Kingdom Come: A Novel

by Ballard, J. G.

  None of them looked at me, or seemed aware that I was leading them. They followed me like commuters in a crowded railway terminal, trailing anyone who had found a gap through the press of travellers. The unique internal geometry of the crowd had come into play, picking first one leader and then another. Apparently passive, they regrouped and changed direction according to no obvious logic, a slime mould impelled by gradients of boredom and aimlessness.

  Trying to lose them, I crossed the perimeter road. Ahead lay the Brooklands main thoroughfare, a high street of office buildings, shops and small department stores that led to the town hall. At least five hundred people were following my lead, though a few had overtaken me like pilot fish. Together we had drawn off other sections of the crowd in the Metro-Centre car parks. Groups of several hundred supporters crossed the perimeter road and set off through the side streets. Gangs of young men in St George’s shirts playfully rough-housed with each other. The Metro-Centre was forgotten, the last smoke rising from its dome, a mournful Thames Valley Vesuvius.

  I walked on, keeping as close as I could to the office entrances. Within fifty yards I realized that the crowd had forgotten me. Forced together by the narrow street, everyone moved shoulder to shoulder. I had served my role, and the logic of the crowd had dispensed with me.

  I RESTED IN the entrance to an insurance company and watched the people passing by, cigarettes glowing in the darkness, spray confetti arcing across the shop windows. A sound system blared out bursts of rock music. I was breathing rapidly, and felt strangely excited, as if about to make love to an unfamiliar woman, in charge of myself for the first time since my arrival in Brooklands.

  And still there were no police. I passed a small car forced to stop on the pavement, roof dented by heavy fists. The grey-haired driver clutched his steering wheel, too shocked to step from his vehicle. Gangs of youths hurled beer bottles at the upstairs windows of a local newspaper, and the sound of falling glass cut through the jeers. A trio of eastern European men emerged from the doorway of an agency recruiting night cleaners for Brooklands Hospital. They were quickly set upon. Noses bloody, arms shielding their faces, they fought their way into a side street through a gauntlet of kicks and punches.

  Fifty yards ahead was the main square, spotlights playing on the balcony of the town hall. A celebratory dinner for the winning sports teams was being held by the mayor and his councillors, and a film crew waited on the balcony, lights in place.

  Within minutes a huge crowd of supporters filled the square, whistling and shouting at the town hall, overrunning the municipal gardens and trampling the flowerbeds. A modest cordon of uniformed constables guarded the steps of the town hall, but no other police had been drafted in, as if the near-riot moving through the streets, the burning cars and vandalized shops, were part of the evening’s festivities.

  New arrivals pressed into the square, athletics teams carrying their banners, ice-hockey claques wearing their helmets and elbow guards. I edged around the fringes of the crowd, and climbed the steps of Geoffrey Fairfax’s law offices. The premises were dark, with steel grilles bolted across the doors and windows, as if the staff had been aware that a riot was scheduled for that evening.

  A cheer went up from the crowd, followed by a din of hoots and whistles. Brooklands’ mayor, a prominent local businessman who was wearing his insignia and chain, came onto the balcony with the captains of two football clubs. Confused by the restless crowd, and the sight of a car burning in a nearby side street, the mayor made an effort to call for quiet, but his amplified voice was drowned by the boos. Beer bottles flew over the heads of the nervous police and shattered on the civic steps.

  Then the boos ended, and the square fell silent. People around me were clapping and whistling their approval. A huge cheer went up, followed by a medley of hunting horns, good-humoured hoots and shouts.

  Two men stood on the balcony behind the mayor. One was David Cruise, dressed like a bandleader in white tuxedo and red silk cummerbund, grinning broadly and raising his arms to embrace the crowd. He bowed his head, a show of modesty that struck me as odd, given that his giant face with its unrelenting smile presided over Brooklands from the display screens at the football ground. In reality, his face seemed small and vulnerable, as if the effort of shrinking himself to human size had exhausted him.

  The mayor offered him the microphone, clearly hoping that Cruise would calm the crowd and defuse its anger after the attack on the Metro-Centre. The cable announcer ducked his head and tried to leave the balcony, but found his way blocked by Tony Maxted. Thuggish in his dinner jacket, shaven head gleaming in the camera lights, the psychiatrist held Cruise’s arms and turned him to face the crowd, like the senior aide of a president with the first signs of Alzheimer’s and unsure what audience he was meant to be addressing.

  Scarcely loosening his grip, Maxted prompted Cruise with a few lines of dialogue, shouting them into his ear as the crowd began to jeer. Behind the two men was William Sangster, a leather bowling jacket over his evening wear. He was strained but smiling, puckering his plump cheeks as if trying to disguise himself from those in the crowd who might recognize their former head teacher. He and Maxted pushed Cruise to the balcony, each raising one of the announcer’s hands like seconds rallying a boxer who had stepped uneasily into the ring. They seemed to be urging Cruise to assume the leadership of the crowd and challenge the powers of the night who had defiled the Metro-Centre.

  Cruise, however, refused to give in. He waved to the crowd, but he had switched off his smile, a gesture that seemed to say he was switching off his audience. He turned his back on the noisy square, forced his way between Maxted and Sangster, and left the balcony.

  There were catcalls as the mayor took the microphone. Football rattles whirled, unheard in any stadium for years, their grating clatter like the chitter of monkeys. The crowd was restless and on the edge of its patience. Beside me, a woman and her teenage daughter, both in ice-hockey shirts, began to whistle in disgust. They needed action, without any idea what form this might take. They had waited for David Cruise to tell them and lead them forward. They would follow him, but they were just as ready to jeer and deride him. They needed violence, and realized that David Cruise was too unreal, too much an electronic illusion, a confection of afternoon television at its blandest and sweetest. They hungered for reality, a rare event in their lives, a product that Cruise could never endorse or supply.

  Hoots and cheers rose around the square as Tony Maxted spoke into the microphone. But he was too thuggish, with his Roman head and mask-like face that revealed everything. The crowd wanted to be used, but in their own way. An ironic Mexican wave moved around the square in a blizzard of whistles trained by years of practice at the decisions of blind referees. A group of youths set fire to a park bench, tearing branches from the municipal shrubbery to feed the flames.

  A blow struck the side of my head, almost knocking me from my feet. A huge explosion sounded from a nearby street. Everyone ducked as the flash lit the trembling windows around the square. The aftershock thrashed the trees, sucking at the air in my lungs and straining my ribs. A vacuum engulfed the night, then hurtled back into itself.

  18

  A FAILED REVOLUTION

  EVERYONE WAS RUNNING, as if trying to chase down their fears. Panic and anger raced in a hundred directions. Within a minute the square was empty, though the town hall and nearby law offices were unharmed. The explosion jarred clouds of dust from the elderly pointing, and wraiths of vapour floated like the palest smoke, the bestirred ghosts of these antique piles.

  The bomb had exploded in a narrow side street of lock-up garages, but no one was hurt, as if Brooklands was a stage set, an adventure playground haunted by malicious and incendiary children. I listened to the ambulance sirens swerving through the streets, the seesaw wail of police klaxons. Beyond them rose a louder and deeper sound, the baying of a crowd around an enemy goalmouth.

  RIOT STALKED THE streets of Brooklands for the next hour.
It wore two costumes, farce and cruelty. Gangs of football supporters broke into every Asian supermarket and looted the alcohol counters, making off with crates of beer that they stacked in the streets and turned into free bars for the roaming crowd. The riot soon began to drink itself into befuddlement, but bands of more determined ice-hockey followers joined forces with track-and-field supporters and marched on an industrial estate in run-down east Brooklands, a night-time wilderness of video cameras and security patrols. Frantic attack dogs hurled themselves at the chain-link fencing, driven to a frenzy by the banner-waving marchers who tossed their looted burgers over the wire.

  Waiting for the police to arrive, I followed this barely disciplined private army to a gypsy hostel beside a bus depot. The aggressive whistles and chanting terrified the exhausted Roma women trying to restrain their husbands. I left them to it, and walked back to the town hall. An overturned car burned outside the ballet school as a breakaway group of boxing supporters tried to provoke the students, whom they saw as a pampered and idle breed of dubious sexuality.

  Beyond the football stadium a hard core of violent demonstrators invaded a Bangladeshi housing estate. They burned a football banner in the garden of a shabby bungalow, a fiery cross doused in petrol siphoned from the old Mercedes in the drive. When the bungalow’s owner, an Asian dentist I had seen in the hospital, opened his door to protest, he met a hail of beer cans.

  Through all this pointless mayhem moved Dr Tony Maxted in his Mazda sports car, still wearing his dinner jacket like a playboy revolutionary. Whenever the riot seemed to slacken he left his car and roamed through the crowd, sharing a can of beer and leading the singsongs, filming the scene on his mobile phone. As I expected, few police appeared through the smoke and noise. They remained on the perimeter of Brooklands, keeping out any curious visitors. On the roof of the town hall I saw Sangster standing beside Superintendent Leighton, surveying the riot with the calm gaze of landowners observing their tenants at play, as if burning cars and racial brawls were boisterous recreations that suited the brutal peasantry of the motorway towns.

  But the outside world had begun to take notice. Behind the town hall two police motorcyclists intercepted a BBC news team setting up their camera. They ordered the crew back into their van, told the driver to reverse and escorted the vehicle back to the M25.

  A small crowd watched them go, disappointed that the Brooklands riot, the town’s only claim to fame since the 1930s, would not be on the breakfast news. In the brief silence before they found something else to attack I listened to the latest bulletin on a radio shared by two teenage girls in St George’s shirts. Street fights between rival sports fans were taking place, the reporter noted, an outbreak of England’s traditional pastime, football hooliganism. The town’s police force, he added, was on alert but was being kept in reserve.

  Disappointed by their enemies, the rioters began to turn on themselves, and the night wound down into a series of drunken brawls and bored attacks on already looted premises. Turning my back on all this, I set off through the quieter side streets. I was lost, and I wanted to be. I hated the riot and the racist violence, but I knew that the crowd was disappointed by the failure of the evening to ignite and set the motorway towns ablaze. Already I guessed that the bomb placed in my Jensen had been an attempt to light a fuse. But a vital element was missing from the minds of the bored consumers who made up the Brooklands population. Marooned in their retail paradise, they lacked the courage to bring about their own destruction. The crowd outside the town hall had wanted David Cruise to lead them, but the cable presenter was too unsure of himself. The riot had ended with the frustrated mob glaring at itself in the mirror and breaking its bloodied forehead against the glass.

  I knew now that we had all been manipulated by a small set of inept puppeteers. A group of prominent local citizens who felt threatened by the Metro-Centre had mounted an amateurish putsch, an attempt to turn back the clock and reclaim their ancient county from a plague of retailers. Geoffrey Fairfax, Dr Maxted, William Sangster among others, probably with the connivance of Superintendent Leighton and senior police officers, had seized the chance given them by the Metro-Centre shooting that led to my father’s death. Only a direct attack on the great shopping mall would rouse a deeply sedated population. No vandalized church or library, no ransacked school or heritage site, would touch a nerve. A violent revolt, the cordite of civil strife in suburban Surrey, would force the county council and the Home Office to react. The retail parks would close, the fox would return to his haunts, and the hunt would gallop again over abandoned dual carriageways and through the forecourts of forgotten filling stations.

  Meanwhile, my martyred Jensen was on its way to the police forensics lab, and I might find myself arraigned as the instigator of a failed revolution . . .

  19

  THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND

  A LINE OF AMBULANCES appeared through the smoke and haze, waiting outside the Accident & Emergency entrance of Brooklands Hospital. The rioters had moved down the street facing the hospital, wrecking several of the shops. The broken windows of a travel agency lay on the pavement in front of me, a glass snare ready to bite the ankles of any incautious stroller.

  I picked my way through the ugly needles, and noticed a woman in a white coat who stood beside a parked car, gesturing in a vague way at the drifting smoke. Recognizing Dr Julia Goodwin, I felt a rush of pleasure in seeing her, and for a moment the whole disastrous evening fell behind me.

  ‘Julia? What’s happened? You look . . .’

  ‘Mr . . . Pearson? God, everything’s happened.’ She seemed confused, fists drumming on the car as if haranguing an obstinate patient. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve been taking part in a riot.’ I tried to calm her, holding her wrists in my hands, a pair of pulses that seemed to throb to a different beat. ‘Are you . . . ?’

  ‘All right? What the hell do you think?’ She wrenched her hands away from me, and noticed an ambulance driver stepping from his cab. She waved to him rather giddily, and lowered her voice, eyes swerving across the haze. ‘Richard, you’re pretty sane, some of the time. What exactly is going on?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea.’ She stared at the car, and said matter-of-factly, as if not wholly believing herself: ‘Geoffrey Fairfax is dead.’

  ‘The bomb at the Metro-Centre. Tragic . . . I’m sorry for him.’

  ‘He was a bit of a thug, actually.’ Saying this seemed to revive her. ‘He tried to defuse the bomb.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Sergeant Falconer. An odd little fish; I wouldn’t like her interrogating me. Geoffrey must have seen the device in the bomber’s car. She says they’ll trace the owner. Who drives around with a bloody bomb in the back seat?’ She turned to me and without thinking brushed the soot from my shoulder, as if grooming a neighbour’s cat. ‘Richard, this whole place is going mad.’

  ‘I think that’s the idea. It didn’t really work, though.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Have you seen Tony Maxted and Sangster?’

  ‘All over the place. They’re everywhere. Practically cheerleaders.’

  ‘They’re trying to lower the temperature. Calm people down, and head off anything really ugly. The police are backing them.’

  ‘Is that what Sergeant Falconer said?’

  ‘More or less. She was a bit shaky, as you’d expect. I don’t know what Geoffrey Fairfax saw in her . . .’

  I held Julia’s shoulders, trying to steady her when she stumbled against the car. I pointed to the hospital, as an ambulance driver switched off his engine. ‘Shouldn’t you be in—?’

  ‘A&E? My shift ended ten minutes ago.’ Reminded of her professional role, she eased me away and straightened her gown. ‘Thanks for the help. You’re very sweet. It’s amazing there aren’t more casualties. Kicking in windows, setting fire to cars—people in Brooklands seem to have the knack. I want to get home, but look at this .
. .’

  She pointed to the shattered windscreen, a spider’s web of fractured glass left by a baseball bat. Raising her head, she began to wail softly to herself.

  ‘Julia, we’ll call a taxi.’ I tried to take one of her hands. ‘Listen, I’ll walk you back to the hospital. Perhaps you should see someone?’

  ‘Who?’ My inept question stopped her in mid-breath. ‘One of the medics? Holy Jesus!’ She blew the hair out of her eyes, genuinely amazed by me. ‘Richard, I work with them all day. There isn’t one of the little shits I’d trust myself with . . .’

  ‘Fair enough.’ I leaned over the windscreen and used my elbow to force in the glass. ‘You can still drive the car. Just keep the speed down.’

  ‘Good.’ Brightening, she said: ‘I’ll give you a lift. Where’s your car?’

  ‘It . . . the engine blew up. They’ve taken the car away to have a look at it.’

  ‘Too bad. I know the feeling.’ She opened the door and swept the beads of glass from her seat. Settling herself behind the wheel, she said: ‘In the end, the street is all you can trust.’

  WE DROVE THROUGH the empty town, fragments of windscreen glass blowing onto our laps. The Metro-Centre was quiet, the last smoke rising from the overturned Land Cruiser. A fire-engine crew were hosing down another gutted vehicle in the deserted plaza. The riot had ended, as if full time had been called by a referee. A few supporters walked home, St George’s shirts tied around their waists, bare-chested husbands arm in arm with their wives. A police car cruised past them, quietly retaking the night.

  Driving calmed Julia. She peered through the hole in the windscreen, and whistled at the burnt-out cars.

  ‘Richard, what happened here? Something new and very dangerous is going on.’