We're Going to Be Fine

"Bad news doesn't improve with keeping. It only gets more expensive. That isn't a moral position, it's interest."

We planted our way back down.

It was Karen's idea and it was a good one. A seed every ten metres or so, from the rocks down to the water and then along the bank the way we had come, so that anybody walking out from the camp with an urgent errand would have a line of green to follow instead of guessing at it in the dark.

She did the placing and I went ahead with the shovel and opened each one, and it took no time at all now that I had a tool in my hands instead of a bent peg. Boot on the shoulder of the blade, crust gone, a scrape to clear it out, on to the next. She came along behind and knelt and pressed and got up again. Neither of us said much. There was a satisfaction in the two of us working like that which I had not had since we were both on our knees at a retaining wall in Collinsvale, and I did not want to be the one who spoiled it.

Which was the trouble.

Because I had worked out, about the fourth hole in, that I was signposting the wrong place.

That line ran from the river up to a scatter of human waste ten metres from the water and five hundred metres above the camp. In a week it would be a path. In a month it would be a habit, and a habit in a settlement gets laid down very fast and comes up again very slowly, and every person who followed those markers would be walking to exactly the ground I had spent the afternoon deciding nobody should ever walk to again.

I could have said it right there. I had the whole of it ready — distance, cover, position, downstream, fifty metres back off the water — and a shovel already in my hand to start with.

And I did not, and I knew precisely why I did not, and none of it was any good.

Because my wife was happy. Because she had spent the afternoon watching seeds come up out of dead ground and had gone quiet and pleased with it. Because there was a rhythm running between the two of us out on that bank that I had not felt in a long while and did not want to put a stop to. And because the moment I opened my mouth I stopped being a man walking his wife home and became the bloke who had been in this world one afternoon and had opinions about everybody's toilet.

So I put the shovel in and she put the seed in, and we went on down the bank, marking out a route I fully intended to close.

"Last seed."

She said it with her fingers already in the ground.

"I thought you said we had plenty," I said.

"I did. We did."

I stood there with the shovel and turned that over and got nothing out of it.

"We've planted all of them."

"All of them?"

"Yes, Chris. That's what I just said."

And there it was. I had counted them back at the camp with the soil going cold in my hands — six, and then seven — with three people leaning in over the top of me putting them down one at a time for the pleasure of watching, and I had done the arithmetic and made it about forty, and known that when the forty were gone there would not be another coriander seed in this world for as long as anybody lived in it.

She had told me there was plenty to go around. And there had not been.

Being right about it gave me nothing whatsoever. I had rather been hoping I was wrong.

"And they all grew, yeah?"

"They all sprouted." She got up off her knees and beat her hands down her thighs. "Whether they continue to grow or not is an entirely different matter."

"Agreed." And I meant it, and I was glad she had said it before I had to. "How many?"

"About thirty. I'd guess we've covered close to three hundred meters. We've still a few hundred meters back to camp."

"Shit!"

It came straight out of me and I heard it land and started laughing, properly, bent over the handle of the shovel, on account of what the pair of us had spent the last part of the afternoon standing about in.

Karen did not laugh. She waited, with the face on, until I had finished.

"I didn't realise we'd gone so far." I got myself straight. "That's great news if this healthy soil is so widespread."

"Healthy soil... that's putting it mildly."

She put a hand out at the seedling standing in the hole between us with its two leaves flat and the dust already on them.

And she was right, and she was a good deal more right than she had any way of knowing, because she had not knelt over eleven holes in a row and taken the same soil out of every one of them.

I did the other sum while I stood there, and I did not care for the answer.

Thirty plants. Every coriander seed in the world, in a line three hundred metres long, standing up out of the ground in the open. No shade on any of them. Nothing to water them with. No shelter, no cover, no windbreak of any description, and a breeze off those dunes that ran all day and carried enough fine material to bury a seedling overnight if it took the notion.

I had said as much myself and Karen had not moved an inch when I said it. We can't be certain that these tiny plants will survive if we leave them exposed like this.

We had just planted the entire stock.

Not one of the thirty was a waste — every one of them told us the ground was good that far along, and the line of them together told us a great deal more than any single one could — but if a hot day and a breeze took the lot, then we had spent the whole seed bank of a world on a demonstration. And there was nothing to be done about it now but walk home and hope.

I did not say that either.

We set off down the bank.

I carried the shovel over my shoulder and Karen walked on the water side of me, and the seedlings went away behind us in both directions, one every ten metres or so, thinning out into the dust until I could not pick one from the next.

Thirty small green points. The only green in that entire country, running in a dotted line along a riverbank in a world with nothing else standing anywhere in it.

And for a moment, walking, I had the other one laid over the top of it. A canopy with a wind moving through the head of it. Birds going over one another. Contour banks with the fall taken out of them properly. It came up on its own and it did not stay long and I did not go after it.

My hands had stopped hurting, which bothered me a good deal more than the hurting had. The blisters had gone stiff and dull and there was grit dried into the open one, and I was going to have to deal with the whole lot of it later, with no clean water and nothing to put on it.

And I was thirsty. Properly thirsty. The back of my throat had gone thick and my tongue had started to feel like a separate item I was carrying about with me.

The river was four metres away on my left, running clear over stone, and I did not drink out of it.

I thought about it. I thought about it three separate times, and each time I got as far as measuring the drop to the water with my eye, and then thought about eleven paces from a scatter of rocks, and stayed where I was.

Karen did not drink either. She had not asked me for a reason and she had not so much as looked at the water since we started walking, and I did not know whether that was chance or whether some part of her had got there ahead of me without being told. She had always been a good deal quicker than she let on.

Either way I was going to have to say it before we reached the tents, or first thing in the morning at the very latest, and standing on that bank I already knew which of the two I was going to take.

The coins moved against my thigh with every second step.

Two small round weights in a trouser pocket. I had never once in my life been conscious of what was in my pockets while I was walking, and now I was conscious of nothing else. Every stride. Whether they touched. Whether they touched loudly enough to carry.

She was right there beside me. I could have had them out and into her hand inside four seconds. Look at this. Look what I found. And she would have stopped dead on that bank and turned them over and read the wall and the tower and the word, and her mind would have gone off at three times the speed of mine, and she would have had six conclusions out of them before we reached the tents that had not occurred to me at all.

I kept walking.

Somewhere in there I worked out that I had three of them now. What I had been told on that rock and had promised to keep. The two coins. And a latrine ten metres from the water with a young man lying sick below it — which I was going to tell them about, and had not told anybody yet, and every hour I did not was an hour somebody might go down to that river and drink.

That was a great deal for a man who had never in nineteen years kept a single thing from her that mattered.

And I thought about what would happen if I lost her out here. Not in any dramatic sense. I mean the plain mechanics of it — which was what my head did with anything it could not look at directly.

She was the one who talked. She was the one who walked up alongside a stranger on a dune and had her whole history out of her by the crest. She was the one who could stand in a dead world and call it a blank canvas and have four people lift their eyes up off the ground because of it. She was the one who would ask the question I was too proud to ask, and then hand me the answer as though I had asked it myself.

Every useful thing I could do out here needed somebody else to do the talking first.

And she was fifty-seven years old, and she had been going since first light, and she had drunk out of that river the same as I had.

I put that down and did not pick it up again.

"You alright, Chris?"

Her hand came onto my shoulder and squeezed, and she left it there while we walked another few paces.

And that was the moment. That was the one. Nobody within four hundred metres of us, a whole riverbank to say it on, and my wife's hand sitting on my shoulder waiting for me.

"Yeah," I said.

My head went up and down and I let it.

I put both hands into my pockets, and there they were, one under each set of fingers, cold and round and worn smooth by somebody else's thumbs a very long time ago.

"We're going to be fine."