Reborn Seven Days Before El Niño

Marisel Veyron Pov

The pavement took the skin off my knees before I had gone ten feet.

I could hear my own breathing. Not breathing, exactly a wet sound, like something being pulled through a straw. The sun stood straight up in a white sky and the street had emptied out. No one on the balconies. No one at the windows. Shutters shut, a dead dog at the kerb, the heat coming off the tarmac in a shimmer that made the road look like it was moving.

I had walked this route a thousand times. Eleven minutes, Dacre liked to say. Door to door. If you ever need me, Marisel, eleven minutes.

It had taken me an hour and I was still going.

And the worst of it, the part I chewed on while I crawled, was that I had given him the idea myself. Six months back, when the broadcasters first started on about the cycle, I was the one who sat up in bed and said we should put water by. Cans, bottles, whatever we can get, even if nothing comes of it. He'd laughed and called me his water merchant's wife. But he'd let me fill the shed behind his shop, and I did it with my own hands. Forty-something cans, lids taped down, my back aching for a week.

Then the taps coughed and the heat came, and my own flat had nothing in it. Not a cup. Because I had put all of it in his shed. Because he was my husband. Because it's eleven minutes.

His building's front step was in the shade. I got up on my elbows and pushed the door and it swung in.

Cold. The lobby was cold. He had the generator running and the air conditioner running off it, and the cold hit my face and I nearly cried.

I went up the stairs on my hands and knees. I remember the tile. I remember thinking it was too bright, that he should have picked a darker tile.

His door stood open a hand's width.

I heard glass.

I got my head around the door and there was Vesper on his kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet, hair stuck to her forehead, and Dacre on one knee in front of her, holding a bottle to her mouth with one hand and holding her hair back from it with the other.

Her throat was moving. The water is going down.

He was talking to her. Low, gentle, the way you talk to a child with a fever. Slow. There's more. Slow.

I said his name. Or I tried. It came out of me as a creak.

He looked over his shoulder.

I'll give him this much, he didn't pretend not to see me. He looked straight at me, lying on his hallway floor with my arms out in front of me, and something crossed his face. Not horror. I've had time since to think about it. It was closer to irritation. Like I'd tracked mud into a clean house.

Then he turned back to her.

"Just a bit more," he said. "Come on."

I don't know how long I lay there. The cold went out of the floor after a while, or I stopped feeling it. The last thing I remember clearly is the bottle. Empty, on its side, rolling a little on the tile, the light through the kitchen window catching the wet inside it.

Then the hallway went out like a lamp.

---

"How would heat kill somebody?"

I sat up on Dacre's couch with my mouth open and my hands shaking, and he was in the armchair with one ankle crossed over his knee, holding the remote, laughing at the television.

I looked down at my knees. No blood. No grit. Just my own cotton trousers and the faint blue line of a vein under the skin.

"There she is," Tovin said, mouth full. "Slept through the whole thing, this one."

"I wasn't asleep."

"You were breathing like a man in a sack." He shook his bowl of peanuts at me. "Have one."

The woman on the screen had a map behind her with a red shape spreading across it, and she was saying the words sea surface temperature and ten-year cycle and something about how the coming week would run hotter and longer than anything the stations had on record.

"Seven days," she said. "Our modelling starts on Wednesday."

Wednesday. I turned it over. Seven days. Tonight was Wednesday.

Sable stood by the window with her arms folded, watching the street, which was her way of listening. Tovin was in the other chair with his shoes off. Vesper sat on the floor with her back against the couch, near enough to Dacre's chair that the arm of it grazed her shoulder whenever she moved, and she had a tall glass of water in her hand with ice in it, and she was holding it the way you hold something you know you can get more of.

She was wearing my earrings. The small gold ones with the chip in the left one. I'd looked for those earrings for two months before I moved out of this flat and told myself I'd lost them at the market.

"-so I said to him, don't buy more than you can move by Sunday," Vesper was saying. "My cousin's got the shop on the corner of Fenner and she's had the distillery rep twice this month. Twice, Dacre. That's not a man who thinks nothing's coming."

"Your cousin sells spirits," Dacre said.

"My cousin sells whatever's walking out the door." Vesper turned her glass slowly on the floor. "She's got a buyer from the coast asking about bulk water. Not bottles. Cans. He's got a hotel and he's frightened. He'd pay over the odds."

"How far over?"

She smiled. "You'd want to sit down."

"Vesper."

"I'm only telling you what she told me."

Sable said, without turning round, "And what does she want for the introduction?"

Vesper's smile didn't move. "She wants her cut, same as anyone."

There it was. The whole argument about whether the sun was dangerous, and under it, this - the two of them had been talking about it already. Not the way I'd talked about it with him six months ago, worried and sensible with a pen and paper. The other way. The way where the danger was the point.

Dacre turned the volume down. Sable reached over and turned it up.

"I'm listening to this."

"You've heard it before."

"Ten years ago it wasn't this."

"Ten years ago it was exactly this." He set the remote down. "I had sixty crates of bottled water in the shop. Remember? My brother-in-law talked me into it. Wholesale out of Kessel Road, cost me more than the roof repairs. What came? Two warm weeks. Then that wedding party in September bought the lot off me at a loss so I could clear the back room. Ten years of that joke. I hear it at every family thing."

"So you don't stock anything now," Sable said.

"The shop stocks what sells. I've got a hundred and forty empty jerrycans in that warehouse this minute. I sell them to builders."

"Empty," I said.

Everyone looked at me. I hadn't meant to say it out loud, but my voice came out steady, which surprised me.

"Empty," I said again. "A hundred and forty of them, and not one with a lid taped."

Dacre laughed. "What, you want a shed of your own now?"

"Maybe."

"You're the one who told me to fill that shed in the first place." He said it lightly. He had no idea what he was saying. "Now you want to do it twice?"

"Maybe I was right the first time and just not early enough."

His face changed, a small amount, the way it does when he decides a conversation isn't worth having. Vesper got there first, which was worse.

"She's frightened, Dacre." She said it gently. "Look at her. Anyone would be, after a broadcast like that. Marisel, love, don't start buying cans in a panic, that's how people get robbed. Leave it to the ones who know the market."

"And you know the market," I said.

"I know my cousin's shop, that's all." She picked her glass back up. "I'm not the one who's going to be standing in a queue on Thursday."

Thursday. She'd said it before the woman on the television had said it. Or maybe she hadn't and I'd misheard. I've turned it over a hundred times since.

"Marisel's right about one thing," Sable said. "Empty cans in a warehouse is a strange kind of nothing."

Dacre picked up the remote and switched the television off in the middle of the woman's sentence.

I got my bag off the floor and put the strap on my shoulder.

"Where are you going?"

"Home."

"It's half nine."

"I know what time it is." I looked at Vesper, at the earrings, at the glass. "Tovin, don't get up. I don't need to walk."

"Marisel-"

"I said I don't need it."

Sable picked her keys up off the windowsill and came with me. On the stairs she said, "How much water have you got in your flat?"

"One bucket."

"Full?"

"About a quarter."

She let out a breath through her nose. "You filled a shed for him."

"I know what I did."

We came out into the street. Nine o'clock at night and the air still holding the day's heat like an oven with the door shut.

"Market tomorrow," she said. "I'll come."

"Be at mine at three."

---

Halim was pulling his shutter down when I got to Kessel Road. I put my hand flat on the metal so he couldn't slide it further.

"Twenty-litre jerrycans."

He looked at my hand, then my face. "How many?"

"How many have you got?"

"Sixty in the back. Eleven of the fifty-litre."

"I'll take twenty of the small ones. Delivered tonight."

He named a price higher than the one chalked on his board. I paid for it. He wrote my address on a scrap of newspaper and said he'd send his nephew round.

Then I said, "Halim. The water board notice on the board by the gate. How long has it been?"

"Since this morning." He squinted at me. "Kessel East, Harrow Row, Mbeki Close. Five days, they say. Five days in this." He laughed. "Somebody at the board's got a sense of humour."

"Can I take it?"

"It's paper. Take the board, take the pole."

I took the notice down. I took it to the woman who runs the photocopier behind the fabric shop, and I paid her for forty copies, and then I walked back down Kessel Road and pinned one to the gate of my building and one to the gate of the tyre place and one to the shutter of the one-shoe woman's stall.

The woman with the baby bath on her head was still at the yard tap, third in the line. I gave her a copy.

"Thursday, six in the morning," I said. "This street goes dry till Tuesday. Tell whoever you like."

She read it twice and then looked up at me. "How do you know?"

"It's on the notice board by the gate. Go and look at the one I left."

"Why are you telling me?"

Because in another life nobody told you, I thought, and on the fifth day you were in a queue with a plastic basin and a dead look, and I never saw you again.

"Because you've got a baby," I said.

---

The cans came at seven. Sixteen of them. The boy wouldn't look at me while I counted twice.

"Four short."

"That's what was on the truck."

"Your uncle wrote twenty." I counted out four cans' worth of money and folded it into his hand anyway. "For the walk. Tell your uncle I want the four on Sunday and I'll pay the Sunday price for them. And tell him the taps on Kessel East go off Thursday at six - five days - and he's got eleven fifty-litre cans in the back that he's going to sell to somebody at four in the morning for less than they're worth. He can do better selling them slow to people who'll remember him."

The boy looked at the money, then at me. "He won't listen."

"You tell him anyway."

I dragged the cans inside one at a time and lined them under the window. Then I went back down with my phone torch and read the notice one more time, standing in the dark by the gate, my own copy in my hand.

Kessel East. Harrow Row. Mbeki Close. Adjoining streets.

My street. Sable's street. The one-shoe woman's. The yard behind the tyre place.

Alder Vale wasn't on it. Dacre's street, eleven minutes away, with its generator and its cold lobby and its kitchen floor, was not on the list.

I stood there for a moment with the torch shining on nothing.

In the life I'd just crawled out of, I had died on his hallway floor while he held a bottle to another woman's mouth. And he would have water. That was the thing. He would have his shed and his generator and his cold tiles, and Vesper would bring him a buyer from the coast, and the two of them would make money out of other people's thirst, and when I was dying eleven minutes away he would look at me the way a man looks at a stain on a clean floor.

So I would not crawl to him this time.

But it wasn't enough to sit behind my own door with my sixteen cans and be right. If that was all I had, he'd still get his way, and Vesper would still be wearing my earrings, and the woman with the baby bath would still be in that queue on the fifth day.

I went up the stairs and got the first can under the tap and turned it on.

It came out the width of a pencil. Warm.

Eight minutes past nine. Sixteen cans, nine hours, one tap.

I sat down on the floor with my back to the cupboard and started counting again.