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

the town, past the overbright foliage in the park, to the church by the open-air swimming-pool. Here at last the birds liftedaway, as if repelled by the immense numbers of feathers that lay on the roofs of the cars parked by the churchyard, torn loose during some dizzying aerial tournament.
    To everyone’s surprise, the church was closed, its doors chained and padlocked. Puzzled, the parishioners stood among the gravestones, prayer-books in hand. The old man raised his stick to the clock tower. Several of the Roman numerals had fallen from the dial, and the hands had stopped at a few minutes past two o’clock. The flagstones around the church were covered with feathers, as if some huge pillow had burst upon the spire.
    ‘Are you the curate?’ A young wife I had followed from the town centre gathered enough courage together to point to my suit. I could see she was unable to reconcile its clerical cut with my muddied tennis shoes and blood-stained hands. ‘The service should begin at eleven. What have you done with Father Wingate?’
    As her husband drew her away the old man in the tweed suit stepped forward and touched my shoulder with the handle of his shooting stick. He peered at me with the gaze of the retired soldier still suspicious of all civilians. ‘Aren’t you the pilot? You came down in the river yesterday. What are you doing here?’
    The parishioners gathered around me, a frustrated congregation. My presence on the ground unsettled them. They would have preferred me safely in the air. Could they sense radiating from my mind those inverted perspectives which had trapped me in this small town?
    Raising my bandaged fists, I stepped through them to the doors of the church, lifted the heavy knocker and struck three times. I was irritated by these timid people in their well-pressed suits and flowered dresses, with their polite religion. I was tempted to break down the doors and drive them into their pews, pen them there while I performed some kind of obscene act in the aisle – press the blood from my hands against their bleeding Christ, expose myself, urinatein the font, anything to shake them out of their timidity and teach them a fierce and violent dread.
    I wanted to scream at them: ‘Birds are gathering here in Shepperton, chimeras more marvellous than anything dreamed of in your film studios!’
    I pointed to the fulmars circling the church spire. ‘The birds! Can you see them?’
    While they backed away from me through the gravestones I noticed that an unusual vegetation was springing through the cobbles around the porch, as if from my heels. I was surrounded by a small grove of gladiolus-like plants each some two feet high, with sword-shaped leaves and a trumpet of milk-crimson blossom the colour of blood and semen within its green flute.
    I gestured to the parishioners, who stood with their prayer-books and disappointed faces, their embarrassing odour of birds. I was about to urge them to pick the flowers, but they were now looking at the doorway of the vicarage, where Father Wingate stood, quietly smoking a cigarette. He was wearing, not his cassock, but a Panama hat and flowered shirt, the garb of a stockbroker self-consciously starting his vacation. Although his congregation smiled expectantly, waving their prayer-books, he ignored them and locked the door of the vicarage behind him.
    Smoking his cigarette, he concentrated his gaze on me. His strong forehead was crossed by a deep frown, as if he had recently received a severe blow to his confidence in the world around him – the news of a close friend’s inoperable cancer, perhaps, or the death of a favourite niece. He seemed so preoccupied that I almost believed he had forgotten he was the priest of this parish and was absent-mindedly waiting for me to conduct my own service.
    Overhead the gulls had begun to circle again. Led by the fulmars, they surrounded the church, heavy wings brushing the spire, trying to dash the last of the numerals from