Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Nothing. Sally, I hate violence.’

  ‘You’re drawn to it, though. The Heathrow bomb – it wasn’t just Laura. That bomb touched something off. Is Peter Pan such a threat?’

  ‘In a way. J.M. Barrie, A.A. Milne, brain-rotting sentimentality that saps the middle-class will. We’re trying to do something about it.’

  ‘By letting off a bomb? That’s even more childish. Henry says that a lot of people here are going to prison.’

  ‘Probably true. They’re serious, though. They’re ready to give up their jobs and lose their houses.’

  ‘A shame.’ She reached out to me, mustering a bleak smile. ‘You’ve still got your house. You’ll come home, David, when you’ve worked everything out.’

  ‘I will.’

  I sat on the sofa and took her hands, surprised by how nervous she seemed. I was glad to be with her again, but St John’s Wood was a long way from Chelsea Marina. I had changed. The guinea pigs had lured the experimenter into the maze.

  I said: ‘I’m glad you came. Did the architect’s wife give you this flat’s number?’

  ‘No. Gould told me.’

  ‘What?’ I felt a shift in the air, a cold front moving across the airless room. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Yesterday. He knocked on the front door. A strange little man. Very pale and intense. I recognized him from the picture on his website.’

  ‘Gould? What did he want?’

  ‘Relax.’ She leaned against my shoulder. ‘I can see why he has such a hold on you. He’s focused on some idee fixe, and nothing else matters. He doesn’t care about himself, and that really appeals to you. In men, anyway. You rather like selfish women.’

  ‘Did you let him in?’

  ‘Of course. He looked so hungry, I thought he was going to faint. He stood there swaying, eyes miles away, as if I was some kind of vision.’

  ‘You are. And then?’

  ‘I asked him in. I knew he was a friend of yours. He wolfed down some Stilton and a glass of wine. This girlfriend, Vera, does a pretty awful job of looking after him. The poor man was starving.’

  ‘She prefers him like that. It keeps him on his toes. What did he talk about?’

  ‘Nothing. He looked at me in a very odd way. I almost had the feeling that he wanted to rape me. Be careful, David. He could be dangerous.’

  ‘He is.’ I stood up and paced the living room. Gould’s motives for calling on Sally were hard to read: some kind of threat, or even a suspicion that I was sheltering Stephen Dexter. The activists at Chelsea Marina were deeply possessive, and resentful of outside loyalties.

  Glancing through the window, I noticed Henry Kendall walking down Beaufort Avenue from the gatehouse. Like all professional visitors to the estate, he seemed embarrassed by the protest banners and vandalized parking meters. Henry was slumming, ready to bestow his patronizing concern on a fellow professional who had fallen on unhappy times.

  ‘David? Is there a problem?’

  ‘Yes. Your boyfriend. I can’t cope with all that kindly forbearance.’ I bent down and kissed her unlined forehead. ‘I’ll come home in a couple of days. Watch out for Richard Gould. Don’t open the door to him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘These are passionate days. The police might think you helped to blow up Peter Pan.’

  ‘That was silly. What’s the matter with you people?’

  ‘Nothing. But tempers are high. One or two hotheads want to blow up Hodge’s statue outside Johnson’s house.’

  ‘God…I hope you stopped them.’

  ‘It was a close thing. I persuaded them not to. Any nation that puts up a statue to a writer’s cat can’t be all bad.’

  I helped Sally from the sofa, and she followed me to the door, her sticks forgotten. In her mind, the pointlessness of the Chelsea Marina protests eased her resentment, and reconciled her to a capricious world.

  ‘David, tell me…’ She waited as I drummed the elevator button. ‘Is Dr Gould in danger?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘He was holding something inside his jacket. He had a peculiar smell and I didn’t want to get too close. But I think it was a gun…’

  27

  The Bonfire of the Volvos

  AT DAWN WE were woken by a terror-storm of noise. I was lying in bed with Kay, my hand on her breast, smelling the sweet, sleepy scent of an unwashed woman, when a police helicopter descended from the sky and hovered fifty feet above the roof. Megaphones blared at each other, a babel of threats and incomprehensible orders. The seesaw wail of sirens shook the windows, drowned by the helicopter’s engines as it soared over Grosvenor Place, spotlight flashing at the startled faces between the curtains.

  ‘Right!’ Kay sat up, like a corpse on a funeral pyre. ‘David, it’s started.’

  I tried to shake off my dream as Kay leapt from the bed, heavy foot stepping on my knee. ‘Kay? Wait…’

  ‘At last!’ Fiercely calm, she stripped off her nightdress and stood by the window. She flung back the curtains, hungrily scratching her breasts as she bared them to the hostile sky. ‘Come on, Markham. You can’t sit this one out.’

  Kay swerved into the bathroom and squatted across the lavatory, impatient to empty her bladder. She stepped into the shower stall and spun the taps, staring down at the dispirited drizzle that splashed her toes.

  ‘The bastards! They’ve cut off the water.’ She flicked the light switch. ‘Can you believe it?’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘There’s no electricity. David! Say something…’

  I hobbled into the bathroom and held her shoulders, trying to calm her. After twiddling the taps and light switch, I sat on the bath. ‘Kay, it looks like they mean business.’

  ‘No water…’ Kay stared at herself in the mirror. ‘How do they think we’ll…’

  ‘They don’t. It’s a little crude, but good psychology. No middle-class revolutionary can defend the barricades without a shower and a large cappuccino. You might as well fight them in yesterday’s underwear.’

  ‘Get dressed! And try to look involved.’

  ‘I am.’ I held her wrists as she pummelled the mirror. ‘Kay, don’t expect too much. This isn’t Northern Ireland. In the end, the police will…’

  ‘You’re too defeatist.’ Kay looked me up and down as she pulled on jeans and a heavy pullover. ‘This is our chance. We can move the revolution out of Chelsea Marina and into the streets of London. People will start joining us. Thousands, even millions.’

  ‘Right, millions. But…’

  The helicopter drifted away, an ugly beast that seemed to devour the sunlight and spit it out as noise. Somewhere a large diesel engine was accelerating above a clatter of steel tracks, followed by the tearing metal of a car being dragged across a road.

  We left the house a few minutes later. Grosvenor Place was filled with unshaven men, wan-faced adolescents and uncombed women. Small children still in their pyjamas gazed down from the windows, girls clutching their teddy bears, brothers unsure of their parents and the adult world for the first time. Many of the residents carried token weapons – baseball bats, golf putters and hockey sticks. But others were more practical. A neighbour of Kay’s, an elderly solicitor and archery enthusiast, held two Molotov cocktails, burgundy bottles filled with petrol into which he had stuffed his regimental ties.

  Despite the dawn ambush by the forces of law and order, and the cowardly complicity of the local utility companies, everyone around me was alert and determined. Kay and her fellow block-leaders had done their jobs well. At least half of Chelsea Marina’s residents had taken to the streets. They waved their weapons at the helicopter, cheering the pilot when he descended to within fifty feet of the ground so that the police cameraman could take the clearest possible pictures of the more prominent rebels.

  In Beaufort Avenue, the central concourse of the estate, almost every resident was out on the pavement and ready to defend the first of the barricades, twenty yards from the gatehouse. A large force of po
lice in helmets and riot gear had massed inside the entrance, next to the shuttered office of the estate manager. They were backed by some thirty bailiffs, itching to secure the dozen houses whose seizure they had announced.

  Confident of success, the police had alerted three television crews, and the cameras were already transmitting pictures of the action to the breakfast audiences. A Home Office minister was touring the studios, stressing the government’s reluctant decision to bring this misguided demonstration to a halt.

  A bulldozer was manoeuvring itself against the barricade of cars in Beaufort Avenue. Its scoop thrust clumsily at a Fiat Uno, the smallest vehicle in the barricade, but the residents clung to its doors and window pillars, distracting the hapless driver with their boos and jeers. Many of the women carried children on their shoulders. Frightened by the menacing helicopter and the bedlam of megaphones, the smaller infants were crying openly, their sobs drowned by the din of the bulldozer’s engine but not lost to the television viewers watching aghast across a million breakfast tables.

  Urged on by a senior social worker, a police inspector remonstrated with the parents and tried to climb the barricade. A flurry of hockey sticks drove him back with bruised knuckles. A young constable, seeing a quick way through the barricade, opened the front passenger door of a Volvo estate and climbed into the car, truncheon at the ready as he tried to open the driver’s door. A dozen residents seized the car and rocked it fiercely, backed by a chant of ‘Out, out, out…!’ Within a minute the constable was shaken insensible, flung from the front seat and tipped dazed into the road at his colleagues’ feet.

  The police watched patiently, waiting beside their armoured vans with chain-link visors over the windscreens, making clear that the Chelsea Marina action differed in no way from the riot-control measures they used in the East End’s less savoury estates. They tightened their chin-straps, rapped their clubs against their shields and moved forward when the bulldozer at last seized the Fiat Uno and lifted it into the air. Forming into a double file, they were ready to pour through the breach in the barricade and set upon the protesters.

  But the inspector threw up his arms and halted them as the toylike Fiat teetered on the upraised scoop, ready to fall onto the jeering residents. Hatless in his concern, the inspector climbed the ladder to the bulldozer’s cab and ordered the driver to shut down his engine.

  There was a brief stand-off, while the inspector retrieved his cap and megaphone. Petrol was dripping from the Fiat’s fuel tank, drops dancing around his feet. He called on the crowd to think of their children, who were now laughing happily at the car swaying over their heads. Chortling toddlers were lifted into the air to give them a better view and, more to the point, expose them to the breakfast TV audiences watching open-mouthed over their toast racks.

  The inspector shook his head in despair, but he had reckoned without the long-engrained ruthlessness of the middle class towards its own children. As I knew full well, any social group that would exile its offspring to the deforming rigours of boarding-school life would think nothing of exposing them to the hazards of an exploding bonfire.

  Exhausted by all the emotion surging around me, I edged through the crowd and reached the pavement. I leaned against a damaged parking meter and searched for any signs of Kay Churchill. I soon noticed that a fellow observer was keeping watch on the action.

  Standing behind the television vans was the familiar figure of Major Tulloch, barrel chest and burly arms concealed inside another short tweed jacket, ginger moustache bristling at the scent of battle. As always, he seemed to be bored by the civil uprising that unfolded around him, and watched the helicopter hovering a hundred yards away, its downdraught emptying a dozen litter bins and driving their contents across the rooftops like confetti. I assumed that he was the Home Secretary’s man on the ground, and was probably in charge of the entire police action.

  The crowd seemed to sense that the Chelsea Marina protest was virtually over, quietening as the driver of the bulldozer reversed his vehicle, subtracting a small but significant element from the barricade. The inspector stood solemnly in front of the protesters, smiling at the small children and satisfied that he had acted as humanely as his orders allowed. Faced by the waiting phalanx of riot police and bailiffs, the protesters began to disperse, lowering their baseball bats and croquet mallets, unable at the last moment to resist an appeal to restraint and good sense.

  Then a shout went up from a window overlooking the street. People stepped aside, cheering as a car approached, horn sounding an urgent call to arms. Kay Churchill’s little Polo sped towards us, Kay herself at the wheel, headlamps full on and fiercely punching the horn as she forced her way through the crowd. Her grey hair flew like a battle banner, the spectral mane of a Norn rousing her defeated troops.

  She reached the barricade, braked sharply and drove into the gap left by the Fiat Uno, forcing back a constable who fell across the bonnet. Shouting defiance at the police, two-finger salutes in either hand, Kay leapt from the car. Within seconds the Polo was overturned and set ablaze, the elderly solicitor igniting his regimental ties with a Garrick Club lighter and dashing his Molotov cocktails against the exposed engine.

  Already a second car was burning. Flames played around its wheels and then leapt high into the air. Fanned by the nearby helicopter, the orange billows swayed across the advancing police and touched the raised scoop of the bulldozer, where the pooling petrol from the Fiat’s tank exploded in a violent blaze.

  Everyone stepped back, looking at the burning car held up to the sky in the bulldozer’s claw. The police snatch squads retreated to the shelter of their vans, while the inspector spoke on his radio to his superiors and Major Tulloch put out his cigarette. Sirens sounded from the King’s Road, and a fire engine eased itself through the watching crowds who blocked both lanes of the thoroughfare. The flames from the burning barricade glowed in the headlamps and polished brass.

  Emboldened now, and determined to defend Chelsea Marina to the last Volvo and BMW, Kay ordered the residents to make a tactical retreat. Brushing away the oily smuts on her cheeks and forehead, one arm bandaged after petrol flashed back from an overturned car, Kay led the protesters to a second barricade fifty yards down Beaufort Avenue. When she stopped to wave the stragglers on, she noticed me in the tail of the retreat. I raised my fists, urging her forward, as always driven by her confused and restless spell. The street was on fire, but Chelsea Marina had begun to transcend itself, its rent arrears and credit-card debts. Already I could see London burning, a bonfire of bank statements as cleansing as the Great Fire.

  An acid cloud of steam and smoke rose from the first barricade as the firemen played their hoses on the burning cars. The vehicles glowered to themselves, doors bursting open as they unfurled like gaudy flowers. Whorls of flame swirled into the downdraught of the helicopter and raced around the eaves of the nearby houses.

  Visored police leapt the garden walls beside the barricade and raced down Beaufort Avenue towards us. They were met by a hail of roof-tiles, but pressed on to the second barricade, sheltering behind the burning skips that Kay had ordered to be set alight. The bulldozer clanked forward, shook the blackened shell of the Fiat from its scoop, and rammed Kay’s smouldering Polo onto the pavement. It moved down the street, followed by the fire engine and the television vans, all under the watchful gaze of Major Tulloch, strolling along behind a group of uneasy press photographers.

  The second barricade was hosed and breached. The police advanced through the cloud of steam and a black, almost liquid smoke that lay over Chelsea Marina, drifting across the Thames to the Battersea shore. Crouching behind the modest barricade of three family estates blocking the entrance to Grosvenor Place, a cricket bat in my hand, I knew that the Chelsea Marina uprising was almost over. The police had reached the top of Beaufort Avenue and would soon control Cadogan Circle. After picking off the side streets one by one, they would arrest the ringleaders and wait for the remaining residents to come to their sen
ses. An occupying army of social workers, do-gooders and carpetbagging estate agents on the prowl for a quick bargain would soon move in. The kingdom of the double yellow line would be restored, and the realm of sanity and exorbitant school fees would return.

  Nonetheless, something had changed. I pressed a handkerchief to my mouth, trying to protect my lungs from the dripping smoke, and watched one of Kay’s neighbours, a BBC radio actress, filling a Perrier bottle with lighter fuel. I was dazed and exhausted, but still excited by the camaraderie, by the sense of a shared enemy. For the first time I fully believed that Kay was right, that we were on the edge of a social revolution with the power to seize the nation. Peering through the steam and smoke, I listened to the bulldozer and waited for the police to make their pointless seizure of a side street in Chelsea.

  Then, as abruptly as they had arrived, the police began to withdraw. I leaned wearily against an overturned Toyota, cheering with Kay and her team as a sergeant listened to his radio and ordered his men to fall back. The bulldozer abandoned its victory lap around Cadogan Circle and returned to the gatehouse. Dozens of police raised their visors and lowered their batons, striding through the smoke to the marshalling point in the King’s Road. They boarded their vans and set off through the morning traffic. The helicopter withdrew, and the air began to clear as the smoke dispersed. Within fifteen minutes, the entire force of police had left Chelsea Marina.

  A second fire engine arrived on the scene, followed by breakdown trucks from the local council, whose workmen began clearing away the burnt-out barricades in Beaufort Avenue. Two repossessed houses had been set on fire, and I assumed that this had forced the police to call off their action. As the bailiffs had battered their way through the front doors, their owners had poured petrol over their living room rugs, tossed burning tapers through the garden windows and waved goodbye to their pleasant homes of many years.

  Faced with the prospect of a general conflagration, and the spectacle on the evening news of Chelsea Marina transformed into a vast funeral pyre, the Home Office had reined in the police and called a truce. That afternoon, a residents’ delegation led by Kay Churchill sat down with the police and local council in the estate manager’s office. As they spoke, emergency crews put out the fires in the two Beaufort Avenue houses nearby. The police inspector agreed that no arson charges would be brought, and promised to urge the bailiffs to delay any further repossessions. Water and power were to be reconnected, and a team of Home Office conciliators promised to look into the residents’ grievances.