Free The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard Page A

nondescript suburb.
    However, if I was trapped here, I at least would assign myself absolute freedom to do whatever I chose.
    Calm now, I crossed the field and returned to the town. As I re-entered the quiet streets the first residents were cleaning their cars and trimming their hedges. A party offreshly scrubbed children was setting off for their Sunday School. They walked past the overbright gardens, unaware that I was following them, caged satyr in tennis sneakers ready to seize their little bodies. At the same time I felt a strange tenderness for them, as if I had known them all my life. They and their parents were also prisoners of this town. I wished that they could learn to fly, steal light aircraft …
    A kite rose from a garden near the film studios, a paper and bamboo rectangle on which a child had painted a bird’s head, the beaky profile of a condor. Following its path across the skyline, I noticed a mansard roof I had seen in my dream. There were the same stepped faces on which a pair of ospreys had slithered, the dormer window with its decorated lintel.
    Beyond the perimeter fence of the film studios the antique aircraft were drawn up on the grass by the canvas hangars. There were Spads and Fokker triplanes, a huge stringed biplane of the interwar years, and several wooden mock-ups of Spitfires. None of them had been here when I first flew over Shepperton, but I had seen them on the night grass during my dream.
    Looking around me, I realized that I had also seen these houses before. The lower floors were unfamiliar, but each of the roofs and chimneys, the television aerials I had nearly impaled myself upon, I recognized clearly. A man in his fifties with his teenage daughter emerged from an apartment house, watching me warily as if unsure whether I was about to beg from them. I remembered the striped canvas awning of the topmost balcony, the pair of mating hawks I had urged into the night sky.
    I was certain that the daughter recognized me. When I waved to her she stared at me in an almost fixated way. Her father stepped into the road, warning me off.
    Trying to calm them, I raised my bandaged hands and blood-stained knuckles.
    Tell me – did you dream last night? Did you dream of flying?’
    The father shouldered me aside and held tightly to his daughter’s arm. On their way to church, they had obviously not expected my messianic presence outside their front door. As they hurried away my nostrils caught beneath the heavy scent of cologne the acrid but familiar odour that still clung to their freshly bathed bodies.
    Two middle-aged couples passed me with their adult children. I strolled along with them, to their irritation sniffing at them from the gutter.
    ‘What about you – did any of you dream of flying?’
    I smiled at them, excusing my shabby parson’s suit and white shoes, but I could smell the same tangy odour, the stench of aviaries.
    I followed them into the town, trailing their aerial spoor. A dozen large sea-birds circled above the shopping centre, a species of deep-water gull that the storm had brought up the river. On the roof of the supermarket a raven perched, two golden orioles clambered over the ornamental fountain by the post office. On all sides a confused avian life had materialized on this quiet Sunday morning above the heads of these church-going people. Attracted by their acrid scent, duped into recognizing the townsfolk as members of their own species, the birds swirled into the shopping mall. The heavy gulls stumbled across the decorative tiles, wings flurried among the polished shoes. An embarrassed woman laughed nervously at a gull trying to alight on her hat, a stiff-backed old man in brown tweed shook his shooting stick at a raven eager to perch on his shoulder. Children ran laughing among the orioles that leapt from their hands, plumage flaming among the television sets and washing machines in the appliance-store windows.
    Badgered by the birds, we moved through the centre of