The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  * * *

  Three weeks later, on another warm summer afternoon, I sat in my chair by the open French window. Dick’s camera, with or without its film, sat on its tripod. While Cleo readied the children for a picnic, Dick was talking to his agent on the telephone, still in high hopes of selling his brain series to a regional channel.

  At Dick’s suggestion we had transformed the overgrown garden into a model of bourgeois family life. The children’s toys sat on the grass like exhibits at a church fête. Rescued from the darkest cupboards, an older generation of bears and koalas sat in a circle like geriatric patients allowed to take the sun. The girls’ brightest frocks, washed and ironed, hung from the clothesline, and Henry’s bullfight poster, listing his name with those of Cordobés and Paco Camino, was pinned to the pear tree.

  Hearing the children shouting by the gate, I left my seat and walked around the side path. Cleo was lifting a picnic basket through the kitchen door.

  “Are you coming with us? Good.” She greeted me with a smile of surprise. She remained doubtful of Dick’s experiments and clearly thought I was being manipulated by him.

  “No.” I helped her with the basket. “I wish I was. We’re starting in a moment.”

  She brushed her hair from her cheeks, deliberately showing me her strong face. “I hope you’re all right. Last time…”

  “There was something wrong with the dose. Don’t worry. I’ll see you as an archangel again.”

  “See me as I am.” She stopped by the car and rested the picnic basket on the hood. Earlier she had helped Dick to set out the children’s toys on the grass, striding uneasily around the garden like the reluctant member of a demolition squad. “Why don’t you come with us? You’re the last person who needs to experiment with himself.”

  “Cleo, I promised Dick…”

  Lucy skipped up to me, showing off her shiny belt. “Daddy, are you coming?”

  “Come on, Daddy,” Henry chimed in. “We’re going to Magic World.”

  “Daddy, go on.”

  Cleo hefted the basket onto her hip, leaving me to make my own decision. “I’ve heard a lot about Magic World.”

  “I hope it’s still there. Old film props from TV commercials.”

  “That sounds like fun. A lot more real than Dick’s nonsense.”

  I held the gate for her and watched the children charge off towards the water meadow, followed by the old retriever. Were they trying to recruit Cleo into their lost childhood, finding again that idyllic dream for which I was searching with LSD? I remembered the pale, spectral children who had gazed at me beside the river, as if watching me from the other side of death.

  Alice held the retriever’s collar, smiling as she waited hopefully for me to join her.

  “You’re right.” I took the basket from Cleo’s hand. The warm scent of her body was more vivid than anything even LSD could contrive. “Dick can find someone else. We’ll bring a couple of bottles and see you at the splash in a few minutes…”

  Hallucinations sang on the summer air, skipping towards the water meadows and the magic glade by the film studios.

  11

  THE EXHIBITION

  The idea of staging an exhibition of crashed cars came to me in 1969 after the road accident near Fair Oaks airfield in which Sally and David Hunter were involved. Luckily, neither of them was hurt in any way, but the strange circumstances of the accident, and the behaviour of the witnesses, seemed to spring straight from the special logic of the sixties. The exhibition at the Arts Laboratory, which intrigued some visitors and outraged a great many more, summed up so many of my obsessions at the time and clearly foretold the car crash that nearly killed me three months later. Right until its end, the decade continued to unravel its lurid mythologies.

  * * *

  Sally, still determined to prise me away from Shepperton, had bought tickets for the Fair Oaks air show, where David was taking part in a formation flight of vintage Tiger Moths. Alice and Lucy were too frightened by the exploding exhausts to come with us and were spending the day with Cleo Churchill and her daughter. Generous as ever, Sally insisted on a special treat for Henry. When she arrived he was assembling a model aircraft in the nursery, surrounded by his own air display of World War II fighters, exquisite replicas that seemed to contain more detail than their originals.

  “Come on, Henry! I’ll ask David to give you a spin around Shepperton.”

  “Well … David’s scary. Will Neil Armstrong be there?”

  “He sent his apologies—he had to go back to the moon.” Sally squeezed Henry’s American football helmet, a gift from Dick Sutherland, over her white hair. “Henry, I’m going to be the first woman astronaut.”

  “Wow…! A woman?”

  “Hard to grasp, isn’t it? One giant step for womankind, that’s what we need.” When Henry went off to change, Sally soared around the model planes, blowing smoke from her Moroccan Gold through the silver propellers. “They’re so perfect, like hatched Fabergé eggs. The world’s filling up with broken plastic, and little Henry sits here by himself, putting it all together again. That’s the sort of thing you should write about.”

  “I do, Sally. It’s practically my only theme.” Glad to see her, I held her restless hips. “Sally … you’re five miles high before the wheels leave the ground.”

  “This is your captain speaking.” She placed her scarred forearms with their medley of sampler scents on my shoulders. “The plane now crashing on Shepperton is the Mumford Express…”

  She was still wearing the football helmet when we set off for Fair Oaks airfield. Her visits to Shepperton, though less frequent, always calmed Sally. She landed like an eccentric Victorian balloonist, tethered to the ground by the children’s affection for her. But once we left its gentle gravity she began to soar away. Blond hair streaming through the open roof, she lay with her arms out of the window, waving to the extras leaving the film studios. The glowing end of her loosely packed cigarette blew a train of sparks into the rear seat and set fire to the ear of a faithful koala. As Henry choked, Sally lunged over the seat and slapped at the smoking embers. She shouted to the young policeman guiding traffic into Fair Oaks, who gazed in awe at her mini-skirt riding over her ice-pale buttocks.

  When we reached the car park she noticed a television crew filming the air display. Sally pulled off the helmet and assumed the hard-eyed stare of her favourite amphetamine shades, gazing in a ravaged way at the parked planes and the handsome pilots. The anti-Vietnam protest marches and scuffles with police, the drug busts and cooling-off trips to New York, had given her a terminal Manhattan tremor, part permanent jet lag, part overdose of heroin and time. Like so many others at the end of the sixties, that ten-year pharmaceutical trial, she thought of the media landscape as a life-support system, force-feeding a diet of violence and sensation into her numbed brain.

  But sometimes I felt that it was Sally and a few thousands like her who supported the decade, which ruthlessly tapped their fraying nervous systems for the last pulse of energy and excitement. The carousel was spinning ever faster, driven on by Sally as she rode her exhausted unicorn. I hated the needle arms, but loved to see her sweep into Shepperton with presents for the children and endless King’s Road talk. She was happy to camp for hours with Alice and Lucy in their garden tent, baking and icing a birthday cake for a long-serving teddy. Later, when the children were asleep, she lay back on the sofa with her heels in the small of my back, almost strangling me as she seized some slipping memory of her father that I had helped to return to her.

  She would dress quickly and forget me, rushing into the night with shouts about a party, too impatient to burden herself with any needs of mine. A little deflated, I was usually relieved to see her go. I was nervous of the empty syringes I found in the lavatory cistern. Worryingly, she stole money from the children, as if trying to take back part of the affection she had given them. Alice and Lucy were too fond of Sally to care. When I tried to lend her money she waved her chequebooks at
me, and I realised that she needed to steal the small coins from the girls’ purses. The carousel had tricked her into thinking that nothing mattered but its speed.

  “Sally sweet … Jim, she got you out of that little Alcatraz of yours.” David stood glamorously by his Tiger Moth in a white flying suit, adjusting a fire extinguisher. He embraced Sally, treated me to a friendly but cool smile, and placed the extinguisher in my hands with a gesture implying that I might soon need it. “Let’s go, Henry—we’ll sneak off and bomb Shepperton…”

  “Say, can we, David? Let’s bomb my school.”

  I had guessed for some time that Sally was seeing him. They shared nothing in the way of temperament or interests—David loathed hippies and bikers and would try to run them down—but they could map their wayward needs onto each other.

  Henry and I paused to peer at a Mignet Flying Flea, little more than an aerial skateboard, and Sally strolled towards the Tiger Moth, which David flew in a vermouth commercial. She peeled away her silk scarf as if they were about to make love under its wing. When he greeted Sally, David’s eyes were filled with the easy humour he had turned upon the Moose Jaw whores. He held her to his shoulder, pressing her blond hair to his lips, while giving Henry a cheery wave. Within minutes Sally was wearing a Bomber Command jacket and an antique helmet and goggles, a fetishist’s dream of a white-haired woman in flying leather. As she stood on tiptoe and kissed David, her crotch ruled the airfield.

  Sally clung to his arm, glad to test this dangerous man. When they took off together in the Tiger Moth, David made a formal circuit of the airfield, and I sensed that he was exposing her to the entire air show, a naiad of the air he had brought down from the clouds. After they landed he lifted her from the cockpit, formally introducing her to the mortal earth. Sally’s face was white with cold, her nose and lips as pointed as an Arctic bird’s, the wind still blowing through her roused eyes. The sky behind her was a dream of heroin. I wanted to stay with them, fearing that Sally might incite David to some mad piece of stunt flying, but he avoided my eyes.

  David and I had seen less of each other in recent years. I liked him for his disruptive spirit and offhand charm, and his fondness towards the children—Henry’s entire passion for aircraft had been carefully instilled by David, who spent endless afternoons driving him to remote light-airfields. But David had taken Miriam’s death badly—far from forgetting her, he felt her loss more strongly as time passed. Sometimes he looked at me as if he thought that I was responsible for her death and that he alone was keeping her memory alive. A week before the Fair Oaks air show he came up to me in a Soho restaurant, where I was having lunch with an American journalist, and stood silently by our table, ignoring my invitation to join us. While the waiters brushed past him he stared into my face, at last recognising me for what I was. I wondered if he was going to hit me, but he touched my shoulder without speaking and walked back to his friends.

  Outwardly he was still the wise older brother, understanding my entire character and motives. He had never read anything of mine, saying that there was no need to—we had already lived through the most important story inside my head. His sense of humour had become more eccentric, almost mimicking the Surrealists I admired so much. The increasing numbers of Japanese tourists who visited London he regarded as a conscious attempt to provoke him. Giving me a lift back from the premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey (“… a Pan-Am instructional film for space hostesses” was his comment), he stopped his Jaguar in Belgrave Square and smilingly watched one of the high stucco houses. I assumed that he had tracked down the home address of a favourite TV comedian, but as it happened this was the Japanese Embassy. When some luckless attaché emerged, probably on the way to a British Council seminar on cultural relations between our countries, David raced the engine and hurled the Jaguar at the elderly Japanese, almost throwing him across the bonnet. To David this had been a lighthearted joke, which would have lost none of its point if he had killed the man. “I have to remind myself of Shanghai,” he shouted as we cornered through Knightsbridge at speed. “I’m starting to forget it … the damn thing is, there’s nothing else to remember.”

  Fortunately, his service in the RAF had given him a support network of ex-military pilots, one of the strongest in the world. He was now an aircraft dealer, selling French two-seater helicopters to pop stars and style-conscious business tycoons. But his real passion was saloon-car racing at Brand’s Hatch. He had twice been banned for dangerous track manoeuvres, the same dangerous driving to which he treated every suburban dual carriageway. He drove in a deliberately careless way, as if trying to express a casual nothingness. Cut off from his past in China, which both of us had begun to forget, and with no roots in England, he watched the few real elements in his life abandon him as his parents died and wartime friends retired to Australia and South Africa.

  Concerned for David, I wanted to help him, just as I wanted to steer Sally away from her needles, but I was too busy with the children. When they strolled arm in arm towards the flying-club bar I began to follow them, and felt Henry tug at my arm. He had the sense to know that we should leave them alone and was far more interested in the lines of vintage flying machines drawn up on the grass, each a conjuring trick to trump the wind. Glad to be together, we spent the afternoon roaming the air show.

  At the end of the day, when we returned to the car park, David’s Jaguar and Sally had gone. I assumed that David had given her a lift to her flat in Bayswater. The scent of her body still filled the interior of our car, imprinted on the seat beside me like an almost visible photograph of affection and desire. I thought of her as we pushed through the traffic returning to London. Tailbacks blocked both lanes, and warning beacons flashed from the roof of a police cruiser parked on the grass verge.

  Two cars had collided in the approaches to Chertsey Bridge, and windscreen glass speckled the road. We moved forward, waved on in a theatrical way by a police patrolman, as if we were film extras late for the day’s shooting. Through the oncoming traffic I could see the first of the damaged cars, a London taxi carrying two Japanese air stewardesses and their suitcases. Watched by a police sergeant, the cabdriver was examining his crushed headlights and radiator grille. The young Japanese women stood beside him, squinting at the English sunlight in an almost guilty way.

  I recognised the second car and the white leg extended to the road through the open passenger door. David’s silver Jaguar lay slewed across the road, its chromium bumper twisted into the right wheel housing. Sally and David sat together in the front seat. Neither had been hurt, but the Jaguar’s windscreen had burst, covering the passenger compartment and the roadway with nuggets of glass. Sally lay back, her thighs spread, one hand resting on David’s arm. She was looking down at the glass that covered their laps, which neither of them made any attempt to brush away. Watching them, I was struck by their self-conscious pose, like dancers arrested in an audience-catching flourish at the end of their performance. They were uninterested in each other’s well-being, but only in the postures they assumed within the cabin of the Jaguar, as if they were memorising for future use the exact geometry of Sally’s exposed thighs and the ribbed leather of the upholstery, the precise angle between David’s crotch and the jut and rake of the steering wheel.

  The police sergeant spoke to them through the window, but they ignored him, staring in a rapt way at their own hands. They seemed almost to be rehearsing themselves for a performance to come, some even more elaborately staged collision. There was no trace of shock in Sally’s face, but a thin smile that was faintly sexual in its self-regard.

  The traffic crept towards the bridge, but I stopped the car and opened my door, ready to offer my help before the ambulance arrived.

  “Daddy…!” Henry warned. “The policeman’s shouting at you!”

  A fist drummed on the roof over my head. I acknowledged the patrolman’s signal, waved encouragingly to Sally and David, and rejoined the queue crossing the bridge. A few pedestrians stood at the kerb,
staring idly at the damaged cars. They stepped back, making room for a more appreciative audience that had now arrived. Spectators returning from the air show were leaving their cars in a side street and in the car park of a riverside pub. They gathered around the Jaguar, inspecting the damaged bodywork and the pattern of tyre marks scored into the road with the practised eyes of enthusiasts judging a display of aerobatics. Two cine-cameras recorded the scene, and the police made no attempt to stop them, so impressed were they by the knowledgeability of this sympathetic audience. Yet no one made the smallest effort to help Sally and David, and a man in a flying jacket even protested when an ambulance appeared on the scene and the attendants lifting Sally from the Jaguar blocked the viewfinder of his expensive camera. As I watched, a new street theatre had been born.

  * * *

  During the next weeks, as I drove through central London, I noticed the same thoughtful gaze in the people who gathered at street accidents, as if the secret formulas of their lives were exposed by these random collisions. Office workers on their way to lunch, drivers unloading delivery vans stared at the damaged cars that materialised out of the passing traffic in a fanfare of ringing metal and sounding horns. An attentive audience would invariably form, calmly inspecting the stricken vehicles.

  Often I stopped my car and walked through the crowds, struck by the spectators’ quiet and measured response. Only ten years earlier everyone would have been pulling with their bare hands at the broken bodywork and crushed roofs, trying to free the injured occupants. Born out of an ecology of violence, acts of numbing brutality now ruled the imaginative spaces of their lives, leaching away all feeling and emotion. Perhaps, in their thoughtful communion with the crashed car, they were trying to come to terms with the televised disasters and assassinations that enfolded their minds and doing what they could to restore a lost compassion.

  Where this perverse logic might lead I grasped for the first time when Sally drove me to the opening of the Arts Laboratory at its new premises in Camden Town. Usually I was wary of being a passenger in Sally’s spirited but erratic MG and always found an excuse to prevent her driving the children. On this evening, however, she was surprisingly sedate, driving well within the speed limit and keeping a steady eye on the rearview mirror. Anxious for her, I wondered if she was still recovering from the collision after the air show.