Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  I watched him sit back, glancing at his watch as he decided whether it was time to leave. Had he played any part in the Heathrow bomb attack? He was so confined within his own shabby universe, this ruined hospital and his memories of the children, that I doubted it. I could almost believe that he had created the entire protest movement at Chelsea Marina as an act of defiance against the medical establishment. At the same time I found myself liking him and drawn to his wayward ideas. His threadbare suit and neglected body spoke of a certain kind of integrity that was rare in the corporate world of corridor politics taking over our lives.

  He seemed aware of my feelings, and as we moved down the iron stairs he suddenly stopped and shook my hand, smiling at me in an eager and almost boyish way.

  I felt his hand, and the bones waiting for their day.

  18

  Black Millennium

  IT WAS NOON when I reached St John’s Wood, and the late editions of the Sunday newspapers carried vivid colour photographs of the fire at the National Film Theatre. The same inferno glowed from the news-stands in Hammersmith and Knightsbridge. At the traffic lights I stared down from the taxi at the fierce orange flames, barely grasping that I had been partly responsible for them. At the same time I felt an odd pride in what I had done.

  On a whim, when we reached Hyde Park Corner, I asked the driver to detour to Trafalgar Square and the Embankment. The last smoke rose from the rubble of the NFT, a moraine of ash that had given up its dream. A hose played on the charred timbers, sending a plume of vapour over the Hayward Gallery. Engineers on a trestle below Waterloo Bridge were examining the damage to the arches. The Millennium Wheel hung motionless beside County Hall, its gondolas blackened by the smoke, a swan that had shed its plumage. A silent crowd lined the Embankment and stared across the slack water, as if waiting for the Wheel to turn, a machine from a painting by Bosch, grinding out time and death.

  We set off for St John’s Wood, past the same images of disaster hanging from the kiosks in the Charing Cross Road. Central London was dressed for an apocalyptic day. Arson in a film library clearly touched deep layers of unease, as the unconscious fears projected by a thousand Hollywood films at last emerged into reality. I thought of Kay Churchill in her dressing gown, forking scrambled eggs into her mouth while she watched the television news. Vera Blackburn would be in her apartment, playing moodily with her fuses and timers, ready to tackle another bastion of middle-class servitude, Hatchards or Fortnums or the V&A. The Day of Judgement was being planned by neurotic young women with badly bitten nails, and put into effect by out-of-breath psychologists with guilt complexes and dying mothers.

  The taxi reached our house, and pulled to a stop behind Sally’s car. I decided to say nothing about my role in the NFT attack, which Sally would never understand and soon confide to her friends – when I arrived at the Institute on Monday morning Professor Arnold would be waiting for me, Superintendent Michaels at his shoulder.

  I let myself into the house, picking the newspapers from the doorstep. I waited for Sally to call to me, but the undisturbed air carried no trace of her morning shower, the aroma of towels and fresh coffee, and the soft, wifely realm where I now felt like an intruder. The kitchen was untouched, the dishes of a supper for one, an omelette and a glass of wine, lying by the sink.

  I climbed the stairs, realizing how exhausted I was, bruised and bludgeoned as if I had spent the night with a violent policewoman. No one had slept in our bed, but the imprint of Sally’s body dappled the silk spread. The telephone sat squarely on my pillow, almost reducing my husbandly role to a series of digits and unanswered messages. I assumed that Sally had waited up for me, watched the midnight news from the NFT and never guessed that her husband had been one of the arsonists. But Richard Gould’s call had probably unsettled her. Confused by this maverick doctor, she decided to spend the night with a girlfriend.

  Waiting for her to ring, I lay in the bath for an hour, then watched the lunchtime bulletin. The NFT attack still led the broadcast. No credible motive had emerged, but there was talk of an Islamic group protesting against the vilification of Arab peoples in Hollywood films. Once again, thanks to luck and bungling, we had got away with it.

  Picking out a clean pair of shoes, I noticed Sally’s overnight bag on the cupboard floor. Her dressing gown hung next to mine, but she had taken her painkillers from the bedside table, and the foil sachet of contraceptive pills.

  I sat on the bed, staring into the open drawer. I lifted the telephone receiver and pressed the redial button, jotting the number on Sally’s scribble pad.

  The digits were painfully familiar, a number that I had often called, a long-standing private code for feelings of loss and regret. It was the number I dialled whenever I rang Laura to discuss the solicitor’s slow progress with our divorce, in the year after she moved in with Henry Kendall.

  I parked the Saab by the kerb, a series of complex and exhausting manoeuvres, and lay back gratefully, hiding my face behind a newspaper propped against the steering wheel. Fifty feet away was Henry’s small terraced house in Swiss Cottage, a red-brick villa I had always disliked. The short drive from St John’s Wood had tested to the full the tolerances of both the north London traffic system and my own temper. But by mastering the difficult and headstrong car I was in some way maintaining my grip on its errant owner.

  Crossing Maida Vale, I tried to change gear and pulled the handbrake, stalling the engine under the eyes of a nearby policeman. He walked over to me, staring gravely into my face, and then recognized the adapted controls. Assuming that I was a crippled driver, he held back the traffic until I restarted the engine, and waved me on.

  By the time I parked in Swiss Cottage I almost felt that I had become a cripple – more so than Sally, who dispensed with her sticks when the mood took her, and could easily drive my Range Rover. I resembled a skilled ballroom dancer obliged to do the tango on his hands. Sitting like a haunted husband in the car of his faithless wife, controls chafing my knees and elbows, I was now a distorted version of myself, reshaped by my sweetly affectionate and promiscuous wife.

  I waited for an hour, gazing at the yellow blaze of forsythia beside Henry’s dustbins, while the Sunday traffic carried families towards Hampstead Heath. I assumed that Sally had spent the night with him, though her telephone call had possibly been an attempt to find me. The terrorist bombs made her nervous of sleeping alone. But she had not rung for a taxi, and someone had driven to St John’s Wood to collect her.

  As I knew perfectly well, Sally insisted on the freedom to have her affairs. There had been only a few during the years, none lasting more than a week, and some briefer than the parties where she would pick an unattached man and slip away into the night. Often she reached home before I did. She always apologized, smiling hopelessly over a social gaffe, as if she had dented my car or ruined a new electric razor.

  She took for granted that she had earned the right to these impulsive gestures. Like Frida Kahlo, the tram accident entitled her to indulge her whims, to play her own games with chance and a tolerant husband. Giving way to these infidelities was a means of paying me back for being so kindly and understanding. In her mind she remained a perpetual convalescent, free to commit the small cruelties she had displayed at St Mary’s. I knew that the affairs would go on until she found a convincing explanation for the accident that had nearly killed her.

  Cramped in the driver’s seat, I stretched myself against the wheel, arranging my knees and elbows between the invalid controls, a contorted world that seemed to mimic a realm of deviant sexual desires. I held the pistol grip of the accelerator, and heard the linkages click and spring, the sound of relays coupling and uncoupling.

  In many ways, my life was as deformed as this car, rigged with remote controls, fitted with overriders and emergency brakes within easy reach. I had warped myself into the narrow cockpit of professional work at the Adler, with its inane rivalries and strained emotional needs.

  By contrast, the firebombing
of the NFT was a glimpse of a more real world. I could still taste the smoke in the doomed auditoriums, rolling above my head like a compulsive dream. I could hear the hot breath of the goatlike figure who chased me to the Festival Hall, and see the calming smile of the waiter offering me a glass of champagne in the gondola of the Wheel. My quest for Laura’s murderer was a search for a more intense and driven existence. Somewhere in my mind a part of me had helped to plant the Heathrow bomb.

  A taxi pulled to a halt twenty feet from the Saab. Henry Kendall stepped out and paid the driver. He was tired but elated, his handsome face flushed by more than a good lunch. He reached through the passenger door and helped an attractive woman with shoulder-length hair, a long-stem rose in her hand. As he guided her from the taxi he seemed to lift her onto the pavement like a husband carrying his bride over the threshold.

  Sally took his arm, smiling wryly as if the two of them had pulled off a clever conjuring trick. Laughing together, they paused to stare at Henry’s house, pleasantly unsure where they really were.

  Sally strolled across the pavement while Henry hunted for his keys, but her eye was caught by the headlines on the front page of the newspaper shielding my face. She stopped, recognizing her car, and pointed to the handicapped person’s sticker on the windscreen.

  ‘David…?’ She waited as I lowered the window, and then beckoned to Henry, who was staring at me as if we had never met. ‘We’ve just had lunch.’

  ‘Good.’ I waved to Henry, who made no movement. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Why not? Thanks for bringing the car round.’ She bent down and kissed me with unfeigned affection, clearly glad to see me. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I guessed. It wasn’t hard to work out. I’m a psychologist.’

  ‘So is Henry. I’d give you a lift home, but…’

  ‘I’ll take a cab.’ I stepped from the car, extricating myself from the controls, and handed her the keys. ‘I’ll see you soon. There’s a lot going on. The NFT…’

  ‘I know.’ She searched my face, and touched a small bruise on my forehead. ‘You’re not fighting with the police again?’

  ‘Nothing like that. I’m still looking into the Heathrow bomb. Some new leads have come up – I think they’re important. You can tell Henry.’

  ‘I will.’ She stepped back, giving me a clear run at Henry, waiting for a show of husbandly outrage. When I failed to react, she said: ‘Right, I’ll be home later.’

  ‘Good. When you’re ready…’

  I watched her hurry away, head down and her eyes on the pavement. For once, she had failed to provoke me. Henry stood by his front door, the rose in one hand. He waved it at me, but I ignored him and walked past.

  Heading towards St John’s Wood, I lengthened my step. I had made a small payment in masculine pride, but the investment had been worthwhile. The attack on the NFT had unlocked the door of my cell. I felt free again, for the first time since I joined the Adler and was inducted into the freemasonry of the professional class. Its suffocating regalia still hung in a wardrobe of my mind, the guilt and resentments and self-doubt, demanding to be taken out and paraded in front of the nearest mirror, a reminder of civic duty and responsibility. But the regalia were heading for the dustbin. I no longer resented my mother for her offhand selfishness, or my colleagues at the Institute for the bone-breaking boredom they inflicted on the world. And I no longer resented Sally for her little infidelities. I loved her, and it mattered nothing if I was her father’s private nurse.

  I crossed Maida Vale and saluted the constable on duty, who seemed surprised that I was now striding along with such a skip in my stride. I was thinking of Chelsea Marina and the fire on the South Bank, and the black Millennium Wheel ready to turn above the ruins. I remembered Kay Churchill and Vera and Joan Chang and, above all, Dr Richard Gould, and knew that I needed to see them again.

  19

  The Siege of Broadcasting House

  UNPREDICTABLE AS EVER, the police had decided not to intervene. I stood in the crowd of demonstrators outside Broadcasting House, waiting in vain for the sirens to sound and the riot vans to swerve into our ranks. But calm reigned, by order of the Police Commissioner. Double-decker buses moved along Langham Place, tourists gazing down at us, keen to observe one of London’s historic rituals, the raising of fists against the establishment.

  Across the street two constables patrolled the pavement near the Chinese Embassy. A third guarded the doors of the Langham Hotel, chatting to a limousine driver. None of them took any interest in the hundred or more protesters now blocking the entrance to the BBC’s flagship headquarters. But without the police and a brisk confrontation, we would never rouse ourselves to action. We needed to lose our tempers, push aside the security men and seize the building.

  ‘They must think we’re fans,’ I muttered to the fifty-year-old woman standing beside me in a sheepskin jacket. A veterinary surgeon and volunteer sexton at the Chelsea Marina chapel, she was a neighbour of the Reverend Dexter. ‘Mrs Templeton – why is it you can never find a policeman when you need one? They must think we’re here for some pop star…’

  ‘Mr Markham? You’re talking to yourself again…’

  Like most of the protesters, Mrs Templeton was listening to her portable radio, tuned to the Radio 4 channel at that moment transmitting a commentary on the demonstration. Microphone at his lips, the reporter stood behind the security guards in the foyer of Broadcasting House, and there were hoots of laughter at some absurd comment about our motives for picketing the BBC.

  Looking at the attentive faces around me, ears to their radios, I realized that we were taking our orders from the organization against which we were demonstrating. During the past three days the one o’clock news programme had run an investigation into the unrest at Chelsea Marina, and into similar outbursts of middle-income disquiet in Bristol and Leeds.

  As expected, the journalists had missed the point. They blamed the revolt on the deep dissatisfactions of the babyboomer generation, a self-indulgent and over-educated class unable to hold their own against a younger age-group thrusting their way into the professions. Pundits, backbench MPs, even a Home Office junior minister offered similar pearls. Listening to them in Kay’s kitchen as she sliced the salad cucumber, I knew that I would have been just as glib if I had never set foot in Chelsea Marina.

  So incensed by the BBC’s patronizing tone that she cut her finger, Kay set about organizing a demo. We would flood Portland Place with protesters, rush the venerable deco building and seize control of the World Today studio, then broadcast a true account of the rebellion gathering pace across the map of middle England.

  A large charge of resentment waited to be lit. As Kay explained, using a megaphone to address the crowd outside her house, for more than sixty years the BBC had played a leading role in brainwashing the middle classes. Its regime of moderation and good sense, its commitment to the Reithian aims of education and enlightenment, had been an elaborate cover behind which it imposed an ideology of passivity and self-restraint. The BBC had defined the national culture, a swindle in which the middle classes had colluded, assuming that moderation and civic responsibility were in their own interest.

  Steadying Kay as she teetered on her kitchen chair, I nodded confidently at her tirade. She introduced two fellow residents, former BBC arts producers recently made redundant. They knew their way around Broadcasting House, and would lead the assault on the World Today studio. All we lacked, when we made our separate ways across London the next morning, was a determined and ruthless enemy.

  But I was still gripped by the excitements of the revolution. After leaving Sally and Henry Kendall outside Henry’s house, I had waylaid a passing minicab, and kept it waiting in St John’s Wood while I packed a small suitcase. I had no idea how long I would stay in Chelsea Marina, or how much luggage Lenin carried from the Finland Station, but I assumed that revolutionaries travelled light.

  I felt a surge of relief when we reached th
e King’s Road, like a child returning to a happy foster home. I had taken three weeks’ leave, assuring Professor Arnold that my dying mother needed me with her. He had known her in her younger days, and was understandably sceptical. I would be happy to see Sally later, once she had emasculated Henry with her complex needs. At the moment, what was happening in this west London housing estate had far more meaning, and in some way held the key to my future.

  Despite all this, the Pakistani driver refused to enter the estate, and stopped by the gatehouse.

  ‘Far too dangerous, sir – the police advise us to stay out. A Harrods van has been stoned.’

  ‘Stoned? What’s behind it?’

  ‘It’s a question of ethnic rivalries. The people here have their own little Kashmir problem. There’s a dominance struggle between the traditional Guardian supporters and the new middle class from the financial services field.’

  ‘Interesting.’ I noticed a copy of The Economist on the front seat. ‘Now which side do I belong to?’

  The driver turned to peer at me. ‘Non-aligned, sir. Undoubtedly…’

  I paid up and left him to it, setting off on foot past the boarded windows of the estate manager’s office. A police car patrolled Beaufort Avenue, trailed by two residents in a battered Mini, which flashed its lights in warning. I expected to find Kay’s house under close surveillance, but the cul de sac was at peace, the silence broken only by the snipping of Kay’s shears as she trimmed her hedge.

  She embraced me eagerly, took my hands and pressed them to her breasts, then seized my suitcase. We spent a happy afternoon with several bottles of wine, debriefing each other after the attack on the NFT. Kay had already forgotten that she had abandoned me – in the hope, I now suspected, that I would be caught and betray her. Martyrdom waited in the wings of her ambition, ready to bestow stardom. She graphically described further planned assaults on the South Bank, an outpost of the new tyranny, enslaving those who huddled for cultural shelter against its brutalist walls.