The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  I fended him off. ‘Look – I’m not interested in this aircraft. It’s the wrong one, you fool . . . !’ When he stared uncomprehendingly at me I took the airline tag from my pocket and showed him the picture of the huge passenger jet. ‘This one! Very large. Hundreds of bodies.’ Losing my temper, and giving way completely to my outrage and disappointment, I screamed at him: ‘It’s the wrong one! Can’t you understand? There should be bodies everywhere, hundreds of cadavers . . . !’

  He left me where I was, ranting away at the stony walls of this deserted ravine high in the mountains, and at the skeleton of this wind-blown reconnaissance plane.

  Ten minutes later, when I returned to my car, I discovered that the slow puncture I had suspected earlier that afternoon had flattened one of the front tyres. Exhausted now, my shoes pierced by the rocks, my clothes filthy, I slumped behind the steering wheel, realising the futility of this absurd expedition. I would be lucky to make it back to the coast by night-fall. By then every other journalist would have reported the first sighting of the crashed airliner in the Pacific. My editor would be waiting with growing impatience for me to file my story in time for the evening newscasts. Instead, I was high in these barren mountains with a damaged car, my life possibly threatened by these idiot peasants.

  After resting, I pulled myself together. It took me half an hour to change the wheel. As I started the engine and began the long drive back to the coastal plain the light had begun to fade even here at the peak.

  The village was three hundred yards below me when I could see the first of the hovels on a bend in the track. One of the villagers was standing beside a low wall, with what seemed to be a weapon in one hand. Immediately I slowed down, knowing that if they decided to attack me I had little hope of escape. I remembered the wallet in my pocket, and took it out, spreading the bank-notes on the seat. Perhaps I could buy my way through them.

  As I approached, the man stepped forward into the road. The weapon in his hand was a crude spade. A small man, like all the others, his posture was in no way threatening. Rather, he seemed to be asking me for something, almost begging.

  There was a bundle of old clothing on the verge beside the wall. Did he want me to buy it? As I slowed down, about to hand one of the bank-notes to him, I realised that it was an old woman, like a monkey wrapped in a shawl, staring sightlessly at me. Then I saw that her skull-like face was indeed a skull, and that the earth-stained rags were her shroud.

  ‘Cadaver . . .’ The man spoke nervously, fingering his spade in the dim light. I handed him the money and drove on, joining the road leading to the village.

  Another younger man stood by the verge fifty yards ahead, also with a spade. The body of a small child, freshly disinterred, sat against the lid of its open coffin.

  ‘Cadaver –’

  All the way through the village people stood in the doorways, some alone, those who had no one to disinter for me, others with their spades. Freshly jerked from their graves, the corpses sat in the dim light in front of the hovels, propped against the stone walls like neglected relations, put out to at last earn their keep.

  As I drove past, handing out the last of my money, I could hear the villagers murmuring, their voices following me down the mountainside.

  1975

  LOW-FLYING AIRCRAFT

  ‘The man’s playing some sort of deranged game with himself.’

  From their balcony on the tenth floor of the empty hotel, Forrester and his wife watched the light aircraft taking off from the runway at Ampuriabrava, half a mile down the beach. A converted crop-sprayer with a silver fuselage and open cockpits, the biplane was lining up at the end of the concrete airstrip. Its engine blared across the deserted resort like a demented fan.

  ‘One of these days he’s not going to make it – I’m certain that’s what he’s waiting for . . .’ Without thinking, Forrester climbed from his deck-chair and pushed past the drinks trolley to the balcony rail. The aircraft was now moving rapidly along the runway, tail-wheel still touching the tarmac marker line. Little more than two hundred feet of concrete lay in front of it. The runway had been built thirty years earlier for the well-to-do Swiss and Germans bringing their private aircraft to this vacation complex on the Costa Brava. By now, in the absence of any maintenance, the concrete pier jutting into the sea had been cut to a third of its original length by the strong offshore currents.

  However, the pilot seemed unconcerned, his bony forehead exposed above his goggles, long hair tied in a brigand’s knot. Forrester waited, hands gripping the rail in a confusion of emotions – he wanted to see this reclusive and stand-offish doctor plunge on to the rocks, but at the same time his complicated rivalry with Gould made him shout out a warning.

  At the last moment, with a bare twenty feet of runway left, Gould sat back sharply in his seat, almost pulling the aircraft into the air. It rose steeply over the broken concrete causeway, banked and made a low circuit of the sea before setting off inland.

  Forrester looked up as it crossed their heads. Sometimes he thought that Gould was deliberately trying to provoke him – or Judith, more likely. There was some kind of unstated bond that linked them.

  ‘Did you watch the take-off ?’ he asked. ‘There won’t be many more of those.’

  Judith lay back in her sun-seat, staring vaguely at the now silent airstrip. At one time Forrester had played up the element of danger in these take-offs, hoping to distract her during the last tedious months of the pregnancy. But the pantomime was no longer necessary, even today, when they were waiting for the practicante to bring the results of the amniotic scan from Figueras. After the next summer storm had done its worst to the crumbling runway, Gould was certain to crash. Curiously, he could have avoided all this by clearing a section of any one of a hundred abandoned roads.

  ‘It’s almost too quiet now,’ Judith said. ‘Have you seen the practicante? He was supposed to come this morning.’

  ‘He’ll be here – the clinic is only open one day a week.’ Forrester took his wife’s small foot and held it between his hands, openly admiring her pale legs without any guile or calculation. ‘Don’t worry, this time it’s going to be good news.’

  ‘I know. It’s strange, but I’m absolutely certain of it too. I’ve never had any doubts, all these months.’

  Forrester listened to the drone of the light aircraft as it disappeared above the hills behind the resort. In the street below him the sand blown up from the beach formed a series of encroaching dunes that had buried many of the cars to their windows. Fittingly, the few tyre-tracks that led to the hotel entrance all belonged to the practicante’s Honda. The clacking engine of this serious-faced male nurse sounded its melancholy tocsin across the town. He had tended Judith since their arrival two months earlier, with elaborate care but a total lack of emotional tone, as if he were certain already of the pregnancy’s ultimate outcome.

  None the less, Forrester found himself still clinging to hope. Once he had feared these fruitless pregnancies, the enforced trips from Geneva, and the endless circuit of empty Mediterranean resorts as they waited for yet another seriously deformed foetus to make its appearance. But he had looked forward to this last pregnancy, seeing it almost as a challenge, a game played against enormous odds for the greatest possible prize. When Judith had first told him, six months earlier, that she had conceived again he had immediately made arrangements for their drive to Spain. Judith conceived so easily – the paradox was bitter, this vigorous and unquenched sexuality, this enormous fertility, even if of a questionable kind, at full flood in an almost depopulated world.

  ‘Richard – come on. You look dead. Let’s drink a toast to me.’ Judith pulled the trolley over to her chair. She sat up, animating herself like a toy. Seeing their reflections in the bedroom mirror, Forrester thought of their resemblance to a pair of latter-day Scott Fitzgeralds, two handsome and glamorous bodies harbouring their guilty secret.

  ‘Do you realize that we’ll know the results of the scan by this eve
ning? Richard, we’ll have to celebrate! Perhaps we should have gone to Benidorm.’

  ‘It’s a huge place,’ Forrester pointed out. ‘There might be fifteen or twenty people there for the summer.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. We ought to meet other people, share the good news with them.’

  ‘Well . . .’ They had come to this quiet resort at the northern end of the Costa Brava specifically to get away from everyone – in fact, Forrester had resented finding Gould here, this hippified doctor who lived in one of the abandoned hotels on the playa and unexpectedly turned up in his aircraft after a weekend’s absence.

  Forrester surveyed the lines of deserted hotels and apartment houses, the long-shuttered rotisseries and supermarkets. There was something reassuring about the emptiness. He felt more at ease here, almost alone in this forgotten town.

  As they stood together by the rail, sipping their drinks and gazing at the silent bay, Forrester held his wife around her full waist. For weeks now he had barely been able to take his hands off her. Once Gould had gone it would be pleasant here. They would lie around for the rest of the summer, making love all the time and playing with the baby – a rare arrival now, the average for normal births was less than one in a thousand. Already he could visualize a few elderly peasants coming down from the hills and holding some sort of primitive earth festival on the beach.

  Behind them the aircraft had reappeared over the town. For a moment he caught sight of the doctor’s silver helmet – one of Gould’s irritating affectations was to paint stripes on his helmet and flying-jacket, and on the fenders of his old Mercedes, a sophomore conceit rather out of character. Forrester had come across traces of the paint at various points around the town – on the footbridge over the canal dividing the marina and airstrip at Ampuriabrava from the beach hotels in Rosas, at the corners of the streets leading to Gould’s hotel. These marks, apparently made at random, were elements of a cryptic private language. For some time now Forrester had been certain that Gould was up to some nefarious game in the mountains. He was probably pillaging the abandoned monasteries, looting their icons and gold plate. Forrester had a potent vision of this solitary doctor, piloting his light aircraft in a ceaseless search of the Mediterranean littoral, building up a stockpile of art treasures in case the world opened up for business again.

  Forrester’s last meeting with Gould, in the Dali museum at Figueras, seemed to confirm these suspicions. He had dropped Judith off at the ante-natal clinic, where the amniotic scanning would, they hoped, confirm the absence of any abnormalities in the foetus, and by an error of judgement strolled into this museum dedicated by the town to its most illustrious native artist. As he walked quickly through the empty galleries he noticed Gould lounging back on the central divan, surveying with amiable composure the surrealist’s flaccid embryos and anatomical monstrosities. With his silver-flecked jacket and long hair in a knot, Gould looked less like a doctor than a middle-aged Hell’s Angel. Beside him on the divan were three canvases he had selected from the walls, and which he later took back to decorate his hotel rooms.

  ‘They’re a little too close to the knuckle for me,’ Forrester commented. ‘A collection of newsreels from Hell.’

  ‘A sharp guess at the future, all right,’ Gould agreed. ‘The ultimate dystopia is the inside of one’s own head.’

  As they left the museum Forrester said, ‘Judith’s baby is due in about three weeks. We wondered if you’d care to attend her?’

  Gould made no reply. Shifting the canvases from one arm to the other, he scowled at the trees in the deserted rambla. His eyes seemed to be waiting for something. Not for the first time, Forrester realized how tired the man was, the nervousness underlying his bony features.

  ‘What about the practicante? He’s probably better qualified than I am.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of the birth, so much, as the . . .’

  ‘As the death?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Unsettled by Gould’s combative tone, Forrester searched through his stock of euphemisms. ‘We’re full of hope, of course, but we’ve had to learn to be realistic.’

  ‘That’s admirable of you both.’

  ‘Given one possible outcome, I think Judith would prefer someone like youtodeal withit...’

  Gould was nodding sagely at this. He looked sharply at Forrester. ‘Why not keep the child? Whatever the outcome.’

  Forrester had been genuinely shocked by this. Surprised by the doctor’s aggression, he watched him swing away with an unpleasant gesture, the lurid paintings under his arm, and stride back to his Mercedes.

  Judith was asleep in the bedroom. From her loose palm Forrester removed the Valiums she had been too tired to take. He replaced them in the capsule, and then sat unsteadily on the bed. For the last hour he had been drinking alone in the sun on the balcony, partly out of boredom – the time-scale of the human pregnancy was a major evolutionary blunder, he decided – and partly out of confused fear and hope.

  Where the hell was the practicante? Forrester walked on to the balcony again and scanned the road to Figueras, past the abandoned nightclubs and motorboat rental offices. The aircraft had gone, disappearing into the mountains. As he searched the airstrip Forrester noticed the dark-robed figure of a young woman in the doorway of Gould’s hangar. He had seen her mooning around there several times before, and openly admitted to himself that he felt a slight pang of envy at the assumed sexual liaison between her and Gould. There was something secretive about the relationship that intrigued him. Careful not to move, he waited for the young woman to step into the sun. Already, thanks to the alcohol and an over-scrupulous monogamy, he could feel his loins thickening. For all his need to be alone, the thought that there was another young woman within half a mile of him almost derailed Forrester’s mind.

  Five minutes later he saw the girl again, standing on the observation roof of the Club Náutico, gazing inland as if waiting for Gould’s silver aircraft to return.

  As Forrester let himself out of the suite his wife was still asleep. Only two of the suites on the tenth floor were now maintained. The other rooms had been locked and shuttered, time capsules that contained their melancholy cargo, the aerosols, douche-bags, hairpins and sun-oil tubes left behind by the thousands of vanished tourists.

  The waiters’ service elevator, powered by a small gasolene engine in the basement, carried him down to the lobby. There was no electric current now to run the air-conditioning system, but the hotel was cool. In the two basketwork chairs by the steps, below the postcard rack with its peeling holiday views of Rosas in its tourist heyday, sat the elderly manager and his wife. Señor Cervera had been a linotype operator for a Barcelona newspaper during the years when the population slide had first revealed itself, and even now was a mine of information about the worldwide decline.

  ‘Mrs Forrester is asleep – if the practicante comes send him up to her.’

  ‘I hope it’s good news. You’ve waited a long time.’

  ‘If it is we’ll certainly celebrate tonight. Judith wants to open up all the nightclubs.’

  Forrester walked into the sunlight, climbing over the first of the dunes that filled the street. He stood on the roof of a submerged car and looked at the line of empty hotels. He had come here once as a child, when the resort was still half-filled with tourists. Already, though, many of the hotels were closing, but his parents had told him that thirty years earlier the town had been so crowded that they could barely see the sand on the beach. Forrester could remember the Club Náutico, presiding like an aircraft-carrier over the bars and nightclubs of Ampuriabrava, packed with people enjoying themselves with a frantic fin de siècle gaiety. Already the first of the so-called ‘Venus hotels’ were being built, and coachloads of deranged young couples were coming in from the airport at Gerona.

  Forrester jumped from the roof of the car and set off along the beach road towards Ampuriabrava. The immaculate sand ran down to the water, free at last of cigarette-ends and bottle-tops, as clean and s
oft as milled bone. As he moved past the empty hotels it struck Forrester as strange that he felt no sense of panic at the thought of these vanished people. Like Judith and everyone else he knew, like the old linotype operator and his wife sitting alone in the lobby of their hotel, he calmly accepted the terrifying logic of this reductive nightmare as if it were a wholly natural and peaceful event.

  Forty years earlier, by contrast, there had been an uncontrolled epidemic of fear as everyone became aware of the marked fall in the world’s population, the huge apparent drop in the birth-rate and, even more disquieting, the immense increase in the number of deformed foetuses. Whatever had set off this process, which now left Forrester standing alone on this once-crowded Costa Brava beach, the results were dramatic and irreversible. At its present rate of decline Europe’s population of 200,000 people, and the United States’ population of 150,000, were headed for oblivion within a generation.

  At the same time, by an unhappy paradox, there had been no fall in fertility, either in man or in the few animal species also affected. In fact, birth-rates had soared, but almost all the offspring were seriously deformed. Forrester remembered the first of Judith’s children, with their defective eyes, in which the optic nerves were exposed, and even more disturbing, their deformed sexual organs – these grim parodies of human genitalia tapped all kinds of nervousness and loathing.

  Forrester stopped at the end of the beach, where the line of hotels turned at right angles along the entrance channel of the marina. Looking back at the town, he realized that he was almost certainly its last visitor. The continued breakdown of the European road-systems would soon rule out any future journeys to Spain. For the past five years he and Judith had lived in Geneva. Working for a United Nations agency, he moved from city to city across Europe, in charge of a team making inventories of the huge stockpiles of foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, consumer durables and industrial raw materials that lay about in warehouses and rail terminals, in empty supermarkets and stalled production-lines – enough merchandise to keep the dwindling population going for a thousand years. Although the population of Geneva was some two thousand, most of Europe’s urban areas were deserted altogether, including, surprisingly, some of its great cathedral cities – Chartres, Cologne and Canterbury were empty shells. For some reason the consolations of religion meant nothing to anyone. On the other hand, despite the initial panic, there had never been any real despair. For thirty years they had been matter-of-factly slaughtering their children and closing down the western hemisphere like a group of circus workers dismantling their tents and killing their animals at the season’s end.