The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  * * *

  Every afternoon, as I left the dissecting room, I passed the blue Chevrolet parked outside the Psychology Department, owned perhaps by some visiting Nobel Prizewinner from Harvard or M.I.T. Admiring the car, and the Stan Kenton gramophone record on the rear shelf, I noticed a windshield sticker inviting volunteers to take part in a new experimental project. Almost all the department’s volunteers were medical students, who could be counted on to walk the treadmills with electrical leads taped to their chests and ride exercise bicycles without gagging into the mouthpieces.

  I hesitated before pushing back the swing doors of the designated office, wondering if I would rather spend the afternoon with one of the physiology demonstrators and her cracked nails. A lecturer knelt on the floor, hard at work repairing an electric coffee percolator. He ignored me until he had finished and handed the machine to a tall, dark-haired schoolgirl in her late teens who was standing beside the secretary’s desk.

  “Good … Coffee first, psychology second.” Looking up at me, he asked: “Another victim? We need all the volunteers we can get. Miriam, fill out his death certificate.”

  Already I had recognised the rising star of the Psychology Department, Dr. Richard Sutherland, presumably the owner of the Chevrolet and the Stan Kenton record. More like a film actor than a Cambridge don, he was a handsome Scotsman with a shock of red hair that he combed out to maximum effect. He wore basketball sneakers, tartan shirt, and jeans, clothes seen in Cambridge only on off-duty American servicemen. On the wall behind him were the wooden propeller of a Tiger Moth, a New Jersey licence plate, and a framed photograph of himself with von Neumann. Sutherland had taken his doctoral degree at Princeton, and it was even rumoured that he had appeared on television, inconceivably fast behaviour for a Cambridge academic.

  He cast an affable eye over me, as if he already had a serviceable grasp of my motives. “You’re a first-year med…? How did I guess? The formalin—you all smell like Glasgow undertakers. Let me show you what we’re testing.”

  Watched by the schoolgirl’s approving but arch eyes, he took me rapidly through the experiment, which would test the persistence of after-images in the optical centres of the brain.

  “You’ll find it fascinating—you can actually see the brain working—assuming you medicos have a brain, something Miriam inclines to doubt. First we’d like you to fill out this questionnaire. We need to get an idea of your psychological profile. Do introverts have more persistent after-images than extroverts? Nothing personal, we don’t need to know if you lusted after your grandmother.”

  “She lusted after me.”

  “That’s the spirit. Miriam, take over, he’s ready to confess.”

  “I’m looking for the thumbscrew, Dr. Richard.”

  Sutherland lifted an American ski jacket from the door peg. “Miriam’s in the sixth form at the Perse School, she’s helping out while my secretary has a baby. See you after my lecture.”

  He left us while Miriam took me through the questionnaire. She read out the entries in a mock-solemn voice, strong eyes watching me without expression as I fumbled over my replies. Her fingers played with the beads of her bracelet, as if adding up her first impressions of me. A modest score, I guessed. Despite the school uniform, she was only a year younger than me, and in complete command of the office, handling the bulky folders like an experienced bookkeeper. Her loosened school tie, creased tunic, and the laboratory stain on her cotton shirt gave her a kind of dishevelled glamour. Had she just left the unmade bed I could see in the inner office? Already I wondered if she and Dr. Sutherland were lovers.

  Only when she checked the details of my birth in China did she properly notice me for the first time.

  “Shanghai? Were you there during the war?”

  “I was interned by the Japs. Do you know Peggy Gardner?”

  “Of course—we’re all in awe of her.”

  “She was in the same camp.”

  “Peggy? How strange. Why doesn’t she talk about it?”

  “Nothing very much happened.”

  “I can’t believe that. How long were you and Peggy there?”

  “Three years. I never think about it.”

  “Perhaps you should.” Using an American ballpoint pen shaped like a silver rocketship, she checked off my entries, eyebrows raised as her fingers flicked through the beads. “Then you came to England and went to the Leys School—I can imagine how you felt about that.”

  “It was fine. Just like the camp, only the food was worse.”

  “God, I know, school food. I refuse to eat ours. I practically led a riot last week.” She lowered her voice. “I only come here for Richard’s chocolates. He calls me his Hershey bar girl.”

  “Why do you work for him?”

  She picked at the stain on her tunic, showing off her breast for me. “I used to hang around here after school—it’s easily the most interesting department. I go to a lot of lectures—Leavis, Ryle, Leach. Richard’s are the best. One day he gave me a lift in his car.” She smiled at the memory.

  “You’re going to read psychology here?”

  “No fear! I’ve spent enough time in Cambridge. My father’s the bursar at Fitzwilliam Hall. I want to be a cocktail waitress in New York, or live on a desert island with three strange men. Anything to get out of here.”

  “I have a motorbike. Why don’t you?”

  “I will!” Aware that I might be sceptical, she said with some pride: “I tried to join the RAF. Richard’s taken me up in his Tiger Moth and says I have a real flair for flying. The RAF had the nerve to turn me down, something about the lack of toilet facilities in the V-bomber force. Jesus, if I can fly a plane I can learn to pee in a milk bottle.”

  “Well … Professor Harris says anatomy is the basis of everything.”

  “He’s right. So why are you doing medicine?”

  “I’ve forgotten already. I thought that I wanted to be a psychiatrist.”

  “But why? What do you need to cure? Something to do with the war?”

  I hesitated, unsettled by this bright schoolgirl and her shrewd questions. “That might be true. I haven’t found out yet.”

  “Well, you will.” She spoke with a robust confidence in me. “And now you’re cutting up your first corpse. Treat him with respect.”

  “Of course. In fact, it’s a woman.”

  “A woman?” She whistled through a chipped tooth. “You’re my first necrophile.”

  “In a way, that’s not far from the truth.”

  “Go on. This is being secretly recorded.”

  “Nothing. You can get very close. It turns into a sort of weird marriage.”

  “Hold on! Professor Harris is going to be bailing you out of the local clink.” She leaned back and put her feet on the desk, revealing her long legs and the white skin of her thighs through the holes in her black school stockings.

  “So?” I asked.

  “Instead of the dead, why don’t you try the living?”

  * * *

  In her teasing way, this intelligent schoolgirl had seen through my undergraduate banter and realised that I was still preoccupied by wartime events that now seemed to be reimposing themselves on the calm Cambridgeshire landscape. The students poled their punts on the Cam, talked endlessly in the coffeehouses, and debated the issues of the day at the Union, mimicking the tones of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, on the airfields that ringed the university, American bombers were massing for a final nuclear countdown.

  On Sunday afternoons I drove Miriam on my motorcycle to Cambridge airfield, where we watched Richard Sutherland circle the field in his Tiger Moth. Later I took Miriam out to the great American bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and we walked together through the November wind to stare at the nuclear bombers. Once we came across a run-down British air base where World War II Liberators sat in parking bays far from their hangars. As Miriam kept watch, I climbed through the wire and approached one of the unguarded bombers. I swung myself through the ven
tral hatch into the equipment-cluttered fuselage. As the wind drummed at the bomber’s hull and flexed its heavy wings I imagined myself taking off towards the east.

  “Jim, you’re trying awfully hard to get arrested,” Miriam told me when we returned to King’s. “Where is your father now?”

  “He’s still in China.”

  “You won’t feel at home until he comes to England.”

  “He’s stuck in Shanghai for a while. The Communists put him on trial. Luckily, he’d read more Marx and Engels than the peasant judges, so they let him off.”

  “There’s a moral there…” Miriam took my arm as we stood by the fire, running her eye along the Surrealist reproductions. “Ernst, Dalí, the Facteur Cheval … they’re your real syllabus. Don’t let Peggy Gardner rubbish them. Hang on to your imagination, even if it is a bit lurid.”

  “Miriam…” I had heard this too often at school. “The world is lurid. You’ve never had to rely on your imagination, thank God.”

  “Any moment now, he’s going to start tunnelling…”

  I had described my attempt to break into the food store at Lunghua, which Miriam thought comical but oddly touching. Already I was infatuated with this quick-witted schoolgirl, with her bold gaze and outrageous enthusiasms. At times she would lose interest in me, preoccupied with some grudge against one of the women teachers at the Perse, or after the endless rows with her mother about her drinking in the undergraduate pubs. The proctors had complained to her father that Miriam had been seen in a punt with a crowd of Trinity men, threatening them with a pint of beer in each hand.

  Every moment with her produced some surprise. She told me that the optical experiments devised by Richard Sutherland were no more than a blind, part of a larger test to determine the psychological profiles of students who volunteered to take part in medical experiments. Research workers had always assumed that casually recruited volunteers formed a typical cross section of the student population.

  “But that isn’t true. Richard says that the only ones who apply are either aggressive extroverts or neurotic introverts.”

  “And where are the sane ones?”

  “They never apply. They’re either getting drunk or necking on the river.”

  “Call Professor Harris…” We were lying in bed together, and I searched below the sheet. “Where does that leave me?”

  Miriam pressed my head to the pillow and brushed the hair from my eyes. “Jim, you’re a war criminal.”

  “What?”

  “Or you think like one. Richard and I were talking about you.”

  “Another bogus test…”

  “Listen, if you take away the war you behaved just like a schizophrenic child. Richard has a patient whose son was schizophrenic. He spent twenty years quietly trying to kill himself. It’s all he wanted to do.”

  “And?”

  “I forget. Anyway, you aren’t going to kill yourself. I need you for at least the next three weeks.” She sat up on one elbow, laying her right breast on my chest, and drew lines with her fingernail around her nipple. “Tell me, is it strange to dissect a woman? You say she’s the only one there.”

  “Speak softly, she’s the queen of the dead.”

  “I know she’s my biggest rival. Can you imagine dissecting me? Where would you start?”

  Smiling, I turned to face Miriam, drawing back the frayed sheets so that the firelight warmed her broad hips and ribcage. “I don’t know … in a way, dissection is a kind of erotic autopsy. We could start with the cervical triangle, save me having to wring your neck…” I kissed the small mole under Miriam’s chin, savouring the taste of her mother’s perfume. “Or a nasal resection, you have been getting a little toffee-nosed…” I pressed my tongue into her nostril with its scent of decayed lavender until she snorted with laughter. “Or what about an augmentation mammoplasty, not really necessary in your case…” I ran my lips from the musky sweet hollow of her armpit to her full breast with its heavy nipple. Veins ran below the white skin, asps waiting to sting a princess. I tasted the skin of her breasts, hunting for the scent glands, running my tongue against the hard pippin of her nipple. I moved down to her abdomen. “Your navel smells of oysters…”

  “Wait a minute. You haven’t dissected the abdomen yet.”

  “The only tool I need here is a slice of lemon.”

  “So this is what you get up to in the DR. My mother always warned me about unqualified doctors…”

  I embraced her, pressing my lips against her nipple. The only women I had made love to, apart from David Hunter’s Chinese girlfriends in Shanghai, were the middle-aged landlady and her daughter who ran the small hotel in west London where I had stayed during my mother’s return to the Far East, and a Cambridge prostitute who thought I was an American serviceman posing as an undergraduate, a shrewd guess in the circumstances. With Miriam, sex for the first time brought with it a sense of the future. I hoped that she and I would make love many other times, and that an unlimited store of affection lay waiting for us in some bonded warehouse of the heart.

  Miriam’s fingers were snipping across my chest, scissoring at my breastbone. She tapped down to my stomach, bypassing my navel with an elegant swerve, and with a cry caught my testicles in a lobster’s claw. Laughing, I raised her thigh and placed it across my hip. She sat astride me and rested her vulva against my penis, teasing me as she held the tip between her labia. I entered her vagina, needing her so much that I could happily have dissected her. I imagined a strange act of love performed by an obsessed surgeon on a living woman, in a deserted operating theatre in one of those sinister clinics in the Cambridge suburbs. I would kiss the linings of her lungs, run my tongue along her bronchi, press my face to the moist membranes of her heart as it pulsed against my lips …

  “Jim…” Miriam paused, a forefinger on my nose. “What are you thinking about?”

  “It’s probably illegal.”

  “Well, stop…”

  I held her tightly, forgetting the dissecting room and its cadavers, the nuclear bombers and the November fens.

  * * *

  Soon after, Miriam returned to her Trinity friends and her work for Richard Sutherland. She was unsettled by my obsessive visits to the American bases and aware that I was still ensnared in a past from which I made little effort to free myself. She realised, too, that I was under the sway of a woman whose body I knew even more intimately than her own. Concerned for me, she tried to make me talk about Shanghai and the war, and even asked another medical student to smuggle her into the dissecting room, ready to confront her rival. But I cared for Miriam too much to risk exposing her to the past.

  So, in her wise and kindly way, she kissed me against the mantelpiece, formally turned my Surrealist paintings to the wall, and with a friendly wave closed the door of my rooms behind her.

  I was sorry to see her leave, but she was right in thinking that a strange duel was taking place between herself and the dead physician who had begun to dominate my waking hours in Cambridge. Through the milky eyes of this silent woman I felt that I was joined once again to the Shanghai I had left behind, but which I still carried with me like a persistent dream that gripped my shoulders. Inside my head hung the façades of the Bund and the Nanking Road. When I looked from the windows of the Anatomy Library at the flat Cambridgeshire countryside, with its American air bases and their glowing vision of a Third World War, I could see the abandoned paddy fields near Lunghua. The railway lines that carried me back to Cambridge after my weekend visits to London seemed to lead to the small country station where the four Japanese soldiers still waited for me.

  Without speaking to me, the woman doctor on her glass table had identified herself with all the victims of the war in China and with the young Chinese clerk I had seen murdered against the telephone pole. By dissecting her, exploring her body from within, I felt that I was drawing closer to some warped truth which I had never been able to discuss with anyone since sailing from Shanghai on the Arrawa. Its refrigerated meat
holds had carried a secret cargo back to England. I had left Shanghai too soon, with a clutch of insoluble problems that postwar England was too exhausted and too distracted to help me set aside.

  The British had known their own war, a conflict with clear military and political goals, so unlike the war in China. They had coped with its unhappy memories and their reduced status like the adults in Lunghua camp. Over the rubble of bombed streets and the deflated hopes of a better world they had imposed a mythology of slogans, a parade of patriotic flags that sealed the past away forever, far from any searching eye.

  Even the ex-servicemen I met in London bars, who had experienced real combat during their years in the British forces, seemed to have taken part in a different war, a bloody pageant not too far removed from the Military Tattoos which one or two of them, bizarrely, had helped to stage in Shanghai. But war, which had widowed and maimed so many of them, had never touched their imaginations. In Shanghai, from 1937 to the dropping of the atom bombs, we had been neither combatants nor victims but spectators roped in to watch an execution. Those who had drawn too close had been touched by the blood on the guns.

  I tried to shut my eyes, dozing in the cramped flats of the hard-drinking physiology demonstrators, but the past endured. More and more, the cadavers in the dissecting room reminded me of the severed limbs I had seen in the Avenue Edward VII.

  * * *

  On the last Thursday in November I drove out to Cambridge airfield. I knew that Miriam often skipped her sports afternoon at school and sneaked away to watch Richard Sutherland practise aerobatics in his Tiger Moth. As I guessed, she was waiting in the Chevrolet when I arrived, running the car’s powerful heater. Cheerily, she waved me towards her and threw open the passenger door. Glad to be with her again, I sat next to her in the car, listening to the exhilarating drone of aircraft engines.