Free Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard Page A

the half-length mirror above the maid’s kettle and biscuit tin. The tasselled banner hung behind me, as if I were on a podium that faced a chanting crowd. I seemed more aggressive, not in the bully-boy way of the street thugs who had driven the imam from his suburban mosque, but in the more cerebral style of the lawyers, doctors and architects who had enlisted in Hitler’s elite corps. For them, the black uniforms and death’s-head emblems represented a violence of the mind, where aggression and cruelty were part of a radical code that denied good and evil in favour of an embraced pathology. Morality gave way to will, and will deferred to madness.
    I tried to smile, but a different self stood behind the shirt. My cautious take on the world, imposed on me by my neurotic mother, had given way to something far less introverted. The focus of my face moved from my eyes and high forehead to my mouth and jaw. The muscles in my face were more visible, the strings of a harder appetite, a more knowing hunger . . .
    I threw the shirt into the empty laundry basket.
    WHAT DANGEROUS GAME had my father been playing? Years of mismanaged third world airports brought out a nasty strain of racism in senior pilots. Or was there something fascist about flight itself? Death, far from closing his life, had opened the door to a dozen possible futures. Already he was a different man from the wise and sympathetic figure I had imagined. What sort of father would he have made? I sensed my free and easy childhood, scarcely controlled by my distracted mother, giving way to a more disciplined regime. Discipline as a means of instilling love . . . ?
    The flat was airless, and I needed to pace a car park somewhere to clear my head. I closed the door behind me and left the apartment house, listening to my feet on the gravel, a horizontal slide area where nothing was firmly bedded.
    I was sitting in the driving seat of the Jensen, waiting for my mental compass to reset itself, when a grey Audi turned into the car park beside me. A tall, middle-aged Asian in a creased business suit stepped out. As his large shoes ploughed their way to the entrance doors, I noticed that he was carrying a rolled-up newspaper in his right hand, tapping the air like a bandmaster beating time. His bulky chest and shoulders reminded me of the intruder I had pinned briefly to the wall.
    ‘Excuse me . . . ! Sir, can you wait . . . ?’
    I caught up with him in the lobby, as he searched for his keys to the ground-floor flat. Startled when I burst through the doors, he dropped the keys onto the tiled floor. None of my neighbours had called on me to express their sympathies, but this Asian resident would have seen me coming and going, and must have guessed who I was.
    Trying to calm him, I introduced myself. ‘Richard Pearson—I’m Captain Pearson’s son. He died in the Metro-Centre shooting. You remember . . . ?’
    ‘Of course. My deepest sympathies.’ His eyes moved quickly over my grey suit and tie and then turned to the lobby doors, as if he suspected that an accomplice might be lurking outside. ‘A shocking affair, even for Brooklands.’
    ‘For Brooklands . . . ?’ I bent down and retrieved his keys, then handed them to him, conscious of the rolled-up newspaper and the bandage around his right wrist. ‘Tell me, Mr—?’
    ‘Kumar. Nihal Kumar. I’m resident here for many years.’
    ‘Good. It’s a pleasant little backwater. We’ve met before, Mr Kumar. No . . . ?’
    ‘It’s not likely.’ Kumar pumped his doorbell, too confused to use his keys. ‘Perhaps when your father . . . ?’
    ‘A few days ago. I left the door of the flat open. You probably thought a burglar had broken in. I still have your medical journal. You are a doctor?’
    ‘Definitely not.’ He gestured wearily. ‘My professional background is in engineering. I’m the manager of Motorola’s research laboratory in Brooklands. My wife is a doctor.’
    ‘A paediatrician? That