Drought Read online

  ‘No. Nobody does. I’ve tried calling the water department but their phone is always busy. I looked at their website, too, but it makes no mention of water being cut off. I just wondered if you knew anything about it.’

  ‘No, nothing. I’ll try to find out what’s going on and get back to you. I expect a couple of water mains have burst, that’s all. They’ll probably have them fixed by the end of the day.’

  Peta said, ‘I’m worried about Ella, that’s the trouble. She has a temperature of ninety-eight-point-eight and she says she’s feeling shivery. I don’t want to be stuck without water if she’s not very well.’

  ‘Did you call the doctor?’

  ‘I don’t think I need to, not yet, anyhow. I’ve given her some Tylenol and put her to bed. It’s probably nothing worse than period pains.’

  Martin didn’t respond to that. Ella had always been his favorite little girl and the thought of her becoming a woman when he wasn’t around to take care of her was constantly hurtful. But he knew that it had all been his own fault, his marriage to Peta splitting up. No woman could be expected to put up with black moods like his, and his unpredictable bursts of temper. He called them his ‘Djinn Days’, after the devils who were supposed to appear in dust storms in Afghanistan, and make everybody depressed or mad.

  ‘I’m going back to the office now,’ he told Peta. ‘I promise you I’ll look into this and get back to you. How’s Tyler, by the way, is he OK?’

  ‘Tyler is just fine. When he’s not asleep or at school he’s stuck in front of his laptop but all his friends are the same.’

  ‘OK, Peta. Like I say, I’ll get back to you.’ He was tempted to add, ‘I love you,’ but he knew that would only irritate her.

  If you love me so much, why did you shout at me and push me around and try to make feel so small? Why didn’t you get yourself some help, if you were so disturbed by what happened to you in Afghanistan?

  THREE

  On the way back to the office in Carousel Mall Martin switched on the radio in his car. According to the weather reporter on KTIE, there was no foreseeable prospect of what he called ‘measurable precipitation’. In other words, no rain was expected for the next four days at least. Temperatures would reach 100–107 degrees during the day, and drop only to between seventy-five and eight-three degrees by night.

  ‘San Bernardino’s Municipal Water Department is asking every citizen of San Bernardino to conserve as much water as possible. Over the past three years the lack of any significant rainfall has brought us close to crisis point. You should think twice, folks, before washing your vehicle, and make sure you check the watering index online to decide how much water you’re going to use to irrigate your plants.’

  Martin parked his Eldorado in the basement parking lot and went up in the elevator to the office. As he pushed open the glass door with San Bernardino County Children & Family Services stenciled on it in silver letters, Brenda the receptionist gave him her usual glower, peering at him over her thick-rimmed spectacles. Martin had always thought Brenda would be quite attractive if she didn’t wear such schoolmistressy glasses and didn’t clench her hair in the tightest of French pleats, like a coil of copper wire. He sometimes wondered if she was always so scathing to him because she thought he was attractive, too.

  ‘Arlene wants to see you in her office,’ she told him.

  ‘OK, Brenda, thanks,’ he said, and started to walk down the corridor toward the soda vending machine.

  ‘I think she wants you in there right now,’ said Brenda. ‘“Just as soon as he comes through the door,” that’s what she said.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to tell her you gave me the message,’ said Martin. He continued to the end of the corridor, pushed a dollar into the soda vending machine and noisily bought himself a can of Dr Pepper. Brenda continued to glower at him as he walked back past her desk.

  ‘Brenda, have a heart. My throat was as dry as a camel’s back passage.’

  She pursed her lips but didn’t say anything. As he reached Arlene Kaiser’s office, however, and knocked on the door, he glanced back and he was sure that he caught her smiling. Women, he thought. If only they would come out straight and tell you how they felt, and stopped making you guess.

  ‘Come!’ called out Arlene Kaiser, in her usual high-pitched screech, and he opened the door and stepped into her office. Arlene was the Deputy Director of Children & Family Services and so she had a gray steel desk the size of an aircraft carrier and a corner office. Out of the windows she enjoyed a view of orange-tiled rooftops and gleaming new office buildings and scaffolding and tower cranes, and the distant San Bernardino mountains, hazy and wavering in the afternoon heat, like mountains seen in a dream.

  ‘Ah, Martin!’ Arlene shrilled at him. ‘At last! Didn’t you get my text?’

  ‘Text?’ Martin blinked at her.

  Arlene was short and bulky, with close-cropped gingery-brown hair and an oddly cherubic face for a fifty-five-year-old woman, with bright blue eyes and a bulbous nose. She was wearing a mustard-colored nylon blouse and a gingery-brown pleated skirt which matched her hair, and a necklace of shiny green beads which looked like olives.

  ‘Well, anyhow. You’re here now. This is Saskia Vane, from the water department, and her associate—’

  ‘Lem Kunicki,’ said a pale, thirtyish man sitting in the corner. In his pale lemon polo shirt and pale gray linen pants he was almost invisible, like a chameleon. He even had bulging eyes like a chameleon.

  Saskia Vane, however, was far from invisible. She was sitting cross-legged beside Arlene’s desk, dressed in a scarlet suit with a short matador jacket and a very short skirt, and high-heeled Louboutin shoes with bright red soles. Her hair was black and glossy and cut in a severe geometric bob, which emphasized the sharp angles of her cheekbones and her slanting, catlike eyes. She had full, pouting lips, which had been glossed in scarlet to match her suit. Underneath her jacket she was wearing a black scoop-neck T-shirt which revealed a deep suntanned cleavage. Between her breasts dangled a necklace which looked like a shark’s tooth set in gold.

  She raised her hand toward Martin in an undulating motion, as if she were trying to demonstrate to him how dolphin swim. He took it, and briefly shook it, and smiled at her. She didn’t take her eyes off him as he pulled up a chair and sat next to her, but she didn’t smile back. She was wearing a strong jasmine perfume with musky undertones, the sort of perfume a woman wears to mask the smell of recent sex.

  Martin said, ‘So, Ms Vane, you’re from the water department? That’s a lucky coincidence. You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.’

  ‘Please, Martin, call me Saskia. And I don’t actually represent the water department itself. I’m a member of a special emergency team which Governor Smiley has put together. Our brief is to advise local government officers on how to deal with the ongoing drought situation.’

  ‘Oh! In that case, I think you’re exactly the person I want to talk to. My wife just called me from Fullerton Drive to say that her water’s been cut off. And this morning, when I was dealing with a case on East Julia Street, there was no water supply there, either. So what gives?’

  Saskia gave him one of those queasy smiles that politicians give when faced with a question they don’t really want to answer. ‘I’m afraid I’m not personally familiar with those particular locations, Martin, so I couldn’t possibly give you a specific response to that. But I can answer you in more general terms.’

  Martin glanced across at Arlene but Arlene simply nodded toward Saskia as if she were telling him to let her have her say, because this was critical.

  Saskia said, ‘The reason I’ve come here today to talk to you is because we’re faced with having to consider rotational hiatuses in service.’

  ‘Excuse me? “Rotational hiatuses”? That sounds like some kind of skin complaint.’

  Saskia kept on smiling that slightly nauseated smile. ‘Let me tell you this, Martin. Water reserves nationwide are lower than they have be
en in almost fifty years.’

  ‘Sure, I know that. But I can’t see this city running dry, can you? We’re sitting right on top of more underground water than we know what to do with. I mean, that was the whole reason the city was built here in the first place. And what about Arrowhead Springs, up in the mountains? San Bernardino exports water, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Well, sorry, but not right now you don’t. You’ll have seen for yourself on the TV news that reservoirs are nearly empty and rivers and lakes are down to the lowest levels ever recorded. This is happening all across the country, Martin, coast to coast, especially in California and the Midwest. Even here in San Bernardino, I’m afraid to tell you. You used to have one hundred fifteen million gallons of water stored in your reservoirs, and your groundwater wells used to hold more water than Lake Shasta, but now they’ve dropped to less than a fifth of that. Demand is outstripping supply, by a very long way, and continuing to do so, and that’s one of the reasons I’m here.’

  ‘OK,’ said Martin. ‘But you still haven’t told me what “rotational hiatuses” are.’

  ‘Martin – this is strictly restricted information which is being given to selected individuals only – local government administrators, emergency services, the police and military. If we made it public we could be risking a national panic. The drought situation is very much more severe than you’ve seen on the news. Crops have been devastated, especially corn and soy, and if it carries on like this we’re going to be facing food rationing as well as water restrictions.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Martin. He had a long-standing aversion to being lectured, especially by women, but he knew he would have to listen to this.

  Saskia said, ‘We’ve already been forced to start rotational hiatuses in San Bernardino, both city and county. That means we’ve been cutting off the water supply on a strict rota basis, first one neighborhood and then another, and we’ve been doing it without giving those neighborhoods any prior warning.’

  ‘That’s kind of drastic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I agree. But if you give people notice that their water supply is about to be cut off, they immediately fill up buckets and bathtubs and any other container they can lay their hands on, which puts an even greater strain on what limited reserves we have left.’

  ‘So how long is each of these “rotational hiatuses” going to last?’

  ‘Hopefully, no longer than forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Forty-eight hours, in this heat?’

  ‘Well, we’re hoping it won’t have to be longer.’

  ‘Yes, but come on! How are people going to wash, and cook, and everything else you need water for?’

  ‘I’m afraid they’ll just have to get by.’

  ‘That’s easy enough to say. But what about local businesses? How are restaurants and laundries going to cope? And what about hospitals, and clinics, and retirement homes? In forty-eight hours, believe me, people won’t just be thirsty, they’ll be dying. I saw droughts when I was serving in Afghanistan, and it didn’t take more than a couple of days without water before old people and children were dropping like flies.’

  ‘Martin,’ said Saskia, ‘you just don’t get it. Take San Bernardino alone. The average rainfall here is usually sixteen-point-four-three inches per year, and that’s pretty low by any standard. Over the past three years you’ve had less than a tenth of that, one-point-five-two, which is disastrous. We can’t supply people with water that we simply don’t have.

  She paused for a moment, and lowered her voice, as if she were making an effort to be reasonable. ‘I came here today to talk to you at CFS because you need to be aware that many families which are already dysfunctional are going to be under even greater stress when they find that they have no water, especially in this heatwave. You need to know what the situation is so that you can keep them calm – explain to them that the San Bernardino Municipal Water Department is doing everything it can to share out water fairly, and that protesting about it is not going to do them any good – in fact it’s going to be severely counterproductive. You have to persuade them that this drought is an act of God, and not the fault of the county, or the state, or the federal government for that matter.’

  ‘And this is your remit, is it?’ Martin asked her. ‘You’re here to tell us that we have to keep a thirsty sweaty resentful underclass from running riot?’

  Saskia raised her eyes again and looked at Martin steadily. ‘It’s in everybody’s best interests, Martin. Especially all of those children you care for.’

  ‘So what do we say to them? “Let them drink cola?” As well as wash in it, cook in it, and spray it on their lawns?’

  ‘Not even that, Martin. All soda manufacturers have been ordered to stop production until further notice.’

  Arlene tilted her chair forward and gave Martin her most serious frown. ‘Saskia tells me that Governor Smiley has been keeping a very tight lid on this, Martin, and now you can understand why.’

  ‘Oh, for sure. It’s coming dangerously close to inhumanity.’

  Arlene ignored that. ‘I’m not sharing what Saskia has told us with everybody in the office, Martin, believe me, and I’m only sharing it with you because you’re in charge of some of the city’s most deprived districts, which have a much higher risk of social disorder. We’re right on the front line, here at CFS, you know that. We have to do our best to keep at-risk families from boiling over and falling apart, with all the damage that could do to their children.’

  Martin shrugged. ‘All right, Arlene, if you say so. I don’t quite understand how you can boil over and fall apart both at the same time, especially if you don’t have any water. But at least I know what’s going on now. I’ll call my wife and tell her.’

  He stood up, but Saskia reached up and caught hold of his tan leather watch strap. ‘I’d rather you didn’t, Martin.’

  ‘You’d rather I didn’t what? Tell my wife? It’s OK. She’s only my ex-wife, as it happens.’

  ‘I’d prefer it if we kept this information on a need-to-know basis only, if you don’t mind. Like I say, we could be right on the brink of a national panic. It only takes one spark to start a forest fire.’

  ‘With respect, Saskia, I think my ex-wife has a need to know. My daughter has a high temperature and she has no water.’

  ‘Martin, please. Just tell her that the water is coming back on again very soon, if she can just hold on. I’m not supposed to advise anybody to do this, because supplies are so low, but tell her to go to her nearest supermarket and stock up on as much bottled water as she can, if she hasn’t done that already – and if there’s any left.’

  Martin looked down at Saskia’s hand, still holding his watch strap. Her fingernails were polished red to match her suit and her lips. She was wearing a single large ring with a red agate in it, but no wedding band. He was prepared to admit that he didn’t always understand women, but they never frightened him. All the same, there was something about Saskia Vane that put him off balance, although he couldn’t understand exactly what it was. Maybe it was that pungent post-coital perfume; or the way that she looked at him with eyes as bright and hard as nail-heads. He may not have been frightened of her, but then it was obvious that she wasn’t frightened of him, either.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But you’ll need to give us a schedule. Which neighborhoods you’re planning to cut off, and when. Then – if we do get any trouble – at least we’ll be prepared for it.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Martin. That really is restricted information. If it got into the wrong hands … believe me, it would be disastrous. All hell let loose. Some neighborhoods have much higher and more critical needs than others, and you can imagine the resentment if some were disconnected for a shorter period than others.’

  Martin didn’t know what to say to that. He looked across at Arlene again, but all Arlene could do was shrug. ‘Don’t see what else we can do, Martin. We’re here to keep families together and protect children from harm. Starting a riot isn’t goi
ng to help any.’

  Martin lifted his arm a little and Saskia released her grip on his watch strap.

  ‘It was very good to meet you, Martin,’ she said. ‘Look – take one of my cards. If there’s anything else you need to know, just get in touch. Do you have any further questions for now?

  ‘No,’ said Martin. ‘I don’t think so. Or – yes, maybe one. Can I ask you what qualifications you have? I mean, what does it take for somebody like you to be appointed to a drought crisis advisory team?’

  Saskia kept on looking at him unblinking and for quite a long time Martin thought that she wasn’t going to answer him, or else she was going to tell him to mind his own business.

  Instead, she said, ‘Good looks, Martin, and a natural flair for diplomacy. And a doctorate in environmental management from UCLA, that helped. And a law degree. And connections in some very high places.’

  ‘I just wondered, that’s all,’ Martin told her. ‘I find it hard to picture you, when you were an innocent little girl, dreaming of telling everybody in California not to flush their toilets so often.’

  Saskia looked away from him, but as she did so, she said, ‘I was never an innocent little girl, Martin.’

  Martin hesitated. If this had been a cocktail bar, and he had been coming on to her, he could have thought of some smart and provocative response to that. But it was Arlene’s office, and Arlene was listening intently.

  He smiled at Saskia as if to say ‘touché’, and then he gave Arlene a salute and turned to leave. On his way out the pale man in the pale lemon shirt bobbed up from his chair and held out his hand.

  ‘Lem Kunicki,’ he said. His palm was chilly and damp and Martin thought that it was like shaking hands with somebody who had recently died.

  FOUR

  Peta put down the phone and went through to the sunlit living room, where Tyler was sprawled on the couch with his laptop, playing Alien Armageddon IV.