The Unlimited Dream Company
Page 20
CHAPTER 42
The Unlimited Dream Company
‘Blake, can’t we stay? It’s so beautiful here!’
We stood arm-in-arm among the brilliant flowers in the churchyard. Laughing to herself, Miriam raised her hands to the bright sun.
‘A little longer, Blake?’
I watched her happily as a flock of hummingbirds hovered about our heads. Miriam had stepped from the vestry with the strong stride and lively gaze of an enthusiastic schoolgirl. The two days of death had made her younger, as if she were visiting this parish church from a newer and fresher world.
Delighted to see me, she stood naked beside me among the headstones. I was glad that she no longer remembered her death. She held my waist in a sudden gesture of affection. ‘Where is everyone? Mother and Father Wingate?’
‘They’ve left already, Miriam.’ I led her through the graves to the gates of the churchyard. ‘Stark and the children, everyone else. The whole town has gone.’
She looked up at the sky, smiling at the rainbow around the sun. ‘Blake, I can see them – they’re all there!’
Already I was steeling myself against her departure. I knew that she would soon move on to that world of which Shepperton was merely a brightly furnished but modest antechamber. I held her naked shoulders against my chest, breathing the hot scents of her body, counting the small blemishes on her skin, the point of dry wax in her ear. I wished that I could spend forever here among the flowers with this young woman, dress her hair with garlands sprung from my own sex.
But the birds pressed around us. They stood on every window-ledge, and crowded the roofs of the film studios. Again I felt that the town was closing upon itself, forcing the birds into an ever smaller space. Already the great condors were looking upwards ready to seize their places in the sky.
‘Miriam, it’s time for you to leave.’
‘I know, Blake. You’ll come with me?’ She touched my forehead, as if taking my temperature, an adolescent girl playing at being a doctor. Each minute she stayed she seemed to grow younger by a year.
She knelt down between the graves and lifted in her hands an infant thrush, a bundle of stippled feathers with a lolling head, exhausted by the strange air.
‘Blake, will it be strong enough to fly?’
I took it from her, charged it briefly with my strength, the wing-span of the frigate-birds that filled my arms. As it spread its wings on my hands I felt the gathering vortex around us. A miniature tornado was sweeping the churchyard. The red-tipped blossoms thrashed us with their soft spears, urging us into the air. Miriam struggled with her hair, which rose above her into the swirl of petals. A whirlwind of feathers circled the churchyard, driven around the headstones by thousands of wings.
Everywhere the birds were lifting into the air. As Miriam swayed towards me I gripped her hands.
‘It’s time, Miriam! Time to fly!’
We embraced, each taking the other’s body. I felt her strong bones and firm flesh, the affectionate pressure of her mouth on mine, of her breasts in my breast.
‘Blake, take them with us! Even the dead, Blake!’
Together we merged with the cloud of creatures that now filled the sky above the churchyard. We sailed through the vivid air, climbing the long aisles of the sun. We invited the birds to join us, welcome guests at the wedding-feast of the air. We moved in and out of ourselves, a concourse lit by the plumage of the birds, an armada of winged and feathered chimeras that soared above the rooftops of the deserted town. As the distant traffic moved along the motorway I released Miriam from me and dressed her with the wings of the albatross. In turn she dressed me with the beak and talons of the condors.
On all sides an immense panoply of living creatures was rising into the air. A cloud of silver fish rose from the river, an inverted waterfall of speckled forms. Above the park the timid deer ascended in a tremulous herd. Voles and squirrels, snakes and lizards, a myriad insects were sailing upwards. We merged together for the last time, feeling ourselves dissolve into this aerial fleet. Taking them all into me, I chimerized myself, a multiple of all these creatures passing through the gateway of my body to the realm above. Concourses of chimeric beings poured from my head. I felt myself dissolve within these assembling and separating forms, beating together with a single pulse, the infinitely chambered heart of the great bird of which we were all part.
At last, near the end, the dead rose to join us, conjured from their graves in the churchyard, from the warm soil of the park, from the dust that lined the empty streets, from the damp streams and forgotten burrows. A grey miasma rose from the ground, an aerial shroud that seemed.about to blight the trees and the sky, but was then lit by the lanterns of the living beings above it.
At the last moment I heard Miriam call out. She moved away from me, a diadem-gate through which all these creatures passed towards the sun, the smallest and the highest, the living and the dead.
‘Wait for us, Blake
I stood on the beach, the remains of my ragged flying suit lying on the wet sand at my feet. Although I was naked, my skin was still warmed by the creatures who had passed through my body, warming each cell as they crossed its hearth. Looking up at the sky, I could see the last glow of light moving towards the sun.
Shepperton was silent now, abandoned by the birds. The empty river touched my feet, a calm sleeper nudging me in its dream. The park was deserted, the houses empty.
The Cessna was almost submerged, its wings tipping below the sweeping tide. As I watched, the fuselage turned and slipped below the coverlet of the water. When the river had carried it away I walked across the beach to the bone-bed of the winged creature whose place I was about to take. I would lie down here, in this seam of ancient shingle, a couch prepared for me millions of years earlier.
There I would rest, certain now that one day Miriam would come for me. Then we would set off, with the inhabitants of all the other towns in the valley of the Thames, and in the world beyond. This time we would merge with the trees and the flowers, with the dust and the stones, with the whole of the mineral world, happily dissolving ourselves in the sea of light that formed the universe, itself reborn from the souls of the living who have happily returned themselves to its heart. Already I saw us rising into the air, fathers, mothers and their children, our ascending flights swaying across the surface of the earth, benign tornadoes hanging from the canopy of the universe, celebrating the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features …
About the author
Interview
J.G. Ballard talks to Vanora Bennett
Q: Did you always know you would become a writer?
A: Yes. As a child I was always writing. I think I had a certain flair, because of what happened at my school in Shanghai, when I was eight or nine and was set lines as a punishment. The book I was told to copy from was Westward Ho!, and as I was copying it I realized it was about the Spanish Main, pirates and the like, and it would be much easier to make it up myself. So this is what I did from then on. Once, when I handed in my lines, the master read them and said, ‘Ballard, next time you’re given lines, don’t pick a trashy novel. Pick one of the classics.’ So I realized I had a flair. And I went on, writing stories and then finally science fiction in the mid- 1950s and became a professional writer.
Q: What impact did your childhood experience of internment in Shanghai during World War Two have?
A: A very big impact. Shanghai during World War Two, and my period interned in a Japanese camp, was a sort of very extreme version of ordinary life. I experienced so many things that my children, for example, will never experience. Living in a camp for nearly three years was like living in a huge slum. I was living, in effect, the kind of life that refugees live today in Africa and the Middle East: very short of food, very cramped. Also I saw adults around me in a state of great stress, and that’s something that most children today never see. Also
I saw an occupied city, enemy soldiers on the street and tanks rumbling around, bombing and all the rest of it. It was a very extreme world. I think that feeds into the imagination. It’s like being in a plane crash. If you walk away, you’re never going to forget it.
Q: Have you ever been back to China?
A: Yes, in 1991, forty-five years after leaving. It was very strange – like time travelling, going back to my childhood. There were a huge number of skyscrapers, of course, but on street level it was still there, the family house was still there and the camp was still there – it’s a school now. It was very strange.
Q: After the war you went to England and pursued a very different, very English life: studying medicine at Cambridge for two years, then doing various young man’s jobs including being a copywriter and a porter at Covent Garden fruit market. What did this abrupt change in lifestyle bring to your writing?
A: I think probably my wartime experiences gave me a need to discover, if I could, what was wrong with the world, why were human beings so busy killing each other, why was there so much cruelty? I was interested in medicine, so I thought,’I’ll become a doctor.’ So I began my medical studies. After two years I’d done enough. I knew I had to become a writer.
I did science fiction at first because I didn’t want to write the Hampstead novel, and the great thing about science fiction was that nobody in it lived in Hampstead. Also science fiction was about change, and I was interested in change because England in the 1950s was beginning to change – motorcars, TV, supermarkets, jet travel, the consumer society were all arriving, and England was changing in a very dramatic way. I wanted to write about change.
Q: Which writers and artists have most influenced you?
A: Graham Greene was a big influence; Kafka; and the Surrealist painters because they were painting what I called ‘inner space’. My science fiction was not about outer space but about psychological change, psychological space.
Q: Your mature fiction focuses on what is just about to happen in a given community. What kind of real-life event will suggest a novel to you?
A: I just have a feeling in my bones: there’s something odd going on, and I explore that by writing a novel, by trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface and looking for the hidden wiring. It’s as if there are all these strange lights, and I’m looking for the wiring and the fuse box.
Q: In the forty-plus years that you’ve lived there, your own home in Shepperton has gone from rural idyll to ‘a suburb of London airport’. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that your book is full of landscapes of suburban alienation?
A: Yes, I’m fascinated by the psychology of gated communities and the England of the M25. Not Heritage England or Heritage London – the bus parks and executive housing, CCTV cameras, airports. A lot of the bleak scenarios I’ve thought of have come true. When we look back over the last thirty years, meaningless violence has become very common: people who walk into supermarkets and start shooting at random, violence like Jill Dando’s killing or even these latest ghastly bombs in Madrid. It’s not certain if any of the people who carry out these atrocities have any justification, even in their own minds. It may be violence for violence’s sake. That’s dangerous because you can’t predict it. Maybe people are so bored and modern life is so empty that they want to drop a bomb or kill someone just to feel alive.
Q: In your personal life you’re known as a devoted family man. Are there other writers and artists in your family?
A: I have three children and four grandchildren, of whom I’m very proud. I see a lot of them and my family have always been very important to me. My wife died a long time ago, in 1964, and I brought up my children myself.
Q: How do you organize your time? Do you write by timetable?
A: Yes. Unless you’re disciplined, all you end up with is a lot of empty wine bottles. All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day—even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re a professional. There’s no other way.
Q: In 2003 you refused a CBE. Why?
A: (He chuckles.) If I could have called myself Commander Ballard I would have accepted! I think too much is made of these things
Life at a Glance
BORN
1930 in Shanghai
EDUCATED
Cathedral School, Shanghai; The Leys School, Cambridge; King’s College, Cambridge
CAREER
Studied medicine but left
OTHER WORKS INCLUDE
The Crystal World
High-Rise
The Atrocity Exhibition
Crash
The Drought
Empire of the Sun
The Day of Creation
The Kindness of Women
Rushing to Paradise
Cocaine Nights
Super-Cannes.
Millennium People
Kingdom Come
Miracles of Life
AWARDS AND HONOURS
1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Q&A
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Playing with my grandchildren.
What is your greatest fear?
Terrorist attacks.
What objects do you always carry with you?
Latchkeys, I hope.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
A time machine.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Risk everything for what you believe.
Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?
Aldous Huxley.
Top Ten Favourite Reads
1. Moby Dick
Herman Melville
2. The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh
3. The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
4. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
5. The Trial
Franz Kafka
6. The Tempest
William Shakespeare
7. Catch 22
Joseph Heller
8. Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene
9. 1984
George Orwell
10. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Read on
Have You Read?
The Drought
Water. Man’s most precious commodity is a luxury of the past in this compelling early novel from Ballard. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on Dr Charles Ransom and the remaining inhabitants of Mount Royal, civilization begins to crack …
Crash
Ballard’s controversial cult novel, subsequently made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg, was originally published in 1973 but it has lost none of its potency. Vaughan, a TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the highways, craves the ultimate erotic atrocity: a union of blood, semen and engine fluid in a head-on smash with Elizabeth Taylor.
Empire of the Sun
Rooted in Ballard’s own wartime experiences in an internment camp in Shanghai, Empire of the Sun is a story of starvation and survival which blends honesty with a unique vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, it was also filmed to the author’s satisfaction by Steven Spielberg.
Millennium People
While searching for the truth behind the Heathrow bomb that killed his ex-wife, psychologist David Markham infiltrates a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable enclave of Chelsea Marina. He finds that these middle-class revolutionaries are intent on destroying everything they’ve worked so hard for: blowing up the National Film Theatre, no less, burning their books, defaulting on their maintenance charges and staging a great Bonfire of the Volvos.
Part cultural analysis and part surreal social prediction, this gripping late novel finds Ballard still at the height of his creative powers.
Kingdom Come
Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive, arrives in Brooklands, a motorway town on the M25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the centre of this apparently peaceful town. But as Richard delves into events he begins to suspect that there is a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall.
Miracles of Life
Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Miracles of Life reveals the events of J. G. Ballard’s fascinating, disorientating and singular life; from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of a Japanese prison camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war, from the social changes of the 1960s to the adjustment to life after the premature loss of his wife. Miracles of Life is both a captivating narrative of the experiences that have shaped this extraordinary writer’s works, his distinctive outlook and his original visions of the future, and is also an account of an entirely remarkable life.