Millennium People
J.G. Ballard

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2003

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 2003

J. G. Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN:9780006551614

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780007371907

Version: 2017-01-04

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

1 The Rebellion at Chelsea Marina

2 The Heathrow Bomb

3 ‘Why Me?’

4 The Last Rival

5 Confrontation at Olympia

6 Rescue

7 Odd Man Out

8 The Sleepwalkers

9 The Upholstered Apocalypse

10 Appointment with a Revolution

11 The Heart of Darkness

12 The Video Store

13 A Neuroscientist Looks at God

14 From Guildford to Terminal 2

15 The Depot of Dreams

16 The Children’s Sanctuary

17 Absolute Zero

18 Black Millennium

19 The Siege of Broadcasting House

20 White Space

21 The Kindness of Light

22 A Visit to the Bunker

23 The Last Stranger

24 The Defence of Grosvenor Place

25 A Celebrity Murder

26 A Wife’s Concern

27 The Bonfire of the Volvos

28 Vital Clues

29 The Long-term Car Park

30 Amateurs and Revolutions

31 The Sentimental Terrorist

32 A Decline in Property Values

33 Giving Himself to the Sun

34 A Task Completed

35 A Sun Without Shadows

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Works by J.G. Ballard

About the Publisher

1 The Rebellion at Chelsea Marina

A SMALL REVOLUTION was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed. Like a visitor to an abandoned film set, I stood by the entrance to Chelsea Marina and listened to the morning traffic in the King’s Road, a reassuring medley of car stereos and ambulance sirens. Beyond the gatehouse were the streets of the deserted estate, an apocalyptic vision deprived of its soundtrack. Protest banners sagged from the balconies, and I counted a dozen overturned cars and at least two burnt-out houses.

Yet none of the shoppers walking past me showed the slightest concern. Another Chelsea party had run out of control, though the guests were too drunk to realize it. And, in a way, this was true. Most of the rebels, and even a few of the ringleaders, never grasped what was happening in this comfortable enclave. But then these likeable and over-educated revolutionaries were rebelling against themselves.

Even I, David Markham, a trained psychologist infiltrated into Chelsea Marina as a police spy – a deception I was the last to discover – failed to see what was going on. But I was distracted by my unusual friendship with Richard Gould, the hard-working paediatrician who was the leader of the revolt – the Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set, as our shared lover, Kay Churchill, christened him. Soon after our first meeting, Richard lost interest in Chelsea Marina and moved on to a far more radical revolution, which he knew was closer to my heart.

I approached the crime-scene tapes that closed the King’s Road entrance to the estate, and showed my pass to the two policemen waiting for the Home Secretary’s arrival. The driver of a florist’s delivery van was arguing with them, pointing to a large display of arum lilies on the seat beside him. I guessed that a local resident, some happily married solicitor or account executive, had been too busy with the revolution to cancel his wife’s birthday bouquet.

The constables were unmoved, refusing to let the driver into the estate. They sensed that something deeply suspect had taken place in this once law-abiding community, an event that required the presence of a cabinet minister and his retinue of worthies. The visitors – Home Office advisers, concerned churchmen, senior social workers and pyschologists, including myself – would begin their tour at noon, in an hour’s time. No armed police would guard us, on the safe assumption that a rebellious middle class was too well mannered to pose a physical threat. But, as I knew all too well, that was the threat.

Appearances proved nothing and everything. The policemen waved me through, barely glancing at my pass. Having been harangued for weeks by articulate mothers in the scruffiest jeans, they knew that my fashionable haircut, courtesy of BBC make-up, dove-grey suit and sunbed tan ruled me out as a native of Chelsea Marina. The residents would die rather than resemble a minor television guru, a renegade intellectual from the dubious world of video-conferencing and airport seminars.

But the suit was a disguise, which I had put on for the first time in six months, after stuffing my torn leather jacket and denims into the dustbin. I sprang lightly over the crime-scene tapes, far fitter than the policemen guessed. The ‘terrorist actions’, as the Home Secretary termed them, had soon toughened up a lazy physique softened by years of boarding lounges and hotel atriums. Even my wife Sally, forever tolerant and never surprised, was impressed by my muscular arms as she counted the bruises left by scuffles with police and security guards.

But a disguise could go too far. Catching sight of myself in the broken windows of the gatehouse, I loosened the knot of my tie. I was still unsure what role I was playing. Richard Gould and I had been seen together so often, and the constables should have recognized me as the chief accomplice of this hunted terrorist. When I waved to them they turned away, scanning the King’s Road for the Home Secretary’s limousine. I felt a pang of disappointment. For a few seconds I had wanted them to challenge me.

In front of me lay Chelsea Marina, its streets empty as never before in its twenty-year existence. The entire population had vanished, leaving a zone of silence like an urban nature reserve. Eight hundred families had fled, abandoning their comfortable kitchens, herb gardens and book-lined living rooms. Without the slightest regret, they had turned their backs on themselves and all they had once believed in.

Beyond the rooftops I could hear the west London traffic, but it faded as I walked down Beaufort Avenue, the estate’s main thoroughfare. The vast metropolis that surrounded Chelsea Marina was still holding its breath. Here the revolution of the middle class had begun, not the uprising of a desperate proletariat, but the rebellion of the educated professional class who were society’s keel and anchor. In these quiet roads, the scene of uncountable dinner parties, surgeons and insurance brokers, architects and health service managers, had built their barricades and overturned their cars to block the fire engines and rescue teams who were trying to save them. They rejected all offers of help, refusing to air their real grievances or to say whether any grievances existed at all.

The siege negotiators sent in by Kensington and Chelsea Council were met first by silence, then by mockery, and finally by petrol bombs. For reasons no one understood, the inhabitants of Chelsea Marina had set about dismantling their middle-class world. They lit bonfires of books and paintings, educational toys and videos. The television news showed families arm in arm, surrounded by overturned cars, their faces proudly lit by the flames.

I passed a fire-gutted BMW, lying wheels uppermost beside the kerb, and stared at its ruptured fuel tank. An airliner cruised over central London, and hundreds of broken windows trembled under the droning engines, as if releasing their last anger. Curiously, the residents who destroyed Chelsea Marina had shown no anger at all. They had quietly discarded their world as if putting out their rubbish for collection.

This uncanny calm and, more worryingly, the residents’ indifference to the huge financial penalties they would pay, had prompted the Home Secretary’s visit. Henry Kendall, a colleague at the Institute with close Home Office contacts, told me that other sites of middle-class unrest were coming to light, in well-to-do suburbs of Guildford, Leeds and Manchester. All over England an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.

I watched the airliner cross the Fulham skyline, then lost it among the exposed roof-beams of a burnt-out house at the end of Beaufort Avenue. Its owners, a local headmistress and her doctor husband, had left Chelsea Marina with their three children, after holding out to the last minutes before the police riot teams overwhelmed them. They had been in the forefront of the rebellion, determined to expose the blatant injustice that ruled their lives. I imagined them endlessly circling the M25 in their muddy Land Rover, locked in a deep trance.

Where had they gone? Many of the residents had retreated to their country cottages, or were staying with friends who supported the struggle with food parcels and cheerful e-mails. Others had set off on indefinite tours of the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands. Towing their trailers, they were the vanguard of an itinerant middle class, a new tribe of university-trained gypsies who knew their law and would raise hell with local councils.

Kay Churchill, the film studies lecturer at South Bank University who became my landlady, was arrested by the police and released on bail. Still proclaiming the revolution, she held forth on an afternoon cable channel. Her cramped but comfortable home, with its shabby sofas and film stills, had been drowned by the powerful hoses of the Chelsea Fire Service.

I missed Kay and her shaky crown of ash-grey hair, her erratic opinions and ever-flowing wine, but her abandoned house was my reason for arriving an hour before the Home Secretary. I hoped that my laptop was still on the coffee table in Kay’s living room, where we had laid out our maps and planned the arson attacks on the National Film Theatre and the Albert Hall. During the final moments of the revolt, as the police helicopters hovered overhead, Kay was so determined to convert the handsome fire chief to her cause that his men had ample time to shatter her windows with their water jets. A neighbour had pulled Kay from the house, but the laptop was still there for the police forensic teams to find.

I reached the end of Beaufort Avenue, at the silent centre of Chelsea Marina. A seven-storey block of flats stood beside Cadogan Circle, banners hanging limply from the balconies and offering their slogans to the unlistening air. I crossed the road to Grosvenor Place, Kay’s raffish cul-de-sac and a reminder of another, older Chelsea. The short road had been home to a convicted antiques dealer, two lesbian marriages and an alcoholic Concorde pilot, and was a haven of bad company and good cheer.

I walked towards Kay’s dishevelled house, listening to my footsteps click behind me, echoes of guilt trying to flee the scene but managing only to approach itself. Distracted by the sight of so many empty houses, I tripped on the kerb and leaned against a builder’s skip heaped with household possessions. The revolutionaries, as ever considerate of their neighbours, had ordered a dozen of these huge containers in the week before the uprising.

A burnt-out Volvo sat beside the road, but the proprieties still ruled, and it had been pushed into a parking bay. The rebels had tidied up after their revolution. Almost all the overturned cars had been righted, keys left in their ignitions, ready for the repossession men.

The skip was filled with books, tennis rackets, children’s toys and a pair of charred skis. Beside a school blazer with scorched piping was an almost new worsted suit, the daytime uniform of a middle-ranking executive, lying among the debris like the discarded fatigues of a soldier who had thrown down his rifle and taken to the hills. The suit seemed strangely vulnerable, the abandoned flag of an entire civilization, and I hoped that one of the Home Secretary’s aides would point it out to him. I tried to think of an answer if I was asked to comment. As a member of the Adler Institute, which specialized in industrial relations and the psychology of the workplace, I was nominally an expert on the emotional life of the office and the mental problems of middle managers. But the suit was difficult to explain away.

Kay Churchill would have known what to reply. As I stepped through the pools of water outside her house I could hear her voice inside my head: bullying, pleading, sensible and utterly mad. The middle class was the new proletariat, the victims of a centuries-old conspiracy, at last throwing off the chains of duty and civic responsibility.

For once, the absurd answer was probably the right one.

The firemen had drenched the house, making sure that Kay would never set it alight. Water still dripped from the eaves, and a faint mist rose from the brickwork. The open-plan living room was a marine grotto, moisture seeping through the cracked ceiling, turning the walls into damp tapestries. I stood between the Ozu and Bresson posters, almost expecting Kay to emerge from the kitchen with two glasses and a bottle of some admirer’s wine, insisting that the battle had been won.

Kay had left, but her cheerful and rackety world was still in place – the Post-it notes on the mirror above the fireplace, the lecture invitations from anarchist groups, and the cairn of white pebbles on the mantelpiece. Each stone, she told me, was a memento of a summer love affair on a Greek beach. Beads of moisture covered the framed photograph of her daughter, now a teenager in Australia, taken on a last holiday before custody was awarded to her husband. Kay had moved on, claiming that memory was a baited trap, last night’s dregs in a lipstick-smeared glass, but sometimes I caught her wiping her tears from the photograph and pressing the frame to her breast.

The sofa where Kay and I had dozed together was a sodden hulk. But my laptop lay among the film scripts and magazines. The hard drive contained more than enough evidence to convict me as Richard Gould’s co-conspirator. There were lists of video stores to be torched, travel agencies to be attacked, galleries and museums to be sabotaged, and the teams of residents assigned to each action. Trying to impress Kay, I had appended notes on the damage done, injuries to team members and likely insurance claims. Tapping out these unnecessary details, Kay’s arm warmly around my shoulders, I sometimes felt that I was unrolling a carpet that ran straight to my prison cell.

Thinking fondly about Kay, I reached out to straighten the portrait of her daughter. A shard of glass slipped from the frame and cut my palm, lightly severing the life-line. As I stared at the bright smear and searched for my handkerchief, I realized that this was the only blood I had shed in Chelsea Marina during the entire rebellion.

Laptop under my arm, I closed the front door behind me. I stared for a last time at the wooden panelling, and in the smooth enamel saw a window move and catch the sun. An open casement swung on the top floor of the apartment building beside Cadogan Circle. Bizarrely, a hand reached out and cleaned the panes, shook a duster and then withdrew.

I stepped into the street and walked towards the apartments, passing a burnt-out Saab sitting in its long-term bay. Were squatters moving into Chelsea Marina, giving up their soft drugs and hard mattresses? Were they ready to try a new lifestyle, to face the problems of school fees and Brazilian daily helps, ballet classes and BUPA subscriptions? Our modest revolution would become part of the folkloric calendar, to be celebrated along with the last night of the Proms and the Wimbledon tennis fortnight.

Pressing the handkerchief to my palm, I pumped the elevator buttons in the hall of the apartment building. Frustratingly, all electric power to Chelsea Marina had been disconnected. I climbed the stairs, resting on each landing, surrounded by the open doors of abandoned apartments, an actor searching for the right stage set. I was light-headed when I reached the top floor. Without thinking, I pushed back the unlocked door and stared across the empty living room at the window that had swung in the sunlight.

A third-floor tenant of the same apartment house, Vera Blackburn, was a former government scientist and a close friend of Kay Churchill’s. I remembered that the top-floor flat was owned by a young optician and her husband. The living-room windows had the clearest views in Chelsea Marina, looking down Beaufort Avenue along the route that the Home Secretary would take on his inspection tour.

I stepped over a discarded suitcase and entered the room. A blue canvas bag lay on the desk, its side embossed with the seal of the Metropolitan Police, part of the equipment carried by riot-control teams. Inside would be stun guns, canisters of tear gas and the cattle prods with which the police defended themselves against their ever-present enemies.

The laptop had grown more heavy in my hand, a half-conscious warning signal. I could hear two people speaking in the nearby bedroom, a man’s curt but low tones and a woman’s sharper replies. I assumed that a police constable and a woman colleague were keeping watch on the Home Secretary’s approach. Methodical to a fault, they had wiped the windows to give themselves the clearest view possible of the Cabinet Minister and his sagely nodding advisers. Finding me in their observation post, they would assume the worst, and soon decide that a psychologist’s laptop was a potentially offensive weapon.

Trying not to trip over the suitcase, I edged towards the door, aware for the first time of the optician’s diagrams pinned to the wall above the desk, target-like circles and rows of meaningless letters that resembled coded messages.

The bedroom door opened and a distracted man in a shabby suit stepped into the living room. The sun was behind him, but I could see his undernourished face, and the light flaring off his high temples. He noticed me, but seemed preoccupied with a problem of his own, as if I were a patient who had called at his surgery without an appointment. He stared through the window at the empty streets and fire-damaged houses with the tired gaze of an overworked doctor trying to carry out his medical work in a wartorn Middle East suburb.

At last he turned to me, smiling with a sudden show of warmth.

‘David? Come in. We’ve all been waiting for you.’

Despite myself, I knew that I was eager to see him.

2 The Heathrow Bomb

MY SEDUCTION BY Dr Richard Gould, and the revolution he launched at Chelsea Marina, began only four months earlier, though I often felt that I had known this disgraced children’s doctor since my student years. He was the maverick who attended no lectures and sat no exams, a solitary with an unpressed suit and a syllabus of his own, but who managed to move on to a postgraduate degree and a successful professional career. He came into our lives like a figure from one of tomorrow’s dreams, a stranger who took for granted that we would become his most devoted disciples.

A telephone call was our first warning of Gould’s arrival. My mobile rang as we were leaving for Heathrow Airport and a three-day conference of industrial psychologists in Florida. I was steering Sally down the staircase and assumed the call was one of those last-minute messages from the Institute designed to unsettle my flight across the Atlantic – the resignation of a valued secretary, the news that a much-liked colleague had gone into rehab, an urgent e-mail from a company chairman who had discovered Jung’s theory of archetypes and was convinced that it outlined the future of kitchenware design.

I left Sally to answer the phone while I took our suitcases into the hall. A natural mender and healer, she had the knack of making everyone feel better. Within minutes the check-in queues at Heathrow would melt away, and the Atlantic would smooth itself into a dance floor. I stood outside the front door and scanned the crescent for our hire car. A few taxis penetrated into this quiet turning off the Abbey Road, but were soon commandeered by Beatles fans making their pilgrimage to the recording studios, or by well-lunched MCC members swaying from Lord’s cricket ground into the unsettling world beyond pad and crease. I had booked the car to arrive two hours before our Miami flight from Terminal 3, but the usually reliable Mr Prashar was already twenty minutes late.

Sally was still on the phone when I returned to the sitting room. She leaned against the mantelpiece, smoothing her shoulder-length hair with a casual hand, as handsome as an actress in a thirties Hollywood film. Mirrors held their breath around Sally.

‘So…’ She switched off the phone. ‘We wait and hope.’

‘Sally? Who was that? Not Professor Arnold, please…’

Gripping a walking stick in each hand, Sally swayed from the mantelpiece. I stepped back, as always humouring her little fantasy that she was handicapped. Only the previous afternoon she had played ping-pong with a colleague’s wife, sticks forgotten on the table as she batted the ball to and fro. She had not needed the sticks for months, but still reached for them at moments of stress.

‘Your friend Mr Prashar.’ She leaned against me, scented scalp pressed to my cheek. ‘There’s a problem at Heathrow. Tailbacks as far as Kew. He thinks there’s no point in leaving until they clear.’

‘What about the flight?’

‘Delayed. Nothing’s taking off. The whole airport is down.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Have a large drink.’ Sally pushed me towards the liquor cabinet. ‘Prashar will ring in fifteen minutes. At least he cares.’

‘Right.’ As I poured two Scotch and sodas I glanced through the window at Sally’s car, with its fading disability sticker on the windscreen, wheelchair folded in the rear seat. ‘Sally, I can drive us there. We’ll take your car.’

‘Mine? You can’t cope with the controls.’

‘Dear, I designed them. I’ll use the hard shoulder, headlights, plenty of horn. We’ll leave it in the short-term car park. It’s better than sitting here.’

‘Here we can get drunk.’

Lying back on the sofa, Sally raised her glass, trying to revive me. The war of succession at the Adler, the struggle to replace Professor Arnold, had left me tired and scratchy, and she was keen to get me to the other side of the Atlantic. The conference at Celebration, Disney’s model community in Florida, was a useful chance to park an exhausted husband by a hotel swimming pool. Travelling abroad was an effort for her – the knee-jarring geometry of taxis and bathrooms, and the American psychologists who saw a glamorous woman swaying on her sticks as a special kind of erotic challenge. But Sally was always game, even if for much of the time her only company would be the minibar.

I lay beside her on the sofa, our glasses tapping, and listened to the traffic. It was noisier than usual, the Heathrow tailback feeding its frustration into inner London.

‘Ten minutes.’ I finished my Scotch, already thinking not of the next drink, but of the one after that. ‘I have a feeling we’re not going to make it.’

‘Relax…’ Sally poured her whisky into my glass. ‘You didn’t want to go in the first place.’

‘Yes and no. It’s having to shake hands with Mickey Mouse that drives me up the wall. Americans love these Disney hotels.’

‘Don’t be mean. They remind them of their childhoods.’

‘Childhoods they didn’t actually have. What about the rest of us – why do we have to be reminded of American childhoods?’

‘That’s the modern world in a nutshell.’ Sally sniffed her empty glass, nostrils flaring like the gills of an exotic and delicate fish. ‘At least it gets you away.’

‘All these trips? Let’s face it, they’re just a delusion. Air travel, the whole Heathrow thing, it’s a collective flight from reality. People walk up to the check-ins and for once in their lives they know where they’re going. Poor sods, it’s printed on their tickets. Look at me, Sally. I’m just as bad. Flying off to Florida isn’t what I really want to do. It’s a substitute for resigning from the Adler. I haven’t the courage to do that.’

‘You have.’

‘Not yet. It’s a safe haven, a glorified university department packed with ambitious neurotics. Think of it – there are thirty senior psychologists cooped up together, and every one of them hated his father.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I never met him. It was the one good thing my mother did for me. Now, where’s Prashar?’

I stood up and went to the telephone. Sally picked up the TV remote from the carpet and switched on the lunchtime news. The picture swam into view, and I recognized a familiar airport concourse.

‘David…look.’ Sally sat forward, gripping the sticks beside her feet. ‘Something awful…’

I listened to Prashar’s voice, but my eyes were held by the news bulletin. The reporter’s commentary was drowned by the wailing of police sirens. He stepped back from the camera as an ambulance team pushed a trolley through the mêlée of passengers and airline personnel. A barely conscious woman lay on the trolley, rags of clothing across her chest, blood speckling her arms. Dust swirled in the air, billowing above the boutiques and bureaux de change, a frantic microclimate trying to escape through the ventilator ducts.

Behind the trolley was the main arrivals gate of Terminal 2, guarded by police armed with sub-machine guns. A harried group of hire-car drivers waited at the barrier, the names flagged on their cardboard signs already at half-mast. A man carrying an executive briefcase stepped from the arrivals gate, the sleeveless jacket of his double-breasted suit exposing a bloodied arm. He stared at the signs raised towards him, as if trying to remember his own name. Two paramedics and an Aer Lingus hostess knelt on the floor, treating an exhausted passenger who clutched an empty suitcase that had lost its lid.

‘Mr Markham?’ A voice sounded faintly in my ear. ‘This is Prashar speaking…’

Without thinking, I switched off the phone. I stood beside the sofa, my hands steadying Sally’s shoulders. She was shivering like a child, her fingers wiping her nose, as if the violent images on the screen reminded her of her own near-fatal accident.

‘Sally, you’re safe here. You’re with me.’

‘I’m fine.’ She calmed herself and pointed to the set. ‘There was a bomb on a baggage carousel. David, we might have been there. Was anyone killed?’

‘”Three dead, twenty-six injured…”’ I read the caption on the screen. ‘Let’s hope there are no children.’

Sally fumbled with the remote control, turning up the sound. ‘Don’t they issue a warning? Codewords the police recognize? Why bomb the arrivals lounge?’

‘Some people are mad. Sally, we’re all right.’

‘No one is all right.’

She held my arm and made me sit beside her. Together we stared at the pictures from the concourse. Police, first-aid crews and duty-free staff were helping injured passengers to the waiting ambulances. Then the picture changed, and we were watching an amateur video taken by a passenger who had entered the baggage-reclaim area soon after the explosion. The film-maker stood with his back to the customs checkpoints, evidently too shocked by the violence that had torn through the crowded hall to put down his camera and offer help to the victims.

Dust seethed below the ceiling, swirling around the torn sections of strip lighting that hung from the roof. Overturned trollies lay on the floor, buckled by the blast. Stunned passengers sat beside their suitcases, clothes stripped from their backs, covered with blood and fragments of leather and glass.

The video camera lingered on the stationary carousel, its panels splayed like rubber fans. The baggage chute was still discharging suitcases, and a set of golf clubs and a child’s pushchair tumbled together among the heaped luggage.

Ten feet away, two injured passengers sat on the floor, watching the suitcases emerge from the chute. One was a man in his twenties, wearing jeans and the rags of a plastic windcheater. When the first rescuers reached him, a policeman and an airport security guard, the young man began to comfort a middle-aged African lying beside him.

The other passenger gazing at the baggage chute was a woman in her late thirties, with a sharp forehead and a bony but attractive face, dark hair knotted behind her. She wore a tailored black suit pitted with glass, like the sequinned tuxedo of a nightclub hostess. A piece of flying debris had drawn blood from her lower lip, but she seemed almost untouched by the explosion. She brushed the dust from her sleeve and stared sombrely at the confusion around her, a busy professional late for her next appointment.

‘David…?’ Sally reached for her sticks. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I left the sofa and knelt in front of the screen, nearly certain that I recognized the woman. But the amateur cameraman turned to survey the ceiling, where a fluorescent tube was discharging a cascade of sparks, fireworks in a madhouse. ‘I think that’s someone I know.’

‘The woman in the dark suit?’

‘It’s hard to tell. Her face reminded me of…’ I looked at my watch, and noticed our luggage in the hall. ‘We’ve missed our flight to Miami.’

‘Never mind. This woman you saw – was it Laura?’

‘I think so.’ I took Sally’s hands, noticing how steady they felt. ‘It did look like her.’

‘It can’t be.’ Sally left me and sat on the sofa, searching for her whisky. The news bulletin had returned to the concourse, where the hire-car drivers were walking away, placards lowered. ‘There’s a contact number for relatives. I’ll dial it for you.’

‘Sally, I’m not a relative.’

‘You were married for eight years.’ Sally spoke matter-of-factly, as if describing my membership of a disbanded lunching club. ‘They’ll tell you how she is.’

‘She looked all right. It might have been Laura. That expression of hers, always impatient…’

‘Call Henry Kendall at the Institute. He’ll know.’

‘Henry? Why?’

‘He’s living with Laura.’

‘True. Still, I don’t want to panic the poor man. What if I’m wrong?’

‘I don’t think you are.’ Sally spoke in her quietest voice, a sensible teenager talking to a rattled parent. ‘You need to find out. Laura meant a lot to you.’

‘That was a long time ago.’ Aware of her faintly threatening tone, I said: ‘Sally, I met you.’

‘Call him.’

I walked across the room, turning my back to the television screen. Holding the mobile, I drummed my fingers on the mantelpiece, and tried to smile at the photograph of Sally sitting in her wheelchair between her parents, taken at St Mary’s Hospital on the day of our engagement. Standing behind her in my white lab coat, I seemed remarkably confident, as if I knew for the first time in my life that I was going to be happy.

The mobile rang before I could dial the Institute’s number. Through the hubbub of background noise, the wailing of ambulance sirens and the shouts of emergency personnel, I heard Henry Kendall’s raised voice.

He was calling from Ashford Hospital, close to Heathrow. Laura had been caught by the bomb blast in Terminal 2. Among the first to be evacuated, she had collapsed in Emergency, and now lay in the intensive-care unit. Henry managed to control himself, but his voice burst into a torrent of confused anger, and he admitted that he had asked Laura to take a later flight from Zurich so that he could keep an Institute appointment and meet her at the airport.

‘The Publications Committee…Arnold asked me to chair it. For God’s sake, he was refereeing his own bloody paper! If I’d refused, Laura would still be…’

‘Henry, we’ve all done it. You can’t blame yourself…’ I tried to reassure him, thinking of the stream of blood from Laura’s mouth. For some reason, I felt closely involved in the crime, as if I had placed the bomb on the carousel.

The dialling tone sounded against my ear, a fading signal from another world. For a few minutes all the lines to reality had been severed. I looked at myself in the mirror, puzzled by the travel clothes I was wearing, the lightweight jacket and sports shirt, the tactless costume of a beach tourist who had strayed into a funeral. There was already a shadow on my cheeks, as if the shock of the Heathrow bomb had forced my beard to grow. My face looked harassed and shifty in a peculiarly English way, the wary glower of a deviant master at a minor prep school.

‘David…’ Sally stood up, the sticks forgotten. Her face seemed smaller and more pointed, mouth pursed above a childlike chin. She took the mobile from me and gripped my hands. ‘You’re all right. Bad luck for Laura.’

‘I know.’ I embraced her, thinking of the bomb. If the terrorist had chosen Terminal 3, an hour or two later, Sally and I might have been lying together in intensive care. ‘God knows why, but I feel responsible.’

‘Of course you do. She was important to you.’ She stared at me, calmly nodding to herself, almost convinced that she had caught me in a minor but telling gaffe. ‘David, you must go.’

‘Where? The Institute?’

‘Ashford Hospital. Take my car. You’ll get through faster.’

‘Why? Henry will be with her. Laura isn’t part of my life. Sally…?’

‘Not for her sake. For yours.’ Sally turned her back to me. ‘You don’t love her, I know that. But you still hate her. That’s why you have to go.’

3 Why Me?

WE REACHED ASHFORD HOSPITAL an hour later, a short journey into a very distant past. Sally drove with verve and flourish, her right hand gripping the accelerator control mounted beside the steering wheel, working the throttle like a fighter pilot, left hand releasing the brake lever next to the gate of the automatic transmission. I had designed the controls, helped by an ergonomics specialist at the Institute, who had taken Sally’s measurements with the painstaking care of a Savile Row tailor. By now she had recovered all the strength in her legs, and I suggested that we ask the Saab garage to reconvert the car. But Sally liked the adapted controls, the special skills unique to herself. When I gave in, she teased me that I secretly enjoyed the perverse thrill of having a handicapped wife.

Whatever my motives, I watched her with husbandly pride. She steered the Saab through the dense midday traffic, flashing the headlights at the overworked police on the motorway, fiercely tapping the handicapped driver’s sticker on the windscreen. Seeing the wheelchair on the rear seat, they waved us onto the hard shoulder, a high-speed alley that only a glamorous woman could make her own.

As we sped along, hazard lights flashing, I almost believed that Sally was eager to meet her one-time rival, now lying in the intensive-care unit. In a sense, a kind of justice had been done. Sally had always seen her accident as a random event, a cruel deficit in the moral order of existence that placed it firmly in her debt.

Sightseeing with her mother in the Bairro Alto district of Lisbon, a maze of steeply climbing streets, Sally had crossed the road behind a stationary tram. The fleet of ancient vehicles with their wooden panelling and cast-iron frames had been installed by British engineers almost a century earlier. But charm and industrial archaeology both came at a price. The tram’s brakes failed for a few seconds, and it rolled backwards before the safety clutch locked the wheels, knocking Sally to the ground and trapping her legs under the massive chassis.

I met Sally in the orthopaedic wing at St Mary’s, at first sight a plucky young woman determined to get well but inexplicably not responding to treatment. The months of physiotherapy had produced a grumpy temper, and even a few foul-mouthed tantrums. I overheard one of these tirades, an ugly storm in a private suite, and put her down as the spoilt daughter of a Birmingham industrialist who flew to see her in the company helicopter and indulged every whim

I visited St Mary’s once a week, supervising a new diagnostic system developed in collaboration with the Adler. Instead of facing a tired consultant eager for a large gin and a hot bath, the patient sat at a screen, pressing buttons in reply to prerecorded questions from a fresh-faced and smiling doctor, played by a sympathetic actor. To the consultants’ surprise, and relief, the patients preferred the computerized image to a real physician. Desperate to get Sally onto her feet, and well aware that her handicaps were ‘elective’, in the tactful jargon, her surgeon suggested that we sit Sally in front of the prototype machine.

I distrusted the project, which treated patients like children in a video arcade, but it brought Sally and me together. I rewrote the dialogue of a peptic ulcer programme, adapting the questions to Sally’s case, put on a white coat in front of the camera and played the caring doctor.

Sally happily pressed the response buttons, revealing all her anger over the injustice of her accident. But a few days later she swerved past me in the corridor, almost running me down. Pausing to apologize, she was amazed to find that I existed. Over the next days her good humour returned, and she enjoyed mimicking my wooden acting. As I sat on her bed she teased me that I was not completely real. We talked to each other in our recorded voices, a courtship of imbeciles that I was careful not to take seriously.

But a deeper, unspoken dialogue drew us together. I called in every day, and the nursing staff told me that when I was late Sally climbed from her bed and searched for me, dispensing with her wheelchair. As I soon learned, she was a more subtle psychologist than I was. Gripping her volume of Frida Kahlo paintings, she asked me if I could track down the make of tram that had injured Kahlo in Mexico City. Was the manufacturer by any chance an English firm?

I could grasp the anger that linked the two women, but Kahlo had been grievously wounded by a steel rail that pierced her uterus and gave her a lifetime of pain. Sally had crossed a foreign street without looking to left or right, and lost nothing of her beauty. It was her curious obsession with the random nature of the accident that prevented her from walking. Unable to resolve the conundrum, she insisted that she was a cripple in a wheelchair, sharing her plight with other victims of meaningless accidents.

‘So you’re on strike,’ I told her. ‘You’re conducting your own sit-in against the universe.’

‘I’m waiting for an answer, Mr Markham.’ She played with her hair as she lay back against three huge pillows. ‘It’s the most important question there is.’

‘Go on.’

‘”Why me?” Answer it. You can’t.’

‘Sally…does it matter? It’s a fluke we’re alive at all. The chances of our parents meeting were millions to one against. We’re tickets in a lottery.’

‘But a lottery isn’t meaningless. Someone has to win.’ She paused to get my attention. ‘Like our meeting here. That wasn’t meaningless…’

Heathrow approached, a beached sky-city, half space station and half shanty town. We left the motorway and moved along the Great West Road, entering a zone of two-storey factories, car-rental offices and giant reservoirs. We were part of an invisible marine world that managed to combine mystery and boredom. In a way it seemed fitting that my former wife was lying in a hospital here, within call of life and death, in an area that hovered between waking and the dream.

Sally drove with more than her usual zest, overtaking on the inside, jumping the red lights, even hooting a police car out of her way. The Heathrow bomb had recharged her. This vicious and deranged attack confirmed her suspicions of the despotism of fate. For all her wifely concern, she was eager to visit Ashford Hospital, not only to free me from my memories of an unhappy marriage, but to convince herself that there was no meaning or purpose in the terrorist bomb. Already I was hoping that Laura had made a sudden recovery and was on her way back to London with Henry Kendall.

I switched on the radio and tuned in to the reports of rescue work at Terminal 2. The airport was closed indefinitely, as police searched for explosives in the other three terminals. Scarcely noticed by the newspapers, several small bombs had detonated in London during the summer, mostly smoke and incendiary devices unclaimed by any terrorist group, part of the strange metropolitan weather. Bombs were left in a Shepherd’s Bush shopping mall and a cineplex in Chelsea. There were no warnings and, luckily, no casualties. A quiet fever burned in the mind of some brooding solitary, a candle of disaffection that threw ever-longer shadows. Yet I only heard about the incendiary device that destroyed a McDonald’s in the Finchley Road, a mile from our house, when I glanced through the local free-sheet left by Sally’s manicurist. London was under siege from a shy, invisible enemy.

‘We’re here,’ Sally told me. ‘Now, take it easy.’

We had reached Ashford Hospital. Outside the Accident and Emergency entrance the ambulance lights rotated ceaselessly, hungry radars eager to suck any news of pain and injury from the sky. Paramedics sipped their mugs of tea, ready to be recalled to Heathrow.

‘Sally, you must be tired.’ I smoothed her hair as we waited to enter the car park. ‘Do you want to stay outside?’

‘I’ll come in.’

‘It could be nasty.’

‘It’s nasty out here. This is for me, too, David.’

She released the brake lever, pulled sharply onto the pavement and overtook a Jaguar driven by an elderly nun. A security man leaned through Sally’s window, noticed the adapted controls and beckoned us into the car park of a nearby supermarket, where the police had set up a command post.

The Jaguar pulled in beside us, and the nun stepped out and opened the door for a grey-haired priest, some monsignor ready to give the last rites. I was helping Sally from the car when I noticed a bearded figure in a white raincoat outside the Accident and Emergency entrance. He was staring over the heads of the police and ambulance drivers, eyes fixed on the silent sky, as if expecting a long-awaited aircraft to fly over the hospital and break the spell. He carried a woman’s handbag, holding it against his chest, a life-support package that might work its desperate miracle.

Distractedly, he offered the bag to a concerned paramedic who spoke to him. His eyes were hidden by the ambulance lights, but I could see his mouth opening and closing, a subvocal speech addressed to no one around him. Despite all our years at the Adler, the tiresome clients and their impossible secretaries, this was the first time I had seen Henry Kendall completely at a loss.

‘David?’ Sally waited for me to lift her from the driving seat. When I hesitated, she moved her legs out of the car, seized the door pillar in both hands and stood up. Around her were endless rows of parked cars, a silent congregation that worshipped death. ‘Has something happened?’

‘It looks like it. Henry’s over there.’

‘Grim…’ Sally followed my raised hand. ‘He’s waiting for you.’

‘Poor man, he’s not waiting for anything.’

‘Laura? She can’t be…’

‘Stay here. I’ll talk to him. If he can hear anything I say…’

Five minutes later, after trying to comfort Henry, I walked back to Sally. She stood by the car, a stick in each hand, blonde hair falling across her shoulders. Carrying Laura’s handbag, I stepped around the monsignor’s Jaguar, sorry that our aggressive driving had delayed his arrival by even a few seconds.

I embraced Sally tightly, aware that I was trembling. I held the handbag under my arm, realizing that Laura’s death had driven a small space between us.

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