The Water Thief

by Claire Hajaj

As he passed, something else called his attention – a presence or absence in the garden’s shade. It broke into his haste, like a cold voice calling his name.

  Under the half-shadow of Nagode’s tree a pile of dirt lay in irregular pieces – part stone, part gravel, part sandy earth. A small stick had been snapped at its centre, fragments of bright cloth peeping out from the rubble.

  JoJo’s castle. One outer wall still stood and a couple of inner chambers. But the careful turrets, the stones that formed the support walls, the central tower that had taken a day to set in place – all lay scattered.

  A terrible fear started to swell in Nick. That slamming door. But no, surely JoJo was still waiting for him at school? And why would he come in through the back door and not the front?

  Nick pulled his keys from his office desk and hurried out to the Jeep, sweltering in the dead heat. He felt the grind of the gearbox as he turned the ignition, yellow dust trails blasting behind him as he sped past the mosque and down towards the village school.

  But the gates were shut and the playground silent. A deep brown haze loomed over it – his father, leaning down from his desk with a thunderous face. JoJo was nowhere to be seen.

  We are doing wrong. Nick leaned his head on the wheel, the heated rubber branding his skin. And these were the bitter consequences: distraction, lies, oblivious cruelty. Bad deeds breed. It had been one of the old man’s favourite sayings. Nick had heard him utter it countless times – over the morning paper’s latest iniquities, or to crush one of his son’s feeble acts of rebellion.

  It was too late to search for JoJo: the governor’s inspection was imminent and Nick was running late. He headed out onto the northern highway, the tarmac a shimmering ribbon ahead. Dust flew in through the ancient air-conditioner, parching his throat. Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink. His Jeep was a tiny white boat sailing over silent oceans just meters beneath.

  He reached the site half an hour before the governor and his circus. Nick’s men had worked through Christmas and New Year against a punishing schedule, trying to get the ground floor photo-shoot ready.

  Eric stood under the scaffold of the gaping entrance, signing a docket for four huge crates. Generators, the governor had insisted on them, power thirsty, high-end imaging appliances. Nick had argued, ‘The power drain will unbalance your whole system. Maintenance will cost a fortune. You’ll have a showpiece, but no show.’

  The governor smiled at this. ‘Worry less and build faster,’ he’d advised.

  Eric waved to him from the container. ‘You’re fucking late,’ he yelled over the fury of the drill. ‘The boss will be here soon. And Tricky Dicky wanted to talk to you, but he fucked off home. Too much waity waity.’ Tricky Dicky was Richard, the construction firm’s boss and shiftless provider of cheap labour.

  ‘I was writing reports,’ Nick lied.

  He gestured to a banner being unrolled over the bones of the clinic entrance, an oversized governor smiling down at a little girl in a white gown, her wheelchair sleekly state-of-the-art. In her lap she clutched a teddy bear; they both stared up at their benefactor, plump and admiring. Below, the crew was wreathed in yellow dust, scarves wrapped around their mouths, bloodshot eyes straining against the gritty air.

  ‘It’s inhuman to make them work today,’ Nick muttered. ‘I can barely breathe.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Eric spat on the ground. ‘It’s our big afternoon, isn’t it? Not to mention completion on fucking schedule. With the weather like this we could be getting sandstorms right up to the rains. If there ever are any rains.’

  ‘Sandstorms?’ Nick imagined the heat rising in a cloudy fist, choking the last of the lake and the dying millet crops.

  ‘You’ve not seen one of the really big buggers. We’re not usually in line for them here, but this year who fucking knows?’

  Nick shook his head. ‘Can you come inside? I want to talk something through.’

  The silent corridors were air-conditioning cool as Nick entered his office. He laid J.P.’s cash envelope on the table, counting out five thousand dollars: two for rental of the digging machines, one for the foreman and the rest to be spread among the crew, tens of dollars each. The little bundle of money looked pathetic, crumpled against the smooth grey of the desk.

  ‘So,’ Eric said, after they’d made their monthly tally. ‘I hear J.P. gave your well the old heave-ho.’

  So Eric and J.P. were talking on the side. ‘And what else did J.P. say?’

  ‘That maybe it’s something to look at next dry season.’

  ‘I’ll be gone by then.’ The fact hit him like a punch to the stomach, delivering its brutal reality-check.

  ‘Good for you. I’m stuck here till I fucking die.’

  ‘But how long would it take,’ Nick persisted. ‘From start to finish?’

  ‘To put in a well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Near Dr Ahmed’s place?’ Eric pursed his lips. ‘A couple of weeks for the permit, a few more to drill. You’re not exactly talking top-of-the-range kit out here. Ramadan is coming at the end of March, finding workers then is like getting blood from a fucking stone.’

  Ramadan lasted a month, Nick remembered. ‘So it could be done in May? After Ramadan?’

  ‘Better not to drill in the wet season. If the rains come, you’re fucked. And if they don’t come, then the whole place is fucked.’

  The rains. ‘So April would be the latest to finish the build.’

  ‘Finishing in March would be better.’

  ‘We’re already mid-January. That’s just a few weeks away.’

  Eric frowned. ‘This is theoretical, no?’

  ‘Yes . . . I don’t know.’ Nick stood up, crossing to the window. ‘They really need that water.’ The air swirled thickly outside. He touched the hollow centre of his chest, where Margaret’s breath had blended with the salt of his sweat.

  Eric watched him, eyes narrowed. ‘You ever hear that saying: “man cannot live by bread alone”? The same goes for water.’

  Nick ignored him. The moving dust clouds were hypnotic, shadows ebbing and flowing across the sun. ‘And how much would it cost?’

  ‘For a medium-depth well, motorised with a good flow-rate? Around twenty thousand all-in. Good enough for drinking and cooking for maybe five hundred families.’

  Nick turned to him. ‘So if I gave you twenty thousand, could you do it? Organise it and supervise?’

  Eric raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you personally have twenty thou’ spare to build a fucking well?’

  ‘I might.’ The legacy from his father had been little short of that. He’d put it into a fund, with some of Kate’s money from her grandmother. They’d planned to build a house one day, designed by him, decorated by her.

  A shout of alarm drifted through the haze. The throb of engines slowed and stopped and voices began calling across the site. People were running towards an area blocked from Nick’s view. One man unwrapped a scarf from his head; Nick saw it snatched frantically from his hand.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ he told Eric, in sudden certainty. They both ran for the door and out into the choking heat.

  The worker who’d fallen from the first floor had landed by chance on a sand pile. He looked more ghost than human – thin and grey, his legs pale branches sticking from his cut-off jeans. His eyes blinked slowly, dazed and red under the cropped fuzz of his hair, his mouth making small, animated twitches like someone conversing with unseen forces.

  Nick pushed through the crowds, the stench of ash and dry sweat filling his nostrils. ‘Dry,’ said a workman as he knelt down, patting himself on the head for emphasis. ‘Too dry.’

  ‘Where’s water?’ Nick demanded. Someone held a bottle to the man’s lips. He did not swallow. ‘Wait,’ Nick said in frustration. ‘You’ll choke him.’ He looked up at the hospital, incredulous. Had anyone gone to get a doctor?

  More shouts – this time from the soldiers at the checkpoint. Nick looked behind to see the governor’s
car pulling up – a silent black Land Rover, followed by several others. The rear door swung open and the man himself emerged, his long robe trailing in the dirt. Other doors were opening; men darted forward holding cameras. Nick knew instantly who the governor’s guests were. They moved with the slow assurance of wealth, pressing forward with dignified curiosity.

  ‘What has happened here?’ the governor asked Nick, without a word of greeting.

  ‘He fell,’ Nick said. Eric added, ‘Dehydration. This weather’s no good for afternoon working.’

  The governor nodded. ‘Where are my doctors?’ No one replied. The governor roared out over the courtyard: ‘Where are my doctors?’

  The suited young men by his car jumped in alarm. One was sent running into the hospital. The governor knelt in the dust by the injured man, putting his hand on his forehead. Cameras snapped around them. He spoke quietly, and the man’s eyes refocused, his lips pulling back in a rictus smile.

  ‘This should not happen.’ The governor spoke to Nick. ‘You must take better precautions.’

  Nick swallowed his fury. ‘You told us to maintain our pace. You vetoed a morning-only schedule.’

  ‘And now I am telling you to take better precautions,’ the governor replied, getting to his feet as two white-coated orderlies and a doctor squeezed past.

  He raised his voice. ‘Go home,’ he called to the filthy, sweating workmen. ‘Now! Stop your work and go home. I will take care of him.’ The command was shouted again in the local dialect, and a murmur rose from the crowd – cheering broken by coughing.

  The governor turned to the men behind him. ‘This is my right hand,’ he told them, gesturing at Nick. ‘He runs a tight ship.’ Laughter and murmurs of approval broke out. ‘But we must also take care of our sailors, eh?’

  Nick was forced to shake hand after hand, feeling the moist fullness of the flesh, thanking them for coming, hearing the steady click of camera shutters.

  ‘We will reschedule our event,’ the governor said into Nick’s ear, gripping his arm. Then, louder: ‘When you are finished, join us inside for some refreshments.’

  Nick watched as the governor herded his guests back towards the mansion, his clothes stained with dark patches of the workman’s sweat. Fountain spray drifted towards the facade in white plumes, its coolness a slap to the face. His thoughts swarmed, binding to each other in a chain of dark connections: the charred fish staring eyelessly up at them from the governor’s table; pus leaking from Adeya’s burned hands as JoJo wept; JoJo sloping off with a bucket to the lake that killed his brother; Bako’s cross in Margaret’s garden, the blood-red beads on her wrist.

  The dehydrated workman was on his feet now, arms slung over the orderlies’ shoulders. Eric started laughing as they stumbled together towards the hospital entrance, the man’s feet dragging in the dirt. ‘Ah, the irony,’ he said. ‘The only way that unlucky bugger could ever dream of seeing the inside of the governor’s hospital is nearly to break his fucking neck building it. Life is full of surprises.’

  Nick smiled faintly in reply. And in a deep corner of his mind, a braver version of him wrapped his hands around the governor’s thick throat and squeezed and squeezed until nothing was left of him but empty skin.

  The sky to the west was reddening as Nick drove home. Eric’s words bounced inside his mind like arcade pinballs, maddening him with repetition. Twenty thousand spare to build a well.

  At last he could bear it no longer; he swung off-road before reaching the village, heading towards the sun’s open mouth.

  The lake emerged, barely an oily slick on the ground. He felt the mud become soft, sucking at his wheels. The open window in the cooling air, with its brilliant song of insects.

  Water stretched out around him – the land’s empty mirror to the sky. Old plastic bags clung to dried bushes, ripped on their thorns, fluttering in the wind like tattered flags.

  Twenty thousand spare to build a well. His savings were a world away – intended for a future with Kate, to make rooms for their children to sleep in and gardens where they would dream of retirement.

  But he’d set that future ablaze in Margaret’s arms. And for the first time, he understood the fire might burn more than him.

  I’m sorry. He saw Kate, standing at the airport, watching him leave. Her eyes locked on his, accusing. Blue numbers ran down her face from the announcement board overhead, counting down endless departures.

  To get the money would mean more lies and betrayals. He’d given Kate power of attorney before leaving; now he’d have to talk her into liquidating their bonds and wiring the money to him. One part of his mind ran through schemes and scenarios while another cried out in protest. He felt dizzy, a compass needle spinning back and forth between two opposite poles of right, like the tick tock of Dr Ahmed’s grandfather clock. But time was running out.

  Nick’s hands gripped the steering wheel, damp and slick against the worn rubber. The violence of his feelings frightened him – welling up from some deep pit within, a darkness he’d never known was there. That ridiculous clock. He could almost see it, right there in front of him in the growing dusk, its pendulum swinging sadly. What Dr Ahmed knew, or suspected, Nick did not dare to imagine. The old man was no fool. ‘My husband may choose not to see,’ Margaret had said. ‘But his heart knows more than his eyes.’

  What would Dr Ahmed do if he discovered the truth? Hunt them down and drive them out? He doesn’t really love her, the dark inner voice urged. He’d rather be a saint than make her happy. But Dr Ahmed wasn’t the only one he’d wronged. JoJo’s broken castle loomed in Nick’s memory, an icy question. Sunlight glinted off its scattered stones, bright as the diamond on Kate’s ring finger. If you do something wrong out of love, can it still be all wrong? Or does love make it a little bit right?

  Against the glare of sunset an old woman was wading through the plants, hair and face ash-white. Her robe was hitched up to her thighs over twisted, tree-stump legs. Behind her, the red curtain of the witch’s hut flapped open.

  Binza. Even at this distance she radiated a malevolent energy. It repulsed him; but he felt an eerie sense of confederacy, too – they were the last living things between the village and the void.

  Binza picked her way into the watery mud, her waddling gait uneven. A bag dangled from her waist. Her lips opened as she bent to pluck things from the water, drooping like a voracious flower. Nick thought of Baba Yaga, the Russian witch in his mother’s books, whose house chased children so that she could devour them in the forest’s depths.

  Something powerful stirred within him then, a righteous anger. Margaret came to you for help, and you failed her too. Binza was just another false prophet, her magic as hollow as the red beads that could not tie one little boy to life.

  Then the witch stood and turned towards him.

  Her eyes were grey as the lakewater, her gaze physically unpleasant like a cold hand reaching inside. She’s just an old woman. A lonely old woman. Sun shone through the tangled strands of her thinning hair – her face like a spider’s in a glowing web.

  Hatred seized him – for her, for the malevolent land, for the callous forces that punished without reason, that conspired with greedy men to crush people’s lives and plunder their hopes.

  Sickened, he turned the ignition and put the Jeep into gear. The wheels bit deep into the ground. Binza faded from view, her eyes flashing once in the rear-view mirror before they were swallowed by the sun’s glare.

  He passed the empty millet fields and Adeya’s house, its curtains drawn. Dr Ahmed’s Ford was parked in front of the gate, the light on in his office window.

  As Nick walked along the porch he heard the creak of the garden door as it opened. Margaret’s back was to him as she walked down the steps with a bucket of black kitchen water, her form silhouetted against the dusk. Nagode was tied to her back in a dark scarf that flattened the swell of her breasts.

  Need flooded him; he crept up behind her and felt the stiffening of her body as his ar
ms slid under hers. Nagode breathed, warm and soft between them.

  ‘Hush,’ he whispered, as Margaret twisted around, eyes wide as they darted to the kitchen window. ‘No one’s there.’

  Nagode reached out from behind her mother. ‘Ni,’ she crowed. Her face had thinned recently, high cheekbones emerging from its soft, round depths.

  Margaret smiled in the darkness. ‘No one except Nagode.’

  Nick touched the small hands; they grasped his finger with youth’s casual ferocity. ‘Nagode won’t tell,’ he said. ‘Will you?’

  Margaret’s mouth moved onto his; he smelled the bucket’s odour – rot, mud, the richness of moisture.

  ‘I was expecting you home before now,’ she whispered. ‘I waited for you.’

  ‘I know.’ He longed to promise a time when they would not have to wait, or hide – but the future seemed impenetrable, a sandstorm blocking the sun.

  ‘Let me help you with that,’ he said instead, taking the bucket from her. The liquid inside was too thick and filthy to be considered water even in these desperate times. She watched him pour it out onto the soil.

  ‘Tomorrow JoJo will have to get more.’ Her hand reached behind to touch Nagode’s foot – a compulsive reassurance. ‘This drought is even worse than the last.’

  ‘I’ll get more if you need it,’ he said. ‘We could go to the lake together.’ They’d found a dip behind one of the rocks out by the water’s edge, where only the sky could see them.

  He saw her blush with understanding. ‘So noble,’ she teased. ‘Is there no more challenging quest for this knight to prove his faith?’

  ‘Try me,’ he said, in deadly earnest.

  After Margaret had returned to the house, Nick unlocked his office door.

  A kerosene stench lay heavy in the air. He flipped the generator’s ignition and sat back, the whine of the turning engine lacing the room with petrol-fumed light. The radio was a hulking black presence, one red button blinking on and off like a warning.

  Nick knelt to open the safe. The code was Madi’s birthday.