The Drought

by J. G. Ballard

  They returned to Catherine and Mrs Quilter. For a few minutes they rested in the shade inside the hull of a wrecked barge. In a breaker’s yard across the river was the skeleton of a large fishing trawler. Its long hull was topped by the high stern bridge which Jonas had paced like a desert Ahab, hunting for his white sea. Ransom glanced at Philip Jordan, who was staring up at the bridge, his eyes searching the empty port-holes.

  Mrs Quilter sat up weakly. ‘Can you see my old Quilty?’ she asked. During the past few days, as they neared Mount Royal, each of them had been generous with his water rations to Mrs Quilter, as if this in some way would appease the daunting spectre of her son. Now, however, with only two canteens left and the city apparently deserted, Ransom noticed that she received barely her own ration.

  ‘He’ll be here, doctor,’ she said, aware of this change of heart. ‘He’ll be somewhere. I can feel it.’

  Ransom wiped the dust from his beard. The thinning hair was now as white as Miranda Lomax’s had ever been. He watched the distant plumes of smoke rising along the course of the river. ‘Perhaps he is, Mrs Quilter.’

  They left the trawler and set off towards the motor-bridge. They reached the shade below the pylons half an hour later. Outside the entrance to the yacht basin the remains of Mrs Quilter’s barge lay in the sunlight, a few burnt beams dimly outlining its shape. She pottered over them, stirring the charred timbers with a stick, and then let herself be lifted back into the cart.

  As they ploughed through the fine dust below the fishermen’s quays, Ransom noticed that from here to the white dunes of the lake the surface was composed entirely of the ground skeletons of thousands of small fish. Spurs of tiny bones and vertebrae shone in the dust at his feet. It was this coating of bone-meal which formed the brilliant reflector illuminating the lake and the surrounding desert.

  They passed below the intact span of the motor-bridge. Ransom let go of the shaft. ‘Philip !’ he shouted. ‘The houseboat!’ Recognizing the rectangular outline buried in the sand, he ran ahead through the drifts.

  He knelt down and brushed the flowing sand away from the windows, then peered through the scored glass as Philip Jordan clambered up beside him.

  Some years earlier the cabin had been ransacked. Books were scattered about, the desk drawers pulled on to the floor; but at a glance Ransom could see that all the mementoes he had gathered together before leaving Hamilton were still within the cabin. A window on the port side was broken, and the sand poured across the deck, half-submerging the framed reproduction of Tanguy’s painting, the image of drained strands. Ransom’s paper-weight, the fragment of Jurassic limestone, lay just beyond the reach of the sand.

  ‘Doctor, what about the water?’ Philip Jordan knelt beside him, scooping the sand away with his hands. ‘You had some water in a secret tank.’

  Ransom stood up, and brushed the dust from his ragged clothes. ‘Under the galley. Get in round the other side.’ As Philip stepped over the roof and began to drive the sand down the slope, kicking at it with his long legs, Ransom peered through the window. The care he had given to furnishing the houseboat, the mementoes with which he had stocked it like the cargo of some psychic ark, almost convinced him that it had been prepared in the future, and then stranded on the bank ten years ahead in anticipation of his present needs.

  ‘Over here, doctor!’ Philip called. Ransom left the window and crossed the roof. Fifty yards to his right Catherine Austen was climbing the bank, gazing up at the ruins of her villa.

  ‘Have you found it, Philip?’

  Philip pointed through the window. The floor of the galley had been ripped back to the walls, revealing the rungs of a stair-well into the pontoon.

  ‘Someone else got to it first, doctor.’ Philip stood up wearily. He rubbed his throat, leaving a white streak across his neck. He looked back down the river to the fishing trawler in the breaker’s yard.

  36

  THE MIRAGE

  THE SAND SHIFTED, pouring away around their knees.

  Ransom began to climb the slope to the embankment of the bridge. His feet touched a bladed metal object, and he remembered the outboard motor he had abandoned by the houseboat. For some reason he now wanted to get away from the others. During the journey from the coast they had relied on one another, but with their arrival at Hamilton, at the very point from which they had set out ten years earlier, he felt that all his obligations to them had been discharged. As he climbed the embankment he looked down at them. Isolated from each other in the unvarying light, they were held together only by the sand pouring between their feet.

  He pulled himself over the balustrade and limped along the pavement towards the centre of the span. The surface was covered with pieces of metal and old tyres. He rested on the rail, gazing out across the dune-covered ruins that surrounded the empty towers of the distant city. To the north-east the white surface of the lake rolled onwards to the horizon.

  He sat down by a gap in the balustrade, surrounded by the empty cans and litter, like an exhausted mendicant. Below him Philip Jordan made his way along the river-bed, spear in hand and one of the two canteens over his shoulder. Catherine Austen was moving diagonally away from him up the bank, searching for something among the splinters of driftwood. Only Mrs Quilter still sat on the cart below her tattered awning.

  For ten minutes Ransom leaned against the balustrade in the centre of the deserted bridge, watching the figures below move away.

  Vaguely hoping for a glimpse of his own house, he scanned the slopes of rubble. His eye was distracted by a gleam of light. Cradled among the dunes near the site of Lomax’s mansion was what appeared to be a small pond of blue water, its surface ruffled into vivid patterns. Watching it, Ransom decided that the pond was a mirage of remarkable intensity. At least a hundred feet in diameter, the water was ringed by a narrow beach of sand shaped like the banks of a miniature reservoir. The dunes and ruined walls surrounded it on all sides.

  As he waited for the mirage to fade, a white bird crossed the ruins and swooped down over the water. Furling its wings, it landed on the surface, gliding along, a wake of breaking light.

  Ransom climbed to his feet and hurried forward across the bridge. Giving up any attempt to find the others, he straddled the rail at the lower end and slid down the embankment. Pausing to rest every fifty yards, he ran along the water-front streets, stepping on the roofs of cars buried under the sand.

  ‘Doctor!’ As he clambered over a low wall, Ransom almost jumped on to the diminutive form of Mrs Quilter, crouching below him in a crevice. She gazed up at him with timid eyes. Somehow she managed to dismount from the cart and make her way up the bank. ‘Doctor,’ she sighed plaintively, ‘I can’t move myself.’

  When Ransom was about to run on she fished the second canteen from beneath her silks. ‘I’ll share it with you, doctor.’

  ‘Come on, then.’ Ransom took her arm and helped her to her feet. They hobbled along together. Once she tripped over a partly buried cable and sat panting in the dust. Ransom chafed at the delay. Finally he knelt down and hoisted her on to his back, her small hands clasped around his neck.

  Surprisingly, she was as light as a child. Across the sloping dunes he was able to run for a few paces. Every fifty yards he put her down and climbed a wall to take his bearings. Sitting in one of the sand-filled swimming pools by a lean-to of burnt timber, the embers of a fire around her, she watched Ransom like an amiable crone.

  As they took their final leave of the river Mrs Quilter pinched his ear.

  ‘Doctor, look back for a minute!’

  Half a mile away, below the motor-bridge, clouds of smoke rose from the houseboat, the flames burning in the shadows below the bridge. A few seconds later the cart began to burn, as if touched by an invisible torch.

  ‘Never mind!’ Tightening his grip on her legs, Ransom stumbled away across the rubble, a lunatic Si
nbad bearing the old woman of the desert sea. He turned in and out of the sloping streets, avoiding the half-filled swimming pools, the dust rising behind them. Ahead he saw the ring of higher dunes that surrounded the reservoir. With a last effort he ran up the nearest slope.

  He stopped when he reached the crest. Mrs Quilter slid from his shoulders and scuttled away through the refuse. Ransom walked down to the water. Stirred by the wind, a few wavelets lapped at the beach, a strip of dark sand that merged into the rubble. The lake was a small reservoir, the banks built along a convenient perimeter of ruined walls. To Ransom, however, it seemed to have dropped from the sky, a distillation of all the lost rain of a decade.

  Ten feet from the water’s edge he began to run, and stumbled across the loose bricks to the firmer sand. The white bird sat in the centre, watching him circumspectly. As the water leapt around his feet the foam was as brilliant as its plumage. Kneeling in the shallow water, he bathed his head and face, then soaked his skirt, letting the cool crystal liquid run down his arms. The blue water stretched to the opposite shore, the dunes hiding all sight of the wilderness.

  With a cry, the bird flew off across the surface. Ransom gazed around the bank. Then, over his shoulder, he became aware of a huge figure standing on the sand behind him.

  Well over six feet tall, an immense feathered cap on its head, the figure towered above him like a grotesque idol bedecked with the unrelated possessions of an entire tribe. Its broad shoulders were covered by a loose cloak of cheetah skins. Girdled around its waist by a gold cord was a flowing caftan that had once been a Paisley dressing-gown, cut back to reveal a stout leather belt. This hitched up a pair of trousers apparently sewn from random lengths of Turkish carpeting. Their uneven progress terminated in a pair of hefty sea-boots. Clamped to them by metal braces were two stout wooden stilts nailed to sand shoes. Together they raised their owner a further two feet above the ground.

  Ransom knelt in the water, watching the figure’s scowling face. The expression was one of almost preposterous ferocity. The long russet hair fell to the shoulders, enclosing the face like a partly curtained exhibit in a fairground freak show. Above the notched cheekbones the feathered cap sprouted laterally into two black wings, like a Norseman’s helmet. Between them a wavering appendage pointed down at Ransom.

  ‘Quilter—!’ he began, recognizing the stuffed body of the black swan. ‘Quilter, I’m—’

  Before he had climbed to his feet the figure was suddenly galvanized into life, and with a shout launched itself through the air at Ransom. Knocked sideways into the water, Ransom felt the heavy knees pressing in the small of his back, strong hands forcing his shoulders into the water. A fist pounded on the back of his head. Gasping for air, Ransom had a last glimpse through the flying furs of Mrs Quilter hobbling down the bank. Her beaked face wore a stunned smile as she croaked: ‘It’s my Quilty boy . . . come here, lad, it’s your old mother come to save you . . .’

  HALF AN HOUR later Ransom had partly recovered, stretched out on the beach by the cool water. As he lay half-stunned in the sunlight he was aware of Mrs Quilter jabbering away on one of the dunes a few yards from him, the silent figure of her son, like an immense cuckoo, squatting beneath his furs in the sand. The old woman, beside herself with delight at having at last found her son, was now inflicting on him a non-stop résumé of every­thing that had happened to her during the previous decade. To Ransom’s good luck, she included a glowing account of the magnificent expedition by automobile to the coast which Ransom had arranged for her. At the mention of his name, Quilter strode down the dune to inspect Ransom, turning him over with a stilted boot. His broad dented face, with its wandering eyes set above the hollow cheeks, had changed little during the intervening years, although he seemed twice his former height and gazed about with a more self-composed air. As he listened to his mother he cocked one eye at her thoughtfully, almost as if calculating the culinary possibilities of the small bundle of elderly gristle.

  Ransom climbed unsteadily to his feet and walked up the dune to them. Quilter seemed barely to notice him, almost as if Ransom had emerged half-drowned from his pool every morning of the past ten years. His huge eyes were mottled like marbled sandstone. The ambiguous watery smile had vanished, and his wide mouth was firm and thin-lipped.

  ‘Doctor—?’ Mrs Quilter broke off her monologue, surprised to see Ransom but delighted that he had been able to join them. ‘I was just telling him about you, doctor. Quilty, the doctor’s a rare one with cars.’

  Ransom murmured, weakly brushing the damp sand from his half-dried clothes.

  In a gruff voice, Quilter said: ‘Don’t fish into any cars here, there are people buried in them.’ With a gleam of his old humour he added: ‘Hole down to the door, slide them in, up with the window and that’s their lot—eh?’

  ‘Sounds a good idea,’ Ransom agreed cautiously. He decided not to tell him about Philip Jordan or Catherine. As yet Quilter had given them no indication of where or how he lived.

  For five minutes Quilter sat on the crest of the dune, occasionally patting his furs. His mother chattered away, touching her son tentatively with her little hands. At one point Quilter reached up to the swan’s neck, dangling in front of his right eye, and pulled off the head-dress. Beneath it his scalp was bald, and the thick red hair sprang from the margins of a huge tonsure.

  Then, without a word, he jumped to his feet. With a brief gesture to them he strode off on his stilts across the sand, the furs and dressing-gown lifting behind him like tattered wings.

  37

  THE OASIS

  BARELY KEEPING UP with Quilter, they followed him as he strode in and out of the dunes, his stilted sandshoes carrying him across the banks of rubble. Now and then, as Ransom helped Mrs Quilter over a ruined wall, he saw the river bank and the white bone-hills of the lake, but the pattern of the eroded streets was only a distant memory of Hamilton. Nothing moved among the ruins. In the hollows they passed the remains of small fires and the picked skeletons of birds and desert wolves left there years beforehand.

  They reached a set of wrought-iron gates rooted into the sand, and Ransom recognized the half-buried perspectives of the avenue in which he had once lived. On the other side of the road the Reverend Johnstone’s house had vanished below the dust carried up from the lake.

  Skirting the gate, Quilter led them through an interval in the wall, then set off up the drive. The shell of Lomax’s mansion was hidden among the dunes, its upper floors burned out. They passed the entrance. The cracked glass doors stood open, and the marble floor inside the hall was strewn with rubbish and rusty cans.

  They rounded the house and reached the swimming pool. Here at last there were some signs of habitation. A line of screens made of tanned hide had been erected around the pool, and the eaves of a large tent rose from the deep end. The faint smoke of a wood fire lifted from the centre of the pool. The sandy verges were littered with old cooking implements, bird traps and pieces of refrigerator cabinets, salvaged from the near-by ruins. A short distance away the wheel-less bodies of two cars sat side by side among the dunes.

  A wooden stairway led down on to the floor of the swimming pool. Protected by the screens, the floor was smooth and clean, the coloured tridents and sea-horses visible among the worn tiles. Walking down the slope from the shallow end, they approached the inner wall of blankets. Quilter pushed these aside and beckoned them into the central court.

  Lying on a low divan beside the fire was a woman whom Ransom, with an effort, recognized to be Miranda Lomax. Her long white hair reached to her feet, enclosing her tike a threadbare shroud, and her face had the same puckish eyes and mouth. But what startled Ransom was her size. She was now as fat as a pig, with gross arms and hips, hog-like shoulders and waist. Swaddled in the fat, her small eyes gazed at Ransom from above her huge cheeks. With a pudgy hand she brushed her hair off her forehead. She was wearing, almost modish
ly, a black nightdress that seemed designed expressly to show off her vast corpulence.

  ‘Quilty . . .’ she began. ‘Who’s this?’ She glanced at Quilter, who kicked off his stilts and gestured his mother to a stool by the fire. Leaving Ransom to sit down on the floor, Quilter reclined into a large fan-backed wicker chair. The bamboo scrollwork rose above his head in an arch of elaborate trellises. He reached up to the swan’s neck and pulled off his hat, dumping it on to the floor.

  Miranda stirred, unable to roll her girth more than an inch or two across the divan. ‘Quilty, isn’t this our wandering doctor? What was his name . . . ?’ She nodded slowly at Mrs Quilter, and then turned her attention to Ransom again. A smile spread across her face, as if Ransom’s arrival had quickened some long-dormant memory. ‘Doctor, you’ve come all the way from the coast to see us. Quilty, your mother’s arrived.’

  Mrs Quilter regarded Miranda blankly with her tired eyes, either unable or unwilling to recognize her.

  Quilter sat in his wicker throne. He glanced distantly at his mother, and then said to Miranda, with a quirk of humour: ‘She likes cars.’

  ‘Does she?’ Miranda tittered at this. ‘Well, she looks as if she’s just in time for you to fix her up.’ She turned her pleasant beam on Ransom. ‘What about you, doctor?’

  Ransom brushed his beard. Despite the strangeness of this ménage at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, he felt little sense of unease. Already he had reached the point where he could accept almost any act of violence that might occur. These sudden displacements of the desert calm were its principal integers, its acts of time. ‘Cars—? I’ve had to make do with other forms of transport. I’m glad to see you’re still here, Miranda.’

  ‘Yes . . . I suppose you are. Have you brought any water with you?’