Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  We left the car, and Gould led the way into a disused building, through a crumbling foyer filled with signs pointing to relocated hospital departments. We climbed the iron steps to the fourth floor. Exhausted, I followed Gould into a ward of dusty and unmade beds. Too tired to resist, I let this odd man, a thoughtful fanatic with gentle hands, pick out a mattress for me. I fell deeply asleep among the drawings of deranged children.

  Gould was on the roof when I joined him, face raised to the sunlight, shielded from the wind by a breastwork of Victorian chimneys. He held his mobile phone to one ear, apparently listening to an update on the night’s action against the NFT, but he was more interested in the builder’s cranes below the parapet. Looking at his sallow face, I could see years of hurried canteen meals and nights spent dozing fitfully in hospital dayrooms. He wore a doctor’s name-tag on his coat, as if he was still the paediatrician in charge of the departed children.

  I watched a police helicopter flying along the motorway, and tried to work out how I could get away from this derelict hospital. I scanned the huge buildings, immense masonry piles with gables like the superstructures of battleships. This was the architecture of prisons, cotton mills and steel foundries, monuments to the endurance of brick and the Victorian certainties. Three buildings still remained, beside a neglected park where patients had once been wheeled by starch-obsessed VADs.

  ‘David?’ Gould switched off the phone in mid-message and turned to survey me, like a busy consultant faced with an unexpected patient. ‘You feel a lot better. I can see it.’

  ‘Really? Good…’

  I guessed that to Gould I seemed exhausted and fretful, in urgent need of coffee and definitely out of my league as a weekend revolutionary. By contrast, he was surprisingly calm, as if he had injected himself with a strong sedative before going to sleep and a strong stimulant on waking. The muscles in his face had relaxed their grip on the underlying bones, and he moved jauntily in the quiet Sunday air. He was at home in this one-time asylum, and it occurred to me that he had not been a doctor here but a patient. Released into the community when the hospital closed, he had assembled a new identity that easily convinced the residents at Chelsea Marina. The website and its story of the department-store fire would be a clever touch. He was a little too friendly, keeping a careful watch on me out of the side of his eye, but there was a frankness that was almost likeable, and a nervous authority to which everyone at Chelsea Marina had responded.

  He waited until the police helicopter was safely out of view, and reached across to pat my arm.

  ‘You’re unsettled, David. Operations like last night’s – they leave the heart pounding for days. You’ll recover, and feel stronger for it.’

  ‘Thank God. I’d hate to be like this for the rest of my life.’

  ‘It won’t happen. There’s nothing better for us than acting out of real conviction.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I was.’ I stared at my bruised palms. ‘I nearly handed myself in to the police.’

  ‘The others didn’t wait for you? No…’ Gould shook his head in a display of sympathy. ‘These middle-class revolutionaries – they’ve been repressed for years. Now they can taste ruthlessness and betrayal, and they like the flavour.’

  ‘Too bad. They’ll be tasting cold porridge before they know it.’

  ‘It’s a risk. We’re safe, as long as we keep up the element of surprise.’ Gould frowned at the sun, resenting its efficient control over events, and then fingered his badge, reminding himself of his own identity. ‘Don’t worry about prison. At least, not yet.’

  ‘So everyone got away. How’s the NFT?’

  ‘Completely gutted. Sadly, some reels of an early Fritz Lang were lost. Still, Vera Blackburn knows her stuff.’

  ‘She’s unbalanced. You need to watch her.’

  ‘Vera?’ Gould turned to look at me, and then nodded in full agreement. ‘She’s a damaged child, trying to make sense of the world. I’m doing my best to help her.’

  ‘Drawing her out? Giving scope to her natural talents?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’ Amused by the sarcasm in my voice, Gould waved a white hand at the derelict buildings around us. ‘David, who cares about the NFT? Look what they’ve done here. For three hundred children, this was the only home they knew.’

  His bloodless fingers pointed to the isolated wings. High walls masked by rhododendrons surrounded each building. There were courtyards within courtyards, barred windows on the upper floors.

  ‘Walls and bars,’ I commented. ‘It looks like a prison. Where are we?’

  ‘Bedfont Hospital. A mile south of Heathrow. A good place for a madhouse – you can’t hear anyone scream.’ Gould made a mock bow. ‘The last of the great Victorian asylums.’

  ‘A mental hospital? So the children were – ?’

  ‘Brain-damaged. Encephalitis, measles cases that went wrong, inoperable tumours, hydrocephalus. All of them severely handicapped, and abandoned by their parents. Social services didn’t want to cope.’

  ‘Grim.’

  ‘No.’ Gould seemed surprised by my reflex response. ‘Some of them were happy.’

  ‘You worked here?’

  ‘For two years.’ Gould gazed across the empty roof, smiling as if he could see the children skipping around the chimneys. ‘I hope we gave them a good life.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘I was suspended.’ Gould caught a fly in his hand, then released it to the air and watched it swerve away. ‘The General Medical Council has spies everywhere. They’re like the Gestapo. I used to take a few children to the theme park at Thorpe. They loved it, packed into an old minibus. No supervision, I let them run free. For a few minutes they knew wonder.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Some of them got lost. Police tipped off the social services.’

  ‘Too bad. Still, it doesn’t sound that serious.’

  ‘Don’t believe it. In today’s climate?’ He tilted his head back, closing his eyes at the follies of bureaucracy. ‘There was another matter. The great taboo.’

  ‘Sexual?’

  ‘A good guess, David. Genital molestation, they called it. You look shocked.’

  ‘I am. It doesn’t seem…’

  ‘Like me? It wasn’t. But I sensed it was going on.’

  ‘Another doctor?’

  ‘One of the nurses. A very sweet young Jamaican. She was their real mother. Some of the children had brain tumours and only weeks to live. She knew a little sexual stimulation did no harm. It was the only glimpse of happiness they would ever feel. So, a bit of mild masturbation after lights out. A few seconds of pleasure touched those damaged brains before they died.’

  ‘You were the doctor in charge?’

  ‘I defended her. That was too much for the governors. Six months later the health authority closed the place down. Bedfont Asylum was due for a makeover.’ Gould pointed across the park. ‘They sold the whole site to a property company. Look closely, and you can see the future moving towards you.’

  I stared beyond a screen of poplars at the western perimeter of the park. Advancing across the grass were rows of timberframed houses, the vanguard of a huge estate. Already the first roads were laid out, cement diagrams that led to car ports and minuscule gardens.

  ‘Starter homes,’ Gould explained. ‘Rabbit hutches for aspiring marrieds. The first taste of middle-class life. A nodeposit, low-interest dream, cooked up by my father’s old firm. One day they’ll cover the whole of England.’

  ‘It’s quite a place to pick.’

  ‘The old asylum?’

  ‘Heathrow.’ Shielding my eyes, I could see the tail fins of passenger jets beyond the roofs of the air-freight terminal. ‘They’re living in the suburb of an airport.’

  ‘They like that. They like the alienation.’ Gould took my arm, a teacher relieved to find an intelligent pupil. ‘There’s no past and no future. If they can, they opt for zones without meaning – airports, shopping malls, motorways, car
parks. They’re in flight from the real. Think about that, David, while I make some coffee. Then I’ll drive you back to London.’

  ‘Good.’ Glad to get off the roof, I reached for Gould’s mobile resting between us on the parapet. ‘I ought to tell my wife where I am.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Gould slipped the phone into his pocket and steered me to the staircase door. ‘I called her last night. You were asleep.’

  ‘Sally? Was she all right?’

  ‘Absolutely. I explained you were staying at Chelsea Marina. She might have contacted the police.’ Gould patted my back as I lowered myself down the narrow stairs. ‘Interestingly, she asked me if you were sleeping at Kay Churchill’s house.’

  I paused on the steps, trying not to lose my footing. ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘Well…I’m never the soul of discretion, David.’ I listened to his generous laughter echo off the stone walls, carried through the silent dormitories as if summoning the ghosts of his dead children and calling them out to play.

  17

  Absolute Zero

  ‘SALLY SOUNDS VERY sweet, David.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘That’s good. Traffic accidents often bring out the worst in people.’

  ‘She told you she was…?’

  ‘Handicapped?’ Gould slowly shook his head. ‘An awful word, David. You don’t think of her like that.’

  ‘I don’t. Her “handicap” isn’t physical. She can walk as well as you or I can. It’s her way of reproaching the world, reminding it of the evil it’s capable of doing.’

  ‘I’m impressed. She’s a woman of spirit.’

  We sat at the table in the fourth-floor dispensary. Without moving from his chair, Gould hunted the line of refrigerators. The electric current had been switched off for months, and each refrigerator was an Aladdin’s cave of rotting cakes and lurid cordials. He found a bottle of mineral water with an intact seal, and began to warm a saucepan over a can of jellied heat.

  ‘So…’ After spooning instant coffee into the pan, Gould poured the dark brew into paper cups decorated with Disney characters. ‘I’d like to meet her. Bring her along to Chelsea Marina.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ I watched Gould sip thirstily at the scalding liquid, his lips almost inflamed. ‘It’s not her sort of place. Besides, she has a thing about…’

  ‘Physicians?’ Gould nodded tolerantly. Eyeing my own coffee, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, leaving a blood-like smear on his white skin. ‘She prefers your diagnostic computers and virtual doctors. Press Button B if you’re having a nervous breakdown. Right?’

  ‘Yes and no. Curiously, people prefer talking to a video screen. They’re far more frank. Face to face with a real doctor, they’ll never admit they have VD. Give them a button to push and they uncross their legs.’

  ‘Great.’ Gould seemed genuinely pleased. He took the coffee cup from my hands and sipped at it encouragingly. ‘You don’t realize it, David, but you’re the apostle of a new kind of alienation. You should move into one of those starter homes. I watched you on that TV series, whatever it was called – a kind of DIY take on the Almighty.’

  ‘It was facile. A Neuroscientist Looks at God? Television at its most glib. A game show.’

  ‘About God?’ Gould smiled at the ceiling. ‘That’s quite a thought. But I remember one or two things you said – the idea of God as a huge imaginary void, the largest nothingness the human mind can invent. Not a vast something out there, but a vast absence. You said that only a psychopath can cope with the notion of zero to a million decimal places. The rest of us flinch from the void and have to fill it with any ballast we can find – tricks of space-time, wise old men with beards, moral universes…’

  ‘You don’t agree?’

  ‘Not really.’ Gould finished my coffee and pushed the empty cup back to me. ‘It isn’t only the psychopath who can grasp the idea of absolute nothing. Even a meaningless universe has meaning. Accept that and everything makes a new kind of sense.’

  ‘Difficult to do, without dragging in your own obsessions.’ I tossed the cup into the cluttered sink. ‘We all carry baggage. The psychopath is unique in not being afraid of himself. Unconsciously, he already believes in nothing.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Gould waved his hands over the table, an underbidder throwing in his cards. ‘You’re right, David. I’m too close to the ground. Besides, there were real voids here, unlimited space inside a small skull. Looking for God is a dirty business. You find God in a child’s shit, in the stink of stale corridors, in a nurse’s tired feet. Psychopaths don’t manage that too easily. Places like Bedfont Hospital are the real temples, not St Paul’s or…’

  ‘The NFT?’ Before Gould could reply, I said: ‘A building on fire is quite a spectacle, especially if you’re trapped inside it. As a matter of interest, did we need to burn it down?’

  ‘No.’ Gould waved the question away, consigning it to the bedpans under the sink. The coffee had brought a wintry colour to his face, but his skin was as pale as the unwashed tiles. Undernourished for years, he was held together by professional resentment and his commitment to the lost children. ‘The NFT? Of course not. That was absurd – completely pointless, in fact. And dangerous.’

  ‘Then why the firebombs?’

  Gould let his limp hands circle the air. ‘It’s a matter of momentum. I have to keep the wheels turning. Ambition feeds on itself. Kay, Vera Blackburn and the others at Chelsea Marina, they want to change the world. Always the easy option. Near-nonentities have pulled it off. That’s why I need people like you, David. You can calm the hotheads. And your motives are different.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. As a matter of interest, what are my motives? It might be useful to know, if I get asked by the police.’

  ‘Well…’ Gould cleared the table, placing his paper cup in the sink and returning the saucepan and jellied heat to a cupboard. ‘Your motives are fairly clear – your first wife’s death at Heathrow. That affected you deeply.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Don’t underestimate it. First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages go wrong. That’s how we learn the truth about ourselves.’

  ‘We were divorced.’

  ‘Divorce from a first wife is never complete. It’s a process that lasts until death. Your own, that is, not hers. The Heathrow bomb was a tragedy, but it didn’t bring you to Chelsea Marina.’

  ‘What did? I take it you know.’

  ‘Something much more mundane.’ Gould leaned back, trying to adopt a sympathetic pose, his toneless face pulled in rival directions by a series of small grimaces. ‘Look closely in the mirror, David. What do you see? Someone you don’t like very much. When you were twenty, you accepted yourself, flaws and all. Then disenchantment set in. By the time you were thirty your tolerance was wearing thin. You weren’t entirely trustworthy, and you knew that you were prone to compromise. Already the future was receding, the bright dreams were slipping below the horizon. By now you’re a stage set, one push and the whole thing could collapse at your feet. At times you feel you’re living someone else’s life, in a strange house you’ve rented by accident. The “you” you’ve become isn’t your real self.’

  ‘But why Chelsea Marina? A collection of club-class professionals complaining about their legroom? Kay Churchill trying to shock the bourgeoisie out of its toilet training?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Gould leaned forward, arms raised to take me into the fold. ‘The entire protest is ludicrous – I knew that when I first set things going. Double yellow lines, school fees, maintenance charges…a rumour here, a murmur there. Everyone responded, even though they knew it was senseless to fight back. This was the last throw of the dice, and the more meaningless the better. That’s what brought you to Chelsea Marina. It’s a wild card, an impossible bet, a crazy gesture that signals some kind of message. Blowing up a video store, setting fire to the NFT – completely absurd. But that alone mad
e you feel free.’

  ‘Kay and the others have a point, though. Middle-class life at their level can be fairly tight.’ I stood up, trying to avoid Gould’s pale hands as they reached for my wrists. ‘Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security. Anyone earning less than £300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button suit.’

  ‘And we don’t like ourselves for it. I don’t, and you don’t either, David.’ Gould watched me as I tried to turn a tap on the cluttered sink. ‘People don’t like themselves today. We’re a rentier class left over from the last century. We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive. We think we believe in God but we’re terrified by the mysteries of life and death. We’re deeply self-centred but can’t cope with the idea of our finite selves. We believe in progress and the power of reason, but are haunted by the darker sides of human nature. We’re obsessed with sex, but fear the sexual imagination and have to be protected by huge taboos. We believe in equality but hate the underclass. We fear our bodies and, above all, we fear death. We’re an accident of nature, but we think we’re at the centre of the universe. We’re a few steps from oblivion, but we hope we’re somehow immortal…’

  ‘And all this is the fault of…the 20th Century?’

  ‘In part – it helped to lock the doors on us. We’re living in a soft-regime prison built by earlier generations of inmates. Somehow we have to break free. The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th Century. The deaths were tragic, but otherwise it was a meaningless act. And that was its point. Like the attack on the NFT.’

  ‘Or Heathrow?’

  ‘Heathrow…yes.’ Gould lowered his eyes, careful not to catch my own. He stared at his hands, lying in front of him like a pair of surgeon’s white gloves, and noticed the coffee smear. He licked a thumb and tried to rub it away, so intently that he seemed not to notice me. ‘Heathrow? That’s difficult for you to think about. I understand, David, but your wife’s death wasn’t necessarily pointless.’