Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘They’re bred for death, not life. The rest of the litter are drowned at birth. It’s a vicious eugenic experiment, the sort of thing Dr Mengele got up to. Think about that, Mr Markham.’

  ‘I do, Angela…’

  We completed our circuit of the upper gallery. Angela noted the exits, the ancient elevators and stairs, the fire escapes and surveillance cameras. The ground floor was dominated by manufacturers’ stands, displays of health tonics for cats, toys and climbing frames, cosmetics and grooming kits. Every worldly pleasure a cat could experience was lavishly provided.

  But logic was not the strongest suit of the protest movements, as I had found during the past two months. On the day after Laura’s funeral I began to scan the listings magazines and internet sites for details of the more extreme protest rallies, searching for fringe groups with a taste for violence. One of these fanatical sects, frustrated by its failure to puncture the soft underbelly of bourgeois life, might have set off the Heathrow bomb.

  I decided not to contact Major Tulloch and the Home Office, who would have an agenda of their own and write off the Heathrow atrocity when it no longer served their purpose. The police, Henry Kendall told me, were making little progress in their investigation. They now discounted the holdall with its audio-cassette stuffed into the lavatory air vent near the Terminal 2 carousel. The muddled threats about Third-World tourism belonged to the deluded mind-set of some backpacker returning from Goa or Kathmandu, head clouded by pot and amphetamines.

  The forensic teams had combed through every fragment of glass, metal and plastic. Curiously, they found no trace of a barometric device designed to set off a mid-air explosion. The bomb had been furnished with an acid-capsule trigger, probably primed no more than five minutes before the explosion. Not only had Laura’s death been meaningless, but the killer was almost certainly among the fleeing crowd we had watched on television.

  Protest movements, sane and insane, sensible and absurd, touched almost every aspect of life in London, a vast web of demonstrations that tapped a desperate need for a more meaningful world. There was scarcely a human activity that was not the target of a concerned group ready to spend its weekends picketing laboratories, merchant banks and nuclear-fuel depots, trudging up muddy lanes to defend a badger sett, lying across a motorway to halt the reviled race enemy of all demonstrators, the internal combustion engine.

  Far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country’s civic traditions, along with the Lord Mayor’s parade, Ascot week and Henley Regatta. At times, as I joined a demonstration against animal experiments or Third-World debt, I sensed that a primitive religion was being born, a faith in search of a god to worship. Congregations roamed the streets, hungry for a charismatic figure who would emerge sooner or later from the wilderness of a suburban shopping mall and scent a promising wind of passion and credulity.

  Sally was my field researcher, scanning the net for advance news of obscure protest rallies, and only too keen to help. Both of us had been shaken by Laura’s death, Sally more than I expected. Using her sticks again, she moved around the house with the same wristy determination she had shown in the physiotherapy unit at St Mary’s where I had first courted her. She was returning to the period of wounded time when she was obsessed with Frida Kahlo and their shared tram accidents. If only for Sally’s sake, I needed to crack the conundrum of Laura’s death.

  From the backs of halls, and behind the barricades at protest meetings, I searched the rows of determined faces for a genuinely disturbed mind, some deranged loner eager to live out a dream of violence. But in fact almost all the demonstrators were good-humoured members of the middle class – level-headed students and health-care professionals, doctors’ widows and grandmothers working on Open University degree courses. Some prick of conscience, some long-dormant commitment to principle, brought them out into the cold and rain.

  The only frightening people I met were the police and television crews. The police were morose and unpredictable, paranoid about any challenge to their authority. The television reporters were little more than agents provocateurs, forever trying to propel the peaceful protests into violent action. Neutrality was the most confrontational stance of all, while the nearest I came to an exponent of political violence was Angela, the Kingston housewife and cat lover.

  As I sat on the steps of the mansion block, she produced antiseptic spray and surgical lint from her jacket. She cleaned my wounds and sprayed the stinging vapour over the weals. All the while she kept a baleful eye on the policewoman, now threatening to arrest two cyclists who had stopped to observe the demo.

  ‘Feel better?’ Angela flexed my knee. ‘I’d visit your doctor pronto.’

  ‘I’m fine. I ought to bring a complaint, but I didn’t see her move.’

  ‘You never do.’

  I pointed to the medical kit. ‘You were expecting trouble?’

  ‘Of course. People feel very strongly.’

  ‘For the cats?’

  ‘They’re political prisoners. Start experimenting on animals and human beings will be next.’ She smiled with surprising sweetness and kissed my forehead, a field decoration for a valiant trooper. With a wave, she left me to look after myself.

  Touched by her warmth, I watched the protesters regroup and make a second attempt to block the exhibition hall’s entrance foyer and ticket office. Placards rose into the air, and a pole carried a small cage occupied by a stuffed marmalade cat, paws handcuffed through the bars. A stream of yellow plastic confetti struck the policewoman, dribbling across her uniform jacket. Brushing the sticky threads from her chin, she stepped into the group of demonstrators and tried to seize the aerosol can from a young man in a tiger mask.

  An ugly struggle broke out, blocking the traffic in Hammersmith Road, a series of running scuffles that left half a dozen middle-aged protesters sitting stunned beside the wheels of stalled taxis. But I was watching Angela as she crossed the road, hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. She ignored the demonstrators wrestling with the police, and held the arm of a ponytailed man who stepped from the pavement to join her.

  I stood up and made my way towards the exhibition hall, walking through the startled tourists and curious passers-by who were milling about in the centre of the road. Angela and her ponytailed companion moved through the entrance foyer, arms around each other’s waists, like lovers immersed in their own world.

  I was following them past the ticket office when I heard a thunderflash explode in the exhibition hall. Startled by the harsh air burst, and the re-echo of slammed doors, the visitors around me flinched and ducked behind each other. A second thunderflash detonated in the overhead gallery, lighting up the mirrors in the antique lifts. An elderly couple in front of me stumbled into a pyramid of jewelled flea collars, throwing it to the floor in a gaudy sprawl.

  A violent struggle was taking place among the cages on the main floor. Angela and the ponytailed man forced their way through the confused breeders and wrenched the doors off the display hutches. I guessed that a group of infiltrators had been waiting for the police to be distracted by the commotion in Hammersmith Road, giving them time to carry out their action.

  I limped after Angela, aware that she would be no match for the outraged breeders. A police sergeant and two constables overtook me through the crowd, ducking their heads as a third thunderflash exploded inside a sales pavilion filled with quilted baskets.

  A large cat, a sleekly groomed Maine Coon, streaked towards us, paused to get its bearings in the forest floor of human legs, and darted between the sergeant’s boots. The sight of this liberated creature sent a spasm of rage through the onlookers. One of the constables blundered into me, pushed me aside and ran after Angela. Her ponytailed companion brandished a can of tear gas, holding back a circle of breeders while Angela snapped the cage locks with a pair of cutters.

  The sergeant hurled Angela’s colleague aside, struck the cutters from her hands and seized her shoulders from behind. He lifted her in
to the air like a child and threw her at his feet among the sawdust and scattered rosettes. As he lifted her again, ready to hurl this small and stunned woman to the cement floor, I ran forward and gripped his arm.

  Less than a minute later I was lying on the floor, my face in the sawdust, hands cuffed behind me. I had been viciously kicked by the angry breeders, shouting down my pleas that I was defending a Kingston housewife, cat lover and mother of two.

  I rolled onto my back, as the sirens sounded in Hammersmith Road and the Olympia loudspeakers urged visitors to remain calm. The protest had ended and the last cordite vapour from the thunderflashes drifted under the ceiling lights. Breeders straightened their cages and comforted their ruffled pets, and a saleswoman rebuilt the pyramid of flea collars. Angela and the ponytailed man had slipped away, but the police bundled several handcuffed demonstrators towards the exit.

  Two police officers lifted me to my feet. The younger, a black constable baffled by the huge menagerie of cats and the attention lavished on them, dusted the straw from my jacket. He waited as I tried to breathe through my bruised ribs.

  ‘You have something against cats?’ he asked.

  ‘Just against cages.’

  ‘Too bad. You’re going into one.’

  I inhaled deeply, looking at the overhead lights. I realized that a second odour had replaced the tang of cordite. As the thunderflashes exploded, a thousand terrified creatures had joined in a collective act of panic, and the exhibition hall was filled with the potent stench of feline urine.

  6

  Rescue

  A LESS BRACING scent, the odour of the guilty and unwashed, hung over the magistrates’ court in Hammersmith Grove. I waited in the back row of the public seats, trying to hear the bench’s verdict on a mother of three accused of soliciting outside Queen’s Tennis Club. She was a depressed woman in her early forties, barely literate and in desperate need of remedial care. Her mumbled plea was drowned by the ceaseless activity in the court as solicitors, accused, police officers, ushers and witnesses roamed up and down the aisles, a cast straight from the pages of Lewis Carroll. What was being dispensed was not justice but a series of tired compromises with the inevitable, the calls of a harassed referee at a chaotic football match.

  I had been fined £100 and bound over to keep the peace. My solicitor’s claim that I was an innocent visitor to Olympia who had tried to defend a woman demonstrator from unprovoked police violence was ignored by the magistrates. The guilt of everyone brought before the court – petty thieves, drink drivers, animal rights protesters – was taken for granted. Only contrition carried the slightest weight. My solicitor rattled off my professional qualifications, lack of a criminal record and good standing in the community. But a police sergeant I had never seen before testified that I featured in numerous surveillance films and frequently attended violent street demonstrations.

  The magistrates stared at me darkly, assuming that I was one of those middle-class professionals who was a traitor to the civil order and deserved the sharpest of short, sharp shocks. Before sentence I explained that I was searching for the murderers of my first wife, at which point the chief magistrate closed his eyes.

  ‘At a cat show?’

  Afterwards my solicitor offered me a lift to central London, but to his relief I declined. I needed to find somewhere to rest, even in the bedlam of the magistrates’ court. The vicious kicks that the cat lovers had aimed at my chest and genitals three days earlier, and rough handling in the police van, had left me with badly bruised arms and ribs, and a swollen testicle that startled Sally. Standing in the dock was deeply embarrassing, but I was too exhausted to sense any real shame. Many of the patients treated at the Adler felt a vast sourceless guilt, but none of those convicted by the magistrates showed the slightest remorse. Justice achieved nothing, wasted police time and trivialized itself.

  I rested on the punitive wooden pew, as the court heard a plea that the next case be referred to a jury trial. A confident woman in a tailored suit stood before the bench, gesturing in a theatrical way with a sheaf of documents in her hand. Behind her, standing at the altar table that served as a dock, were the accused, a young Chinese woman with black bangs and a combative expression, and an uneasy clergyman in dog collar and motorcycle jacket, eyes lowered over unshaven cheeks. Together they were charged with a breach of the peace in a Shepherd’s Bush shopping mall, causing damage estimated at £27.

  I had seen the group on the steps of the courthouse when I arrived, and assumed that the well-dressed woman was their lawyer. She strode up and down before the magistrates, now and then pausing to give these three worthies time to catch up with her. She swung on a high heel, ash-grey hair swirling around her shoulders, showing off her hips to the attentive court, and confident enough of her good looks to wear her glasses on the tip of her nose.

  Intrigued by her command of the stage, I wished I had asked her to represent me. People in the public benches were already laughing at her sallies, and she played up to the applause like a skilled actress. When the chief magistrate dismissed her plea for a jury trial she threw aside her papers and strode to the bench in an almost threatening way. A policeman restrained her and led her back to the dock, where she stood defiantly with the Chinese girl and the downcast clergyman.

  So this spirited advocate was not a solicitor but one of the accused. She stared defiantly at the magistrates, aware that her moment was over. She took off her glasses in a petulant way, like a child separated from her toy. I guessed that she and her fellow-accused were part of some evangelical group, a cranky New Age cult trying to perform a stone-age solstice ritual in the atrium of a shopping mall.

  I made my way out of the courtroom, keen to get back to sanity, Sally and my work at the Institute. Sally had agreed not to attend the hearing, saving me any further embarrassment. The search for Laura’s killers would have to take some other course, or be left to the police and the antiterrorist units.

  I eased myself through the crowd of relatives and witnesses in the lobby, conscious of the unpleasant scent that rose from my shirt, a medley of sweat and guilt. In front of me was a uniformed chauffeur who had testified against his boss, a local businessman convicted of kerb-crawling. He turned suddenly and collided into me, his elbow catching my chest, then gripped my arms in apology and plunged away through the crowd.

  A rush of pain tore at my breastbone, as if my bruised ribs had been opened to the air. Barely able to breathe, I stepped into the daylight of Hammersmith Grove, and tried to flag down a passing taxi, but the effort of raising my arm left me winded. I leaned against the stone lion on the balustrade, and the policeman on duty waved me away from the courthouse steps as if I were a tottering wino.

  I stepped into the crowded lunch hour, filled with office staff heading for the sandwich bars. All the air in the street had vanished. I was about to faint, and had the desperate notion that if I lay on the pavement someone would think that I was dying and call an ambulance.

  Hands on my knees, I rested against a parked car, and managed to draw a little air into my lungs. Then a woman’s arm gripped me around the waist. Resting against her hip, I could smell a heady blend of perfume and woollen suiting, overlaid by perspiration brought on by sheer indignation, an unsettling aura that made me look up at her.

  ‘Mr Markham? I think you could use some help. You’re not drunk?’

  ‘Not yet. I can’t breathe…’

  I stared into the strong face of the woman who had harangued the magistrates. She was watching me with genuine concern, but also an element of calculation, one hand on the mobile phone in her bag, as if I were a possible recruit to her evangelical cell.

  ‘Now, try to stand.’ She propped me against the car, and waved cheerily to the watching constable. ‘I’m parked somewhere here, if the car hasn’t been stolen. Police courts create their own crime waves. You look awful – what happened to you?’

  ‘I bruised a rib,’ I explained. ‘Someone kicked me.’

  ‘A
t Olympia? A police boot, I bet.’

  ‘Cat lovers. They’re very violent.’

  ‘Really? What were you doing to the poor mogs?’ Almost carrying me, she searched the lines of parked cars. ‘Let’s get you somewhere safe. I know a doctor who can look at you. Believe me, nothing brings out violence like a peaceful demonstration.’

  7

  Odd Man Out

  STRONG HANDS STEERED my head from the car and helped me towards a front door beside a bay window covered with protest stickers. Kay Churchill, the woman who had come to my aid, put her shoulder to the door and forced it open, as if leading a police raid. I assumed that we were breaking into an unoccupied house somewhere in Chelsea, but she strode confidently into the hall and tossed her car keys onto the coat stand. She sniffed the air, clearly unsure whether she liked her own body scent, and beckoned me to follow her.

  Framed film posters hung in the living room, scowling samurai from a Kurosawa epic, a screaming woman from Battleship Potemkin. Kay lifted a pile of scripts from a leather armchair and eased me among the cushions, waiting with an encouraging smile until I started to breathe. Eager to care for a fellow demonstrator who had been brutalized by the police, she found a small bottle of whisky among the scripts and produced a tumbler from her desk drawer. She nodded approvingly as I inhaled the heady vapour.

  ‘Poor man – you needed that. Those bastards really had a go.’

  ‘It’s kind of you…’ I leaned back, trying not to breathe. ‘If you ring my wife, she’ll come and collect me.’

  ‘Let’s get the doctor here first. I’m not sure your wife ought to see you now.’ She leaned forward. ‘Mr Markham? Still there?’

  ‘Right. You know my name?’

  ‘I heard the clerk call you.’ She sat on the arm of the settee, tight skirt exposing her thighs. She was generous and likeable, if overly self-conscious, and used to being the centre of attention. For all her friendliness, she was curious about me, as if I failed somehow to convince her. During the journey from the magistrates’ court she drove with one hand on the wheel of her Polo, the other reaching between the front seats to hold my shoulder, checking that I was still alive. After introducing herself, she kept a close eye on the rear-view mirror.