Concrete Island. J. G. Ballard

       5 The perimeter fence

      TAKING himself in hand like a weary drill-sergeant, Mait-land clambered down from the trunk of the Jaguar. He ignored the pain in his thigh and propped himself roughly against the car, waving the crutch and trying to call back the vanished driver. Sober now, he looked with disgust at his injured leg and ragged clothes, angry with himself for having given way to a moment of juvenile hysteria. As well as breaking up his car, the crash seemed to have jolted his brain loose from its moorings.

      Maitland leaned his right armpit on to the metal crutch. He realized that he was unequipped to carry out any but the simplest physical activities. The grimy and crippled figure whose distorted reflection glimmered in the trunk lid exactly summed up his position on the island, marooned among these concrete causeways with almost no practical skills or resources.

      Few psychological ones, for that matter, Maitland reflected. These days one needed a full-scale emergency kit built into one's brain, plus a crash course in disaster survival, real and imagined.

      ‘Wrench, box spanner, wheel brace … ’ Maitland searched methodically through the tool-kit. He spoke aloud to himself as if bullying along an incompetent recruit, exploiting his irritation with himself.

      When he had loaded the tools into his jacket pockets he straightened the crutch and set off towards the overpass, ignoring the cars that moved along the motorway. It was shortly after nine o'clock, and the traffic had slackened after the morning rush-hour. Already the warm sunlight was drawing from the damp grass the faint yellow haze that had hung over the island the previous afternoon, blurring the perimeter walls.

      As he swung himself along, Maitland remembered that Catherine was collecting her new car that morning from the Japanese distributors. Helen Fairfax would be busy in the paediatric clinic at Guy's – ironically, neither would try to telephone him, each assuming that Maitland had spent the night with the other. For that matter, no one at his office would be particularly alarmed by his absence, taking for granted that he was ill or away on some urgent business. Maitland had trained his staff to accept his comings and goings without question. Several times he had flown to the United States, deliberately not notifying the office until his return. Even if he were away for a week his secretary would not feel concerned enough to call Catherine or Helen.

      Painfully, his swing upset by the uneven ground, Maitland hobbled towards the wire-mesh fence. Below the grass he could identify the outlines of building foundations, the ground-plans of Edwardian terraced houses. He passed the entrance to a World War II airraid shelter, half-buried by the earth and gravel brought in to fill the motorway embankments.

      By the time he reached the fence, deep within the shadow of the overpass, Maitland was exhausted. He leaned his crutch against the fence and sat down on the black earth. From his pockets he took out the wrench, box spanner and pliers. The heavy metal tools had dragged at his shoulders, bumping against his bruised chest and abdomen.

      No grass grew under the overpass. The damp earth was dark with waste oil leaking from the piles of refuse and broken metal drums on the far side of the fence. The hundred-yard-long wire wall held back mounds of truck tyres and empty cans, broken office furniture, sacks of hardened cement. Builder's forms, bales of rusty wire and scrapped engine parts were heaped so high that Maitland doubted whether he would be able to penetrate this jungle of refuse even if he could cut through the fence.

      Still sitting, he turned to face the wire. High above him, almost contiguous with the clear April sky, was the concrete span of the overpass, its broad deck reverberating faintly under the pressure of the passing traffic. Holding the pliers in both hands, he worked away at a metal link, testing the steel cord against the teeth. In the dim light he saw that he had made only a faint notch. Maitland shivered in the cold air. Moving the wrench and box spanner along the ground, he edged towards the steel post ten feet away. Here the adjacent sections of wire were pinned to the post by a continuous steel flange bolted on to a backing plate by self-locking nuts.

      Adjusting the spanner, Maitland worked away at one of the nuts. He was now too weak even to get a secure grip on the head, let alone put any pressure to bear. He looked up at the high wall of the fence – ten years earlier, perhaps ten days earlier, he would have been strong enough to climb the fence with his bare hands.

      He threw down the spanner, and scratched with the wrench at the damp ground. Although slick with oil, the dark earth was as impenetrable as sodden leather. To dig a trench below the fence he would need to excavate at least a cubic metre of stony soil, force his way through a ten-feet-high pile of truck tyres, each of which weighed a hundred pounds.