Drought Days

1 August 2024

Inside the concrete pipe the world is smooth and cool and dry.

Porcelain-white walls curve over my head and under my toes as I scrunch up, tucked away from the heat outside. Bright sun slants across my tunnel vision, the dark shadow of the pipe concealing me further and dividing my view: sharp white sunlight versus thick, rank shade. When I wipe my fingers along the roof, the tips come away grey and dusty. Dust inside. Dust outside. The fragments of manufacture mix in the air with nature’s own detritus: shucks, chaff, husks, remnants of a burnt-out July.

I would like to lie on my belly, stretch out like an imagined worm being measured for a chart. Height and weight, taller, smaller, fatter, thinner. Instead, I’m crouched, a thin-limbed spider, waiting, watching. A sudden grit-storm blows across my sights, and I shut my mouth and close my nose against it.  When I breathe again, the dense green smell is back – a sort of vegetative plea for more water. The chemical balance of every plant is off-key today, struggling to photosynthesise, loving the sun and dreading the drought and the inevitable desiccation to come.

Yet still the bees and butterflies find what they need among the frothing achillea. Grass grown high is flattened into paths by itinerant cats and foxes. Arching brambles form palaces and prisons over the crabs and haws. Plants for sand and chalk in the nutrient-low wasteland.

Outside the concrete pipe the endless sun bears down from a sky so blue I can pretend it is the sea I have never seen. I shade and squint my eyes and see my brother across the yard; a lizard splayed across a pipe-rock, a mariner on an ocean of broken concrete.

We were sent to look for blackberries. Not to pick but to scout; it’s weeks before the pinking flowers become the familiar fruits on the card deck.

I see his hand raise and swipe in sudden irritation to swat away a wasp. And then for the first time I hear them: the long, low hum of the flies all around us, searching the litter, the dropped, the lost and decayed. Other people were here before us, and other people will come after us; the dust on my fingers is not just the pipe-dust and plant-dust, it is people-dust too. Beyond the flies, I hear that other drone, the traffic that never ends and echoes down from the long high roads cutting across all our other pathways. A siren starts at the cement factory. Soon, a truck will rumble along the dirt track.

We need to go.