Running Wild

by J. G. Ballard

  By a grim paradox, the instrument of the parents’ deaths was the devoted and caring regime which they had instituted at Pangbourne Village. The children had been brainwashed, by the unlimited tolerance and understanding that had erased all freedom and all trace of emotion—for emotion was never needed at Pangbourne, by either parents or children.

  Denied any self-expression, and with even the most wayward impulse defused by the parents’ infinite patience, the children were trapped within an endless round of praiseworthy activities—for nowhere were praise and encouragement lavished more generously than at Pangbourne Village, whether earned or not. Altogether, the children existed in a state closely akin to sensory deprivation. Far from hating their parents when they killed them, the Pangbourne children probably saw them as nothing more than the last bars to be removed before they could reach out to the light.

  I often think of Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and of their toneless faces as they turned their weapons on us. I remember the experiments in sensory deprivation that I attended at the School of Aviation Medicine at RAF Farnborough, and the great dangers to the laboratory staff presented by these deeply desensitized volunteers. The attempt to help them from their soundproof immersion tanks could be fraught with risk. On numerous occasions the volunteers had injured themselves and even attempted to strangle the laboratory staff while under the impression that they were warding off stray equipment that had intruded into their zero world.

  The same schizophrenic detachment from reality can be seen in the members of the Manson gang, in Mark Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald, and in the guards at the Nazi death camps. One has no sympathy for Manson and the others—an element of choice existed for them all—but the Pangbourne children had no such choice. Unable to express their own emotions or respond to those of the people around them, suffocated under a mantle of praise and encouragement, they were trapped forever within a perfect universe. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

  The Trigger

  In the cases of Michael Ryan, Mark Chapman and Oswald one can assume that the unconscious decision to commit their crimes had been taken many weeks before the actual event. What provided the trigger for the Pangbourne children? This will not be known until the children are captured and interrogated, if ever. Nonetheless the planned arrival of the producer of the TV documentary on June 25 may have warned the children that time was running out. The program researchers and the fashionable sociologist who would front the documentary had also agreed to visit the estate, and had already spoken to the older children.

  The last issue of The Pangbourne Pang reveals that the provisional title of the documentary was The New Samoa, a reference to Margaret Mead’s influential but partly discredited work in which she described the idyllic world of these unrepressed islanders, from whose lives all jealousy, repression and discord had been erased. The prospect that a glib sociologist would soon take up virtual residence at Pangbourne for the three months of the program’s filming may well have spurred the children into action.

  Another factor may have been the reports, well advertised in the architectural press, that the “success” of Pangbourne Village had led to plans for the construction of similar estates nearby, and that within two or three years these would be amalgamated in a super-Pangbourne with its own schools, community clubs and resident youth counselors, protected by even more elaborate security systems.

  At all events, the children must have known that they had only a few days to act before they were enrolled into the documentary. Intensely proud of Pangbourne Village, the parents were all present on June 25, presumably to meet the TV team. How the children planned the massacre is not yet known, but it is possible to reconstruct the last hours leading up to the murders, with the help of a few imaginary interpolations.

  June 25, 1988—The Reconstruction

  5:56 a.m. The first sighting of one of the children on the morning of the massacre. A surveillance camera picks up the night security officer Edwards as he walks down The Avenue, on his way to the gatehouse. He has made his final circuit of the estate. At 6:00 he and Officer Baines will hand over to their two replacements on the day shift. As the camera follows Edwards it catches the seventeen-year-old Jasper Ogilvy watching through the transom windown of his bathroom.

  Jasper’s slim, childlike face is composed, but he has a lot to do. At 6:00 Mark Sanger, who can see the gatehouse from the laundry-room window of the Sanger home, will signal that the guards’ change-over has taken place. On Saturday morning the replacement shift is often late, and the men will then make tea together in the gatehouse, subtracting fifteen minutes from the next two crowded hours. During this time Jasper must see that the three children on his roster (Marion and Robin Miller, and Annabel Reade) are awake and ready for action, then slip out and retrieve the shotgun he has buried behind the rose pergola. He must return to his bedroom with the weapon, before joining Mark Sanger in the task of cutting the telephone and TV cables.

  6:02 a.m. Mark Sanger also has a full two hours. In addition to cutting the cables with Jasper, he has to supervise the three children on his alarm roster (Andrew and Emma Zest, and Roger Sterling). Most difficult of all, he must assemble the lethal bamboo man-trap, still masquerading as a box kite, which hangs from the ceiling of his computer room, and carry it across the open lawn under his parents’ bedroom window. Officer Turner is a stickler for security, and Mark knows that he will only gain access to the gatehouse by using a decoy. In this case the decoy is the murder weapon.

  Leaning on the pile of linen sheets below the window, Mark impatiently watches the gatehouse. He knows that he is nowhere near so self-controlled as Jasper, or the slightly creepy Roger Sterling, but he is surprised by the sweat pouring from his arms onto the linen sheets (Exhibit 75). Where are the security men?

  6:09 a.m. Annabel Reade listens to the alarm under her pillow. In the dim light of the bedroom she sees the paging signal blinking softly on the computer screen. Jasper is calling her, tapping out the opening lines of her favorite book, Animal Farm. She must remember to erase the signal before they leave. Switching off the alarm, she gets out of bed, unsteady but refreshed, and glad that Jasper insisted they all have a night’s sleep. Through the wall she can hear that her sister Gail is awake. She types in the acknowledgment signal, “Snowball,” and goes into the bathroom, leaning with her palms (E 98) against the mirror as she is sick into the basin (E 99). There is no time even to wash or brush her teeth. After dressing in her blue tracksuit she begins to unscrew the aluminum baffle of the ventilator shaft above the computer. Already she can see the slide and barrel of the two Remington pistols which she and Gail will use to kill their parents.

  6:15 a.m. By now all the children have risen, alerted by their own alarms and the paging signals on their computer screens. Graham Lymington has slept fully dressed, and is already waiting by his terminal as the awake signal appears on the screen. Next door, his fourteen-year-old sister, Amanda, has a shower, using her nightdress to block the drainage grille between her feet (E 63), so that her parents will not hear the pipes drumming.

  Only Jeremy Maxted has been unable to sleep—he has spent the night in his bedroom armchair, watching an all-night TV channel with the sound turned down. He disturbs the bed, but its dry and uncreased sheets confirm that it has not been slept in.

  Emma Zest has risen at 4:00 a.m., and spends the next two hours sitting in her brother’s bedroom, watching him as he sleeps, his crossbow in her arms. One of its steel bolts slips below the cushion (E 29), but there are nine others, more than enough for both their parents and the perimeter security guard Burnett.

  Marion Miller is also up and dressed before her brother, and sits on the edge of Robin’s bath, eating a chocolate bar as he uncoils the electric cable which she has hidden inside her doll’s house and which he will plug into the steel frame of their mother’s Exercycle.

  Roger Sterling, Graham and Amanda Lymington are in visual contact wit
h Jeremy Maxted across The Avenue, and duck to avoid the security camera on the weather vane as it pans across the houses. Roger is late—in his excitement the previous day he dropped his alarm clock, and he wakes at 6:05 to see the paging signal pulsing fiercely on his computer screen. He breaks a shoelace of his jogging shoes and stumbles noisily across the bedroom, but he knows his parents cannot hear him. In their nearby bedroom they are in a deep, drugged sleep from which they will never wake.

  6:21 a.m. The security day shift has arrived! Fortunately there is no time for tea. The wait has been exhausting for Mark Sanger—the sheets in the linen room are sodden with his sweat—but the moment Baines and Edwards drive off, taking the two loathsome Dobermans with them, he feels an immense relief. He has always feared the dogs, which are only allowed onto the estate at night (all pets are discouraged at Pangbourne Village; they foul the lawns and are a distracting focus of affection). He watches Turner and Burnett settle into the gatehouse, and then signals to Jasper Ogilvy. The first of the parents will begin to rise between 7:00 and 7:15, and this gives the children barely forty minutes to move around the estate.

  6:23 a.m. Jasper leaves his bedroom, closing the door behind him. There is no sound from his father’s bedroom, but he waits outside his mother’s door, listening to her deep, uneven breathing, which occasionally breaks into a snore. She is often awake for a few hours in the middle of the night, but then sleeps deeply until well after dawn. Jasper walks across the landing and opens the cabinet of the burglar alarm system. He disconnects the electrical circuit that links the windows and doors together during the night. As he eases the toggle his sweaty hands leave ample fingerprints (E 110) on the plastic handle.

  Jasper is now free to leave the house. He enters the silent kitchen, unlocks the outer door and lets himself onto the patio behind the garages. Screened by the roof of the swimming pool from his parents’ bedrooms, he sets off across the lawn. Behind the rose pergola he retrieves the buried shotgun, which he carries back to the house and hides among the golf clubs in his bedroom closet.

  He then returns to the garden. Beyond the tennis courts, the rear gate opens onto the pathway inside the perimeter fence, which Burnett will patrol in twenty minutes. Jasper sets off along the path until he sees the gatehouse on its grassy knoll, separated from the houses by a screen of ornamental trees. Jasper parts the hanging curtain of a weeping willow. Squatting against the tree trunk is Mark Sanger, the bamboo man-trap on the ground beside him.

  6:35 a.m. Andrew Zest is moving through the trees at the bottom of The Avenue, near the pathway at the northern perimeter of the estate. This is the farthest point from the gatehouse, and the surveillance camera sweeps the lonely pathway for a full hundred yards on either side. Attached to the pylon is a telephone box and a miniaturized relay from the gatehouse of the camera picture.

  Behind the pylon is a dense mass of rhododendrons, their dark leaves shutting out all signs of the houses. Graham crouches within the foliage and unpacks the crossbow from his canvas satchel. Using the spanner, he cranks back the powerful bow. His feet slip in the soft earth as he fits a steel bolt into the runnel. He carefully rearranges the foliage, satisfied that he is only six feet from the telephone box.

  6:48 a.m. Mark and Jasper expose the telephone and TV cables. Over the past week they have excavated a rectangular pit in the damp soil, cut through the tar-paper housing and the yellow plastic tubing that contains the cables. Jasper lowers the steel cutters into the pit. Beside him Mark is setting the springs of the man-trap, bending the bamboo arms that will pinion Officer Turner and allow him to strangle himself.

  7:00 a.m. The children’s preparations are now complete. Graham Lymington has taken the bolt-action target rifle from beneath the floorboards in his bedroom. In the gray light he cuts his right thumb on the loosened nails (E 42). He sits on the bed, cleaning the weapon for the last time, then feeds the soft-nosed cartridges into the magazine.

  Annabel and Gail Reade have completed the last exchange of messages on their computer screens. Annabel has loaded her small Remington and left the pistol within reach in the drawer of the bedside table. Gail has placed her weapon between the legs of her teddy bear. Sitting on the beds in their separate bedrooms, the two girls can see Jeremy Maxted at his window across The Avenue, reading an American comic that he has smuggled into the estate.

  Composed now, the children wait in their rooms, computer screens glowing and blank, ready for the action to come.

  7:05 a.m. The first parents begin to wake. Mrs. Sanger lies in bed for a few minutes, making notes for the day into the tape recorder of her bedside clock radio. “The TV people will be here at three. See the garage this morning about the spare car key. Ask Miss Neame to prepare the lobster dressing. Cancel riding lesson, and check with Mark about his weekend program…” (E 142).

  7:12 a.m. Charles Ogilvy writes down a dream on the bedside telephone pad (E 159). He has dreamed of sailing down the Nile, a journey he and his wife made three years earlier, but in his dream the great temples and pyramids have been replaced by film sets …

  7:29 a.m. Margot Winterton plays the radio in her bathroom and records an interesting film review on Radio 4’s morning magazine program.

  7:45-8:00 a.m. All the parents are now awake and up, with the exception of the Sterlings, who are still drugged by the powerful sleeping draught which Roger managed to steal during his visit to the London Clinic. The live-in tutors, Mr. Lodge and Mr. Wentworth, and the two au pairs, Krystal and Olga, have also risen. Several of the parents exercise in their bedrooms before bathing, while others don tracksuits and jog around their swimming pools.

  8:05 a.m. Mrs. West, the first of the domestic staff to arrive, parks her small Honda in the rear drive of the Garfield house. Two more domestic staff appear, Miss Neame and Mrs. Mercier, both intrigued by the expected visit of the TV unit, as their relatives testify. They busy themselves taking the mail and newspapers which they have collected from Officer Turner at the gatehouse. They prepare breakfast and switch on the dishwashers.

  8:10 a.m. The children wait. Weapons are loaded, and where necessary appliances have been booby-trapped, lethal electric cables plugged into their sockets. Hidden within the willow tree, Mark and Jasper kneel beside the exposed telephone and TV cables, cutters in hand. The children’s attention is now on the Miller house.

  8:15 a.m. At about this time Mrs. Miller, relaxed after ten minutes of t’ai chi, mounts the Exercycle in the family gymnasium. Overhead she can hear her husband running the water for his bath. Her children, as far as she knows, are still in bed, and she is tempted to prepare a little surprise for them. She settles herself on the well-sprung seat of the Exercycle. Its powerful electric motor will rotate the pedals while rocking the seat and handlebars, and she has to take care to stay on. She slips her feet into the pedal straps and sets her hands onto the metal grips with their leather cuffs. Cables run from the motor to the power socket on the wall. There are many electric cables in the gymnasium, to the scales, sunbed and rowing machine, and Mrs. Miller fails to notice the extra cable that runs from the positive terminal of the motor and is clipped to the steel frame of the cycle between her legs.

  She reaches down and switches on. Immediately a thirty-two-amp charge surges through her body, galvanizing every muscle and almost throwing her from the machine, but she is held to the bucking seat by her ankle and wrist cuffs. Perhaps in the wall-length mirror she catches a last glimpse of Marion and Robin, watching quietly from the open door as her arms and legs, head and torso gyrate wildly on this last ride.

  Three minutes later, the father lies in his bath, listening to the curious slapping sound from the gymnasium (his wife’s right leg striking the floor). When his son and daughter enter the bathroom he asks them about the noise, but through the steam he sees his daughter plugging the hair dryer into its socket. She brushes her blond fringe from her eyes and walks up to the bath, looking at him with a strangely fixed smile.

  8:21 a.m. Annabel Reade sees M
arion and her brother waving from the Millers’ study. The signal moves swiftly to Mark and Jasper, waiting with their cutters beside the exposed TV and telephone cables. In their bedrooms, the children sit quietly, each with a telephone receiver to the ear. Some ninety seconds later the lines go dead.

  8:23 a.m. Within the next seven minutes all the remaining adults in Pangbourne Village meet their deaths.

  Puzzled by the blank monitor screens in the gatehouse, Officer Turner goes out to inspect the camera mounted on the roof. Mark Sanger is waiting outside the door, with another of the box kites he is always building, but Turner is too busy to speak to him and waves him into the office. When Turner reenters the gatehouse Mark is standing by the lavatory door. Burnett is calling on his radio pager, reporting that the perimeter camera seems to be dead. Turner sits at his desk and looks down at his monitors, vaguely aware that Mark has stepped behind him, still talking about his kite. The boy raises it into the air, demonstrating how he will fly it. There is a sound of string snapping, and suddenly Turner is gripped around the throat and chest by a powerful vise. He has a glimpse of bamboo-green arms, as if he has been seized by a giant praying mantis.

  8:25 a.m. Dr. Harold and Dr. Edwina Maxted are walking to their car, which is parked in the rear drive behind the garage. They have a busy day ahead of them. Dr. Edwina has a hair appointment in Reading, and Dr. Harold must collect the Super-8 camera with which he will record his conversation with the TV producer. They are pleased that Jeremy has reversed the black Porsche out of the garage for them before returning to his breakfast. Its engine ticks softly in the crisp morning air. Dr. Edwina notices that her son has left a magazine on the gravel by the garage doors. To her surprise it is a lurid American horror comic. She points it out to her husband, and Dr. Harold stands beside her, nodding thoughtfully as she lifts it in her well-manicured fingers. Neither sees their son sitting up in the driver’s seat of the Porsche, and they barely hear its engine as it leaps across the gravel toward them.