Millennium People

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Stephen.’ I tried to avoid the pistol. ‘Get away from here. The police are armed…’

  The clergyman stopped, testing the cement floor with his metal-tipped boots as he listened to the helicopter’s fading engine and the shouts of security men. He raised his visor and moved around the car, the pistol in his hand. I knew that he had always seen me as Richard Gould’s chief collaborator. Aware that he was about to shoot me, I stepped back to the Saab and opened the front passenger door, ready to join Gould at the controls.

  But Dexter pressed the pistol into my hand. I caught the harsh scent on his clothes, the same reek of fear I could smell on my own skin after the burning of the NFT. I gripped the pistol, surprised by the warm metal that seemed to beat like a heart. When I looked up, Dexter had withdrawn into the shadows behind the rubbish bins. He stepped through the steel service door that led to the boiler room and the caretaker’s flat. He pointed to me, like a target-master encouraging a novice at a rifle range, closed the door behind him and slipped away, vanishing into another time and space. The task he had set himself so many months earlier at Heathrow had at last been fulfilled.

  I waited by the car, pistol in hand, watching Gould’s face empty itself, shedding all memories of the young doctor who had once gazed so fiercely at an inexplicable world. But I was thinking of Stephen Dexter in the few moments when he raised his visor. Watching him, I had seen the temper and conviction that he had brought to his first ministry, lost under his captors’ whips, and then searched for in this west London estate, encouraged by a disbarred consultant with a punitive vision of his own.

  The first police were entering the garage. An inspector signalled to two armed officers who trained their weapons at my chest. He shouted to me, his voice lost in the horns sounded by the residents impatient to return to their homes.

  Then a thickset man in a police forage jacket stepped forward and strode over to the Saab, his sandy air ruffled by the helicopter’s downdraught.

  ‘Mr Markham? I’ll take that…’ Major Tulloch gripped my arm with a tobacco-stained hand and pushed me against the car. ‘You’re a better shot than I thought…’

  I gave him the pistol and pointed to Richard Gould, sprawled among the controls like a crashed aviator. ‘He was going to kill my wife. And the Home Secretary.’

  ‘We understand.’ Major Tulloch looked me up and down, as unimpressed and detached as ever. He leant into the Saab and checked the bodies, feeling for any weapons, and then searched perfunctorily for a pulse.

  Police now filled the basement, and a forensic team was already laying out its gear, the cameras, crime-scene tapes and white overalls. Sally waited by the fire door, face tense and her hair in a swirl, but determined to stand on her own legs. Henry Kendall hovered beside her, nodding to a silent police sergeant, almost light-headed among the armed constables. He took Sally’s arm, trying to calm himself, but she eased him away and walked towards me. With a brave effort, she managed to smile at me through the noise, and gestured with the damp laptop she had carried from the flat. Watching her proudly, I knew that everything would be well.

  Major Tulloch spoke tersely into his radio, the identification over. Handing me into the custody of an inspector, he said: ‘Mr Markham, you’ve been taking too many chances. Just for once, try a quiet life…’

  Outside, louder than the engine of the helicopter, a noisy carnival filled the air, the braying horns of the middle-class returning to Chelsea Marina.

  35

  A Sun Without Shadows

  THE CLOCKS SEEMED to pause, waiting for time to catch up with them. Calendars scrolled back to calmer months before the summer. Sally and I resumed our life together in St John’s Wood, and the residents of Chelsea Marina continued their return to the estate. Within a week a third of the residents had moved back to their homes, and within two months almost the entire population had re-established itself. Kensington and Chelsea Council, nervous of the effects that a social revolution would have on its property values, ordered an army of workers into the estate. They dragged away the burnt-out cars, asphalted the streets and repaired the damaged houses. The few tourists and social historians found that nothing had changed.

  Money, always harder-wearing than asphalt, helped to repave the streets. Amicable negotiations with the management company ended with the promise of a financial sweetener from the council. In return, the company postponed the rise in maintenance charges that had set off the revolt. Public concern that lower-paid workers were being priced out of the London property market shelved all plans for a complex of luxury apartments. Like nurses, bus drivers and traffic wardens, the middle-class professionals of Chelsea Marina were now seen as poorly paid but vital contributors to the life of the city. This sentiment, repeated by a relieved Home Secretary in many television interviews, confirmed the residents’ original belief that they were the new proletariat.

  The Minister, having survived an assassination attempt by a demented paediatrician, generously urged that no charges of arson, assault or public mischief should be brought against the residents. The attacks on the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, the Peter Pan statue and numerous travel agents and video stores were quietly forgotten. The Heathrow bomb was blamed on unknown al-Qaeda extremists.

  Kay Churchill was the only resident to receive a short custodial sentence, for biting Sergeant Angela when she tried to restrain Kay from burning down her house. The former film studies lecturer served sixty days in Holloway and returned in triumph to the estate. Her agent secured a large advance for her book-of-the-revolution, and Kay went on to become a successful columnist and TV pundit.

  Stephen Dexter slipped out of the country, and lived quietly in Ireland before he emigrated to Tasmania. His faith restored, he became a parish priest in a small town fifty miles from Hobart. A postcard he sent to me showed him handsome and pensive, rebuilding a Tiger Moth in a barn behind his rectory. He wrote that he had begun to construct a runway, and had cleared fifty yards of stony scrub.

  I returned to the Adler Institute, taking up my post again, the only member of the staff who had fired a bullet in anger. Many of my colleagues had damaged their patients, but I had killed one. Henry has told me that I may well be the Institute’s next director.

  Whether Major Tulloch, the Home Office or Scotland Yard believed I shot Dr Gould and Vera Blackburn, I seriously doubt. They were careful not to question me too closely or submit my hands to a powder test. But media speculation is today’s crucible of accepted truth, and I am widely identified as the man who spared the Home Secretary from the assassin’s second bullet.

  Sally testified that I had saved her. At the inquest she confirmed that Richard Gould had kidnapped her, and then lured me to Chelsea Marina, intending to kill us both. This may well be true, but I like to think that it was Sally who saved me, locking me into the bedroom before I could follow Gould to the roof.

  Marriages are nourished by small myths, and this one brought us together, reversing the roles of patient and protector that bedevilled our early years together. Sally threw away her sticks and bought a new car, becoming a devoted and strong-willed wife. As we play bridge with Henry Kendall and his latest fiancée, I see Sally look at him with the puzzled eyes of a woman who finds it inconceivable that she ever decided to be his lover.

  The police released her old Saab two months after the coroner’s inquest. The forensic team had completed their work, and I was surprised that they made no attempt to clean the car. Blood still stains the front and rear seats, and Gould’s fingerprints cover the interior, ghostly whorls that mark his strange grip on the world.

  The Saab is stored in the garage of my mother’s house in High Barnet. After her death my solicitor urged me to sell the house, but I prefer to keep it, a shrine both to my mother’s selfish nature and to a far stronger and more destructive mind that had an even greater influence on me.

  Sally swears that ghosts haunt the Barnet house, and she is happy not to visit its dusty rooms with their framed
photographs of forgotten nightclubs and anti-nuclear rallies. But I call in once a month, and check the ceilings and the roof. Before leaving, I let myself into the garage and look down at the Saab with its controls that seem designed, like the brain-damaged children, for a parallel world that Gould tried so hard to enter.

  I accept now that Richard set off the bomb that killed Laura at Heathrow. Almost certainly he shot dead the television celebrity whose name he could never remember, picking her because she was both famous and a complete nonentity, so that her death would be truly pointless. Dreaming of Hungerford, he would have gone on to commit ever more serious crimes.

  In his despairing and psychopathic way, Richard Gould’s motives were honourable. He was trying to find meaning in the most meaningless times, the first of a new kind of desperate man who refuses to bow before the arrogance of existence and the tyranny of space-time. He believed that the most pointless acts could challenge the universe at its own game. Gould lost that game, and had to take his place with other misfits, the random killers of school playgrounds and library towers, who carried out atrocious crimes in their attempts to resanctify the world.

  But even Chelsea Marina helped to prove Gould’s point. As he soon realized, the revolution was doomed from the start. Nature had bred the middle class to be docile, virtuous and civic-minded. Self-denial was coded into its genes. Nevertheless, the residents had freed themselves from their own chains and launched their revolution, though now they are only remembered for their destruction of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens.

  A mystery remains. Why did the residents, having achieved so much, then return to Chelsea Marina? No one can explain their puzzling behaviour, least of all the residents themselves. Social workers, Home Office psychologists and experienced journalists have spent months roaming the estate, trying to find why the residents called off their exile. No one I talk to at Chelsea Marina can explain their return, and a curious vagueness comes over them when the subject is raised.

  Did they realize from the start that the Chelsea Marina protest was doomed to failure, and that its pointlessness was its greatest justification? They knew that the revolt in many ways was a meaningless terrorist act, like the fire at the NFT. Only by cutting short their exile and returning to the estate could they make it clear that their revolution was indeed meaningless, that the sacrifices were absurd and the gains negligible. A heroic failure redefined itself as a success. Chelsea Marina was the blueprint for the social protests of the future, for pointless armed uprisings and doomed revolutions, for unmotivated violence and senseless demonstrations. Violence, as Richard Gould once said, should always be gratuitous, and no serious revolution should ever achieve its aims.

  Yesterday evening, Sally and I joined friends for dinner at a King’s Road restaurant not far from Chelsea Marina. Afterwards we strolled through the gates, past the former manager’s office that is now a residents’ advice bureau. The accounts and billing department, the banks of meters that log the residents’ consumption of gas, water and electricity, are out of sight in an annexe at the rear. In the windows a retouched aerial photograph represents Chelsea Marina as a place of almost millennial charm, with crime-free streets and ever-rising property values.

  Happy to be with each other, Sally and I walked down Beaufort Avenue. A dozen dinner parties were in progress, conversation fuelled by the better second growths. Adolescent girls still wearing jodhpurs after their afternoon riding classes flirted around the family Jeeps and Land Rovers, teasing the well-bred boys who aped the latest black teen fads.

  ‘It’s all rather nice.’ Sally leaned comfortably against my shoulder. ‘It must be fun living here.’

  ‘It is. They’ve built a sports club and enlarged the marina. There’s almost everything you want here.’

  ‘I can see. What exactly were they rebelling against?’

  ‘Well…I may write a book about it.’

  But I was thinking of another time, a brief period when Chelsea Marina was a place of real promise, when a young paediatrician persuaded the residents to create a unique republic, a city without street signs, laws without penalties, events without significance, a sun without shadows.

  By the same author

  The Drowned World

  The Voices of Time

  The Terminal Beach

  The Drought

  The Crystal World

  The Day of Forever

  The Disaster Area

  The Atrocity Exhibition

  Vermilion Sands

  Crash

  Concrete Island

  High-Rise

  Low-Flying Aircraft

  The Unlimited Dream Company

  The Venus Hunters

  Hello America

  Myths of the Near Future

  Empire of the Sun

  The Day of Creation

  Running Wild

  War Fever

  The Kindness of Women

  Rushing to Paradise

  A User’s Guide to the Millennium (non-fiction)

  Cocaine Nights

  Super-Cannes

  The Complete Short Stories

  Kingdom Come

  Miracles of Life

  About the Author

  J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. He and his family were interned in a civilian prison camp, following their release they returned to England in 1946. After reading medicine at Cambridge for two years, he worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF. His first major novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. His acclaimed novels include The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, Empire of the Sun (filmed by Steven Spielberg), The Kindness of Women, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published in 2008 to great acclaim. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.

  INTERVIEW

  J. G. Ballard talks to Vanora Bennett

  Did you always know you would become a writer?

  Yes. As a child I was always writing. I think I had a certain flair, because of what happened at my school in Shanghai, when I was eight or nine and was set lines as a punishment. The book I was told to copy from was Westward Ho!, and as I was copying it I realised it was about the Spanish Main, pirates and the like, and it would be much easier to make it up myself. So this is what I did from then on. Once, when I handed in my lines, the master read them and said, ‘Ballard, next time you’re given lines, don’t pick a trashy novel. Pick one of the classics.’ So I realised I had a flair. And I went on, writing stories and then finally science fiction in the mid-1950s and became a professional writer.

  What impact did your childhood experience of internment in Shanghai during World War Two have?

  A very big impact. Shanghai during World War Two, and my period interned in a Japanese camp, was a sort of very extreme version of ordinary life. I experienced so many things that my children, for example, will never experience. Living in a camp for nearly three years was like living in a huge slum. I was living, in effect, the kind of life that refugees live today in Africa and the Middle East: very short of food, very cramped. Also I saw adults around me in a state of great stress, and that’s something that most children today never see. Also I saw an occupied city, enemy soldiers on the street and tanks rumbling around, bombing and all the rest of it. It was a very extreme world. I think that feeds into the imagination. It’s like being in a plane crash. If you walk away, you’re never going to forget it.

  Have you ever been back to China?

  Yes, in 1991, forty-five years after leaving. It was very strange – like time travelling, going back to my childhood. There were a huge number of skyscrapers, of course, but on street level it was still there, the family house was still there and the camp was still there – it’s a school now. It was very strange.

  After the war you went to England and pursued a very different, very English life
: studying medicine at Cambridge for two years, then doing various young man’s jobs including being a copywriter and a porter at Covent Garden fruit market. What did this abrupt change in lifestyle bring to your writing?

  I think probably my wartime experiences gave me a need to discover, if I could, what was wrong with the world, why were human beings so busy killing each other, why was there so much cruelty? I was interested in medicine, so I thought, ‘I’ll become a doctor.’ So I began my medical studies. After two years I’d done enough. I knew I had to become a writer.

  I did science fiction at first because I didn’t want to write the Hampstead novel, and the great thing about science fiction was that nobody in it lived in Hampstead. Also science fiction was about change, and I was interested in change because England in the 1950s was beginning to change – motorcars, TV, supermarkets, jet travel, the consumer society were all arriving, and England was changing in a very dramatic way. I wanted to write about change.

  Which writers and artists have most influenced you?

  Graham Greene was a big influence; Kafka; and the Surrealist painters because they were painting what I called ‘inner space’. My science fiction was not about outer space but about psychological change, psychological space.

  Your mature fiction focuses on what is just about to happen in a given community. What kind of real-life event will suggest a novel to you?

  I just have a feeling in my bones: there’s something odd going on, and I explore that by writing a novel, by trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface and looking for the hidden wiring. It’s as if there are all these strange lights, and I’m looking for the wiring and the fuse box.

  In the forty-plus years that you’ve lived there, your own home in Shepperton has gone from rural idyll to ‘a suburb of London airport’. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that your book is full of landscapes of suburban alienation?