Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Fifty minutes? Why so long?’

  ‘She has to switch off the fire alarms. There are dozens of them.’ She pinched my cheek in a fleeting show of affection. ‘Do your best, David.’

  ‘And if someone tries to get in?’

  ‘They won’t. Salute and stroll away. You’re a bored security man.’

  ‘Bored?’ I pointed to the framed film posters. ‘This place holds a lot of memories.’

  ‘Start to forget them. In an hour they’ll all be ash.’

  ‘Do we need to go that far? Burt Lancaster, Bogart, Lauren Bacall…they’re just movie actors.’

  ‘Just? They poisoned a whole century. They rotted your mind, David. We have to make a stand, build a saner England…’

  She slipped away into the shadows, a faceless assassin of the most famous faces the world had known. The six of us had arrived in pairs at the South Bank, posing as film noir enthusiasts, an easy task for me but a difficult one for Kay, who considered the Hollywood motion picture her sworn enemy. We took our places in NFT2 for a late-night showing of Out of the Past. As we sat among the Mitchum fans it was hard to believe that the theatre where I had spent so many formative hours would soon be reduced to cinders. I was too unsettled to concentrate on a single frame, but Kay sat forward, engrossed by this brutal tale of infatuation and betrayal. At one moment of high drama, when the heroine feigned a pang of despair, I even felt the pressure of her hand on my wrist.

  Thirty minutes before the end-titles we slipped from the theatre, and made our way to the disused Museum of the Moving Image, now a storeroom filled with packing cases. Here we joined the other members of the team, and changed into police overalls and ski masks. Vera Blackburn kept watch by the locked doors, whose key she had duplicated while working as a volunteer cataloguer of religious films.

  Crouching in the darkness, we waited for the performances to end and the complex to empty. In the open crates around me I felt the antique cameras and dismantled lights in their moisture-proof wrappings, the costumes worn by Margaret Lockwood and Anna Neagle, the scripts of The Sound Barrier and The Winslow Boy, the unforgettable furniture of the 20th Century’s greatest dream, about to exit through a furnace vent of its own making.

  Dreams died different deaths, taking unexpected doors out of our lives. Trying to behave like a bored security guard, I paced the carpet by the box office, thinking of the countless hours I had spent here with Laura. I had argued my case with Kay and Vera, urging that we spare the NFT and target a suburban multiplex. Kay, however, had set her mind on the NFT’s destruction.

  Despite her casual betrayal of me in the Twickenham video store, Kay had welcomed me back to Chelsea Marina. In the struggle for a better world, she told me without embarrassment, no one was more disposable than a friend. Unless friends were prepared to betray each other, no revolution would ever succeed.

  Visiting Chelsea Marina in the week after our Twickenham expedition, I listened to the doorstep meetings, trying to catch any hint of involvement in the Heathrow bomb. I was surprised by the growing number of protest groups. Leaderless and uncoordinated, they sprang up at dinner parties and PTA meetings. One committee planned a sit-in at the offices of the management company responsible for Chelsea Marina’s abysmal services, but most of the residents were now set on a far more radical response to the social evils that transcended the local problems of the estate. They had moved on to wider targets – a Pret A Manger in the King’s Road, Tate Modern, a Conran restaurant scheduled for the British Museum, the Promenade Concerts, Waterstone’s bookshops, all of them exploiters of middle-class credulity. Their corrupting fantasies had deluded the entire educated caste, providing a dangerous pabulum that had poisoned a spoon-fed intelligentsia. From sandwich to summer school, they were the symbols of subservience and the enemies of freedom.

  The NFT was silent, a pale blue light filling its toneless corridors. I straightened my jacket in the mirror behind the pay desk. A smear of blood-stained vomit was drying on the identity badge clipped to my breast pocket. Either I had been sick with panic, or one of the security guards was more injured than I realized.

  I pulled on my ski mask and walked to the manager’s office. The prisoners sprawled on the carpet beside the desk. The two students were awake and lay back to back, trying to disguise their attempt to loosen each other’s handcuffs. The older guard was barely breathing, his head lolling on the vomit-stained carpet. He seemed to be deeply unconscious, a faint breath moving through his bloodied teeth.

  Smoke hung in the corridor outside the office, diffusing below the ceiling lights. I assumed that Vera had decided on a quick cigarette, once the fire alarms were disconnected. Somewhere a window had been opened onto the night, and a cooler air moved around me, the street scents of diesel fuel, rain and cooking fat from the all-night cafés near Waterloo Station.

  I left the manager’s office and crossed the corridor to NFT1. As I pushed back the curtain a cloud of chemical vapour was rising from the stage, an acrid fog that rolled across the empty seats like a wraith freed from a monster movie. The vapour streamed below the ceiling, found the open exit and flowed around me in looping swirls.

  I tried not to gag on the plastic stench, closed the doors and ran to NFT2. I searched the aisles for Kay or Vera. The screen loomed above me, a clouded mirror drained of its memories. On its metallized skin floated the pale shadow of my own reflection, a trapped spectre. An acid vapour was filling the auditorium, and there was a flare of light from the stage. The walls glowed with the electric white of an arc furnace, and a hundred shadows flinched behind the seats.

  In the entrance lobby the glass doors were open to the night. Smoke flowed over my head and vented itself into the air, rising towards the promenade deck of the Hayward Gallery. The two students stumbled through the smoke in the corridor, hands cuffed behind them.

  ‘Get out! Run for it!’ One of them stopped to raise his cuffs to me, and I seized his shoulder. ‘Run!’

  In the manager’s office I knelt beside the older guard and tried to lift his heavy torso. His eyes were open, but he was barely conscious, blood caked on his chin and shirt. I gripped his ankles and pulled him across the carpet, his huge legs against my thighs.

  As I paused by the door, trying to mask my face from the smoke, his feet slipped from my hands. I bent down to seize them, but he drew back his leather boots, arched himself off the floor and kicked me in the chest.

  Winded by the blow, I fell against the door, too stunned to breathe. The guard was wide awake, his eyes fixed on my face. Wrists cuffed behind him, he edged himself across the carpet and drew his knees back, ready to kick my head.

  A boot brushed my left ear, and I rolled away from him into the corridor. He propped himself against the door, turned onto his side and rose to his feet.

  ‘Get out of here!’ I shouted through the smoke that filled the office. ‘Run for the lobby…’

  He steadied himself on both feet, lowered his shoulders and charged at me, emerging from the fog like a rugby forward out of a steaming scrum. His head caught a framed film poster of Robert Taylor and Greer Garson, and knocked it to the floor. He stepped onto the glass pane, kicked the fragments out of his way and hurled himself at me through the smoke.

  He followed me into the night, past the lobby doors and onto the slip road to the Hayward Gallery, hands behind his back, smoke rising from his clothes. Only twenty feet ahead of him, I ran around the parked security van, searching for the staircase to the Purcell Room. The students stood back to back, still trying to unpick their handcuffs. The guard head-charged them, throwing them aside with his powerful shoulders.

  His boots rang on the concrete steps when I reached the promenade deck of the Hayward Gallery. Behind the glass doors two security men watched me run past, apparently followed by an injured colleague. Their eyes turned towards the column of smoke rising from the roof of the NFT. Both spoke into their radios, and I heard the first police siren wail along the embankment near Westminster Bridge
.

  I crossed the upper terrace beside the Festival Hall, gasping at the damp river air. I could barely stumble, but my pursuer had given up the chase. Bent double, he leaned exhausted against a piece of chromium sculpture, phlegm dripping from his mouth, eyes still fixed on me.

  I set off towards the Millennium Wheel. Launched onto the night sky, the gondolas circled the cantilever arm, a white latticework cut from frost, the armature of a swan that sailed the dark air. A corporate party was taking place in three of the gondolas, and the guests pressed against the curved glass, watching the first fires break through the roof of the NFT.

  I smoothed my security jacket, brushing away the sooty smuts, and walked past the catering vans parked below the Wheel. Waitresses were clearing away the trays of half-eaten canapés. I chewed on a chicken drumstick, and gulped from a bottle of Perrier water. Together we watched a fire engine turn into Belvedere Road, bell clanging. A police car stopped outside the Festival Hall, and its spotlight played on the Hayward Gallery. Firemen and police on foot were closing in on the NFT, and would soon find the handcuffed security guards.

  An empty gondola moved past me, its doors open. The corporate party would be over in an hour, and as the guests strolled across the green to their cars I would lose myself among them.

  I stepped into the gondola and leaned on the rail overlooking the river, almost too weary to breathe. While we moved along the boarding platform an off-duty waiter swung himself through the door, a tray bearing two champagne flutes in his hand. He placed the tray on the seat and sat beside it, searching his pockets for a cigarette.

  As we rose above County Hall the fires lit the night air and seemed to burn on the dark water of the Thames. A huge caldera had opened beside Waterloo Bridge and was devouring the South Bank Centre. Billows of smoke leaned across the river, and I could see the flames reflected in the distant casements of the Houses of Parliament, as if the entire Palace of Westminster was about to ignite from within.

  The waiter pointed to a champagne glass on the tray. Without thanking him, I tasted the warm wine. The bubbles stung my lips, cracked by the fierce heat in the auditorium. I thought of the smoke-swept corridors lined with the portraits of the film world’s greatest stars. The fires set by Vera Blackburn had taken hold, burning fiercely throughout the NFT, engulfing the smiles of James Stewart and Orson Welles, Chaplin and Joan Crawford. My memories of them seemed to rise with the turning Wheel, escaping from a depot of dreams that was giving up its ghosts to the night.

  I crossed the gondola, my back to the smoking waiter and the Thames, and searched the streets around County Hall. I almost expected to see Kay and Joan Chang darting from one doorway to another as the police cars sped past, sirens wailing down the night. Needless to say, they had escaped without warning me, through the riverside entrance to the theatre cafe, which they had left open to create a fire-spurring draught.

  The first smoke had reached the windows of the gondola, laying itself across the curved panes. I began to cough, tasting the acrid vapour that had churned outside the manager’s office. I retched onto the rail, and spilled the champagne over the floor at my feet.

  Concerned, the waiter stood behind me, and nodded when I cleared my throat, smiling in an oddly complicit way. He was so close that I almost expected him to whisper some proposition, and it occurred to me that the Millennium Wheel might be a favoured place for gay pick-ups.

  I tried to wave him away, but he took the empty glass from my hand. He was a slim, agile man with a strong forehead and bony, almost emaciated face, and a tubercular pallor that should have ruled him out as a waiter. I imagined him moving on the fringes of a twilight world of obscure corporate venues. Like so many waiters I had known, he was friendly but slightly aggressive, a skin-thin charm overlaying a barely concealed aloofness.

  When he stepped behind me there was something evasive about him that reminded me of another shadowy figure who had concealed his face. There was the same odour of forgotten hospital wards and languishing children. But his movements were quick and decisive, and I could see him reaching between one of his small patients and a clumsy nurse, a syringe in one hand and distracting toy in the other.

  ‘Dr Gould?’ I turned to face him, trying to see behind the disarming smile. ‘We’ve met before.’

  ‘At Kay Churchill’s, that’s right.’ He steadied me as the gondola rocked in the billows of smoke and overheated air. ‘You did well tonight, David.’

  ‘You remember me?’

  ‘Of course. I wanted us to meet, at the right time and place. There’s so much I need to show you.’ He took my arm in a firm grip as the gondola began its final descent. ‘But let’s get out of here before someone else remembers you…’

  The flame-lit buildings along the Thames threw their light into his unsettled eyes. I tried to free myself from him, but he held me with a hard hand.

  A darker fire drew closer.

  16

  The Children’s Sanctuary

  A CHEERFUL FRIEZE of children’s drawings looked down on me when I woke, a lively patchwork of armless men, two-legged tigers and shoebox houses that peeled from the walls of the empty ward like the sketches of disassembled dreams.

  I lay on the shabby mattress with its stains of ancient urine and disinfectant, glad that this amiable gallery had watched over me as I slept. A thick dust covered the Victorian panes, and trembled in the ceaseless drone of airliners landing at Heathrow. The handicapped children in their dormitory beds must have sensed that the entire world around them suffered a perpetual headache.

  I sat up and steadied my feet on the floor. I had slept for four deep hours, but my thighs jumped as I remembered the violent night at the National Film Theatre. A rush of images scanned themselves across my mind like a cassette at fast forward – the spectral smoke that searched the corridors, Vera Blackburn’s hard fists, the flinching shadows in the auditoriums, the desperate run to the Millennium Wheel and Richard Gould in his waiter’s jacket, offering me a glass of champagne as he fired the Thames.

  I stood up, swaying slightly on the unsteady floor, and waited for my bones to engage with each other. Thinking of Sally and a hot bath in St John’s Wood, I walked between the worn mattresses. Few parents, I guessed, had ever visited the retarded children who had lingered here. Yet the drawings were touchingly hopeful, the optimistic echoes of a world these handicapped infants would never know. A patient and kindly teacher had steered them towards the crayons and a colourful pathway into their own minds.

  Beyond the connecting doors was a stone landing that led into the next dormitory, another high-ceilinged space filled with dust. A dark-haired man in a white coat, his head lowered in thought, appeared briefly and waved to me, then hurried up a staircase to the next floor.

  ‘Dr Gould! We need to…’ I called to him, my voice lost in the infinite space of this disused hospital, and listened to Gould’s footsteps making their way to the roof. The ancient but imposing architecture, moral judgements enshrined in every forbidding corbel, reminded me of other halls where justice was dispensed. I wanted to warn Gould, this elusive author of the Chelsea Marina rebellion, that we would soon be hunted down by the police and locked away for the next five years.

  I slapped my thighs, trying to calm the jumpy nerves. I had taken part in a serious crime, against a museum of film and my memories of my first wife, but I felt curiously uninvolved. I was an actor standing in for the real self who lay asleep beside Sally in St John’s Wood. A dream of violence had escaped from my head into the surrounding streets, driven on by the promise of change.

  I remembered our flight across London only a few hours earlier. Gould’s car had been parked outside the Marriott Hotel in the old County Hall, a Citroën estate with Hospice de Beaune stickers on its rear window. From the way Gould searched the controls I guessed that he had never driven the vehicle with its complex hydraulics, left for him by a francophile resident at Chelsea Marina. Concerned by the keening sirens and the police cars blocking Wes
tminster Bridge, I offered to drive, but Gould waved me aside, calming me with his distant but ever-friendly smile. Hunting the dashboard and control levers for the ignition lock, he reminded me of Sally when she first sat in the adapted Saab, faced with a geometric model of her own handicaps.

  We lurched away, leapfrogging along the kerb, and rarely left second gear as we accelerated through the dark streets south of the river. I could see the fear in Gould’s eyes, and thought of him serving drinks to the corporate clients on the Millennium Wheel. Out of the smoke and fire I had blundered into his lookout post, but he seemed relieved to see me. When we swerved past the Lambeth Palace roundabout the window pillar struck my head, and he held my arm with surprising concern, as if I were a frightened child at a fairground.

  We crossed Chelsea Bridge and turned into the darker streets that led to the King’s Road. The headlights picked their way through a maze of turnings, drawing us past shop windows filled with kitchen units and bedroom suites, office furniture and bathroom fittings, tableaux of a second city ready to replace the London that burned behind us. Gould withdrew into himself, retreating behind the bones of his face. As he watched the rear-view mirror he became a tired graduate student in a threadbare suit, undernourished and self-neglected.

  We crossed the stucco silences of South Kensington with its looming museums, so many warehouses of time, and headed westwards along the Cromwell Road. Inner London fell behind us when we left the Hammersmith flyover and Hogarth House, joining the motorway to Heathrow. Twenty minutes later, we entered the operational zone of the airport, a terrain of air-freight offices and car-rental depots, surrounded by arrays of landing lights like magnetic fields, the ghosts of business parks and industrial estates, a night-world haunted by security guards and attack dogs.

  Somewhere near the airport we stopped by a cluster of high Victorian buildings that stood beside a vast construction site. Gould edged the Citroën past the mud-flecked hulls of graders and tractors, and parked in a yard filled with Portakabins and bales of breeze blocks on wooden pallets.