Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Richard, tell me – did you touch that little boy?’

  Gould turned his head to look at me, clearly disappointed. ‘David? Would it matter?’

  ‘Not really. It’s arguable.’

  ‘Talk it over with Stephen Dexter.’

  Impatient to leave, he reached across me and turned the ignition key.

  After an hour’s drive, we reached a small gliding school high in the Marlborough Downs. Gould had enrolled by e-mail for a course of lessons, but the school’s secretary seemed surprised by the undernourished and unkempt appearance of this odd young doctor with his white skin and shabby suit. I offered to vouch for Gould, but he sent me back to the car. As I knew he would, he soon convinced the secretary of his powerful need to fly.

  I sat in the clubhouse and watched Gould inspect the tandem cockpit of a training glider. Through the open windows I listened to the flutter of air over the grass aerodrome, the fabric of parked gliders shivering in the cool wind. Gould nodded to the woman instructor, eyes on the sky as if already planning to stow himself away on the Space Shuttle.

  ‘Right,’ he told me when we walked back to the car. ‘Trial flight next week. You can come and watch.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘It’s a challenge, David.’ He touched his ear. ‘I have a small problem with my balancing organ. Oddly enough, airline hijackers tend to suffer from it. One could see the hijack as an unconscious attempt to solve the problem.’

  ‘Far-fetched?’

  ‘Why?’ He looked back as a glider rose into the air, released the towing cable and soared away with the icy grace of a condor. ‘Besides, it’s all part of the great search.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘This and that. Some kind of tentative explanation. The mystery of space-time, the wisdom of trees, the kindness of light…’

  ‘Gliding? More than powered flight?’

  ‘Heaven forbid. The world turned into noise; life and death measured by legroom.’

  ‘And gliding?’

  ‘You’re above the sky.’

  He lay back in the passenger seat as we headed for the motorway, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, unpacking himself for the sun.

  I switched on the radio, flattering myself that the Broadcasting House invasion would lead the news. The bulletins were dominated by the bomb at Tate Modern, the most popular cultural centre in London, which performed the role once assigned to the Dome. No group admitted its part in the attack, and security had been tightened at the British Museum and the National Gallery.

  ‘From now on it’s going to be a lot harder,’ I commented. ‘The Science Museum, the British Library…’

  ‘David, they’re the wrong targets.’ Gould closed his eyes in the sun, lost in a reverie of wings and light. ‘They’re the targets people expect us to hit. They’re zebra-crossing protests writ large, educated mothers demonstrating for speed humps outside schools. It’s what the middle classes do.’

  ‘Anything wrong with that?’

  ‘They’re too predictable, too sensible. We need to pick targets that don’t make sense. If your target is the global money system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam shop next door. Deface the cenotaph, spray Agent Orange on Chelsea Physic Garden, burn down London Zoo. We’re in the business of creating unease.’

  ‘And a meaningless target would be the best of all?’

  ‘Well said. You understand me, David.’ Gould touched my hand, pleased to be driven by me. ‘Kay and her crowd, they’re still locked into honesty and good manners. All those architects and lawyers – the most radical thing they can imagine is burning down St Paul’s School for Girls. They don’t realize their lives are empty.’

  ‘Is that true? Most of them love their children.’

  ‘DNA. Biology’s first commandent. Take no more credit for loving your children than birds take credit for nest-building.’

  ‘Civic pride?’

  ‘The gene pool’s neighbourhood-watch scheme. Look at you, David. Concerned, thoughtful, kindly, but nothing you do matters a damn.’

  ‘You’re right. Religious faith?’

  ‘Dying. Now and then it sits up and seizes the undertaker by the wrists. A pointless act has a special meaning of its own. Calmly carried out, untouched by any emotions, a meaningless act is an empty space larger than the universe around it.’

  ‘So we avoid motives?’

  ‘Absolutely. Kill a politician and you’re tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger. Oswald and Kennedy, Princip and the Archduke. But kill someone at random, fire a revolver into a McDonald’s – the universe stands back and holds its breath. Better still, kill fifteen people at random.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Figuratively, that is. I don’t want to kill anyone.’ Keen to reassure me, Gould rehearsed a disarming smile in the visor’s mirror, and then treated me to the full grimace. ‘You see all this, David. You’ve grasped the point. That’s why I trust you. People are nervous of violence. Excited, of course, but it unsettles them.’

  ‘Not you?’

  ‘You’ve noticed that? I suppose it’s true. Violence is like a bush fire, it destroys a lot of trees but refreshes the forest, clears away the stifling undergrowth, so more trees spring up. We’ll have to think of the right targets. They need to be completely pointless…’

  ‘Keats House, the Bank of England, Heathrow?’

  ‘No, not Heathrow.’ Distracted by a roadside sign, Gould reached over and held the wheel. ‘Slow down, David – there’s something I want to see…’

  We were passing through a pleasant country town a few miles from our junction with the motorway. The traffic was surprisingly heavy, tourists peering through their car windows. On the outskirts of the town there were bosky lanes and high sycamores, and Gould gazed at the distant boughs like a latter-day Samuel Palmer, searching the window of the sky for a glimpse of the light beyond. His pale hand traced the overlay of branches, as if working out a route through a maze.

  But the town itself was nondescript, cottages with simulated thatch roofs converted into dry-cleaners and video shops, a half-timbered Chinese takeaway, souvenir stores and coffee bars. There was a forest of signs helpfully guiding the visiting motorist to the car parks, though it was unclear why the town should have so many visitors or why they would want to park there.

  Yet Gould seemed satisfied, smiling over his shoulder as we approached the motorway.

  ‘A charming place, David. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Well…Watford with fields?’

  ‘No. There’s something very special. You saw all those tourists. It’s almost a place of worship.’

  ‘Hard to believe.’ I followed the slip road and joined the motorway traffic. ‘Where is it, exactly?’

  ‘It’s off the A4, on the way to Newbury.’ Gould lay back, inhaling deeply, as if he had held his breath for minutes. ‘Hungerford…it’s where I’d like to end my days.’

  Hungerford? The name flitted around my mind like a trapped moth as we drove back to London. I was surprised by Gould’s response to the town, and I suspected that our visit to the gliding school had been an excuse to drive through its streets. If he became a glider pilot he would be able to fly over its car parks and souvenir shops, satisfying some deep dream of rural peace.

  Childhood arsonists carried their apocalyptic fantasies into adult life. Fire and flight seemed to fill Gould’s mind. I watched him dozing beside me, only stirring when we approached Heathrow. The airport had as great a hold on his imagination as it did on mine, binding us together in an unusual partnership. I had wasted half a day driving him into the country, hoping that he would reveal more of himself. But in fact he had ensnared me in his bizarre world, drawing me into his fragmentary personality, almost offering himself as a kit from which I could construct a vital figure missing from my life. I admired him for his kindness to the dying children, and he had skilfully played on this, and on my own weaknesses. I was drawn to him and the way that he had sacri
ficed everything to his quest for truth, an exhausted captain still ready to feed his own masts into the furnace.

  All these thoughts left my mind when I dropped Gould off at Chelsea Marina and went on to the Institute. Buying an evening paper that headlined the Tate bomb attack, I read the names of the three victims, a warder, a French tourist, and a young Chinese woman living in west London. Joan Chang, the Reverend Dexter’s friend in the Puffa jacket…

  22

  A Visit to the Bunker

  THE THAMES SHOULDERED its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it. Below Westminster the Thames became a bruiser of a river, like the people of the estuary, unimpressed by the money terraces of the City of London.

  The dealing rooms were a con, and only the river was real. The money was all on tick, a stream of coded voltages sluicing through concealed conduits under the foreign exchange floors. Facing them across the river were two more fakes, the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe, and an old power station made over into a middle-class disco, Tate Modern. Walking past the entrance to the Globe, I listened for an echo of the bomb that had killed Joan Chang, the only meaningful event in the entire landscape.

  I had parked in Sumner Street, a hundred yards from the rear of the Tate. Police vehicles surrounded the gallery, and crime-scene tapes closed the entrance to the public. I took the long route round, down Park Street to the Globe, then turned onto the embankment. I strolled through the tourists drawn across the Millennium Bridge, eager to see the damage to this bombastic structure, more bunker than museum, of which Albert Speer would have thoroughly approved.

  Like all our friends, Sally and I saw every exhibition held in this massive vault. The building triumphed by a visual sleight of hand, a psychological trick that any fascist dictator would understand. Externally, its deco symmetry made it seem smaller than it was, and the vast dimensions of the turbine hall cowed both eye and brain. The entrance ramp was wide enough to take a parade of tanks. Power, of kilowatt hours or messianic gospel, glowered from the remote walls. This was the art show as Führer spectacle, an early sign, perhaps, that the educated middle classes were turning towards fascism.

  I walked through the tourists to the main entrance, and stared across the grass at the bomb damage. The device had detonated at 1.45 pm, as I was being led from Broadcasting House by Sergeant Angela. Witnesses stated that a young Chinese woman was running around the bookshop. Evidently distraught, she seized a large art book from the shelves and ran into the turbine hall. The staff chased her, but gave up when they realized that she was warning people away. At the top of the entrance ramp the book exploded in her hands, its force amplified by the sloping floor. Glass and masonry lay across the grass, and covered the cars parked in Holland Street.

  I thought of Joan Chang, sitting cheerfully behind Stephen Dexter on the Harley-Davidson. I guessed that after viewing an exhibition she had passed a few minutes in the bookshop, and by tragic mischance saw the terrorist plant his bomb, a lethal device intended to inflict the largest number of casualties. The police had identified the injured victims, but Stephen Dexter was not among them. The clergyman had vanished from Chelsea Marina, leaving his Harley sitting in the rain outside his chapel. Kay had telephoned a friend in the film unit at the Tate, but no one remembered seeing Dexter in the bookshop or galleries. Weeping over the Chinese girl’s death, Kay assumed that he had fled London and gone to ground at some religious retreat.

  Remembering the devastation at Heathrow, I knew that Dexter and I now had something in common. A terrorist bomb not only killed its victims, but forced a violent rift through time and space, and ruptured the logic that held the world together. For a few hours gravity turned traitor, overruling Newton’s laws of motion, reversing rivers and toppling skyscrapers, stirring fears long dormant in our minds. The horror challenged the soft complacencies of day-to-day life, like a stranger stepping out of a crowd and punching one’s face. Sitting on the ground with a bloodied mouth, one realized that the world was more dangerous but, conceivably, more meaningful. As Richard Gould had said, an inexplicable act of violence had a fierce authenticity that no reasoned behaviour could match.

  A rain squall, thrown up by the strutting river, lashed the face of the gallery. The crowd scattered to the shelter of the side streets, leaving the police forensic team to work on, sifting the debris and decanting the broken glass into plastic bags.

  A constable shouted to two German women who crossed the crime-scene tapes and took refuge behind a police van. They moved away, buttoning their raincoats as they hurried past a small car covered with dust and fragments of masonry.

  I followed them, but stopped beside the car, a Volkswagen Beetle. Under the coating of dirt and rubble I could see the white paintwork of a car identical to Joan Chang’s. I watched the constable guarding the forecourt, stamping his feet and talking to the forensic officers sheltering in the entrance.

  Already I had decided to make a forensic examination of my own.

  I returned from Sumner Street ten minutes later, wearing the white coat that Gould had bundled into the back of the Range Rover when we left the children’s hospice. The constable was busy with the tourists brought out by the fitful sun, and the forensic team pegging out their stakes and string barely glanced at me, assuming that I was a Home Office investigator, perhaps a pathologist searching for human remains.

  I approached the Beetle and gripped the door handle, ready to break the driver’s window with my elbow. As I raised my arm I felt the mechanism open smoothly under my thumb. When she stepped from the car, Joan had forgotten to lock it, perhaps distracted by a passing vehicle or some acquaintance she had agreed to meet.

  I eased back the door and slipped into the seat, recognizing the pale scents of jasmine and orris oil. The windows were thick with a bricky dust, streams of ochre mud that hid me from the police twenty yards away. I turned and scanned the rear seat, a clutter of tissues, discarded perfume samplers and a tourist guide to China, pages turned back to a five-day boat trip through the Yangtse gorges.

  Stretching my legs, I pressed the brake and clutch pedals, barely able to reach them. The seat had been racked back, giving room to longer legs than Joan Chang’s. Driving the Beetle, the petite Chinese sat with her chin touching the steering wheel.

  Someone else, almost certainly Stephen Dexter, had driven Joan to the Tate. Uncomfortable with my legs extended, I felt below the seat and searched for the release handle.

  There was a faint bleep of electronic protest. I was holding a mobile phone. Waiting for it to ring, I placed it against my ear, almost expecting Joan’s piping voice. The phone was silent, and had been lying under the driving seat for the past two days, unnoticed by the police investigators.

  Through the smeary windscreen I watched the forensic team at work, dividing the forecourt into narrow allotments, a laborious anatomy that might yield a few pieces of bomb mechanism. I rang the last number dialled, and listened to the ringing tone.

  ‘You are calling Tate Modern.’ A recorded voice spoke. ‘The gallery is closed until further notice. You are calling…’

  I switched off the phone, assuming that Joan had rung the Tate before setting out, perhaps to book a restaurant table. As I sat in her car, with her mobile in my hand, I felt that I was reliving the last moments in the life of this pleasant young woman.

  A hand fumbled at the driver’s door, scraping the wet dust over the window. I had locked the door from the inside, pushing down the safety toggle. Fingers scrabbled at the glass, like the paws of a huge dog. I could see the blurred face and shoulders of a man in a black raincoat, perhaps one of the detectives working on the case.

  I wound down the window. A faint rain was falling again, but I recognized the stressed and dishevelled face of the man who looked down at me.

  He reached out and pulled me against the door pillar. �
��Markham? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Stephen…let me help you.’ I pulled his hand from my shoulder, but hesitated before opening the door. Sweat sprang from the clergyman’s forehead, beading around his enlarged eyes. He had lost his dog collar, torn away in his panic, and his unshaven cheeks were flushed and swollen, as if he had been weeping as he ran all night through profane and empty streets. When he gazed into the car, aware of its impossible void, I thought of him running along the river through the nights to come, forever following its journey into the dark.

  He peered at my face, confused by my white coat, and showed me a set of ignition keys, clearly hoping that he had approached the wrong vehicle. ‘Markham…? I’m looking for Joan. Her car’s here…’

  Pushing back the door, I stepped into the rain. I placed my hands on Dexter’s shoulders, trying to calm him.

  ‘Stephen…I’m sorry about Joan. It’s horrific for you.’

  ‘For her.’ Dexter forced me aside, and stared at the rubblestrewn entrance to the Tate. ‘I wanted to call her.’

  ‘What happened? Stephen?’

  ‘Everything. Everything happened.’ He stared into my face, fully recognizing me for the first time, and stepped back, flinching from me as if I were responsible for Joan Chang’s death. In a rush of words, a blurted warning of approaching danger, he shouted: ‘Go back to your wife. Get away from Richard Gould. Run, David…’

  He turned from me, one hand still gripping my shoulder, and pointed across the roof of the car. Thirty feet from us, a young woman with rain-soaked hair was standing on the embankment. Her patent leather coat streamed with moisture, as if she had just emerged from the river, or stepped from a dark barge that plied the deeper tides below its surface. She watched the clergyman with the punitive gaze of a wronged parishioner set on revenge.

  Dexter’s grip tightened on my arm. He was clearly cowed by the young woman, who seemed to have punished him once and would soon punish him again. Staring at the inflamed scar on his forehead, I thought of the Philippine guerrillas whose whips had broken his spirit.