From the bank of the canal Forrester peered up at the white hull of the Club Náutico. There were no signs of the young woman. Behind him, facing the airstrip, was a roadside restaurant abandoned years before. Through the salt-stained windows he could see the rows of bottles against the mirror behind the bar, chairs stacked on tables.
Forrester pushed back the door. The interior of the restaurant was like a museum tableau. Nothing had been moved for years. Despite the unlocked door there had been no vandalism. From the footprints visible in the fine sand blown across the floor it was clear that over the years a few passing travellers had refreshed themselves at the bar and left without doing any damage. This was true of everywhere Forrester had visited. They had vacated a hundred cities and airports as if leaving them in serviceable condition for their successors.
The air in the restaurant was stale but cool. Seated behind the bar, Forrester helped himself to a bottle of Fundador, drinking quietly as he waited for the young woman to reappear. As he gazed across the canal he noticed that Gould had painted two continuous marker lines in fluorescent silver across the metal slats and wire railing of the footbridge. From the door he could see the same marker lines crossing the road and climbing the steps to Gould’s hotel, where they disappeared into the lobby.
Standing unsteadily in the road, Forrester frowned up at the garish façade of the hotel, which had been designed in a crudely erotic Graecian style. Naked caryatids three storeys high supported a sham portico emblazoned with satyrs and nymphs. Why had Gould chosen to live in this hotel, out of all those standing empty in Rosas? Here in what amounted to the red-light quarter of the town, it was one of a group known euphemistically all over the world as the ‘Venus hotels’, but which Judith more accurately referred to as ‘the sex-hotels’. From Waikiki to Glyfada Beach, Rio to Recife, these hotel complexes had sprung up in the first years of the depopulation crisis. A flood of government-subsidised tourists had poured in, urged on into a last frantic festival of erotomania. In a misguided attempt to rekindle their fertility, every conceivable kind of deviant sexual activity had been encouraged. Pornographic hotel decor, lobbies crammed with aids and appliances, ceaseless sex-films shown on closed-circuit television, all these reflected an unhappy awareness by everyone that their sex no longer mattered. The sense of obligation, however residual, to a future generation was no longer present. If anything, the ‘normal’ had become the real obscenity. In the foyer of one of these hotels Forrester and Judith had come across the most sinister pornographic image of all – the photograph of a healthy baby obscenely retouched.
Judith and her husband had been too young to take part in these despairing orgies, and by the time of their marriage there had been a general revulsion against perverse sex of every kind. Chastity and romantic love, pre-marital celibacy and all the restraints of monogamy came back in force. As the world’s populations continued to fall, the last married couples sat dutifully together like characters from a Vermeer interior.
And all the while the sexual drive continued unabated. Feeling the alcohol surge through him, Forrester swayed through the hot sunlight. Somewhere around the hangar beside the airstrip the young woman was waiting for him, perhaps watching him at this moment from its dark interior. Obviously she knew what he was thinking, and almost seemed to be encouraging him with her flirtatious dartings to and fro.
Forrester stepped on to the bridge. Behind him the line of garish hotels was silent, a stage-set designed for just this adventure. The metal rungs of the bridge rang softly under his feet. Tapping them like the keys of a xylophone, Forrester stumbled against the rail, smearing his hands against the still-wet stripe of silver paint.
Without thinking, he wiped his hands on his shirt. The lines of fluorescent paint continued across the bridge, winding in and out of the abandoned cars in the parking lot beside the airstrip. Following Gould’s illuminated pathway, Forrester crossed the canal. When he reached the fuel store he saw that the young woman had emerged from the hangar. She stood in the open doorway, her feet well within the rectangle of sunlight. Her intelligent but somehow mongoloid face was hidden as usual behind heavy sunglasses – a squat chin and high forehead fronted by a carapace of black glass. For all this concealment, Forrester was certain that she had been expecting him, and even more that she had been hoping for him to appear. Inside her black shawl she was moving her hands about like a schoolgirl – no doubt she was aware that he was the only man in the resort, apart from Gould, away on his endless solo flying, and the old linotype operator.
The sweat rose from Forrester’s skin, a hot pelt across his forehead. Standing beside the fuel hydrant, he wiped away the sweat with his hands. The young woman seemed to respond to these gestures. Her own hands emerged from the shawl, moving about in a complex code, a semaphore signalling Forrester to her. Responding in turn, he touched his face again, ignoring the silver paint on his hands. As if to ingratiate himself, he smeared the last of the paint over his cheeks and nose, wiping the tacky metal stains across his mouth.
When he reached the young woman and touched her shoulder she looked with sudden alarm at these luminous contours, as if aware that she had been forming the elements of the wrong man from these painted fragments – his hands, chest and features.
Too late, she let herself be bundled backwards into the darkness of the hangar. The sunglasses fell from her hands to the floor. Forrester’s luminous face shone back at him like a chromiumed mask from the flight-office windows. He looked down at the sightless young woman scrabbling at his feet for her sunglasses, one hand trying to hide her eyes from him. Then he heard the drone of a light aircraft flying over the town.
Gould’s aircraft circled the Club Náutico, the panels of its silver fuselage reflecting the sun like a faceted mirror. Forrester turned from the young woman lying against the rear wall of the hangar, the glasses with their fractured lenses once more over her face. He stepped into the afternoon light and ran across the runway as the aircraft came in to land.
Two hours later, when he had crossed the deserted streets to his hotel, he found Señor Cervera standing on the dune below the steps, hands cupped to his eyes. He waved Forrester towards him, greeting him with relief. Forrester had spent the interval in one of the hotels in the centre of Rosas, moving restlessly from one bathroom to the next as he tried to clean the paint off his face and hands. He had slept for half an hour in a bedroom.
‘Mrs Forrester –’ The old man gestured helplessly.
‘Where is she?’ Forrester followed Cervera to the hotel steps. His wife was hovering in an embarrassed way behind her mahogany desk. ‘What’s happened?’
‘The practicante arrived – just after you left.’ The old man paused to examine the traces of silver paint that still covered Forrester’s face. With a wave of the hand, as if dismissing them as another minor detail of this aberrant day, he said, ‘He brought the result to Mrs Forrester . . .’
‘Is she all right? What’s going on?’
Forrester started towards the elevator but the old woman waved him back. ‘She went out – I tried to stop her. She was all dressed up.’
‘Dressed? How?’
‘In . . . in a very extravagant way. She was upset.’
‘Oh, my God . . .’ Forrester caught his breath. ‘Poor Judith – where did she go?’
‘To the hotels.’ Cervera raised a hand and pointed reluctantly towards the Venus hotels.
Forrester found her within half an hour, in the bridal suite on the third floor of one of the hotels. As he ran along the canal road, shouting out Judith’s name, Gould was walking slowly across the footbridge, flying helmet in hand. The dark figure of the young woman, the lenses of her fractured sunglasses like black suns, followed him sightlessly from the door of the hangar as Gould moved along the painted corridor.
When at last he heard Judith’s cry Forrester entered the hotel. In the principal suite on the third floor he discovered her stretched out on the bridal bed, surrounded by the obscene murals a
nd bas-reliefs. She lay back on the dusty lamé bedspread, dressed in a whore’s finery she had put together from her own wardrobe. Like a drunken courtesan in the last hours of pregnancy, she stared glassily at Forrester as if not wanting to recognize him. As he approached she picked up the harness beside her on the bed and tried to strike him with it. Forrester pulled it from her hands. He held her shoulders, hoping to calm her, but his feet slipped in the vibrators and film cassettes strewn about the bed. When he regained his balance Judith was at the door. He ran after her down the corridor, kicking aside the display stands of pornographic magazines outside each bedroom. Judith was fleeing down the staircase, stripping off pieces of her costume. Then, thankfully, he saw Gould waiting for her on the landing below, arms raised to catch her.
At dusk, when Gould and Forrester had taken the distraught woman back to the hotel, the two men stood by the entrance in the dusk.
In an unexpected gesture of concern, Gould touched Forrester’s shoulder. Apart from this, his face remained without expression. ‘She’ll sleep till morning. Ask the practicante to give you some thalidomide for her. You’ll need to sedate her through the next three weeks.’
He pointed to the silver stains on Forrester’s face. ‘These days we’re all wearing our war-paint. You were over at the hangar, just before I landed. Carmen told me that you’d accidentally stepped on her glasses.’
Relieved that the young woman, for whatever reasons, had not betrayed him, Forrester said, ‘I was trying to reassure her – she seemed to be worried that you were overdue.’
‘I’m having to fly further inland now. She’s nervous when I’m not around.’
‘I hadn’t realized that she was . . . blind,’ Forrester said as they walked down the street towards the canal. ‘It’s good of you to look after her. The Spaniards would kill her out of hand if they found her here. What happens when you leave?’
‘She’ll be all right, by then.’ Gould stopped and gazed through the fading light at the causeway of the airstrip. A section of the porous concrete seemed to have collapsed into the sea. Gould nodded to himself, as if working out the time left to him by this fragmenting pier. ‘Now, what about this baby?’
‘It’s another one – the same defects. I’ll get the practicante to deal with it.’
‘Why?’ Before Forrester could reply, Gould took his arm. ‘Forrester, it’s a fair question. Which of us can really decide who has the defects?’
‘The mothers seem to know.’
‘But are they right? I’m beginning to think that a massacre of the innocents has taken place that literally out-Herods Herod. Look, come up with me tomorrow – the Cerveras can look after your wife, she’ll sleep all day. You’ll find it an interesting flight.’
They took off at ten o’clock the following morning. Sitting in the front cockpit, with the draught from the propeller full in his face, Forrester was convinced that they would crash. At full throttle they moved swiftly along the runway, the freshly broken concrete slabs already visible. Forrester looked over his shoulder, hoping that Gould would somehow manage to stop the aircraft before they were killed, but the doctor’s face was hidden behind his goggles, as if he was unaware of the danger. At the last moment, when the cataract of concrete blocks was almost below the wheels, Gould pulled back on the stick. The small aircraft rose steeply, as if jerked into the air by a huge hand. Thirty seconds later Forrester began to breathe.
They levelled out and made a left-hand circuit of the empty resort. Already Gould was pointing with a gloved hand at the patches of phosphorescent paint in the hills above Rosas. Before the take-off, while Forrester sat uncomfortably in the cockpit, wondering why he had accepted this challenge, the young woman had wheeled a drum of liquid over to the aircraft. Gould pumped the contents into the tank which Forrester could see below his feet. As he waited, the young woman walked round to the cockpit and stared up at Forrester, clearly hoping to see something in his face. There was something grotesque, almost comic, about this mongoloid girl surveying the world with her defunct vision through these cracked sunglasses. Perhaps she was disappointed that he was no longer interested in her. Forrester turned away from her sightless stare, thinking of Judith asleep in the darkened hotel room, and the small and unwelcome tenant of her body.
Eight hundred feet below them was a wide valley that led inland towards the foothills of the Pyrenees. The line of low mountains marked the northern wall of the plain of Ampurdan, a rich farming area where even now there were small areas of cultivation. But all the cattle had gone, slaughtered years beforehand.
As they followed the course of the valley, Forrester could see that sections of the pathways and farm tracks which climbed the hills had been sprayed with phosphorescent paint. Panels of silver criss-crossed the sides of the valley.
So this was what Gould had been doing on his flights, painting sections of the mountainside in a huge pop-art display. The doctor was waving down at the valley floor, where a small, shaggy-haired bullock, like a miniature bison, stood in an apparent daze on an isolated promontory. Cutting back the engine, Gould banked the aircraft and flew low over the valley floor, not more than twenty feet above the creature. Forrester was speculating on how this sightless creature, clearly a mutant, had managed to survive, when there was a sudden jolt below his feet. The ventral spraying head had been lowered, and a moment later a huge gust of silver paint was vented into the air and fanned out behind them. It hung there in a luminescent cloud, and then settled to form a narrow brush-stroke down the side of the mountain. Retracting the spraying head, Gould made a steep circuit of the valley. He throttled up his engine and dived over the head of the bullock, driving it down the mountainside from its promontory. As it stumbled left and right, unable to get its bearings, it crossed the silver pathway. Immediately it gathered its legs together and set off at a brisk trot along this private roadway.
For the next hour they flew up the valley, and Forrester saw that these lines of paint sprayed from the air were part of an elaborate series of trails leading into the safety of the mountains. When they finally turned back, circling a remote gorge above a small lake, Forrester was not surprised to see that a herd of several hundred of the creatures had made their home here. Lifting their heads, they seemed to follow Gould as he flew past them. Tirelessly, he laid down more marker lines wherever they were needed, driving any errant cattle back on to the illuminated pathways.
When they landed at Ampuriabrava he waited on the runway as Gould shut down the aircraft. The young woman came out from the darkness inside the hangar, and stood with her arms folded inside her shawl. Forrester noticed that the sides of the aircraft fuselage and tailplane were a brilliant silver, bathed in the metallic spray through which they had endlessly circled. Gould’s helmet and flying-suit, and his own face and shoulders, shone like mirrors, as if they had just alighted from the sun. Curiously, only their eyes, protected by their goggles, were free from the paint, dark orbits into which the young woman gazed as if hoping to find someone of her own kind.
Gould greeted her, handing her his helmet. He stripped off his flying-jacket and ushered her into the hangar.
He pointed across the canal. ‘We’ll have a drink in your bar.’ He led the way diagonally across the car park, ignoring the painted pathways. ‘I think there’s enough on us for Carmen to know where we are. It gives her a sense of security.’
‘How long have you been herding the cattle?’ Forrester asked when they were seated behind the bar.
‘Since the winter. Somehow one herd escaped the farmers’ machetes. Flying down from Perpignan through the Col du Perthus, I noticed them following the aircraft. In some way they could see me, using a different section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Then I realized that I’d sprayed some old landing-light reflector paint on the plane – highly phosphorescent stuff.’
‘But why save them? They couldn’t survive on their own.’
‘Not true – in fact, they’re extremely hardy. By next winter they’ll be a
ble to out-run and out-think everything else around here. Like Carmen – she’s a very bright girl. She’s managed to keep herself going here for years, without being able to see a thing. When I started getting all this paint over me I think I was the first person she’d ever seen.’
Thinking again of Judith’s baby, Forrester shook his head. ‘She looks like a mongol to me – that swollen forehead.’
‘You’re wrong. I’ve found out a lot about her. She has a huge collection of watches with luminous dials, hundreds of them, that she’s been filching for years from the shops. She’s got them all working together but to different times, it’s some sort of gigantic computer. God only knows what overlit world nature is preparing her for, but I suppose we won’t be around to see it.’
Forrester gazed disagreeably into his glass of brandy. For once the Fundador made him feel ill. ‘Gould, are you saying in effect that the child Judith is carrying at this moment is not deformed?’
Gould nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s not deformed at all – any more than Carmen. It’s like the so-called population decline that we’ve all accepted as an obvious truth. In fact, there hasn’t been a decline – except in the sense that we’ve been slaughtering our offspring. Over the past fifty years the birth-rate has gone up, not down.’ Before Forrester could protest, he went on, ‘Try for a moment to retain an open mind – we have this vastly increased sexuality, and an unprecedented fertility. Even your wife has had – what – seven children. Yet why? Isn’t it obvious that we were intended to embark on a huge replacement programme, though sadly the people we’re replacing turn out to be ourselves. Our job is simply to repopulate the world with our successors. As for our need to be alone, this intense enjoyment of our own company, and the absence of any sense of despair, I suppose they’re all nature’s way of saying goodbye.’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 122
