The Kindness of Women by J. G. Ballard Page B

on the Cam, talked endlessly in the coffeehouses, and debated the issues of the day at the Union, mimicking the tones of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, on the airfields that ringed the university, American bombers were massing for a final nuclear countdown.
    On Sunday afternoons I drove Miriam on my motorcycle to Cambridge airfield, where we watched Richard Sutherland circle the field in his Tiger Moth. Later I took Miriam out to the great American bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and we walked together through the November wind to stare at the nuclear bombers. Once we came across a run-down British air base where World War II Liberators sat in parking bays far from their hangars. As Miriam kept watch, I climbed through the wire and approached one of the unguarded bombers. I swung myself through the ventral hatch into the equipment-cluttered fuselage. As the wind drummed at the bomber’s hull and flexed its heavy wings I imagined myself taking off towards the east.
    â€œJim, you’re trying awfully hard to get arrested,” Miriam told me when we returned to King’s. “Where is your father now?”
    â€œHe’s still in China.”
    â€œYou won’t feel at home until he comes to England.”
    â€œHe’s stuck in Shanghai for a while. The Communists put him on trial. Luckily, he’d read more Marx and Engels than the peasant judges, so they let him off.”
    â€œThere’s a moral there…” Miriam took my arm as we stood by the fire, running her eye along the Surrealist reproductions. “Ernst, Dalí, the Facteur Cheval … they’re your real syllabus. Don’t let Peggy Gardner rubbish them. Hang on to your imagination, even if it is a bit lurid.”
    â€œMiriam…” I had heard this too often at school. “The world is lurid. You’ve never had to rely on your imagination, thank God.”
    â€œAny moment now, he’s going to start tunnelling…”
    I had described my attempt to break into the food store at Lunghua, which Miriam thought comical but oddly touching. Already I was infatuated with this quick-witted schoolgirl, with her bold gaze and outrageous enthusiasms. At times she would lose interest in me, preoccupied with some grudge against one of the women teachers at the Perse, or after the endless rows with her mother about her drinking in the undergraduate pubs. The proctors had complained to her father that Miriam had been seen in a punt with a crowd of Trinity men, threatening them with a pint of beer in each hand.
    Every moment with her produced some surprise. She told me that the optical experiments devised by Richard Sutherland were no more than a blind, part of a larger test to determine the psychological profiles of students who volunteered to take part in medical experiments. Research workers had always assumed that casually recruited volunteers formed a typical cross section of the student population.
    â€œBut that isn’t true. Richard says that the only ones who apply are either aggressive extroverts or neurotic introverts.”
    â€œAnd where are the sane ones?”
    â€œThey never apply. They’re either getting drunk or necking on the river.”
    â€œCall Professor Harris…” We were lying in bed together, and I searched below the sheet. “Where does that leave me?”
    Miriam pressed my head to the pillow and brushed the hair from my eyes. “Jim, you’re a war criminal.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œOr you think like one. Richard and I were talking about you.”
    â€œAnother bogus test…”
    â€œListen, if you take away the war you behaved just like a schizophrenic child. Richard has a patient whose son was schizophrenic. He spent twenty years quietly trying to kill himself. It’s all he wanted to do.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œI forget. Anyway, you aren’t going to kill yourself. I need you for at least the next three weeks.”