fabrics stitched together from the oddments salvaged by the quarry-workers—squares of tartan blanket, black velvet and faded corduroy, ruffed with strips of embroidered damask.

  Outside the door was a large jar of fish-oil. A dozen herrings, part of her recent take, dried in the sun. On the slopes around her, lines of shells and conches had been laid out in the sand to form pentacles and crescents.

  Dusting the sand off the shells as Ransom approached was Catherine Austen. She looked up, greeting him with a nod. Despite the warm sunlight in the hollow, she had turned up the leather collar of her fleece-lined jacket, hiding her lined face. Her self-immersed eyes reminded Ransom of the first hard years she had spent with the old woman, eking out their existence among the wrecks of the motor-cars. The success of their present relationship—both had the same fading red hair, which made them seem like mother and daughter—was based on their absolute dependence on each other and rigorous exclusion of everyone else.

  On the sloping sand Catherine had set out the signs of the zodiac, the dotted lines outlining the crab, ram and scorpion.

  ‘That looks professional,’ Ransom commented. ‘What’s my horoscope for the day?’

  ‘When were you born? Which month?’

  ‘Cathy!’ Mrs Quilter waved her fist at Ransom from her booth. ‘That’ll be a herring, doctor. Don’t give him charity, dear.’

  Catherine nodded at the old woman, then turned to Ransom with a faint smile. Her strong, darkly tanned face was hardened by the spray and wind. ‘Which month? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?’

  ‘Early June,’ Ransom said. ‘Aquarius?’

  ‘Cancer,’ Catherine corrected. ‘The sign of the crab, doctor, the sign of deserts. I wish I’d known.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Ransom said. They walked past the merry-go-round. He raised his hand to one of the horses and touched its eyes. ‘Deserts? Yes, I’ll take the rest as read.’

  ‘But which desert, doctor? There’s a question for you.’

  Ransom shrugged. ‘Does it matter? It seems we have a knack of turning everything we touch into sand and dust. We’ve even sown the sea with its own salt.’

  ‘That’s a despairing view, doctor. I hope you give your patients a better prognosis.’

  Ransom looked down into her keen eyes. As she well knew, he had no patients. During the early years at the beach he had tended hundreds of sick and wounded, but almost all of them had died, from exposure and malnutrition. By now he was regarded as a pariah by the people of the settlement, on the principle that a person who needed a doctor would soon die.

  ‘I haven’t got any patients,’ he said quietly. ‘They refuse to let me treat them. Perhaps they prefer your brand of reassurance.’ He looked around at the hills above. ‘For a doctor there’s no greater failure. Did you see Philip Jordan? About half an hour ago?’ />
  ‘He went by. I’ve no idea where.’

  She followed a few paces behind him as he took one of the pathways out of the dell, almost as if she wanted to come with him. Then she turned and went back to Mrs Quilter.

  For half an hour Ransom climbed the dunes, wandering in and out of the foot-hills below the cliffs. Old caves studded the base, glass windows and doors of tin sheeting let into their mouths, but the dwellings had been abandoned for years. The sand retained something of the sun’s warmth, and for ten minutes Ransom lay down and played with the tags of waste paper caught in its surface. Behind him the slopes rose to a smooth bluff a hundred feet above the dunes, the headland jutting out over the surrounding hills. Ransom climbed up its flank, hoping that from here he would see Philip Jordan when he returned to the settlement.

  Reaching the bluff, he sat down and scanned the beach below. In the distance lay the shore, the endless banks of salt undulating towards the sea. The wrecked freighters in the settlement were grouped together like ships in a small port. Ignoring them, Ransom looked out over the bed of the river. For more than half a mile the estuary was overrun by dunes and rock-slides. Gradually the surface cleared to form a white deck, scattered with stones and small rocks, the dust blown between the dumps of grass.

  Exploring the line of the bank, Ransom noticed that a small valley led off among the rocks and ravines, like the river, the valley was filled with sand and dust, the isolated walls of the ruined houses on the slopes half-covered by the dunes.

  In the slanting light Ransom could clearly see the line of foot-prints newly cut m the powdery flank. They led straight up to the rums of a large villa, crossing the edge of partly excavated wad around the valley.

  As Ransom made his way down from the bluff he saw Philip Jordan emerge briefly behind a wall, then disappear down a flight of steps.