Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  At six o’clock that evening, when Kay returned to Grosvenor Place, she waved her bloodied bandage at us, her face flushed with victory. As she explained in the dozen TV interviews that followed, the only demand to be rejected was her insistence that all the streets in Chelsea Marina be rechristened. She had wanted to drop the bogus Mayfair and Knightsbridge names and replace them with those of Japanese film directors, but had been warned by far-seeing fellow residents that this might damage property values. So Beaufort, Cadogan, Grosvenor and Nelson remained.

  What else had changed was hard to elicit. Already the first families were leaving Chelsea Marina. Unconvinced by the bailiffs’ change of heart, and unsure that the truce would hold, several residents with small children packed up, locked their front doors behind them and drove off to stay with friends. They promised to return if they were needed, but their departure was a small admission of defeat.

  Kay stood on her doorstep, fist raised, undismayed by their defection. The rest of us watched them go, children crammed among the suitcases in the rear seats. Responsibly, we dismantled the modest barricade in Grosvenor Place, pushed the overturned cars into the parking bays, brushed up the broken glass and did what we could to tidy the street. The single intact meter soon received its first coin.

  When I entered the house, broom under my arm, I could hear the sound of taps running in the bathroom and kitchen. Kay lay in her armchair, grimy bandage unravelled from her arm, sleeping deeply in front of the television news that showed her breathless with victory beside the shell of the Beaufort Avenue barricade. I kissed her fondly, turned down the sound and went upstairs to switch off the taps. In the medicine cabinet, filled with enough tranquillizers to sedate Manhattan, I found a fresh roll of bandage and antiseptic cream.

  Watching from the window as another resident’s car took off, it occurred to me that Kay should join them, leave Chelsea Marina and stay with friends elsewhere in London, at least until the police interest died down. Plainclothes officers were almost certainly keeping an eye on the entrance to the estate, and sooner or later the Home Office would demand a scapegoat. There was only one exit from Chelsea Marina for motor vehicles, but several pedestrian alleyways led out of the estate into nearby side streets. In one of these I had parked the Range Rover, and could easily smuggle Kay and a suitcase to safety.

  I returned to the living room with a bowl of warm water, ready to bathe and dress her burn. But when I tried to unwind the bandage she briefly woke and pushed me away, clinging to the blood-stained lint like a comfort blanket.

  I was proud of her, and she had earned the right to her trophy. As I took a shower, I was only sorry that Joan Chang and Stephen Dexter had not been present at her triumph. Above all, I missed Richard Gould, who had inspired the Chelsea Marina rebellion and who had now lost interest in it.

  28

  Vital Clues

  WISPS OF SMOKE and steam still rose from the fire-damaged houses in Beaufort Avenue, but the rescue services had done their job. Curious to visit the battlefield before it passed into folklore, I walked towards the gatehouse. Water dripped from the charred eaves, and the crazed window-glass reflected a fractured sky. In a reversion to type, their instinct for order and good housekeeping, the residents had swept the street and straightened the protest banners thrown askew by the helicopter. Many of the cars in the parking bays were overturned, but Beaufort Avenue almost resembled its usual self, a street of middle-class housing with a mild hangover.

  A group of police officers patrolled the entrance to the estate, answering the queries of any passing pedestrians like tour guides at a newly opened theme park. They had made the manager’s looted office into their station house, and a council employee handed out cups of tea through a broken window. Without a trace of rancour, the constables amiably saluted the residents on their way to shoplift in the King’s Road. A TV crew sat by their van, eating bacon sandwiches and listening to a pop radio station, but their cameras and sound equipment were still unpacked. By this reliable measure, the revolution at Chelsea Marina was over.

  Walking back to Cadogan Circle, I found it hard to believe that only a week earlier Chelsea Marina had been the site of the most violent civil clash since the Northern Ireland troubles. Already the uprising led by Kay Churchill seemed closer to a student rag. The infantilizing consumer society filled any gaps in the status quo as quickly as Kay had driven her Polo into the collapsing barricade.

  At the junction with Grosvenor Place, two ten-year-old boys played with their airguns, dressed in camouflage fatigues and military webbing, part of the new guerrilla chic inspired by Chelsea Marina that had already featured in an Evening Standard fashion spread. A Haydn symphony floated gently through a kitchen window, below a protest banner whose damp slogan had dissolved into a Tachiste painting.

  We had won, but what exactly? Gazing at the quiet streets, I was conscious of an emotional vacuum. Our victory had been a little too easy, and like Kay I had been looking forward to my day in court. I had overturned cars and helped to fill Perrier bottles with lighter fuel, but a tolerant and liberal society had smiled at me and walked away, leaving me with the two boys in their camouflage jackets, pointing their toy guns at me with menacing frowns.

  I understood now why Richard Gould had despaired of Chelsea Marina and the revolution he had launched. Without his radicalizing presence the estate would revert to type. Each morning I rang Vera Blackburn’s doorbell, hoping that Gould had returned, and had recovered from the horrific experience of seeing a young woman shot to death by a deranged clergyman in a quiet west London street. A fault line had opened, and swallowed sanity and pity, though Stephen Dexter’s motives were as mysterious as those of the pudgy weapons fanatic due to be tried for the murder.

  I rang Vera’s doorbell, listened for any sounds from the empty flat, and then rode the lift down to the ground floor. Kay was out for the day, helping to make a television documentary about middle-class radicalism in the London suburbs. Confident that a new world was on the march, she hoped that the programme would trigger uprisings in Barnet and Purley, Twickenham and Wimbledon, the bastions of moderation and good sense.

  I had heard no more from Sally, and assumed that she was waiting for me to return to St John’s Wood. I wanted to see her, but I knew that once I crossed the doorstep I would be committing myself to the past and its endless needs, to my father-in-law, the Institute and Professor Arnold.

  I strolled down Nelson Lane towards the marina and the clearer air that lifted off the river, free of the soot and smuts and kerosene tang of helicopter exhaust. A solitary yachtswoman was coiling ropes on the deck of her sloop, watched by her two-year-old son. I had seen them at the barricade in Beaufort Avenue, the boy on his mother’s shoulders as she abused the police. I assumed that she was about to raise anchor and set sail for the Thames estuary, away from Chelsea Marina and its harbour of lost hopes. I waved to her, thinking that I might ship aboard as deck hand and marine psychologist, dream-rider and tide-reader…

  Behind me a front door opened in Nelson Lane, close to the Reverend Dexter’s chapel. A woman hesitated on the threshold, fumbled with the keys and set off quickly down the steps, leaving the door ajar behind her. She wore a patent leather coat and high heels that flicked in a familiar mincing step. She hurried along the pavement, pausing to hide from me behind the school minibus, a Land Cruiser donated by the soft-porn publisher who was Chelsea Marina’s richest resident.

  ‘Vera! Hold on!’

  I followed her among the parked cars, and saw her turn into a pedestrian alleyway that led from the estate into the nearby side street. Head down, she scuttled towards the security gate, slipped through and closed it behind her.

  When I reached the gate she had disappeared among the tourists strolling past the antique shops and small boutiques. I caught my breath, leaning against the wrought-iron bars. Head-high, the gate was topped by a fan of metal spikes, and could be opened by a resident’s swipe card.

  Someone had tampere
d with the mechanism, using a power tool to cut cleanly through the brass pinion. The exposed metal was already dull, suggesting that the lock had been penetrated at least a week earlier.

  I pulled back the gate and stepped into the street, watching the passing shoppers. Fifty feet away, three police vans were parked against the kerb. Each carried six constables, sitting upright beside the windows while the driver listened to his radio.

  I closed the gate behind me and walked back to the marina. In the narrow alleyway there was a hint of Vera’s perfume, a spoor I no longer wanted to follow. I was thinking about the gate, and the police waiting in their vans. At any time during the riot they had been free to enter Chelsea Marina in force and attack the residents from the rear. The entire confrontation might well have ended within minutes rather than hours, long before any cars were overturned and the tempers of the rioters rose into open violence.

  I left the alleyway and returned to Dexter’s house, standing on the pavement below the front door. A helicopter circled above Wandsworth Bridge, and two launches of the river police sat in midstream, crews watching the entrance to the marina. A combined air, sea and land assault on Chelsea Marina might easily have been mounted, but the police, or whoever controlled them, had held back, restricting themselves to a show of strength in Beaufort Avenue.

  Had the entire confrontation, which so lifted our spirits, been staged to test the resolve of the Chelsea Marina residents? By confining their action to a single street the police had kept the revolution within acceptable limits and tested its temper. I thought of the ever-watchful Major Tulloch with his tweed sports jackets and ‘links’ to the Home Office, clearly bored by the petrol bombs and hysteria. For Scotland Yard the confrontation across the burning Fiats and Volvos had been a ploy to tease out the residents and their possible access to more dangerous weapons than croquet mallets and moral indignation. I guessed that Henry Kendall had known that a large police action was being mounted, and that he and Sally had visited Chelsea Marina in an attempt to warn me.

  I climbed the steps and pushed back the front door, listening to the drone of the helicopter, then closed it behind me and entered the living room. The clergyman’s house had been ransacked, drawers pulled from the desk, carpet rolled back, hymn books swept from the mantelpiece. The pup tent in which Dexter had camped, the primus stove and trestle bed had been flung against the fireplace. Food cans, a Harley owner’s manual and his Philippine photographs lay scattered across the floor. In the kitchen Dexter’s motorcycle leathers were exposed across the wooden table, seams ripped apart by a carving knife taken from a drawer, eviscerated in a fury that seemed to be aimed at their one-time wearer.

  Upstairs, in the cell-like rooms, Vera had carried out the same whirlwind hunt, wrenching Dexter’s cotton flying suit and academic gown from their hangers and throwing them to the floor beside the bed. Frustrated by the spartan bathroom and its meagre hiding places, Vera had smashed a jar of expensive bath salts into the washbasin, a gift from a parishioner that formed a lurid turquoise pool.

  I sat on the bare mattress, the flying overall in my hands. Vera’s perfume hung in the air, a sharp mineral tang of an exotic explosive. Beside me, laid out like his dark shadow, was Dexter’s cassock, black sleeves at its side. I assumed that Dexter had placed the cassock there after Joan Chang’s death, knowing that they would never again sleep together in this modest bed.

  Almost in sympathy, I reached out and touched the coarse fabric, in some way hoping to conjure the unhappy clergyman from its unforgiving weave, and tried to guess what valuable trophy Vera Blackburn had been hunting down in frenzy. My palm moved across the cassock to its breast pocket, and I felt a clutch of small metal objects.

  I drew out a yellow silk handkerchief, tightly folded and secured with an elastic band. I opened this miniature parcel and found a set of car ignition keys. They were old and discoloured, engrained with grime, attached to a Jaguar dealer’s medallion.

  I reached into the pocket again and pulled out a strip of printed card. Holding it to the light, I recognized a ticket issued by a long-term car park at Heathrow. Across it Dexter had scribbled with a green ball point pen: B 41, and what I assumed was the number of his parking space: 1487.

  Did Dexter own an old Jaguar, for some reason parked at Heathrow? I scanned the punch-holes, trying to see if the ticket had been cancelled. My eyes played over the black magnetic strip, but my mind was fixed on something far more easily read, the time-stamped issue date on the edge of the ticket: 11.20 a.m., May 17.

  This was the date of the Terminal 2 bomb. The time was almost exactly two hours before the baggage carousel explosion that had killed Laura.

  29

  The Long-term Car Park

  MEMORIES OF REVOLUTION fell swiftly behind me, lost among the marker lines receding in the rear-view mirror. I reached the roundabout near Hogarth House and accelerated towards the motorway and Heathrow. For the first time I had tangible evidence linking someone at Chelsea Marina with Laura’s death. A priest brain-damaged by repeated beatings had waded like a sleepwalker into the ever-deeper violence that could alone give a desperate meaning to his life.

  Ignoring the gantry cameras, I sped along the overpass, a great stone dream at last waking from its sleep. The slipstream roared past my head, blowing away all doubts, though I knew there were other explanations. The parking ticket and the Jaguar in long-term bay 1487 might belong to one of the Terminal 2 victims, perhaps a senior cleric returning from Zurich on the same flight as Laura who had mailed the ticket to Dexter and asked him to pick up the car and collect him from the arrival lounge.

  Or was the priest whom Chelsea Marina knew as the Reverend Stephen Dexter in fact an imposter, an illegal immigrant on the run from the customs officers? He had helped a dying clergyman in the baggage-reclaim area, then seized his chance, stealing the dead man’s documents and letter of appointment to Chelsea Marina. At any other parish, the motorcycle, Chinese girlfriend and uncertain faith would have led to his exposure, but at Chelsea Marina they were seen as normal and almost obligatory qualifications.

  Whatever their source, the parking ticket and ignition keys had been lying in Dexter’s cassock. As I entered the Heathrow perimeter at Hatton Cross I was thinking of Laura, whose fading presence had woken in my mind, and seemed to hover above the signposts pointing to the airport terminals. I waited as a tractor towed a 747 across the perimeter road to the British Airways maintenance hangar. Acres of car parks stretched around me, areas for airline crews, security personnel, business travellers, an almost planetary expanse of waiting vehicles. They sat patiently in the caged pens as their drivers circled the world. Days lost for ever would expire until they dismounted from the courtesy buses and reclaimed their cars.

  An airliner came in to land, turbofans sighing as it eased itself onto the runway, a whisper of dreams bruised by time. Laura had emerged from this mirage for a few last minutes, and then slipped away into a mystery greater than flight.

  I took my ticket from the dispenser, and drove past the administration office towards the B section of the car park. Despite the rapacious charges, almost every space was filled, a vast congregation of cars pointing towards their Mecca, the Heathrow control tower. I turned into B 41 and drove between the lines of vehicles, scanning the numbers on the tarmac. Despite myself, I imagined the assassin still sitting in his Jaguar, waiting for me to arrive.

  Bay 1487 was occupied. An imposing Mercedes saloon filled the space, its polished body like black ceremomial armour. I stopped the Range Rover and walked across to it. Through the windows I could see the white leather upholstery, and the control panel with its satellite-navigation screen. A week-old copy of the Evening Standard lay on the rear seat. The Mercedes had been parked here for no more than a few days.

  I found the Jaguar twenty minutes later, in a small holding area on the north side of section E. Thwarted by the Mercedes, I had returned to the administration offices near the exit gate. A helpful Asian manager explained
that any vehicles unclaimed after two months were towed to the holding area and left there until the company’s legal department had tracked down the owners. Joyriders, criminals escaping abroad, even overdue air travellers unwilling to pay the surcharges often abandoned their cars, assuming they would remain for ever in this automotive limbo.

  I showed the manager the ticket from Stephen Dexter’s cassock, and said that I had found it trapped behind a seat in a Terminal 2 boarding lounge.

  ‘There might be a reward,’ I ventured. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘I’ll check it for you.’ Smiling at my eagerness, he tapped the ticket and parking bay numbers into his computer. ‘Right – Jaguar 4-door saloon, X registration, 1981 model. We’re contacting the present owner through the Vehicle Licensing Office.’

  ‘You have his name? He’ll be glad to see the ticket.’

  ‘It’s unlikely, sir. There’s an outstanding charge of £870. Plus VAT.’ When I winced, he spoke with pride. ‘Parking is a luxury activity, factored into business and holiday price structures. If you wish to save money, there are the public highways.’

  ‘I’ll remember that. Any phone number where I can reach the owner?’

  ‘No phone number.’ He hesitated, watching my hand slide a twenty-pound note across the desk. ‘His address is Chelsea Marina, King’s Road, Fulham, London SW6.’