J. Ballard - Concrete island

Maitland kicked the packing-case, rattling the pans inside it. 'I need some food – let's see what you've got. And none of that infant feed you keep bringing for me. I'm not going to play the part of your baby.'

Stung, the girl retorted, 'I suppose you think that's why I've kept you here.'

'I wouldn't be surprised. I'm not deriding your little maudlin outbursts, they'd be very sweet in the right place, but I've got other things on my mind. One, two and three, I want out.'

Jane rolled up the grimy dress-shirt. 'I'll wash this for you. Listen, I'll call for help – when I'm ready. You keep thinking of yourself all the time- Can't you understand that I may have problems of my own?'

'With the police?'

'Yes! With the police!' Furiously, she pulled a metal pail from beneath the bed and poured the hot water into it.

'What was it?' Maitland asked. 'Drugs, abortion – or are you on the run from a remand home?'

Jane paused, her hands motionless in the water.

'Clever,' she commented quietly. 'You must do very well in your business, Mr Maitland – but not so well in your private life, I'd guess.' She added, in a limp voice, 'I borrowed some money. From a friend of my husband. Rather a lot of money, in fact. Lousy bastard.'

She began to wash Maitland, her hands soaping his bruised skin. When she had finished she found a cosmetic razor and shaved his beard. Maitland sat on the edge of the bed, enjoying the gentle pressure of her small hands moving across his skin like submissive birds. He was surprised that it had pleased him, even slightly, to humiliate the young woman, playing on her muddled feelings of guilt and deriding her in a way that he had never thought himself capable of doing. By contrast, his humiliation of Proctor had been entirely calculated; he had degraded the old tramp in the crudest way he could. But even this brutal act had given him a certain pleasure. He had relished the violent confrontation, knowing that he would make both of them submit to him. In part, he was taking his revenge on Proctor and the young woman, although he was well aware that both of them, by some paradoxical logic, were satisfied by being abused. Maitland's aggressiveness fulfilled their expectations, their half-conscious estimates of themselves. Much as he distrusted himself for enjoying these small cruelties, Maitland had deliberately egged himself on. Determined to survive above all else, he would exploit this strain of cruelty in himself in the same way that he had earlier exploited his self-pity and contempt. All that mattered was that he dominate the senile tramp and this wayward young woman.

He let the girl towel him down. Her hands, steering between the bruises, calmed and soothed him.

'What about your father?' he asked her. 'Could he help you?'

'He's not my father any more. I don't think about him.' She gazed at the sunlight coming down the stair well, clasping her hands in what seemed to be a Masonic grip. 'Suicide is… a suggestive act, it runs in families, you know. When someone in your family reaches the point where they cannot just kill themselves, but take a couple of years over it – really take their time, as if it was the most important thing they'd ever done – then it's difficult to stop seeing your own life through their eyes. Sometimes I'm nervous of my mind.'

She stood up with a brave flourish. 'Come on, strip off and let's get you washed. Then we'll have some food and I'll fuck you.'

Later, after Maitland had been washed by the girl, he lay on the bed in her towelling dressing-gown. He felt fresh and revived. He had stood naked in the stair well as Jane worked away at his legs and abdomen with her strong hands, rubbing at the bruises and oil-stains. As she prepared a small meal he watched her moving around the room, happy in this domestic retreat. She took out her smoker's kit and rolled a cigarette for herself.

'Jane, you smoke too much pot.'

'It's good for sex… '

She began to inhale the smoke. By the time they had finished their meal the room was filled with the fumes, and Maitland felt himself relax for the first time since his arrival on the island. She took off her skirt and lay on the bed beside him, propping her head next to his on the pillow. She offered him the loosely wrapped cigarette, but Maitland was already pleasantly high.

'That's nice…' She inhaled deeply on the smoke, and held his hand. 'How do you feel?'

'A lot better. It may sound strange, but for once I'm not all that keen to get away from here… Jane, where do you go to at night?'

'I work in a club – a kind of club, let's say. Now and then I pick someone up on the motorway. So what? Sordid, isn't it?'

'A little. Why don't you straighten your life out and make a start with someone?'

'Oh, come on… why don't you straighten your life out? You've got a hundred times more hang-ups. Your wife, this woman doctor – you were on an island long, before you crashed here.'

She turned to face him. 'Well, Mr Maitland, I suppose I'd better undress – I don't think you could manage that job.'

Maitland lay passively with his hand on her hip. As she undressed, her mood underwent a curious change. Her jaunty smile faded. The awareness of her naked body seemed to distance her from Maitland, as if some defensive reflex was corning into play. She knelt across him, her sharp knees pressing into his chest wall. Maitland reached up to reassure her, but she pulled away, snapping in a hard voice.

'Not like this. First, I want some money. Come on, money for sex.'

'Jane… for God's sake.'

'Never mind God – I'm not fucking you for his sake or anyone else's.' She handed him his wallet. 'Five pounds – I want five pounds.'

'Jane, take it all. You can have it all.'

'_Five!'__ She gripped his shoulders in her hands, nails tearing at his bruised skin. 'Come on – I can get ten on the motorway any night of the week!'

'Jane, your face – it's…'

'Never mind my face!'

Confused by this outburst, Maitland fumbled with the wallet. As he counted out the pound notes she tore them from his hand and stuffed them under the pillow.

Maitland held her breasts as she settled herself astride him. He tried to remember every pressure and movement of this sexual act, the orgasm that bolted through every over-stressed nerve in his body. He accepted the rules of the young woman's charade, glad of the freedom it implied, a recognition of their need to avoid any hint of commitment to each other. His relationships with Catherine and his mother, even with Helen Fairfax, all the thousand and one emotionally loaded transactions of his childhood, would have been tolerable if he had been able to pay for them in some neutral currency, hard cash across the high-priced counters of these relationships. Far from wanting this girl to help him escape from the island, he was using her for motives he had never before accepted, his need to be freed from his past, from his childhood, his wife and friends, with all their affections and demands, and to rove for ever within the empty city of his own mind.

Yet, at the end of their brief sexual act, Jane Sheppard reached under the pillow and drew out the five pound notes. She settled her hair, wincing at the cramp in her thighs. When Maitland hesitated, she took the notes from his hand and packed them back into his wallet.

'Wait, Proctor! Stop here!'

From his vantage point on Proctor's back, Maitland gazed across the central valley of the island. In the course of their afternoon patrol they had reached the abandoned churchyard to the south of the breaker's yard. Maitland could see along the entire length of the island, from the wire-mesh fence below the overpass to the western apex. The concrete junction of the two motorway routes shone in the sunlight like an elegant sculpture, and Maitland often visualized using its high deck as a pleasant roof garden.