Water (28 page)

her, splashing sand, and blow through red nostrils, asking to gallop on, but she would wait for

the rest of her party, less wonderfully mounted, toiling behind her. Then she would turn again in

the direction they were all going, and shade her eyes with one hand, talking soothingly to her

restless horse through the reins held lightly in the other; and there would be the dark shadow of

mountains before her, mountains she knew to call the Hills.

As the years passed, however, the dreams changed again. She left school at sixteen because her

parents said they could spare her no longer, with her mother ill and Ruth and Jeff still so little

and her father and Dane (who had left school two years before) working extra hours in the shop

because the specialists her mother needed were expensive. When Mrs Halford and Mr Jonah

came to visit them at home (repeated efforts to persuade her parents to come into the school for a

meeting having failed), and begged them to reconsider, and said that she was sure of a

scholarship, that her education would be no burden to them, her mother only wept and said in her

trembling invalid voice that she was a good girl and they needed her at home, and her father only

stared, until at last they went away, the tea and biscuits she had made in honour of so rare an

event as visitors in the parlour untouched. Her father finally told her: “See them out to their car,

Hetta, and then come direct back. Supper’s to be on time, mind.”

The three of them were quiet as they went down the stairs and through the hall that ran alongside

the shop. The partition was made of cheap ply, for customers never saw it, which made the hall

ugly and unfriendly, in spite of the old family photos Hetta had hung on the walls. The shop-door

opened nearly on the kerb, for the shop had eaten up all of what had been the front garden. At the

last minute Mrs Halford took Hetta’s hand and said, “If there’s anything I can do—this year, next

year, any time. Ring me.”

Hetta nodded, said good-bye politely, and then turned round to go back to the house and get

supper and see what Ruth and Jeff were doing. Her father had already rejoined Dane in the shop;

her mother had gone to bed, taking the plate of biscuits with her.

Ruth had been told by their father to stay out of the way, it was none of her concern, but she was

waiting for Hetta in the kitchen. “What happened?” she said.

“Nothing,” said Hetta. “Have you done your homework?”

“Yes,” said Ruth. “All but the reading. D’you want to listen while you cook?”

“Yes,” said Hetta. “That would be nice.”

That night Hetta dreamed of a sandstorm. She was alone in darkness, the wind roaring all round

her, the sand up to her ankles, her knees, her waist, filling her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Friendly

sand. She snuggled down into it as if it were a blanket; as it filled her ears she could no longer

hear the wind, nor anything else. When the alarm went off at dawn, she felt as stiff as if she had

been buried in sand all night, and her eyes were so sticky, she had to wash her face before she

could open them properly.

It had been a relief to quit school, because she was tired all the time. There was more than she

could get done even after there was no schoolwork to distract her; but without the school-work

she found that her mind went to sleep while her body went on with her chores, and for a while

that seemed easier. Sometimes months passed without her ever thinking about what she was

doing, or not doing, or about Mrs Halford, or about how she might have used that scholarship if

she had got it, if her parents had let her accept it, which they wouldn’t have. Months passed

while her days were bound round with cooking and housekeeping and keeping the shop

accounts, looking through cookery books for recipes when her mother thought that this or that

might tempt her appetite, sweeping the passage from the shop twice a day because of the

sawdust, teaching Ruth and Jeff to play checkers and fold paper airplanes. When she had first

started keeping the accounts, she had done it in the evening, after supper was cleared away and

there were no other demands till morning, and the kitchen was peaceful while everyone watched

TV in the parlour. But she found she was often too bone weary to pay the necessary attention, so

she had taught herself to do it in the edgy time between breakfast and lunch, when the phone was

liable to ring, and her mother to be contemplating having one of her bad days, and her father to

call her down to the shop to wait on a customer. One afternoon a week she took the car to the

mall and shopped for everything they had to have. After the narrow confines of the house, the car

park seemed liberating, the neon-edged sky vast.

The months mounted up, and turned into years.

One year the autumn gales were so severe that ruining the harvest and breaking fences for the

stock to get through out in the countryside wasn’t enough, and they swept into the towns to

trouble folk there. Trees and TV aerials came down, and some chimney-pots; there was so much

rain that everyone’s cellars flooded. The wood stored in their cellar had to come up into the

parlour, whereupon there was nowhere to sit except the kitchen. Everyone’s tempers grew short

with crowding, and when the TV was brought in too, there was nowhere to put it except on

counter space Hetta couldn’t spare. The only time there was armistice was during programmes

interviewing farmers about how bad everything was. Her father—watched these with relish and

barked “Ha!” often.

That season in spite of the weather she spent more time than ever in the garden. The garden had

still been tended by her great-grandfather when she was very small, but after he died, only her

grandmother paid any attention to it. As her mother’s illness took hold and her father’s business

took off, it grew derelict, for her grandmother had done the work Hetta did now, with a bad hip

and hands nearly frozen with arthritis. Hetta began to clear and plant it about a year after she

stopped school; gardening, she found, was interesting, and it got her out of the house. Her father

grumbled about having to contain his heaps of wood chips and discarded bits too broken to be

mended, but permitted it because she grew vegetables and fruit, which lowered the grocery bills,

and she canned and froze what they didn’t eat in season. No one else even seemed to notice that

the view from the rear of the house looked any different than the front—although Ruth liked

bugs, and would sometimes come out to look at the undersides of leaves and scrape things into

jars—and so long as Hetta wasn’t missing when someone wanted her, nothing was said about the

hours she spent in the garden. Their house was the oldest on the street and had the largest garden.

It had been a pretty house once, before the shop destroyed its front, but the shop at least made it

look more in keeping with the rest of the row. There were proper walls around their garden, eight

foot tall on three sides, and the house the fourth. It was her own little realm.

That autumn there was a heaviness to the air, and it smelled of rain and earth and wildness even

on days when the sun shone. Hetta usually left as much as she could standing over the winter, to

give shelter to Ruth’s bugs and the birds and hedgehogs that ate them, but this year she brought

the last tomatoes and squashes indoors early (where, denied the wet cellar, she balanced them on

piles of timber in the parlour), and she cut back and tied in and staked everything that was left.

Even with the walls protecting it, the wind curled in here, flinging other people’s tiles at her

runner-bean teepees and stripping and shredding the fleece that protected the brassicas.

Sometimes she stopped and listened, as if the whistle of the wind was about to tell her

something. Sometimes at sunset, when there was another storm coming, the sky reminded her of

her desert. But she didn’t dare stop long or often, even in the garden; her mother’s bedroom

window overlooked it, and the sight of Hetta standing still invariably made her hungry. She

would open her window and call down to Hetta that she just felt she might eat a little something

if Hetta would make it up nice the way she always did and bring it to her.

When the meteorologists began predicting the big storm on its way, the family gathered round

the TV set as if the weather report had become a daily installment of a favourite soap opera. Her

father snorted; he hated experts in clean business suits telling him things he didn’t know. But he

didn’t protest when the TV was turned on early and he didn’t declare the forecast rubbish, and he

told Hetta to do her weekly shop early, “just in case.”

Two days later the sky went green-yellow, grey-purple;
soon,
sighed the prickle of wind against

her skin, and for a moment, leaning on her hoe, the sky was some other sky, and the smooth

wooden handle in her hands felt gritty, as if sticky with sand. Her fingers, puzzled, rolled it

against her palm, and she blinked, and the world seemed to blink with her, and she was again

standing in the back garden of the house where three generations of her father’s kin had lived,

and there was a storm coming.

When the storm came in the deep night, Hetta was asleep. She knew she was asleep, and yet she

knew when the storm wind picked her up ... no, it did not pick her up, it plunged her down,

forced her down, down into darkness and roaring and a great weight against her chest, like a

huge hand pressing her into—

She was drowning in sand. It wasn’t at all as she’d imagined it, a peaceful ending, a giving up:

she did not want to die, and what was happening
hurt.
She gasped and choked, nearly fainting,

and the sand bit into her skin, sharp as teeth. She could feel the tiny innumerable grains hissing

over her, offering no apparent resistance as she beat at them, pouring through her fingers, down

her body, into her eyes and mouth, the unimaginable multitudes of them covering her till they

weighed as heavy as boulders, a river, an avalanche—

Where were the others? Had they set out knowing a storm was on the way? Even in this area a

storm this severe gave some warning—

In this area?
Where was she? There was nothing to tell her—nothing but sand and wind roar and

darkness. And ... who were
they?
She could not remember—she would not have set out alone—

even a guided party had to take care—in the last few years the storms had grown more violent

and less predictable—parties rarely went mounted any more-she—remembered—

Perhaps she slept; perhaps she fainted. But there were hands upon her—hands? Had her party

found her again? She tried to struggle, or to cooperate. The hands helped her up, held her up,

from her wind-battered, sand-imprisoned crouch. The wind still shouted, and she could see

nothing; but the hands arranged the veil over her face and she could breathe a little more easily,

and this gave her strength. When the hands lifted her so that one of her arms could be pulled

around a set of invisible shoulders, and one of the hands gripped her round her waist, she could

walk, staggering, led by her rescuer.

For some time she concentrated on breathing, on breathing and keeping her feet under her, tasks

requiring her full attention. But her arm, held round the shoulders, began to ache; and the ache

began to penetrate her brain, and her brain began to remember that it didn’t usually have to

occupy itself with negotiating breathing and walking—

It was still dark, and the wind still howled, and there was still sand in the heaving air, but it

pattered against her now, it no longer dragged at and cut her. She thought, The storm is still

going on all round us, but it is not reaching us somehow. She had an absurd image that they—her

unknown rescuer and herself—were walking in a tiny rolling cup of sand that was always

shallow to their feet just a footstep’s distance before and behind them, with a close-fitting lid of

almost quiet, almost sandless air tucked over them.

When the hand clutching her wrist let go, she grabbed the shoulder and missed, for her hand had

gone numb; but the hand round her waist held her. She steadied herself, and the second hand let

go, but only long enough to find her hand, and hold it firmly—As if I might run off into the

sandstorm again, she thought, distantly amused. She looked toward the hand, the shoulders—and

now she could see a human outline, but the face was turned away from her, the free hand groping

for something in front of it.

She blinked, trying to understand where the light to see came from. She slowly worked out that

the hand was more visible than the rest of the body it was attached to; and she had just realised

that they seemed to be standing in front of a huge, rough, slightly glowing—wall? Cliff? For it

seemed to loom over them,; she guessed at something like a ledge or half-roof high above

them—when the fingers stiffened and the hand shook itself up in what seemed like a gesture of

command—and the wall before them became a door, and folded back into itself. Light fell out,

and pooled in the sand at their feet, outlining tiny pits and hummocks in shadows.

“Quickly,” said a voice. “I am almost as tired as you, and Geljdreth does not like to be cheated of

his victims.”