The Drought. J. G. Ballard

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       1 The Draining Lake

      At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mud-bank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom the dream-faced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the river.

      Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the comparison was less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time watching the river as Ransom and everyone else, his motives would be typically perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge – an eccentric gift from Quilter's protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom's neighbour – had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a few inches in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.

      Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks of the river as they wound westwards to the city of Mount Royal five miles away. For a week he had been out on the lake, sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks and mud-flats as he waited for the evacuation of the city to end. After the closure of the hospital at Mount Royal he intended to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided to spend a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now and then, between the humps of damp mud emerging from the centre of the lake, he had seen the distant span of the motor-bridge across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and trucks flashing like jewelled lances as they set off along the coast road for the south; but for most of the period he had been alone. Suspended like the houseboat above the dissolving glass of the water, time had seemed becalmed.

      Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the bridge had ended. By then the lake, once a stretch of open water thirty miles in length, had subsided into a series of small pools and channels, separated by the banks of draining mud. A few last fishing craft sailed among them, their crews standing shoulder to shoulder in the bows. The drab-suited men from the settlement, thin faces hidden under their black caps, had gazed at Ransom's houseboat with the numbed expressions of a group of lost whaling men too exhausted by some private tragedy to rope in this stranded catch.

      By contrast, the slow transformation of the lake exhilarated Ransom. As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into shallow lagoons and then into a maze of creeks, the wet dunes of the lake bed seemed to emerge from another dimension. On the last morning he woke to find the houseboat beached at the end of a small cove. The slopes of mud, covered with the bodies of dead birds and fish, stretched above him like the shores of a dream.

      As he approached the entrance to the river, steering the houseboat among the stranded yachts and fishing boats, the lakeside town of Hamilton was deserted. Along the fishermen's quays the boat-houses were empty, and the white forms of the drying fish hung in the shadows from the lines of hooks. Refuse fires smouldered in the waterfront gardens, their smoke drifting past the open windows that swung in the warm air. Nothing moved in the streets. Ransom had assumed that a few people would remain behind, waiting until the main exodus to the coast was over, but Quilter's presence, like his ambiguous smile, in some way was an obscure omen, one of the many irrational signs that had revealed the real progress of the drought during the confusion of the past months

      A hundred yards to his right, beyond the concrete pillars of the motor-bridge, the wooden piles of the fuel depot were visible above the cracked mud. The floating pier had touched bottom, and the fishing boats usually moored against it had moved off into the centre of the channel. Normally, in late summer, the river would have been three hundred feet wide, but it was now barely half this – a shallow creek winding its slow way along the flat gutter of the banks.

      Next to the fuel depot was the yacht basin, with the Quilters' barge moored against its bows. After signing the vessel over to them at the depot, Lomax had added a single gallon of diesel oil in a quixotic gesture of generosity, barely enough fuel СКАЧАТЬ