The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 3

  Then Santiago sent me a repeat query.

  I found Jane down among the cafés, holding off a siege of admirers.

  ‘Have you given in yet?’ she asked me, smiling at the young men.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ I said, ‘but anything is worth trying.’

  Back at the shop I raised a bank of perennials past their thresholds. Jane helped me attach the gas and fluid lines.

  ‘We’ll try these first,’ I said. ‘Frequencies 543–785. Here’s the score.’

  Jane took off her hat and began to ascend the scale, her voice clear and pure. At first the Columbine hesitated and Jane went down again and drew them along with her. They went up a couple of octaves together and then the plants stumbled and went off at a tangent of stepped chords.

  ‘Try K sharp,’ I said. I fed a little chlorous acid into the tank and the Columbine followed her up eagerly, the infra-calyxes warbling delicate variations on the treble clef.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said.

  It took us only four hours to fill the order.

  ‘You’re better than the Arachnid,’ I congratulated her. ‘How would you like a job? I’ll fit you out with a large cool tank and all the chlorine you can breathe.’

  ‘Careful,’ she told me. ‘I may say yes. Why don’t we rescore a few more of them while we’re about it?’

  ‘You’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

  ‘Let me try the Arachnid,’ she suggested. ‘That would be more of a challenge.’

  Her eyes never left the flower. I wondered what they’d do if I left them together. Try to sing each other to death?

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow perhaps.’

  We sat on the balcony together, glasses at our elbows, and talked the afternoon away.

  She told me little about herself, but I gathered that her father had been a mining engineer in Peru and her mother a dancer at a Lima vu-tavern. They’d wandered from deposit to deposit, the father digging his concessions, the mother signing on at the nearest bordello to pay the rent.

  ‘She only sang, of course,’ Jane added. ‘Until my father came.’ She blew bubbles into her glass. ‘So you think I give them what they want at the Casino. By the way, what do you see?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m your one failure,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Except you.’

  She dropped her eyes. ‘That sometimes happens,’ she said. ‘I’m glad this time.’

  A million suns pounded inside me. Until then I’d been reserving judgment on myself.

  Harry and Tony were polite, if disappointed.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Harry said sadly. ‘I won’t. How did you do it?’

  ‘That mystical left-handed approach, of course,’ I told him. ‘All ancient seas and dark wells.’

  ‘What’s she like?’ Tony asked eagerly. ‘I mean, does she burn or just tingle?’

  Jane sang at the Casino every night from eleven to three, but apart from that I suppose we were always together. Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and café terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum.

  On other evenings we’d go down to one of the quiet bars at Lagoon West, and have supper out on the flats, and Jane would tease the waiters and sing honeybirds and angelcakes to the children who came in across the sand to watch her.

  I realize now that I must have achieved a certain notoriety along the beach, but I didn’t mind giving the old women – and beside Jane they all seemed to be old women – something to talk about. During the Recess no one cared very much about anything, and for that reason I never questioned myself too closely over my affair with Jane Ciracylides. As I sat on the balcony with her looking out over the cool early evenings or felt her body glowing beside me in the darkness I allowed myself few anxieties.

  Absurdly, the only disagreement I ever had with her was over her cheating.

  I remember that I once taxed her with it.

  ‘Do you know you’ve taken over five hundred dollars from me, Jane? You’re still doing it. Even now!’

  She laughed impishly. ‘Do I cheat? I’ll let you win one day.’

  ‘But why do you?’ I insisted.

  ‘It’s more fun to cheat,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it’s so boring.’

  ‘Where will you go when you leave Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her.

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘Why do you say that? I don’t think I shall ever leave.’

  ‘Don’t tease me, Jane. You’re a child of another world than this.’

  ‘My father came from Peru,’ she reminded me.

  ‘But you didn’t get your voice from him,’ I said. ‘I wish I could have heard your mother sing. Had she a better voice than yours, Jane?’

  ‘She thought so. My father couldn’t stand either of us.’

  That was the evening I last saw Jane. We’d changed, and in the half an hour before she left for the Casino we sat on the balcony and I listened to her voice, like a spectral fountain, pour its luminous notes into the air. The music remained with me even after she’d gone, hanging faintly in the darkness around her chair.

  I felt curiously sleepy, almost sick on the air she’d left behind, and at 11.30, when I knew she’d be appearing on stage at the Casino, I went out for a walk along the beach.

  As I left the elevator I heard music coming from the shop.

  At first I thought I’d left one of the audio switches on, but I knew the voice only too well.

  The windows of the shop had been shuttered, so I got in through the passage which led from the garage courtyard round at the back of the apartment house.

  The lights had been turned out, but a brilliant glow filled the shop, throwing a golden fire on to the tanks along the counters. Across the ceiling liquid colours danced in reflection.

  The music I had heard before, but only in overture.

  The Arachnid had grown to three times its size. It towered nine feet high out of the shattered lid of the control tank, leaves tumid and inflamed, its calyx as large as a bucket, raging insanely.

  Arched forwards into it, her head thrown back, was Jane.

  I ran over to her, my eyes filling with light, and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from it.

  ‘Jane!’ I shouted over the noise. ‘Get down!’

  She flung my hand away. In her eyes, fleetingly, was a look of shame.

  While I was sitting on the stairs in the entrance Tony and Harry drove up.

  ‘Where’s Jane?’ Harry asked. ‘Has anything happened to her? We were down at the Casino.’ They both turned towards the music. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Tony peered at me suspiciously. ‘Steve, anything wrong?’

  Harry dropped the bouquet he was carrying and started towards the rear entrance.

  ‘Harry!’ I shouted after him. ‘Get back!’

  Tony held my shoulder. ‘Is Jane in there?’

  I caught them as they opened the door into the shop.

  ‘Good God!’ Harry yelled. ‘Let go of me, you fool!’ He struggled to get away from me. ‘Steve, it’s trying to kill her!’

  I jammed the door shut and held them back.

  I never saw Jane again. The three of us waited in my apartment. When the music died away we went down and found the shop in darkness. The Arachnid had shrunk to its normal size.

  The next day it died.

  Where Jane went to I don’t know. Not long afterwards the Recess ended, and the big government schemes came along and started up all the clocks and kept us too busy working off the lost time to worry about a few bruised petals. Harry told me that Jane had been seen on her way through Red Beach, and I heard recently that someone very like her was doing the nightclubs this side out of Pernamb
uco.

  So if any of you around here keep a choro-florist’s, and have a Khan-Arachnid orchid, look out for a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes. Perhaps she’ll play i-Go with you, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but she’ll always cheat.

  1956

  ESCAPEMENT

  Neither of us was watching the play too closely when I first noticed the slip. I was stretched back in front of the fire with the crossword, braising gently and toying with 17 down (‘told by antique clocks? 5, 5.’) while Helen was hemming an old petticoat, looking up only when the third lead, a heavy-chinned youth with a 42-inch neck and a base-surge voice, heaved manfully downscreen. The play was ‘My Sons, My Sons’, one of those Thursday night melodramas Channel 2 put out through the winter months, and had been running for about an hour; we’d reached that ebb somewhere round Act 3 Scene 3 just after the old farmer learns that his sons no longer respect him. The whole play must have been recorded on film, and it sounded extremely funny to switch from the old man’s broken mutterings back to the showdown sequence fifteen minutes earlier when the eldest son starts drumming his chest and dragging in the high symbols. Somewhere an engineer was out of a job.

  ‘They’ve got their reels crossed,’ I told Helen. ‘This is where we came in.’

  ‘Is it?’ she said, looking up. ‘I wasn’t watching. Tap the set.’

  ‘Just wait and see. In a moment everyone in the studio will start apologizing.’

  Helen peered at the screen. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen this,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we haven’t. Quiet.’

  I shrugged and went back to 17 down, thinking vaguely about sand dials and water clocks. The scene dragged on; the old man stood his ground, ranted over his turnips and thundered desperately for Ma. The studio must have decided to run it straight through again and pretend no one had noticed. Even so they’d be fifteen minutes behind their schedule.

  Ten minutes later it happened again.

  I sat up. ‘That’s funny,’ I said slowly. ‘Haven’t they spotted it yet? They can’t all be asleep.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked, looking up from her needle basket. ‘Is something wrong with the set?’

  ‘I thought you were watching. I told you we’d seen this before. Now they’re playing it back for the third time.’

  ‘They’re not,’ Helen insisted. ‘I’m sure they aren’t. You must have read the book.’

  ‘Heaven forbid.’ I watched the set closely. Any minute now an announcer spitting on a sandwich would splutter red-faced to the screen. I’m not one of those people who reach for their phones every time someone mispronounces meteorology, but this time I knew there’d be thousands who’d feel it their duty to keep the studio exchanges blocked all night. And for any go-ahead comedian on a rival station the lapse was a god-send.

  ‘Do you mind if I change the programme?’ I asked Helen. ‘See if anything else is on.’

  ‘Don’t. This is the most interesting part of the play. You’ll spoil it.’

  ‘Darling, you’re not even watching. I’ll come back to it in a moment, I promise.’

  On Channel 5 a panel of three professors and a chorus girl were staring hard at a Roman pot. The question-master, a suave-voiced Oxford don, kept up a lot of crazy patter about scraping the bottom of the barrow. The professors seemed stumped, but the girl looked as if she knew exactly what went into the pot but didn’t dare say it.

  On 9 there was a lot of studio laughter and someone was giving a sports-car to an enormous woman in a cartwheel hat. The woman nervously ducked her head away from the camera and stared glumly at the car. The compère opened the door for her and I was wondering whether she’d try to get into it when Helen cut in:

  ‘Harry, don’t be mean. You’re just playing.’

  I turned back to the play on Channel 2. The same scene was on, nearing the end of its run.

  ‘Now watch it,’ I told Helen. She usually managed to catch on the third time round. ‘Put that sewing away, it’s getting on my nerves. God, I know this off by heart.’

  ‘Sh!’ Helen told me. ‘Can’t you stop talking?’

  I lit a cigarette and lay back in the sofa, waiting. The apologies, to say the least, would have to be magniloquent. Two ghost runs at £100 a minute totted up to a tidy heap of doubloons.

  The scene drew to a close, the old man stared heavily at his boots, the dusk drew down and –

  We were back where we started from.

  ‘Fantastic!’ I said, standing up and turning some snow off the screen. ‘It’s incredible.’

  ‘I didn’t know you enjoyed this sort of play,’ Helen said calmly. ‘You never used to.’ She glanced over at the screen and then went back to her petticoat.

  I watched her warily. A million years earlier I’d probably have run howling out of the cave and flung myself thankfully under the nearest dinosaur. Nothing in the meanwhile had lessened the dangers hemming in the undaunted husband.

  ‘Darling,’ I explained patiently, just keeping the edge out of my voice, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed they are now playing this same scene through for the fourth time.’

  ‘The fourth time?’ Helen said doubtfully. ‘Are they repeating it?’

  I was visualizing a studio full of announcers and engineers slumped unconscious over their mikes and valves, while an automatic camera pumped out the same reel. Eerie but unlikely. There were monitor receivers as well as the critics, agents, sponsors, and, unforgivably, the playwright himself weighing every minute and every word in their private currencies. They’d all have a lot to say under tomorrow’s headlines.

  ‘Sit down and stop fidgeting,’ Helen said. ‘Have you lost your bone?’

  I felt round the cushions and ran my hand along the carpet below the sofa.

  ‘My cigarette,’ I said. ‘I must have thrown it into the fire. I don’t think I dropped it.’

  I turned back to the set and switched on the give-away programme, noting the time, 9.03, so that I could get back to Channel 2 at 9.15. When the explanation came I just had to hear it.

  ‘I thought you were enjoying the play,’ Helen said. ‘Why’ve you turned it off?’

  I gave her what sometimes passes in our flat for a withering frown and settled back.

  The enormous woman was still at it in front of the cameras, working her way up a pyramid of questions on cookery. The audience was subdued but interest mounted. Eventually she answered the jackpot question and the audience roared and thumped their seats like a lot of madmen. The compère led her across the stage to another sports car.

  ‘She’ll have a stable of them soon,’ I said aside to Helen.

  The woman shook hands and awkwardly dipped the brim of her hat, smiling nervously with embarrassment.

  The gesture was oddly familiar.

  I jumped up and switched to Channel 5. The panel were still staring hard at their pot.

  Then I started to realize what was going on.

  All three programmes were repeating themselves.

  ‘Helen,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘Get me a scotch and soda, will you?’

  ‘What is the matter? Have you strained your back?’

  ‘Quickly, quickly!’ I snapped my fingers.

  ‘Hold on.’ She got up and went into the pantry.

  I looked at the time. 9.12. Then I returned to the play and kept my eyes glued to the screen. Helen came back and put something down on the end-table.

  ‘There you are. You all right?’

  When it switched I thought I was ready for it, but the surprise must have knocked me flat. I found myself lying out on the sofa. The first thing I did was reach round for the drink.

  ‘Where did you put it?’ I asked Helen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The scotch. You brought it in a couple of minutes ago. It was on the table.’

  ‘You’ve been dreaming,’ she said gently. She leant forward and started watching the play.

  I went into the pantry and found the bottle. As I filled a tumbler I
noticed the clock over the kitchen sink. 9.07. An hour slow, now that I thought about it. But my wristwatch said 9.05, and always ran perfectly. And the clock on the mantelpiece in the lounge also said 9.05.

  Before I really started worrying I had to make sure.

  Mullvaney, our neighbour in the flat above, opened his door when I knocked.

  ‘Hello, Bartley. Corkscrew?’

  ‘No, no,’ I told him. ‘What’s the right time? Our clocks are going crazy.’

  He glanced at his wrist. ‘Nearly ten past.’

  ‘Nine or ten?’

  He looked at his watch again. ‘Nine, should be. What’s up?’

  ‘I don’t know whether I’m losing my –’ I started to say. Then I stopped.

  Mullvaney eyed me curiously. Over his shoulder I heard a wave of studio applause, broken by the creamy, unctuous voice of the giveaway compère.

  ‘How long’s that programme been on?’ I asked him.

  ‘About twenty minutes. Aren’t you watching?’

  ‘No,’ I said, adding casually, ‘Is anything wrong with your set?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘Mine’s chasing its tail. Anyway, thanks.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. He watched me go down the stairs and shrugged as he shut his door.

  I went into the hall, picked up the phone and dialled.

  ‘Hello, Tom?’ Tom Farnold works the desk next to mine at the office. ‘Tom, Harry here. What time do you make it?’

  ‘Time the liberals were back.’

  ‘No, seriously.’

  ‘Let’s see. Twelve past nine. By the way, did you find those pickles I left for you in the safe?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. Listen, Tom,’ I went on, ‘the goddamdest things are happening here. We were watching Diller’s play on Channel 2 when –’

  ‘I’m watching it now. Hurry it up.’

  ‘You are? Well, how do you explain this repetition business? And the way the clocks are stuck between 9 and 9.15?’

  Tom laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suggest you go outside and give the house a shake.’

  I reached out for the glass I had with me on the hall table, wondering how to explain to – The next moment I found myself back on the sofa. I was holding the newspaper and looking at 17 down. A part of my mind was thinking about antique clocks.