Kingdom Come (16 page)

‘Are they right?’

‘Yes. They know that madness is the only freedom left to them.’ I sat down in my sun lounger and waited for Cruise to reply. ‘David . . . ?’

Cruise was staring at the pool, once again as smooth as a dance floor. He turned and pointed both forefingers at me, a trademark gesture he employed when a guest uttered an unexpected insight.

‘It has possibilities. Richard, I like it . . .’

PART II

22

THE TRENCHCOAT HERO

THE HEATHROW TOWNS
had cleared the runway, lifted their wheels and were learning to fly, borne aloft on the bosomy thermals of the bright August sun. As I left the motorway and approached the outskirts of Ashford I could see the tasselled pennants flying from an out-of-town hypermarket, transforming this ugly metal shed into a caravel laden with treasure. St George’s flags flew from passing cars, and floated from shops and houses. The livery of the local football and athletics teams decked the town hall and the multi-storey car park, giving a festival kick to the noisy air.

A sports parade headed down the high street, led by a pipe band and a troupe of majorettes, bare-thighed schoolgirls dolled up in Ruritanian tunics and shakos emblazoned with the logo of the sponsoring superstore. They strutted past, forcing the traffic to stop for them, followed by teams waving to their supporters who crowded the pavements and office balconies.

Behind them came the marshals and stewards in St George’s shirts, marching smartly in time to the brass band that brought up the rear. Everywhere classrooms and workstations were abandoned as the hot pulse of civic pride and enthusiasm swept through this nondescript town. Any drop in output, any shortfall at the cash registers, would be more than made up by a surge in productivity and a few hours of overtime.

I sat in the stalled traffic and waved to a group of supporters who had spontaneously formed up behind the marshals, joining the parade as it marched to the coach park near the railway station. From there they would be bussed to Brooklands, spend the afternoon shopping in the Metro-Centre and then cheer on their teams in the local league.

Feet stamped past me, arms grazing my rented Mercedes. But I liked these people, and felt close to them. Many were middle-aged, white knees rising and falling, vigorous and unrushed. Their crusader shirts were covered with stitched medallions, in effect scout badges for adults, another of the schemes I had devised. Each bore the name of a local retailer, and gave their wearers the look of Grand Prix drivers. David Cruise and I expected a certain resistance, but the medallions were hugely popular, reinforcing the sense that people’s lives were only complete when they advertised the consumer world.

A vast social experiment was under way, and I had helped to design it. The neglected people of the motorway towns, so despised by inner Londoners, had found a new pride and solidarity, a social cohesion that boosted prosperity and reduced crime. Whenever I left the motorway near Heathrow I was aware of entering a social laboratory that stretched along the M25, involving every sports arena and housing estate, every playground and retail park. A deep, convulsive chemistry was at work, waking these docile suburbs to a new and fiercer light. The orbital cities of the plain, as remote as Atlantis and Samarkand to the inhabitants of Chelsea and Holland Park, were learning to breathe and dream.

AS THE BRASS BAND
moved away I waited for the traffic to clear, for once in no hurry to escape from London. Three months after first meeting David Cruise, I had sold my Chelsea Harbour flat to a young brain surgeon. Our solicitors had finally exchanged contracts, after cliff-hanging weeks bedevilled by the surgeon’s sharp-eyed wife. She had spotted me pacing around an empty bedroom as she poked and pried, and misread my last doubts about moving permanently to Brooklands. ‘Where?’ she asked, when I explained my reasons for selling up. ‘Does it really exist?’

She suspected a secret flaw, perhaps a zeppelin mooring mast on the floor above or a sewage outfall ten feet below. She endlessly circled the dining room, visualizing the eternity of dinner parties that constituted her dream of the good life. The future for her was an escalator of metropolitan chatter so lofty that it generated its own clouds. When she left I squeezed her hand suggestively, trying to elicit a microsecond’s passion, a hint of sexual mischief, a saving flash of amorality. Go mad, I wanted to say, go bad. Sadly, she walked off without any response. But that was inner London, a congestion zone of the soul.

All the same, I had certain doubts over moving to Brooklands. I was leaving behind my baffled friends, my bridge and squash evenings, a former lover I was still close to, and even my ex-wife, with whom I had a spiky but intriguing bi-monthly lunch. Then there were all the pleasures and discontinuities of metropolitan life, from the cast room at the V&A to the shit in the letter box. To my friends I was apparently giving up all this in return for an obsessive quest to find my father’s killer.

I was still determined to track down the gunman who had shot my father, but for the time being his death was no longer centre stage. The Brooklands police claimed that they had failed to trace the Jensen’s owner. I assumed they were well aware that the car belonged to me, but had their own reasons for not questioning me about the bomb. Perhaps they feared that I would embarrass them by referring to the unsolved mystery of the Metro-Centre shooting. As long as I could, I preferred to keep out of their way and think about my father. In a sense I knew him far better than at any time in the past, but had I redeemed myself in his eyes? I doubted it. Meanwhile, I had stumbled on a far more important means of restoring my faith in myself. A new future waited to greet me: forgiving, full of surprises, and ready to redeem all my failures.

THE TRAFFIC WAS
still stationary in the high street, though the parade had gone and the police were reduced to playing some obscure game of their own. I rested my head against the window pillar, and looked up at the billboard above a TV rental store, advertising the Metro-Centre and its cable channels. There were now three channels, mixing sport, consumer information and social affairs, and they were popular viewing in the motorway towns.

The advertisement showed a grainy close-up of David Cruise, no longer the primped and rouged anchorman of afternoon television, but the fugitive and haunted hero of a
noir
film. He sat at the wheel of his car, staring at the open road and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him. An eerie glare lit the grimy windscreen and exposed every pore in his unshaved face. The chocolate tan had long faded. This David Cruise, though clearly the cable channels’ chief presenter, was closer to the desperate loners of trenchcoat movies, doomed men sleepwalking towards their tragic end.

How this gloomy scenario tied in with the infinite consumer promise of the Metro-Centre was unclear, and when I sketched out the scene for Tom Carradine and his public relations staff they had objected vigorously. But the director, set designer and even Cruise himself all instantly saw the point and carried the day for me.

Another Metro-Centre poster, almost the size of a tennis court, filled the side of a town-centre office block. It showed Cruise in a nightmare replay of a Strindberg drama, threatening and confused as he stared across a display floor of showroom kitchens, a husband who had woken into the innermost circle of hell.

The series of posters were stills from thirty-second commercials on the cable channels. They presented Cruise as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods—grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed. He would stare almost ecstatically at a battered dustbin, as if some revelation was at hand, or ring a doorbell at random and scowl at a startled housewife, ready to slap her or beg for sanctuary. In others he haunted the Brooklands racing circuit, the squeal of tyres like torture in his head, or followed a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse like a would-be child-abductor.

A surprisingly good sport, Cruise played the roles in a skilful and sensitive way, moving through a baleful consumer landscape of car showrooms, call centres and gated estates. The storylines were meaningless, but audiences liked them. Together they made sense at the deepest level, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their minds.

As Cruise’s media adviser, I had taken a gamble, but I was ready to spin the wheel and risk everything. Audience figures surged, and all over the motorway towns the first copycat posters soon appeared, playing on a suppressed need for the bizarre and the unpredictable. At the junction of Ashford High Street and the dual carriageway was a billboard advertising a local insurance company’s endowment policies. It showed a deranged young woman dragging a blood-spattered child across a deserted car park, watched by a smiling couple who picnicked beside a Volvo with a damaged wing.

I laughed generously at the clever in-joke. Like all the posters, it was advertising nothing except its own quirky waywardness. Yet the concept worked. Everywhere sales boomed, and the Metro-Centre activated two dormant cable channels. People from the Home Counties, and even from inner London, drove like tourists through the motorway towns, aware that these invisible suburbs were lit by a new fever. They cheered on the massed sports teams that strutted and wheeled around the Metro-Centre car parks, they straightened their shoulders as the marshals bellowed and stamped. They watched the disciplined files of marching athletes, the ceremonial hoisting of banners, the loyalty-card supporters chanting ‘Metro . . . Metro . . .’

Unknown to its busy executives and sales staff, the Metro-Centre had become the headquarters of a virtual political party, financed by its supporters’ clubs and gold-card memberships. It issued no manifesto, made no promises and outlined no programme. It represented nothing. But several St George’s candidates, standing on no platform other than their loyalty to a shopping mall and its sports teams, had won seats on local councils. Their chosen party political broadcasts were the thirty-second commercials I had devised for David Cruise.

To his credit, Cruise had done a superb job, justifying all my hopes for him. He agreed to every suggestion I put forward, eager to give everything to these tense if meaningless psychodramas. He coped manfully with the flood of valentines and marriage proposals, and never forgot that he was a talk-show presenter. His modest range was a large part of his appeal, and allowed every male viewer to think of himself in these haunted roles, and every female admirer to imagine herself as the heroine playing Jane to this neurasthenic Tarzan of the suburban jungle.

‘Years of failure,’ he often told me, ‘are the worst preparation for overnight triumph.’ And the best preparation? ‘Years of success.’

He was still affable and engaging, despite his sly pleasure in his new-found aggression. He would bully and abuse the self-immersed wives and dull husbands who appeared on his consumer programmes, yet without causing offence. His impatience with the dimmer guests, his clenched fists and evident stress, merged easily into the desperate characters he played in the noir commercials.

He remained the voice of the Metro-Centre, the ambassador from the kingdom of the washing machine and the microwave oven, but he was also the leader of a virtual political party whose influence was spreading through the motorway towns. Like other demagogues, he traded on the psychopathic traits in his personality. Yet he had emerged, not from the bitter streets and working men’s taverns of depression-era Munich, but from the hospitality rooms of afternoon TV, a man without a message who had found his desert.

THE LAST OF
the coaches sped down the dual carriageway, carrying teams and supporters to Brooklands, police outriders with their headlights flashing. The waiting traffic moved forward, impatient to set off in pursuit.

I squeezed through the amber, saluted by a beaming constable who waved me on. Despite my role at the Metro-Centre, I was thinking of Julia Goodwin. We would meet later that afternoon, when she finished her shift at the hospital, and already I envied the patients she would be touching with her worn and tired hands.

A vague sense of unresolved guilt hovered between us, as if she had aborted our child without telling me. But at least this edginess showed her fierce honesty. I guessed that she had been involved with Geoffrey Fairfax, Dr Maxted and Sangster in an attempt to exploit the Metro-Centre shooting for their own ends. The three men tried again on the night of the bomb attack, hoping to seize power with their puppet Bonaparte, the reluctant David Cruise. They had singed their eyebrows and now kept their heads down, but Fairfax had destroyed himself, either setting the bomb in my car or trying to defuse it.

The coroner, perhaps prompted by Superintendent Leighton, brought in a verdict of death by misadventure, but Fairfax was quickly abandoned by his legal colleagues. I was one of the few mourners at his funeral, mourning my Jensen as much as this eccentric solicitor, part-time soldier and full-time fanatic. Geoffrey Fairfax belonged to the past and a Brooklands that had vanished, while I had committed myself to the Metro-Centre and the memory of my father, to Julia Goodwin and the new Brooklands of the future.

23

THE WOMEN’S REFUGE

THE TRAFFIC INTO BROOKLANDS
was slowing again, delayed by police setting up steel railings and no-entry signs, part of the lavish preparations for the weekend sports rally and parade. Several key football matches would take place that evening, and there were hard-fought finals in the rugby, basketball and ice-hockey competitions.

Cricket, as I noted whenever Julia asked me for the test-match scores, was not played in Brooklands or the motorway towns. Contact sports ruled the field of play, the more brutal the better. Blood and aggression were the qualities most admired. The hard tackle was the essence of sport, the kind of violence that flourished in the margins of the rule book. Cricket was too amateurish, its long-pondered intricacies trapped in a cat’s cradle of incomprehensible laws. Above all, it was too middle-class, and unconnected to the kind of impulse buying favoured by Metro-Centre supporters. Julia told me that she had captained the cricket team at her girls’ school, but her interest in the game was a whimsical stand against the far harder stadium values that now dominated Brooklands.

We were meeting at three, when her shift ended at the hospital. She hated the sports rallies, the unending din of marching bands that drummed at the windows above the wail of ambulances and fire engines. Usually she would be on duty, dealing with the human wreckage stretchered into the A&E triage rooms. Thinking of herself for once, she manipulated the rosters to give us a rare free weekend.

I hoped that I would share at least part of it with her, but she had recently kept me at arm’s length. We had yet to make love again after the uneasy night together in my father’s bed. Sex with me had been an act of penance, expiating some unadmitted guilt. Whenever we met she watched me warily, hair over her eyes as if to veil any telltale signs. But I was always glad to be with her. I loved her moods and bolshieness, the cigarette stubbed out in a slushy sorbet, the adversarial relationship with her car, the handsome black cat who slept beside her like a demon husband. Everything between us inverted the usual rules. We had begun with sex of a fraught and desperate kind, followed by a long period of wooing. As far as I knew, I had never let her down, and I hoped that one day she would finally forgive me for whatever she had done to my father in the past.

Waiting in the traffic that approached the Metro-Centre, I watched the columns of supporters marching to their assembly points in the residential side streets. Lines of coaches were parked under the sycamores and beeches, decked with St George’s flags. Supporters now came from as far as Bristol and Birmingham, attracted by the martial mood that gripped the town, ready to stamp through the streets, cheer their lungs out and spend their savings in the retail parks that sponsored the events.

Twenty thousand visitors occupied Brooklands every weekend. In the comfortable driver’s seat of the Mercedes, I marvelled at how disciplined they were, obeying the brusque commands of the stewards steering them to the Metro-Centre, thousands of suburban crusaders emblazoned with logos and moving as one. At synchronized intervals, in an effort to keep the middle-aged blood flowing, phalanxes of ice-hockey or basketball supporters would snap to attention and mark time on the spot, arms swinging like blades in a human wind farm.

Impatient to get home, I checked my text messages, hoping that David Cruise had survived for forty-eight hours without me. There was a brief message from Julia, saying that she would now be working until six at the Asian women’s refuge. Brooklands High School had broken up for the summer, and Sangster had lent part of the school to Asian women and children so intimidated by sporting revellers that they refused to go home.

Impatient to see Julia, I turned into the empty bus lane and drove to the nearest side street, then set off through the residential avenues crowded with coaches. Marshals were controlling the traffic, forcing private cars to give way to the lumbering behemoths. Most of the middle-class residents detested the sports weekends, so I picked a St George’s pennant from the rear seat and clipped it to the windscreen pillar, then put on my St George’s baseball cap. At the next checkpoint I was waved through by the marshals, and exchanged vigorous salutes with them.

The cap and pennant were a disguise, but one that worked. I hated the self-importance of these pocket gauleiters, but the sense of an enemy sharpened the reflexes and lifted everyone’s spirits. Visiting league teams and their supporters were seen as friendly citizens of the new federation of motorway towns, the conference of the Heathrow tribes. Everyone in Brooklands was a friend, but out there somewhere was the ‘enemy’, constantly referred to by David Cruise on his cable programmes but never defined.

At the same time, everyone knew who the real enemy was—subversive elements in local government offices, the county establishment, the church and the old middle classes, with their jodhpurs and dinner parties, their private schools and anal-retentive snobberies. I sympathized with the marching supporters, and was ready to back them in any confrontation. They had seized the initiative and were defining a new political order based on energy and emotion. They had re-dramatized their lives, marching proudly and in step with the military enthusiasm of a people going to war, while staying faithful to the pacific dream of their patios and barbecues. All this might be part of a huge marketing strategy, but I felt revived by the strutting swagger, the discipline and rude health. There was a hint of arrogance that could be dangerous after dark, but a dash of Tabasco spiced up the dullest dish.

My father would have approved.

AVOIDING THE METRO-CENTRE
and its gridlocked streets, I entered downtown Brooklands. Many of the shops were boarded up for the weekend, but I noticed a trio of sports-club stewards outside a Polish-run camera shop. They carried leaflets and recruiting literature, along with a selection of flags and bunting, but these were forgotten in their heated altercation with the young Polish owner. A pale young man with receding hair, he was frightened by the stewards but standing up to them, while his nervous wife tried to draw him back into the shop. Two of the stewards pushed the Pole in the chest, trying to manoeuvre him into provoking them.

I hesitated as the lights changed, tempted to get out and intercede, and sounded my horn. The stewards turned on me aggressively, then saw the Metro-Centre flash on the windscreen with its picture of David Cruise. They saluted, waved the Pole back to his wife and swaggered off down the street, kicking the steel shutters.

I drove on, embarrassed and a little guilty. Sports-club stewards were a plague in the motorway towns, intimidating Asian and east European shopkeepers, harassing small businesses until ‘voluntary’ contributions were paid. Those who refused were visited by drunken supporters who roamed the streets after dark. But these protection rackets were tolerated by the police, since the marshals and stewards did their job for them by keeping order in the towns.

I closed my mind to all this, thinking of the confident marchers on their way to the Metro-Centre. In time the thugs and racists would fade away. Besides, English sports fans were famous for their pugnacity. My conscience slept uneasily, but it slept.

TEN MINUTES LATER
I drove into the staff car park at Brooklands High School, tossed the St George’s pennant into the back seat and stopped beside Sangster’s unwashed Citroën. Vandals haunted the school, and had broken several windows in the admin building. But the authority of a head teacher, even one as moodily eccentric as Sangster, offered some protection. Generously, he had offered the gymnasium and a block of empty classrooms to the frightened Asian women. Their husbands stayed behind, defending their burnt-out houses, trying to run their threatened shops and businesses.

As I arrived two Asian men were unloading suitcases from a paint-splashed car. Sangster and a group of students from the art college were strengthening the fence behind the gymnasium, blocking a side entrance with wooden stakes and barbed wire.

Sangster gave me a limp wave, then touched his forehead, doffing an imaginary hat in an almost feudal salute. I remembered his large figure in the rioting crowd on the night of the Metro-Centre bomb attack, and his odd behaviour, restraining the rioters but encouraging them at the same time. He knew that I was suspicious of him and tried to be patronizing. But he had failed, and I had succeeded.

THREE TIMES A WEEK
an antenatal clinic was held in the gymnasium for the Asian women, run by Dr Kumar, my elusive downstairs neighbour. The last patient was gathering her bundles together. Her children sat on a bench by the parallel bars, watching me with their large, unblinking eyes. They ignored my friendly smile, as if good humour might signal a new kind of aggression.

Julia and Dr Kumar sat in the kitchen, sharing a cup of tea from a thermos. Seeing me, Dr Kumar stared angrily into my eyes, frowned and left without a word.

I held Julia’s shoulders and kissed her forehead. I waved to Dr Kumar, but she put on her coat and walked briskly away.

‘Fierce lady. Have I offended her?’

‘Of course. You never let her down.’

‘A shame. I’m on her side. She always avoids me.’

‘I can’t think why.’ Julia found a clean cup and poured the last of the tea, then sat back and smiled as I winced at the sharp tannin. ‘I keep telling her you’re decent, responsible and rather likeable.’

‘That doesn’t sound much fun. What a thing to say.’ I poured the tea into the sink and ran the tap. ‘Tell her to watch my commercials for David Cruise.’

‘I did. She says there’s a new one. Something about a man laughing in an abattoir.’

‘What did she think of it?’

‘She said you’re beyond psychiatric help.’

‘Good. That shows she’s warming to me. Why was she so hostile?’

‘Look in the mirror.’ Julia pointed to the nightwatchman’s shaving mirror above the sink. ‘Go on. Risk it.’

‘Oh, my God . . . no wonder the children were frightened.’

I was still wearing the St George’s cap. I placed it on the table and slapped my forehead. Julia snatched it away and tossed it into the nearby pedal bin.

‘Julia, I’m sorry . . .’

‘Never mind.’ Julia reached across the table and took my hands. I realized how tired she was, and wanted to embrace her, conjure away the dry skin and the unfamiliar bones pushing through her face. I tried to touch her cheeks but she held my wrists, as if calming a fractious patient. ‘Richard, are you listening?’

‘Dear . . . I haven’t seen you for days. Relax a little.’

‘I can’t. Things here are desperate. The school was attacked last night. Sangster drove them away but they broke a lot of windows. The Asian children were terrifed. One of the mothers had a miscarriage.’

‘I’m sorry. At least you weren’t involved.’

‘I should have been. I spent four hours at the hospital, stitching up a lot of drunken yobs. Why do they do it?’

‘Attack a school? All those years of boredom. A mysterious head teacher who frightened the wits out of them.’

‘It’s nothing to do with that. Attacks are going on everywhere—Hillingdon, Southall, Ashford. They want these people out.’

‘ “People”?’

Julia struck the table with her fist. ‘I’ll call them what I bloody like! Bangladeshis, Kosovans, Poles, Turks. They want them moved to a huge ghetto somewhere in east London. Then they can deal with them when they’re ready.’

‘Julia, please . . .’ I knew that she was bored with me for trying to raise her spirits. ‘Isn’t that a little . . . ?’

‘Apocalyptic?’

William Sangster stepped into the kitchen, his large bulk blocking the windows and throwing the small space into shadow. He took off his canvas gloves and dropped them onto the draining board, then slumped into a chair, counting his huge limbs as an afterthought. He seemed tired but at ease, as if events taking place around him confirmed everything he had expected. There was a growth of beard on his plump and babyish cheeks, like a faulty disguise.

‘Apocalyptic . . .’ I repeated. ‘A few stones? Just a little.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ Sangster tilted back his head and addressed the ceiling, as if preferring not to be reminded of his dim pupils. ‘In my experience, one stone through a window is a fairly accurate predictor that another stone will soon follow. Then two more. Hard stones make for hard data. Add a few frightened Muslim families into the equation and you can extrapolate in a straight line—all the way to a cluster of gateway towns on the Thames flood plain.’

‘Close to the container port at Rotherhithe.’ Julia glared at me meaningfully. ‘And that strange airport they want to build on the Isle of Dogs.’

‘So . . .’ Sangster shook the empty thermos, and laid a large hand gently on Julia’s shoulder. After a night of turmoil he was exhausted beyond mere tiredness, moving into a zone where any wild-eyed fantasy was probably true. ‘Do you think Julia is being apocalyptic? Richard?’

‘As it happens, I don’t. It’s ugly, very ugly. I’ll do what I can, talk to the marshals and find out which supporters came down here.’

‘Good.’ Sangster nodded sagely. ‘Julia, he’ll talk to the marshals. Maybe they’ll tell us when the next attack is. Richard, you could issue a bulletin. Like those old war films—target for tonight. Hillingdon, Ashford, alternate target Brooklands. What do you think, Richard? See it as a marketing campaign.’