‘Where was he?’
‘In the atrium. I think they tied him to one of the bears.’
‘What a hell of a way to go.’ Julia shuddered, tempted to unrein her hair. ‘He was rather devious, but I liked him. Why did the marshals turn on him? He was leading them out of the dome.’
‘They “flipped”. Willed madness, he called it. Remember Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia? It never occurred to Maxted that he could be the last victim.’
‘And Sangster? I don’t think he got out.’
‘Most people didn’t.’ I held Julia’s shoulder, trying to calm her. ‘Sergeant Falconer, Carradine, all those marshals and engineers who helped him seize the dome. The fire . . .’
‘Did Duncan Christie set it off?’
‘Hard to say. He wasn’t very good at anything. His wife has taken the child and disappeared. I hope he’s with them.’
‘If Christie didn’t start the fire, who did?’
‘No one. The army commander gave the order to turn on the lights. Once the police opened the doors the air flooded in. One spark somewhere was all it needed. Instead of flushing out any snipers they started a solar cult.’
Lips pursed, Julia listened to me. ‘So . . . Geoffrey Fairfax, Maxted, Sangster, Sergeant Falconer, Christie—the people who killed your father are all dead. Except for one.’
‘Julia . . .’ I dropped my stick and embraced her. She held her head from me, exposing her chin and neck, and I could see the scars brought to the surface of her skin like a guilty rash, a last flush of self-contempt. ‘You didn’t kill my father. If you’d known what Fairfax and Sangster had really planned you’d have stopped them.’
‘Would I?’ Julia forced her eyes to look away from the dome. ‘I’m still not sure.’
‘Something very dangerous was happening here. You needed to act.’
‘But the wrong people got hurt, as they usually do.’ Julia retrieved my stick and pressed it into my hand. ‘I have to get to the hospital—all these check-ups, they’re a disease in their own right. I’ll give you a lift home.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll stay here for a while. There are a few things . . .’
WE WALKED TO her car, parked on the nearby kerb. She settled herself behind the wheel, watching me through the bright new windscreen as I arranged my mind.
‘Richard? You’re trying to say something?’
‘Right. Why don’t we meet this weekend—you can stay in my father’s flat?’
‘Your flat, Richard.’ She corrected me solemnly. ‘Your flat.’
‘My flat.’
‘Brave chap. That took some doing. You’re on—I’ll take my chances with a wounded man.’
‘Good. I’ll have to learn how to clean the bath.’
‘I’ll come, if you tell me something. I’ve been thinking about it all week.’ She pointed to the dome and the watching crowds, their impassive faces turned towards the plumes of smoke and water vapour. ‘When you and David Cruise started all this, did you know where it would end?’
‘I can’t say. Perhaps we did . . . in a way, that was the whole idea.’
SHE THOUGHT OVER my reply, once again the serious young doctor, and drove away with a mock-fascist salute. I waved to her until she had gone, inhaling the last traces of her scent on the air. Tapping the ground before each step, I moved through the crowd and found a free place at the railings. The Metro-Centre was as much a tourist attraction as it had ever been. Visitors drove from the motorway towns to gaze at its smoking carcass, once the repository of everything they most valued. None of them, I noticed, was wearing a St George’s shirt. Tom Carradine’s seizure of the dome had sent a seismic jolt through the Heathrow suburbs, and the ground beneath our feet was still shifting.
The policewoman who carried out my debriefing told me that all marches and most of the sports fixtures had been cancelled. Post-match violence and racist attacks had fallen away, and many Asian families were returning to their homes. The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died. The once real possibility of a fascist republic had vanished into the air with all the vapourizing three-piece suites and discount carpeting.
I GRIPPED THE police railing in both hands, the stick crooked over one arm. In some ways the dome reminded me of a crashed airship, one of the vast inter-war zeppelins that belonged to the lost era of the Brooklands racing circuit. But in other ways it resembled the caldera of a resting volcano, still smoking and ready to revive itself. One day it would become active again, spewing over the motorway towns a shower of patio doors and appliance islands, sun loungers and en-suite bathrooms.
I remembered my last moments in the dome, looking back at the fires that raced along the high galleries from one store to the next. In my mind the fires still burned, moving through the streets of Brooklands and the motorway towns, the flames engulfing crescents of modest bungalows, devouring executive estates and community centres, football stadiums and car showrooms, the last bonfire of the consumer gods.
I watched the spectators around me, standing silently at the railing. There were no St George’s shirts, but they watched a little too intently. One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When J. G. Ballard passed in April 2009, the reading world lost one if its most prophetic writers. Over the last century, no other modern fiction writer examined the deleterious effects of technology on culture more unerringly than Ballard, and his surreal, yet richly atmospheric prose has had an indelible effect on Western literature.
Born in Shanghai on November 15, 1930, James Graham Ballard wrote such legendary novels as The Drowned World and Cocaine Nights, but he is most well-known for Crash (1973) and his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), both of which were made into movies and became box office hits. The author of eighteen novels and twenty short story collections, including The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, which was published to great acclaim in 2009, Ballard has been praised as “the most original English writer of the last century” (Martin Amis, The Guardian) and “the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity” (Jason Cowley, The Observer). That his body of work has remained so fresh and shocking makes him a truly unique literary giant, one whose singular imagination will continue to captivate readers for generations to come.
Copyright © 2006 by J. G. Ballard
First American Edition 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ballard, J. G., 1930–2009.
Kingdom come / J.G. Ballard. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-87140-403-9 (hardcover)
1. Advertising executives—Fiction. 2. Consumption (Economics)—Social
aspects—England—Fiction. 3. Suburban life—England—Fiction. I. Title.
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