The Drought

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘He was doing his job.’

  ‘Rubbish. He picks on you deliberately.’ She looked at Ransom critically, and then managed a smile. ‘Poor Charles.’

  Pulling his boots down to his ankles, Ransom crossed the hearth and sat down beside her, feeling the pale warmth inside her shawl. Her brittle fingers kneaded his shoulders and then brushed his greying hair from his forehead. Huddled beside her inside the blanket, one hand resting limply on her thin thighs, Ransom gazed around the drab interior of the shack. The decline in his life in the five years since Judith had come to live with him needed no underlining, but he realized that this was part of the continuous decline of all the beach settlements. It was true that he now had the task of feeding them both, and that Judith made little contribution to their survival, but she did at least guard their meagre fish and water stocks while he was away. Raids on the isolated outcasts had now become more frequent.

  However, it was not this that held them together, but their awareness that only with each other could they keep alive some faint shadow of their former personalities, whatever their defects, and arrest the gradual numbing of sense and identity that was the unseen gradient of the dune limbo. Like all purgatories, the beach was a waiting-ground, the endless stretches of wet salt sucking away from them all but the hardest core of themselves. These tiny nodes of identity glimmered in the light of the limbo, the zone of nothingness that waited for them to dissolve and deliquesce like the crystals dried by the sun. During the first years, when Judith had lived with Hendry in the settlement, Ransom had noticed her becoming shrewish and sharp-tongued, and assumed this to mark the break-up of her personality. Later, when Hendry became the Reverend Johnstone’s right-hand man, his association with Judith was a handicap. Her bodkin tongue and unpredictable ways made her intolerable to Johnstone’s daughters and the other womenfolk.

  She left the settlement of her own accord. After living precariously in the old shacks among the salt-tips, she one day knocked on the door of Ransom’s cabin. It was then that Ransom realized that in fact Judith was one of the few people on the beach to have survived intact. The cold and brine had merely cut away the soft tissues of convention and politeness. However bad-tempered and impatient, she was still herself.

  Yet this stopping of the clock had gained them nothing. The beach was a zone without time, suspended in an endless interval as flaccid and enduring as the wet dunes themselves. Often Ransom remembered the painting by Tanguy which he had left behind in the houseboat. Its drained beaches, eroded of all associations, of all sense of time, in some ways seemed a photographic portrait of the salt world of the shore. But the similarity was misleading. On the beach, time was not absent but immobilized, what was new in their fives and relationships they could form only from the residues of the past, from the failures and omissions that persisted into the present like wreckage and scrap metal from which they built their cabins.

  Ransom looked down at Judith as she gazed into the stove. Despite the five years together, the five arctic winters and fierce summers when the salt banks gleamed like cause-ways of chalk, he felt few bonds between them. The success, if such a term could be used, of their present union, like its previous failure, had been decided by wholly impersonal considerations, above all by the zone of time in which they found themselves.

  He stood up. ‘I’ll bring one of the fish down. We’ll have some breakfast.’

  ‘Can we spare it?’

  ‘No. But perhaps there’ll be a tidal wave tonight.’

  Once every three or four years, in response to some distant submarine earthquake, a huge wave would inundate the coast. The third and last of these, some two years earlier, had swept across the salt flats an hour before dawn, reaching to the very margins of the beach. The hundreds of shacks and dwellings among the dunes had been destroyed by the waist-high water, the reservoir pools washed away in a few seconds. Staggering about in the sliding salt, they had watched everything they owned carried away. As the luminous water swilled around the wrecked ships, the exhausted beach-dwellers had climbed up on to the salt-tips and sat there until dawn.

  Then, in the first light, they had seen a fabulous spectacle. The entire stretch of the draining salt flats was covered with the expiring forms of tens of thousands of stranded fish, every pool alive with crabs and shrimps. The ensuing blood-feast, as the gulls dived and screamed around the flashing spears, had rekindled the remaining survivors. For three weeks, led by the Reverend Johnstone, they had moved from pool to pool, and gorged themselves like beasts performing an obscene eucharist.

  As Ransom walked over to the fish-tank he was thinking, not of this, but of the first great wave, some six months after their arrival. Then the tide had gathered for them a harvest of corpses. The thousands of bodies they had tipped into the sea after the final bloody battles on the beaches had come back to them, their drowned eyes and blanched faces staring from the shallow pools. The washed wounds, cleansed of all blood and hate, haunted them in their dreams. Working at night, they buried the bodies in deep graves below the first salt-tips. Sometimes Ransom would wake and go out into the darkness, half-expecting the washed bones to sprout through the salt below his feet.

  Recently Ransom’s memories of the corpses, repressed for so many years, had come back to him with added force. As he picked up his paddle and flicked one of the herrings on to the sand, he reflected that perhaps his reluctance to join the settlement stemmed from his identification of the fish with the bodies of the dead. However bitter his memories of the half-willing part he had played in the massacres, he now accepted that he would have to leave the solitary shack and join the Reverend Johnstone’s small feudal world. At least the institutional relics and taboos would allay his memories in a way that he alone could not.

  To Judith, as the fish browned in the frying pan, he said: ‘Grady is going to join the settlement.’

  ‘What? I don’t believe it!’ Judith brushed her hair down across her temple. ‘He’s always been such a lone wolf. Did he tell you himself?’

  ‘Not exactly, but—’

  ‘Then you’re imagining it.’ She divided the fish into two equal portions, steering the knife precisely down the midline with the casual skill of a surgeon. ‘Jonathan Grady is his own master. He couldn’t accept that crazy old clergyman and his mad daughters.’

  Ransom chewed the flavourless steaks of white meat. ‘He was talking about it while we waited for the tide. It was obvious what was on his mind—he’s sensible enough to know we can’t last out on our own much longer.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. We’ve managed so far.’

  ‘But, Judith . . . we live like animals. The salt is shifting now, every day it carries the sea a few yards farther out.’

  ‘Then we’ll move along the coast. If we want to we can go a hundred miles.’

  ‘Not now. There are too many blood feuds. It’s an endless string of little communities, trapping their own small pieces of the sea and frightened of everyone else.’ He picked at the shreds of meat around the fish’s skull. ‘I have a feeling Grady was warning me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If he joins the settlement he’ll be one of Jordan’s team. He’ll lead them straight here. In an obscure way I think he was telling me he’d enjoy getting his revenge.’

  ‘For his father? But that was so far in the past. It was just one of those tragic accidents.’

  ‘It wasn’t. In fact, the more I think about it the more I’m convinced it was simply a kind of cold-blooded experiment, to see how detached from everyone else I was.’ He shrugged. ‘If we’re going to join the settlement it would be best to get in before Grady does.’

  Judith shook her head. ‘Charles, if you go there it will be the end of you. You know that.’

  AN HOUR LATER, when she was asleep, Ransom left the cabin and went out into the cold morning light. The sun was overhead, but the
dunes remained grey and lifeless, the shallow pools like clouded mirrors. Along the shore the rusting columns of the half-submerged stills rose into the air, their shafts casting striped shadows on the brilliant white slopes of the salt-tips. The hills beyond were bright with desert colours, but as usual Ransom turned his eyes from them.

  He waited for five minutes to make sure that Judith remained asleep, then picked up his paddle and began to scoop the water from the tank beside the ship. Swept out by the broad blade, the water formed a pool some twenty feet wide, slightly larger than the one he had brought home that morning.

  Propelling the pool in front of him, Ransom set off across the dunes, taking advantage of the slight slope that shelved eastwards from the beach. As he moved along he kept a careful watch on the shore. No one would attempt to rob him of so small a pool of water, but his departure might tempt some roving beachcomber to break into the shack. Here and there a set of footprints led up across the firmer salt, but otherwise the surface of the dunes was unmarked. A mile away, towards the sea, a flock of gulls sat on the salt flats, but except for the pool of water scurrying along at Ransom’s feet, nothing moved across the sky or land.

  28

  AT THE SETTLEMENT

  LIKE A BROKEN-BACKED LIZARD, the derelict conveyor crossed the dunes, winding off towards the hidden sea. Ransom changed course as he approached it, and set off over the open table of shallow salt-basins that extended eastwards along the coast. He moved in and out of the swells, following the long gradients that carried the pool under its own momentum. His erratic course also concealed his original point of departure. Half a mile ahead, when he passed below a second conveyor, a stout bearded man in a fur jacket watched him from one of the gantries, honing a whale-bone spear. Ransom ignored him and continued on his way.

  In the distance a semi-circle of derelict freighters rose from the salt flats. Around them, like the hovels erected against the protective walls of a medieval fortress, was a clutter of small shacks and outbuildings. Some, like Ransom’s, were built from the bodies of old cars salvaged from the beach, but others were substantial wood and metal huts, equipped with doors and glass windows, joined together by companion-ways of galvanized iron. Grey smoke lifted from the chimneys, conveying an impression of warmth and industry. A battery of ten large stills on the foreshore discharged its steam towards the distant hills.

  A wire drift fence enclosed the settlement. As Ransom approached the western gate he could see the open surfaces of the water reservoirs and breeding tanks. Each was some two hundred feet long, buttressed by embankments of sand and shingle. A team of men, heads down in the cold sunlight, were working silently in one of the tanks, watched from the bank by an overseer holding a stave. Although three hundred people lived together in the settlement, no one moved around the central compound. As Ransom knew from his previous visits, the settlement’s only activity was work.

  Ransom steered his pool over to the gateway, where a group of huts gathered around the watch-tower. Two women sat in a doorway, rocking an anaemic child. At various points along the perimeter of the settlement a few sub-communities had detached themselves from the main compound, either because they were the original occupants of the site or were too lazy or unreliable to fit into the puritan communal life. However, all of them possessed some special skill with which they paid for their places.

  Bullen, the gatekeeper, who peered at Ransom from his sentry-­box below the watch-tower, carved the paddles used by the sea-trappers. In long racks by the huts the narrow blades, wired together from pieces of whale-bone, dried in the sunlight. In return, Bullen had been granted proprietary rights to the gateway. A tall, hunchbacked man with a sallow face, he watched Ransom suspiciously, then walked slowly across the water-logged hollows below the tower.

  ‘Back again?’ he said. Despite the infrequency of his visits, Ransom seemed to worry him in some obscure way. This was a symptom of the general withdrawal of the settlement from the world outside. He pointed down at Ransom’s pool with a paddle. ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘I want to see Captain Hendry,’ Ransom said.

  Bullen released the gate. As Ransom steered the pool forwards Bullen held it back with his paddle. Wearily, Ransom swept several bladefuls of the water into the basin by the tower. Usually Bullen would have expected a pair of small herring at the least, but from his brief glance at Ransom’s appearance he seemed to accept that these few gallons of water were the limit of his wealth.

  As the gate closed behind him, Ransom set off towards the compound. The largest of the freighters, its bows buried under the salt, formed the central tower of the settlement. Part of the starboard side, facing the shore, had been dismantled and a series of two- and three-storey cabins were built on to the decks. The stern castle of the ship, jutting high into the air, was topped by a large whale-bone cross. This was the settlement’s chapel. The port-holes and windows had been replaced by crude stained glass images of biblical scenes, in which some local craftsman had depicted Christ and his disciples surrounded by leaping sharks and sea-horses.

  The settlement’s preoccupation with the sea and its creatures could be seen at a glance. Outside every hut dozens of small fish dried on trestle tables or hung from the eaves. Larger fish, groupers and sharks that had strayed into the shallow water, were suspended from the rails of the ships, while an immense swordfish, the proudest catch of the settlement and the Reverend Johnstone’s choice of a militant symbol to signify its pride, was tied to the whale-bone mast and hung below the cross, its huge blade pointed heaven-wards.

  On the seaward side of the ships a second team of men was working in one of the tanks, bending in the cold water as they harvested the edible kelp. Swathed in rubber tubing, they looked like primitive divers experimenting with make-shift suits.

  Directly below the gangway of the freighter half a dozen round basins had been cut in the salt-dunes, temporary storage tanks for people moving with their water up and down the coast. Ransom steered his pool into the second of them, next to a visiting fisherman selling his wares to one of the foremen. The two men argued together, stepping down into the water and feeling the plump plaice and soles.

  Ransom drove his paddle into the sand by his pool. Some of the water had been lost on the way, and there was barely enough to cover the floor of the basin.

  He called up to the look-out on the bridge: ‘Is Captain Hendry aboard? Ransom to see him.’

  The man came down the companion-way to the deck, and beckoned Ransom after him. They walked past the boarded-up port-holes. Unpainted for ten years, the hulk was held together by little more than the tatters of rust. The scars of shell-fire marked the decks and stanchions—the freighter, loaded with fresh water and supplies, had been stormed by the insurgents breaking out from the rear areas of the beach, and then shelled from the destroyer now reclining among the dunes, a hundred yards away. Through one of these rents, gaping like an empty flower in the deck overhead, Ransom could see an old surplice drying in the sun.

  ‘Wait here. I’ll see the Captain.’

  Ransom leaned on the rail, looking down at the yard below. An old woman in a black shawl chopped firewood with an axe, while another straightened the kelp drying on a frame in the sunlight. The atmosphere in the settlement was drab and joyless, like that of an early pilgrim community grimly held together on the edge of some northern continent. Partly this was due to the sense of remorse still felt by the survivors—the spectres of the thousands who had been killed on the beaches, or driven out in herds to die in the sea, haunted the bitter salt. But it also reflected the gradual attrition of life, the slow reduction of variety and movement as the residues of their past lives, the only materials left to them, sank into the sterile dunes. This sense of diminishing possibility, of the erosion of all time and space beyond the flaccid sand and draining beaches, numbed Ransom’s mind.

  ‘The Captain will see you.’

&n
bsp; Ransom followed the man into the ship. The nautical terminology—there were a dozen captains, including Hendry, Jordan and the Reverend Johnstone, a kind of ex-officio rear-admiral—was a hangover from the first years when the nucleus of the original settlement had lived in the ship. The freighter sat where she had been sunk in the shallow water, the waves breaking her up, until the slopes of salt produced by the distillation units had driven the water back into the sea. At this stage thousands of emigrants were living in the cars and shacks on the beaches, and the distillation units, run by the citizens’ co-operatives that had taken over from the military after the break-out battles, were each producing tons of salt every day. The large freighter had soon been inundated.

  ‘Well, what have you brought now?’ Seated at his desk in the purser’s cabin, Hendry looked up as Ransom came in. Waving Ransom into a chair, he peered down the columns of a leather-bound log-book which he used as a combined ledger and diary. In the intervening years all trace of Hendry’s former quiet humour had gone, and only the residue of the conscientious policeman remained. Dour and efficient, but so dedicated to securing the minimum subsistence level for the settlement that he could no longer visualize anything above that meagre line, he summed up for Ransom all the dangers and confinements of their limbo.

  ‘Judith sends her regards, Captain,’ Ransom began, trying to force a little brightness into his manner. ‘How’s the baby coming along?’

  Hendry gestured with his pen. ‘As well as can be expected.’

  ‘Would you like some water for it? I have some outside. I was going to hand it over to the settlement, but I’d be delighted to give you and Julia the first cut.’

  Hendry glanced cannily at Ransom, as if suspecting that this harmless outcast, however incompetent, might have stumbled on some Elysian spring. ‘What water is this? I didn’t know you had so much you were giving it away.’

  ‘It isn’t mine to give,’ Ransom said piously. ‘The poachers were out again last night, stealing Jordan’s catch as it came in. I found this pool near the channel this morning.’