The Iron Woman by Ted Hughes Page B

For one thing, it was not only Lucy’s father whose hair had gone white. Every man who had been a fish, or a seal, or a water-bug, or aleech, now had white hair. Men who had been grizzled, or nearly grey, or grey, stared into their mirrors at their silvery white hair and cried: ‘Oh God, I look like Granny!’ or else ‘But my face isn’t any older, is it?’ And young men whose hair had been curly gold or glossy auburn brown or mousy hardly dared catch sight of themselves in their car mirror, or in a shop window. ‘It’s no wonder,’ they said to their wives or girlfriends. ‘What we went through was no joke. Worse than seeing a thousand ghosts! You’d have gone white too.’ Within days, hairdressers and chemists were out of hair dye.
    But other things had changed for the better. Everybody realized straightaway that the terrible scream no longer blasted them when they touched each other. Instead they now heard it all the time, but only faintly – like a ringing in the ears. And strangely enough, it came and went.
    It was easy to see what made it come. When you looked at the waste bin, it came noticeably stronger. And when you poured soap powder into the washing machine, it seemed to zoom in on you and go past very close, like a jet going over the house – but a jet powered with those screams. It was a bit of a shock. And when Mr Wells, with his little white moustache, looked at his stacked drums of toxic waste, it came nearly full strength, a painful screech in his ears, like something coming straight at him, and he had to look away quickly.
    So nobody could forget. Farmers stood in their fields, listening and thinking. Factory owners sat in their offices, listening and thinking. The Prime Minister sat with his Cabinet Ministers, listening and thinking – and whoever spoke, the others looked at the speaker’s weirdly white hair and listened more carefully, and thought more deeply.
    They had all learned a frightening lesson. But what could they do about it?
    They soon found out.
     *
    Already, next morning, an odd thing was noticed. The first men back to work at Chicago saw a yellow net, like a massive spider’s web, draped thickly over the stacks of drums full of poisonous chemicals. Each strand was the thickness of a pencil, and brittle, so it broke up into short lengths. It was a mystery.
    The same webs were draped over all the waste dumps in the country. Over all the rubbish heaps. Over all the lagoons of cattle slurry. The same stuff.
    Chemists were baffled by it when they tried to find out what it was. But pretty soon they found what it was good for. It was the perfect fuel. Dissolved in water, it would do everything that oil and petrol would do, yet fish could live in it. It would burn in a fireplace with a grand flame but no fumes of any kind. And that first morning there were thousands of tons of it.
    Next morning, the same. And now everybody could see that the rubbish and the poisonous waste were being mysteriously changed into these yellow webs during the night.
    Even if you had a little rubbish heap in your back garden , you would have a web on it next morning. Or a web where it had been. Then you could dissolve it in water and run your car on it for a while.
    Strange!
    People soon realized what was happening. At nightfall , a mist gathered over any rubbish, wherever it might be. A dark, webby, smoky mist. Just like the clouds of puff that had bubbled from those suffering men when they were fish and newts and frogs. And next morning there was the yellow web – and the rubbish had gone. Or most of it had. Another night and it would be all gone. As if the mist had eaten the rubbish and left a web.
    No wonder they called it a miracle. It happened in no other country.
    But wherever the rubbish or the waste leaked into a stream or a pond, the mist would not form. Once that leak was stopped, sure enough next night the webs would come. So everybody stopped those leaks because everybody wanted the magic