He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters. The periphery, according to him, is where the future reveals itself. New Labour, he asserts, was hatched in airport satellite-strips and gated communities. The child terrorists of Running Wild are the result of benevolent eugenic planning; Internet education, leavened by supervised abseiling, white-water rafting, paragliding, will result in the spook children of Blair and flinty Jack Straw. Ordinary hormonal adolescents making a mess of it, spewing on pavements, dealing dope.
But it’s not suburbia. Suburbia is drift-Hackney (relocated to Chingford). Bethnal Green and Limehouse, once seen as the epitome of urban experience (immigrant, criminous, highly spiced), are now models of Neo-Suburbia: expensive dormitories, Barratt and Laing estates, commuters working elsewhere. The concerned middle classes discussing equity, schools; laying out gardens (even on roofs).
Ballard referred me to a piece he had written, ‘Welcome to the Virtual City’, for Tate magazine:
But Shepperton, for what it’s worth, is not suburbia. If it is a suburb of anywhere, it is of London Airport, not London. And that is the clue to my dislike of cities and my admiration for what most people think of as a faceless dead-land of inter-urban sprawl. Hurrying back from Heathrow or a West Country weekend to their ludicrously priced homes in Fulham or Muswell Hill, they carefully avert their gaze from this nightmare terrain of dual carriageways, police cameras, science parks and executive housing, an uncentred realm bereft of civic identity, tradition or human values, a zone fit only for the alienated and footloose, those without past or future.
And that, of course, is exactly what we like about it… The triangle formed by the M3 and the M4, enclosing Heathrow and the River Thames, is our zone of possibility…
He doesn’t speak badly of anybody, any named individual. It’s almost a superstition, no gossip. The enemy is generic and vague: ‘the literary mob’, ‘cities’, ‘dull furniture’. Like Burroughs, he might not choose to join the club, but he passes very effectively: a voice from another world, good manners. It’s very decent of him to give me this riverside afternoon. He doesn’t take a drink before eight o’clock. I don’t need what Ballard says, I know what he says, I’ve read the books. What I need is the chance to pay homage, in the course of this mad orbital walk, to the man who has defined the psychic climate through which we are travelling. It’s a romantic foible on my part, the impulse that once had De Quincey tramping off to the Lake District, to make a nuisance of himself in Wordsworth’s cottage.
The hair is long and silvery, the skin ivory coloured. Ballard, through his long residence and his riverine hermeticism, has joined the company. He looks and behaves like a magus, like Dr John Dee: modesty of address enlivened by a proper arrogance about how his vision of the world has been confirmed. I show him the Siebel brochure, but it means nothing. He knows. Blake at Lambeth, Dee at Mortlake, Pope at Twickenham, Ballard at Shepperton: the great British tradition of expulsion, indifference. The creation of alternative universes that wrap like Russian dolls around a clapped-out core.
Ballard drove me back to the station. The streets were deserted. We passed some white, flat-roofed, vaguely Thirties properties. ‘I thought of trying one of those,’ he said. The paint was peeling. A failed experiment, a Utopian fantasy that had run out of puff. A warehouse, near the river, was used for shooting TV commercials. I thought of Crash. ‘I aimlessly followed the perimeter roads to the south of the airport, feeling out the unfamiliar controls among the water reservoirs of Stanwell.’
Shepperton was sun-dappled, leafy, bleached. The Asian community, if it existed, were all out at Heathrow. The streets were as white as the Suffolk littoral, as Shenley. Ballard, when I interviewed him in Shepherd’s Bush, spoke of a malaise, the death of affect. ‘Rather than fearing alienation,’ he said, ‘people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting. That’s the message of my fiction. We need to explore total alienation and find what lies beyond. The secret module that underpins who we are and our imaginative remaking of ourselves that we all embrace.’
3
I don’t know where we are. None of the landmarks relate to anything in my past. As a motorist, I’ve kept clear of this section of the M25. My world has been turned upside-down: the Thames is now at the back of me, a lost ceiling.
Renchi clips along (tales of a painter friend who offers spirit-guided walks around sacred sites; who paints, under mediumistic instruction, hundreds of canvases). Kevin sheds his jacket and puts away his notebook. We stick with the motorway.
Thorpe is undistinguished. Low-level warehouses, industrial estates: ALPHA WAY, PRIVATE ROAD. Across still-green cereal fields, I notice a spectacular Italianate tower. One of our orbital acupuncture needles. We’re back on track. Through the long lens, I can make out a red brick chateau, crenellated parapets, too many windows. This hilltop fantasy, Renchi tells me, is the Royal Holloway College. The tower isn’t Italian: it’s loosely modelled on the Cloth Hall at Ypres. Belgian Gothic as interpreted by the architect William Crossland, under the patronage of patent medicine magnate Thomas Holloway.
There was of course a story, an anecdote connected with the college. A relative of Renchi’s had been at Royal Holloway, briefly, studying drama. An end-of-term party. Drink taken in the cloisters. A marble hand broken from the statue of Queen Victoria, removed. This dark token was now buried in a country garden. Should it be located and returned? The college was too much of a detour, we let it go.
In deep lanes you come on parked vans. I assembled, in the course of our walk, quite a collection: men slumped over wheels, sleeping. Away from the science parks, the railside enterprises, drivers take time out: a folded newspaper, a tattooed arm hanging against warm metal, cigarette smouldering in a two-fingered grip. Dashboard as travelling mantelpiece. An indented tray for the tupperware lunchbox. A slot for ciggies and plastic lighter. Family portraits: wife and baby in hospital, girl-child and large doll in bed. Pulling away from the M25, the puff goes out of motorists. On the road there is a communal energy, flight chemicals, petrol fugues. Green lanes are private dormitories, windows wide to birdsong, pesticide; a sewage farm beyond the Junction 12 interchange (‘a two-level cyclic design, close to the 164 feet high St Ann’s Hill’).
In the next village, Kevin flashes his notebook. All sorts of interesting things are happening: a group of chefs in tall hats, white jackets and checkered trousers are hanging out with dangerous looking schoolgirls. Alice in Wonderland revisited. Among rose-red brickwork, white window frames, yew hedges, is an American/Swiss school. With appropriate catering. Three cooks to every pupil. Moneyed Americans and international Swiss, when they get together, look for security, security and security. Exclusion of undesirables. Food that doesn’t knot in your throat, explode in your belly. Thorpe Village, Eastly End, Virginia Water: these places are perfect. Convenient for the airport. They look like Agatha Christie. Behave like Bern or Basel, Orange County (California).
Wild girls, experimentally made up, wearing customised chalet-school outfits, are smoking. They don’t have bike sheds in Thorpe. But they do have the Monk’s Walk, which carries us out among the grey lakes you see from the M3 (as you head out of London, for Winchester and Southampton). Trees, rounded like broccoli crowns, reach to the water’s edge.