The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  The rifle had been pointed at the man automatically and Dr Jamieson trained the sights on his chest and fired, just before the bomb left his hand. The discharge jolted Dr Jamieson off his feet, the impact tearing at his shoulder, the rifle jangling up into the venetian blind. Remmers slammed back crookedly into the cigarette kiosk, legs lolling, his face like a skull’s. The bomb had been knocked out of his hand and was spinning straight up into the air as if tossed by a juggler. It landed on the pavement a few yards away, kicked underfoot as the crowd surged sideways after the royal coach.

  Then it exploded.

  There was a blinding pulse of expanding air, followed by a tremendous eruption of smoke and hurtling particles. The window facing the street dropped in a single piece and shattered on the floor at Dr Jamieson’s feet, driving him back in a blast of glass and torn plastic. He fell across the chair, recovered himself as the shouts outside turned to screams, then dragged himself over to the window and stared out through the stinging air. The crowd was fanning out across the road, people running in all directions, horses rearing under their helmetless riders. Below the window twenty or thirty people lay or sat on the pavement. The royal coach, one wheel missing but otherwise intact, was being dragged away by its team of horses, guardsmen and troops encircling it. Police were swarming down the road towards the hotel, and Dr Jamieson saw someone point up to him and shout.

  He looked down at the edge of the pavement, where a girl in a white dress was stretched on her back, her legs twisted strangely. The young man kneeling beside her, his jacket split down the centre of his back, had covered her face with his handkerchief, and a dark stain spread slowly across the tissue.

  Voices rose in the corridor outside. He turned away from the window, the rifle still in his hand. On the floor at his feet, unfurled by the blast of the explosion, was the faded newspaper cutting. Numbly, his mouth slack, Dr Jamieson picked it up.

  ASSASSINS ATTEMPT TO MURDER KING JAMES

  Bomb Kills 27 in Oxford Street

  Two men shot dead by police

  A sentence had been ringed: ‘. . . one was Anton Remmers, a professional killer believed to have been hired by the second assassin, an older man whose bullet-ridden body the police are unable to identify . . .’

  Fists pounded on the door. A voice shouted, then kicked at the handle. Dr Jamieson dropped the cutting, and looked down at the young man kneeling over the girl, holding her dead hands.

  As the door ripped back off its hinges he knew who the second unknown assassin was, the man he had returned to kill after thirty-five years. So his attempt to alter past events had been fruitless, by coming back he had merely implicated himself in the original crime, doomed since he first analysed the cyclotron freaks to return and help to kill his young bride. If he had not shot Remmers the assassin would have lobbed the bomb into the centre of the road, and June would have lived. His whole stratagem selflessly devised for the young man’s benefit, a free gift to his own younger self, had defeated itself, destroying the very person it had been intended to save.

  Hoping to see her again for the last time, and warn the young man to forget her, he ran forward into the roaring police guns.

  1961

  THE INSANE ONES

  Ten miles outside Alexandria he picked up the coast road that ran across the top of the continent through Tunis and Algiers to the transatlantic tunnel at Casablanca, gunned the Jaguar up to 120 and burned along through the cool night air, letting the brine-filled slipstream cut into his six-day tan. Lolling back against the headrest as the palms flicked by, he almost missed the girl in the white raincoat waving from the steps of the hotel at El Alamein, had only three hundred yards to plunge the car to a halt below the rusting neon sign.

  ‘Tunis?’ the girl called out, belting the man’s raincoat around her trim waist, long black hair in a Left Bank cut over one shoulder.

  ‘Tunis – Casablanca – Atlantic City,’ Gregory shouted back, reaching across to the passenger door. She swung a yellow briefcase behind the seat, settling herself among the magazines and newspapers as they roared off. The headlamps picked out a United World cruiser parked under the palms in the entrance to the war cemetery, and involuntarily Gregory winced and floored the accelerator, eyes clamped to the rear mirror until the road was safely empty.

  At 90 he slacked off and looked at the girl, abruptly felt a warning signal sound again. She seemed like any demi-beatnik, with a long melancholy face and grey skin, but something about her rhythms, the slack facial tone and dead eyes and mouth, made him uneasy. Under a flap of the raincoat was a blue-striped gingham skirt, obviously part of a nurse’s uniform, out of character, like the rest of her strange gear. As she slid the magazines into the dashboard locker he saw the home-made bandage around the left wrist.

  She noticed him watching her and flashed a too-bright smile, then made an effort at small talk.

  ‘Paris Vogue, Neue Frankfurter, Tel Aviv Express – you’ve really been moving.’ She pulled a pack of Del Montes from the breast pocket of the coat, fumbled unfamiliarly with a large brass lighter. ‘First Europe, then Asia, now Africa. You’ll run out of continents soon.’ Hesitating, she volunteered: ‘Carole Sturgeon. Thanks for the lift.’

  Gregory nodded, watching the bandage slide around her slim wrist. He wondered which hospital she had sneaked away from. Probably Cairo General, the old-style English uniforms were still worn there. Ten to one the briefcase was packed with some careless salesman’s pharmaceutical samples. ‘Can I ask where you’re going? This is the back end of nowhere.’

  The girl shrugged. ‘Just following the road. Cairo, Alex, you know –’ She added: ‘I went to see the pyramids.’ She lay back, rolling slightly against his shoulder. ‘That was wonderful. They’re the oldest things on earth. Remember their boast: “Before Abraham, I was”?’

  They hit a dip in the road and Gregory’s licence swung out under the steering column. The girl peered down and read it. ‘Do you mind? It’s a long ride to Tunis. “Charles Gregory, MD –”’ She stopped, repeating his name to herself uncertainly.

  Suddenly she remembered. ‘Gregory! Dr Charles Gregory! Weren’t you – Muriel Bortman, the President’s daughter, she drowned herself at Key West, you were sentenced –’ She broke off, staring nervously at the windshield.

  ‘You’ve got a long memory,’ Gregory said quietly. ‘I didn’t think anyone remembered.’

  ‘Of course I remember.’ She spoke in a whisper. ‘They were mad what they did to you.’ For the next few minutes she gushed out a long farrago of sympathy, interspersed with disjointed details from her own life. Gregory tried not to listen, clenching the wheel until his knuckles whitened, deliberately forgetting everything as fast as she reminded him.

  There was a pause, as he felt it coming, the way it invariably did. ‘Tell me, doctor, I hope you forgive me asking, but since the Mental Freedom laws it’s difficult to get help, one’s got to be so careful – you too, of course . . .’ She laughed uneasily. ‘What I really mean is –’

  Her edginess drained power from Gregory. ‘– you need psychiatric assistance,’ he cut in, pushing the Jaguar up to 95, eyes swinging to the rear mirror again. The road was dead, palms receding endlessly into the night.

  The girl choked on her cigarette, the stub between her fingers a damp mess. ‘Well, not me,’ she said lamely. ‘A close friend of mine. She really needs help, believe me, doctor. Her whole feeling for life is gone, nothing seems to mean anything to her any more.’

  Brutally, he said: ‘Tell her to look at the pyramids.’

  But the girl missed the irony, said quickly: ‘Oh, she has. I just left her in Cairo. I promised I’d try to find someone for her.’ She turned to examine Gregory, put a hand up to her hair. In the blue desert light she reminded him of the madonnas he had seen in the Louvre two days after his release, when he had run from the filthy prison searching for the most beautiful things in the world, the solemn-faced more-than-beautiful 13-year-olds who had posed for Leonardo and
the Bellini brothers. ‘I thought perhaps you might know someone –?’

  He gripped himself and shook his head. ‘I don’t. For the last three years I’ve been out of touch. Anyway, it’s against the MF laws. Do you know what would happen if they caught me giving psychiatric treatment?’

  Numbly the girl stared ahead at the road. Gregory flipped away his cigarette, pressing down on the accelerator as the last three years crowded back, memories he had hoped to repress on his 10,000-mile drive . . . three years at the prison farm near Marseilles, treating scrofulous farm-workers and sailors in the dispensary, even squeezing in a little illicit depth analysis for the corporal of police who couldn’t satisfy his wife, three embittered years to accept that he would never practise again the one craft in which he was fully himself. Trick-cyclist or assuager of discontents, whatever his title, the psychiatrist had now passed into history, joining the necromancers, sorcerers and other practitioners of the black sciences.

  The Mental Freedom legislation enacted ten years earlier by the ultraconservative UW government had banned the profession outright and enshrined the individual’s freedom to be insane if he wanted to, provided he paid the full civil consequences for any infringements of the law. That was the catch, the hidden object of the MF laws. What had begun as a popular reaction against ‘subliminal living’ and the uncontrolled extension of techniques of mass manipulation for political and economic ends had quickly developed into a systematic attack on the psychological sciences. Over-permissive courts of law with their condoning of delinquency, pseudo-enlightened penal reformers, ‘Victims of society’, the psychologist and his patient all came under fierce attack. Discharging their self-hate and anxiety onto a convenient scapegoat, the new rulers, and the great majority electing them, outlawed all forms of psychic control, from the innocent market survey to lobotomy. The mentally ill were on their own, spared pity and consideration, made to pay to the hilt for their failings. The sacred cow of the community was the psychotic, free to wander where he wanted, drooling on the doorsteps, sleeping on sidewalks, and woe betide anyone who tried to help him.

  Gregory had made that mistake. Escaping to Europe, first home of psychiatry, in the hope of finding a more tolerant climate, he set up a secret clinic in Paris with six other émigré analysts. For five years they worked undetected, until one of Gregory’s patients, a tall ungainly girl with a psychogenic stutter, was revealed to be Muriel Bortman, daughter of the UW President-General. The analysis had failed tragically when the clinic was raided; after her death a lavish show trial (making endless play of electric shock apparatus, movies of insulin coma and the testimony of countless paranoids rounded up in the alleyways) had concluded in a three-year sentence.

  Now at last he was out, his savings invested in the Jaguar, fleeing Europe and his memories of the prison for the empty highways of North Africa. He didn’t want any more trouble.

  ‘I’d like to help,’ he told the girl. ‘But the risks are too high. All your friend can do is try to come to terms with herself.’

  The girl chewed her lip fretfully. ‘I don’t think she can. Thanks, anyway, doctor.’

  For three hours they sat back silently in the speeding car, until the lights of Tobruk came up ahead, the long curve of the harbour.

  ‘It’s 2 A.M.,’ Gregory said. ‘There’s a motel here. I’ll pick you up in the morning.’

  After they had gone to their rooms he sneaked back to the registry, booked himself into a new chalet. He fell asleep as Carole Sturgeon wandered forlornly up and down the verandas, whispering out his name.

  After breakfast he came back from the sea, found a big United World cruiser in the court, orderlies carrying a stretcher out to an ambulance.

  A tall Libyan police colonel was leaning against the Jaguar, drumming his leather baton on the windscreen.

  ‘Ah, Dr Gregory. Good morning.’ He pointed his baton at the ambulance. ‘A profound tragedy, such a beautiful American girl.’

  Gregory rooted his feet in the grey sand, with an effort restrained himself from running over to the ambulance and pulling back the sheet. Fortunately the colonel’s uniform and thousands of morning and evening cell inspections kept him safely to attention.

  ‘I’m Gregory, yes.’ The dust thickened in his throat. ‘Is she dead?’

  The colonel stroked his neck with the baton. ‘Ear to ear. She must have found an old razor blade in the bathroom. About 3 o’clock this morning.’ He headed towards Gregory’s chalet, gesturing with the baton. Gregory followed him into the half light, stood tentatively by the bed.

  ‘I was asleep then. The clerk will vouch for that.’

  ‘Naturally.’ The colonel gazed down at Gregory’s possessions spread out across the bedcover, idly poked the black medical bag.

  ‘She asked you for assistance, doctor? With her personal problems?’

  ‘Not directly. She hinted at it, though. She sounded a little mixed up.’

  ‘Poor child.’ The colonel lowered his head sympathetically. ‘Her father is a first secretary at the Cairo Embassy, something of an autocrat. You Americans are very stern with your children, doctor. A firm hand, yes, but understanding costs nothing. Don’t you agree? She was frightened of him, escaped from the American Hospital. My task is to provide an explanation for the authorities. If I had an idea of what was really worrying her . . . no doubt you helped her as best you could?’

  Gregory shook his head. ‘I gave her no help at all, colonel. In fact, I refused to discuss her problems altogether.’ He smiled flatly at the colonel. ‘I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, would I?’

  The colonel studied Gregory thoughtfully. ‘Sensible of you, doctor. But you surprise me. Surely the members of your profession regard themselves as a special calling, answerable to a higher authority. Are these ideals so easy to cast off?’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of practice.’ Gregory began to pack away his things on the bed, bowed to the colonel as he saluted and made his way out into the court.

  Half an hour later he was on the Benghasi road, holding the Jaguar at 100, working off his tension and anger in a savage burst of speed. Free for only ten days, already he had got himself involved again, gone through all the agony of having to refuse help to someone desperately needing it, his hands itching to administer relief to the child but held back by the insane penalties. It wasn’t only the lunatic legislation but the people enforcing it who ought to be swept away – Bortman and his fellow oligarchs.

  He grimaced at the thought of the cold dead-faced Bortman, addressing the World Senate at Lake Success, arguing for increased penalties for the criminal psychopath. The man had stepped straight out of the 14th-century Inquisition, his bureaucratic puritanism masking two real obsessions: dirt and death. Any sane society would have locked Bortman up for ever, or given him a complete brain-lift. Indirectly Bortman was as responsible for the death of Carole Sturgeon as he would have been had he personally handed the razor blade to her.

  After Libya, Tunis. He blazed steadily along the coast road, the sea like a molten mirror on the right, avoiding the big towns where possible. Fortunately they weren’t so bad as the European cities, psychotics loitering like stray dogs in the uptown parks, wise enough not to shop-lift or cause trouble, but a petty nuisance on the café terraces, knocking on hotel doors at all hours of the night.

  At Algiers he spent three days at the Hilton, having a new engine fitted to the car, and hunted up Philip Kalundborg, an old Toronto colleague now working in a WHO children’s hospital.

  Over their third carafe of burgundy Gregory told him about Carole Sturgeon.

  ‘It’s absurd, but I feel guilty about her. Suicide is a highly suggestive act, I reminded her of Muriel Bortman’s death. Damn it, Philip, I could have given her the sort of general advice any sensible layman would have offered.’

  ‘Dangerous. Of course you were right,’ Philip assured him. ‘After the last three years who could argue otherwise?’

  Gregory looked out across the terrace
at the traffic whirling over the neon-lit cobbles. Beggars sat at their pitches along the sidewalk, whining for sous.

  ‘Philip, you don’t know what it’s like in Europe now. At least 5 per cent are probably in need of institutional care. Believe me, I’m frightened to go to America. In New York alone they’re jumping from the roofs at the rate of ten a day. The world’s turning into a madhouse, one half of society gloating righteously over the torments of the other. Most people don’t realize which side of the bars they are. It’s easier for you. Here the traditions are different.’

  Kalundborg nodded. ‘True. In the villages up-country it’s been standard practice for centuries to blind schizophrenics and exhibit them in a cage.

  Injustice is so widespread that you build up an indiscriminate tolerance to every form.’

  A tall dark-bearded youth in faded cotton slacks and rope sandals stepped across the terrace and put his hands on their table. His eyes were sunk deep below his forehead, around his lips the brown staining of narcotic poisoning.

  ‘Christian!’ Kalundborg snapped angrily. He shrugged hopelessly at Gregory, then turned to the young man with quiet exasperation. ‘My dear fellow, this has gone on for too long. I can’t help you, there’s no point in asking.’

  The young man nodded patiently. ‘It’s Marie,’ he explained in a slow roughened voice. ‘I can’t control her. I’m frightened what she may do to the baby. Postnatal withdrawal, you know –’

  ‘Nonsense! I’m not an idiot, Christian. The baby is nearly three. If Marie is a nervous wreck you’ve made her so. Believe me, I wouldn’t help you if I was allowed to. You must cure yourself or you are finished. Already you have chronic barbiturism. Dr Gregory here will agree with me.’

  Gregory nodded. The young man stared blackly at Kalundborg, glanced at Gregory and then shambled off through the tables.

  Kalundborg filled his glass. ‘They have it all wrong today. They think our job was to further addiction, not cure it. In their pantheon the father-figure is always benevolent.’