Kingdom Come (10 page)

13

DUNCAN CHRISTIE

A BRASS BAND
struck up a spirited Souza medley, fireworks threw umbrellas of gaudy pink and turquoise light over the layabed town, car horns sounded and voices booed and cheered, greeting the Metro-Centre blimp as it sailed across the dome, more dreamlike than anything that had filled our heads during the night. The weekend was an extended sports festival, sponsored by the Metro-Centre and packed with more promises than even William Sangster could have imagined.

As I made a late breakfast I listened to the buses and coaches bringing teams and their supporters from the motorway towns. Under the evening arc lights there would be a ‘Thames Valley Olympics’, featuring football and rugby matches, athletics meetings, ice-hockey elimination rounds and a series of marathons and road races. Sport and shopping would celebrate a two-day marriage, to be solemnized by David Cruise. The sky would be the wedding marquee, and southeast England was invited. On the Metro-Centre cable channel the announcers worked up their audiences, playing up the mano-a-mano rivalries of the contact sports, the ‘hate’ matches between hockey teams from the Heathrow area.

By two o’clock, when I finally reached the Metro-Centre, the largest crowd I had seen in Brooklands filled the plaza beside the South Gate entrance, a congregation of worshippers that would have filled a dozen cathedrals. Shoppers chatted to each other, vendors in official livery carried placards listing the day’s discounts in menswear, minced beef and Botox treatments. Security men murmured into their lapel radios, stewards in Metro-Centre tracksuits struggled to keep clear a railed passage from the perimeter road to the entrance.

Sports-club supporters were out in force, a suburban crusader army in their St George’s shirts. I parked my car in the basement garage, using the complimentary VIP pass supplied by Tom Carradine. Emerging from the lift, I found myself co-opted into a football squad running and skipping on the spot. The scent of their sweat and good cheer, the pain-blessed grunts and shouts, rose into the air towards the circling blimp. Nearby, a women’s athletics club were exercising gracefully, moving like a dance class through a repertory of cheerleader motions. Nowhere was there a single policeman.

The only sign of tension came from the perimeter road, where a battered pick-up truck had broken down by the kerb. But this was not a day for parking violations, the cardinal sin of suburbia in which everyone happily indulged, along with bouncing cheques and credit card overruns. Double-parking, like adultery and alcoholism, was a vital part of the social glue that kept the suburbs healthy.

I walked towards the stranded truck, where the crowd seemed thinner. Radios began to buzz and fret around me, the group hive coming to life in the presence of an intruder. A young man stood by the tailgate, unloading a refrigerator onto the pavement. Already a small crowd had gathered around him, mothers holding back their pointing children. A black woman sat in the driving cab as her daughter played beside her, reading a magazine and ignoring the crowd and her husband.

I had last seen the young man outside the magistrates’ court, and now for the first time I had a good chance of speaking to Duncan Christie.

THE LARGEST OF
Christie’s deliveries was still to be unloaded, a double-cabinet refrigerator with chromium doors and an ice-cube dispenser big enough for a hotel bar. Exhausted by the effort of moving his cargo, Christie leaned against the tailgate and smiled at the Metro-Centre blimp lazing above him. He had recovered from his rough treatment at the hands of the police, but his face was bruised and sallow, as if the violent storms seething within him had left their shadows on his skin.

His scarred mouth, self-cropped hair—no doubt sheared with a power tool during a building-site tea break—and general air of neglect made him look erratic and unfocused, a methadone addict forever emerging from rehab. Everything about him, from his large feet in a pair of unmatched trainers to the tic that pulled at an infected ear piercing, fixed him firmly as an urban scarecrow designed to frighten away any circling security cameras.

But his eyes were calm, and he seemed to have made his peace with the lazy blimp five hundred feet above him, as if hoping that the cameramen in the gondola would photograph the modest display of goods he had unloaded from his pick-up.

Lined up along the kerb was a selection of kitchen appliances—a spin-dryer, two refrigerators, a trio of washing machines and a microwave oven. None was new, and rust leaked from their hoses. They were the familiar furniture of every kitchen in Brooklands, but there was something surrealist about their presence that unsettled the small crowd. A middle-aged woman next to me pulled at the leash of her docile spaniel, prompting the beast to look up at me and growl menacingly.

‘Right, little beauty . . .’ Christie roused himself from his communion with the blimp and spat on his scarred hands. ‘Time to mount you, girlie . . .’

He seized the refrigerator around its waist, rocked it from side to side and walked it towards the lowered tailgate. He was stronger than I thought, with a stevedore’s hard arms, but the refrigerator was too heavy for him. When it tilted forward one of its doors fell open and trapped his right hand.

‘ . . . Jesus!’ Unable to move, the refrigerator pressing against his chest, he glared at the unmoving spectators. ‘Is none of you a fucking Christian? Maya!’

His wife watched all this through the rear-view mirror, assessed the situation and went back to playing with her daughter. I stepped forward and closed the refrigerator door, releasing Christie’s numbed fingers, then helped him lower the bulky machine to the ground. He leaned against it, a winded Samson clinging to his temple.

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you. A good deed these days takes courage.’

An elderly woman in a serge coat and pillbox hat peered at Christie, irritated by his apparent euphoria.

‘Can you hear me?’ she bellowed as he rolled his head. ‘You’re in the wrong place. Do you want a refund?’

‘Refund?’ Christie roused himself and surveyed the woman. ‘I don’t want a refund, madam. I want retribution.’

‘Retribution? You can’t get that here.’ The woman turned to her husband, who was nodding at the microwave as if recognizing a friend fallen on hard times. ‘Harry, what department is that?’

‘You’re not asking me?’

‘I am asking you.’

Still bickering, they wandered off towards a troupe of drum-majorettes snap-marching beside their pipe band.

Christie took up his position near the display of kitchenware. His manner was affable, but his eyes darkened as a squall blew through his mind. He was a Petri dish of mental infections, a smear-culture of grimaces and tics. He leaned behind the refrigerator and spat on the ground, then deployed himself like a salesman, turning a wild smile onto his customers.

‘Well, what am I offered?’ He caressed the microwave, and addressed a young woman with a daughter pushing a small pram. ‘One careful owner, perfect working order, a few chicken kievs, throw in a cheeseburger. Fully reconditioned.’

‘How much?’ The woman ran a finger over the greasy enamel. ‘There’s a written guarantee?’

‘Written?’ Christie rolled his eyes and confided to me: ‘A sudden trust in literacy. Written, madam?’

‘You know, a printed form.’

‘A form . . .’ Christie raised his voice to a shout above the pipe band. ‘Madam, nothing is true, nothing is untrue! Say nothing, admit nothing, believe everything . . .’

The woman and her daughter moved away, taking the small crowd with them. Seeing that I was the last of his audience, Christie turned to me.

‘Sir, I’ve been watching you. Am I right? You have your eye on that refrigerator. The big fellow . . . ?’

I waited as Christie sized me up. I was the enemy, in my dove-grey summer suit, a creature of the Metro-Centre and the retail parks. I was fairly sure that he no longer remembered me. His arrest, the violent police, his appearance at the magistrates’ court, had disappeared into some garbage chute at the back of his mind.

‘Yes, the big fellow.’ I touched the huge wreck of the refrigerator. ‘Can I assume it works?’

‘Absolutely. Enough ice cubes to freeze the Thames.’

‘How much?’

‘Well . . .’ Enjoying himself, Christie closed his eyes. ‘Seriously, you couldn’t afford it.’

‘Try me.’

‘No point. Believe me, the price is beyond your grasp.’

‘Twenty pounds? Fifty pounds?’

‘Please . . . the price is unimaginable.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s
free
!’ An almost maniacal grin distorted Christie’s face. ‘Free!’

‘You mean . . . ?’

‘Gratis. Not a penny, not a euro, zilch.’ Christie patted me cheerfully on the shoulder. ‘Free. An inconceivable concept. Look at you. It’s outside your entire experience. You can’t cope with it.’

‘I can cope.’

‘I doubt it.’ Confidentially, Christie lowered his voice. ‘I come every Saturday, sooner or later someone asks, “How much?” “Free,” I say. They’re stunned, they react as if I’m trying to steal from them. That’s capitalism for you. Nothing can be free. The idea makes them sick, they want to call the police, leave messages for their accountants. They feel unworthy, convinced they’ve sinned. They have to rush off and buy something just to get their breath back . . .’

‘Very good.’ I waited as he lit a roll-up. ‘I thought it might be a piece of street theatre. But in fact you’re making a serious point.’

‘Absolutely. Maya, hear the man.’

‘This is your stand against the Metro-Centre, and all the other super-malls. Why not just burn them down?’

‘It could be done.’ Christie sucked the sweet smoke from the spliff. ‘If I lit the fuse, would you hold the torch?’

‘I might. As it happens, I have my own problems with the Metro-Centre. My father died in the shooting there.’

Christie puffed his spliff, and turned to look at me without surprise. For a few seconds all expression drained from his face, but he was devoid of emotion. Pain, sympathy and regret had moved to another floor of his mind. Whether or not he recognized me as the man who had watched him outside the magistrates’ court was now irrelevant. I realized that even if he had been responsible for the shooting he would have long since repressed all memory of it.

‘Your father? That’s a hard buy.’ He stepped away from me, drumming his fists on the washing machines. As his wife climbed from the driving cab he called out: ‘Maya . . . a close shave. I nearly had a customer.’

‘Christie, we need to go.’

She was quiet but determined, watching over her husband like a tired mental nurse. Her eyes met mine, then looked away, as if used to dealing with the human strays that Christie’s aimless garrulity drew to him.

A LARGE AMERICAN
car had stopped by the kerb fifty feet away, a silver Lincoln with a cable-company logo emblazoned on its doors. A chauffeur in Metro-Centre livery stepped out, and strode around the car to the rear passenger door. A waiting television unit approached the car, guided through the watching crowd by three uniformed stewards. The Steadicam operator crouched inside his harness, filming the rear-seat passenger, a familiar handsome figure who was inspecting his deep tan in a vanity mirror.

David Cruise was wearing studio make-up, ready for the tracking shot that opened his Saturday show. The camera would film him stepping from the silver Lincoln, saluting the cheering customers and drum majorettes, and then entering the consumer palace over which he presided.

A band struck up ‘Hail to the Chief’, and a smile touched Cruise’s upper lip, a faint tremor that spread outwards to annex the muscles of his face. Energized by this grimace, he leapt nimbly from the passenger seat. He greeted the spectators like a practised politician, pinching the cheek of a delighted old lady, exchanging quips with two workmen in overalls, picking out people in the crowd and treating them to their own personal smile. I noticed his lack of aggression, and the softness of his hands, which were everywhere, fluttering around him like well-trained birds, squeezing, patting, waving and saluting.

With his lipstick, blusher and pancake make-up, Cruise seemed even more real than he did on television. He reminded me of all the minor actors I had coached while filming their commercials. The TV ad jumped the gap between reality and illusion, creating a world where the false became real and the real false. The crowd watching Cruise as he made his regal progress to the South Gate entrance expected him to wear make-up, and took for granted that he made exaggerated claims for the products they were so easily persuaded to buy. David Cruise, supporting actor in television serials that he always joined as their ratings slumped, was a complete fiction, from his corseted waist to his boyish smile. But he was a fake they could believe in.

‘You’re right,’ I said to Christie. ‘Nothing is true, and nothing is untrue. What was it? Say nothing, believe everything . . . ?’

Christie stood beside me, so close that I could hear his laboured breathing. His lungs moved in sudden starts, as if his body was trying desperately to uncouple itself from his brain. In a deep fugue, he stared at the retreating figure of David Cruise, parting the crowd like a cut-price messiah. I assumed that Christie was on the edge of an epileptic fit, surrounded by the warning aura that preceded an attack. I put my hands on his sweating shoulders, ready to catch him when he fell. But he pushed me away, straightened his back and gazed at the drifting blimp above our heads. He had willed himself into the fugue, expressing all his hatred of the fleshy actor who incarnated everything he loathed about the mall.