The Long Dry Read Free Page A

as no one else drinks it. He makes a strong pot full of coffee at this time of the morning and it does him for the day, warming up the cupfuls in a pan as they are needed – which makes them stronger as the day goes on. No one else touches the pan. She says it’s why he does not sleep. His first coffee each morning is the remnants of the night before because grinding the beans he does not want to wake the house, and the children sleep above the thin ceiling of the kitchen.
    He sits at the table with a loose fist and runs his thumb over the first joint of his forefinger in the way he has, so it makes a quiet purring sound, like rubbing leather.
    ‘What about the dosing?’
    ‘It’ll have to wait,’ he says.
    He rubs his finger. He does this always, at table, talking, or reading a paper, even with the handle of a cup held there, so that this part of his finger is smooth and shines. Whenever he’s at rest.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’ve checked the obvious places and she’s not there. She’s got her head down and gone.’ He does not tell her about the stillborn calf.
    ‘It’s typical. It has to be today,’ she says. ‘I should have got up to check.’
    ‘It would have gone anyway,’ he says quietly.
    He looks down at the missing part of his little finger on his right hand and makes the sound against his thumb again. She still blames herself for this damage to him. He was trying to free the bailer from the new tractor and she had done something and the catch had just bit down. He takes a mouthful of coffee. It was a clean cut and it healed well and he could have lost his hand instead. That’s how he looked at it. In some ways he loves it.
    She’d burned the toast so he’s gone quietly over and made some more while she tried to rescue the wrecked toast.
    ‘The vet phoned about Curly,’ she says.
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘He wants to come today.’
    He knows the vet will put the old dog down. Not today, he thinks. It’s a hard thing to have to have today, if he has to find the cow too.
    ‘You should have some breakfast,’ he says to her. It’s odd how seriously we take the silly names of animals.
    The door latch snaps and Emmy comes in still dressed in her pyjamas and her blanket tucked in her hand, thumb in her mouth. She shuffles over to the old settle and curls up with her green and purple zebra. She would come down when she heard her parents talking in the kitchen below in the morning.
    ‘Hello sweetie,’ says her mother.
    She shines her eyes up at her mother, looks to her father quickly, shyly. Something secret passes between them and she smiles and settles. They stop talking of the cow.
    He sits there rubbing his finger and looking at the stump of his little finger fondly.
    ‘It’s going to be hot again today,’ he says.
    *

Chapter Two
the Rain
    There had been much rain. In the early part of the year and through the Autumn before, the rain came down and the fields were loud with grass and the rivers full and fast.
    Then at some point in the early morning of March 11 th something changed. The rain stopped; that day the sun came out hot and fast and deliberately. There had been a geomagnetic storm. Epileptics had fits, and people prone to strokes or with weak hearts were ill, some died. The electric things of our body went wrong in many people. The swallows came early, and that day a cloud of racing pigeons and one white dove landed at the farm. They came suddenly and curiously and were very lost. Emmy fell in love with the long white dove.
    Nobody – not the ‘experts’ anyway, admitted any link between the storms and the sudden change of things; but storms like this could shut down warships and satellites, and the War Office was always watching out for them. In their records, it says the storm on March 11 th was a massive one.
    Then it rained in May. He remembers the shearers – three men – moving methodically around the barn; the process: the unspoken movement of them all.
    __
    The rain