The Drought. J. G. Ballard
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Название: The Drought
Автор: J. G. Ballard
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Классическая проза
isbn: 9780007321834
isbn:
He saw the boy on and off over the next year. He would share a meal with Ransom in the well of the boat, and help him sail the craft back to the entrance to the river. Here he always left Ransom, reluctant to leave the open water of the lake. Friend of the water-birds, he was able to tame swans and wild geese. He still referred to himself only by his surname, the first clue that he had escaped from some institution and he was living wild. His strange changes of costume – he would appear in a man's overcoat or pair of old shoes three sizes too big – confirmed this. During the winters he was often close to starvation, going off alone to eat the food Ransom gave him.
All these times Ransom wondered whether to report him to the police, frightened that after a cold week-end he might find the boy's body following the fish downstream. But something dissuaded him: partly his own increasing influence over Philip – he lent him paper and crayons, and helped him to read – and partly his fascination at the spectacle of this starveling of the river-ways creating his own world out of the scraps and refuse of the twentieth century, the scavenger for every nail and fish-hook turning into a wily young Ulysses of the waterfront.
As Ransom collected the turpentine and cotton waste from a locker in the galley, he reminded himself that selfishness in not reporting the youth years earlier might make Philip now pay a terrible price. The river was no more a natural environment than a handful of pebbles and water-weed in an aquarium, and its extinction would leave Philip Jordan with a repertory of skills as useful as those of a stranded fish. Philip was not a thief — but from where had come those mysterious ‘gifts’: clasp knives, a cigarette lighter, even an old gold-plated watch?
‘Come on, doctor!’ Philip Jordan beckoned him over the rail. The swan lay with wings outstretched, its plumage slick with oil.
‘Easy, Philip.’ Ransom began to clean the swan's bill. The bird roused faintly in response to the manual pressure, but it seemed nearly dead, smothered in the great weight of oil.
Philip Jordan shouted: ‘Leave it, doctor! I'll take it down to the galley and soak off the oil.’ He lifted the bird in his arms, struggling with its flopping head, but Ransom held his shoulder. ‘What's the matter?’
‘Philip, I can't spare the water. The bird is almost dead.’
‘That's wrong, doctor!’ Philip steadied himself in the skiff, the bird sliding in a sprawl out of his oil-covered arms. ‘I know swans – they come back.’ He released the bird and let it subside between his feet. ‘Look, all I need is one bucket and some soap.’
Involuntarily, Ransom glanced up at Catherine Austen's villa. In addition to the water tank in the roof of the houseboat, there was a second tank containing two hundred gallons in the pontoon. Some inner caution had prevented him from revealing its existence to Philip Jordan.
Ransom gestured at the sky, knowing that he would have to make allowance for Philip in his plans for departure. Below his feet the dead birds and water-fowl drifted past. ‘The drought may well go on for another two or three months. There's got to be an order of priorities.’
‘There is, doctor!’ His face stiff, Philip Jordan seized his aft line and jerked it loose. ‘All right, I'll find water. The river still has plenty in it.’
‘Philip, Don't blame yourself.’
Ransom watched him as he paddled off, his strong arms sweeping the skiff across the river. Standing in the stern with his legs astride, his back bending, the outstretched wings of the dying bird dipping into the water from the bows, he reminded Ransom of a land-locked mariner and his stricken albatross, deserted by the sea.
In the sunlight the white carcasses of the fish hung from their hooks in drying sheds, rotating in the warm air. The boat-houses were deserted, and the untended fishing craft were beached side by side in the shallows, their nets lying across the dust. Below the last of the wharfs two or three tons of smaller fish had been tipped out on to the bank, and the slope was covered with the silver bodies.
Turning his face from the stench, Ransom looked up at the quay. In the shadows at the back of the boat-house two of the fishermen watched him, their eyes hidden below the peaks of their caps. The other fishermen had gone, but this pair seemed content to sit there unmovingly, separated from the draining river by the dusty boat across their knees, like two widows with a coffin.
Ransom stepped through the fish, his feet sliding on their jellied skins. Fifty yards ahead he found an old dinghy on the bank that would save him the effort of crossing the motor-bridge. Pushing off, he reached the opposite shore and then retraced his steps along the bank towards Hamilton.
Across the surface of the lake the pools of evaporating water stirred in the sunlight. Along its southern margins, where the open water had given way before the drought to the creeks and marshes of Philip Jordan's water-world, the channels of damper mud wound among the white beaches. The tall columns and gantries of an experimental distillation unit operated by the municipal authorities rose above the dunes. At intervals along the shore the dark plumes of reed fires lifted into the sky from the deserted settlements, like the calligraphic signals of a primitive desert folk.
At the outskirts of the town Ransom climbed the bank and left the river, crossing an empty waterfront garden to the road behind. Unwashed by the rain, the streets were covered with dust and scraps of paper, the pavement strewn with garbage. Tarpaulins had been draped over the swimming pools, and the tattered squares lay about on the ground like ruined tents. The trim lawns shaded by willows and plane trees, the avenues of miniature palms and rhododendrons had vanished, leaving a clutter of ramshackle gardens. Most of Ransom's neighbours had joined the exodus to the coast. Already Hamilton was a desert town, built on an isthmus of sand between a drained lake and a forgotten river, sustained by a few meagre water-holes.
Two or three months beforehand many of the residents had built wooden towers in their gardens, some of them thirty or forty feet high, equipped with small observation platforms to give them an uninterrupted view of the southern horizon. From this quadrant alone were any clouds expected to appear, generated from moisture evaporated off the surface of the sea.
Halfway down Columbia Drive, as he looked up at the deserted towers, a passing car swerved in front of Ransom, forcing him on to the pavement. It stopped twenty yards ahead.
‘Ransom, is that you? Do you want a lift?’
Ransom crossed the road, recognizing the grey-haired man in a clerical collar – the Reverend Howard Johnstone, minister of the Presbyterian Church at Hamilton.
Johnstone opened the door and moved a shot-gun along the seat, peering at Ransom with a sharp eye.
‘I nearly ran you down,’ he told Ransom, beckoning him to shut the door before he had seated himself. ‘Why the devil are you wearing that beard? There's nothing to hide from.’
‘Of course not, Howard,’ Ransom agreed. ‘It's purely penitential. Actually, I thought it suited me.’
‘It doesn't. Let me assure you of that.’
A man of vigorous and stubborn temper, the Reverend Johnstone was one of those muscular clerics who intimidate their congregations not so much by the prospect of divine justice at some future date but by the threat of immediate physical retribution in the here and now. Well over six feet tall, his strong head topped by a fierce crown of grey hair, he СКАЧАТЬ