Which Way the Sun Went

"One hole is a curiosity. Ten in a line is a fact. There's no shortcut between the two and I've never once found one."

"I'll go," Jamie said.

He said it to nobody in particular, and he was up off his haunches and moving before anybody could ask him what he meant by it. Back toward the tents, shoulders set, short in the stride, and he did not look at one of the three of us on his way past. Whether that was the boy, or the dogs, or simply away from us, I could not have told anybody.

Nobody offered. And nobody so much as glanced after him, which told me they were used to it, which told me it had been going on a good while longer than we had been standing there.

"What do we do with these plants now?" Glenda said.

I had four coriander seedlings sitting in a double handful of soil, and every person in that camp had walked past the question until she asked it.

"We keep them safe." I got myself round onto my knees. "The tents should give them a little shade and protection from the sun."

Then I did the job properly, which took a while, and nobody hurried me.

I opened the hole out wider with my fingers, working down through the broken crust and lifting the pieces clear. I stacked them to one side rather than throwing them — flattest face down, squared off at the edges, without ever deciding to. There was a use in them somewhere. I could not have said what it was, but a hard flat material that came out of the ground in slabs was not a thing to be scattering about in a place with nothing else in it, and my hands had settled that between themselves before the rest of me got a vote.

The soil came up cool against my fingers and held together when I moved it, and every handful of it smelled the way the first one had, and I did not get used to that once in the whole of the afternoon.

I made four separate seats in it, a hand's width apart, each one deep enough to take the whole of a root without bending it. They went in one at a time. Roots straight down, no kink and no hook anywhere in them, the seed-leaves sitting clear of the surface with a little air beneath. Then I drew the soil back in round each one and firmed it with my thumbs, working from the outside towards the stem, until there was nothing loose left anywhere against the root. An air pocket against a root finished a seedling quicker than drought ever did, and once one was in there no amount of watering afterwards ever got it out again.

That was the one thing I did that day that I was entirely certain about.

Then I sat back on my heels and looked at where I had put them, and worked out that I had no idea whatsoever whether it was the right place.

Shade from the tent. I had said it out loud and I had said it the way I would have said it to a client on a site visit, with the whole weight of thirty years behind it — and then the actual job of it turned up and stood in front of me. Shade from the tent when? The shadow was lying out to one side of us right then, and it was going to move, and it was going to move in a direction, and to know that direction I needed to know which way that sun went and how far over and how quickly. I had been in this world part of one day.

I did not know where west was. I could not have pointed at it.

I had planted out somewhere north of two thousand things in my life and there had never once been one of them where I did not know, before the trowel came out, which side the morning sun came in on and where the shadow would be sitting by the middle of the afternoon. That was not knowledge. That was the ground underneath the knowledge, and I did not have any.

So I guessed. I put them on the side of the tent that had the longest shadow on it at that moment and told myself the odds were even, and I had rarely in my life liked myself less over a decision that size.

Water was worse.

They wanted watering in. Anything lifted and put back into the ground wanted watering in straight away — it settled the soil down against the root and took the shock out of the whole business — and there was a river a few hundred metres behind me carrying more water than the whole of Collinsvale drank in a year, and there was no way on this earth of getting a drop of it up to where I was kneeling. Nothing to carry it in. Not a bucket, not a bottle, not a tin, not a folded sheet of anything. I could have gone down and come back with two cupped hands and arrived with a damp palm and a good story.

An empty container. Kneeling there in the dirt I put an empty container somewhere near the top of the list of things I would have traded a very great deal for, and it stayed on that list a long while afterwards.

"We had better finish putting it up," Glenda said, and got to her feet and put a hand down to Karen.

Karen took it and came up, and the two of them stood there beating the dust off themselves, and I stayed exactly where I was with my hands on my knees looking at four plants.

Karen looked down at me. She did not say anything and she did not have to. She had the whole expression loaded and ready and she held it there and let me get to it in my own time, which after nineteen years was about as close to a courtesy as the pair of us managed.

"I want to see how far this soil spreads," I said, and got up.

And there it was. The first thing I had asked for since I came through that door.

I had been carried the whole of that day. Hauled through a wall by my own arm. Walked across country I had not chosen by a woman I had never met. Introduced to people I had not gone looking for. Volunteered for a tent by my wife, handed a job description I had not written and a research programme I had not agreed to, and told by something inside my own head where I was going to go and what I was going to keep quiet about on the way.

This was mine.

Somebody had to find out where the good ground stopped. There was exactly one person standing in that camp who knew how to go about it properly, and I was going to go and do it.

"Fine." Karen gave me the shrug that was not quite a shrug. "I'll come and find you when Glenda and I are done with the tent."

She would rather have come. I knew it standing there, and she knew that I knew it, and she was going to go and hold poles instead because she had said she would, and my wife had never once in her life got out of a thing she had said she would do.

I nearly told her to leave the tent to them. I did not, because Glenda was standing right beside her, and because we were the newest arrivals in a settlement of five and I did not fancy our chances as the pair who wandered off on the first afternoon.

I bent down and picked up a tent peg on the way past.

It was a good peg. Three hundred of hardened steel, entirely useless for the job it had been brought into this world to do, and very nearly perfect for breaking crust. My hand had already closed round it in the grip I would have taken on a trowel. And there were about thirty more of them lying in that bag, every one of them equally incapable of holding anything down in that sand, so as far as I was concerned the camp was not going to miss one.

I would go upstream. That was where the ground got interesting, because that was where the river came from and where the fall was in it, and if the good soil stopped anywhere it would stop on a boundary, and boundaries followed water. They always had.

It was also, and I noticed this with the peg already in my fist, the direction of the mountains.

I had a proper reason for going that way. A good one, and the right one, and I would have handed it over to anybody who asked me for it, and every word of it would have been true and not one word of it would have been the whole. Because there was a second reason as well, and I had been carrying it since a rock beside that river, and the two of them lay along exactly the same line of country.

I stood there with that for a moment. Then I went anyway, which I was always going to.

"Where are you going with that?"

Karen, from behind me, without any need to see my hands.

"With what?" I said, and turned round.

"You know what." Both hands on her hips.

Which she did, and I did, and I was not giving it up on that account.

"Well, I'm not going to get too far trying to dig beyond that crust with my bare hands, am I," I said, and held the peg up where she could get a proper look at it.

Her eyebrows came in together.

She had nothing. For the first time since a wall in our own house opened up and swallowed the pair of us, my wife had absolutely nothing to come back at me with, and I stood in the dust of another world and enjoyed it a good deal more than was reasonable.

I turned for the river with the peg in my hand, and I was grinning, and I did not much care who saw it.