J G Ballard by The Unlimited Dream Company (epub)

Author:The Unlimited Dream Company (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

I Am the Fire

When I woke, a sombre light filled the meadow. Dusk had crossed the park, and the street-lamps of Shepperton shone through the trees. My antlers had gone, my semen-spattered hooves and powerful loins. Incarnated again as myself, I sat in the twilit grave. Around me the secret arbour of the crippled children glowed like an illuminated side-chapel in a forgotten jungle cathedral. I squeezed the sweat from my suit. The fabric was smeared with blood and excrement, as if I had spent the afternoon driving a herd of violent beasts.

I stared down at the grave of flowers, at the hundreds of dead tulips and daisies which the children had gathered. They had added more pieces of the Cessna—another section of the starboard wing-tip, fragments of fabric torn from the fuselage and washed ashore. All too closely, the structure already resembled the original aircraft, reconstituting itself around me.

Through the deep grass the faces of the three children glowed like pensive moons. David’s worried eyes gazed out below his huge forehead, still waiting for those absent sections of his brain to catch up with them. Rachel’s small features flickered among the dark poppies, a forgotten flame. Now and then Jamie hooted at the air, reminding the sky and the trees that he still existed. They were sad at being excluded from my new world. Had they realised that I could change my form, like a pagan god, into that of any creature I chose? Had they seen me as lord of the deer, strutting at the head of my herd, copulating on the run?

I stood up and waved them away. ‘David, take Rachel home. Jamie, it’s your time to sleep.’

For their own sake I was concerned that they should not come too close to me.

Leaving them in the dark grass by the grave, I walked through the meadow to the river. The night water seethed with fish—silver-backed eels, pike and golden carp, groupers and small sharks. Phosphorescing animalcula swarmed in dense shoals. I stepped on to the sand, and let the charged water swirl across my tennis shoes, washing away the blood and dung. A huge fish crept into the shallows at my feet. Its eyes watchfully upon me, it devoured the fragments, then withdrew silently into the deep.

White pelicans sat on the roof of the conservatory. The evening air was lit from below by the plumage of thousands of birds, and by the vivid petals of the tropical flowers that had wreathed themselves around the dead elms, together forming an immense corona like the one I had first glimpsed as I climbed from the aircraft.

‘I am the fire …’ And the earth, air and water. Of these four realms of the real world, three I had already entered. I had stepped through three doors, through the birds, the fish and the mammals. Now it only remained for me to enter the fire. But as what strange creature, born to the flame?

A hurricane lamp flared across the metal railings of the amusement pier, illuminating the thousands of fish in the river.

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