Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  I switched on the radio and tuned in to the reports of rescue work at Terminal 2. The airport was closed indefinitely, as police searched for explosives in the other three terminals. Scarcely noticed by the newspapers, several small bombs had detonated in London during the summer, mostly smoke and incendiary devices unclaimed by any terrorist group, part of the strange metropolitan weather. Bombs were left in a Shepherd’s Bush shopping mall and a cineplex in Chelsea. There were no warnings and, luckily, no casualties. A quiet fever burned in the mind of some brooding solitary, a candle of disaffection that threw ever-longer shadows. Yet I only heard about the incendiary device that destroyed a McDonald’s in the Finchley Road, a mile from our house, when I glanced through the local free-sheet left by Sally’s manicurist. London was under siege from a shy, invisible enemy.

  ‘We’re here,’ Sally told me. ‘Now, take it easy.’

  We had reached Ashford Hospital. Outside the Accident and Emergency entrance the ambulance lights rotated ceaselessly, hungry radars eager to suck any news of pain and injury from the sky. Paramedics sipped their mugs of tea, ready to be recalled to Heathrow.

  ‘Sally, you must be tired.’ I smoothed her hair as we waited to enter the car park. ‘Do you want to stay outside?’

  ‘I’ll come in.’

  ‘It could be nasty.’

  ‘It’s nasty out here. This is for me, too, David.’

  She released the brake lever, pulled sharply onto the pavement and overtook a Jaguar driven by an elderly nun. A security man leaned through Sally’s window, noticed the adapted controls and beckoned us into the car park of a nearby supermarket, where the police had set up a command post.

  The Jaguar pulled in beside us, and the nun stepped out and opened the door for a grey-haired priest, some monsignor ready to give the last rites. I was helping Sally from the car when I noticed a bearded figure in a white raincoat outside the Accident and Emergency entrance. He was staring over the heads of the police and ambulance drivers, eyes fixed on the silent sky, as if expecting a long-awaited aircraft to fly over the hospital and break the spell. He carried a woman’s handbag, holding it against his chest, a life-support package that might work its desperate miracle.

  Distractedly, he offered the bag to a concerned paramedic who spoke to him. His eyes were hidden by the ambulance lights, but I could see his mouth opening and closing, a subvocal speech addressed to no one around him. Despite all our years at the Adler, the tiresome clients and their impossible secretaries, this was the first time I had seen Henry Kendall completely at a loss.

  ‘David?’ Sally waited for me to lift her from the driving seat. When I hesitated, she moved her legs out of the car, seized the door pillar in both hands and stood up. Around her were endless rows of parked cars, a silent congregation that worshipped death. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘It looks like it. Henry’s over there.’

  ‘Grim…’ Sally followed my raised hand. ‘He’s waiting for you.’

  ‘Poor man, he’s not waiting for anything.’

  ‘Laura? She can’t be…’

  ‘Stay here. I’ll talk to him. If he can hear anything I say…’

  Five minutes later, after trying to comfort Henry, I walked back to Sally. She stood by the car, a stick in each hand, blonde hair falling across her shoulders. Carrying Laura’s handbag, I stepped around the monsignor’s Jaguar, sorry that our aggressive driving had delayed his arrival by even a few seconds.

  I embraced Sally tightly, aware that I was trembling. I held the handbag under my arm, realizing that Laura’s death had driven a small space between us.

  4

  The Last Rival

  AS I LEFT the chapel and joined the mourning party in the sunlight, a passenger jet was making its descent towards Heathrow. I watched it ease its way over the Deer Park at Richmond, above the disused observatory where the Astronomer Royal had once scanned the imperial heaven. Perhaps the airliner was bringing back to London the last delegates to the Celebration conference, skins toned by the Florida air, minds numbed by the babble of podium-speak.

  In my secretary’s office that morning I had scanned the e-mail summaries of the papers. The confident claims for the new corporate psychology seemed to float above the world like a regatta of hot-air balloons, detached from the reality of modern death that the mourners at the west London crematorium had gathered to respect. The psychologists at the Adler were trying to defuse the conflicts of the workplace, but the threats from beyond the curtain-walling were ever more real and urgent. No one was safe from the motiveless psychopath who roamed the car parks and baggage carousels of our everyday lives. A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence.

  The airliner soared over Twickenham, undercarriage lowered, confident that firm ground waited for it at Heathrow. Still unsettled by Laura’s death, I imagined a bomb exploding in the cargo-hold, scattering the scorched lectures on the psychology of the new century across the rooftops of west London. The fragments would rain down on blameless video shops and Chinese takeaways, to be read by bemused housewives, the fading blossom of the disinformation age.

  My colleagues at the Adler, uncomfortable in their dark suits, stood in small groups as the organ voluntary sounded from the chapel’s loudspeakers. Henry Kendall was talking to the funeral director, a suave figure in morning dress with the air of a senior concierge who could always supply tickets to the most sought-after shows, in this world or the next.

  Henry, I was glad to see, had recovered from his moments of despair outside Ashford Hospital. He had shaved off his beard, clearing away the past now that he faced a future without Laura. He had grown the beard soon after the start of their affair, and I always suspected that this was an ill omen. He had aged rapidly during his time with Laura, and already he looked younger, with the keen edge to his eye that he had first brought to the Adler.

  I nodded to Professor Arnold, the Institute’s director, an affable but shrewd man with the mind of a small-claims lawyer, well aware that he was surrounded by rivals eager to take his job. Laura’s death had unsettled them all, reminding them how much she had once despised them. She would have been amazed by the presence of her former colleagues – ‘grey men with hang-ups they cling to like comfort blankets,’ she once remarked – and would have laughed the lid off her coffin if she had heard the straight-faced tributes to her. For years she had nagged me to leave the Adler and set up in practice on my own, claiming that my loyalty to the Institute concealed a refusal to grow up. During our last years together, I needed the security that the Adler offered, and when she resigned to set up a consultancy of her own I knew that our marriage was over.

  But then security was not something that Laura ever pretended to offer. I remembered her sharp humour and the depressions that showed a warmer and more interesting side, and the sudden enthusiasms that made everything seem possible. Sadly, I was far too stable and cautious for her. Once she deliberately provoked me into slamming a door in her face. A torrent of blood sprang from her strong nose, about which she had always been sensitive. Strangely, it was the blood on the face of the injured woman by the baggage carousel that had first made me think of Laura.

  Leaving the mourners, I strolled along the display of flowers, each a burst of colour that reminded me of another explosion. The bomb in Terminal 2 had detonated as the baggage on a BA flight from Zurich was reaching the carousel. There had been no warning, and no organization claimed responsibility for all the deaths and injuries. Nothing explained why these passengers had been targeted, a group of bank couriers, holidaymakers and Swiss wives visiting their London-based husbands. Laura had been speaking to an urban-studies seminar run by Nestlé. She died in the intensive-care unit at Ashford Hospital, half an hour before our arrival, her heart torn by a shard of the timing mechanism that had set off the bomb.

  I strolled back to the chapel, leaving the flowers to shine their last at the afternoon sun. The mourners
were returning to their cars, ready for the consoling Montrachet that Professor Arnold would offer in lieu of a wake. Henry Kendall stood on the chapel steps, talking to a thickset man with pale ginger hair who wore a sheepskin coat over his suit. I had seen him in the back row when I entered the chapel, scanning the mourners as if familiarizing himself with the men in Laura’s life. He left when I approached, and walked briskly to his car.

  ‘David…’ Henry held my arm. He seemed affable and confident, relieved that more than the funeral was over. ‘I’m glad you came.’

  ‘It went well.’ I gestured at the departing mourners. ‘Short, but…’

  ‘Laura would have hated it. All those bogus last words. I’m amazed everyone turned up.’

  ‘They couldn’t keep away. She’d frightened the wits out of all of them. You look…’

  ‘Fine, fine…’ Henry turned from me, a hand feeling his cheek. He was searching for his beard, aware that his handsome face and all its insecurities were open to the air. Not for the first time, I suspected that it was nothing more than his looks, and a certain passivity, that Laura found attractive. In his eyes we had always been rivals, and he was puzzled whenever I failed to follow up a chance of weakening his position. His affair with Laura was in part an attempt to flush me out. I liked him, but I could afford to, knowing that he would never become director of the Adler.

  I pointed to the man in the sheepskin coat, now sitting alone in the car park, large hands resting on the steering wheel. ‘Who is he? Some old flame of Laura’s?’

  ‘I hope not. Major Tulloch, ex-Gibraltar Police. A bit of a bruiser. He’s attached to the Home Office, in some kind of antiterrorist unit.’

  ‘He’s looking into the Heathrow bomb? Any news?’

  ‘Hard to make out. Intelligence people always know less than you think. He wanted to talk to you before the service, but you looked a little preoccupied.’

  ‘Weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ Henry smiled shiftily, still testing me out. ‘According to Tulloch they’ve found a suspicious poster near the baggage reclaim in Terminal 2.’

  ‘Connected with the bomb?’

  ‘It’s possible. Someone crammed a bag into an air shaft behind a lavatory cubicle. Only fifty feet from the bomb.’

  ‘It might have been there for months. Or years.’

  Henry gazed at me patiently, nodding to himself as if confirming something that Laura had once said about me. ‘Yes, but one can be too sceptical. Some things we have to take at face value. There was a tape protesting against holiday flights to the Third World. You know, sexual tourism, concreting over native habitats. The marina culture.’

  ‘In Switzerland?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Aware that he had unsettled me, Henry lowered his voice. ‘Do you want to talk to Tulloch? The Home Office values our expertise.’

  ‘On violent death? I don’t think I have any.’

  ‘They’re worried about new terrorist groups. Thrill-seekers with a taste for random violence. There’s been a spate of bombings recently, mostly hushed up. In fact, Tulloch asked if I’d like to work for them. Unofficially, that is. Join demos, stand back and observe, map the emerging psychology.’

  ‘Go undercover?’

  ‘Semi-undercover.’

  ‘Will you?’ I waited for him to reply. ‘Henry?’

  ‘Hard to say. In a way I owe it to Laura.’

  ‘You owe her nothing. There are hundreds of these groups. “Defend the Killer Whale.” “Save the Smallpox Virus.”’

  ‘Exactly, where would you start? Tulloch admits there’s an element of danger.’

  ‘Really? Keep clear, Henry.’

  ‘Sound advice. Perhaps too sound.’ As we shook hands, he said: ‘Tell me, David – why did you drive to the hospital? Ashford is a long way from St John’s Wood.’

  ‘We were worried about Laura. And about you.’

  ‘Good. By the way, Laura’s handbag…?’

  ‘It’s in my car. I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘Fair enough. Did you open it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know the feeling. There are some secrets that none of us can face.’

  I watched him drive off, leaving me alone with Tulloch. Wisps of smoke rose from the crematorium chimney while the combustion chamber warmed to its fiercest temperature. There was a puff of darker smoke, as if part of Laura had freed itself from the drag-anchor of her body – perhaps a hand that had once caressed me, or the soft foot that would touch mine while she slept. I watched the smoke rising, a series of bursts as if this dead woman was signalling to me. Under my dark suit my shirt was drenched with sweat. Her death had freed me from all resentments, all pain of memory. I remembered the quirky young woman I had met in the bar at the National Film Theatre, and invited to a late-night screening of Antonioni’s Passenger.

  Major Tulloch was watching me from his car, while the smoke rose rapidly into the sky. I resented the presence of this thuggish policeman, sitting in his slaughterman’s coat as my wife’s body dispersed into the sky. But he knew that I needed to find her killer, hunting down the secret love of Laura’s life, and my last rival.

  5

  Confrontation at Olympia

  AROUND ME EVERYONE was calm, a sure sign that the moment of crisis had come. Cheered by the arrival of a television camera crew, the demonstrators were resolute, their confidence boosted by the sense that a larger audience was sharing their indignation. They waved their hand-lettered placards and jeered good-humouredly at the visitors entering the Olympia exhibition. But the police seemed bored, usually an omen of violent action. Already they were tired of this pointless protest, one group of cat lovers ranged against another.

  Locking arms with two middle-aged women from Wimbledon, I stood in the front row of demonstrators in Hammersmith Road. As the traffic cleared, we surged across the eastbound lane towards the watching police, like an advancing chorus in an agit-prop musical. Behind me, a young woman held aloft a banner.

  ‘A CAT IN HELL’S CHANCE? STOP BREEDING NOW!’

  Leaning back, I tried to restrain my Wimbledon partners from colliding into the nearest group of constables. By now, two months after Laura’s funeral, I was a veteran of a dozen demos. I knew that however difficult it was to read the shifts in crowd psychology, the mood of the police was impossible to predict. In a few seconds, with the departure of a radio van or the arrival of a senior officer, friendly banter could turn into outright hostility. After a flurry of concealed blows, we would be forced to withdraw, leaving some grey-haired man on the pavement with a broken placard and a bloody nose.

  ‘Moggie, moggie, moggie…out, out, out!’

  We surged across the road again, fists drumming on the roof of a taxi bringing more visitors to the cat show. As we reached the line of surly constables I noticed once again how huge the police seemed when one stepped up to them, and how they construed almost any behaviour as threatening. Pushed forward by the scrum of demonstrators, I brushed against a small policewoman dwarfed by her male colleagues. She was looking over my shoulder, quite unfrightened by the noisy crowd. Barely changing her stance, she kicked me twice in the right shin.

  ‘Mr Markham? Are you all right? Lean on me…’

  The young woman with the ‘CAT IN HELL’S CHANCE’ banner gripped me around the waist. Bent double in the scrum of police and protesters, I joined the retreat across Hammersmith Road, limping and hopping on one leg.

  ‘That was vicious. Totally unprovoked. Mr Markham, can you breathe?’

  Likeable and intense, Angela was a computer programmer in Kingston with a husband and two children. We had teamed up soon after our arrival at Olympia, bought tickets and carried out a reconnaissance of the vast cat show, with its five hundred exhibitors and its population of the world’s most pampered pets.

  I gripped her hand and sat on the entrance steps of a block of mansion flats. Rolling up my trousers, I touched the huge blood-bruises already forming.

  ‘I’ll walk ag
ain. I think…’ I pointed to the policewoman, now efficiently on traffic duty, moving the lines of waiting cars towards Kensington and Hammersmith Broadway. ‘She was nasty. I hate to imagine what’s she’s like in bed.’

  ‘Unspeakable. Don’t even think about it.’ Angela stared across the road with narrowed eyes and all a suburbanite’s unlimited capacity for moral outrage. Walking around the exhibition two hours earlier, I was impressed by her unswerving commitment to the welfare of these luxurious pets. The protest rallies I had recently attended against globalization, nuclear power and the World Bank were violent but well thought out. By contrast, this demonstration against the Olympia cat show seemed endearingly Quixotic in its detachment from reality. I tried to point this out to Angela as we strolled along the lines of cages.

  ‘Angela, they look so happy…’ I gestured at the exquisite creatures – Persians, Korats and Russian blues, Burmese and colourpoint short-hairs, drowsing on their immaculate straw, coats puffed and gleaming after their shampoos and sets. ‘They’re wonderfully cared for. We’re trying to rescue them from heaven.’

  Angela never varied her step. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Just watch them.’ We stopped in front of a row of Abyssinians so deeply immersed in the luxury of being themselves that they barely noticed the admiring crowds. ‘They’re not exactly unhappy. They’d be prowling around, trying to get out of the cages.’

  ‘They’re drugged.’ Angela’s brows knotted. ‘Mr Markham, no living creature should be caged. This isn’t a cat show, it’s a concentration camp.’

  ‘Still, they are rather gorgeous.’