London Overground (16 page)

One aspect of Ballard's years of apparent retreat in Shepperton – actually a strategic withdrawal to cut out inessentials and facilitate a ruthless production of texts – was his virtuosity with the telephone. Afternoons are passed in dialogue with some remote and unseen interrogator. Ballard riffs around rehearsals for the novels: provocative takes on US politics, Vietnam, Iraq, oil, pornography.

‘I sometimes think we're entering a New Dark Age. The
lights are full on, but there's an
inner darkness
,' he told V. Vale in 2004. ‘The flight of reason leaves people with these partly conscious notions that perhaps they can rely on the
irrational
. Psychopathology offers a better guarantor of freedom from cant and bullshit and sales commercials that fill the ether every moment of the day. One can almost choose to indulge in a mode of psychopathic behaviour without any sort of moral inhibition at all.'

David Markham, the narrator of
Millennium People
, shares a special kind of
visual
addiction with the film-maker Luis Buñuel, an interest in the erotic potential of psychosomatic disability, his wife's use of walking canes as a weapon of power. Cinema, infecting Ballard all the way back to childhood expeditions in Shanghai, through afternoons avoiding medical studies in Cambridge, becomes the defining aspect of millennial London: a prompt for acts of urban terrorism. Like the motorcar, cinema was a twentieth-century phenomenon: its usefulness was over, the heroic period was done. A sentimental attachment to past masters is now registered as a badge of bourgeois self-satisfaction.

‘I remembered the quirky young woman I had met at the National Film Theatre, and invited to a late screening of Antonioni's
Passenger
,' Ballard writes. Seduced by the lizardly sexuality of a film-studies lecturer with posters of Kurosawa samurai and the screaming woman from
Battleship Potemkin
on the walls of her unruly flat, Markham is soon a passenger of another kind, a participant in attacks on the institutions of riverbank culture. He becomes part of the outer circle of the group responsible for a bomb left in the National Film Theatre. If the Overground railway is a rough democracy, all classes, all tastes, then the oil-company-promoted galleries, theatres and cinemas of the South Bank are an exploitation of the river.
The Thames is a hierarchy of power and property, from the downriver towers of
High-
Rise
to the bungalows of Shepperton, by way of Chelsea Marina. The circuit of the orbital railway, like the M25 motorway, links east and west, ghetto and suburb. Train journeys mingle inner and outer topographies; cinematic reveries in the spirit of Patrick Keiller with a neurotic picking at iPhones and Kindles. Chelsea Harbour is about stasis and false memory. Ballard's translation makes that concept into a fever chart of incipient violence, a spill point for embattled investors.

Readers who had tracked Ballard's work for years, and taken his published interviews at face value, trusted him as a guide to the airport margin, the terrain covered by those lists he delivered: science parks, retail parks, golf courses, executive housing, pharmaceutical-research facilities, motorway junctions. The internalized geography of the final Ballard novel,
Kingdom Come
, was the apotheosis of the M25. A supermall is the ideal setting for a mirthless comedy of messianic consumerism.
Millennium People
was more troubling because it played its fate game in a city that Ballard had always told us was devoid of interest. A suitable location for apocalyptic fantasy of the sort previously contrived by Richard Jefferies in
After London
(1885). Jefferies imagined his own drowned world, a poisonous swamp occupied by stunted inbreeds. Ballard, at the start of his career, concentrated on what would happen on the far side of ecological cataclysm: London frozen, burnt, returned to the Mesozoic era. He compared his favoured Westway overpass with the ruined temples of Ankor Wat: ‘a stone dream that will never awake'.

‘I regard the city as a semi-extinct form,' Ballard told me. ‘London is basically a nineteenth-century city. And the habits of mind appropriate to the nineteenth century, which survive
into the novels set in London in the twentieth century, aren't really appropriate to understanding what is going on today.'

Horror is incubated in the labyrinth of an estate agent's glossy brochure, in CGI panoramas of estates that will never be built, populated by smiling people who have never lived. Victor Gollancz, Ballard's formidable early publisher, took him to lunch at the Ivy, telling him how much he had enjoyed
The Drowned World
, even though it was stolen from Conrad. At that time, as Ballard admitted, he had read nothing by the Polish author. Influence can act through sensitivity to place, as much as through close reading. The Chelsea bombers of
Millennium People
inherit the virus from the Soho anarchists of Conrad, as displayed in
The Secret Agent
(1907). The microclimate of Kötting's Deptford, as exploited by Paul Theroux in
The Family Arsenal
(1976), is part of the same lineage. Sedentary writers, coming to terms with the unquantifiable mystery of London, discover an inclination towards nihilistic violence. ‘If you think blowing up Nelson's column is crazy why did you put the bomb in Euston?' says one of Theroux's characters. Reports of anarchist incidents, random killings in quiet Berkshire towns, bombs in department stores and railway terminals, shape the trajectory of literary fiction; fictions that, by some inexplicable magic, become mantic, prophesying –
and making inevitable
– future disasters.

A hypnagogic foreshadowing of tabloid headlines is one of Ballard's disturbing gifts. His aerodynamic prose has journalists ringing him for quotes every time there is a car crash in an underpass. The framing material of
Millennium People
is built from a close reading of recent outrages: the unsolved murder of the television presenter Jill Dando on her Fulham doorstep, the Hungerford killings by Michael Ryan, the massacre of sixteen children and one adult at Dunblane Primary School on
13 March 1996. Ballard's Chelsea Marina cultists, disaffected middle-class professionals, treat the Dando assassination as a re-enactment. The prose has the inevitability of that archive clip, the CCTV footage of Dando forever emerging from a Hammersmith store with a newly acquired stapler. Ballard's rogue paediatrician, Richard Gould, heretical prophet of the group, makes regular pilgrimages to Hungerford.

The names Ballard gives his actors are always significant. What do we make of David Markham, the mediating consciousness of
Millennium People
? Is the ‘Markham' bit a nod towards Ballard's early supporter and Hampstead friend, Kingsley Amis? Amis, under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham', wrote the posthumous James Bond novel
Colonel Sun.
The sun, seen as part of the Japanese flag on the cover of
Empire of the Sun
, has a symbolic role to play in
Millennium People.
There is an epiphany for Richard Gould, after the doorstep shooting of the Dando character in Fulham, when he lifts his arms and salutes the burning gold orb behind the canopy of shivering leaves in the trees in Bishop's Park.

After Ballard's mad clergyman has thrown his revolver into the Thames, he vanishes ‘into the infinite space of Greater London, a terrain beyond all maps'. At that intersection of time and place, when books and charts can no longer be trusted, a pared-down narrative becomes uncanny. Five years after the publication of the novel, there was a tragic incident in Chelsea that could have been lifted straight from the pages of
Millennium People.
A barrister, Mark Saunders, living in a quiet residential square, just off King's Road, fired his shotgun indiscriminately at neighbours. The police were called. One of the eyewitnesses, Jane Winkworth, was in the square's private garden, working on shoe designs. Her clients, newspapers reported, had included Diana, Princess of Wales, and, more recently, Kate Middleton. A police marksman returned fire and
Mr Saunders received a fatal wound.
The incident happened in Markham
Square
.

‘The sirens sounded for many days,' Ballard wrote, ‘a melancholy tocsin that became the aural signature of west London.' Producing his novel, right on the hinge of the new millennium, he demonstrated, yet again, a gift for travelling both ways in time, teaching us how to read the runes and how to confront the best as well as the worst of ourselves.

Before we took our leave of Chelsea Harbour and returned to the companionship of the railway – rails that whispered of Haggerston, Whitechapel, Surrey Quays – we inspected the misconceived piazza in which we found ourselves; a town square with no town, a non-space bereft of humans but overlooked by an infinity of blind windows with a bluish glaze. The open square felt committee designed, with no casting vote, and all options still on the table: herringbone-patterned bricks on which to walk, stock bricks the colour of dried mustard for the walls. A low-level lamp standard was hung with globes like Christmas-tree decorations. It was the season of uprooted forests; dead evergreens dropped under railway arches near London Fields.

There was a shop, with a trade name blazoned on three awnings, offering lamps and lamp-holders:
VAUGHAN
. I thought of the poet of light and of borderlands between worlds, the haunted hours between night and day, Henry Vaughan: ‘Rove in that mighty and eternal light / Where no rude shade, or night / Shall dare approach us.' And I thought of another Vaughan too, the ‘hoodlum scientist' of
Crash
; the one whose windshield is set at an angle to express an ‘oblique and obsessive passage' through the open spaces of Ballard's troubled consciousness.

We left the colony of the barely living, Chelsea Harbour, and we moved on towards a much more substantial enclosure, a city of the named dead, those who fought to stay with us, to make us aware of their suspended narratives.

Reconnecting with Lots Road, we registered a specialist trade in tables too distinguished to be dirtied with food, oil paintings of questionable pedigree, and all the displayed plunder of forages through gardens and libraries, kitchens and bedrooms; the residue of persons of property who no longer had any use for it. They would not be burying it with them. Auction houses like private banks. Coffee enclaves, draped in subtle greenery, in which bidders and vendors debated percentages. And yawned. And fingernailed digital wafers. There were mews entrances to secret yards, quiet offices and spaces that hovered between top-end retail and sneering exhibitionism.

Here was a subterrain in which neither of us was at home; it lacked, as we did, serviceable anecdotes. We pushed through the confusion of King's Road and Fulham Road, as they sprinted competitively, in parallel lanes, towards their point of abdication at Putney Bridge. You haul in the necessary connections until you arrive at some wholly unexpected destination: Sloane Square or the Royal Brompton Hospital (and painful recollection of Angela Carter's gruelling sessions of chemotherapy).

The Overground, after crossing the Thames – all change, please, at Clapham Junction – has a revived identity: high on its embankment, or down below, now screened by strategic planting, viewed over the lip of an established bridge, a rounded
ledge of lichen blots and cracks filled with mosses. The line has been coerced into the orbital promotion, splashed with ginger, but it retains its older inclination, as a track for transporting coal; a link with the railway-harbour at Willesden Junction; a boundary marker for Kensington and Chelsea; a western rim for Brompton Cemetery.

Before venturing into the burial ground, by way of South Lodge, we made a detour to its hollow neighbour, the Stamford Bridge football cathedral, autonomous province of the oligarch Abramovich: West London's Crimea. The citizens here, paying heavily for their role as obedient spectators, voted some years back to throw in their lot with the exiled Russian billionaire, his associates and political connections. A fools' plebiscite allowing them to do no more than clap in approval at the loss of identity.

We noticed, at the perimeter of the deserted stadium, a wall on which a representation of a Euro-triumphant Chelsea team had been projected. A well-behaved queue, fathers with sons in branded shirts, was waiting its turn for the chance to pose for a photograph that would place a humble fan among the demigods, the Terrys and Drogbas. The emptiness of the high bowl, attended by security guards, gazed upon by devout pilgrims, was buffered by development: executive flats, two hotels, restaurants, bars, megastore. There was an attempt, which never took, to rebrand this plot of captured Fulham ground as ‘Chelsea Village' or ‘The Village'; in just the way that upwardly mobile knots of Hackney, parasitical on parks or railway hubs, try to sound neo-pastoral by slapping an Oliver Goldsmith title on to a concrete mall or a bleak and windblown Barratt Homes piazza with spouting water feature. Locations without locality. The careless exuberance of Ridley Road street market becomes a ‘Shopping Village', roofed over, policed; while at the same time, by some curious irony, grass-roots
protestors, challenging the firebombing and inevitable demolition of a Georgian terrace, say that they are fighting to preserve the ambiance of a threatened village, a community of many faiths and origins.

Chelsea football managers are appointed like provincial governors, hired, fired, paid off. Sometimes, like José Mourinho, they come back, in new outfits, with reconsidered (and greying) hair, and new lines in obscurantist banter. Sometimes, like the unfortunate Spaniard Rafael Benítez, tainted by his association with Liverpool FC, former managers become non-persons, exploitable for a few months before being shipped out to Naples.

Kötting was restless. It was at least two hours since we had eaten with the man from Ecuador, two hours since there had been anyone worth interrogating. I couldn't sell my companion the close relationship between geology, railways and football stadia. How Stamford Bridge was connected with his beloved Millwall and the Den. How Stanford Creek once flowed down to the Thames along the way now occupied by rail tracks. In the early days of territorial exploitation, there was an attempt to sell the land on which the stadium was built to the Great Western Railway Company. Stamford Bridge had its own small railway halt, lost after Second World War bombing raids. Great dunes of London soil, excavated during the construction of the Piccadilly Line, were used as terracing for standing spectators. Railways, rivers, stadiums, cemeteries: there was always traffic between them, acoustic whispers, mass cheers and whistles of derision, the scream of trains slowing for West Brompton, drifting over the layered and dignified silence of the nature-reserve burial ground.

The lodged dead absorb and soak up the restless movement of the city. They manufacture calm. Contemplation. And a
measure of gratitude: that we are still on our feet. We are going home. This time. We are allowed to saunter, without challenge, down the broad avenue of an enclosed space laid out over a market garden as an open-air, non-denominational church. A pantheist temple roofed by West London sky. In death, inequalities are emphasized: from grandiose mausoleums, follies and vaults, to half-erased slabs and squares of turf marked with twigs or numbers. And patrolled by crows.

The design of Brompton Cemetery, seen from above, is like a thermometer with the bulb of the Great Circle to the south. Or like an elongated ankh, symbol of life. Andrew is inspired by this set. He sees possibilities for future interventions. He wants to return with his pet photographer, a former student who goes by the name of Anonymous Bosch, and who has mastered the pinhole camera as a device for capturing interactions between movement and stillness, past and present, the
living and the dead. Elective accidents. Leaks of furtive light. Mortality as a lens fault. A sudden blurring of focus confirming future disease.

The lime avenue short cut between Fulham Road and Lillie Road is an oasis for wildlife and certain specialized subspecies of the human tribe: amateur antiquarians, canine accompanists, relatives paying their respects to the dear departed, gay men patrolling the outer circle, and wild-haired, barefoot vagrants setting down their burdens in shady alcoves. What attracted me was the sense of being somewhere with a rich history about which I knew very little. Among the colonnades, Andrew was a silent stalker. I told him that this was the favourite cruising ground of William Burroughs in his first, mysterious London days, when he practised the cult of invisibility in the old Empress Hotel at 25 Lillie Road. He was cruising for silence and a connection with the reservoir of memory as much as for sexual partners. Bill liked to spread a rug over a convenient tombstone and picnic on sandwiches and wine from a paper cup. He made a number of recordings.

The dead are a logistical nuisance in expanding cities. They offer a poor return for short-term property investors. In Brompton the concept was always theatrical architecture; an aspect stressed by the designer Benjamin Baud, in order that this railside halt could compete with the rustic attractions of suburban burying grounds like Nunhead and Highgate. Brompton Cemetery was a city of extinguished Londoners built for 250,000 souls. Victorian cemeteries were the original garden cities. A demonstration, perhaps, that utopian theme parks for the good life are much better suited to citizens who will never move again. Here was a sculpture garden dressed with 35,000 eccentric monuments to the wealthy and the established (almost all of whom are now forgotten).

A former colleague of mine in the illegitimate book trade, a
self-assembled eccentric who went under the name of Driffield, wrote about hearing a radio programme on the wildlife in Brompton Cemetery, and being inspired, at once, to go there, after equipping himself with a large tub of ice cream and a pint of fruit juice. Driff was a man who slept under suicide-watch conditions: lights on, World Service playing all night. Waiting for the dawn knock on the door.

But the aspect of Baud's plan that appealed to me was the circle of colonnades (with catacombs beneath) at the approach to the Anglican chapel. This lidless temple, rimmed by Piranesi walkways, memorial tablets obscured by occult geometries and sexual solicitation, is a forest of calcified classical figures: stumps, pillars, crosses. The carbon-encrusted skulls on the fading stones are a vanitas, a stern reminder of the penalty for thinking too well of ourselves. Here are the platforms, ramps, vaults, of a ghost station from which no traveller returns.

The intrusion of metaphysics into our tramp dressed the colonnades in Shakespearean velvet:
Hamlet
, Act V, Scene I – A Church-Yard ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?'

A brisk female photographer fussed around a senior actor, who was being invited to hold up one of those circular sun-reflecting disks. Like a provincial aristocrat expected to catch his own head after he has been guillotined. She rushed and flustered to exploit the golden hour.

‘You must tell me about the hair,' the man said, patting it down. What there was of it.

‘I can always retouch.'

He is in a white jacket for an uncivil day, a midnight-blue shirt. Dressing for the Med, in the way some big performers favour: as if coming ashore from a cruise liner. And expecting the day to be ten degrees hotter than it actually is. Dark glasses and straw hat optional.

I
know the actor's face, his mannerisms, the timbre of the voice, but the name takes a few hours to shake from my sluggish memory-file. I'd seen him do Polonius. And, if not, he should have done, he had the right look: asymmetrical, one eye more hooded than the other; successful, well fed; a babbler of unwanted advice with a streak of irony running down his spine, like Blackpool rock. Courtier, minor duke, king's uncle. Now required to turn out in a cemetery, to be herded and primped by a photographer the age of his daughter, if he had one. Lear and Cordelia. Where Lear is fond, confused. And Cordelia can't keep still. This man was more obliging about the process than Ballard when he was trapped on a traffic island in Shepherd's Bush in the rain. ‘One more, Mr Ballard.' Sodden, nagged by back pain, threatened by traffic. ‘I'm off.'

Oliver Ford Davies. The name popped into my head, a couple of hours later, and three Overground stations down the track, as we skirted a flashers' wood on the margin of Wormwood Scrubs. I saw Mr Davies do a turn as Duke of York to David Tennant's king in
Richard
II. Serviceable. But playing well within himself, the senior company man. This other performance, gracious among the tombs, was a ruder assignment.

The whole spectacle of the colonnades, figures vanishing into alcoves and secret exits, broad steps leading down to the underworld, makes Brompton Cemetery one of London's most Jacobean retreats. The empty grave of the Sioux warrior Long Wolf proves this quality of other-worldliness. The burial site, on the left-hand side as you approach the chapel, is a bed of lavender. Long Wolf, who is reputed to have fought against Custer at Little Big Horn, died when he was performing with Buffalo Bill Cody's troop at Earls Court in 1892. In September 1997, the grave was opened. There were two caskets interred on top of Long Wolf: Star Ghost Dog, a two-year-old Sioux girl who fell from a horse in Cody's show, and an anonymous
Englishman. After tribal ceremonies, a feast of venison and buffalo meat, Long Wolf was returned to South Dakota, to the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

The long straight avenue leading to Old Brompton Road was a meditative walk through a gated community where all the temples had shrunk and the towers were occupied by owls and ravens and the multifarious wildlife with which Driffield wanted to become acquainted. There were names and dates on doors and relief portraits like selfies taken with a marble camera. Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragette. Dr John Snow, pioneer anaesthetist. James McDonald, co-founder of Standard Oil. Bernard Levin, journalist. George Henty, novelist. Constant Lambert, composer. George Borrow, writer and wanderer. And thousands more in this huge West Brompton boarding house, this alternative Empress Hotel, of all the trades and professions. With a notable repertory company of players and stage folk, gypsies of the halls: Sir Squire Bancroft, Richard Tauber, Brian Glover, Benjamin Webster, Sir Augustus Harris, Walter Brandon Thomas.

Anonymous Bosch, when he came here on assignment, lumbering his tripod and pinhole camera, found a story I had missed: the burial place of a faded celebrity photographer, Bob Carlos Clarke. Like to like, camera drawn to camera, I thought, with the two image-makers as compliant accessories. Bosch, in shaping his record of the grave, was invited to complete a portfolio begun, years earlier, by a very different operator. Carlos Clarke was hard-edged, a cataloguer of women as fish. Bosch sculpted smoke.