Kingdom Come: A Novel

by James Graham Ballard

  ‘It did.’

  ‘No. Tonight was just another football riot. Maxted and Sangster are being used. I don’t know about Geoffrey Fairfax. The real people behind the bomb want street revolution, something violent and ugly, spreading to all the motorway towns. With David Cruise as the Wat Tyler of cable TV, leading a new peasants’ revolt. Then the police and Home Office will move in. Close down the dome, wheel on the cucumber sandwiches and relaunch the kingdom of Surrey.’

  ‘It nearly happened.’

  ‘Not quite. David Cruise wouldn’t take the bait. He hasn’t spent all these years in television for nothing. He could see it was a set-up.’

  ‘But why? I hate the damned dome, but I don’t want to kill anyone.’

  ‘You’ve still got your job. There are people who were doing very nicely and feel left out. Power has moved to the Metro-Centre and the retail parks along the M25. It’s a new kind of consumerism—sponsored football teams, supporters’ clubs, marching bands, stadium lights blazing all night, cable TV. A lot of people don’t like it. The police, the local council, old-style businessmen who can’t get their noses in the trough. They want to discredit the Metro-Centre, and they’ll do anything to harm it.’

  ‘Tony Maxted? And Bill Sangster?’

  ‘They’re too amateurish. For Maxted the whole thing is a case study. One day he’ll write a book and get it adapted on BBC2. Sangster is different, how and why I don’t know.’

  ‘I do. Listen, he’s drawn to the madness of it all. Every day he has to hold his school together, a huge effort of will. Why bother? Secretly, he’s tired. He wouldn’t mind if the whole bloody place was flushed down the loo . . .’ She reached out to grip my hand. ‘Richard, I’m sorry about Brooklands, it’s been a nightmare for you . . .’

  I sat back, glad to be with this spirited and chaotic young woman, even in this shambles of a night, which had left me more confused than ever. Part of me wanted to confront Julia Goodwin about my father’s fatal injury and the mysterious role played by Duncan Christie. She wore her unease over the old man’s death like a badly tailored shroud. Emotions crowded her face, competing for space among its frowns and grimaces. Like a child, her guilty feelings played around her mouth and bared teeth, fretting her tired eyes and the muscles of her cheeks. At times, her entire personality was a courtroom sitting in judgement on herself.

  When we reached my father’s flat she turned carefully into the drive, then lost her bearings in the darkness. A privet hedge thrashed what was left of the windscreen, sending a shower of sharp beads across us. I took the wheel, forced the gear lever into neutral and let the car freewheel across the gravel. Julia peered into the driving mirror, wincing at a tiny nick on her forehead.

  ‘You ought to look at that.’ I helped her from the car. ‘There’s an old airline first-aid kit. Have a drink while I call a taxi . . .’

  I HESITATED BEFORE opening the front door of the flat, unsure how Julia would respond to my father’s presence in every leather armchair and ashtray. At first she was stiff and awkward, as if expecting him to appear and challenge her. But she seemed at home when she emerged from the bathroom, a plaster over her eyebrow. She circled the living room, warming her hands around the tumbler of brandy, smiling at the pipe stands and the chorus line of framed photographs. Had she been the last of my father’s lovers? I could imagine her in the kitchen, reminding him about his next flu jab as he cooked an omelette for her.

  Surprisingly, she was at ease with me, and sat on the arm of my chair, a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Richard? Are you holding on?’

  ‘Just about. That was one very bizarre day. I’m glad you’re here.’

  ‘I wanted to see it.’ She winced at the tireless seesaw of a distant alarm. ‘Richard, I warned you strange things are going on.’

  ‘I’m not sure what is going on. After lunch I met the local wild man of the desert—your friend Duncan Christie. Completely mad and completely sane at the same time. Then Maxted locked me up in his loony bin. I got out thanks to his blonde stooge, Sergeant Falconer, and the next thing I knew I was leading a riot. For ten minutes this huge crowd was actually following me.’

  ‘We have to follow someone. Poor devils, there’s nothing else in our lives.’

  ‘Not much, anyway. That’s why I made a very good living—everything we believe comes from advertising. Tonight was different, though. The Metro-Centre bomb was supposed to light a fuse, but it didn’t work.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t advertising anything?’

  ‘You’re right. There needs to be a message. Next time I’ll remember.’

  ‘Another wild man from the desert. Dear Jesus . . .’ She took her drink and sat on the coffee table facing me. ‘Listen, Richard. You’re waking up into the nightmare you helped to script. Go back to London. The suburbs are far too weird for you. Why did you leave your job?’

  ‘It left me. To tell the truth, I was sacked. Pushed out by a rival who knew all my weaknesses.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘She was my wife. In fact, I’d reached the end of the road.’

  ‘With her?’

  ‘And with the advertising business. The economy is rolling along an endless plateau, and consumers are bored with the view. Something strange is needed to get them to sit up.’

  ‘How strange?’

  ‘Strange, and more than a little mad. That was my big idea. We even had a slogan—“Mad is bad. Bad is good.” We tried it out once, with a new micro-car, but people got killed. No one liked it after that.’

  ‘Terribly dull of them.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Another of the great advertising breakthroughs that got nowhere.’

  ‘Its time will come.’ She brushed her hair back from her face, as if exposing herself to me, the removal of yet another of the veils that hung between us. ‘How well did you know your father?’

  ‘Hardly at all. My mother never got over his leaving her. For years she told me he had died in an air crash. Cheques would arrive on my birthday and she’d claim they came from the other side. I always thought high-street banks were outposts of heaven. The curious thing is that I’ve got to know him better since he died.’

  ‘I’m sure he was a fine man.’

  ‘He was. With one or two odd ideas.’

  ‘Interesting . . .’ She moved around the living room, and peered into the corridor that led to the bedrooms. ‘Can I snoop around? These days, you don’t see where your patients live.’

  I followed her into the kitchen, and watched as she glanced at the modest array of herbs and spices. She patted the basil plant I had bought, tore off a leaf and raised it to a nostril. She was tired but stylish, clearly moved by the memories of the old man she had tried to keep alive for a few last hours. I trailed after her, already roused by her scent, a perfume of her own distilled from beauty, bloody-mindedness and chronic fatigue.

  ‘So this is where he slept?’ She stood in the doorway of my father’s bedroom, nose quickening at the dark, picking up the spoor of an old man’s body. She stepped forward and switched on the bedside lamp, then sat on the bedspread, smoothing the stress lines from the silk fabric.

  ‘Julia . . . ?’

  ‘Here . . .’ She beckoned me to sit beside her. As if without thinking, she loosened the top button of her shirt. ‘So . . . his head lay on that pillow. An old pilot’s dreams. Think of them, Richard. All those endless runways . . .’

  ‘Julia . . .’ I sat beside her and held her shoulders. I realized that she was shaking, a faint trembling as if she had caught a sudden chill, a cold draught from a door onto the dark that had come ajar. A desperate woman was sitting on my father’s bed, about to make love to his son for reasons that had everything and nothing to do with sex, the kind of clutching and violent love that only the bereaved ever experience.

  She took my hand and slipped it inside her shirt, then placed it over her breast. ‘You don’t have to like me.’

  ‘Julia . . .’ I tried to calm her.
‘Not here. Let’s go into my bedroom. Julia . . . ?’

  ‘No.’ She spoke flatly, in an almost coarse voice. ‘Here.’

  ‘Dear, try to—’

  ‘Here! It’s got to be here!’ She turned a fierce gaze on me. ‘Can’t you understand?’

  20

  THE RACING CIRCUIT

  I LEFT HER SLEEPING in my father’s bed. It was still dark when I woke at four, uneasy with the odd contours of the mattress, the narrow hollows of an old man’s hips and shoulders, and the more unsettling imprint of his mind. Julia lay beside me when I sat up, then turned and nestled easily into the aged pilot’s mould. A strange night passage had exhausted her. Restless dreams followed a fierce act of love. She had seized me as if I were a demon to be pinioned, a delegate from my father’s grave. Sex with me was part atonement and part restitution, an act of penance.

  I sat on the bed, stroking the cloud of dark hair, and gripped her free hand, hoping to force something of my affection into her. There was a faint answering pulse, like a thank-you note slipped under the emotional door, and she sank into a shallow morning sleep that would last for hours.

  I needed to get out and run the streets before anyone else was up. As I pulled on my tracksuit I carried out a quick inventory of myself. A bleak list: I missed my car, my job, my friends in London. I missed my father, whom I had never known, and I missed the quirky but likeable young doctor I had met at the hospital, with whom I had shared a bed but scarcely knew any better. Some kind of guilt and unease separated us, despite all the warmth I clearly felt for her. Had she failed my father in some way during his last hours in the intensive care unit? Sitting astride me, she made love as if trying to resuscitate a corpse. I listened to her breathing, a child’s small burps and swallows, sounds shaped like bliss, and thought of the daughter that Julia and I might have one day.

  But I needed to leave the flat and visit the Brooklands circuit, and hear the ghosts of engines rumbling in the dark.

  A carton of orange juice in my hand, I jogged out of the estate and set off for the racetrack half a mile to the south. Around me the residential streets were still silent, the suburbs of nowhere, immaculate pavilions that reminded me of the stylish tombs on the mortuary island in the Venice lagoon.

  A section of the Brooklands embankment rose through the darkness, thirty feet high at its peak, its ridge line cut by an access road. I ran through this narrow corridor, and then stopped at the beach of ancient concrete. I thought of my father visiting the track in the 1930s, a small boy stunned by the reek of fuel oil and expensive perfume, the scent of glamour and danger. Spectacular crashes filled the newsreels of the day, heroic deaths that were England’s answer to the dictators across the Channel, and expressed the kingdom’s unconscious need for war.

  ‘Hello . . . ? You down there . . . come up and join me. You get a better view of the race . . .’

  Above me, on the upper slope of the embankment, a man was strolling through the darkness. He wore a white tuxedo, as if he had strayed from an all-night party. He beckoned to me with an actorish gesture, but moved cautiously along the pitted concrete, as if a lifetime of treacherous floors had taught him to be wary of any surface. Seeing that I was too out of breath to climb up to him, he made his way down the slope.

  I waited for him to reach me, and noticed an American car parked on the road below. A chauffeur in a peaked cap leaned against a door, smoking a cigarette and drawing small sketches on the dark air with its red tip.

  ‘Right . . .’ David Cruise took my hand, smilingly easy and avuncular, as if greeting a new contestant onto his cable show. ‘It’s worth going up there, you can still feel the slipstream. Listen—did you hear that?’

  ‘Hold on. A Bugatti, I think. Four carburettors, or maybe a Napier-Railton.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Pleased that I had played my role in his little routine, Cruise shook my hand. ‘Mr—?’

  I introduced myself, but Cruise waved my name into the misty dawn air, taking for granted that he was too famous to identify himself. Without being aware of it, he was playing to the camera, which I sensed was somewhere beyond his favourite left profile.

  ‘Good, good . . .’ He savoured the air, as if relishing the tang of burnt rubber. ‘Wonderful . . . unlimited horsepower, twenty-litre engines. Nothing like it today. We have the technology, but we can’t build a dream.’

  ‘Formula One? No?’

  ‘Come on . . . millionaires in asbestos suits plastered with logos. This was the real thing.’

  ‘More than the Metro-Centre?’

  Cruise stopped to glance at me as we made our way down to the Lincoln. ‘The Metro-Centre? I wish I could see it lasting seven years, let alone seventy.’

  He gazed over the dark rooftops of the town, where the last haze of smoke from a few smouldering cars merged into the morning mist. At the football stadium the giant screens were still lit, showing an intermission commercial to the deserted stands. His screen self spoke to an elderly team supporter about her new bedroom suite, his hand bouncing the mattress as if inviting her for a romp.

  Cruise silenced me with a raised fist, and stopped to watch himself. His mouth mimed in response to his signature repertory of engaging smiles, the shy grimaces that expressed a deep interest in his studio guests.

  Despite the dim light, I could see him clearly in the pale aura of suburban fame that surrounded him. The dark was his medium, the deep blackness disguised as the interior of a TV studio. I was struck by how small he seemed, though he was almost six feet tall, with the kind of muscled physique found among gym users. He was bantering and easy-listening, but never ironic about himself. A minor deity should never express doubt over his own existence. In every way he was a creature of afternoon television, with a head of silver hair sculpted to show off the lower half of his face and hide his high forehead and the inner coldness of his eyes. Long ago he had convinced himself that he liked and felt at ease with ordinary people, and the illusion had sustained him.

  A brief cascade of sparks flared beyond the north stand of the stadium, a warehouse put to the torch, an insurance scam taking advantage of the night’s fires.

  Cruise winced and turned towards his car. ‘Madhouse—looting, arson, broken windows . . . there was a bomb at the Metro-Centre. As if we haven’t got enough problems.’

  ‘I saw the damage. The police took me into the basement.’

  ‘You were there? Brave man. They planted the bomb in someone’s car.’

  Cruise had reached the Lincoln, where the driver stood by the open passenger door. I decided to take a chance, and said: ‘My car, as it happens.’

  ‘Your car?’ Cruise paused before getting into his rear seat. He noticed me for the first time, a face in a studio crowd that the director had pinpointed through his earpiece. ‘They blew up your car? Poor man. You must have been shocked.’

  ‘I was. An old Jensen. Beautiful car: nothing worked, including the rear lock.’

  ‘Obliterated? Thank God the bomber was killed.’ Cruise pointed to the silent embankment. ‘And that’s why you came here, to the racing circuit. You wanted to hear those engines again. The authentic thing, like your Jensen.’

  ‘You might be right.’

  ‘I am right!’ Cruise held my shoulders in a pair of powerful hands, as if comforting a bereaved contestant. ‘I know—that’s why I came. It’s a ruin, but it’s the only part of Brooklands that’s real.’

  ‘The Metro-Centre is real.’

  ‘Please . . .’ He took my arm. Deep in thought, he walked me away from the Lincoln. ‘Listen, I’ve seen you before?’

  ‘Yesterday. Outside the Metro-Centre. You arrived for your afternoon show.’

  ‘No. Somewhere else. Years ago.’ He stared into my face with the cold eye of a pathologist recognizing a cadaver. ‘You were younger, tougher, more ambitious. Your voice was higher, you ordered me around. God, I needed that job. What business are you in?’

  ‘Advertising.’

  ‘That’s it! Th
e crazy Skoda commercial. I played the dangerous driver. Everyone thought it was mad.’

  ‘It was mad. That was the idea.’

  ‘My agent warned me not to do it. Too weird, he said. I’d be typecast. Fat chance, I hadn’t worked for a year. It turned out I was too big for the car, they couldn’t see my eyes. But after that I never looked back. My agent was fighting them off. In a way, thanks to you . . . ?’

  ‘Richard Pearson. You were very good.’

  ‘No, I was still trying to act. A big mistake in this business. You have to be yourself. That takes a lot of working at. Every one of us is a cast of characters. I told myself I was a director putting on a new play. All these people turn up at the audition, and they’re all me. Some are more interesting than others, some are more real, some can reach your heart. This happens every morning when I wake up. I have to choose, and I have to be ruthless. You understand that.’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s a matter of finding the right roles. The kind of roles where you don’t need to act.’

  ‘That’s it. I remember, last year you won an industry award. At the Savoy, I saw you collect it . . .’

  Cruise straightened up, leaving his thoughts to float away across the embankment. I assumed that I would soon be forgotten, the creator of his career left here like the Ben Gunn of this concrete beach.

  Then I noticed that the driver had walked around the Lincoln to the offside. Both passenger doors were now open.

  ‘Richard . . .’ Cruise’s sunburnt hand took my elbow, steering me towards the car as if moving a lucky contestant to his prize. ‘Let’s have some breakfast at my house. There are one or two things we need to talk over. You can give me your advice. Already I feel we can work together . . .’

  21

  A NEW POLITICS

  ‘BROOKLANDS? THE WHOLE PLACE is off its rocker. I just don’t get it.’ David Cruise screwed up his paper tissue and threw it at the camera mounted on a tripod beside the swimming pool. ‘What on earth was happening last night?’