Ominously, the BBC reported that fights were breaking out between the supporters’ groups—unable to find any new enemies, they were turning on themselves.
I WAS TRYING to phone Julia Goodwin, and warn her that the Asian women’s refuge was in danger, when David Cruise began his address to his new ‘republic’, transmitted live from the mezzanine studio in the Metro-Centre. He had swapped his fireman’s overall for a stylish combat jacket, but the make-up girls had left untouched his ruffled hair and oily bruises on his cheeks. He was fighting off his own hysteria, aware that his sports clubs might rampage through a modest county town, but the referee was about to blow the whistle and there would be no extra time. What the television reporters still called football hooliganism was what central government termed civil insurrection. The army and police were waiting.
Cruise leaned forward into the camera, ready to rally his loyal audience, and unable to resist his familiar cheeky smile. But as he opened his mouth, displaying his strong teeth and muscular tongue, he seemed to slip from his chair. A spasm of indigestion brought a hand to his chest, and his eyes lost their focus. He swayed to one side, elbow sliding across the desk, and tore the lapel microphone from his jacket. He reached out to clutch at the air, eyes rolling under their lids. His smile seemed to drift away, an empty smirk deserted like an abandoned ship. He held himself upright, and then fell forward from his chair, head across his bloodstained script.
Five seconds later, the screen went blank. There was a brief silence, and then a deep roar rose from the Metro-Centre as the crowd watching the screens above the South Gate entrance let out a cry of anger and pain, the visceral bellow of an animal goaded at the point of death. The sound rose over Brooklands, drumming at the windows and echoing off the nearby roofs.
I turned to the Channel 4 news. The reporter stared uneasily at her autocue, ready to interrupt herself.
‘We’re hearing reports . . . of an assassination attempt at a Brooklands shopping mall. Eyewitnesses claim that a lone gunman . . . we don’t know yet if—’
I switched off the set and stared at the darkened room. Someone had shot David Cruise, but I found it difficult to cope with the notion that he had been seriously injured. I knew him too well, and had helped to create him. He was so pervasive a figure, dominating almost every moment of my life at Brooklands, that he had long since become a fictional character. He had floated free into a parallel space and time where celebrity redefined reality as itself. His anguished slide across the table, the desperate way in which he had torn the microphone from his bursting chest, had been the latest episode in the series of noir commercials I had devised for him. In fact, I had switched off the set to avoid turning back to the cable channel and seeing the consumer product that sponsored the episode.
But already I was forgetting David Cruise. Julia Goodwin would be at her wits’ end, trying to protect her Asian women from the ferocious backlash that would soon follow. Bereft of their champion and cable philosopher, the supporters’ clubs would go berserk, attacking anything in their sights.
I strode into the hall and unlocked the cupboard where I stored my suitcases. My father’s golf bag, clubs untouched for months, leaned against the rear wall. I pulled out the heavy leather bag, felt between the putters and drew my father’s Purdey shotgun into the light.
On the shelf above was a box of twelve-bore shells, enough to see off any hooligans trying to ransack their old school. Nothing was true, and nothing was untrue. But the real was making a small stand against the unreal.
31
‘DEFEND THE DOME!’
A CAR APPROACHED, tyres raking the gravel outside the entrance to the flats. Its headlights were on full beam, flooding the car park like a film set. I leaned through the rear passenger door of the Mercedes and stowed the shotgun on the floor, wrapped in my raincoat. Its butt rested on the transmission hump within easy reach of the driving seat.
The headlights of the visitor’s car still flared in my face. The driver stepped out, a burly man who left his engine running. He stared around him, bald head almost glowing in the dark, then recognized me.
‘Right . . . I thought you’d be here. Leave that and come with me.’
‘Who the hell . . . ? Dr Maxted?’
‘I hope so—nothing’s certain now. Look snappy.’
‘Wait . . . where are we going?’
Maxted stared at me as I hesitated, one hand moving towards the shotgun. He was exhausted but determined, his troubled face openly hostile as he peered at me. Wearily he took my arm.
‘Where? Your spiritual home—the Metro-Centre. For once you’re going to do something useful.’
‘Hold on . . .’ I watched the fires rising into the night sky and pointed to my Mercedes. ‘There’s a shotgun in the back.’
‘Forget it. If we need that, it’s already too late. We’ll take my car.’
‘You heard the news flash? About David Cruise?’
‘Someone put a bullet through him.’ Maxted stepped into the Mazda sports car. ‘On air! My God, I have to hand it to you people. Don’t tell me that was something you dreamed up?’
‘No . . .’ I slid into the cramped passenger seat. In the light reflected from the porch I could see Maxted’s swollen face, knuckle marks bruising his cheek. ‘Is he alive?’
‘Just about.’ Maxted reversed and ran over a rose display. He winced at the hooting horns and the din of traffic in the avenue, the shouts and cheering that had returned to Brooklands. ‘The bullet knocked out a lung—let’s hope he lasts the night.’
‘Who shot him? Do they know?’
‘Not yet. Some Bangladeshi who’s had his shop trashed once too often, maybe a Kosovan who’s seen his wife slapped around.’ Maxted accelerated down the narrow drive, then braked sharply as we reached the avenue, a free-for-all of stalled traffic, veering headlights and panic-stricken pedestrians. He shouted above the din. ‘One thing David Cruise had was an unlimited supply of enemies. That was part of his strategy. You know that, Richard. You planned it that way.’
I ignored this jibe, thinking of the hours I had spent in Cruise’s swimming pool, watched by the Filipina maids. ‘Where is he? Brooklands Hospital?’
‘The first-aid unit at the Metro-Centre. Until he stabilizes it’s too risky to move him. Let’s hope the unit is well equipped. I never thought I’d say it, but David Cruise is one person we need to keep alive.’
‘And if he dies?’
‘People here are ready to flip. Not just Brooklands, but all along the motorway towns. I don’t like what’s been going on, but the next chapter could be a lot nastier.’
‘Elective . . . ?’
‘Psychopathy? You’ve got it. Willed madness.’ Maxted swung the sports car into the traffic stream, a motorized babel of horns and whistles. ‘They don’t know it, but they’ve been waiting for the trigger. Sooner or later some nobody would turn up with the key and put it into the lock for them.’
‘And did he?’
‘Turn up? Oh, yes.’
‘Who?’
‘You.’ Maxted overtook a pick-up truck packed with banner-waving supporters. ‘You wrote the script for our pocket führer. A suburban Dr Goebbels . . . what did you think you were doing? Selling washing machines?’
‘Something like that. It worked.’
‘It worked too well. Late capitalism is scratching its piles and trying to figure out where next to shit. All the privy doors are closed except one. Buying a washing machine is a political act—the only real kind of politics left today.’
We sat in the stalled traffic, the air dinned by a rising clamour of horns. Supporters in St George’s shirts darted between the cars, drumming on the roofs. Everyone in the Thames Valley was converging on the Metro-Centre. It rose above the houses and office blocks, an immense white ghost, a mausoleum readying itself for death.
‘And the fire this afternoon?’ I asked Maxted, shouting over the noise. ‘At the dome?’
‘Don’t be taken in. That was Da
vid Cruise trying to light the fuse.’
‘It was a stunt?’
‘Absolutely. He needed to set off an uprising, but he knew he’d left it too late. He’d heard about the army units waiting at the racetrack.’
‘I saw them this afternoon. They look as if they mean business.’
‘They do.’ Maxted laughed into the raucous horns. ‘That must have sobered you up.’
‘I already was sober. I checked my father’s computer and read his diary. He wasn’t a St George’s supporter. He hated all the sports clubs and the whole Metro-Centre thing.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Now you’ve got someone better to look up to.’
‘He tried to infiltrate the movement and find who’s leading it. It’s just possible that’s why he was shot.’
‘Maybe.’ Two ice-hockey fans sat on the Mazda’s bonnet, beating time with their fists, and Maxted sounded the horn until they leapt away through the confusion of headlights. He bellowed at me: ‘No one is leading it. I’m sorry your old man was killed, but this is a bottom-up revolution. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Sangster and I were trying to damp it down. We wanted Cruise out of the studio and into the street where he could see what was going on. But reality was never his thing.’
‘Why haven’t the government moved in? Brooklands has been out of control for months.’
‘Not just Brooklands. The Home Office want to see what happens. The suburbs are the perfect social laboratory. You can cook up any pathogen and test how virulent it is. The trouble is, they’ve waited too long. The whole M25 could flip and drag the rest of the country into outright psychopathy.’
‘Impossible. People are too docile.’
‘People are bored. Deeply, deeply bored. When people are that bored anything is possible. A new religion, a fourth reich. They’ll worship a mathematical symbol or a hole in the ground. We’re to blame. We’ve brought them up on violence and paranoia. Now, what’s happening here?’
The traffic was moving around a Range Rover parked outside a Tudor-style mansion. A gang of sports supporters were breaking the car’s windows with iron bars. The driver, a shocked young matron in a sheepskin jacket, tried to remonstrate with them, pushing away one of the youths who was fondling her.
‘Maxted . . . we ought to help.’
‘No time.’ Head down, Maxted drove on, joining the main boulevard that ran to the dome. ‘We need to get you to the Metro-Centre before the roof lifts off.’
‘You want me to talk to David Cruise?’
‘Talk? Julia Goodwin says the man’s on a ventilator.’
‘Julia? She’s there?’
‘Sangster drove her from the refuge. Julia knows we have to keep Cruise alive.’
‘And what can I do?’
‘Take over from David Cruise. You know the production team, they’ll be glad to have you. You wrote the scripts so you should be word-perfect. Speak to the camera, urge everyone to go home and cool down. Say the whole sports-club programme is a PR exercise, a marketing experiment that failed. Cobble something together, but say you were wrong.’
‘I wasn’t wrong.’
WE ABANDONED THE car five hundred yards from the dome. Maxted drove onto a traffic island, and we stepped out between the lines of cars and buses bringing supporters to the Metro-Centre from all over the Thames Valley. A huge crowd packed the open plaza, staring at the dome as if waiting for a message. They watched the display screens over the South Gate entrance, as two linkmen described Cruise’s battle for life in an emergency operating theatre set up in the first-aid station.
Maxted pushed through the spectators, showing his doctor’s ID card and shouting at a marshal who tried to turn us back. Behind us, headlamps flared along the perimeter road, the sweeping spotlights of police and military vehicles forcing their way through the traffic. An armoured personnel carrier rammed Maxted’s little Mazda and tossed it to one side. Heavy trucks with bull bars shouldered the smaller cars out of their way and shunted them brutally onto the verge. Squads of police in riot gear marched forward under a creeping barrage of megaphoned orders.
‘Richard! Snap out of it!’ Maxted seized my arm. ‘Head for the South Gate entrance.’
The crowd moved with us, a mulish mob forced by the police against the dome. Fights broke out, fists flailing through the workmanlike rise and fall of police truncheons. A young woman dropped to the ground, knocked senseless when she tried to defend her husband. Her children began to shriek, voices soon drowned by the blades of army helicopters cuffing the night air. Searchlights swept the storm of dust stirred by the downdraught, probing the more resolute sections of the crowd. Elite supporters’ clubs joined battle with the aggressive snatch squads seizing their marshals. A police horse reared, its padded legs flinching from the rain of baseball bats. The bitter tang of CS gas mingled with the stench of vomit.
The crowd yielded, retreating to the South Gate entrance. I steadied an elderly woman listening to her mobile phone. She tried to elbow me away, then cried out: ‘They want to close the dome!’
I shook her birdlike shoulder. ‘Why? Who want to?’
‘The police! They’re closing the dome!’
All around me the cry was taken up, a fearful mantra that flashed like a spectre from mouth to mouth.
‘Closing the dome . . . ! Closing the dome . . . !’
Everyone was shouting. The crowd surged towards the entrance, a frantic riptide that swept us with it, carrying us under the display screens, past the first-aid tables, through the doors and into the brightly lit haven of the entrance hall. People were stumbling, hands clutching each other, shoes lost in the stampede, consumers returning to their sanctuary, to their fortress temple and sacred asylum.
A new cry went up.
‘Defend the dome . . . !’
32
THE REPUBLIC
OF THE METRO-CENTRE
FLEEING FROM THE TEAR GAS and the police truncheons, the last of the crowd burst past the doors into the entrance hall. The searchlights seemed to follow us into the dome, and the iron din of the helicopters drummed at the roof over our heads, the language of pain roaring through the cheerful interior light.
I tripped over a shopping trolley and fell to my knees, bringing down a black woman and two children who clung to my jacket. Tony Maxted had vanished, swept away by the rush. People were boarding the travelator, seeking safety in the vast interior of the Metro-Centre, waving their loyalty cards at the astonished counter staff who came to the doors of their shops.
I stood up, and noticed that I had lost my left shoe. Sandals, trainers, court shoes and even a pair of carpet slippers lay scattered among the abandoned shopping bags. I found my brogue beside a broken stiletto heel, and remembered a large woman in a fur coat stepping on my foot, then screaming abuse at me.
Beyond the doors a line of soldiers with shields and batons were dispersing the hundreds of spectators who had stepped from their cars on the perimeter road. Police constables in riot gear and vizored helmets now sealed off the entrance, and ignored the television cameras recording the scene from the location vans of the main news channels.
But already a modest fightback had begun. Spurred on by the camera lights, a group of marshals and supporters in St George’s shirts were bolting the outer doors. They sealed the manual locks, unwound a heavy hose from the emergency fire-control station and threaded the brass nozzle through the door handles.
The police ignored all this, taking for granted that they could break down the doors whenever they wanted. Two inspectors conferred, watching the marshals assemble a barricade of sales counters and display stands, clearly unconcerned by all this fierce determination. By neutralizing the Metro-Centre, the police had defused the threat of a civil uprising, and the ringleaders of any open rebellion had conveniently isolated themselves from their supporters outside the dome.
Sitting on a chair beside the enquiry desk, I peeled off my bloody sock and tied my handkerchief around my foot. I watched the marshals ral
lying their teams, admiring their doomed efforts to defend the mall. Many of the customers trapped inside the dome by the riot were now helping to build the barricade, and their commitment to the Metro-Centre was more than a set of slogans. They resented the police ambush, and the involvement of the army. The helicopters endlessly soaring over the roof were trying to intimidate them, and they had decided to stand their ground. Everyone cheered on a women’s judo team who carried a hamburger kiosk across the hall, leaking a trail of hot fat. Clapped by their menfolk, they swung the kiosk to and fro and launched it onto the barricade. Even the inspectors gave an admiring salute.
I STOOD UP, trying to clear my throat of the dust and tear gas. The public-address system played a medley of Strauss marches, and the information screens announced the opening of a new crèche. Customers still sat in a nearby coffee house with their double espressos and Danish pastries. But for all their bravery, the Metro-Centre had struck its iceberg. I needed to find Julia Goodwin, and help her to move David Cruise to Brooklands Hospital before we sank together.
Outside the dome a column of riot vehicles and military trucks had drawn up. Spotlights were trained on the doors, turning the entrance hall into a giant hallucination of swerving shadows. The police had forced three of the doors, and a squad of a dozen constables approached the barricade, but for the moment made no attempt to dismantle it. A senior officer, an assistant commissioner of the Surrey police, began to address the watching crowd, fragments of his amplified message barely audible above the blare of the helicopters.
‘. . . from tonight the Metro-Centre will close for renovations . . . management in full agreement . . . concern for customers . . . for your own safety leave in an orderly way . . .’
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