J. Ballard - Concrete island

Maitland loosed his trousers and inspected, his injured thigh. The joint had stiffened, and the heavy bruising and broken blood vessels gleamed through the overlay of oil and dirt.

Nursing his injured mouth, he drank the last of the tacky water in the windshield reservoir. He scanned the office blocks visible through the haze over central London. A conference he had been due to attend would now be re-assembling after lunch – did any of the delegates have any idea what had happened to him? Even if he were rescued now, it would be several days at least, and possibly weeks, before he returned to work. He thought of the chain of appointments missed, cancelled client meetings, a committee on which he sat. Like a tocsin warning him reprovingly of all this, Maitland's leg began to throb.

'Right – let's see what we've got…' Maitland roused himself, mastering the mounting urge to sleep all the time. He swung himself round to the rear of the car. He could hear the traffic moving along the motorway, but he ignored the vehicles, knowing that he would only tire himself by trying to wave them down.

He lifted the lid of the trunk and opened his overnight case. The vivid scent of his after-shave filled the air. He took out his patent dress-shoes and dinner-jacket. The overnight case was almost literally a time capsule – he could easily reconstitute a past world from these scents and surface textures.

He unclipped the blade from his razor, and cut his blue towel into strips. He soaked one of the strips in his after-shave. The tart Cologne stung his injured hand, biting at the dozens of minute cuts and abrasions. Maitland cleaned away the dirt and oil that clotted the kidney-shaped wound running from the knuckle of his wrist to the ball of his thumb. He bandaged the hand with the towelling strips, locked the trunk and hobbled through the grass around the abandoned cars-Five vehicles, wrecks left behind in the breaker's yard, lay in a semi-circle around the Jaguar. The grass grew through the gaps in the rusting body panels, sprouting through the empty engine compartment of the overturned taxi. Dented fenders, a pile of bald tyres, a single bonnet hood, lay among the nettles. Maitland moved among them, now and then looking up at the embankment as he estimated what he would need to build a ramp.

Rain fell across Maitland's neck. He swung himself back to the Jaguar. The sun was hidden by the darkening cloud. Already it was raining heavily over central London. As he stepped into the car the cloudburst broke across the island. The gusts of rain-filled air levelled the swirling grass. The cars moving along the motorway were lashed by the rain, their headlamps flaring in the liquid darkness.

Maitland sat back in the rear seat, watching the rain hit the window glass three inches from his face. He stared passively at the storm, grateful that he had even the minimal shelter of this crashed car. The rain striking the bonnet danced back through the open windshield, the motes of spray hitting his face.

'Come on!' Deliberately striking his injured leg, Maitland opened the rear door. The dark rain lashed at his head, soaking his torn clothes as he pulled out his leg and struggled with the crutch, twice dropping it to the ground. As he swung himself across the breaker's yard the whirling raindrops cut like shot through the thin fabric of his jacket and trousers. Maitland turned his head, catching the rain in his open mouth as he lurched along.

He stumbled over the bald tyres and fell to his knees. Seizing the loose bonnet hood he had noticed earlier, he struggled back to his feet. Ignoring the rain stinging his cold skin, and the sodden bandage on his right hand, he dragged the hood towards the Jaguar, lifted it on to the bonnet and jammed it upside down through the open windshield.

He stood back as the first water rilled down the greasy metal on to the instrument panel of the Jaguar. Leaning on the crutch, Maitland shouted soundlessly to himself, an exultant madman in the driving rain. His wet clothes clung to him like a dead animal. He climbed into the car and crouched over the front seat with the reservoir canister, steering the wavering stream of water that moved down the upturned hood. The rain slackened when there was little more than half a pint of bubble-filled water in the canister, but after five minutes began again in a steady torrent.

By the time the storm ended, thirty minutes later, Maitland had collected a full canister of water. All this while, as he crouched forward in his soaked clothes, bruised hands fumbling across the front seat, Maitland talked aloud to himself, half aware that he was bringing both Catherine and Helen Fairfax into these monologues, sometimes mimicking their voices, allowing them to taunt him with his incompetence. To keep himself awake, he deliberately strained his injured leg, in some way identifying the pain with the image in his mind of these two women.

'Good… nearly full, don't cut your mouth on this damned plastic. Not bad – two pints of water, enough for a couple of days. Catherine wouldn't be impressed, though… She'd see the whole thing as some kind of over-extended joke. "Darling, you always have driven rather too fast, you know…" I'd like to see her here, as a matter of fact, how long would she last…? Interesting experiment. Wait a minute, Maitland, they'd stop for _her__. Thirty seconds on that motorway and they'd be locked bumper to bumper all the way back to Westway. What the hell am I talking about? Why blame them, Maitland? The rain's going off… must get away from this island before my strength goes. Head hurts, might be concussion… cold here, bloody leg…'

As the sun came out again, its rays sweeping through the unkempt grass like the tines of an invisible comb, Maitland shivered in his soaked clothes. He drank frugally from the reservoir bottle. The rain-water was well aerated but tasteless, and Maitland wondered whether he had suffered some minor brain damage that had dulled his perception of taste. He knew that his physical strength was moving along a perceptible downhill gradient. Losing interest in the water which he had worked so hard to collect, he climbed from the car and opened the trunk.

Maitland stripped off his jacket and shirt. The wet rags fell from his hands into the pool of muddy water at his feet. It was now little more than twenty-four hours since his accident, but the skin of his arms and chest had blossomed into a garden of bruises, vividly coloured weals and markings. Maitland put on the spare dress-shirt, and buttoned on the dinner-jacket, turning up the collar. He threw his wallet into the trunk and locked down the lid.

Even in the sunlight he felt frozen. In an effort to warm himself, he forced the cork into the wine bottle and sipped at the Burgundy. For the next hour he hobbled between the breaker's yard and the embankment, carrying all the tyres and fenders he could find. The area around the cars soon became a quagmire in which he slid about like a scarecrow in his mud-spattered dinner-jacket.

Around him the last of the day's sunlight fell on the deep grass, drawing the stems even further into the air. This luxuriant growth seemed to Maitland an almost conscious attempt to inundate him. He set the tyres into the slope of the embankment, laboriously cutting the earth away with the crutch. The rain-washed soil liquefied around him in a soft avalanche. The fenders sank through the surface. As the first sounds of the evening rush-hour began, Maitland managed to climb half-way up the embankment, dragging the injured leg after him like a dying companion on a mountain wall.

The traffic drummed over his head, no more than twenty feet away, an unceasing medley of horns and engines. At intervals the high face of an airline bus sped past, the passengers visible behind their windows. Maitland waved to them as he sat in the shifting mud.