Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Undressed concrete, David. Alcatraz revival, always beware. Built by the sort of people who liked Anna Neagle and Rex Harrison…’

  I was delighted to be with Kay and her chaotic enthusiasms. At night I slept soundly on another child’s mattress in her daughter’s bedroom, surrounded by cheerful pastel drawings of the Trojan War. Troy, I noticed, had a marked resemblance to Chelsea Marina, and the wooden horse was the first I had seen furnished with a stripped-pine penis. Shortly after dawn, when she was woken by a police helicopter, Kay slipped into bed beside me. She lay quietly in the grey London light, inhaling the scent of her daughter’s pillow before she turned to me.

  During the next fortnight the Chelsea Marina rebellion made significant strides. More than half the residents were involved in the protest actions. As the Daily Telegraph – now the house journal of the revolution – noted in an editorial, many of the activists were senior professionals. Doctors, architects and solicitors took a prominent part in the sit-in at Chelsea Town Hall protesting against the new parking charges. A retired barrister led the demo outside the offices of the management company, demanding the surrender of the estate’s freeholds.

  The first confrontation with the police came a week after I returned. Bailiffs tried to force their way into a house owned by a young accountant, his wife and four children. The couple refused to pay their outrageous utility bills and were threatened with repossession.

  But the bailiffs were met by a force of articulate and indignant women, who attacked their van before they could unload the sledgehammers. Twenty minutes later, the police arrived with a French television crew in tow. A storm of missiles rained down, stones lovingly gathered from the Seychelles, Mauritius and the Yucatan. The police tactfully withdrew, persuaded by a Home Office minister whose sister lived at Chelsea Marina. But the television scenes of the accountant’s terrified children, screaming from their bedroom windows, prompted uneasy memories of sectarian violence in Belfast.

  Many parents withdrew their children from their fee-paying schools, rejecting the entire ethos of private education, a vast obedience-training conspiracy. Concerned for their families’ safety, many residents took unpaid leave, hoping to give themselves time to think. Their wives and children turned to pilfering from the King’s Road supermarkets and delicatessens. Hauled in front of the magistrates, they refused to pay their fines, and the Daily Mail dubbed them ‘the first middle-class gypsies’.

  When an Inland Revenue office in Fulham was forced to close, after a walkout by the key computer managers, the authorities at last roused themselves. A sustained middle-class boycott of the consumer society would have disastrous effects on tax revenues. Investigators from the Department of Health roamed Chelsea Marina with their questionnaires, trying to isolate the underlying grievances.

  The wide scatter of chosen targets made it difficult to find a common psychology at work. The pickets who blocked the entrances to Peter Jones and the London Library, Legoland and the British Museum, travel agencies and the V&A, a Hendon shopping mall and a minor public school, had nothing in common other than a rejection of middle-class life. Two smoke bombs in Selfridge’s food hall and the Dinosaur wing of the Natural History Museum seemed unrelated, but closed both institutions for a day. The ‘Destroy the museums’ cry of Marinetti’s futurists had a surprising resonance.

  During a local by-election, when Kay and Vera set out for the polling station, hoping to deface their ballots, they found that the rejection of civic cooperation had become a serious threat to the democratic system. Parliamentary elections had long been run by middle-class volunteers. The stay-at-home decision by even a few experienced tellers forced a postponement, applauded by the residents at Chelsea Marina, who regarded parliamentary democracy as a none too subtle way of neutering the middle class.

  Pleased by all this, Kay sent me out to buy the broadsheet newspapers, and over her wine read out the worried editorials. The Times and Guardian were baffled why so many of their readers were seceding from society. Both quoted a deputy head teacher and Chelsea Marina resident interviewed on television:

  ‘We’re tired of being taken for granted. We’re tired of being used. We don’t like the kind of people we’ve become…’

  Outside Broadcasting House the demonstrators pressed closer to the entrance, pushing back the wooden barriers that the BBC security men had placed in front of the doors. A crowd of some two hundred protesters had now formed, listening on their radios to a news programme that discussed the events unfolding below the BBC’s windows.

  I scanned the familiar faces of Chelsea Marina residents, but there was no sign of Kay, Vera Blackburn or Richard Gould. I knew that a protest was planned at the V&A, which Kay termed ‘an emporium of cultural delusions’. The target was the Cast Room, where the copy of Michelangelo’s David would be pulled from its plinth, in much the way that statues of Stalin and Lenin were toppled after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The David, Kay claimed, deluded the middle classes that a developed ‘cultural’ sensibility endowed them with a moral superiority denied to football fans or garden gnome enthusiasts.

  ‘Oh, my God…’ Mrs Templeton rocked back on her heels. Around us, people were laughing in disbelief.

  ‘Mrs Templeton? Has something happened?’

  ‘It certainly has.’ She brushed a fly from the sleeve of her sheepskin jacket. ‘Chelsea Marina is “the first middle-class sink estate”. We’re the “underclass” of the bourgeoisie. Dear God…’

  I tried to think of an adequate response, but an angry confrontation had broken out between the security guards and a group of protesters knocking over the wooden barriers. A tug of war quickly followed, the security men insisting that the barrier was BBC property and taunting the demonstrators for refusing to pay their licence fees.

  A thunderflash burst near the entrance, a hard explosion that cuffed our ears. In the shocked silence a cloud of blue smoke floated over our heads. Taking Mrs Templeton’s arm, I saw a TV news car in Portland Place forced onto the pavement. White police vans, sirens seesawing, swerved through the traffic and pulled to a halt by All Souls church in Langham Place. Officers in riot gear, shields and truncheons at the ready, leapt from the vans and pushed their way through the watching lunchtime crowds.

  A smoke bomb shot a gust of black vapour into the air. A startled security guard tripped over one of the barriers and fell to the ground. The protesters seized their chance and surged past him, forcing their way through the doors. Still holding Mrs Templeton’s arm, I felt myself propelled into the foyer by the police pressure.

  A hundred of us packed the reception area, overwhelming the security staff trying to guard the lifts. A group of guests cowered among the armchairs, pundits at last confronted by reality. The smoke followed us into the foyer, swirling into the lift shafts as the elevators carried the advance parties of demonstrators to the upper floors. Led by one of the BBC producers who had come over to our side, they planned to invade the news studio and broadcast the manifesto of middle-class rebellion to the listening nation, mouths agape over their muesli.

  The other BBC man, a slim-faced Anglo-Indian, herded us towards the stairs to the left of the foyer. One floor above, we burst through a door marked ‘Council Chamber’. The high-ceilinged room, with its semi-circular south wall, was hung with portraits of the BBC’s director-generals, who had presided over the Corporation’s benevolent tyranny.

  Like a revolutionary rabble breaking into an ancien régime drawing room and confronting the effigies of a corrupt aristocracy, we stared aghast at the portraits, dominated by the BBC’s principal architect, Lord Reith. I noticed that the subjects’ heads grew larger as the years passed and the BBC’s power increased, culminating in the smiling balloon-head of a recent appointee, an immense inflated blimp of self-satisfaction.

  A nervous line of junior producers and studio engineers faced us across the chamber, barely convinced of any sacrifice they might have to make. They surrendered limply when we pushed past them. Mrs T
empleton drew an aerosol can from her handbag. As smoke drifted into the chamber from the foyer below, she expertly aimed her paint jet at the portraits, endowing them with a series of Hitler moustaches and forelocks.

  Five minutes later it was all over. As the riot police manhandled us through the lobby we learned that the assault on The World Today had failed. Long before our arrival, the entire production team had moved to a secure studio in the basement. The police snatch squads had entered Broadcasting House through a side door in Portland Place. They were waiting for us, truncheons warm and at the ready, and made short work of any protesters lost in the mazelike corridors. We were roughly rounded up and ejected from the building, and the Corporation resumed its historic task of beguiling the middle classes.

  Police violence, I noted, was directly proportional to police boredom, and not to any resistance offered by protesters. We were saved from any real brutality by our own incompetence and the swift end to the demonstration. Helped along by kicks and baton blows, we were bundled into the smoke-stained air of Portland Place. In half an hour we would be bussed to West End Central, charged and bailed to appear before the magistrates. First offenders like Mrs Templeton would be spared, but I was almost certain to be given a thirty-day sentence.

  Flung through the doors by a sweating constable, I tripped over a wooden barrier. A woman police sergeant stepped forward and took my arm. As she helped me to my feet I recognized the determined face of the demonstrator at Olympia who had bandaged my injured leg.

  ‘Angela…?’ I peered under the lowered brim of her hat. ‘The cat show, Olympia…’

  ‘Cat show?’

  ‘Kingston, two children…’

  ‘Right.’ Vaguely recognizing me, she relaxed her strong grip. ‘I remember.’

  ‘You joined the police?’

  ‘Looks like it.’ She moved me towards the church, where the prisoners were being processed. ‘You’re a long way from Olympia, Mr – ?’

  ‘Markham. David Markham.’ I stared into her steely eyes as a police van veered past us. ‘Quite a change of heart. When did you join?’

  ‘Four years ago. Never felt better.’

  ‘So, you were…undercover?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’ She led me through the throng of dog handlers and police drivers. ‘You look all in. Find a different hobby.’

  ‘Undercover?’ Remembering my £100 fine for going to her aid, I said: ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘Someone has to keep the streets safe.’

  ‘I agree. As it happens, I was also undercover.’

  ‘Really? Who with?’

  ‘Hard to explain. It’s connected to the Heathrow bomb. The Home Office is interested.’

  ‘Now I’m impressed.’ She pointed to the last protesters being expelled from Broadcasting House. Mrs Templeton, her jacket torn, was complaining to a weary inspector. ‘What about today? Is this part of your project?’

  ‘No. It’s more serious than it looks. We have a point to make.’

  ‘You may be serious, but it’s a very small point. You’re wasting police time and giving cover to people who want to do real damage.’

  Already she had lost interest in me. Her eyes picked up a change of mood among the police units. Handlers were urging their dogs into the backs of vans, drivers started their engines. All but a few of the officers guarding the protesters on the church steps turned and ran to their vehicles. Leaving me without a word, Angela slipped into the front passenger seat of a police car that halted briefly beside us.

  Sirens wailed down Upper Regent Street as the convoy departed. Almost the entire police presence had gone, a vacuum filled by ambling tourists who began to photograph us. The protesters corralled on the church steps were listening to their radios again, and began to disperse as the constables beckoned them away.

  Mrs Templeton walked towards me, radio held to her ear. She seemed ruffled and confused, unaware of her torn jacket and the paint on her chin.

  ‘Mrs Templeton? We’ll share a taxi. I think we’ve got away with it.’

  ‘What?’ She stared wildly at me, her attention fixed on the radio. She had lost the heel of her right shoe, and in an odd middle-class reflex of my own I felt that she was letting the side down by appearing so dishevelled.

  ‘We’re safe, Mrs Templeton. The police – did they hurt you?’

  ‘Listen…’ Eyes almost crossed, she handed the radio to me. ‘A bomb’s gone off at Tate Modern. Three people were killed…’

  I listened to the reporter’s urgent voice, but around me all sound seemed to withdraw from the street. Tourists wandered past Broadcasting House, staring at maps that led nowhere. Rag-trade despatch riders hovered at the traffic lights, exhausts pumping, ready to race from one meaningless assignment to another. The city was a vast and stationary carousel, forever boarded by millions of would-be passengers who took their seats, waited and then dismounted. I thought of the bomb cutting through another temple of enlightenment, silencing the endless murmur of cafeteria conversations. Despite myself, I felt a surge of excitement and complicity.

  20

  White Space

  ‘IF THE MEANS are desperate enough, they justify the ends.’

  Kay spoke with her hands on my shoulders, standing behind me as we watched the breakfast news in her kitchen. Despite the closeness and affection prompted by the Tate bomb, I could feel her fingers trembling as if they were trying to break free from me. I thought of the deep night we had spent together, the hours passed talking in the dark, each of us unpacking a lifetime’s memories. But the destruction at the Tate rekindled nerves that had been numbed by too much talk of violence, the conspirator’s blank cheque that might one day have to be cashed. Protest tapped all Kay’s high ideals, but violence devalued them, making her uneasily aware that reality waited for us outside an already open door.

  She squeezed my shoulders, staring through the sitting-room window at a convoy of neighbours’ cars leaving to support a rent strike in north London. ‘Kay?’

  ‘I’m all right. There’s so much going on.’ ‘The Mill Hill demo – do you want to join them?’ ‘I ought to.’ Her worn fingers felt the spurs of bone in my neck. ‘There’s a lot to think over.’

  ‘The two of us?’ I tried to calm her. ‘Kay?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You and I. Do we need to talk anything through?’

  ‘Again? Slow-motion replays make me nervous. Cinema died when they invented the flashback.’ Taking pity on me, she massaged my temples with her forefingers. ‘It’s all starting to happen. You can feel we’re on the edge of something.’

  ‘We are. Ten years in jail.’

  ‘That’s not a joke.’ She held my head protectively to her breast, like a mother with her child. ‘You could do some real time. I always thought you might be a police spy. You took so many chances, and came back even though we left you in the shit. Either you were very careless or you had some special friends looking after you. But that wasn’t it at all-I knew that yesterday. You were so involved.’

  ‘Good. The BBC demo?’

  ‘No. That was a joke. Even Peggy Templeton couldn’t get herself arrested. I mean the bomb at Tate Modern.’

  ‘Kay…?’ I turned and held her hips, looking up at her troubled face. ‘Tate Modern? That was horrific. I wasn’t involved in any way at all.’

  ‘It was horrific, but you were involved.’ Kay sat down at right angles to me, looking at my face in profile, like a phrenologist trying to read my character in the angles of my forehead. ‘Last night in bed – you were so wrapped up in the violence of it, the horror of those deaths. You had the best sex in your life.’

  ‘Kay…’

  ‘Be honest, you did. How many times did you come? I stopped counting.’ Kay held my wrists. ‘You wanted to bugger me, and beat me. For God’s sake, I know when a man’s balls are alight. Yours were on fire. You were thinking of that bomb, suddenly going off and tearing everything apart. The meaningless violence – it excited you.’<
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  ‘Unconsciously? Maybe. Once we went to bed I didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘You didn’t need to. You got up to pee and looked in the bathroom mirror. You could see it in your eyes.’ Frustrated by herself, and her too tolerant responses, Kay switched off the TV set. She pointed accusingly at the blank screen. ‘Three people died. Think about it, David. Some poor warder giving his life for a Damien Hirst…’

  The previous evening, still charged by the adrenalin rush of the BBC protest and the news of the Tate explosion, we had drunk far too much wine. The bomb, a Semtex device hidden inside a large art book, had detonated near the bookshop at 1.45 pm, killing the visitor who carried it, and blowing out a large section of the masonry above the entrance. A French tourist and a warder were also killed, and some twenty visitors injured. The police had cordoned off the surrounding area, and a forensic team was picking through the dust and rubble that covered the nearby grass and parked cars.

  No one took responsibility, but the bomb gave a sharper edge to London’s grey and muffled air. Boredom and volatility marked the future. The device exploded on the same day as the Broadcasting House protest, and seemed to point towards Chelsea Marina and its middle-class rebellion, but Kay strongly condemned the Tate attack. Phone-in audiences who watched her TV interviews accepted this, if only because the bomb-maker’s sinister competence clearly belonged to a different realm. Chelsea Marina’s architects and solicitors, with their smoke bombs and thunderflashes, claimed that they had never tried to kill anyone. For the first time, Kay found herself regarded as a voice of moderation.

  Perhaps to offset this novel image she told me as she undressed for bed that she had slept with all her lodgers, from eighteen-year-old film students to an alcoholic cartoonist ejected from his home near the marina by his exasperated wife. ‘All landladies over forty have sex with their lodgers. It’s the last surviving link with matriarchy…’