Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  As it happened, Mrs Turner was not alone. The residents of Chelsea Marina had launched a small crime wave on the surrounding neighbourhood. As executives and middle managers gave up their jobs, there was an outbreak of petty thieving from delis and off-licences. Every parking meter in Chelsea Marina was vandalized, and the council street cleaners, traditional working class to the core, refused to enter the estate, put off by the menacing middle-class air. Removed from their expensive schools, bored teenagers haunted Sloane Square and the King’s Road, trying their hands at drug-dealing and car theft.

  The location vans of Japanese and American television channels cruised around Chelsea Marina, waiting for blood. But the police held back, under orders from the Home Office not to provoke an outright confrontation. Cabinet ministers were now well aware that if the middle class withdrew their goodwill, society would collapse.

  Meanwhile, law and order had returned, ready to make a small push. From Kay’s window I counted three police vans parked in the entrance to Grosvenor Place. The constables sat by the windows, accepting cups of tea from nearby residents. One policewoman dropped a pound coin into a biscuit tin labelled ‘community poor box’. The sergeant in charge conferred with a firm of bailiffs, a thuggish group eager to evict the Turners. A local security firm stood by, ready to change the Turners’ locks and board up the ground-floor windows.

  A Newsnight TV crew waited keenly, camera trained on the Turners, who stood bravely by their front door, pale but unbowed, like a miner’s family during a pithead lockout. Their neighbours linked arms around the gate, and a second banner flew from the balcony – ‘FREE THE NEW PROLETARIAT’.

  The sergeant raised his megaphone and urged the crowd to disperse, his words lost in the jeers and shouts. Kay Churchill pushed tirelessly through the throng, urging everyone on, kissing the cheeks of husbands and wives. Her face flushed with pride, she broke off to run back to her house. I admired her, as always, for her passion and wrongheadedness. She was often lonely, writing long letters to her daughter in Australia, but nothing roused her spirits like the prospect of heroic failure.

  ‘David? I’m glad you’re here. We may need you.’ She embraced me fiercely, her body trembling against me.

  ‘Kay? What are you doing?’

  ‘Changing my underwear. Believe me, the police can be brutal.’

  ‘Not that brutal…’ I followed her into the kitchen where she towelled her arms and poured herself a large gin. ‘What exactly is happening?’

  ‘Nothing, yet. It’s about to start. It could be rough, David.’

  ‘Don’t sound so pleased. I take it you have a plan?’

  Kay threw the towel at me, a heady bouquet of fear and sex. ‘Only a few people know. Watch the news tonight.’

  ‘A sit-down? A mass strip?’

  ‘You’d like that.’ She blew me a kiss, tugging off her thong. ‘This is our first confrontation, hand to hand with the police. This is the Odessa Steps, this is Tolpuddle.’

  ‘All these lawyers and ad-men?’

  ‘Who cares what they do? It’s what they are that matters. This is the first time we’ve defended our ground. They want to evict an entire community. It’s time for you to be serious, David. No more observer status.’

  ‘Kay…’ I tried to settle her chaotic hair. ‘Don’t expect too much of yourself. Bailiffs repossess houses every day in London.’

  ‘But we’ve chosen not to pay the mortgage. We’re forcing a showdown, so everyone in Harrow and Purley and Wimbledon can look hard at themselves. Every schoolteacher and GP and branch manager. They’ll realize they’re just a new kind of serf. Coolies in trainers and tracksuits.’ Kay snatched the towel from me and dried her armpits. ‘Stop sniffing that. The sidelines have been abolished, David. No one can stand and watch any more. Buying an olive ciabatta is a political act. We need everyone to help.’

  ‘Right…I’ll join you when the action starts.’ I tapped the mobile phone in my shirt pocket. ‘I’m waiting for a call from Richard Gould. He has some project on.’

  ‘He ought to be here. Without him it’s difficult to hold things together.’ Irritated by the mention of Gould’s name, Kay glanced at the corners of the sitting room. ‘Where is he? No one’s seen him for days.’

  ‘He still supports us, but…’

  ‘It’s all a bit too quaint? Sit-ins, picket lines, raw emotion. He’s a cold fish.’

  ‘He’s trying to track down Stephen Dexter before the police do. The Tate bomb could derail everything.’

  ‘Joan? The world’s mad.’ Kay grimaced and pressed her worn hands to her face, trying to smooth away her lines. ‘Poor Stephen, I can’t believe he set off the bomb.’

  She raced upstairs, eager to change and return to her riot.

  A megaphone was blaring when I returned to the window, its ponderous message lost on the crowd, orotund phrases bouncing off the the rooftops. The police dismounted from their vans and secured the chin-straps of their helmets. They formed up behind the bailiffs, six stocky men in leather jackets.

  The residents turned to face them, arms linked. There was a flurry of blows when the bailiffs tried to shoulder them aside, and a balding orthodontist fell to his knees with a bloodied nose, comforted by his outraged wife. From an upstairs window a sound system began to play a Verdi extract, the prisoners’ chorus from Nabucco. At this signal, like an audience who had stood for the national anthem, the residents sat down in the street.

  Unimpressed, the police moved in, strong hands wrenching the protesters apart and dragging them away. A fierce ululation rose from Grosvenor Place, the outrage of professional men and women who had never known pain and whose soft bodies had been pummelled only by their lovers and osteopaths.

  I turned towards the front door, ready to join in, and heard my mobile ring in my shirt pocket.

  ‘Markham?’ A flat voice spoke, faint and metallic, the recording of a recording. ‘David, can you hear me?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Richard…?’ Relieved that Gould had called, I closed the front door. ‘Nothing much. Kay’s organized a small riot. Meanwhile, the police are evicting the Turners.’

  ‘Right…’ Gould seemed distracted, his voice fading and surging. ‘I need you to help me. I’ve seen Stephen Dexter.’

  ‘Stephen? Where? Can you talk to him?’

  ‘He’s all right. Later, if I get a chance.’

  A hum of background noise drowned his voice, the sound of a busy airport concourse.

  ‘Richard? Where are you? Heathrow?’

  ‘These security cameras…I have to be careful. I’m in Hammersmith, the King Street shopping mall. Consumer hell.’

  ‘What about Stephen?’

  ‘He’s looking at glassware, in the local Habitat. I’m trying to move closer. There’s another bloody camera…’

  I pressed the mobile to my ear, picking up a hubbub of pedestrian noise. Gould sounded aroused but curiously dreamy, as if an attractive young woman was sharing his phone booth. He had been shocked by Joan Chang’s death, dismayed by the real violence that had taken place after his relaxed talk of meaningless acts. Violence, I wanted to tell him, was never meaningless. Now I thought of Stephen Dexter, this haunted clergyman prowling the shopping mall, perhaps with another bomb, hoping to drive away his grief for Joan.

  ‘Richard? Is Dexter still there?’

  ‘Plain as daylight.’

  ‘You’re sure? You recognize him?’

  ‘It’s…him. I need you over here. Can you get to the Range Rover?’

  ‘It’s parked round the corner.’

  ‘Good man. Give me an hour. Wait for me in Rainville Road, near the River Café. Off the Fulham Palace Road.’

  ‘Right. Be careful. He’ll see you if you get too close.’

  ‘Don’t worry. The world has too many cameras…’

  When I left the house a few minutes later the protest was almost over. Kay’s riot, which she hoped would engul
f Chelsea Marina, had become a local brawl between the police and a few of the more aggressive residents. The others sat on the ground, exchanging insults with the constables trying to clear the street. Too reliant, as always, on argument and social stance, the Chelsea Marina rebels were no match for the heavy squad. Property rights were involved, unlike the CND marches of the 1960s or the cruise-missile protests. A seat in the great British lifeboat was sacrosanct, however cramped and whatever posterior occupied it.

  The bailiffs had reached the front door of the Turners’ house and were trying the locks with a set of skeleton picks. I searched for Kay, expecting to see her in the forefront of the action, berating the sergeant or dressing down some junior woman constable. The Turners had taken refuge with neighbours and their house seemed empty, but I glimpsed a swirl of ash-grey hair in the front bedroom. I assumed that Kay had returned to the house by a garden window, and was retrieving some memento of Mrs Turner’s before it disappeared into the bailiffs’ pockets.

  As I walked towards Beaufort Avenue, ignition keys in hand, I noticed a thickset man with a brush moustache and ginger hair standing near the police vans. I had last seen him among the mourners at Laura’s cremation. Major Tulloch, once of the Gibraltar police and Henry’s contact at the Home Office, was keeping an eye on Chelsea Marina, on these opinionated wives and their idle husbands. His face had the bored, hard-nosed stare of an ambitious rugby coach in charge of a third-rate team. He took in the vandalized parking meters and unswept streets, the amateurish banners hanging from bedroom windows, with the weary patience of all police officers faced with pointless criminality.

  Behind me, the crowd fell silent, and the sergeant’s megaphone died on the air. The bailiffs stepped into the street and stared at the roof. Smoke rose from the upstairs windows of the Turners’ house. The ropes of dark vapour threaded themselves through the open transoms, knotted into ever thicker coils and raced up the mock-Tudor gable. Inside the bedroom, a fierce yellow glow expanded across the ceiling.

  The first house in Chelsea Marina to be torched by its owners was now on fire, a mark of true rebellion that would baffle Major Tulloch and the Home Office. I reached Beaufort Avenue and looked back for the last time, aware that a significant step had been taken. The protest movement was no longer a glorified rent strike, but a full-scale insurrection. Well aware of this, Kay Churchill stood outside her front door, shrieking at the bailiffs and police, arms raised in triumph.

  I parked in Rainville Road, fifty yards from the entrance to the River Café. The glass barrel vault of Richard Rogers’s design office rose beside the Thames, a transparent canopy that cleverly concealed the architect’s wayward plans for London’s future. It was four o’clock, but the sleek patrons of the restaurant, the television chieftains and fifteen-minute celebrities of the political world, were still leaving after their lunches, an aroma of boozy fame dispersing through the stolid streets of west London.

  I searched the low rooftops for any sight of the smoke from Chelsea Marina. Farce and tragedy embraced each other like long-lost friends, but the Turners had read the wind. The middle-income residents of the estate had long outstayed their welcome. The Home Office might fear this outbreak of social unease, but the property developers who dominated the economy of London would be glad to see the entire population of Chelsea Marina exiled to the duller suburbs, the grim and bricky enclaves around Heathrow and Gatwick. The ceaseless roar of aircraft would drive out any future thoughts of revolution.

  Richard Gould had been right. Inexplicable and senseless protests were the only way to hold the public’s attention. During the past month, inspired by Richard, action groups had attacked a number of ‘absurd’ targets – the Penguin pool at London Zoo, Liberty’s, the Soane Museum and the Karl Marx tomb at Highgate Cemetery. Home Office ministers and newspaper columnists were baffled, and dismissed the attacks as misguided pranks. Yet the targets were important elements in maintaining the middle class’s herd mentality, from Lubetkin’s too-precious penguin walkways to the over-busy prints in Liberty’s airless emporium. No one was injured, and little damage was done by Vera Blackburn’s smoke and paint bombs. But the public was unsettled, aware of a deranged fifth column in its midst, motiveless and impenetrable, Dada come to town.

  I had last seen Gould on the evening of the smoke bomb attack on the Albert Hall. He had been away for a week, helping a team of volunteers to give a seaside holiday to a group of Down’s teenagers, and asked me to collect him from the hostel in Tooting. As the happy children tottered home with their funfair trophies and monster masks, Gould collapsed into the Range Rover, reeking of carbolic and exhausted after spending his nights scrubbing out lavatories. He slept against the window, face tubercularly pale.

  He revived after a shower and a change of clothes in Vera’s flat, where he was now staying, and then suggested we drive to Kensington Gardens. Leaving Chelsea Marina, we picked up two young residents on their way to the last night of the Proms, dressed in Union Jack hats and Robin Hood cloaks, ready to join in the orgy of Elgar choruses and pantomime Britishness.

  We dropped them off and then strolled through the evening park, where Gould talked over his worries for Stephen Dexter. The clergyman had still not returned to his house near the marina, and the coroner had released Joan Chang’s body for its lonely flight back to Singapore. Gould feared that the Tate attack would be blamed on Chelsea Marina and used to discredit the revolution. From now on, only meaningless targets should be chosen, each one a conundrum that the public would struggle to solve.

  As we walked near the Round Pond I heard the sound of fire engines and saw cerise smoke rising from the roof of the Albert Hall. By the time we reached Kensington Gore the entire street was filled with promenaders in their end-of-season costumes, orchestra players holding their instruments, police and firemen. The promenaders launched into a spirited singsong, refusing to let their patriotism be cowed, while billows of smoke rose from the upper galleries of the concert hall and a bedlam of horns sounded from the stalled traffic.

  Later I learned that the two residents we had driven from Chelsea Marina were acting with Gould’s blessing. They had smuggled their smoke bombs into the auditorium and left them in the lavatories, timed to go off at the opening bars of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. But Gould seemed too tired and distracted to enjoy the spectacle, however childish and absurd. He left me by the steps of the Albert Memorial, and disappeared into the crowd, cadging a lift from the driver of a catering van. I assumed he was thinking of the Down’s children, bobbing cheerfully down the Bognor front, and the larger absurdity to which nature would never provide an answer.

  I was still waiting for Gould as the last of the River Café patrons eased himself into his limousine. My parking meter had expired; feeding in more coins, I almost missed my ringing mobile.

  ‘David? What’s happened?’ Gould was panting, his voice high-pitched, as if he had seized himself by the throat. ‘Markham…?’

  ‘I’m outside the River Café. Nothing’s happened. Have you seen Dexter?’

  ‘He…got away. Too many cameras.’

  ‘You didn’t catch him?’

  ‘Stay away from cameras, David.’

  ‘Right. Where are you?’

  ‘Fulham Palace. Meet me there now.’ He spoke breathlessly, and I could hear an ambulance siren above the traffic, and the voices of women talking in a queue. ‘David? Dexter’s here somewhere…’

  I reached Fulham Palace within five minutes, and waited in the visitor’s car park, listening to the clamour of traffic in the Fulham Palace Road. Police cars sped across Putney Bridge, sirens cutting through the air. A lane had been cleared for them, and buses stood nose to tail on the span of the bridge, passengers peering from the windows.

  Had Gould tipped off the police? He was far too slight and undernourished to restrain Stephen Dexter, and I remembered how the clergyman had shaken me roughly in Joan Chang’s Beetle outside Tate Modern. Seeing Gould hovering behind him like an incompeten
t detective, the clergyman might well have left the shopping mall and caught a bus down the Fulham Palace Road, yielding to some atavistic urge to find sanctuary in the precincts of the bishop’s palace.

  I stepped from the Range Rover, and approached a family picnicking around the tailgate of their Shogun. The parents confirmed that no one resembling Gould or Stephen Dexter had walked up the approach road to the car park in the past hour.

  Entering Bishop’s Park, which lay between the palace and the Thames, I scanned the wide lawns and the wooden benches for a distraught cleric, perhaps still carrying his carrier bag filled with Habitat tumblers. An elderly couple circled the perimeter path, buttoned up safely in the warm September weather. The only other visitor was near the embankment, a small man in a dark suit pacing between the high beeches and sycamores that grew along the river. He paused after a few steps and raised his hands to search the topmost branches. Even across the park I could see his pale hands held against the light.

  I walked along the path, hiding myself behind the elderly couple. I recognized Gould when I was thirty feet from him. He stood with his back to me, head craning at the swaying branches, hands clutching at the air like a devout seminary student gazing at a rose window in a great cathedral.

  Disturbed by the strolling couple, he waited until they had passed, and then turned towards me. His bony face was lit by the sun, a pale lantern swaying among the tree trunks. He stared over my head, his attention fixed on a point far beyond the focus of his eyes. All the bones in his face had come forward, their sharp ridges cutting against the transparent skin, as if his skull was desperate for the light. His threadbare suit was soaked with sweat, his shirt so damp that I could see his ribs through the shabby cotton. His expression was numbed but almost ecstatic, and his eyes followed the swirling branches in a childlike way, apparently in the throes of a warning aura before an epileptic fit.