Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"
Автор книги: James Graham Ballard
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 113 страниц)
The next day at the store Mr Goddard made his usual rounds, dispensing his invariable prescription of friendly chatter and bonhomie to sales assistants and customers alike, making full use of the countless trivial insights he had been provided with the previous evening. All the while he kept a constant lookout for Mr Durrant; reluctant to interfere, he was nevertheless afraid that without some drastic re-direction of the man’s fortunes his entanglement with the bookmaker would soon end in tragedy.
No one in the stockrooms had seen Durrant all morning, but shortly after 12 o’clock Mr Goddard spotted him hurrying down the street past the main entrance. Durrant stopped, glanced around indecisively, then began to wander through the showcases as he pondered something.
Mr Goddard made his way out, and casually sidled up to Durrant.
‘Fine day, isn’t it?’ he remarked. ‘Everybody’s starting to think about their holidays.’
Durrant nodded absently, examining a display of alpine equipment in the sports-goods window. ‘Are they? Good.’
‘You going away, Mr Durrant? South of France again, I suppose.’
‘What? No, I don’t think we will be this year.’ Durrant began to move off, but Mr Goddard caught up with him.
‘Sorry to hear that, Mr Durrant. I thought you deserved a good holiday abroad. Nothing the trouble, I hope.’ He looked searchingly into Durrant’s face. ‘If I can help at all, do let me know. I’d be glad to make you a small loan. An old man like me, hasn’t much use for it.’
Durrant stopped and peered thoughtfully at Mr Goddard. ‘That’s kind of you, Goddard,’ he said at last. ‘Very kind.’
Mr Goddard smiled deprecatingly. ‘Don’t give it a thought. I like to stand by the firm, you know. Forgive me mentioning it, but would fifty be any use to you?’
Durrant’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Yes, it would be a lot of use.’ He paused, then asked quietly: ‘Are you doing this off your own bat, or did Sellings put you up to it?’
‘Put me up to it—?’
Durrant closed the interval between them, and in a harder voice rapped out: ‘You must have been following me around for days. You know just about everything about everybody, don’t you, Goddard? I’ve a damn good mind to report you.’
Mr Goddard backed away, wondering how to retrieve the situation. Just then he noticed that they were alone at the showcases. The groups of people who usually milled around the windows were pressing into the alleyway beside the store; there was a lot of shouting in the distance.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Durrant snapped. He joined the crowd in the alleyway and peered over the heads.
Mr Goddard hurried back into the store. All the assistants were craning over their shoulders and whispering to each other; some had left the counters and were gathering around the service doors at the rear.
Mr Goddard pushed his way through, someone was calling for the police and a woman from the personnel department came down in the freight lift carrying a pair of blankets.
The commissionaire holding the throng back let Mr Goddard past. In the yard outside was a group of fifteen or twenty people, all looking up at the fifth-floor balcony. Tied to the railings was the lower half of a home-made ladder, jutting up into the air at an angle of 45 degrees. The top section, a limb about twelve feet long, had been lashed to the upper end, but the joint had failed, and the section now hung down vertically, swinging slowly from side to side above the heads of the people in the yard.
With an effort Mr Goddard controlled his voice. Someone had covered the two bodies with the blankets, and a man kneeling beside them presumably a doctor – was shaking his head slowly.
‘What I can’t understand,’ one of the assistant managers was whispering to the commissionaire, ‘is where they were trying to climb to. The ladder must have pointed straight up into the air.’
The commissionaire nodded. ‘Mr Masterman and Mr Streatfield, too. What would they be building a ladder for, senior men like that?’
Mr Goddard followed the line of the ladder up towards the sky. The rear wall of the yard was only seven or eight feet high, beyond it lay the galvanized iron roof of a bicycle shed and an open car park. The ladder had pointed nowhere, but the compulsion driving the two men had been blind and irresistible.
That evening Mr Goddard made the rounds of his house more perfunctorily than usual, glanced briefly into the empty rooms, closing the doors before the cat had a chance to do more than test the air. He shut it into the kitchen, then hurried off to unlock the safe.
Carrying the box out into the centre of the floor, he unlatched the lid.
As the town came to life below him he scrutinized it carefully, moving up and down the miniature streets, peering through all the windows in turn, fixing the identity and role of as many as possible of the tiny inhabitants. Like a thousand shuttles weaving an infinitely intricate pattern, they threaded through the shops and offices, in and out of countless doorways, every one of them touching a score of others somewhere among the pavements and arcades, adding another stitch to the tapestry of incident and motive ravelling their lives together. Mr Goddard traced each thread, trying to detect any shift in direction, and untoward interlocking of behaviour.
The pattern, he realized, was changing. As yet it was undefined, but slight variations were apparent, subtle shifts in the relationships between the people in the box: rival storekeepers seemed to be on intimate terms, strangers had begun to talk to each other, there was a great deal of unnecessary and purposeless activity.
Mr Goddard searched for a focus, an incident that would unmask the sources of the new pattern. He examined the balcony behind the lift shaft, watching for any further attempts to escape. The ladder had been removed but nothing had been done to replace it. Other potential escape routes the roof of the cinema, the clock tower of the town hail – revealed no further clues.
One incident alone stood out, puzzling him even more. This was the unique spectacle, in a quiet alcove of the billiards saloon, of Mr Durrant introducing his bank manager to the bookmaker. The trio were still in earnest conversation when he closed the box reluctantly at two o’clock the next morning.
Over the following days Mr Goddard watched the crowds passing through the store, waiting to detect, as it were in the macrocosm, some of the tendencies he had observed in the box. His sixty-fifth birthday, soon due to fall, was a handy topic which provided ready conversational access to the senior members of the staff. Curiously, however, the friendly responses he expected were missing; the exchanges were brief, sometimes almost to the point of rudeness. This he put down to the changed atmosphere in the store since the deaths of the two ladder climbers. At the inquest there had been a confused hysterical outburst by one of the saleswomen, and the coroner had cryptically remarked that it appeared that information was being deliberately withheld. A murmur of agreement had spontaneously swept the entire room, but what exactly he meant no one seemed to know.
Another symptom of this uneasiness was the rash of notices that were handed in. Almost a third of the staff were due to leave, most of them for reasons that were patently little more than excuses. When Mr Goddard probed for the real reasons he discovered that few people were aware of them. The motivation was purely unconscious.
As if to emphasize this intrusion of the irrational, one evening as Mr Goddard was leaving the store he saw the bank manager standing high above the street on the clock tower of the town hall, gazing up into the sky.
During the next week little occurred within the box to clarify the situation. The shifting and regrouping of relationships continued. He saw the bank manager more and more in the company of the bookmaker, and realized that he had been completely mistaken in assuming that Durrant was under pressure of his gambling debts – in fact, his role seemed to be that of intermediary between the bookmaker and bank manager, who had at last been persuaded to join them in their scheme.
That some sort of conspiracy was afoot he was sure. At first he assumed that a mass break-out from the box was being planned, but nothing confirmed this. Rather he felt that some obscure compulsion, as yet unidentified to itself, was generating within the minds of those in the box, reflected in the bizarre and unpredictable behaviour of their counterparts in the outside world. Unconscious of their own motives and only half aware of themselves, his fellow employees at the store had begun to resemble the pieces of some enormous puzzle, like disjointed images fixed in the fragments of a shattered mirror. In conclusion he decided on a policy of laissez-faire. A few more weeks would certainly reveal the sources of the conspiracy.
Unfortunately, sooner than Mr Goddard anticipated, events moved forward rapidly to a spectacular crisis.
The day of his sixty-fifth birthday, he made his way to the store half an hour later than usual, and on arrival was told that Mr Sellings wished to see him.
Sellings first offered his congratulations, then launched into a recapitulation of Mr Goddard’s years of service to the store, and concluded by wishing him as many years again of contented retirement.
It took Mr Goddard several moments to grasp the real significance of this. Nothing had ever been said to him about his retirement, and he had always assumed that he would stay on until, like many members of the staff, he was well into his seventies.
Collecting himself, he said as much to Sellings. ‘I haven’t exactly been expecting retirement, Mr Sellings. I think there must have been some mistake.’
Sellings stood up, shaking his head with a quick smile. ‘No mistake at all, Mr Goddard, I assure you. As a matter of fact the board carefully considered your case yesterday, and we agreed that you well deserve an uninterrupted rest after all these years.’
Mr Goddard frowned. ‘But I don’t wish to retire, sir. I’ve made no plans.’
‘Well, now’s the time to start.’ Sellings was on his way to the door, handshake ready. ‘Comfortable pension, little house of your own, the world’s your oyster.’
Mr Goddard sat tight, thinking quickly. ‘Mr Sellings, I’m afraid I can’t accept the board’s decision. I’m sure, for the sake of the business, I should stay on in my present post.’ The smile had gone from Sellings’ face; he looked impatient and irritable. ‘If you were to ask the floor managers and assistants, not to speak of the customers, they would all insist that I stay on. They would be very shocked at the suggestion of retirement.’
‘Would they?’ Sellings asked curtly. ‘My information is to the contrary. Believe me, your retirement has come at a very lucky time for you, Mr Goddard. I’ve had a great number of complaints recently that otherwise I should have been obliged to act upon. Promptly and drastically.’
As he left the accounts department for the last time Mr Goddard numbly repeated these words to himself. He found them almost impossible to believe. And yet Sellings was a responsible man who would never take a single opinion on such an important matter. Somehow, though, he was colossally in error.
Or was he? As he made his farewell rounds, half-hoping that the news of his sudden retirement would rally support to him, Mr Goddard realized that Sellings was right. Floor by floor, department by department, counter by counter, he recognized the same inner expression, the same attitude of tacit approval. They were all glad he was going. Not one of them showed real regret; a good number slipped away before he could shake hands with them, others merely grunted briefly. Several of the older hands, who had known Mr Goddard for twenty or thirty years, seemed slightly embarrassed, but none of them offered a word of sympathy.
Finally, when one group in the furniture department deliberately turned their backs to avoid speaking to him, Mr Goddard cut short his tour. Stunned and humiliated, he collected his few possessions from his locker and made his way out.
It seemed to take him all day to reach his house. Head down, he walked slowly along the quiet side-streets, oblivious of the passers-by, pathetically trying to absorb this blow to all he had assumed about himself for so many years. His interest in other people was sincere and unaffected, he knew without doubt. Countless times he had gone out of his way to be of help to others, had put endless thought into arriving at the best solutions to their problems. But with what result? He had aroused only contempt, envy and distrust.
On his doorstep the cat waited patiently. Surprised to see him so early it ran forward, purring and rubbing itself against his legs as he latched the gate. But Mr Goddard failed to notice it. Fumbling, he unlocked the kitchen door, closed it automatically behind him. Taking off his coat, he made himself some tea, and without thinking poured a saucer of milk for the cat. He watched it drink, still trying helplessly to understand the antagonism he had aroused in so many people.
Suddenly he pushed his tea away and went to the door. Without bothering to go upstairs he made his way straight into the lounge. Switching on the light, he stared heavily at the safe. Somewhere here, he knew, was the reason for his dismissal that morning. If only his eyes were sharp enough, he would discover it.
Unlocking the safe, he unclasped the door and pulled it back abruptly, wrenching himself slightly against its great inertia. Impatient to open the box he ignored the twinge in his shoulder, reached down and seized the butterfly handles.
As he swung the box out of the safe he realized that its weight was, momentarily, too much for him. Trying to brace himself, he edged one knee under the box and leaned his elbows on the lid, his shoulder against the safe.
The position was awkward, and he could only support it for a few seconds. Heaving again at the box, in an effort to replace it in the safe, he suddenly began to feel dizzy. A small spiral revolved before his eyes, gradually thickening into a deep black whirlpool that filled his head.
Before he could restrain it, the box tore itself from his hands and plunged to the floor with a violent metallic clatter.
Kneeling beside the safe, Mr Goddard slumped back limply against the wall, head lolling onto his chest.
The box lay on its side, just within the circle of light. The impact had forced the catches on the lid, and this was now open; a single narrow beam reflected off the under-surface into the interior of the box.
For a few minutes the room was quiet, except for the laboured uneven sounds of Mr Goddard’s breathing. Then, almost imperceptibly, something moved in the interval between the lid and the floor. A small figure stepped tentatively out of the shadow, peered around itself in the full glare of the light, and disappeared again. Ten seconds later three more figures emerged, followed by others. In small groups they spread out across the floor, their tiny legs and arms rippling in the light. Behind them a score more appeared, pressing out in a solid stream, pushing past each other to escape from the box. Soon the circle of light was alive with swarms of the tiny figures, flickering like minnows in a floodlit pool.
In the darkness by the corner, the door creaked sharply. Together, the hundreds of figures froze. Eyes glinting suspiciously, the head of Mr Goddard’s cat swung round into the room. For a moment it paused, assessing the scene before it.
A sharp cry hissed through its teeth. With vicious speed, it bounded forward.
It was several hours later that Mr Goddard pulled himself slowly to his feet. Leaning weakly against the safe, he looked down at the upended safe beneath the bright cone of light. Carefully collecting himself, he rubbed his cheekbones and painfully massaged his chest and shoulders. Then he limped across to the box and steered it back onto its base. Gingerly, he lifted the lid and peered inside.
Abruptly he dropped the lid, glanced around the floor, swinging the light so that it swept the far corners. Then he turned and hurried out into the hall, switched on the light and examined the floor carefully, along the skirting boards and behind the grilles.
Over his shoulder he noticed that the kitchen door was open. He crossed to it and stepped in on tiptoe, eyes ranging between the table and chair legs, behind the broom and coal bucket.
‘Sinbad!’ Mr Goddard shouted.
Startled, the cat dropped the tiny object between its paws and backed away below the couch.
Mr Goddard bent down. He stared hard at the object for a few seconds, then stood up and leaned against the cupboard, his eyes closing involuntarily.
The cat pounced, its teeth flickering at its paws. It gulped noisily.
‘Sinbad,’ Mr Goddard said in a quieter voice. He gazed listlessly at the cat, finally stepped over to the door.
‘Come outside,’ he called to it.
The cat followed him, its tail whipping slowly from side to side. They walked down the pathway to the gate. Mr Goddard looked at his watch. It was 2.45, early afternoon. The houses around him were silent, the sky a distant, pacific blue. Here and there sunlight was reflected off one of the upstairs bay windows, but the street was motionless, its stillness absolute and unbroken.
Mr Goddard gestured the cat onto the pavement and closed the gate behind it.
Together they walked out into an empty world.
1960
Studio 5, The Stars
Every evening during the summer at Vermilion Sands the insane poems of my beautiful neighbour drifted across the desert to me from Studio 5, The Stars, the broken skeins of coloured tape unravelling in the sand like the threads of a dismembered web. All night they would flutter around the buttresses below the terrace, entwining themselves through the balcony railings, and by morning, before I swept them away, they would hang across the south face of the villa like a vivid cerise bougainvillaea.
Once, after I had been to Red Beach for three days, I returned to find the entire terrace filled by an enormous cloud of coloured tissues, which burst through the french windows as I opened them and pushed into the lounge, spreading across the furniture and bookcases like the delicate tendrils of some vast and gentle plant. For days afterwards I found fragments of the poems everywhere.
I complained several times, walking the three hundred yards across the dunes to deliver a letter of protest, but no one ever answered the bell. I had only once seen my neighbour, on the day she arrived, driving down the Stars in a huge El Dorado convertible, her long hair swept behind her like the head-dress of a goddess. She had vanished in a glimmer of speed, leaving me with a fleeting image of sudden eyes in an ice-white face.
Why she refused to answer her bell I could never understand, but I noticed that each time I walked across to Studio 5 the sky was full of sand-rays, wheeling and screeching like anguished bats. On the last occasion, as I stood by her black glass front door, deliberately pressing the bell into its socket, a giant sand-ray had fallen out of the sky at my feet.
But this, as I realized later, was the crazy season at Vermilion Sands, when Tony Sapphire heard a sand-ray singing, and I saw the god Pan drive by in a Cadillac.
Who was Aurora Day, I often ask myself now. Sweeping across the placid out-of-season sky like a summer comet, she seems to have appeared in a different role to each of us at the colony along the Stars. To me, at first, she was a beautiful neurotic disguised as a femme fatale, but Raymond Mayo saw her as one of Salvador Dali’s exploding madonnas, an enigma serenely riding out the apocalypse. To Tony Sapphire and the rest of her followers along the beach she was a reincarnation of Astarte herself, a diamond-eyed time-child thirty centuries old.
I can remember clearly how I found the first of her poems. After dinner one evening I was resting on the terrace – something I did most of the time at Vermilion Sands – when I noticed a streamer lying on the sand below the railing. A few yards away were several others, and for half an hour I watched them being blown lightly across the dunes. A car’s headlamps shone in the drive at Studio 5, and I assumed that a new tenant had moved into the villa, which had stood empty for several months.
Finally, out of curiosity, I straddled the rail, jumped down on to the sand and picked up one of the ribbons of pink tissue. It was a fragment about three feet long, the texture of rose petal, so light that it began to flake and dissolve in my fingers.
Holding it up I read:
…COMPARE THEE TO A SUMMER’S DAY,
THOU ART MORE LOVELY
I let it flutter away into the darkness below the balcony, then bent down and carefully picked up another, disentangling it from one of the buttresses.
Printed along it in the same ornate neo-classical type was:… SET KEEL TO BREAKERS, FORTH ON THAT GODLY SEA…
I looked over my shoulder. The light over the desert had gone now, and three hundred yards away my neighbour’s villa was lit like a spectral crown. The exposed4 quartz veins in the sand reefs along the Stars rippled like necklaces in the sweeping headlights of the cars driving into Red Beach.
I glanced at the tape again.
Shakespeare and Ezra Pound? My neighbour had the most curious tastes. My interest fading, I returned to the terrace.
Over the next few days the streamers continued to blow across the dunes, for some reason always starting in the evening, when the lights of the traffic illuminated the lengths of coloured gauze. But to begin with I hardly noticed them – I was then editing Wave IX, an avant-garde poetry review, and the studio was full of auto-tapes and old galley proofs. Nor was I particularly surprised to find I had a poetess for my neighbour. Almost all the studios along the Stars are occupied by painters and poets – the majority abstract and non-productive. Most of us were suffering from various degrees of beach fatigue, that chronic malaise which exiles the victim to a limbo of endless sunbathing, dark glasses and afternoon terraces.
Later, however, the streamers drifting across the sand became rather more of a nuisance. When the protest notes achieved nothing I went over to my neighbour’s villa with a view to seeing her in person. On this last occasion, after a dying ray had plummeted out of the sky and nearly stung me in its final spasm, I realized that there was little chance of reaching her.
A hunchbacked chauffeur with a club foot and a twisted face like a senile faun’s was cleaning the cerise Cadillac in the drive. I went over to him and pointed to the strands of tissue trailing through the first-floor windows and falling on to the desert below.
‘These tapes are blowing all over my villa,’ I told him. ‘Your mistress must have one of her VT sets on open sequence.’
He eyed me across the broad hood of the El Dorado, sat down in the driving seat and took a small flute from the dashboard.
As I walked round to him he began to play some high, irritating chords. I waited until he had finished and asked in a louder voice: ‘Do you mind telling her to close the windows?’
He ignored me, his lips pressed moodily to the flute. I bent down and was about to shout into his ear when a gust of wind swirled across one of the dunes just beyond the drive, in an instant whirled over the gravel, flinging up a miniature tornado of dust and ash. This miniature tornado completely enclosed us, blinding my eyes and filling my mouth with grit. Arms shielding my face, I moved away towards the drive, the long streamers whipping around me.
As suddenly as it had started, the squall vanished. The dust stilled and faded, leaving the air as motionless as it had been a few moments previously. I saw that I had backed about thirty yards down the drive, and to my astonishment realized that the Cadillac and chauffeur had disappeared, although the garage door was still open.
My head rang strangely, and I felt irritable and short of breath. I was about to approach the house again, annoyed at having been refused entry and left to suffer the full filthy impact of the dust squall, when I heard the thin piping refrain sound again into the air.
Low, but clear and strangely menacing, it sang in my ears, the planes of sound shifting about me in the air. Looking around for its source, I noticed the dust flicking across the surface of the dunes on either side of the drive.
Without waiting, I turned on my heel and hurried back to my villa.
Angry with myself for having been made such a fool of, and resolved to press some formal complaint, I first went around the terrace, picking up all the strands of tissue and stuffing them into the disposal chute. I climbed below the villa and cut away the tangled masses of streamers.
Cursorily, I read a few of the tapes at random. All printed the same erratic fragments, intact phrases from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats and Eliot. My neighbour’s VT set appeared to have a drastic memory fault, and instead of producing a variant on the classical model the selector head was simply regurgitating a dismembered version of the model itself. For a moment I thought seriously of telephoning the IBM agency in Red Beach and asking them to send a repair man round.
That evening, however, I finally spoke to my neighbour in person.
I had gone to sleep at about eleven, and an hour or so later something woke me. A bright moon was at apogee, moving behind strands of pale green cloud that cast a thin light over the desert and the Stars. I stepped out on to the veranda and immediately noticed a curiously luminescent glow moving between the dunes. Like the strange music I had heard from the chauffeur’s flute, the glow appeared to be sourceless, but I assumed it was cast by the moon shining through a narrow interval between the clouds.
Then I saw her, appearing for a moment among the dunes, strolling across the midnight sand. She wore a long white gown that billowed out behind her, against which her blue hair drifted loosely in the wind like the tail-fan of a paradise bird. Streamers floated about her feet, and overhead two or three purple rays circled endlessly. She walked on, apparently unaware of them, a single light behind her shining through an upstairs window of her villa.
Belting my dressing gown, I leaned against a pillar and watched her quietly, for the moment forgiving her the streamers and her illtrained chauffeur. Occasionally she disappeared behind one of the greenshadowed dunes, her head raised slightly, moving from the boulevard towards the sand reefs on the edge of the fossil lake.
She was about a hundred yards from the nearest sand reef, a long inverted gallery of winding groynes and overhanging grottoes, when something about her straight path and regular unvarying pace made me wonder whether she might in fact be sleepwalking.
I hesitated briefly, watching the rays circling around her head, then jumped over the rail and ran across the sand towards her.
The quartz flints stung at my bare feet, but I managed to reach her just as she neared the edge of the reef. I broke into a walk beside her and touched her elbow.
Three feet above my head the rays spat and whirled in the darkness. The strange luminosity that I had assumed came from the moon seemed rather to emanate from her white gown.
My neighbour was not somnambulating, as I thought, but lost in some deep reverie or dream. Her black eyes stared opaquely in front of her, her slim white-skinned face like a marble mask, motionless and without expression. She looked round at me sightlessly, one hand gesturing me away. Suddenly she stopped and glanced down at her feet, abruptly becoming aware of herself and her midnight walk. Her eyes cleared and she saw the mouth of the sand reef. She stepped back involuntarily, the light radiating from her gown increasing with her alarm.
Overhead the rays soared upwards into the air, their arcs wider now that she was awake.
‘Sorry to startle you,’ I apologized. ‘But you were getting too close to the reef.’
She pulled away from me, her long black eyebrows arching.
‘What?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Who are you?’ To herself, as if completing her dream, she murmured sotto voce ‘Oh God, Paris, choose me, not Minerva—’ She broke off and stared at me wildly, her carmine lips fretting. She strode off across the sand, the rays swinging like pendulums through the dim air above her, taking with her the pool of amber light.
I waited until she reached her villa and turned away. Glancing at the ground, I noticed something glitter in the small depression formed by one of her footprints. I bent down, picked up a small jewel, a perfectly cut diamond of a single carat, then saw another in the next footprint. Hurrying forwards, I picked up half-a-dozen of the jewels, and was about to call out after her disappearing figure when I felt something wet in my hand.
Where I had held the jewels in the hollow of my palm now swam a pool of ice-cold dew.
I found out who she was the next day.
After breakfast I was in the bar when I saw the El Dorado turn into the drive. The club-footed chauffeur jumped from the car and hobbled over in his curious swinging gait to the front door. In his black-gloved hand he carried a pink envelope. I let him wait a few minutes, then opened the letter on the step as he went back to the car and sat waiting for me, his engine running.
I’m sorry to have been so rude last night. You stepped right into my dream and startled me. Could I make amends by offering you a cocktail? My chauffeur will collect you at noon.
AURORA DAY
I looked at my watch. It was 11:55. The five minutes, presumably, gave me time to compose myself.
The chauffeur was studying his driving wheel, apparently indifferent to my reaction. Leaving the door open, I stepped inside and put on my beach-jacket. On the way out I slipped a proof copy of Wave IX into one of the pockets.
The chauffeur barely waited for me to climb in before moving the big car rapidly down the drive.
