Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘You resisted?’

  ‘Not for long.’ He touched the scar on his forehead. ‘I thought of going back to schoolmastering, but my duty is here. Social unrest always throws up a few really dangerous types. People who use extreme violence to explore themselves, like some people use extreme sex.’

  ‘Kay Churchill?’

  ‘Not Kay. She’s too generous with herself.’

  ‘What about Vera Blackburn?’

  ‘More of a problem. I’m watching her.’

  ‘And Dr Gould?’

  Dexter turned away and gazed at the black water in the marina. ‘Richard? It’s hard to say. He faces enormous danger – from himself.’

  Before we parted, I said: ‘A last question. Why haven’t the courts locked us up for good? Kay, Vera, you and I, all the others. The Home Office must know what’s going on.’

  ‘They do. They’re letting us run with the ball. They want to see where this leads. Nothing frightens them more than the thought of a real middle-class revolution…’

  He watched me walk away, troubled face hidden from the light, and then returned to the shelter of his unsheltering roof.

  14

  From Guildford to Terminal 2

  SALLY THREW HER walking sticks onto the floor and strode across the lounge, shocked by how unconcerned I seemed.

  ‘David! You could go to prison…’

  ‘It’s possible. Don’t worry, though. I’m probably in the clear.’

  ‘These people are completely mad. Keep away from them.’

  ‘Dear, I intend to. All I did was spend an afternoon with them.’

  ‘An afternoon? You set fire to Twickenham.’

  ‘That sounds like a painting by John Martin. Twickenham Aflame. The stadium burning, the tennis courts scorched, swimming pools beginning to boil – that really would be the end of the world.’

  ‘David…’ Trying a different tack, Sally sat on the arm of my chair. She had been asleep when I reached home, but over breakfast I described my baptism as a Chelsea Marina terrorist. She said nothing, frowning hard at her toast, thought about it for an hour and then made a fierce effort to bring me to my senses. Anger, wasted on her doltish husband, gave way to cajollery. She took my face in her hands. ‘David, you’re far too involved. Ask yourself why. These people have got to you, for some reason. Arson, vandalism, incendiary bombs? Out in the suburbs, videos are practically sacred objects. Setting off explosions – it’s all unbelievable.’

  ‘Smoke bombs. The fire was an accident. The fuses were too powerful – why, I don’t know.’

  ‘Why? Because whoever set them was on drugs.’ Sally grimaced, remembering her own addiction to hospital painkillers. ‘That’s Chelsea for you. Like my mother’s set in the seventies. Lesbians, heroin, mad boutiques opening all the time, freaky people pretending to be pop stars. Always avoid Chelsea.’

  ‘Fulham, actually. No hard drugs and the Protestant work ethic going full blast. Middle managers, accountants, civil servants. The promotion ladders have been kicked away and they see the bailiffs swarming.’

  ‘They should be in Milton Keynes.’ Sally smoothed my scalp, trying to conjure up the contours of respectability. The excitements of the previous day had left my hair springing like a Mohawk. ‘Chelsea, Fulham…you’re north London, David. You’re Hampstead.’

  ‘Old-style socialism? Psychoanalysis and Jewish scholarship? Not really me. You’d like the people at Chelsea Marina. They have passion. They hate their lives and they’re doing something about it. The French revolution was started by the middle class.’

  ‘Revolution? Attacking a video shop?’

  I took her hands and pondered the life-lines, time-routes that ran for ever, still callused by the handles of her walking sticks. ‘Forget the video shop. The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know they are the enemy. Kay Churchill thinks that Chelsea Marina is a re-education labour camp, the sort of place they have in North Korea, updated with BMWs and BUPA subscriptions.’

  ‘She sounds mad.’

  ‘She is, a little. It’s deliberate. She’s winding herself up, like a child with a toy, curious to see where she’ll go. Those big houses in Twickenham were an eye-opener. Civilized people, golden retrievers, but each of those homes was a stage set. All they do is inhabit the scenery. They reminded me of my grandmother’s place in Guildford.’

  ‘You were happy there.’ Sally pinched my ear, trying to wake me. ‘Think what the alternative was – racketing around with your mother, sleeping in strange beds in north Oxford, smoking pot when you were eight years old, drinking Scotch with R.D. Laing. You’d never have become a psychologist.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have needed to.’

  ‘Exactly. You’d have been an architect in Chelsea Marina. Going to bijou little dinner parties and worrying about the Volvo and the school fees. At least you’re doing well.’

  ‘Thanks to your father.’

  ‘That’s not true. You’ve never liked him.’

  ‘Face it, Sally. I’d hate us to have to rely on my Adler salary. His company’s retainer is half our income. It’s a kindly way of giving you a hefty allowance without making me lose my self-respect.’

  ‘You do useful work for him. That problem over car parking at the Luton factory. You made the executives walk further than everyone else.’

  ‘Common sense. The most useful work I do for your father is keeping you happy. That’s what he pays me for. In his eyes I’m just a glorified counsellor and medical attendant.’

  ‘David!’ Sally was more baffled than shocked. She stared at me like a ten-year-old finding a spider in her sock drawer. ‘Is that how you see our marriage? No wonder you’re so keen on Chelsea Marina.’

  ‘Sally…’

  I tried to reach her hand but the doorbell distracted us. Swearing under her breath, Sally made for the hall. I sat in the armchair, staring at the house around me, a gift from Sally’s mother that reminded me of the role that money played in my life, other people’s money. As Sally had noticed, I felt a growing closeness to the residents of Chelsea Marina, to the feckless film lecturer and the evasive priest with the Harley and the Chinese girlfriend. I liked the way they were looking frankly at themselves and throwing their useless luggage out of the window.

  Too many of the props in my own life were baggage belonging to someone else that I had offered to carry – the demeaning requests from my father-in-law’s managers, the committee meetings in my year as a governor of an approved school in Hendon, my responsibilities for my ageing mother whom I liked less and less, the tiresome fundraising for the Adler, little more than touting for corporate clients.

  Voices sounded from the pavement. Leaving my chair, I went to the window. Henry Kendall was standing near his car, a suitcase in hand. Beside him was a senior policeman in full uniform, looking up at the house while he spoke to Sally. Without thinking, I assumed that he had come to arrest me and had invited Henry, a close colleague, to act as the prisoner’s friend. The suitcase would carry the few belongings I was allowed to take with me to the police station.

  I stood behind the curtains, my heart leaping against my chest like a trapped animal throwing itself at the bars of its cage. I was tempted to run, to flee through the garden gate and make my way to the sanctuary of Chelsea Marina. Calming myself, I walked stiffly to the door.

  Henry greeted me affably. We lunched frequently in the Institute dining room, but I noticed how well he looked. The haggard figure outside Ashford Hospital had been replaced by a confident analyst and corporate thruster with both eyes fixed on Professor Arnold’s chair. He had become more patronizing towards me, and at the same time more suspicious, convinced that my interest in Chelsea Marina concealed an agenda of my own.

  The policeman had returned to the car, sitting in the front passenger seat as he scanned a white folder with the Adler crest. Henry and I paced the pavement together.

  ‘Superintendent Michaels,’ Hen
ry explained. ‘I’m giving him a lift to the Home Office. He’s working on the Heathrow case.’

  ‘I thought he’d come to arrest me.’ I smiled, a little too easily. ‘Is there any progress?’

  ‘Unofficially? No. It’s almost a meaningless crime. No one’s claimed responsibility, and there’s no apparent motive. I’m sorry, David. We both owe it to Laura to clear the thing up.’

  ‘What about the bomb fragments? They must say something.’

  ‘Puzzling. British Army detonators of a highly classified type. Used by the SAS and covert ops people. No one can understand how the bomber got hold of them.’

  I waved to Sally, who was standing on the step by the front door, smiling at Henry whenever he looked at her. Offhandedly, I said: ‘There was a bomb in Twickenham last night.’

  ‘You heard about that? It wasn’t on the breakfast news.’ Henry peered sharply at me, a pointer spotting a concealed bird. ‘A rugger prank, they think. It’s odd how many of these small incidents there are – most of the “fires” you read about are really bomb attacks. There are some curious targets.’

  ‘Suburban cinemas, McDonalds, travel agents, private prep schools…?’

  ‘Good guesswork.’ Henry’s chin rose even higher, and he gazed at me down his nose. ‘You’re in touch with someone at the Yard?’

  ‘No. It’s…in the air we breathe.’

  ‘You’ve obviously got a feel for the subversive.’ Henry handed the suitcase to me. ‘A few things of Laura’s. I’ve been clearing out the house with her sister. Papers you wrote together, one or two books you gave her, conference photographs. I thought you’d like to have them.’

  ‘Well…’ I held the suitcase, surprised by how light it seemed, the documents of a ten-year relationship, the last deeds of marriage and memory. Holding it as Henry watched me, it seemed to grow heavier in my hand.

  Sally made her way down the steps, using the walking sticks to complicate her descent, a sure sign that she was thinking her way to an important decision. Henry and I waited for her to join us, but she left us standing on the pavement and stepped into the street, making a laboured circuit of the car. Superintendent Michaels noticed her in his wing mirror, and held out his arm to halt an approaching taxi. He tried to climb from the car, but Sally leaned against the passenger door, her elbows on the roof.

  ‘Sally?’ Henry waited for her, our conversation forgotten, taking his keys from his pocket. ‘Do you want a lift?’

  She ignored him, and stared across the roof of the car, her eyes levelled at me as I stood with the suitcase, filled with my first wife’s mementoes. I realized that she was about to report me to Superintendent Michaels, and tell him of my involvement in the video-store fire. She watched me without smiling, as if reviewing our entire life together across the polished cellulose of Henry’s car, a stretch wider than the Hellespont.

  Puzzled by her presence at his elbow, the superintendent edged open his door and spoke to her. Sally noticed his concerned smile, and I heard her apologize for not inviting him in for a drink. They waved to each other as the car pulled away.

  Later, in the kitchen, I watched Sally sip a small sherry, nose twitching at the volatile fluid. Her face seemed sharper, and for the first time I saw the older woman in her bones, less spoilt and less sure of either her husband or the world.

  ‘Sally…’ I spoke calmly. ‘The superintendent – you were going to…’

  ‘Yes.’ She stirred the sherry with her finger. ‘I thought about it.’

  ‘Why? He would have arrested me on the spot. If it came to court there’d be a good chance of my ending up in prison.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Sally nodded sagely, as if this was the first sensible thing I had said. ‘And if you go on with this Chelsea Marina nonsense you’ll definitely go to prison. For a very long time, if someone gets killed. I don’t want that, and maybe now’s the moment to stop it.’

  ‘It won’t happen.’ I stepped across the kitchen, intending to embrace her, and realized I was still carrying Laura’s suitcase. ‘Believe me, it’s finished.’

  ‘It isn’t.’ Wearily, Sally pushed away her glass. ‘Just see yourself. Hair standing on end, bruised face, that old suitcase. You look like an illegal immigrant.’

  ‘I am, in a way. An odd thought.’ I left the suitcase on a chair, and turned confidently to Sally. ‘I’ve seen all I need to. Chelsea Marina probably has no connection with the Heathrow attack. They’re not in the same league.’

  ‘Are you sure? These people are amateurs, they haven’t a clue what they’re doing. Anyway, the Heathrow bomb isn’t why you’re going back to Chelsea.’

  ‘No? Then why am I going back?’

  ‘You’ve picked up some kind of trail there. You think it leads to a new self you’re searching for. Maybe you need to find it. That’s why I said nothing to the superintendent.’

  I moved the sherry glass and pressed her hands to the table. ‘Sally, there’s no trail, and there’s nothing to find. I’m happy here, with myself and with you. The people at Chelsea Marina can’t cope with their overdrafts. They’re fed up with themselves and are taking it out on a few double yellow lines.’

  ‘Find out why. That’s the world we’re living in – people will set off bombs for the sake of free parking. Or for no reason at all. We’re all bored, David, desperately bored. We’re like children left for too long in a playroom. After a while we have to start breaking up the toys, even the ones we like. There’s nothing we believe in. Even this flying parson you met seems to have turned his back on God.’

  ‘The Reverend Dexter? He hasn’t turned his back, but he’s keeping his distance. It’s hard to know what exactly, but there’s something on his mind.’

  ‘And on yours.’ Sally placed her sherry glass in the sink. She smiled gamely, the same confidence-boosting grin I had seen in her orthopaedic ward, willing me on as she had once willed herself to walk. ‘Find out what it is, David. Follow the trail. Guildford to Terminal 2. Somewhere along the way you’ll meet yourself…’

  15

  The Depot of Dreams

  THE REBELLION OF the new proletariat had begun, but was I foe or friend? Surprised by myself, I helped to drag the handcuffed security guards into the manager’s office, and tried to shield them from the combat boots aimed at their faces. Kay Churchill caught me when I tripped over the sprawl of legs. She steered me around the desk and sat me in the manager’s chair.

  ‘David, make up your mind.’

  ‘I have. Kay, I’m with you.’

  ‘Get a grip for once.’ Her large eyes with their aroused pupils peered at me through the slits of her ski mask. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘I stay by the box office until everyone leaves. I make sure the doors are locked and let no one in. Kay, I’ve rehearsed everything.’

  ‘Good. Now stop rehearsing. This is the real thing.’

  Vera Blackburn, cool and suspicious in her blue overalls, stood in the corridor, waiting for the assault teams to move to their demolition points. She raised a gloved hand towards me, palm upwards, and clenched it fiercely, as if crushing my testicles.

  ‘Right…’ Kay hesitated, and then rallied herself. She adjusted her ski mask, supplied like our snatch-squad overalls and CS gas by a former lover of Vera’s in the Surrey Police. Planned in Kay’s living room, argued over endless bottles of Bulgarian wine, the action against the National Film Theatre had promised to be little more than a student prank. I was unprepared for the ruthless violence of these middle-class saboteurs. Tempted to call the police, I had lagged behind when they gassed and stunned the three security guards.

  Two of the guards were moonlighting film students at City University. They lay face down, coughing a gas-green phlegm onto the manager’s carpet. Both were weeping, as if shocked to find themselves in a brutal drama straight from the gangster movies they so venerated.

  The third guard was a security company regular, a fifty-year-old man with the heavy shoulders and close-cropped hair
of a retired nightclub bouncer. He had been sitting at his console in the next-door office, watching the surveillance-camera screens, when Vera Blackburn stepped quietly behind him. He caught the CS spray straight in his face, but put up a fight, wresting the can from Vera’s hands. She stepped back, surprised by this show of ingratitude, drew her truncheon and beat him to the floor. He now lay at my feet in the manager’s office, blood leaking across his scalp, unfocused eyes staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Kay…’ I knelt beside the guard and searched for a pulse through the blood and vomit. ‘This man needs help. There must be a first-aid kit.’

  ‘Later! We have to move.’

  She threw a security-company jacket over my shoulders and forced my arms into the sleeves, then propelled me into the corridor. In the camera room Joan Chang was stripping out cassettes of surveillance videotape and tossing them into a duffle bag. She was white-faced with fear, but turned and gave me a vigorous thumbs up.

  Doors swung in the corridor as two team-members in overalls stepped into NFT1. Junior barristers who were near-neighbours of Kay’s, they carried briefcases holding the incendiary charges and timers. They moved in step, entering the silent auditorium like bagmen for the mob.

  Kay paused to focus herself when we reached the NFT lobby. The high glass doors exposed the box-office area to the concrete night of the South Bank complex. A slip road ran from the NFT to the Hayward Gallery car park below the staircases and pilotis of this cultural bunker. A security company van was stationed near the artists’ entrance of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but its crew would be by the coffee machine in the foyer upstairs, staring across the river at Big Ben and counting the long hours to the end of their shift.

  ‘Kay…’ I held her arm before she could leave. ‘Aren’t we taking a risk? Anyone can see me.’

  ‘You’re a security guard. Act like one.’ She pulled the ski mask from my head. ‘Vera needs time.’