Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘What about the flight?’

  ‘Delayed. Nothing’s taking off. The whole airport is down.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Have a large drink.’ Sally pushed me towards the liquor cabinet. ‘Prashar will ring in fifteen minutes. At least he cares.’

  ‘Right.’ As I poured two Scotch and sodas I glanced through the window at Sally’s car, with its fading disability sticker on the windscreen, wheelchair folded in the rear seat. ‘Sally, I can drive us there. We’ll take your car.’

  ‘Mine? You can’t cope with the controls.’

  ‘Dear, I designed them. I’ll use the hard shoulder, headlights, plenty of horn. We’ll leave it in the short-term car park. It’s better than sitting here.’

  ‘Here we can get drunk.’

  Lying back on the sofa, Sally raised her glass, trying to revive me. The war of succession at the Adler, the struggle to replace Professor Arnold, had left me tired and scratchy, and she was keen to get me to the other side of the Atlantic. The conference at Celebration, Disney’s model community in Florida, was a useful chance to park an exhausted husband by a hotel swimming pool. Travelling abroad was an effort for her – the knee-jarring geometry of taxis and bathrooms, and the American psychologists who saw a glamorous woman swaying on her sticks as a special kind of erotic challenge. But Sally was always game, even if for much of the time her only company would be the minibar.

  I lay beside her on the sofa, our glasses tapping, and listened to the traffic. It was noisier than usual, the Heathrow tailback feeding its frustration into inner London.

  ‘Ten minutes.’ I finished my Scotch, already thinking not of the next drink, but of the one after that. ‘I have a feeling we’re not going to make it.’

  ‘Relax…’ Sally poured her whisky into my glass. ‘You didn’t want to go in the first place.’

  ‘Yes and no. It’s having to shake hands with Mickey Mouse that drives me up the wall. Americans love these Disney hotels.’

  ‘Don’t be mean. They remind them of their childhoods.’

  ‘Childhoods they didn’t actually have. What about the rest of us – why do we have to be reminded of American childhoods?’

  ‘That’s the modern world in a nutshell.’ Sally sniffed her empty glass, nostrils flaring like the gills of an exotic and delicate fish. ‘At least it gets you away.’

  ‘All these trips? Let’s face it, they’re just a delusion. Air travel, the whole Heathrow thing, it’s a collective flight from reality. People walk up to the check-ins and for once in their lives they know where they’re going. Poor sods, it’s printed on their tickets. Look at me, Sally. I’m just as bad. Flying off to Florida isn’t what I really want to do. It’s a substitute for resigning from the Adler. I haven’t the courage to do that.’

  ‘You have.’

  ‘Not yet. It’s a safe haven, a glorified university department packed with ambitious neurotics. Think of it – there are thirty senior psychologists cooped up together, and every one of them hated his father.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘I never met him. It was the one good thing my mother did for me. Now, where’s Prashar?’

  I stood up and went to the telephone. Sally picked up the TV remote from the carpet and switched on the lunchtime news. The picture swam into view, and I recognized a familiar airport concourse.

  ‘David…look.’ Sally sat forward, gripping the sticks beside her feet. ‘Something awful…’

  I listened to Prashar’s voice, but my eyes were held by the news bulletin. The reporter’s commentary was drowned by the wailing of police sirens. He stepped back from the camera as an ambulance team pushed a trolley through the mêlée of passengers and airline personnel. A barely conscious woman lay on the trolley, rags of clothing across her chest, blood speckling her arms. Dust swirled in the air, billowing above the boutiques and bureaux de change, a frantic microclimate trying to escape through the ventilator ducts.

  Behind the trolley was the main arrivals gate of Terminal 2, guarded by police armed with sub-machine guns. A harried group of hire-car drivers waited at the barrier, the names flagged on their cardboard signs already at half-mast. A man carrying an executive briefcase stepped from the arrivals gate, the sleeveless jacket of his double-breasted suit exposing a bloodied arm. He stared at the signs raised towards him, as if trying to remember his own name. Two paramedics and an Aer Lingus hostess knelt on the floor, treating an exhausted passenger who clutched an empty suitcase that had lost its lid.

  ‘Mr Markham?’ A voice sounded faintly in my ear. ‘This is Prashar speaking…’

  Without thinking, I switched off the phone. I stood beside the sofa, my hands steadying Sally’s shoulders. She was shivering like a child, her fingers wiping her nose, as if the violent images on the screen reminded her of her own near-fatal accident.

  ‘Sally, you’re safe here. You’re with me.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She calmed herself and pointed to the set. ‘There was a bomb on a baggage carousel. David, we might have been there. Was anyone killed?’

  ‘”Three dead, twenty-six injured…”’ I read the caption on the screen. ‘Let’s hope there are no children.’

  Sally fumbled with the remote control, turning up the sound. ‘Don’t they issue a warning? Codewords the police recognize? Why bomb the arrivals lounge?’

  ‘Some people are mad. Sally, we’re all right.’

  ‘No one is all right.’

  She held my arm and made me sit beside her. Together we stared at the pictures from the concourse. Police, first-aid crews and duty-free staff were helping injured passengers to the waiting ambulances. Then the picture changed, and we were watching an amateur video taken by a passenger who had entered the baggage-reclaim area soon after the explosion. The film-maker stood with his back to the customs checkpoints, evidently too shocked by the violence that had torn through the crowded hall to put down his camera and offer help to the victims.

  Dust seethed below the ceiling, swirling around the torn sections of strip lighting that hung from the roof. Overturned trollies lay on the floor, buckled by the blast. Stunned passengers sat beside their suitcases, clothes stripped from their backs, covered with blood and fragments of leather and glass.

  The video camera lingered on the stationary carousel, its panels splayed like rubber fans. The baggage chute was still discharging suitcases, and a set of golf clubs and a child’s pushchair tumbled together among the heaped luggage.

  Ten feet away, two injured passengers sat on the floor, watching the suitcases emerge from the chute. One was a man in his twenties, wearing jeans and the rags of a plastic windcheater. When the first rescuers reached him, a policeman and an airport security guard, the young man began to comfort a middle-aged African lying beside him.

  The other passenger gazing at the baggage chute was a woman in her late thirties, with a sharp forehead and a bony but attractive face, dark hair knotted behind her. She wore a tailored black suit pitted with glass, like the sequinned tuxedo of a nightclub hostess. A piece of flying debris had drawn blood from her lower lip, but she seemed almost untouched by the explosion. She brushed the dust from her sleeve and stared sombrely at the confusion around her, a busy professional late for her next appointment.

  ‘David…?’ Sally reached for her sticks. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I left the sofa and knelt in front of the screen, nearly certain that I recognized the woman. But the amateur cameraman turned to survey the ceiling, where a fluorescent tube was discharging a cascade of sparks, fireworks in a madhouse. ‘I think that’s someone I know.’

  ‘The woman in the dark suit?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell. Her face reminded me of…’ I looked at my watch, and noticed our luggage in the hall. ‘We’ve missed our flight to Miami.’

  ‘Never mind. This woman you saw – was it Laura?’

  ‘I think so.’ I took Sally’s hands, noticing how steady they felt. ‘It did look like her.’<
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  ‘It can’t be.’ Sally left me and sat on the sofa, searching for her whisky. The news bulletin had returned to the concourse, where the hire-car drivers were walking away, placards lowered. ‘There’s a contact number for relatives. I’ll dial it for you.’

  ‘Sally, I’m not a relative.’

  ‘You were married for eight years.’ Sally spoke matter-of-factly, as if describing my membership of a disbanded lunching club. ‘They’ll tell you how she is.’

  ‘She looked all right. It might have been Laura. That expression of hers, always impatient…’

  ‘Call Henry Kendall at the Institute. He’ll know.’

  ‘Henry? Why?’

  ‘He’s living with Laura.’

  ‘True. Still, I don’t want to panic the poor man. What if I’m wrong?’

  ‘I don’t think you are.’ Sally spoke in her quietest voice, a sensible teenager talking to a rattled parent. ‘You need to find out. Laura meant a lot to you.’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’ Aware of her faintly threatening tone, I said: ‘Sally, I met you.’

  ‘Call him.’

  I walked across the room, turning my back to the television screen. Holding the mobile, I drummed my fingers on the mantelpiece, and tried to smile at the photograph of Sally sitting in her wheelchair between her parents, taken at St Mary’s Hospital on the day of our engagement. Standing behind her in my white lab coat, I seemed remarkably confident, as if I knew for the first time in my life that I was going to be happy.

  The mobile rang before I could dial the Institute’s number. Through the hubbub of background noise, the wailing of ambulance sirens and the shouts of emergency personnel, I heard Henry Kendall’s raised voice.

  He was calling from Ashford Hospital, close to Heathrow. Laura had been caught by the bomb blast in Terminal 2. Among the first to be evacuated, she had collapsed in Emergency, and now lay in the intensive-care unit. Henry managed to control himself, but his voice burst into a torrent of confused anger, and he admitted that he had asked Laura to take a later flight from Zurich so that he could keep an Institute appointment and meet her at the airport.

  ‘The Publications Committee…Arnold asked me to chair it. For God’s sake, he was refereeing his own bloody paper! If I’d refused, Laura would still be…’

  ‘Henry, we’ve all done it. You can’t blame yourself…’ I tried to reassure him, thinking of the stream of blood from Laura’s mouth. For some reason, I felt closely involved in the crime, as if I had placed the bomb on the carousel.

  The dialling tone sounded against my ear, a fading signal from another world. For a few minutes all the lines to reality had been severed. I looked at myself in the mirror, puzzled by the travel clothes I was wearing, the lightweight jacket and sports shirt, the tactless costume of a beach tourist who had strayed into a funeral. There was already a shadow on my cheeks, as if the shock of the Heathrow bomb had forced my beard to grow. My face looked harassed and shifty in a peculiarly English way, the wary glower of a deviant master at a minor prep school.

  ‘David…’ Sally stood up, the sticks forgotten. Her face seemed smaller and more pointed, mouth pursed above a childlike chin. She took the mobile from me and gripped my hands. ‘You’re all right. Bad luck for Laura.’

  ‘I know.’ I embraced her, thinking of the bomb. If the terrorist had chosen Terminal 3, an hour or two later, Sally and I might have been lying together in intensive care. ‘God knows why, but I feel responsible.’

  ‘Of course you do. She was important to you.’ She stared at me, calmly nodding to herself, almost convinced that she had caught me in a minor but telling gaffe. ‘David, you must go.’

  ‘Where? The Institute?’

  ‘Ashford Hospital. Take my car. You’ll get through faster.’

  ‘Why? Henry will be with her. Laura isn’t part of my life. Sally…?’

  ‘Not for her sake. For yours.’ Sally turned her back to me. ‘You don’t love her, I know that. But you still hate her. That’s why you have to go.’

  3

  ‘Why Me?’

  WE REACHED ASHFORD HOSPITAL an hour later, a short journey into a very distant past. Sally drove with verve and flourish, her right hand gripping the accelerator control mounted beside the steering wheel, working the throttle like a fighter pilot, left hand releasing the brake lever next to the gate of the automatic transmission. I had designed the controls, helped by an ergonomics specialist at the Institute, who had taken Sally’s measurements with the painstaking care of a Savile Row tailor. By now she had recovered all the strength in her legs, and I suggested that we ask the Saab garage to reconvert the car. But Sally liked the adapted controls, the special skills unique to herself. When I gave in, she teased me that I secretly enjoyed the perverse thrill of having a handicapped wife.

  Whatever my motives, I watched her with husbandly pride. She steered the Saab through the dense midday traffic, flashing the headlights at the overworked police on the motorway, fiercely tapping the handicapped driver’s sticker on the windscreen. Seeing the wheelchair on the rear seat, they waved us onto the hard shoulder, a high-speed alley that only a glamorous woman could make her own.

  As we sped along, hazard lights flashing, I almost believed that Sally was eager to meet her one-time rival, now lying in the intensive-care unit. In a sense, a kind of justice had been done. Sally had always seen her accident as a random event, a cruel deficit in the moral order of existence that placed it firmly in her debt.

  Sightseeing with her mother in the Bairro Alto district of Lisbon, a maze of steeply climbing streets, Sally had crossed the road behind a stationary tram. The fleet of ancient vehicles with their wooden panelling and cast-iron frames had been installed by British engineers almost a century earlier. But charm and industrial archaeology both came at a price. The tram’s brakes failed for a few seconds, and it rolled backwards before the safety clutch locked the wheels, knocking Sally to the ground and trapping her legs under the massive chassis.

  I met Sally in the orthopaedic wing at St Mary’s, at first sight a plucky young woman determined to get well but inexplicably not responding to treatment. The months of physiotherapy had produced a grumpy temper, and even a few foul-mouthed tantrums. I overheard one of these tirades, an ugly storm in a private suite, and put her down as the spoilt daughter of a Birmingham industrialist who flew to see her in the company helicopter and indulged every whim

  I visited St Mary’s once a week, supervising a new diagnostic system developed in collaboration with the Adler. Instead of facing a tired consultant eager for a large gin and a hot bath, the patient sat at a screen, pressing buttons in reply to prerecorded questions from a fresh-faced and smiling doctor, played by a sympathetic actor. To the consultants’ surprise, and relief, the patients preferred the computerized image to a real physician. Desperate to get Sally onto her feet, and well aware that her handicaps were ‘elective’, in the tactful jargon, her surgeon suggested that we sit Sally in front of the prototype machine.

  I distrusted the project, which treated patients like children in a video arcade, but it brought Sally and me together. I rewrote the dialogue of a peptic ulcer programme, adapting the questions to Sally’s case, put on a white coat in front of the camera and played the caring doctor.

  Sally happily pressed the response buttons, revealing all her anger over the injustice of her accident. But a few days later she swerved past me in the corridor, almost running me down. Pausing to apologize, she was amazed to find that I existed. Over the next days her good humour returned, and she enjoyed mimicking my wooden acting. As I sat on her bed she teased me that I was not completely real. We talked to each other in our recorded voices, a courtship of imbeciles that I was careful not to take seriously.

  But a deeper, unspoken dialogue drew us together. I called in every day, and the nursing staff told me that when I was late Sally climbed from her bed and searched for me, dispensing with her wheelchair. As I soon learned, she was a more subtle psychologist th
an I was. Gripping her volume of Frida Kahlo paintings, she asked me if I could track down the make of tram that had injured Kahlo in Mexico City. Was the manufacturer by any chance an English firm?

  I could grasp the anger that linked the two women, but Kahlo had been grievously wounded by a steel rail that pierced her uterus and gave her a lifetime of pain. Sally had crossed a foreign street without looking to left or right, and lost nothing of her beauty. It was her curious obsession with the random nature of the accident that prevented her from walking. Unable to resolve the conundrum, she insisted that she was a cripple in a wheelchair, sharing her plight with other victims of meaningless accidents.

  ‘So you’re on strike,’ I told her. ‘You’re conducting your own sit-in against the universe.’

  ‘I’m waiting for an answer, Mr Markham.’ She played with her hair as she lay back against three huge pillows. ‘It’s the most important question there is.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘”Why me?” Answer it. You can’t.’

  ‘Sally…does it matter? It’s a fluke we’re alive at all. The chances of our parents meeting were millions to one against. We’re tickets in a lottery.’

  ‘But a lottery isn’t meaningless. Someone has to win.’ She paused to get my attention. ‘Like our meeting here. That wasn’t meaningless…’

  Heathrow approached, a beached sky-city, half space station and half shanty town. We left the motorway and moved along the Great West Road, entering a zone of two-storey factories, car-rental offices and giant reservoirs. We were part of an invisible marine world that managed to combine mystery and boredom. In a way it seemed fitting that my former wife was lying in a hospital here, within call of life and death, in an area that hovered between waking and the dream.

  Sally drove with more than her usual zest, overtaking on the inside, jumping the red lights, even hooting a police car out of her way. The Heathrow bomb had recharged her. This vicious and deranged attack confirmed her suspicions of the despotism of fate. For all her wifely concern, she was eager to visit Ashford Hospital, not only to free me from my memories of an unhappy marriage, but to convince herself that there was no meaning or purpose in the terrorist bomb. Already I was hoping that Laura had made a sudden recovery and was on her way back to London with Henry Kendall.