It was this sense of remorseless caprice, with its world of infinite possibilities unrestrained by any moral considerations, which had its expression in the figure of the white-haired witch. As he watched the abandoned houses stretching along the ash-covered streets, and heard the restive cries of the animals as they skirted its wall, he saw an image of Miranda squatting in her filthy robe by some hearth among the smoking rubble, her perverted cherub’s face like an old crone’s.
Yet Lomax’s references to the future, and his own confusion of the emerging landscape with the past, tantalized him. These last days in Hamilton had seemed to offer a choice of direction, but already he sensed that Lomax had been right. If the future, and his whole sense of time, were haunted by images of his own death, by the absence of identity beyond both birth and grave, why did these chimeras not coincide more closely with the terrifying vision of Miranda Lomax? He listened to the baying of the animals, raucous cries like tearing fabric, and thought to himself, they’ll wake the dead.
12
THE DROWNED AQUARIUM
THEY APPROACHED the gates of the zoo. Whitman stopped the tanker at the metal barrier across the service entrance. Ransom climbed out and raised the boom, and Whitman drove the tanker to the pump-house behind the cages.
Ransom walked across the central promenade of the zoo. Some twenty pink flamingoes huddled together in a shallow trough at one end of the rock-pool, the water sunk to a pallid slush between their feet. Sheets of matting covered the wire mesh over the pool but the birds fretted nervously, opening their beaks at Ransom.
A monotonous chorus of bellows and grunts sounded around the zoo, the visceral cries reflected off the concrete pens. The smaller cages housing the ornamental birds and monkeys were empty. In one of the stalls a dead camel lay on the floor. Near by, a large Syrian bear prowled up and down its cage, arms and head rolling around the bars. A hyena stared at Ransom like a blind pig, emitting a high-pitched whine. Next to it a pair of cheetahs flicked around their cages, their small, killing heads swivelling as Ransom passed.
An attempt had been made to feed and water the animals. Clumps of monkey meat lay on the floors, and there were a few pails of water, but the cages were as dry as desert caves.
Ransom stopped in the entrance to the lion house. A roar of noise greeted him, striking his head like a fist. The five white-haired lions—two pairs and a single older male—were about to be fed, and their roars sounded like the slamming of a steel mill. Striding up and down the narrow aisle between the rail and the bars was Catherine Austen. Her white shirt and riding breeches were stained with dirt and perspiration, but she moved without any sign of fatigue, hoisting a pail of meat under the noses of the lions as she tossed the giblets through the bars. At first Ransom thought she was tormenting them, but the lions bounded up and down, catching the meat in their jaws.
‘Come on, Sarah, up, up! You’re as slow as a cow! No, Hector, here!’ At the end cage, where the single lion, a blind old male with a ragged mane and a dulled yellow hide, was swinging left and right like a demented bear, hoarse with bellowing, she heaped the meat through the bars almost into his jaws.
As the lions tore at the meat Catherine moved back along the cages, rattling her pail against the bars. Recognizing Ransom, she beckoned him towards her, then began to rake out the cages with a long-handled broom, tripping playfully at the lions’ legs.
‘Who’s this?’ she called over her shoulder. ‘The veterinary?’
Ransom put his valise down on a bench. ‘Your friend Whitman gave me a lift. He’s brought Lomax’s water.’
Catherine pulled her broom from the cage with a flourish. ‘Good for him. I wasn’t going to trust Lomax until I saw it come. Tell Whitman to pump it into the reserve tank.’
Ransom moved along the cages, the smell and energy of the lions quickening his blood. Catherine Austen had cast away all trace of lethargy and moodiness.
‘I’m glad to see you, doctor. Have you come to help?’
Ransom took the broom from her and leaned it against the wall. ‘In a sense.’
Catherine surveyed the floor, which was strewn with straw and splinters of bone. ‘It may look a mess, but I think Father would have been proud of me.’
‘Perhaps he would. How did you persuade Barnes to leave you here?’
‘He worked for Father years ago. Whitman and I convinced him that we should stay on and put them down one at a time, so there wouldn’t be any panic.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘What? Of course not. I know we can’t hope to keep them all alive, but we’ll try with the mammals. The lions we’ll save right to the end.’
’And then?’
Catherine turned on him ‘What are you trying to say, doctor? I’d rather not think about it.’
Ransom stepped over to her. ‘Catherine, be sensible for a moment. Lomax hasn’t given this water to you out of charity—he obviously intends to use the animals for his own purposes. As for Whitman—perhaps zoos need people like him, but he’s a menace on his own. It’s time to leave, or one morning you’ll come here and find all the cages open.’
Catherine wrenched her arm away from him. ‘Doctor, can’t you understand? It might rain tomorrow, much as you may hate the prospect. I don’t intend to desert these animals, and as long as there’s food and water I certainly can’t destroy them.’ Lowering her voice, she added: ‘Besides, I don’t think Whitman would let me.’ She turned away and touched the cage of the blind lion.
‘He probably wouldn’t,’ Ransom said. ‘Remember, though, that here, unlike the world outside, you still have bars between you and the animals.’
Quietly, Catherine said: ‘One day you’re going to be surprised, doctor.’
Ransom was about to remonstrate with her again when something moved behind him. Silhouetted against the sunlight was the faun-like figure that had already crept up behind him once that day.
Ransom stepped towards the door, but the youth darted away.
‘What the devil is he up to? Has he been hanging around before?’
‘Who was that? I didn’t see him.’
‘Lomax’s familiar—Quilter.’ A few feet from Ransom the lions munched at the joint of meat, jaws tearing through the bony shafts. Quilter’s appearance had abruptly let another dimension into the already uncertain future of the zoo.
Hands in pockets, Catherine followed him into the sunlight. ‘Tomorrow I’m moving in here, so I won’t see you again doctor. By the way, your houseboat hardly looks as if it’s going anywhere.’
‘I intend to put a stronger motor on it.’ The sky was still stained by the plumes of smoke billowing upwards from the city. He saw Quilter moving past the entrance to the aviary, a circular wire-topped building that backed on to the pump house.
Catherine slipped her arm through his. ‘Why don’t you join me, doctor? We’ll teach the lions to hunt in packs.’
She waved and walked away among the cages.
Clasping the valise, Ransom set off across the central promenade. He stopped behind the flamingo pool. Around him the animals patrolled their cages in the bright sun. The water tanker stood by the pump-house, its hose trailing into a manifold. Whitman had gone off to the living quarters near the gates.
A bird’s cry pierced the air, ending in a flat squawk. Ransom walked along the wall of the pool, searching the empty passages between the cages. He stepped out into the open and moved towards the pump-house, hiding in the shade below the roofs of the cages. The bear swayed along the bars after him, trying to embrace him in its ponderous arms. The cheetahs’ tails flicked like whips, their cold eyes cutting at Ransom.
He stepped into the entrance to the aquarium. Faint sunlight filtered through the matting laid on the frosted glass overhead, a crack here and there illuminating a corner of one of the tanks. The usual liquid glimmer had been st
illed, and there was a sharp tang in the air. Ransom moved between the lines of tanks towards the service door beyond the alligator pit, then paused as his eyes cleared in the darkness.
Suspended in the dim air around him, their pearly bodies rotating like the vanes of elaborate mobiles, were the corpses of hundreds of fish. Poisoned by their own wastes, they hung in the gloomy water, their blank eyes glowing like phosphorus, mouths agape. In the smaller tanks the tropical fish effloresced like putrid jewels, their coloured tissue dissolving into threads of gossamer. Gazing at them, Ransom had a sudden vision of the sea by the coastal beaches, as clouded and corpse-strewn as the water in the tanks, the faces of the drowned eddying past each other.
He crossed the aquarium and stepped into the service unit. A narrow yard led him into the rear of the pump-house. The machinery was silent, the large flywheel stationary in its pit. Masking his footsteps, he approached the open double doors, through which he could see the green hull of the water-tanker.
Standing with his back to Ransom as he examined the damp hose leading into the manifold, was Quilter. He wore the same filthy trousers stained with wine and grease, but he now sported an expensive gold-and-purple Paisley shirt. Suspended from his belt by a piece of string fastened around its severed neck, was a dead peacock, its jewelled tail sweeping behind him like a train.
A fly circled the air above his head, then alighted on his neck. Absent-mindedly, Quilter raised one hand and slapped the insect into a red smudge. He picked thoughtfully at the remains.
Ransom stepped out into the sunlight. With his right hand he held Quilter’s arm above the elbow.
Startled, Quilter looked around, his liquid eyes rolling beneath his dented brows.
‘Doctor—’
‘Hello, Quilter.’ Gripping the muscular biceps, an immense bulge of muscle, Ransom glanced between the wheels of the tanker for any signs of the Alsatians. ‘Is this your afternoon off? I didn’t know you enjoyed zoos.’
‘Doctor . . .’ Quilter gazed down at the fingers clenched around his arm, a puzzled frown on his face. ‘Doctor, I don’t like—’ He jerked his arm away, then lashed out at Ransom with the edge of his hand. Ready for this, Ransom side-stepped, knocking Quilter off-balance with his elbow, and clouted him across the shoulders with the valise. Quilter sat down on the concrete, the peacock’s tail flaring between his legs. For a moment he seemed stunned. Then a rheumy smile struggled fitfully on to his deformed face.
His point made, Ransom leaned against the side of the tanker, washing his hand in the water dribbling from the hose.
‘You should be more careful, Quilter. Now what are you up to here?’
Quilter shook his head, apparently mystified by Ransom’s behaviour. He pointed to the water on Ransom’s fingers. ‘One day, doctor, you’ll drown in that much water.’
‘Keep to the point. What are you doing so far from home?’
Quilter gazed at him guilelessly. He stood up, hitching the peacock on to his hip, then inspected his shirt with great care. ‘Lomax told me to follow you; tell him everything you did.’
‘Interesting.’ Ransom pondered this. The frankness could be discounted. No doubt these were Lomax’s instructions, but the real point of Quilter’s remark would lie elsewhere. ‘As a matter of fact Lomax invited me to stay with him,’ he said, adding with deliberate irony: ‘You’ll be working for me then, Quilter.’
Quilter regarded him sceptically, his toad’s face full of bile. ‘I’m working for Miss Miranda,’ he said.
‘That makes more sense.’ Ransom watched Quilter’s face as it started to quiver, breaking into a mirthless laugh. The scarred lips shook silently, the mole on his left cheek dancing. Repelled by this grimacing parody of a human being, Ransom turned to go, hoping to draw Quilter away from Catherine Austen and the zoo. As long as the animals were alive Whitman would guard her, but the one-eyed man would be no match for Quilter.
‘I wish you both luck,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘You have a lot in common.’
Quilter stared after him, his eyes suddenly glazed, fingers feeling the blood-streaked neck of the peacock hanging from his belt. Then, with virulent energy he hurled after Ransom: ‘We’ll have more in common later, doctor! Much more!’
13
THE NETS
OUTSIDE THE ZOO, Ransom waited before crossing the street. He rested against the trunk of a dead plane tree, watching the deserted houses. Quilter’s absurd words, crazier than even he could understand, echoed in Ransom’s ears. Normally the youth would have tittered at the grotesque implications of the remark, but his obvious conviction in this new realm of possibility made Ransom suspect that he was at last out of his depth. Perhaps the boy was regaining his sanity—no lunatic would ever dream up such an implausible fantasy.
Retracing the route Whitman had taken, Ransom set off across the street. The houses were empty, the garbage fires drifting from the gardens. The city was silent and the billows of the burning oil fires still rose into the air over his head. A door swung open, reflecting the sun with a sharp stab. Somewhere to his left there was a clatter as a lost dog overturned a refuse bin.
Barely filtered by the smoke, the sunlight burned across the ashy dust, the flints of quartz stinging his eyes. After walking for a quarter of an hour Ransom regretted not bringing a flask of water. The dust filled his throat with the dry taste of burning garbage. Leaning on the fender of a car, he massaged his neck, and debated whether to break into one of the houses.
A short way ahead he passed an open front door. Pushing back the gate, he walked up the path to the porch. Hidden by the shade, he glanced up and down the empty street. Through the door he could see into the living-room and kitchen. Cardboard cartons were stacked in the hall, and unwanted suitcases lay across the armchairs.
He was about to step through the door when he noticed a small sign drawn in the dust a few feet away from him. The single loop, like a child’s caricature of a fish, had been casually traced with a stick lying on the path near by.
Ransom watched the houses around him. The sign had been made within the last minutes, but the street was silent. He walked off down the path. His first reaction was to blame Quilter for the sign, but he then remembered the two fishermen’s women in black shawls whom he had seen from the tanker, and the strange congregation at the church that morning. The sign outside the church had been the same simple loop, by coincidence the rebus used by the first Christians to identify themselves to one another. The fishermen’s sullen expressions as they listened to the Reverend Johnstone’s sermon on Jonah and the gourd were probably in many ways like those on the obsessed faces of the primitive fishermen who left their nets by the Lake of Galilee.
A hundred yards away a black-suited figure moved behind a wall. Ransom stopped, waiting for the man to come out into the road. Quickening his pace, he set off along the avenue again, ignoring a door that opened behind him. Deliberately avoiding the route he and Whitman had taken, he turned left at the first intersection, then right again into the next street. Behind him, the ash drifted down across the roads, lightly covering the foot-prints.
Five minutes later he could hear all around him the running steps of the men following his path. Hidden behind the intervening walls and houses, they moved along with him, extending in two arcs on either side, like a group of small boats tracking a sounding whale. The muffled footsteps padded across the empty porches. Ransom crouched down and rested between two cars. Behind him the smoke plumes rising from the gardens were disturbed and broken.
He strode on again, pausing only at the crossroads. Despite his progress, Hamilton still seemed to lie a mile or so beyond the roof-tops, as if his invisible pursuers were steering him in a circle. Wondering why they should bother to follow him, he remembered Catherine Austen’s jibe—perhaps the fishermen marooned ashore by the dying lake were hunting for some kind of scapegoat?
&
nbsp; He slowed down to regain his breath, and then made a last effort. He broke into a run and turned left and right at random, darting in and out of the cars. To his relief his pursuers seemed to drop behind. He turned again into the next street, and then found that he had blundered into a cul-de-sac.
Retracing his steps, Ransom saw two black-suited figures scuttle through a gap in a ruined wall. He raced along the white dust covering the pavement, but the road was full of running men, vaulting across the cars like acrobats. A large net lay over the pavement. As he approached, it rose into the air, cast at him off the ground. Ransom turned and clambered between two cars. In the centre of the road half a dozen men appeared around him, arms outstretched as they feinted with their nets, watching his feet with intent eyes. Their black serge suits were streaked with ash.
Ransom tried to break through them, using his weight to shoulder two of the men aside. The heavy shawl of a net was thrown over his face. Knocking it away with the valise, he tripped in the tarry skeins underfoot, cast at him like lassos from all directions. As he fell the fishermen closed around him, and the nets caught him before he could touch the ground. Swept off his feet, he was tumbled on to his back in the huge hammock, then lifted into the air on a dozen arms as if he were about to be tossed to the sun. Pulling at the thick mesh, he shouted at the men, and caught a last confused glimpse of their pointed faces below their caps. There was a wild scramble across the road, and his shoulders struck the ground. Swept up again, he collided head-on with the fender of a car.
14
A NEW RIVER
ILLUMINATED BY THE tinted sky, the curved beams rose above Ransom on either side, reaching inwards to the open space over his head like the ribs of a stranded whale. Lying back on an old mattress, Ransom counted the girders, for a moment imagining that he was indeed lying within the bowels of a beached leviathan, its half-rotten carcass forgotten on the shore.
The Drought Page 6