If at First ... (Short Story) by Hamilton Peter F

Author:Hamilton, Peter F. [Hamilton, Peter F.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780345529084
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2011-06-19T18:30:00+00:00

‘Kibbutzes always seemed a bit of a contradiction in terms to me,’ Greg said. ‘Christian Marxists. A religious philosophy ofa >dignified individuality, twinned with state oppression. Not your obvious partnership.’ He and Eleanor were walking down the dirt track to his chalet in Berrybut Spinney, a couple of kilometres along the shore from Edith Weston. The old time-share estate’s nightly bonfire glimmered through the black trees ahead, shooting firefly sparks high into the cloudless night. A midnight zephyr was rucking the surface of Rutland Water, wavelets lapping on the mud shallows. He could hear the smothered-waterfall sound from the discharge pipes as the reservoir was filled by the pumping stations on the Welland and Nene, siphoning off the March floodwater. The water level had been low this Christmas, parched farmland placing a massive demand for irrigation. Thousands of square metres of grass and weeds around the shore that’d grown up behind the water’s summer retreat were slowly drowning under its return. As the rotting vegetation fermented it gave off a gas which smelt of rancid eggs and cow shit. It lasted for six weeks each year.

‘Not much of either in a kibbutz,’ Eleanor said, ‘just work. God, it was squalid, medieval. We were treated like people-machines, everything had to be done by hand. Their idea of advanced machinery was the plough which the shire horses pulled. God’s will. Like hell!’

Greg nodded sympathetically, he’d seen the inside of a kibbutz. She was chattering now, a little nervous. The restrictive doctrine that’d dominated her childhood had stunted the usual pattern of social behaviour, leaving her slightly unsure, and slightly turned on by new-found freedom.

Greg felt himself getting high on expectation. He was growing impatient to reach the chalet, and bed with that fantastic-looking body. Edwards’ face was already indistinct, monochrome, falling away. Even the neurohormone hangover had evaporated.

The tall ash and oak trees of Berrybut Spinney had died years ago, unable to survive the Warming. They’d been turned into gigantic gazebos for the cobaea vines Greg and the other estate residents had planted around their broad buttress roots, dangling huge cascades of purple and white trumpet-flowers from stark skeletal boughs.

He’d spent long hours renovating the estate for the first three years after he moved in, putting in new plants – angel trumpets, figs, ficus, palms, lilies, silk oaks, cedars, even a small orange grove at the rear: a hurried harlequin quilt thrown over the brown fungal rot of decay. The first two years after the temperature peaked were the worst. Grass survived, of course, and some evergreen trees, but the sudden year-round heat wiped out entire ecological systems right across the country. Arable land suffered the least; farms, and the new kibbutzes, adapted readily enough, switching to new varieties of crops and livestock. But that still left vast tracts of native countryside and forests and city parks and village greens looking like battlefields scoured by some apocalyptic chemical weapon.

Repairs were uncoordinated, a patchwork of gross contrasts. It made travelling interesting, though.

Greg and Eleanor emerged from the spinney into a rectangular clearing which sloped down to the water.

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