The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  “Beans on toast and all that jazz.”

  “Too much of a fiddle. They can have salami.”

  “They hate salami.”

  “They’ll love it! Washed down with a glass of wine? It’s their first pop concert.”

  “And mine.”

  “Good. I’m going to get you out of here more often.” Sally licked and dabbed, making a quick survey of the refrigerator. She waved a cheese-tipped forefinger at me, flecks of cole slaw on her brightly painted mouth. “Jim, you’re spending too much time in Shepperton. It’s like living on a small planet miles from anywhere. I’m moving you back to Earth.”

  I loved to watch her, whether she was fuelled by amphetamines or plain American sass. She and Peter Lykiard had arranged to call for me, but Lykiard had left separately for the open-air concert, near Brighton on the south coast. The Arts Laboratory, of which Lykiard was now exhibitions director, was to stage a number of prose and poetry readings during the intermissions and Sally had persuaded me to take part, against my better judgement. I found it impossible to resist her swerves of enthusiasm and good cheer.

  “You’ll enjoy it—Burroughs will be there.”

  “The great man. But what do I read?”

  “Anything. One of your sadomasochistic romps should go down a treat. The audiences are very conventional.”

  “So am I. Sally…”

  But nothing could stop her. As we drove away from Shepperton towards the southeast I felt my usual pang of uneasiness at leaving the Thames-side town. Sally was right—in the two years since Miriam’s death the familiar gardens and water meadows had come to my rescue, but at something of a price. I went up to London more often, but the quiet streets with their bricky villas, presided over by the film studios, formed the reassuring centre of my mind. Through the tranquil TV suburbs moved a light as serene as any Stanley Spencer had seen at Cookham.

  At the same time, I was grateful to people who lured me away from it. Lykiard and Sally had arrived unexpectedly on the doorstep six weeks earlier. They carried presents and a cheery welcome for the children, who had almost forgotten them, and a bottle of Japanese whisky for me which Sally was opening as she stepped through the door. Lykiard wanted me to write the catalogue notes to an exhibition of Kennedy assassination photographs, but this was little more than the pretext for their visit.

  I was happy to see them both, even though their island hideaway had been the setting for Miriam’s fatal accident. Watching Sally whooping around the children, I realised how strong a memory she had left me of herself. Casually she filled the nursery with scented smoke that had the children’s nostrils flicking like butterfly wings. She regaled them with baffling word games, concocted elaborate family histories for the tribe of plastic trolls that were their latest craze, scandalised them with media gossip from the television world, where she now worked as a news programme researcher. Anyone within range was treated to her eccentric comments on the Vietnam War, Carnaby Street fashions, the latest outrage committed by President Johnson and the British police. She was full of anecdotes about Dalí, whose entourage at Port Lligat she had penetrated, and his voyeuristic delight in watching young couples have sex, without making clear whether she altogether disapproved.

  Only when her last amphetamine tablet began to wear off would she become scratchy and silent, rubbing the coolness from her eyes until she could take her handbag and a glass of water upstairs to the bathroom. But I always looked forward to seeing her. She excited me in the way that Miriam had done, and I envied Lykiard his close hold over her wayward imagination.

  The 1960s were tailor-made for them. In his office at the Arts Laboratory the pipe-smoking Lykiard logged onto his wall charts the latest outburst of psychedelia, the newest drug craze or exhibition of concept art, like a contented meteorologist registering a summer of unexpected cyclones. Exhibitions of Vietnam atrocities, posters advertising a self-mutilating cabaret performer or an Artaud revival moved beneath his tolerant eyes as if he had put aside all emotion or even, conceivably, not yet experienced this rare condition. For him the end of the world, the imminent nuclear Armageddon against which protestors marched on every weekend, would merely be the ultimate happening, the audience-storming last act in the theatre of cruelty.

  Sally, at least, still kept her feelings, though jammed into the wrong pigeonholes in her mind. She thrived on the volatile landscape of the mid-sixties, which made a virtue of psychic damage. Mediated by the TV documentaries which she helped to edit, the civil wars in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Congo became a never-ending group catharsis, a psychological life-support system into which she could plug between her amphetamine highs. Trying to sort all this out had brought her to Shepperton. In Sally’s mind, a near-addicted Scotch drinker blessed with an ox-like liver and three children seemed a model of almost churchgoing rectitude. Once she had offered me her flat tin of amphetamine tablets, but then quickly withdrew them as if tempting me with the fruit of the second forbidden tree.

  How could I manoeuvre her away from Lykiard? Her large, ramshackle apartment in an expensive Bayswater block was a museum of unmet needs. Dusty photographs of her mother, sitting stiffly in the garden of some private mental clinic near Boston, hung side by side with stills of jack-booted parade-ground troops from Triumph of the Will.

  “Gorgeous men … just so glamorous,” Sally commented wistfully, settling her icy heroes next to a magazine profile of Israeli kibbutz sentries, her other sexual dream. She attended Ouspenski seminars, had taken a parachute jump at Elstree Flying Club, loathed her department-store tycoon father, yet treasured her schoolgirl letters from him and wore his old silk smoking jacket as a dressing gown, inhaling the ancient odours of sweat and tobacco like healing balm. Naïvely, I asked if they had committed incest. “I wish we had,” she mused nostalgically. “Jesus, I wanted him to—I know what a deprived childhood really means…”

  All the way to Brighton she played happily with the children in the back of the car. Was she, I wondered hopefully, trying to make herself one of my daughters? After ten years of Miriam’s level common sense it was difficult to hunt the zigzag contours of Sally’s mind. The Hell’s Angels guarding the entrance to the concert site were wearing her beloved black leather and death’s-head insignia, but she gave them scarcely a glance.

  We parked behind a tower of steel scaffolding high enough to launch a space vehicle and walked through the buses and location vans to the performers’ canvas tent. Lykiard was holding court with his Arts Laboratory groupies—intense young women, concept artists all, with the intimidating stares of gangsters’ molls. Anyone over thirty was a race enemy, and having three children instantly marked me down for retribution. Sally’s presence gave me a temporary laissez-passer, to be revoked, I was made to feel, at the slightest betrayal of such bourgeois inclinations as wanting an ice cream for the children or a hygienic lavatory. Lykiard informed them that I would read a text celebrating the perverse sexuality of President Kennedy’s widow, and there was a momentary flicker of interest behind the heavy shades, soon replaced by a stony hostility. Class assumptions and exclusivities survived strongly amid the rock amplifiers and Warholiana.

  Between the sudden bursts of rock music, as the engineers wired their circuits, the children were whispering to Sally.

  “Me too,” Sally agreed. Entrusting the picnic hamper to Lykiard, she spotted a sign behind the stage, on which was printed FREE TOILET. An arrow pointed towards a wood of beech trees. Like characters in a Magritte painting, people wandered in a dislocated way among the trees, whose trunks steamed with urine. Burroughs hovered briefly into view, as formal as an undertaker in his natty suit.

  I watched Alice and Lucy daintily pick their way through the moist grass after Sally, who had gathered up her long skirts. Henry was happily spraying every tree, and accidentally sprinkled the boots of a Hell’s Angel too stoned to notice. Already the counterculture was a revelation beyond all their childhood dreams.

  Lykiard showed me his timetable and t
he ramp of wooden planks that led to the upper of the two stages. I gazed uneagerly at the tower of steel scaffolding.

  “Is this thing going to hold together? If one bolt snaps we’ll all be launched into orbit.”

  “I think that’s the idea. It may be our only chance. Let’s face it, middle-aged America has hijacked the Apollo programme. Men older than your bank manager will land on the moon.”

  “But is it going up or down?” Trying to steady my nerves, I bought a whisky at the bar, then found that the plastic cup contained nothing but a brown stain.

  “It isn’t dirty,” Lykiard explained. “That’s your measure of whisky. Smoke pot, but don’t buy any here. You’ll find capitalist exploitation at its most ruthless.” He pointed to the seats in the VIP enclosure below the stage. “Despite appearances, the old class structures survive intact. The best seats are reserved for the pop aristocracy—promoters, record company executives, TV people, and the music press. Behind them we get the pop world’s middle class, all those well-brought-up girls from the suburbs who just come for the day. But down at the bottom, as ever, is the proletariat of the drug culture…”

  Strolling through the fringes of the crowd, we reached a wide ditch that marked the edge of the field rented from a local farmer. Groups of shabby young men and a few sallow girls were camping in the ditch. Most of them had spent the night there, sleeping among the tree roots in makeshift tents of tarpaulin. Smoking their joints, they were cooking on small stoves from which a sweet pine smoke rose into the air. They reminded me of the Chinese peasants I had seen clinging to life in the irrigation ditches of wartime Shanghai. One of them offered me a skillet of gruel. I squatted under the tarpaulin and ate the spicy oatmeal, sharing the plastic cup of wine I had taken from the picnic hamper.

  Later, as I recovered from my reading, I lounged beside Sally and the children on the grassy slopes behind the concert stage. The entire terrain of trees and meadows resembled the aftermath of some harmless and cheerful Waterloo. Bodies lay in the long grass, singly and in pairs, as if they had fallen on the field of battle, while the survivors sat in their square below the stage, many of them wearing the scarlet tunics, gold braid, and epaulettes of the classic English regiments. I envied them all their mastery of make-believe. I had wasted my own youth dissecting cadavers and training to be a military pilot, trying to match myself against the realities of the postwar world. But the 1960s had effortlessly turned the tables on reality. The media landscape had sealed a Technicolor umbrella around the planet and then redefined reality as itself.

  Drowsy on the warm wine, I thought of myself on the swaying platform above the crowd, bellowing into the erratic microphones. Giant fragments of amplified prose had toppled away through the air like sections of a glacier. No one had heard a word. My dreams of Mrs. Kennedy’s sexuality had boomed across the placid downs, unsettling the grazing cattle a dozen fields away.

  “It was a Surrealist joke—on me,” I told Sally, shutting my eyes to the humiliation of it. “Not the kind that Duchamp or Tzara would approve of…”

  “You were wonderful. Wasn’t he, pixies?”

  “Yes!” Their eyes were opening to a new world far richer than anything Shepperton could offer.

  “Sally, the whole thing was absurd.”

  “So? Nothing matters anymore. Jackie Kennedy, Vietnam, flying to the moon—they’re just TV commercials.”

  “And what are they selling?”

  “Everything you need—pain, fun, love, hate. You can make anything mean anything. Only the pixies matter.”

  She seemed restless with me, smoking an endless series of joints that left her eyes blunted. Wine bottle in hand, she spent the afternoon striding around in her long gown, her neck and breasts turning pink in the sun, blond hair like a white whip that she flicked from one shoulder to the other. The festival, which celebrated nothing except itself, already bored her. She wandered away from us, and an hour later I found her in a quiet field beyond the car park. She was running with a family of horses, a black mare and two foals, driving them round and round the field, her hands happily slapping their haunches, her eyes lit with some memory of childhood.

  When she demanded that we visit the beach at Brighton I discovered what had unsettled her. Searching for Lucy in the performers’ tent, we saw Lykiard and one of his concept artists lying in a deck chair behind the bar. Ignoring Sally, they embraced each other, and both seemed to hide behind the single pair of sunglasses. Sally stared at them, the pink flush fading from her breasts. She took Lucy’s hand and walked along the bar, scattering the paper cups with their brown stains.

  Fortunately, she cheered up as soon as we left the festival behind and reached the beach. The incoming tide and strong black waves put an ironic gleam into her eyes. We parked on the hard shoulder above the beach and watched the waves splinter themselves against the wooden breakwater.

  “Right!” Sally opened the door. “I’m going for a swim.”

  “Sally … the sea’s too strong.”

  “I’ll tell it to behave … it’s just a big puppy.”

  I followed her across the shingle as she kicked off her shoes and strode to the water’s edge. The foam seethed at her feet, delighted to greet this beautiful and deranged young woman. I expected her to strip, but she stepped straight into the water, bare feet feeling among the stones. The waves smothered her legs, the sodden fabric of her dress clinging to her knees.

  “Sally!” Henry had stepped from the car, model aircraft forgotten in his hand. The girls’ little faces pressed to the windscreen.

  Sally strode out as a larger wave launched itself at the breakwater. The violent black jelly slid around her, clasping her waist, and the undertow dragged at her feet. She was up to her armpits in the foam, her legs trapped by the weight of drenched fabric. She let the next wave carry her towards the shore and stood unsteadily in the racing surf, waving to me with an apologetic grin. She was knocked from her feet in the surging water, pulled down, and carried into the breaking maw of a huge channel roller.

  Warning Henry to stay by the car, I ran into the water, stunned by the wave as it struck my thighs. Wading out, I jumped chest-high through the next roller and swam towards Sally as she lay helplessly on the surface. I seized her shoulders and held her against my chest, stood up and pulled her to the shore.

  She sat exhausted on the shingle, teeth chattering while the foam seethed its disappointment against her feet, as if the sea were laying its eggs and hoping she would fertilise them. The shoulder straps of her dress had broken, and the bodice was around her waist, exposing the icy skin of her torso covered with shreds of seaweed. Washed from her eyes, her makeup ran in blue stains down her cheeks. Her nose and chin were smaller, shrunk by fear and the cold, and she stared at the waves tugging at the train of her dress like a child remembering a drowning at sea.

  Passersby were watching us from the promenade. I covered Sally with my jacket and helped her back to the car and the silent, astounded children. Sally sank gratefully into the front seat.

  “Well,” she said to the children, brushing away the flecks of seaweed. “How many lengths did I swim?”

  * * *

  Later that evening, when the children were asleep, Sally sat on the sofa among the stuffed toys, her good humour returned. During our silent drive she had slumped against the door inside my jacket, eyes fixed on the sodden dress between her feet. At the time I wondered if this had been a halfhearted suicide attempt, prompted by the glimpse of Lykiard in the deck chair, or perhaps a bravura piece of exhibitionism by which she hoped to regain the centre of the stage. But when I mentioned Lykiard she scarcely recognised his name. Her near-drowning had been nothing more than an impulsive Channel dip.

  Wearing my dressing gown, she breathed the fumes rising from a tumbler of hot whisky. When I sat beside her among the stuffed toys she laid her head on my shoulder.

  “Are the pixies asleep? I didn’t mean to frighten them.”

  “They’re fine. They thi
nk you went for a swim.”

  “I did! Until right at the end. When you reached me I was thinking what it would be like.”

  “Drowning?”

  “Those last moments before the end … I had the strange feeling they would go on forever.” She pulled away from me and stared hard at a stuffed toy. “I want to live my whole life like that.”

  “Sally, you do…”

  She opened my palm and carefully read its lines, then slipped it under the lapel of the dressing gown and placed it on her breast. Despite the hot bath her skin still smelled strongly of brine. A depraved and innocent Miranda had been washed ashore on the island of Shepperton. When I caressed her breast she smiled at me in a conspiratorial way, as if we were two lubricious children in a treehouse.

  “My nipples aren’t very sensitive—probably less than yours.”

  She watched me as I undressed her, curious to see how I would discover her body, beckoning me towards her with a ready smile. When I stroked her clitoris she lay back with her legs wide, her face between the soft toys. She took my fingers and moved them to her anus, rhythmically pumping her rectum like a soft accordion.

  “Don’t bother to fuck me. Just bugger me.”

  She knelt on the carpet, her chest and shoulders across the cushions. Spitting on her fingers, she pushed the saliva into her anus with one hand, testing my penis with the other. I hesitated to enter her, nervous of tearing her scarred anus, but she pressed my penis into her, adding more spit between the gasps of pain. When I was fully inside her she at last relaxed, and her rectum was as soft as the vagina of a child-bearing woman. She buried her face among the teddy bears and brought her wrists behind her back, inviting me to force them to her shoulder blades. I moved carefully, trying to control her prolapsing rectum, gently forcing her arms as she wanted, picking the hairs from her mouth as she shouted to me, an eager, desperate child.

  “Bugger me, Daddy! Beat me! Pixie wants to be buggered!”