Chapter Ten

A/N: As always, thanks to MissyHissy3 for her time, her eagle eyes and her advice.

And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

The Waste Land – TS Eliot

Ten tons of topsoil arrived the following week, accompanied by three tons of what Kathryn had assured Tom was 'well-rotted' manure, not that he'd know the difference if it hadn't been. To his surprise, she'd trusted him to take delivery of the whole lot alone.

"I have something else I have to do that morning," she said, as she'd told him when it would arrive. "I'll be on the end of a line if you need me. But you won't. You'll be fine. You can handle it."

Tom hadn't quite known what to say to that. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been trusted to do anything. It was possible it had never happened before at all. His father certainly wouldn't have dreamed of leaving his son in charge of unloading the dishwasher, let alone taking delivery of the thirteen tons of soil and fertilizer that would form the physical foundation of this major project.

He'd spent several sleepless nights worrying about somehow getting it wrong. Tom envisioned discovering too late that he'd accepted the wrong sort of dirt – what was topsoil, anyway? Was there also bottomsoil? If so, what was the difference? How would he be able to tell? – and he had trawled the Internet looking for hints. According to Kathryn, first the soil and manure would be delivered, and then the whole area would need a rotorvator to work it over. After that they could start the real work of building the garden, although Kathryn had yet to finalise exactly what that would entail. She'd confided to Tom that she was still hoping to receive input from the local community, although to him that seemed to be a dwindling hope.

Now, finally, Tom's day of reckoning was here. The deliveries were due to arrive at 7am, but he'd been at the site since five, unable to sleep anyway and wanting to be present just in case the trucks arrived early. They hadn't, which had meant standing around waiting for two hours. But at least he'd been able to make himself plenty of coffee. The coffee machine had appeared, unmentioned by Kathryn, a week ago. Since then it had rarely been out of use. Tom clutched a fresh mug of it now as he watched the third load of soil being dumped in the corner he'd specified. There was something satisfying about watching the huge cascade of earth falling from the truck into the exact area he had indicated. The driver hadn't even batted an eyelid when Tom had appeared in his hardhat and started issuing instructions, as if questioning Tom's authority on this matter hadn't even entered his mind at all. It was a good feeling. As if he'd done something right for a change…

"This is all such a massive waste of time."

The voice came from somewhere just south of his shoulder. Tom turned to find B'Elanna Torres standing beside him, watching the trucks' progress with a grim look on her face. It was the first time since his stilted apology several weeks ago that they had spoken, not to mention the first time she had instigated any form of communication at all. Tom wasn't sure what to say. He wanted to defend the project but also didn't want to fracture this fragile moment of progress. She was still the most gorgeous girl he'd ever seen in real life. Not that she seemed to know or care.

"You don't think maybe you could give it a chance?" he suggested. "Maybe if more people were willing to do that, it wouldn't be the waste of time everyone's assuming it will be."

"No, I mean –" Torres shook her head impatiently, making a sound in her throat, "it's literally a waste of time. A garden, here? It's just going to die. Where's the water for it supposed to come from? Maybe up in Pasadena they haven't noticed that California has hardly had any rain for the last six years – maybe up there there's some kind of private reservoir that never runs dry, or El Nino turned things around – but here, we're already pretty screwed without trying to build a garden that's going to take water we don't have for ourselves, let alone for a bunch of plants."

Tom opened his mouth and then shut it again. This wasn't something he'd thought about, although he couldn't believe that Kathryn hadn't. "I guess we'll have to put in plants that don't use much water," he said.

Torres gave him a withering look. "Great, so you're going to plant a load of cacti? Hooray for us, getting our own doorstep desert. Aren't we lucky."

"Well then – what do you suggest?" he asked.

"Me?" she asked, looking a little taken aback at the question, as if she wasn't used to anyone asking her opinion on anything. Tom knew the feeling.

"Yeah. If a garden's a dumb idea, what's a better one? If you can think of something, you should talk to Kathryn about it. She's only gone with a garden because it's what she knows and no one else around here seems to be interested in making any other suggestions. But if someone comes up with something better, she'll listen. I know she will."

B'Elanna's face took on a steely glare as she stared out across the wasteland to where the final truck was now spreading its load. "Like you'll get me talking to her again. No thanks."

Tom frowned. "Kathryn's all right, you know. If you gave her a chance-" He stopped, seeing the glint of anger in B'Elanna's eyes and unwilling to lose her now. "Anyway, I think-"

"It's not that I think a garden's a totally bad idea," Torres said, in a rush. "I just can't see it working here. Not without some plan to provide water. Like, from somewhere other than a reservoir or the sky."

"But where else would you get water from?"

"The way I see it," Torres said, uncrossing her arms and reaching out to twine her fingers around the metal fence in front of them, "the best way of getting what you haven't got is to make it out of something you've got a lot of that you don't need."

Tom stared at her. He wondered whether she'd just started talking a different language. At his silence, B'Elanna looked at him and rolled her eyes at the blank look on his face.

"You think backwards. You look at what you have too much of, and you say, okay, well, I don't need that, but I do need this. So what do I have to do to that to make it into this? Like…" she cast about for an example. "I don't know, say you have a whole load of-"

Her words were drowned out by the noise of an engine rumbling into the street behind them. With it came the stench of rotting refuse. It was trash collection day. The two teens turned to watch as the bright-jacketed workers jumped out of their rig to drag another plethora of sacks from the side of the road, flinging them into the back of the stinking truck.

"Like a whole load of rotting food," B'Elanna shouted over the noise, nodding her head at the truck as it continued on its way. "You say, hey, we've got way too much food waste. But what we need is water. So how can I make the food waste into water? How can we turn what we've got into what we need?"

Tom shrugged, perplexed. "How would you?"

Torres shook her head. The glare had gone, though, replaced by a thoughtful look. "How the hell would I know? I guess you'd need to construct some sort of filtered compactor. But it'd probably need some chemical reaction, too. And then you'd have to remove that chemical from the water to make it safe. But I bet you could do it. There must be loads of water that just ends up in landfill because it's trapped inside half a rotting mango or a loaf of old bread. There must be a way of reclaiming it."

The dumper turned a corner, rattling away in a haze of noise and stench. Tom watched as B'Elanna's eyes stayed fixed on the space it had left. He could almost see the cogs turning in her head.

"What do you want to do?" he asked. "When you graduate high school, I mean?"

Torres glanced at him with a look that managed to be amused and bitter at the same time. "That's sweet."

"What is?"

"That you think I'm going to graduate high school."

"Come on," Tom protested. "You're smart. Anyone can see that."

B'Elanna shrugged. "Since when did that mean anything in the real world?"

Tom was silent for a moment. "If I could do anything in the world that I wanted, I'd want to be a pilot," he said, quietly. "I'd fly things that no one has ever flown before, faster than anyone has ever flown before. I'd go out to the edge of the atmosphere and every time I did no one down here would be sure that I'd come back in one piece. But I'd know. Because I'd be the best damn pilot anyone's ever seen."

Torres was watching him. Just for a second, Tom thought she might actually understand what he was saying, even though he'd never voiced that particular dream aloud before.

"I'd want to invent things," she said, then. "Amazing things. Things that would change the world. Made out of metal, maybe. Like your planes. If I built planes, I'd build the best damn planes anyone had ever seen. I'd look up and I'd see them flying overhead, and I'd think, I built that. Me. If you flew one of my planes, Tom, you'd always know you were coming back to earth in one piece."

It was the first time she'd called him by his name, and it made him smile. Tom hadn't even been sure she'd known what it was. Something across the site caught his eye. One of the drivers was waving him over: the delivery was done.

"You'd like to make things better," Tom said, as he moved past B'Elanna and headed for the gate. "So does Kathryn. Maybe that's something you two have in common."

Tom headed out over the newly poured earth. It was dry under his feet. He turned mid-stride.

"Waste food into water," he called back to her, over the wind picking up across the square. "I bet you could do it. I bet you could make it work, B'Elanna Torres. And then this place wouldn't be a massive waste of time. Would it?"

[TBC]