Waiting for Rain
After several days of rainless heat, the northern town of Binley begins to take on the characteristics of a middle eastern souk. The smell of rotting vegetables seeps from alleys, gutters turn vile and viscous, pavements are splashed with spit. Tattered awnings are rigged up; dogs wander. In the bus station, the smell of tar and petrol mingles with another, distinctly foreign odour: that of burning metal. The bus queue reels in the heatwave from a passing bus. By the ticket office, the flower bed is completely bare, the earth dried into hard grey lumps. It looks as if nothing has ever grown there, as if nothing could ever grow there. The effort would be too great. One begins to excuse the neglect, and to understand the mentality of hot countries.
Three or four patients sit in the dentist’s waiting room: a mother controlling her child, a man reading a magazine, a young woman with her hands in her lap. Mr. Cowan flutters into the surgery like a piece of blown paper. “It’s going to be another scorcher,” he tells Miss Louth, the dental nurse.
The young woman is the first patient. A wisdom tooth is giving her pain. She drops her handbag on the floor and climbs awkwardly into the chair.
The dentist reads her teeth and Miss Louth makes notes. His probe gently and relentlessly investigates. The young woman knows now that she is nothing but a mouth, and lying on this chair the rest of her body is ready to drop out of existence.
But before it has a chance to do so, she must stand up and walk downstairs for an x-ray. The tooth has got to come out.
She leaves the building in tears.
The woman whose body is ready to drop out of existence on the dentist’s chair is twenty-two years old. Her name is Greta. The main thing about Greta is that she has come into some money and is living on it for a while. She has no occupation, nor plans to have any; she has, in fact, no plans.
The necessity of making appointments with the dentist a week, two weeks in advance, is distressing to her. It presumes a future existence, with dates, times and destinations. She wishes to exist only in the present. But her tooth is giving her a great deal of pain, it cannot be ignored. It has made the present peculiarly incisive and unbearable. She has been trapped into making an appointment. That, and the painful prospect of having the tooth removed, cause her to cry as she leaves the surgery.
She takes the short walk home, knowing that from now until the time of the next appointment she will be in limbo, waiting. It had been her intention to remove all possible islands of expectation, except for that last, inevitable one. Now a tooth has robbed her of her peace of mind.
This gritty town, labyrinth of asphalt and exhaust fumes, ferments strangely in the sun’s heat. Tarmac softens. Stone burns. Even metal has transmuted into some brittle, unreliable substance.
The people, too, are going through a process of change. The heat acts on them like a catalyst. For some it is a liberator, loosening their limbs and freeing them of conscience and inhibition. For others it is an oppressor, crushing them into dark corners of constraint and waiting. Crimes of recklessness increase during the time of drought. Doctors are entreated by streams of sleepless people.
The nights are as hot and airless as the days. The eyes of the town are open in the small hours. Mr. Cowan drinks milk in his kitchen and reads a journal; Miss Louth lies in a cold bath and contemplates her naked body; our Greta sleeps the sleep of the just.
