The Drought. J. G. Ballard

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ crossed the bridge. ‘As a matter of fact, I intend to leave in a day or two.’

      Catherine gazed out at the exposed lake-bed. ‘It's almost dry. Don't you feel, doctor, that everything is being drained away, all the memories and stale sentiments?’

      For some reason this question, with its ironic emphasis, surprised Ransom. He looked down at the sharp eyes that watched his own. Catherine's banter seemed to conceal a complete understanding of his own thoughts. With a laugh, he raised his hands as if to fend her off. ‘Do I take that as a warning? Perhaps I should change my mooring?’

      ‘Not at all, doctor,’ Catherine said blandly. ‘I need you here.’ She handed him the bucket. ‘Have you any water to spare?’

      Ransom slipped his hands into his trousers. The endless obsession with water during the previous months had forged powerful reflexes. Glad to be able to rely on them for once, he shook his head. ‘I haven't. Or is that an appeal to sentiment?’

      Catherine waited, and then turned away. Fastening her robe, she bent down and filled the bucket.

      Ransom took her arm. He pointed to the slip road leading down from the embankment. Directly below the bridge the trailer had parked, and the families of four or five adults and half a dozen children were setting up a small camp. Two of the men carried a chemical closet out of the trailer. Followed by the children, they walked down the bank, sinking up to their knees in the white dust. When they reached the water they emptied the closet and washed it out.

      ‘For God's sake … !’ Catherine Austen searched the sky. ‘Doctor, people are filthy.’

      Ransom took the half-filled bucket from her and lowered it into the water. Catherine watched it glide away on the oily current, her face pale and expressionless. Professor Austen's wife, a noted zoologist in her own right, had died in Africa while Catherine was a child. Watching her, Ransom reflected that however isolated a man might be, women at least remained his companions, but an isolated woman was isolated absolutely.

      Gathering her robe, Catherine began to make her way up the bank.

      ‘Wait,’ Ransom called. ‘I'll lend you some water.’ With forced humour, he added: ‘You can repay me when the pressure comes on again.’

      He guided her on board the houseboat and went off into the galley. As long as the river flowed Catherine Austen remained one of its community. Besides, there were too many correspondences of character between them, more perhaps than he cared to think. However, all this would soon end. The tank in the roof contained little more than twenty-five gallons, laboriously filled from jerricans he had taken down to the river in his car. The public water supplies, a pathetic trickle all summer, had finally been discontinued three weeks earlier, and since then he had been unable to make good the constant drain on the tank.

      He half-filled a can of water and carried it into the cabin. Catherine Austen was strolling up and down, inspecting his books and curios.

      ‘You're well prepared, doctor. I see you have your own little world here. Everything outside must seem very remote.’ She took the can and turned to leave. ‘I'll give it back to you. I'm sure you'll need it.’

      Ransom caught her elbow. The difficulties of coming to terms with the young woman warned him of all the unseen hazards of the changing landscape. ‘Forget the water. Catherine, I'd hate you to think I'm smug, of all things. If I am well prepared it's just that …’ he searched for a phrase ‘… I've always thought of the whole of life as a kind of disaster area.’

      She watched him with a critical eye. ‘Perhaps, but I think you've missed my point, doctor.’

      She walked up the bank, and without looking back disappeared towards her villa.

      Below the bridge, in the shadow of the pylons, the trailer families sat around a huge garbage fire, their faces blazing like voodoo cultists in the serpentine flames. Down on the water the solitary figure of Quilter watched them from his coracle, leaning on his pole among the dead fish like a water-borne shepherd's boy resting with his sleeping flock. As Ransom returned to the houseboat Quilter bent down and scooped a handful of the brackish water to his mouth, drank quickly and then punted himself away below the bridge with an awkward grace.

       4 The Dying Swan

      ‘Doctor! Quickly!’ Half an hour later, as Ransom was fastening the galley fan-lights, there was a shout outside. A long wooden skiff, propelled by a tall, sunburnt youth, naked except for his faded cotton shorts, bumped against the houseboat, materializing like a spectre out of the canopy of reflected light that lay over the black mirror of the water.

      Ransom went up on deck and found the youth, Philip Jordan, fastening the skiff fore and aft to the rail.

      ‘What's this, Philip?’ Ransom peered down into the narrow craft, where a large nest of wet mattress flock, covered with oil and cotton waste, lay in a parcel of damp newspaper.

      Suddenly a snake-like head lifted from the nest and wavered at Ransom. Startled, he shouted: ‘Tip it back into the water! What is it – an eel?’

      ‘A swan, doctor!’ Philip Jordan crouched down in the stern of the skiff, smoothing the clotted head and neck feathers. ‘It's suffocating in the oil.’ He looked up at Ransom, a hint of embarrassment in his wild eyes. ‘I caught it out on the dunes and took it down to the river. I was trying to make it swim. Can you save it?’

      Ransom stepped over the rail into the skiff. He searched the bird's mouth and eyes. Too exhausted to move, the swan stared up at him with its glazed orbs. The oil had matted the feathers together, and choked its mouth and respiratory passages.

      Ransom stood up, shaking his head. ‘Spread its wings out. I'll get some solvent from the cabin.’

      ‘Right, doctor!’

      Philip Jordan, foster-child of the river and its last presiding Ariel, lifted the bird in his arms and unfurled its wings, letting their tips fall into the water. Ransom had known him for several years, and had watched him grow from a child of twelve into a tall, long-boned youth, with the quick eyes and nervous grace of an aboriginal.

      Five years earlier, when Ransom had spent his first weekends out on the lake, rebuilding his world from scratch from the materials of water, wind and sunlight, Philip Jordan had been the only person he could incorporate into his new continuum. One night, as he sat reading under a lantern in the well of his craft moored to a derelict quay among the marshes, he heard a splash of water and saw a slim brown-faced boy paddle a home-made dinghy out of the darkness. Leaving a few feet of open water between them, the boy made no reply to Ransom's questions, but watched the doctor with his wide eyes. He wore a faded khaki shirt and trousers, the remnants of an old Scout uniform. To Ransom he was part waif and part water-elf.

      Ransom resumed his reading and the boy moved twenty yards away, his blade slipping in the liquid silver of the night-water. Finally he came in again and produced from between his feet a small brown owl. Raising it in his hands, he had shown it to Ransom – or more probably, the doctor guessed, had shown Ransom to the owl, the tutelary deity of his water-world – and then vanished among the reeds.

      He appeared again after a lapse of one or two nights, and this time accepted the remains of a cold chicken from Ransom. At last he replied to some of Ransom's questions, answering only those about the owl, the river and his boat. Ransom СКАЧАТЬ