J. Ballard - Concrete island

Hoarse and exhausted, Maitland reached the embankment in a hobbling run, carried a few steps up the slope by his momentum. He tottered back on to the level ground as a large American saloon slowed down, almost stopping directly above him. The driver, a young man with blond shoulder-length hair, was eating a sandwich. He gazed down at Maitland as the last flames lifted from the Jaguar. When Maitland gestured pleadingly, unable to shout any more, the young man waved back, tossed away the sandwich and pressed hard on the accelerator, carrying the long car into the darkness.

Maitland sat wearily on the embankment. Clearly this young driver had assumed that the burning car was part of some tramp's celebration, or a small fire lit to provide an evening meal. Even from where he himself was sitting it was by no means clear that a car was burning at all.

It was now ten o'clock, and the first lights were going out in the high-rise apartments. Too tired to move, and trying to decide where he could spend the night, Maitland lowered his eyes. Ten feet away from him was the white triangle of the discarded sandwich. Maitland stared at it, the pain in his injured leg forgotten.

Without thinking, he crawled towards the sandwich. He had not eaten for thirty-six hours, and found it difficult to focus his mind. He looked down at the two slices of bread, held together around their filling of chicken and salad cream by the semi-circular impress of the young man's teeth.

Seizing the sandwich, Maitland devoured it. Intoxicated by the taste of animal fat and the moist texture of buttered bread, he made no effort to remove the grains of dirt. When he had finished the sandwich he licked the last drops of salad cream from his blackened fingers and searched the slope for any pieces of chicken that might have fallen out.

Picking up the crutch, he took himself back to the Jaguar. The flames had died down, and the last smoke from the engine rose through the dark air. A light rain was coming down, the drops hissing on the cylinder head.

The front of the car had been gutted. Maitland climbed into the back seat. Drinking steadily from the bottle of Burgundy, he gazed at the burnt-out instrument panel and steering wheel, and the front seats charred through to their springs.

Despite his failure in setting fire to his car, Maitland felt a quiet satisfaction that he had found the discarded sandwich. Small step though this was, it stood in his mind as yet another success he had won since being marooned. Sooner or later he would meet the island on equal terms.

He slept steadily until dawn.

The morning sunlight crossed the instrument panel of the car, creeping through the coils of blackened wiring. Around the smoke-streaked windows the tall grass swayed in the warm air. In these first minutes after he had woken, Maitland lay against the rear seat, looking through the smeared glass at the motorway embankment. He brushed at the mud caked across the lapels of his dinner-jacket. It was eight ten a. m. He was surprised by the complete silence of the surrounding landscape, the uncanny absence of that relentless roar of rush-hour vehicles which had woken him the previous morning. It was almost as if some idle-minded technician responsible for maintaining the whole illusion of his marooning on the island had forgotten to switch on the sound.

Maitland stirred his cramped body. His swollen leg lay alongside him like the limb of some partly invisible companion. By contrast, the rest of his once-heavy physique had shrunk during the night. The bones of his shoulders and rib-cage pointed through his bruised skin, as if trying to detach themselves from the surrounding musculature. Maitland ran his torn nails through the light beard beginning to cover his face. Already he was thinking of the chicken sandwich he had eaten before falling asleep. The bland, fatty taste of meat and salad cream still clung to his teeth.

Maitland sat forward over the front seat, peering down at the springs that protruded through the charred leather. Although he was now far weaker physically, his mind felt clear and alert. He knew that whatever he decided to do in his attempt to escape from the island, he must not exhaust himself. He remembered the hostility he had felt for his injured body, and the calculated way in which he had abused himself in order to keep going. From now on, he must relax a little, husband his self-confidence. It might take several hours to devise a means of escape, perhaps another day.

His basic needs, a few of which he could meet, were for water, food, shelter, and some kind of signalling device. He would never be able to escape from the island unaided – the embankments were too steep, and even if he could winch himself to the top he would be barely conscious by the time he climbed the balustrade. Tottering across the road, he might easily be killed by a passing truck.

Maitland pushed back the door and picked up the crutch. Even this small effort made his head swim. He leaned against the seat as the blades of crushed grass sprang through the open door, reaching into the car against his leg. The resilience of this coarse grass was a model of behaviour and survival.

Maitland vomited emptily against the door, watching the globes of silver mucus drip on to the carpet. He lifted himself unsteadily on to the crutch and leaned against the car, doubting whether he would be able to stand for long. The mud-smeared dinner-jacket flapped around him in the light wind, several sizes too large for his gaunt shoulders.

He hobbled forward, inspecting the damage to the Jaguar. Patches of the grass around the car had been burned away, exposing circles of charred earth. The fire had destroyed the battery and engine wiring, burning through the instrument panel bulkhead into the front passenger compartment.

'Damned quiet…' Maitland murmured aloud to himself. No cars or airline buses moved along the motorways. The aerial balconies of the apartment blocks were deserted in the sunlight.

Where the devil was everyone? God… some kind of psychosis. Nervously, Maitland pivoted on the crutch. He hobbled across the charred earth, trying to find a single tenant of this abandoned landscape. Had a world war broken out overnight? Perhaps the source of a virulent plague had been identified somewhere in central London. During the night, as he lay asleep in the burnt-out car, an immense silent exodus had left him alone in the deserted city.

Three hundred yards to the west of the island's apex, beyond the junction of the motorway and the feeder road, a single figure appeared. An elderly man approached the island, pushing a light motorcycle along the eastbound carriageway. He was partly hidden by the central reservation, but in the bright sunlight Maitland could clearly see his long white hair swept back off his forehead on to his shoulders.

As he watched this old man pushing along his silent machine, Maitland was overcome by a sudden sense of fear that drove away all awareness of his hunger and exhaustion. By some nightmare logic he was convinced that the old man was coming for him, perhaps not now but by some circuitous route through the labyrinth of motorways, and that he would eventually arrive to summon Maitland to the point where he had crashed. Moreover, Maitland was certain that this machine he was wheeling was not in fact a light motorcycle, but an horrific device of torture that the old man brought with him on his endless journey around the world, and against whose chain-driven wheels Maitland's already broken body would be applied in a grim judgement by ordeal.

Galvanizing himself, Maitland began to hobble at random around the breaker's yard, swaying and tottering in this circle of dead fire. The man's white head was still visible along the eastbound carriageway, eyes fixed on the empty road curving ahead of him. His shabby clothes and antique machine were illuminated by the sunlight.