The Third Draft

The briefing came back at 4:40 on a Thursday with the word unprecedented struck out for the third time.

Ruth Ellery read the tracked changes on her phone in the lift, because the lift was the only place in the building where nobody could see her face. Someone two floors up had replaced unprecedented with significant. Someone above them had replaced significant with notable. The final reviewer, whose initials she didn’t recognise, had deleted the sentence entirely and written in the margin: Do we need this para? Feels alarmist.

The paragraph in question said that the Murray–Darling’s winter inflows had failed for the second year running and that, on current soil moisture, the Riverland’s stone fruit would not set. It was the least alarmist thing she had ever written. It was a description of dirt.

She put the phone in her bag and let the lift take her to the ground floor, and then she walked out into the kind of heat that had stopped being weather some years ago and had become a place you lived in.

---

The car park had been resurfaced in November and the bitumen was already soft. Her sandals left prints. The dashboard said forty-three, then forty-one as the air conditioning caught up, and she sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, not driving, doing the thing she did now where she ran the numbers again in her head to check that she hadn’t gone mad.

Two failed winters. The third forecast dry. Soil moisture in the deficit band the models said would occur once in a century, occurring for the second time in five years. Wheat in the Mallee at sixty per cent of trend. The Bureau’s own outlook, buried on page nine of a PDF nobody opened, giving a seventy per cent chance of an El Niño by spring, and the models beyond that were the part she didn’t say aloud, because if the Pacific went the way the models thought it would go, then the Indian monsoon went with it, and if India’s wheat and Australia’s wheat and the American corn all failed in the same year, then the word for what happened next wasn’t drought.

She wasn’t a climate scientist. She was careful about that. She had a hydrology degree and eleven years in the Department, and her job was to turn what the scientists said into paragraphs a minister could read on the way to a meeting. She knew exactly how much weight her name carried, which was none, and so she had never once said in a document what she believed. She had only ever said what the data said, and let the data be the alarmist.

The data had been struck out anyway.

She started the car.

---

Dean was in the shed when she got home, which meant the day at the yard had gone badly. Twenty-two years of marriage had taught her the geography of his moods: kitchen for good days, television for ordinary ones, the shed when the numbers didn’t work. Ellery Fabrication did steel frames for sheds and stock yards and the occasional feedlot, and the numbers hadn’t worked properly since the second dry winter, because farmers who weren’t planting weren’t building.

"They cut it again," she said from the doorway.

He didn’t look up from the bench. "Cut what?"

"The fruit paragraph."

"Right." He tightened something. "Which one was that?"

"The one that says there won’t be any fruit."

He put the spanner down then and looked at her, and she could see him deciding whether this was a conversation or a mood, and choosing conversation, which she loved him for and would remember later as one of the things that made it harder.

"They’ll put it back in when it’s true," he said.

"It’s true now."

"Then they’ll put it in when it’s obvious." He wiped his hands. "Ruthie. You’ve been saying the Riverland’s finished since Cameron was in primary school. The Riverland’s still there."

"It’s not finished. It’s failing. Those are different words. Failing takes years, that’s the whole point, that’s why nobody—"

"Okay."

"—nobody does anything, because there’s never a day where it’s happened, there’s only—"

"Okay. I said okay."

She stopped. The shed smelled of cut steel and the dog’s bed and the heat coming off the corrugated iron in waves you could nearly see. She had read once that the human body could not cool itself above a certain wet-bulb temperature, that there was a number, and that when the number was reached it did not matter how fit you were or how much water you drank; you simply cooked, slowly, from the inside. Adelaide was not there. Adelaide was nowhere near there. But she had started, without quite deciding to, keeping a note on her phone of how close it got each summer, and the note was getting longer.

"I want to talk about Tasmania," she said.

Dean laughed, not unkindly. "Again."

"Properly. Not a holiday. I want to look at land."

"With what?"

"With Nana’s shares. Some of them. There’s blocks up the north-west, past Burnie, you can still get forty acres for—"

"Ruth, I’ve got a business."

"I know."

"I’ve got eleven blokes."

"I know that."

"And you want to sell up and go and live in the rain because a paragraph got cut."

She could have said: it isn’t the paragraph. She could have said: it’s the second failed winter, and the El Niño, and the wheat, and the thing I don’t say out loud about India, and it’s the fact that when I try to tell the people whose job it is to know, they fix my adjectives. She could have said: I’m not asking you to believe me, I’m asking you to hedge.

What she said was, "Just come and look. Easter. Four days."

He looked at her for a long moment, and then he picked the spanner up again.

"I’ll think about it," he said, which in the geography of Dean meant no, but slowly.

---

Cameron rang while she was doing the dishes. He rang on Thursdays because Thursdays were when he remembered, and she had stopped minding that it was a scheduled affection, because he was twenty-six and living in Melbourne and rang at all.

"Mum. You sound flat."

"Long day."

"Work?"

"Work." She dried a glass. "How’s the heat over there?"

"Fine. Thirty-eight. We’ve got the aircon in the bedroom now, it’s fine." A pause, and the sound of a tram. "Dad said you’re on about Tassie again."

She closed her eyes. "Dad rang you."

"He texted. He’s worried about you."

"He’s worried about the business."

"He’s worried about you, Mum. He said you’re keeping some kind of temperature diary."

"It’s not a diary, it’s—" She stopped, because she had heard herself, and there was no version of the sentence it’s a wet-bulb log that made her sound like the sane one. "Cam. Can I ask you something and you don’t make it a thing?"

"That’s a thing already."

"If it got bad. Properly bad. If I asked you to come somewhere, would you come?"

The tram noise went away. He’d stepped inside somewhere, or turned a corner.

"Bad how?"

"I don’t know yet. Food. Heat. I don’t know."

"Mum." He said it gently, and the gentleness was worse than if he’d laughed. "You do this. You’ve done this since I was a kid. Remember the water tanks? Remember the year you wouldn’t let us go to the Riverland for Christmas because the river was going to—"

"The river did."

"Two years later, and it came back."

"It came back lower—"

"Mum. Listen to me. It’s going to be fine. It’s always been fine. They’ll sort it, there’s people whose whole job—"

"I’m the people," she said. "Cam. I’m the people whose whole job. And they cut the paragraph."

There was a silence on the line, and in it she heard him decide to be kind, which was the family’s way of deciding not to listen.

"Get some sleep," he said. "Love you. Tell Dad I’ll ring Sunday."

---

She didn’t sleep. At one in the morning she got up and went to the study and opened the laptop and did what she had been doing most nights since November, which was look at maps.

Not the Department’s maps. Her own. She had built them on her own time from public data, because the Department’s models stopped at 2035 and she wanted to see past the edge of the table. She had layered the Bureau’s rainfall projections over the soil maps over the Bureau’s heat-day counts over a crude sea-level overlay she’d made from a CSIRO dataset, and then she had done something she was slightly ashamed of, which was to shade in red the places she thought a person could not reasonably expect to live in twenty years, and green the places they could.

The mainland was mostly red. Not all of it. The Hills had a green smudge, and there was a strip of green down the Victorian coast that she didn’t quite trust, and the south-west corner of WA was green but cut off, an island in everything but geography. And then there was Tasmania, sitting below it all in the westerlies with the Southern Ocean wrapped round it like a wet coat, green from the north-west down the whole wild side of the island, greener than anywhere she could name, and she had known that for a year and had not known how to say it to anyone without sounding like the woman who kept a temperature diary.

She zoomed in on the north-west. Burnie. Wynyard. The dairy country behind it, red soil and rain, forty acres for less than a house in Prospect. There was a listing she’d bookmarked in December and looked at more times than she’d admit, a run-down weatherboard on a hill with a dam and a creek and a paddock going to blackberry, and every time she looked at it she felt something she had not felt at work for years, which was the feeling of a number that added up.

Dean would think about it, slowly. Cameron would be kind. Her parents in Port Augusta would tell her they’d lived through worse, which they had, which was the problem, because the worse they’d lived through had ended.

She saved the map. She closed the laptop. On the way back to bed she stopped at the hall window, where the night outside was thirty-one degrees and still, and the city lights were the colour of a low fever, and she stood there for a while doing the thing she had learned to do instead of panicking, which was to look at what was in front of her and describe it accurately.

Second failed winter. Third forecast dry. Fruit won’t set.

Notable.

She went to bed.