The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

Unable to dispel them, he deliberately let himself drift off into a reverie. Perhaps the association of the funereal rain and the tiresome pain below his sternum was responsible for the gathering sense of foreboding in his mind. Formless ideas rose towards consciousness, and he stirred uneasily in his chair. Without realizing it, he found himself thinking of his wife’s death, an event shrouded in pain and a peculiar dream-like violence. For a moment he was almost inside his wife’s dying mind, at the bottom of an immense drowned lake, separated from the distant pinpoint of sky by enormous volumes of water that pressed upon his chest . . .

  In a flood of sweat, Elliott awoke from this nightmare, the whole tragic vision of his wife’s death before his eyes. Judith was alive, of course, staying with her married sister at the beach-house near Worthing, but the vision of her drowning had come through with the force and urgency of a telepathic signal.

  ‘Judith!’

  Rousing himself, Elliott hurried to the telephone in the hall. Something about its psychological dimensions convinced him that he had not imagined the death scene.

  The sea!

  He snatched up the phone, dialling for the operator. At that very moment Judith might well be swimming alone while her sister prepared tea with the children, in sight of the beach but unaware she was in danger ...

  ‘Operator, this is urgent,’ Elliott began. ‘I must talk to my wife. I think she’s in some sort of danger. Can you get me Calcutta 30331.’

  The operator hesitated. ‘Calcutta? I’m sorry, caller, I’ll transfer you to Overseas –’

  ‘What? I don’t want –’ Elliott stopped. ‘What number did I ask for?’

  ‘Calcutta 30331. I’ll have you transferred.’

  ‘Wait!’ Elliott steadied himself against the window. The rain beat across the glazed panes. ‘My mistake. I meant Worthing 303 –’

  ‘Are you there, caller? Worthing Three Zero Three –’ Her voice waited.

  Wearily Elliott lowered the telephone. ‘I’ll look it up,’ he said thickly. ‘That wasn’t the number.’

  He turned the pages of the memo pad, realizing that both he and Judith had known the number for years and never bothered to record it.

  ‘Are you there, caller?’ The operator’s voice was sharper.

  A few moments later, when he was connected to Directory Inquiries, Elliott realized that he had also forgotten his sister-in-law’s name and address.

  ‘Calcutta 30331.’ Elliott repeated the number as he poured himself a drink from the whisky decanter. Pulling himself together, he recognized that the notion of a telepathic message was fatuous. Judith would be perfectly safe, on her way back to London with the children, and he had misinterpreted the vision of the dying woman. The telephone number, however, remained. The enigmatic sequence flowed off his tongue with the unconscious familiarity of long usage. A score of similar memories waited to be summoned into reality, as if a fugitive mind had taken up residence in his brain.

  He picked the newspaper off the floor.

  . . . Dr Krishnamurti Singh. Scotland Yard believes he may be able to assist them in their inquiries . . .

  ‘Assist them in their inquiries’ – a typical Fleet Street euphemism, part of the elaborate code built up between the newspapers and their readers. A French paper, not handicapped by the English libel laws, would be shouting ‘Bluebeard! Assassin!’

  Detectives are at the bedside of Mrs Ethel Burgess, the charwoman employed by Dr and Mrs Singh, who was yesterday found unconscious at the foot of the stairs . . .

  Mrs Burgess! Instantly an image of the small elderly woman, with a face like a wizened apple, came before his eyes. She was lying in the hospital bed at the Middlesex, watching him with frightened reproachful glances –

  The tumbler, half-filled with whisky, smashed itself on the fireplace tiles. Elliott stared at the fragments of wet glass around his feet, then sat down in the centre of the sofa with his head in his hands, trying to hold back the flood of memories. Helplessly he found himself thinking of the medical school at Calcutta. The half-familiar faces of fellow students passed in a blur. He remembered his passionate interest in developing a scientific approach to the obscurer branches of yoga and the Hindu parapsychologies, the student society he formed and its experiments in thought and body transference, brought to an end by the death of one of the students and the subsequent scandal . . .

  For a moment Elliott marvelled at the coherence and convincing detail of the memories. Numbly he reminded himself that in fact he had been a chemistry student at –

  Where?

  With a start he realized that he had forgotten. Quickly he searched his mind, and found he could remember almost nothing of his distant past, where he was born, his parents and childhood. Instead he saw once again, this time with luminous clarity, the rowing-boat on the crimson Ganges and its dark oarsman watching him with his ambiguous smile. Then he saw another picture, of himself as a small boy, writing in a huge ledger in which all the pencilled entries had been laboriously rubbed out, sitting at a desk in a room with a low ceiling of bamboo rods over his father’s warehouse by the market –

  ‘Nonsense!’ Flinging the memory from him, with all its tender associations, Elliott stood up restless, his heart racing with a sudden fever. His forehead burned with heat, his mind inventing strings of fantasies around the Dr Singh wanted by the police. He felt his pulse, then leaned into the mirror over the mantelpiece and examined his eyes, checking his pupil reflexes with expert fingers for any symptoms of concussion.

  Swallowing with a dry tongue, he stared down at the physician’s hands which had examined him, then decided to call his own doctor. A sedative, an hour’s sleep, and he would recover.

  In the falling evening light he could barely see the numerals. ‘Hello, hello!’ he shouted. ‘Is anyone there?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Singh,’ a woman replied. ‘Is that you?’

  Frightened, Elliott cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. He had dialled the number from memory, but from another memory than his own. But not only had the receptionist recognized his voice – Elliott had recognized hers, and knew her name.

  Experimentally he lifted the receiver, and said the name in his mind. ‘Miss Tremayne –?’

  ‘Dr Singh? Are you –’

  With an effort Elliott made his voice more guttural. ‘I’m sorry, I have the wrong number. What is your number?’

  The girl hesitated. When she spoke the modulation and rhythm of her voice were again instantly familiar. ‘This is Harley Street 30331,’ she said cautiously. ‘Dr Singh, the police have –’

  Elliott lowered the telephone into its cradle. Wearily he sat down on the carpet in the darkness, looking up at the black rectangle of the front door. Again the headache began to drum at his temples, as he tried to ignore the memories crowding into his mind. Above him the staircase led to another world.

  Half an hour later, he pulled himself to his feet. Searching for his bed, and fearing the light, he stumbled into a room and lay down. With a start he clambered upright, and found that he was lying on the table in the dining room.

  He had forgotten his way around the house, and the topography of another home, apparently a single-storey apartment, had superimposed itself upon his mind. In the strange upstairs floor he found an untidy nursery full of children’s toys and clothes, an unremembered frieze of childish drawings which showed tranquil skies over church steeples. When he closed the door the scene vanished like a forgotten tableau.

  In the bedroom next door a portrait photograph stood on the dressing table, showing the face of a pleasant blonde-haired woman he had never seen. He gazed down at the bed in the darkness, the wardrobes and mirrors around him like the furniture of a dream.

  ‘Ramadya, Ramadya,’ he murmured, on his lips the name of the dying woman.

  The telephone rang. Standing in the darkness at the top of the stairs, he listened to its sounds shrilling through the silent house. He walked down to it with leaden feet.

  ‘Yes?’ he said tersely
.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ a woman’s bright voice answered. In the background trains shunted and whistled. ‘Hello? Is that Hampstead –’

  ‘This is Harley Street 30331,’ he said quickly. ‘You have the wrong number.’

  ‘Oh, dear, I am sorry, I thought –’

  Cutting off this voice, which for a fleeting moment had drawn together the fragmented persona clinging to the back of his mind, he stood at the window by the front door. Through the narrow barred pane he could see that the rain had almost ended, and a light mist hung among the trees. The bedraggled figure on the bench still maintained his vigil, his face hidden in the darkness. Now and then his drenched form would glimmer in the passing lights.

  For some reason a sense of extreme urgency had overtaken Elliott. He knew that there were a series of tasks to be performed, records to be made before important evidence vanished, reliable witnesses to be contacted. A hundred ignored images passed through in his mind as he searched for a pair of shoes and a jacket in the cupboard upstairs, scenes of his medical practice, a woman patient being tested by an electroencephalogram, the radiator of a Bentley car and its automobile club badges. There were glimpses of the streets near Harley Street, the residue of countless journeys to and from the consulting rooms, the entrance to the Overseas Club, a noisy seminar at one of the scientific institutes where someone was shouting at him theatrically. Then, unpleasantly, there were feelings of remorse for his wife’s death, counterbalanced by the growing inner conviction that this, paradoxically, was the only way to save her, to force her to a new life. In a strange yet familiar voice he heard himself saying: ‘the soul, like any soft-skinned creature, clings to whatever shell it can find. Only by cracking that shell can one force it to move to a new ...’

  Attacks of vertigo came over him in waves as he descended the staircase. There was someone he must find, one man whose help might save him. He picked up the telephone and dialled, swaying giddily from side to side.

  A clipped voice like polished ivory answered. ‘Professor Ramachandran speaking.’

  ‘Professor –’

  ‘Hello? Who is that, please?’

  He cleared his throat, coughing noisily into the mouthpiece. ‘Professor, understand me! It was the tumour, inoperable, it was the only way to save her – metempsychosis of the somatic function as well as the psychic . . .’ He had launched into a semicoherent tirade, the words coming out in clotted shreds. ‘Ramadya has gone over now, she is the other woman . . . neither she nor any others will ever know . . . Professor, will you tell her one day, and myself . . . a single word –’

  ‘Dr Singh!’ The voice at the end was a shout. ‘I can no longer help you! You must take the consequences of your folly! I warned you repeatedly about the danger of your experiments –’

  The telephone squeaked on the floor where he dropped it. Outside the headlamps of police cars flashed by, their blue roof lights revolving like spectral beacons. As he unlatched the door and stepped out into the cold night air he had a last obsessive thought, of a fair-haired, middle-aged man with glasses who was a chemist at a cancer institute, a man with a remarkably receptive mind, its open bowl spread before him like a huge dish antenna. This man alone could help him. His name was – Elliott.

  As he sat on the bench he saw the lights approaching him through the trees, like glowing aureoles in the darkness. The rain had ended and a light mist dissipated under the branches, but after the warmth indoors it was colder than he expected, and within only a few minutes in the park he began to shiver. Walking between the trees, he saw the line of police cars parked along the perimeter road two hundred yards away. Whichever way he moved, the lights seemed to draw nearer, although never coming directly toward him.

  He turned, deciding to return to the house, and to his surprise saw a slim fair-haired man cross the road from the park and climb the steps to the front door. Startled, he watched this intruder disappear through the open door and close it behind him.

  Then two policemen stepped from the mist on his right, their torches dazzling his eyes. He broke into a run, but a third huge figure materialized from behind a trunk and blocked his path.

  ‘That’s enough, then,’ a gruff voice told him as he wrestled helplessly. ‘Let’s try to take it quietly.’

  Lamps circled the darkness. More police ran over through the trees. An inspector with silver shoulder badges stepped up and peered into his face as a constable raised a torch.

  ‘Dr Singh?’

  For a moment he listened to the sounds of the name, which had pursued him all day, hang fleetingly on the damp air. Most of his mind seemed willing to accept the identification, but a small part, now dissolving to a minute speck, like the faint stars veiled by the mist, refused to agree, knowing that whoever he was now, he had once not been Dr Singh.

  ‘No!’ He shook his head, and with a galvanic effort managed to wrench loose one arm. He was seized at the shoulder and raised his free arm to shield himself from the lights and the pressing faces.

  His glasses had fallen off and been trampled underfoot, but he could see more clearly without them. He looked at his hand. Even in the pale light the darker pigmentation was plain. His fingers were small and neat, an unfamiliar scar marking one of the knuckles.

  Then he felt the small goatee beard on his chin.

  Inside his mind the last island of resistance slid away into the dark unremembered past.

  ‘Dr Krishnamurti Singh,’ the inspector stated.

  Among the suitcases in the doorway Judith Elliott watched the police cars drive away toward Hampstead village. Upstairs the two children romped about in the nursery.

  ‘How horrid! I’m glad the children didn’t see him arrested. He was struggling like an animal.’

  Elliott paid off the taxi-driver and then closed the door. ‘Who was it, by the way? No one we know, I hope?’

  Judith glanced around the hall, and noticed the telephone receiver on the floor. She bent down and replaced it. ‘The taxi-driver said it was some Harley Street psychiatrist. An Indian doctor. Apparently he strangled his wife in the bath. The strange thing is she was already dying of a brain tumour.’

  Elliott grimaced. ‘Gruesome. Perhaps he was trying to save her pain.’

  ‘By strangling her fully conscious? A typical masculine notion, darling.’

  Elliott laughed as they strolled into the lounge. ‘Well, my dear, did you have a good time? How was Molly?’

  ‘She was fine. We had a great time together. Missed you, of course. I felt a bit off-colour yesterday, got knocked over by a big wave and swallowed a lot of water.’ She hesitated, looking through the window at the park. ‘You know, it’s rather funny, but twenty minutes ago I tried to ring you from the station and got a Harley Street number by mistake. I spoke to an Indian. He sounded rather like a doctor.’

  Elliott grinned. ‘Probably the same man.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But he couldn’t have got from Harley Street to Hampstead so quickly, could he? The driver said the police have been looking for him here all afternoon.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve got the wrong man. Unless there are two Dr Singhs.’ Elliott snapped his fingers. ‘That’s odd, where did I get the name? Must have read about him in the papers.’

  Judith nodded, coming over to him. ‘It was in this morning’s.’ She took off her hat and placed it on the mantelpiece. ‘Indians are strange people. I don’t know why, but yesterday when I was getting over my wave I was thinking about an Indian girl I knew once. All I can remember is her name. Ramadya. I think she was drowned. She was very sweet and pretty.’

  ‘Like you.’ Elliott put his hands around her waist, but Judith pointed to the broken glass in the fireplace.

  ‘I say, I can see I’ve been away.’ With a laugh she put her hands on his shoulders and squeezed him, then drew away in alarm.

  ‘Darling, where did you get this peculiar suit? For heaven’s sake, look!’ She squeezed his jacket, and the water poured from her fingers as from a
wet sponge. ‘You’re soaked through! Where on earth have you been all day?’

  1963

  THE SCREEN GAME

  Every afternoon during the summer at Ciraquito we play the screen game. After lunch today, when the arcades and café terraces were empty and everyone was lying asleep indoors, three of us drove out in Raymond Mayo’s Lincoln along the road to Vermilion Sands.

  The season had ended, and already the desert had begun to move in again for the summer, drifting against the yellowing shutters of the cigarette kiosks, surrounding the town with immense banks of luminous ash. Along the horizon the flat-topped mesas rose into the sky like the painted cones of a volcano jungle. The beach-houses had been empty for weeks, and abandoned sand-yachts stood in the centre of the lakes, embalmed in the opaque heat. Only the highway showed any signs of activity, the motion sculpture of concrete ribbon unfolding across the landscape.

  Twenty miles from Ciraquito, where the highway forks to Red Beach and Vermilion Sands, we turned on to the remains of an old gravel track that ran away among the sand reefs. Only a year earlier this had been a well-kept private road, but the ornamental gateway lay collapsed to one side, and the guardhouse was a nesting place for scorpions and sand-rays.

  Few people ever ventured far up the road. Continuous rock slides disturbed the area, and large sections of the surface had slipped away into the reefs. In addition a curious but unmistakable atmosphere of menace hung over the entire zone, marking it off from the remainder of the desert. The hanging galleries of the reefs were more convoluted and sinister, like the tortured demons of medieval cathedrals. Massive towers of obsidian reared over the roadway like stone gallows, their cornices streaked with iron-red dust. The light seemed duller, unlike the rest of the desert, occasionally flaring into a sepulchral glow as if some subterranean fire-cloud had boiled to the surface of the rocks. The surrounding peaks and spires shut out the desert plain, and the only sounds were the echoes of the engine growling among the hills and the piercing cries of the sand-rays wheeling over the open mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds.