Concrete Island

by J. G. Ballard

  He hobbled forward, inspecting the damage to the Jaguar. Patches of the grass around the car had been burned away, exposing circles of charred earth. The fire had destroyed the battery and engine wiring, burning through the instrument panel bulkhead into the front passenger compartment.

  ‘Damned quiet…’ Maitland murmured aloud to himself. No cars or airline buses moved along the motorways. The aerial balconies of the apartment blocks were deserted in the sunlight.

  Where the devil was everyone? God … some kind of psychosis. Nervously, Maitland pivoted on the crutch. He hobbled across the charred earth, trying to find a single tenant of this abandoned landscape. Had a world war broken out overnight? Perhaps the source of a virulent plague had been identified somewhere in central London. During the night, as he lay asleep in the burnt-out car, an immense silent exodus had left him alone in the deserted city.

  Three hundred yards to the west of the island’s apex, beyond the junction of the motorway and the feeder road, a single figure appeared. An elderly man approached the island, pushing a light motorcycle along the eastbound carriageway. He was partly hidden by the central reservation, but in the bright sunlight Maitland could clearly see his long white hair swept back off his forehead on to his shoulders.

  As he watched this old man pushing along his silent machine, Maitland was overcome by a sudden sense of fear that drove away all awareness of his hunger and exhaustion. By some nightmare logic he was convinced that the old man was coming for him, perhaps not now but by some circuitous route through the labyrinth of motorways, and that he would eventually arrive to summon Maitland to the point where he had crashed. Moreover, Maitland was certain that this machine he was wheeling was not in fact a light motorcycle, but an horrific device of torture that the old man brought with him on his endless journey around the world, and against whose chain-driven wheels Maitland’s already broken body would be applied in a grim judgement by ordeal.

  * * *

  Galvanizing himself, Maitland began to hobble at random around the breaker’s yard, swaying and tottering in this circle of dead fire. The man’s white head was still visible along the eastbound carriageway, eyes fixed on the empty road curving ahead of him. His shabby clothes and antique machine were illuminated by the sunlight.

  Maitland crouched in the grass, grateful to this deep bower for hiding him from the approaching figure. He looked at his watch, noticing the date dial at the same moment as an empty car transporter lumbered through the tunnel of the overpass, its diesel braying.

  April 24th …

  Saturday! The weekend had begun. He had crashed on Thursday afternoon, and had now spent two nights on the island. It was Saturday morning, and this explained the silence and absence of traffic.

  Light-headed with relief, Maitland hobbled back to the Jaguar. He drank some water to steady himself. The old man and his motorcycle had gone, hidden somewhere beyond the overpass. Maitland massaged his arms and chest, trying to master his trembling. Had he imagined this solitary figure, conjuring up the spectre of some infantile guilt?

  He looked around the perimeter of the island, carefully scanning the embankments in case any falls of food had taken place during the night. Parcels of newspaper, the bright tags of confectionery wrappers – somehow he must find something to eat. The four bottles of Burgundy would keep him going in an emergency, and there must be edible berries growing on the island, perhaps a forgotten allotment garden with a row of wild potatoes.

  The caisson of the feeder road indicator sign caught his eye. The rain-washed concrete shone brightly in the sunlight like an empty notice-board. A message scrawled across it in three-feet-high letters would be legible to drivers on the motorway …

  Maitland swung himself around the car. He needed writing materials of some kind, or failing that, a tool sharp enough to scratch the concrete so that he could rub dirt into the scored surface.

  The stench of burnt rubber and oil hung over the engine compartment. Maitland looked down at the blackened wiring hanging from the distributor. One by one, he pulled the terminals from the sparking plugs and filled his pockets with the burnt rubber guards.

  * * *

  Half an hour later he had crossed the island and was sitting beside the white slope of the caisson. His legs stretched in front of him like ragged poles. The effort of pushing through the long grass had soon exhausted Maitland. At places in the central valley the vegetation rose shoulder-high. Several times he had fallen over the stone walls and brickwork courses hidden beneath the grass, but he picked himself up and doggedly pushed ahead. By now he ignored the nettles that stung his legs through the torn fabric of his trousers, accepting these burning weals in the same way that he accepted his own weariness. By doing so he found he could concentrate on whatever task lay in front of him – the next painful push through a nettle bank, a difficult step across a tilting flagstone. In some way, this act of concentration proved that he could dominate the island.

  From the pockets of his dinner-jacket he took out the plug caps and burnt rubber leads he had twisted from the engine. Like a child at play, Maitland set out the pieces of charred rubber in two rows in front of him.

  He was too tired to stand, but he could reach to within four feet of the ground. Carefully, in wavering letters eighteen inches high, he marked up his message.

  HELP INJURED DRIVER CALL POLICE

  Leaning against the cold concrete, Maitland surveyed his handiwork. Like a dying pavement artist in a rich man’s cast-off, he pulled the damp dinner-jacket around his thin shoulders. But his hungry eyes soon turned their interest to the cigarette packs, tattered newspapers and refuse lying around him at the foot of the embankment.

  Ten feet away from Maitland was a bundle of greasy newspaper, tossed down during the night from a car or truck moving along the feeder road. Cooking oil leaked through the crushed pages. Pulling himself together, Maitland crawled towards the newspaper. He drew the bundle to him with the handle of the crutch. Fumbling in his hunger, he tore open the paper, overwhelmed by the smell of fried fish that clung to the smeary half-tone illustrations. The food had probably been bought by the driver at one of the all-night cafés that formed a small encampment by the southern entrance to the Westway interchange.

  All the fish had gone – however, as Maitland had guessed from the neat way the parcel had been wrapped, it still held some twenty fried potatoes.

  As he devoured these greasy fingers in his blackened hands, the first rain of the day struck the dust around his legs. Chuckling to himself, Maitland stuffed the paper into the pocket of his dinner-jacket. He lifted himself to his feet and moved away through the deep grass. The roads around the island were deserted again. Carried by a brisk north-east wind, armadas of dark cloud swept overhead. Alone in this concrete landscape, Maitland tottered along, hoping to reach the shelter of his car. He looked back briefly at the letters he had chalked on the embankment, but they were barely visible above the grass.

  The rain gusted across him before he could reach the central valley, forcing him to stop and cling to the crutch. Maitland looked down at his waving hands, moving about in a meaningless semaphore as the rain streamed across them. He knew that he was not merely exhausted, but behaving in a vaguely eccentric way, as if he had forgotten who he was. Parts of his mind seemed to be detaching themselves from the centre of his consciousness.

  He stopped to search for shelter. The grass seethed and whirled around him. as if sections of this wilderness were speaking to each other. Maitland let the rain lash his face, turning his head so that he could catch the drops in his mouth. Surrounded by the squalls of rain, he was tempted to stand there for ever, and only reluctantly pushed himself forward.

  Losing his way, Maitland stumbled into a room-sized enclosure bounded by the nettles growing from the wall-courses of a ruined house. Standing in this stony garden, like the dead centre of a maze, he tried to find his bearings. The heavy rain-clouds hung in dense curtains between himself and the motorway. The mud caked acr
oss his dinner-jacket dissolved and ran into streams down his ragged trousers, exposing the blood-stained flank of his right thigh. Confused for a moment, Maitland squeezed his wrists and elbows, trying to identify himself.

  ‘Maitland…!’ he shouted aloud. ‘Robert Maitland…!’

  He clung to the metal crutch and hobbled from the garden. Twenty feet to his left, beyond a pile of galvanized iron sheets, was the ruined entrance to a basement doorway. Maitland vomited into the streaming rain. He wiped the phlegm from his mouth and swung himself over the stony ground. Worn steps ran down to the doorway, where a narrow entrance led under a tilting lintel into the open air.

  Maitland dragged the sheets of galvanized iron towards the steps. Laying them carefully between the lintel and the top step, he built a crude roof, adjusting the sheets so that the slope carried away the streaming rain. He threw the crutch down the steps and eased himself under the roof of his new shelter.

  Sitting on the steps as the rain drummed at the metal roof over his head, Maitland took off the dinner-jacket and squeezed the sodden fabric in his bruised hands. The muddy water ran away between his fingers, as if he were washing out a child’s football gear. He spread the jacket across the steps and massaged his shoulders, trying to draw a little warmth from the pressure of his hands. He could feel his fever returning, fed from the inflamed hip wound. Nonetheless, his success in building even this shabby shelter had revived him, rekindling his still unbroken determination to survive. As he was already well aware, it was this will to survive, to dominate the island and harness its limited resources, that now seemed a more important goal than escaping.

  Maitland listened to the rain striking the galvanized iron. He remembered the house his parents had taken in the Camargue for their last summer together. The intense delta rain had fallen on the garage roof below the windows of the bedroom where he had happily spent most of the holiday. It was no coincidence that when he had first taken Helen Fairfax to the south of France they had gone straight to La Grande Motte, the futuristic resort complex on the coast a few miles away. Helen had quietly hated the hard, affectless architecture with its stylized concrete surfaces, nervous of Maitland’s buoyant humour. At the time he had found himself wishing that Catherine were with him – she would have liked the ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by the planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned in advance of itself.

  Through the open doorway Maitland watched the pools of water covering the weed-grown basement into which the first floor had collapsed. A small printing shop had once been here, and a few copper-backed letterpress blocks lay around his feet. Maitland picked one up and examined the cloudy figures of a dark-suited man and a white-haired woman. As he listened to the rain he thought of his parents’ divorce; the uncertainties of this period, when he was eight years old, seemed to be replicated in the negative image on the letterpress plate, in the reversed tones of this unknown man and woman.

  An hour later, when the rain had ended, he climbed from his shelter. Holding tightly to the crutch, he hobbled back to the southern embankment. His fever continued to rise, and he gazed light-heartedly at the deserted causeways of the motorway.

  When he reached the embankment and searched for the message he had scrawled on the white flank of the caisson, he found that all the letters had been obliterated.

  9 Fever

  THE last of the rain fell across Maitland’s face. He stared at the remains of the message he had inscribed on the damp concrete. The letters had been reduced to black smudges, the smeared rubber running to the ground at his feet.

  Trying to concentrate, Maitland searched the ground for his rubber markers. Had someone wiped the letters away? Uncertain of himself and his ability to reason clearly, Maitland leaned unsteadily against the metal crutch. The fever poured from his chest and lungs. He realized that the rounded smears were exactly like those of a windshield wiper. He looked round wildly at the island and its deserted motorway embankments. Was he still trapped inside his car? Was the entire island an extension of the Jaguar, its windshield and windows transformed by his delirium into these embankments? Perhaps the windshield wipers had jammed and were flicking to and fro as he lay forward on his crushed chest across the steering wheel, tracing some incoherent message on the steaming glass …

  The sunlight broke through the white cumulus to the east of the island, illuminating the high embankment like a spotlight switched on to a stage set. A truck laboured along the feeder road, the rectangular pantechnicon of a furniture van visible above the balustrade.

  * * *

  Maitland turned his back on the vehicle. Suddenly he no longer cared about the message and the obliterated letters. He swung himself roughly through the waist-high grass, soaking the torn fabric of his trousers and dinner-jacket against the rain-wet stems. In the over-bright sunlight the island and the concrete motorways glimmered with a hard vibrancy that surged through his crippled body. The grass flashed with an electric light, encircling his thighs and calves. The wet leaves wound across his skin, as if reluctant to release him. Maitland swung his injured leg over a ruined brick course. Somehow he must rally himself while he was still strong enough to move about.

  No point in going back to the car, he told himself.

  The grass seethed around him in the light wind, speaking its agreement.

  ‘Explore the island now – drink the wine later.’

  The grass rustled excitedly, parting in circular waves, beckoning him into its spirals.

  Fascinated, Maitland followed the swirling motions, reading in these patterns the reassuring voice of this immense green creature eager to protect and guide him. The spiral curves swerved through the inflamed air, the visual signature of epilepsy. His own brain – the fever, perhaps damage to his cerebral cortex …

  ‘Find a ladder –?’

  The grass lashed at his feet, as if angry that Maitland still wished to leave its green embrace. Laughing at the grass, Maitland patted it reassuringly with his free hand as he hobbled along, stroking the seething stems that caressed his waist.

  Almost carried by the grass, Maitland climbed on to the roof of an abandoned air-raid shelter. Resting here, he inspected the island more carefully. Comparing it with the motorway system, he saw that it was far older than the surrounding terrain, as if this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by the exercise of a unique guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust.

  Parts of the island dated from well before World War II. The eastern end, below the overpass, was its oldest section, with the churchyard and the ground-courses of Edwardian terraced houses. The breaker’s yard and its wrecked cars had been superimposed on the still identifiable streets and alleyways.

  In the centre of the island were the air-raid shelters among which he was sitting. Attached to these was a later addition, the remains of a Civil Defence post little more than fifteen years old. Maitland climbed down from the shelter. Supported by the grass blades swirling around him like a flock of eager attendants, he hobbled westwards down the centre of the island. He crossed a succession of low walls, partly buried under piles of discarded tyres and worn steel cable.

  Around the ruin of a former pay-box, Maitland identified the ground-plan of a post-war cinema, a narrow single-storey flea-pit built from cement blocks and galvanized iron. Ten feet away, partly screened by a bank of nettles, steps ran down to a basement.

  Looking at the shuttered pay-box, Maitland thought unclearly of his own childhood visits to the local cinema, with its endless programmes of vampire and horror movies. More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head. His movement across this forgotten terrain was a journey not merely through the island’s past but through his own. His infantile anger as he shouted aloud for Catherine reminded him of how, as a child, he had once bellowed unwearyingly for his mother while she nursed his
younger sister in the next room. For some reason, which he had always resented, she had never come to pacify him, but had let him climb from the empty bath himself, hoarse with anger and surprise.

  Too exhausted to press on, Maitland sat on a stone wall. Around him the high nettles rose into the sunlight, their tiered and serrated leaves like the towers of Gothic cathedrals, or the porous rocks of a mineral forest on an alien planet. Hunger contracted his stomach in a sudden spasm, forcing him to vomit on to his knees. He wiped away the phlegm and hobbled across the brick courses to the southern embankment.

  Losing consciousness for short intervals, he wandered to and fro, his eyes unfocused, following the blunted end of the crutch.

  As he tottered about, Maitland found himself losing interest in his own body, and in the pain that inflamed his leg. He began to shuck off sections of his body, forgetting first his injured hip, then both his legs, erasing all awareness of his bruised chest and diaphragm. Sustained by the cold air, he moved through the grass, looking round calmly at those features of the island he had come to know so well during the past days. Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged. He would leave his right leg at the point of his crash, his bruised hands impaled upon the steel fence. He would place his chest where he had sat against the concrete wall. At each point a small ritual would signify the transfer of obligation from himself to the island.

  He spoke aloud, a priest officiating at the eucharist of his own body.

  ‘I am the island.’

  The air shed its light.

  10 The air-raid shelter