‘Water?’ Ransom repeated. ‘I’m afraid we used all ours getting here.’
Miranda sighed. She looked across at Quilter. ‘A pity. We’re rather short of water, you know.’
‘But the reservoir—’ Ransom gestured in the direction of the pond. ‘You seem to have the stuff lying around all over the place.’
Miranda shook her head. Her rapid attention to the topic made Ransom aware that the water might well turn out to be a mirage after all. Miranda eyed him thoughtfully, ‘That reservoir, as you call it, is all we’ve got. Isn’t it, Quilter?’
Quilter nodded, taking in Ransom in his gaze. Ransom wondered whether Quilter really remembered him, or even, for that matter, his mother. The old woman sat half-asleep on her stool, exhausted now that the long journey had ended.
Miranda smiled at Ransom. ‘You see, we were rather hoping you’d brought some water with you. But if you haven’t, that’s just that. Tell me, doctor, why have you come here?’
Ransom paused before answering, aware that Quilter’s sharp eyes were on him. Obviously they assumed that the little party was the advance guard of some official expedition from the coast, perhaps the harbinger of the end of the drought.
‘Well,’ he temporized, ‘I know it sounds quixotic, Miranda, but I wanted to see Lomax and yourself—and Quilter, of course. Perhaps you don’t understand?’
Miranda sat up. ‘But I do. I don’t know about Richard, he’s rather awkward and unpredictable these days, and Quilter does look a bit fed up with you already, but I understand.’ She patted her huge stomach, looking down with tolerant affection at its giant girth. ‘If you haven’t brought any water, well things won’t be quite the same, let’s be honest. But you can certainly stay for a few days. Can’t he, Quilter?’
Before Quilter could reply Mrs Quilter began to sway on her stool. Ransom caught her arm. ‘She needs to rest,’ he said. ‘Can she lie down somewhere?’
Quilter carried her away to a small cubicle behind the curtains. In a few minutes he came back and handed Ransom a pail of tepid water. Although his stomach was still full of the water he had swallowed in the reservoir, Ransom made a pretence of drinking gratefully.
To Miranda he mid casually: ‘I take it you had us followed here?’
‘We knew someone was struggling along. Not many people come up from the coast—most of them seem to get tired or disappear.’ She flashed Ransom a sharp smile. ‘I think they get eaten on the way—by the lions, I mean.’
Ransom nodded. ‘As a matter of interest, what have you been eating? Apart from a few weary travellers, that is.’
Miranda hooted. ‘Don’t worry, doctor, you’re much too stringy. Anyway, those days are past, aren’t they, Quilty? Now we’ve got organized there’s just about enough to eat—you’d be amazed how many cans you can find under these ruins—but to begin with it was difficult. I know you think everyone went off to the coast, but an awful lot stayed behind. After a while they thinned out.’ She patted her stomach reflectively. ‘Ten years is a long time.’
Above them, from the dunes by the pool, there was a sharp crackling, and the pumping sounds of a bellows being worked. A fire of sticks and oil rags began to burn, sending up a cloud of smoke. Ransom looked up at the thick black pillar, rising almost from the very ground at his feet. It was identical with all the other smoke columns that had followed them across the desert, and Ransom had the sudden feeling that he had at last arrived at his destination, despite the ambiguous nature of his reception. No one had mentioned Catherine or Philip Jordan, but he assumed that people drifted about the desert without formality, and took their chances with Quilter. Some he no doubt drowned in the pool out of habit, while others he might take back to his den.
Miranda snuffled some phlegm up one nostril. ‘Whitman’s here,’ she said to Quilter, who was gazing at his mother’s sleeping face through a crack in the screen.
There was a patter of wooden clogs from behind the curtains, and three small children ran out from another cubicle. Surprised by the fire lifting from the edge of the swimming pool, they toddled about, squeaking at their mother. Their swollen heads and puckish faces were perfect replicas of Miranda and Quilter. Each had the same brachycephalic skull, the same downward eyes and hollow cheeks. Their small necks and bodies seemed barely strong enough to carry their huge rolling heads. To Ransom they first resembled the children of the congenitally insane, but then he saw their eyes watching him. Half asleep, their pupils were full of dreams.
Quilter ignored them as they scrambled around his feet for a better view of the fire. A man’s hunchbacked figure was silhouetted against the screens. There seemed no point in lighting the fire, and Ransom assumed that its significance was ritual, part of an established desert practice. Like so many defunct and forgotten rituals, it was now more frightening in its mystery than when it had served some real purpose.
Miranda watched the children scurry among the curtains. ‘My infants, doctor, or the few that lived. Tell me you think they’re beautiful.’
‘They are,’ Ransom assured her hastily. He took one of the children by the arm and felt the huge bony skull. Its eyes were illuminated by a ceaseless ripple of thoughts. ‘He looks like a genius.’
Miranda nodded sagely. ‘That’s very right, doctor, they all are. What’s still locked up inside poor old Quilter I’ve brought out in them.’
There was a shout from above. A one-eyed man with a crab-like walk, his left arm ending in a stump above the wrist, the other blackened by charcoal, peered down at them. His face and ragged clothes were covered with dust, as if he had been living in the wild for several months. Ransom recognized the driver of the water tanker who had taken him to the zoo. A scar on the right cheek had deepened during the previous years, twisting his face into a caricature of an angry grimace. The man was less frightening than pathetic, a scarred wreck of himself.
Addressing Quilter, he said: ‘The Jonas boy and the woman went off along the river. The lions will get them tonight.’
Quilter stared at the floor of the pool. At intervals he reached up and scratched his tonsure. His preoccupied manner suggested that he was struggling with some insoluble conundrum.
‘Have they got any water?’ Miranda asked.
‘Not a drop,’ Whitman rejoined with a sharp laugh. His twisted face, which Ransom had seen reflected over his shoulder in the store window, gazed down at him with its fierce eye. Whitman wiped his forehead with his stump, and Ransom remembered the mannequins torn to pieces by the dogs. Perhaps this was how the man took his revenge, hating even the residuum of human identity in the blurred features of the mannequins. They had stood quietly in the piazza like the drained images of the vanished people of the city. Everything around Ransom now seemed as isolated, the idealized residue of a landscape and human figures whose primitive forebears had long since gone. He wondered what Whitman would do if he knew that Ransom too had once amputated the dead—neither past nor future could change, only the mirror between them.
Whitman was about to move off when the sounds of a distant voice echoed across the dunes. A confused harangue, it was addressed to itself as much as to the world at large, and held together only by a mournful dirge-like rhythm.
Whitman scuttled about. ‘Jonas!’ He seemed uncertain whether to advance or flee. ‘I’ll catch him this time!’
Quilter stood up. He placed the swan’s cap on his head.
‘Quilter,’ Miranda called after him. ‘Take the doctor. He can have a word with Lomax, and find out what he’s up to.’
Quilter remounted his stilts. They climbed out of the pool and set off past the remains of the fire burning itself out, following Whitman across the dunes. Tethered to the stump of a watch-tower in one of the hollows were the dogs. The small pack, now on leash, tugged at Whitman’s hand. He crept along the low walls, peering over the rough terrain. Twenty yards behind him, to
wering into the air like an idol in his full regalia, came Quilter, Ransom at his heels. From somewhere ahead of them the low monotonous harangue sounded into the air.
Then, as they mounted one of the dunes, they saw the solitary figure of Jonas a hundred yards away, moving among ruins by the edge of the drained lake. His dark face raised to the sunlight, he walked with the same entranced motion, declaiming at the bone-like dust that reached across the lake to the horizon. His voice droned on, part prophecy, part lamentation. Twice Ransom caught the word ‘sea’. His arms rose at each crescendo, then fell again as he disappeared from sight.
Obliquely behind him, Whitman scurried along, holding back the straining bodies of the dogs. He hesitated behind the base of a ruined tower, waiting for Jonas to emerge on to the open stretch of the lakeside road. Jonas, however, seemed reluctant to approach the lake. Whitman placed the leash in his mouth, and with his one hand began to undo the thong.
‘Jonas—’
The call came softly from among the dunes out on the lake. Jonas stopped and looked around, searching for the caller. Then he saw the grotesque capped figure of Quilter behind him and the dogs jerking away from the hapless Whitman.
As the dogs rushed off in a pack the tall man came to life. Lowering his head, he raced off, his long legs carrying him away across the rubble. The dogs gained on him, snapping at his heels, and he pulled an old fishing net from around his waist and whipped it across their faces. Ten yards ahead the dogs entangled themselves around the stump of a telegraph pole and came to a halt, barking over each other as they tumbled in the dust.
Ransom watched the thin figure of the preacher disappear along the lake shore. Whitman cursed his way over to the dogs, kicking at their flanks. He stood by the edge of the lake, peering out at the dunes for any sight of the invisible caller who had warned Jonas. Quilter, meanwhile, was gazing unperturbed at the hillocks of rubble. Ransom walked over to him. ‘Jonas—he’s here then, Jordan’s father. Is he still looking for a lost sea?’
‘He’s found it,’ Quilter said.
‘Where?’
Quilter pointed to the lake, at the chalk-like dunes. The myriads of white bones washed to the surface by the wind were speckling in the sunlight.
‘This is his sea?’ Ransom said as they set off. ‘Why doesn’t he go out on to it?’
Quilter shrugged. ‘Lions there,’ he said, and strode on ahead.
38
THE PAVILION
A HUNDRED YARDS AWAY, across the stretch of open ground separating the Lomax swimming pool from the eastern edge of the estate, a small pavilion appeared in a hollow among the dunes, its glass and metal cornices shining in the sunlight. It had been constructed from assorted pieces of chromium and enamelled metal—the radiator grills of cars, reflectors of electric heaters, radio cabinets and so on—fitted together with remarkable ingenuity to form what appeared at a distance to be a bejewelled temple, In me sunlight the gilded edifice gleamed among the dust and sand like a Fabergé gem.
Quilter stopped fifty yards from it. ‘Lomax,’ he said, by way of introduction. ‘Talk to him now. Tell him if he doesn’t find water soon he’s going to drown.’
Leaving Ransom with this paradox, he walked away towards the pool.
Ransom set off across the sand. As he approached the pavilion he compared it with the crude hovels he had constructed out of the same materials at the coast. However, the even desert light and neutral sand encouraged fancy and imagination, while the damp salt-dunes had drained them.
He reached the ornamented portico and peered inside. The walls of the small ante-room were decorated with strips of curved chromium. Coloured discs of glass taken from car headlamps had been fitted into a grille and formed one continuous wall, through which the sun shone in a dozen images of itself. Another wall was constructed from the grilles of radio sets, the lines of gilded knobs forming astrological patterns.
An inner door opened. A plump scented figure darted out from the shadows and seized his arm.
‘Charles, my dear boy! They said you were coming! How delightful to see you again!’
‘Richard . . . !’ For a moment Ransom stared at Lomax. The latter circled around him, goggling over Ransom’s ragged clothes with the eyes of a delirious goldfish. Lomax was completely bald, and resembled a handsome but hairless woman. His skin had become svelte and creamy, untouched by the desert wind and sun. He wore a grey silk suit of extravagant cut, the pleated trousers like a close-fitting skirt, or the bifurcated tail of a huge fish, the embroidered jacket fitted with ruffs and rows of pearl buttons. To Ransom he resembled a grotesque pantomine dame, part amiable scoundrel and part transvestite, stranded in the middle of the desert with his pavilion of delights.
‘Charles, what is it?’ Lomax stood back. His eyes, above the short hooked nose, were as sharp as ever. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ He chortled to himself, happy to prepare the way for his own retort. ‘Or is that the trouble—you do!’
Tittering to himself, he led Ransom through the pavilion to a small court at the rear, where an ornamental garden decorated with glass and chromium blooms had been laid around the remains of a fountain.
‘Well, Charles, what’s going on? You’ve brought water with you?’ He pressed Ransom into a chair, his hand holding Ransom’s arm like a claw. ‘God knows I’ve waited long enough.’
Ransom disengaged the arm. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go on waiting, Richard. It must sound like a bad joke after all these years, but one of the reasons we came here from the coast was to look for water.’
‘What?’ Lomax swung on his heel. ‘What on earth are you talking about? You must be out of your mind. There isn’t a drop of water for a hundred miles!’ With sudden irritation he drove his little fists together. ‘What have you been doing all this time?’
‘We haven’t been doing anything,’ Ransom said quietly. ‘It’s been all we could manage just to distil enough water to keep alive.’
Lomax nodded, controlling himself. ‘I dare say. Frankly, Charles, you do look a mess. You should have stayed with me. But this drought—they said it would end in ten years. I thought that was why you came!’ Lomax’s voice rose again, reverberating off the tinsel walls.
‘Richard, for heaven’s sake . . .’ Ransom tried to pacify him. ‘You’re all obsessed by the subject of water. There seems plenty around. As soon as I arrived I walked straight into a reservoir.’
‘That?’ Lomax waved a ruffed hand at him. His white woman’s face was like a powdered mask. Mopping his brow with a soft hand, he noticed his bald pate, then quickly pulled a small peruke from his pocket and slipped it on to his scalp. “That water, Charles, don’t you understand—that’s all there is left! For ten years I’ve kept them going, and now this confounded drought won’t end they’re turning on me!’
Lomax pulled up another chair. ‘Charles, the position I’m in is impossible. Quilter is insane—have you seen him, striding about on those stilts? . . . He’s out to destroy me, I know it!’
Cautiously, Ransom said: ‘He did give me a message—something about drowning, if I remember. There’s not much danger of that here.’
‘Oh no?’ Lomax snapped his fingers. ‘Drowning—after all I’ve done for him! If it hadn’t been for me they would have died within a week.’
He subsided into the chair. Surrounded by all the chromium and tinsel, he looked like a stranded carnival fish, encrusted with pearls and pieces of shell.
‘Where did you find all this water?’ Ransom asked.
‘Here and there, Charles.’ Lomax gestured vaguely. ‘I happened to know about one or two stand-by reservoirs, forgotten for years under car parks and football fields, small ones no one ever thought of, but a hell of a lot of water in them all the same. I showed Quilter where they were, and he and the others piped the water in here.’
‘And that reservoir is the
last? But why should Quilter blame you? Surely they’re grateful—’
‘They’re not grateful! You obviously don’t understand how their minds work. Look what Quilter’s done to my poor Miranda. Those diseased, cretinous children! Think what they’ll be like if they’re allowed to grow up. Three Quilters! Sometimes I think the Almighty keeps this drought going just to make sure they die of thirst.’
‘Why don’t you pack up and leave?’
‘I can’t! Don’t you realize I’m a prisoner here? That terrible one-armed man Whitman is everywhere with his mad animals. I warn you, don’t wander about on your own too much. There are a couple of lions around somewhere.’
Ransom stood up. ‘What shall I tell Quilter?’
Lomax whipped off his wig and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Tell them to go! I’m tired of playing Father Neptune. This is my water, I found it and I’m going to drink it!’ With a smirk, he added: ‘I’ll share it with you, Charles, of course.’
‘Thank you, Richard. I think I need to be on my own at present.’
‘Very well, dear boy.’ Lomax gazed at him coolly, the smirk on his face puffing out his powdered cheeks. ‘Don’t expect any water, though. Sooner or later it’s going to run out, perhaps sooner than later.’
‘I dare say.’ Ransom gazed down at Lomax, realizing how far he had decayed during the previous ten years. The serpent in this dusty Eden, he was now trying to grasp back his apple, and preserve intact, if only for a few weeks, the world before the drought. For Ransom, by contrast, the long journey up the river had been an expedition into his own future, into a world of volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free from the demands of memory and nostalgia, free even from the pressure of thirst and hunger.
‘Charles, wait!’ As Ransom reached the entrance to the pavilion Lomax hurried after him. ‘Don’t leave yet, you’re the only one I can trust!’ Lomax plucked at his sleeve. His voice sank to a plaintive whisper. ‘They’ll kill me, Charles, or turn me into a beast. Look what he’s done to Miranda.’
The Drought Page 18