Concrete Island

by J. G. Ballard

  Trying to position himself more conspicuously, Maitland edged along the narrow road shoulder. No pedestrian or emergency verge had been provided along this fast bend, and the cars speeding past him at sixty miles an hour were no more than three or four feet away. Still carrying the raincoat and briefcase, he moved along the line of trestles, steering each one out of his way. He waved his hat in the exhaust-filled air, shouting over his shoulder into the engine noise.

  ‘Emergency…! Stop…! Pull over…!’

  Two trestles kicked together by a passing truck blocked his way. The lines of traffic swept by, swerving under the route indicators towards the junction ahead. Brake lights pumped, and the sunlight flared off the windshields in electric lances.

  A horn blared warningly behind Maitland as he climbed around the trestles. A car plunged within inches of his right hip, an angry passenger whirling in a window. Maitland pulled himself back, and saw the white hull of a police car in the far lane. It was moving at a steady fifty miles an hour, a few feet behind the bumper of the car in front, but the driver looked over his shoulder at Maitland.

  ‘Slow down…! Police…!’

  Maitland waved both the hat and briefcase, but the police car had been carried away by the rush of traffic. Trying to follow it on foot, Maitland was almost hit by the fender of a passing taxi. A black limousine swept towards him out of the tunnel, the uniformed chauffeur seeing Maitland at the last moment.

  Realizing that he would be crushed against the trestles, Maitland moved away from them. His right hand smarted from a passing blow. The skin had been torn by a piece of sharp windshield or wing-mirror trim. He wrapped the blood-stained handkerchief around it.

  Three hundred yards away, beyond the eastern entrance of the overpass, was the call-box of an emergency telephone, but he knew that he would be killed if he tried to walk through the tunnel. Maitland edged back along the hard shoulder and took up his position at the point where the Jaguar had left the road. He put on his raincoat and buttoned it neatly, straightened his hat and waved calmly at the passing vehicles.

  * * *

  He was still standing there as dusk began to fall. Headlamps swerved past him, their beams cutting across his face. Horns blared endlessly as the three lines of vehicles, tail lights flaring, moved towards the junction. The rush-hour was in full swing. As Maitland stood weakly by the roadside, waving with a feeble hand, it seemed to him that every vehicle in London had passed and re-passed him a dozen times, the drivers and passengers deliberately ignoring him in a vast spontaneous conspiracy. He was well aware that no one would stop for him, at least until the rush hour was over at eight o’clock. Then, with luck, he might be able to attract the attention of a solitary driver.

  Maitland lifted his watch into the glare of the passing headlamps. It was seven forty-five. His son would long since have reached home alone. Catherine would either have gone out or be making dinner for herself, assuming that he had decided to stay on in London with Helen Fairfax.

  Thinking of Helen, ophthalmoscope in the breast pocket of her white coat, peering critically into the eyes of some small child at her clinic, Maitland looked down at the wound on his hand. He was now more tired and shaken than at any time since the crash. Even in the warm, exhaust-filled air he shivered irritably; he felt as if his entire nervous system was being scraped by invisible knives, his nerves drawn through their slings. His shirt clung to his chest like a wet apron. At the same time a cold euphoria was coming over him. He assumed that this light-headedness revealed the first symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. He waved at the cars lunging past him in the darkness, and tottered to and fro like a drunken man.

  An articulated fuel tanker bore down on him along the outer lane, its yellow bulk almost filling the tunnel below the overpass. As it laboured around the bend the driver saw Maitland staggering between his headlamps. Air brakes hissed and slammed. Maitland side-stepped casually out of the tanker’s way, took off his hat and tossed it under the massive rear wheels. Laughing to himself, Maitland watched it vanish.

  ‘Hey…!’ He gestured with his briefcase. ‘My hat – you’ve got my hat…!’

  Horns blared around him. A taxi pulled almost to a halt, the fender brushing Maitland’s legs. Glaring down at Maitland, the driver tapped his forehead as he surged away. Maitland waved him on gallantly. He knew already that he was too exhausted to control himself. His one hope was that he might become so deranged that people would stop simply to prevent him from damaging their cars. He looked at the blood from his mouth on the back of his fingers, but flung the hand away and turned to the passing traffic. Gazing up at the maze of concrete causeways illuminated in the night air, he realized how much he loathed all these drivers and their vehicles.

  ‘Stop…!’

  He shook his blood-smeared fist at an elderly woman driver watching him suspiciously over her steering wheel.

  ‘Yes, you…! You can go! Take your damned car away! No – stop!’

  He kicked a wooden trestle into the road, laughing as a passing truck knocked it back at him, jarring his left knee. He pushed out another.

  His voice rose to a harsh shout above the traffic sounds, a bitter, primal scream.

  ‘Catherine…! Catherine…!’

  With cold anger he shouted her name at the cars, screaming it like a child into the swerving headlamps. He lurched into the roadway again, blocking the outer lane and waving his briefcase like a demented race-track official. Surprisingly, the traffic responded to him, thinning out slightly. For the first time a gap appeared in the stream of vehicles, and he could see through the tunnel to the Westway interchange.

  Across the road from him was the central reservation, a narrow island four feet wide with a maintenance walk between the crash barriers. Maitland leaned against a trestle, trying to rally all his powers of self-control. He was aware of half his mind revelling in this drunken tantrum, but with an effort mastered himself. If he could cross the road, he would then be able to walk back to the Westway interchange and find an emergency telephone.

  He straightened himself, annoyed that he had wasted time. Clearing his head, he waited for a break in the traffic stream. A dozen cars moved towards him in procession, followed by a second group, an airline coach taking up the rear. A breakdown truck towing a damaged van roared past Maitland, blocking his vision as he leaned back in the darkness, watching the play of headlamps in the approaches to the tunnel.

  The road was clear except for a two-decker car-transporter. The driver signalled to Maitland, as if prepared to offer him a lift. Maitland ignored him, waiting impatiently as the long stern section of the transporter lumbered by The road was clear before the next set of approaching headlamps. Gripping the briefcase, he ran forward across the road.

  He was halfway across the road when he heard the blare of a warning horn. Over his shoulder he saw the low hull of a white sportscar, almost invisible behind its unlit headlamps. Maitland stopped and turned back, but the skidding car was already on him, the young driver wrestling with the wheel as he lost control. Maitland felt the car rush through the air towards him. Before he could shout the car had plunged into a wooden trestle which Maitland had kicked into the road. The pinewood frame hurled against him. He felt his legs knocked away and was flung backwards through the dark air.

  3 Injury and exhaustion

  ‘… Catherine … Catherine…’

  The sound of his wife’s name moved through the silent grass. Lying at the foot of the embankment, Maitland listened to the echoes of the syllables inside his head. As they roused him he realized that he had spoken the name himself. The faint sounds were audible in the darkness. The traffic noises had gone, and the embankment above him was quiet. Far away, beyond the central drum of the Westway interchange, an overnight truck-driver steered his vehicle northwards, its engine labouring.

  Maitland lay back in the darkness, his head resting against the soft slope of the embankment. His legs were hidden in the long grass. A hundred yards away, the th
ree lanes of the feeder road were deserted. The route indicators towered above the unvarying yellow glow of the sodium lights. Involuntarily, as he thought about his wife’s name, Maitland looked towards the west. Silhouetted against the evening corona of the city, the dark façades of the high-rise apartment blocks hung in the night air like rectangular planets.

  For the first time since his accident, Maitland’s head felt clear. The bruises on his temple and upper jaw, like the injuries to his legs and abdomen, were defined and localized, leaving his mind free. Already he knew that his right leg was severely damaged. A massive contusion was spreading from the hip down the outer surface of the thigh. Through the torn fabric of his trousers he touched the tender skin, raised by a leaking weal that wet his hand. The hip joint appeared to have been driven into the basin of his pelvis, and the displaced nerves and blood-vessels throbbed through the torn musculature as they tried to reassemble themselves.

  Maitland examined the damaged thigh with both hands. It was one forty-five a.m. Twenty yards away, the silver roof of the Jaguar reflected the distant lights of the motorway. He sat up, clenching his fists as he cut off his involuntary cry. He realized that the energy left to him was finite, perhaps half an hour of extended effort. He turned on to his side, drew his left leg out of the grass and lifted himself into a kneeling position.

  Gasping at the night air, he no longer tried to control himself. He leaned helplessly against the embankment, hands deep in the cold soil. A faint dew already covered his torn suit, chilling his skin. He looked up at the steep slope, for a moment laughing aloud at himself.

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to climb that…? Might as well be Mount Everest.’

  As he crouched there, trying to grapple with the pain from his injured hip, his whole situation seemed to Maitland like a bad joke that had got out of hand. A defective tyre-wall, a bang on the head, and he had suddenly exited from reality. He thought of Helen Fairfax asleep in her flat, as always on the left side of the double bed that filled the minute bedroom, her head lying on the right-hand pillow, as if she had deputised the various sections of her body to represent both herself and Maitland. Curiously enough, this calm and capable woman doctor was a restless dreamer. By comparison, Catherine would be sleeping quietly in her white bedroom, a bar of moonlight across her pale throat. In fact, the whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent.

  Headlamps flared against the roof of the overpass tunnel. A car hummed along the silent roadway.

  ‘Help … Stop…’

  Maitland waved one hand without thinking. He listened to the car fade away, carrying its comfortable driver, latch-key securely in his pocket, to a warm suburban bed.

  ‘Right … Let’s try again…’

  He climbed two feet up the slope, dragging the injured leg behind him, before collapsing into the soft earth. Even this small exertion had multiplied the pain in his hip socket. Unable to move, he knelt with his face in the broken soil, the cold earth against his cheek. Already he knew that he would never be able to climb the embankment, but he tried to drag himself up the slope, scooping armfuls of the soft earth from his path, forcing himself across the crumbling surface like a wounded snake.

  ‘Catherine…’

  For the last time he whispered her name, well aware that in some obscure way he was blaming her for his plight, for the pain in his injured leg, and for the cold night air that lay over his body like a damp shroud. A profound sense of depression had come over him, replacing the brief surge of confidence he had felt. Not only would Catherine assume that he was spending the night with Helen Fairfax, but she would not particularly care. Yet, he himself had almost deliberately created this situation, as if preparing the ground for his crash …

  Night and silence settled over the motorway system. The sodium lights shone down on the high span of the overpass, rising into the air like some disused back entrance to the sky. Maitland lifted himself on to his left leg, supporting himself on his arms against the slope of the embankment. His right leg hung in front of him like a dead animal lashed to his belt. The long grass swayed in the night air, a corridor of crushed blades marking the route he had taken that afternoon. Hobbling along, the injured thigh held in both hands, he pressed on through the grass.

  The silver fuselage of his car appeared among the shabby wrecks. Half-veiled by the grass, their rusting hulls were almost invisible. Maitland reached the rear door. Exhausted by the effort, he was about to lift himself into the back seat when he remembered the carton of wine bottles.

  He pulled himself round to the rear of the car and unlocked the trunk. He lifted out one of the bottles of white Burgundy and fumbled with the wrapper. Opening the tool-kit, he took out the adjustable spanner. On the second blow he struck the neck from the bottle. The clear liquid splashed around his feet in the cold air.

  Sitting unsteadily in the rear seat of the Jaguar, Maitland drank his first mouthfuls of the warm Burgundy. He winced as the alcohol stung his cut mouth and gums. Within seconds the wine flushed his chest, and he could feel the pulse thudding in his injured thigh. Stretching his leg out on the seat, Maitland methodically drank his way down the bottle. Gradually he felt the pain in his hip begin to recede. He was soon too drunk to be able to focus on his wrist-watch and gave up all sense of time. Stirred by the night air, the grass pressed closer against the windows, shutting out the embankments of the motorways. Maitland lay with the bottle in his hands, his head resting against the window pillar. One by one the points of pain that covered his chest and legs like a series of constellations began to fade, and the atlas of wounds into which his body had been transformed went out like a dead sky.

  Mastering his self-pity, he thought again of Catherine and his son. He remembered his cold euphoria as he tottered about on the motorway, screaming his wife’s name at the cars. If anything, he should have thanked her for marooning him here. Most of the happier moments of his life had been spent alone – student vacations touring Italy and Greece, a three-month drive around the United States after he qualified. For years now he had re-mythologized his own childhood. The image in his mind of a small boy playing endlessly by himself in a long suburban garden surrounded by a high fence seemed strangely comforting. It was not entirely vanity that the framed photograph of a seven-year-old boy in a drawer of his desk at the office was not of his son, but of himself. Perhaps even his marriage to Catherine, a failure by anyone else’s standards, had succeeded precisely because it recreated for him this imaginary empty garden.

  Nursing himself from the jagged bottle, he fell asleep three hours before dawn.

  4 The water reservoir

  HE woke in broad daylight. The grass brushed against the quarter window by his head, blades dancing an urgent minuet as if they had been trying to wake him for some time. A panel of warm sunshine crossed his body. Unable to move for several seconds, he wiped the oil-smeared dial of his watch. It was eight twenty-five a.m. He lay sprawled stiffly across the back seat of the car. The motorway embankments were hidden from him, but a steady drumming, as threatening and yet in some way as reassuring as the soundtrack of a familiar nightmare, reminded him where he was.

  The morning rush-hour was under way, thousands of vehicles pouring back into central London. Horns sounded above the guttural roar of diesel engines and the unbroken boom of cars passing through the overpass tunnel.

  The wine bottle lay under his right arm, its broken neck cutting into his elbow. Maitland sat up, remembering the anaesthesia which the wine had brought him. He could remember as well, like a degraded memory hiding itself in the back of his mind, the brief outburst of self-pity.

  Maitland looked down at himself, barely recognizing the derelict figure sitting in the rear seat. His jacket and trousers were smeared with oil and blood. Engine grease covered the weal on his right hand where it had been struck by a passing car. His right thigh and hip had swollen i
nto a massive contusion, and the head of his thigh-bone now seemed to be fused into the damaged pelvic socket. Maitland leaned over the front seat. Bruises and tender pressure-points covered his body like the percussion stops of an overstressed musical instrument.

  ‘Maitland, no one’s going to believe this…’ The words, spoken aloud as a self-identification signal, merely made him aware of the damage to his mouth. Massaging the bruised gums, he smiled to himself with weary humour and peered at his face in the driving mirror. A livid bruise ran diagonally across the right side of his face like one half of an exaggerated handlebar moustache.

  Time to get out of here … He looked round at the motorway embankment. The roofs of airline buses and high-topped trucks moved along the eastbound carriageway. The westbound lanes were almost empty. A delivery vehicle and two passenger coaches sped past on their way to the suburbs. Once he had climbed the embankment he would soon flag down a driver.

  ‘Find a phone booth – Hammersmith Hospital – ring Catherine and the office…’ Itemizing this check-list, Maitland opened the door and eased himself into the sunlight. He carried his right leg in both hands like a joint of meat and lifted it out on to the ground. He leaned unsteadily against the door, exhausted by this small effort. Deep spurs of pain reached from his hip into his groin and buttocks. Standing still, he could just balance himself on the injured leg. He clung to the roof gutter of the car and looked at the traffic moving along the motorway. The drivers had lowered their sun-vizors, shielding their eyes from the morning sunlight. None of them would notice the haggard figure standing among the abandoned cars.

  The cold air drummed at Maitland’s chest. Even in the pale sunlight he felt cold and worn. Only his heavy physique had brought him through the crash and the injuries on the motorway. A stolen sportscar, unlit headlamps, an unlicensed driver – ten to one the young man at the wheel would not report hitting Maitland.