James Ballard - Kingdom Come - A Novel

‘None. Narcotics? A complete drug culture?’

‘Too destructive. Think of . . .’

‘War? It makes for good television.’

‘Difficult to organize. The Thames Valley can’t make territorial demands and invade Belgium. What I have in mind comes free, and is readily to hand.’

‘Sex?’

‘They’ve tried sex. Sooner or later, sex becomes hard work. Wife swapping is fun, but you meet too many people you look down on. Decadence demands a certain degree of innocence.’

‘So that leaves . . . ?’

‘Madness.’ Maxted lowered his voice and spoke more clearly, leaving behind his usual rush of words. ‘A voluntary insanity, whatever you want to call it. As a psychiatrist I’d use the term elective psychopathy. Not the kind of madness we deal with here. I’m talking about a willed insanity, the sort that we higher primates thrive on. Watch a troupe of chimpanzees. They’re bored with chewing twigs and picking the fleas out of each other’s armpits. They want meat, the bloodier the better, they want to taste their enemies’ fear in the flesh they grind. So they start beating their chests and shrieking at the sky. They work themselves into a frenzy, then set off in a hunting party. They come across a tribe of colobus monkeys and literally tear them limb from limb. Very nasty, but voluntary madness brought them a tasty supper. They sleep it off, and go back to chewing twigs and picking fleas.’

‘And then the cycle repeats itself.’ I lay back, aware of Maxted’s hot breath on the air. ‘More race riots and arson attacks, more immigrant hostels put to the torch. So the people of the motorway towns are tired of chewing twigs. One question, though. Who organizes these attacks of madness?’

‘No one. That’s the beauty of it. Elective insanity is waiting inside us, ready to come out when we need it. We’re talking primate behaviour at its most extreme. Witch-hunts, auto-da-fés, heretic burnings, the hot poker shoved up the enemy’s rear, gibbets along the skyline. Willed madness can infect a housing estate or a whole nation.’

‘Thirties Germany?’

‘A good example. People still think the Nazi leaders led the German people into the horrors of race war. Not true. The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party. That’s why they stayed together till the end. They needed a psychopathic god to worship, so they recruited a nobody and stood him on the high altar. The great religions have been at it for millennia.’

‘States of willed madness? Christianity? Islam?’

‘Vast systems of psychopathic delusion that murdered millions, launched crusades and founded empires. A great religion spells danger. Today people are desperate to believe, but they can only reach God through psychopathology. Look at the most religious areas of the world at present—the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they’re going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe in except God.’

‘But what else is there to believe in?’ I waited for Maxted to reply, but the psychiatrist was staring through the picture window at the dome of the Metro-Centre, fists gripping the air as if trying to steady the world around him. ‘Dr Maxted . . . ?’

‘Nothing. Except madness.’ Maxted rallied himself and turned back to me. ‘People feel they can rely on the irrational. It offers the only guarantee of freedom from all the cant and bullshit and sales commercials fed to us by politicians, bishops and academics. People are deliberately re-primitivizing themselves. They yearn for magic and unreason, which served them well in the past, and might help them again. They’re keen to enter a new Dark Age. The lights are on, but they’re retreating into the inner darkness, into superstition and unreason. The future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathies, all of them willed and deliberate, part of a desperate attempt to escape from a rational world and the boredom of consumerism.’

‘Consumerism leads to social pathology? Hard to believe.’

‘It paves the way. Half the goods we buy these days are not much more than adult toys. The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism in order to keep growing. Take the Metro-Centre and its flat sales. Close your eyes a little and it already looks like a Nuremberg rally. The ranks of sales counters, the long straight aisles, the signs and banners, the whole theatrical aspect.’

‘No jackboots, though,’ I pointed out. ‘No ranting führers.’

‘Not yet. Anyway, they belong to the politics of the street. Our “streets” are the cable TV consumer channels. Our party insignia are the gold and platinum loyalty cards. Faintly risible? Yes, but people thought the Nazis were a bit of a joke. The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness. You can see it here already.’

‘In bosky Surrey? I don’t think so.’

‘It’s coming, Richard.’ Maxted pursed his lips, as if to shut out all possibility of a smile. ‘Here and in the towns around Heathrow. You can feel it in the air.’

‘And the führer figure?’

‘He hasn’t arrived yet. He’ll appear, though, walking out of some shopping mall or retail park. Messiahs always emerge from the desert. Everybody will be waiting for him, and he’ll seize his chance.’

‘Parliament, the civil service, the police? They’ll stop him.’

‘Unlikely. They aren’t directly challenged, so they’ll look the other way. This is a new kind of totalitarianism that operates at the checkout and the cash counter. What happens in the suburbs has never bothered the people in Whitehall.’

‘A new Dark Age . . . What do we do?’

‘We try to control it. Steer it onto the beach. A monster is stirring in the deep, and we need to get it onto the shore while it’s still drowsy. Now is the time to act, Richard.’

‘Right.’ I finished the last of my whisky, trying not to meet Maxted’s eyes. He was an impressive figure, with his huge head and powerful hands, but I too was being steered into the shallow water. He had begun to look at his watch, and I half expected the doors to burst open and admit a resistance unit led by Geoffrey Fairfax. In an offhand way, I said: ‘I take it you’re not alone? There are others who think like you?’

‘A few of us. We can see what’s coming and we’re concerned.’

‘Geoffrey Fairfax, William Sangster? Superintendent Leighton?’

‘As it happens, yes.’ Maxted seemed unsurprised. ‘There are others.’

‘Dr Goodwin?’

‘In her left-handed way. Julia is less nervy as a doctor than she is as a young woman. Why do you ask?’

‘It’s interesting that you’re the same group who happened to be in the Metro-Centre.’

‘And saw Duncan Christie in the South Gate entrance? That’s right.’

‘Lucky for him. His doctor, his psychiatrist, his head teacher . . .’

‘We met in the car park, and strolled in together.’

‘Fair enough. And your plans now?’

‘To nip this thing in the bud. If we wait much longer we’ll be overwhelmed.’

‘Willed madness . . .’ I repeated the phrase, already a slogan in a teaser campaign. ‘You think my father was killed by someone so bored he decided to choose insanity?’

‘For a few seconds. Long enough to pull the trigger.’ Maxted took off his leather jacket to free his arms, then reached out and gripped my shoulders in a sudden show of confidence. I could smell the sweat on his shirt, a blend of stale deodorant and sheer unease. He had been perspiring freely since we arrived at the penthouse, but the careful exposition of his fears had been more than a public health warning. He had been hiding his discomfort at having to expose his private guilt to someone who was watching him a little too closely. The bullheaded swagger was a screen carried by a thoughtful and unsure man. I remembered him sitting in the Range Rover outside the Odeon cinema, within earshot of a vicious riot that he and Fairfax had been orchestrating. Yet he had done nothing to stop it.