‘. . . 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 . . .’
At least five hundred people were crammed into the entrance hall and the nearby shopping aisles. Staff, sports-club supporters, customers caught in the riot, and passers-by driven by panic to seek refuge in the dome were together waiting for something to happen. Many wanted to leave, but fell silent as a militant minority shouted abuse at the assistant commissioner.
At a signal, the constables began to dismantle the barricade, first hurling aside the hamburger kiosk, slipping and sliding in the fat. Scuffles broke out in the watching crowd, and children shrieked at the grappling shadows projected by the spotlights onto the walls of the entrance hall.
‘Right . . .’ I shifted my weight from my injured foot, ready to join the exodus from the Metro-Centre. ‘It’s all over. Small revolution in Thames Valley . . .’
‘Not quite.’ Beside me an elderly man in a grey topcoat, briefcase in hand, smiled to himself in a resigned way. I had noticed him taking shelter behind the enquiry desk, and assumed he was leaving the dome when the riot began. He pointed to the staff entrance near the cloakrooms. ‘I fear we won’t see our beds tonight . . .’
Pushing aggressively through the crowd, and almost marching in step, was a group of marshals, Metro-Centre engineers in orange overalls, and some fifty supporters in St George’s shirts. At their head was Tom Carradine, still in his sky-blue public relations uniform, but no longer the earnest figure whose faith in the mall I found so touching. He seemed small but poised, as watchful and unsmiling as a bullfighter faced with a stupid but dangerous bull. Behind him, forming his personal bodyguard, were the two marshals who had hurled Duncan Christie to the ground as he tried to press a bullet into my palm. Both marshals carried shotguns that I assumed they had looted from the many gun shops in the dome. Carradine’s right hand was raised above his head, and he signalled to the marshals with small movements of his forefinger. He was confident and undaunted, glad to be rising at last to the supreme challenge that faced him.
Hard on the marshals’ heels came William Sangster, broad shoulders swaying from side to side, massive head ducking like a boxer’s before climbing into the ring. His eyes scanned the crowd, as if searching for any former pupils who were still playing truant. He smiled in a disoriented way, unsure of himself and what he was doing with these armed men.
A shot rang out, a sharp roar like the slamming of a door. The concourse fell silent. A raised shotgun pointed to the ceiling, as the faint smoke from its barrel faded on the sweating air. The assistant commissioner lowered his megaphone, and the constables dismantling the barricade stopped to wait for their orders.
Carradine handed the shotgun to the marshals. He took off his peaked cap, revealing his blond hair swept back from a surprisingly steep forehead. He listened to the silence that filled the entrance hall, and then spoke briefly into the microphone passed to him by a marshal. His magnified voice in its motorway accent boomed over the heads of the police and soldiers outside the dome.
‘The Metro-Centre is secure . . . Withdraw all army units . . . Repeat, the Metro-Centre is secure . . . We have hostages . . . Repeat, we have hostages . . .’
The sounds echoed through the mall, drumming against the roof. Carradine, the marshals and engineers were staring upwards, as if expecting salvation to descend from the sky. Even Sangster had stopped ducking his head and leaned back.
‘What are they doing?’ I kept my voice down and spoke to the elderly man standing wearily beside me. ‘They’re waiting for a miracle.’
‘Unlikely . . .’ He tried to summon a signal on his mobile, but gave up. ‘Still, you’re on the right track.’
‘These hostages? Who are they?’
‘That I can tell you. We are . . .’
There was a gasp from the crowd, and a hundred hands pointed to the ceiling of the security lobby, the narrow vestibule leading to the entrance hall. A steel fire door was slowly falling from its housing, shutting out the barricade, the assistant commissioner and his officers.
A deep metallic rumble like the clenching of a giant’s teeth filled the hall as the fire door settled onto the floor. The vibration moved away, a subsonic wave that seemed to take in smaller tremors from the exit doors of the dome, the answering calls from the furthest outposts of a vast vault that was sealing itself off from the world.
I stared at the heavy shield, and helped the elderly man to the chair by the enquiry desk. He thanked me and said: ‘Your foot’s bleeding.’
‘I know. Tell me—are we sealed in?’
‘It looks like it.’
‘The North Gate entrance?’
‘I imagine that’s also closed.’
‘And the side exits?’
‘Everything. The car parks and freight entrance.’ He raised a hand to calm me, seeing that I was agitated. ‘It’s the fear of fire, you see. Any draught would turn a small blaze into a furnace.’
‘Right . . .’ I was surprised by how calm he seemed, as if he had known what would happen and had detached himself from all the excitement long before it began. He stared in a regretful way at his useless mobile, resigned to the prospect of being unable to contact his wife. Trying to rest my foot, I asked: ‘I take it you work here?’
‘In Accounts. We tend to have a good idea what’s going on. Mr Carradine is a very determined young man, but these shopping malls haven’t learned how to cope with violence. When they do . . .’
‘War will move into the world’s consumer spaces? That’s quite a thought. Up till now, being a washing machine has been a safe option. There was a shooting here this evening.’
‘The television actor? I’m very sorry. It’s probably best not to know if it really happened.’ He shook my hand. ‘I’ll rest here for a bit. You’ll need to find a bed for the night. There’s a huge selection to choose from . . .’
He sat in his chair behind the enquiry desk, a grey-haired sphinx ready to answer all questions but ignored by the crowd drifting across the entrance hall and unable to find its bearing. Carradine and his entourage had set off on an inspection tour of their new domain, apparently uninterested in the fate of all those trapped inside the dome.
I walked over to the steel fire door, so massive that it muffled all sounds of police and army activity. An emergency escape panel was set into the fire door, and I was tempted to make a run for it, but its electrical locks would be too much for me.
Besides, a new and more interesting world was waiting for me inside the dome, a self-contained universe of treasure and promise. The crowd was drifting back into the mall, resigned to a future of eternal shopping. The republic of the Metro-Centre had at last established itself, a faith trapped inside its own temple.
PART III
33
THE CONSUMER LIFE
IN AN HOUR I would be leaving the dome. For the last time I crossed the deserted terrace of the Holiday Inn and stepped onto the beach beside the lake. Within the lobby the latest group of hostages to be released was checking out of the hotel, ready for their transfer to the South Gate entrance. Guarded by their marshals, they shuffled through the doors, several almost too weak to walk. I waved to them, trying to remind them that in a few minutes they would breathe a different air, but none of them noticed me. There were tired mothers with restless teenage daughters, wives steering elderly husbands, a pallid McDonald’s assistant whom Dr Maxted had treated for hysteria, and a young couple barely coping with a fever picked up from the polluted water.
Julia Goodwin had selected them the previous evening from the pool of five hundred remaining hostages, insisting that the disease risk they posed made them urgent candidates for release. When I presented the list of names to Tom Carradine he rejected Julia’s choice out of hand. Fanatical in his defence of the Metro-Centre—and, according to Maxted, showing the first clinical signs of paranoia—he sat in his make-up ch
air at the mezzanine studio, tapping the sheet of paper with his eyebrow brush. He spent hours preparing himself for the camera, but had never actually appeared on the in-house channel, saving this moment for his last stand. I assumed that deep in the race memory of PR managers was the belief that when they appeared live on television a miracle would follow. The seas would part, and the sky would fall.
Carradine stared cautiously at the list, searching for any coded message to the police and journalists waiting behind the security cordon around the dome. Finally he gave in, silencing Julia when she graphically described the symptoms of typhoid and typhus. He edged away from the exhausted doctor with her feverish corneas, a model of all the diseases that the police negotiators warned would soon break out in the dome, and signed the list with one of his dozen Montblanc pens.
As he knew, Julia held the trump card, at least for the time being. Severely injured, David Cruise lay in her makeshift intensive care unit, holding on to life by an effort of will long after his body had decided to call it a day. But once this card was played, and the ventilators and transfusion pumps were disconnected, Julia Goodwin would lose her authority. She and I would join the hostages in the squalid basement of the Holiday Inn.
At that point the real game of the dome would begin, as Carradine and his henchmen stabilized their rule. The micro-republic would become a micro-monarchy, and the vast array of consumer goods would be Carradine’s real subjects.
I STOOD ON the sand, staring at the oily surface of the lake as the hostage group shuffled away. The marshals still saw me as David Cruise’s media adviser, and reined in their abuse. A Zimmer frame scraped the marble floor, but the group was silent. An hour later they would step through the emergency hatch and face the world’s television cameras. In return, the police would hand over a portable air-conditioning plant that would cool the intensive care unit.
At the last moment I would slip in among them, after Julia added my name to the list. I wanted to stay with her, and help with the rougher chores at the temporary clinic she had set up in the first-aid unit. But she was concerned for my ankle infection, which had resisted all the antibiotics available in the Metro-Centre’s thirty pharmacies. Beyond that, she worried about the larger infection incubated within the dome that had begun to affect all of us: a deepening passivity, and a loss of will and any sense of time. The treasure house of consumer goods around us seemed to define who we were.
I hobbled along the sand to a deckchair set up on the water’s edge. I rested here every evening, when the endless sports commentaries in David Cruise’s recorded voice at last died away, ringside accounts of long-forgotten matches relayed through the public address system. Then the dome’s ceiling lights were dimmed and a grateful silence fell over the Metro-Centre.
I sat in my tilting chair and drank enough whisky from my flask to blunt the fever in my swollen ankle. The silence was even more soothing, before the night patrols began to swear and stamp their way around the dome, torches searching the empty stores and cafés for any intruders. The artificial twilight lasted until the morning. During the long night hours, the ghost creatures of the dome, the thousands of cameras and kitchen appliances and cutlery canteens, began to emerge and glow like a watching congregation.
I reached down to an empty beer can at my feet, and tossed it into a nearby waste bin. Beyond a three-feet radius of my chair, the beach was littered with bottles and empty food cartons. The water never moved, but a scum of cigarette butts and plastic wrappers formed a tide line. At least for the moment, consumerism had beached itself on this filthy sand. Within a few hours, once the police had debriefed me and the doctors confirmed that I was free of infectious disease, I would be back in my father’s flat.
AFTER ONLY FIVE days, the deterioration of the dome was starting to gather pace. In the first flush of victory, Carradine and his marshals found that they had locked themselves inside the mall with almost three thousand people for company—an inner core of several hundred sports supporters and Metro-Centre employees, determined to defend the dome against all comers, and a larger group of customers caught by the riot and spectators who fled into the entrance hall to escape the police truncheons. Almost all were keen to leave once the threat of violence was lifted.
Tom Carradine rose to his hour. The engaging PR man was showing a hard steel. Cannily, he played on the presence of some two hundred small children in the dome, dishevelled and hungry, parted from their favourite computer games and too frightened to sleep in the arms of their exhausted mothers. At midnight on the first day, when an army assault team abseiled from their helicopter onto the roof of the dome, Carradine released a distraught mother who had suffered a heart attack. Her stretcher, eased through the emergency hatch in the South Gate fire door, was accompanied by two weeping toddlers clinging to Julia Goodwin’s hands.
The exhausted but still attractive doctor made a powerful impact on the nation’s television screens, as I saw from my set at the Holiday Inn. Julia warned the police negotiators that further casualties would follow if they tried to break into the dome, and that many children would die in the crossfire between the marshals and the army marksmen. She then selflessly stepped back into the dome and returned to her care of David Cruise, with a promise from the police that a complete intensive care unit would be provided by Brooklands Hospital. No mention was made of the fact that Carradine refused to release Cruise, who had become Hostage Number One, but no further attempts were carried out to penetrate the Metro-Centre.
Secure behind their fire doors, with their own power generators and an unlimited supply of food, drink and hostages, Carradine and the marshals soon consolidated their position. They set out their demands—that all threats to close the dome be lifted, that no charges be brought against its defenders, and that the Metro-Centre re-open for business, along with its supporters clubs and sports teams. The hapless general manager of the mall, flanked by his cowed department heads, was escorted to the mezzanine studio and declared that he was ready to throw open the doors and begin trading again.
Naturally, the Home Office refused to negotiate, but by now a huge media presence surrounded the dome. Beyond the perimeter road, where the police set up their outer cordon, dozens of TV location crews followed every move. Supporters from the motorway towns filled the streets of Brooklands in a huge show of solidarity. Commentators described the seizure of the dome as a populist uprising, the struggle of consumer man and his consumer wife against the metropolitan elites with their deep loathing of shopping malls. The people of the retail parks were defending a more real Britain of Homebase stores, car-boot sales and garden centres, amateur sports clubs and the shirt of St George.
Carradine and his marshals took full advantage of this. Fortunately, the crowd trapped within the dome soon grasped that there was no immediate threat to their lives. The twenty supermarkets inside the Metro-Centre were stocked to capacity with fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and poultry, pizzas and cook chill meals. Its freezer cabinets held a glacier of ice cream. On shelves within easy reach was enough alcohol to float the dome into the North Sea.
Like Tony Maxted, I was amazed that there was little looting. None of the restaurants and cafés were functioning, but the crowd dispersing across the mall in the hours after the lock-down moved in an orderly way through the supermarkets. The cash tills were silent, but customers paid for their purchases, dropping their money into the honesty buckets which the marshals placed beside the tills. Everyone knew that the Metro-Centre was ready to sustain them. The aisles and concourses were their parks and neighbourhoods, and they would keep them clean and law-abiding.
Afterwards, the marshals steered us to the hotels and staff rest rooms in the dome, and to the furniture and bedding departments of the big stores. I spent the night in the Holiday Inn, sharing a double room on the third floor with Tony Maxted. We slept in our clothes, windows sealed against the unending night noises of the police and army, the searchlights sweeping across the dome’s semitransparent skin.
Maxted was a restless sleeper, haranguing me in his dreams. The room was stuffy, the water pipes in the bathroom fluting and whining as the pressure fell and airlocks interrupted the system. The next morning, when I stepped onto the balcony, the outside air was as warm as the tropics.
Both Maxted and I took for granted that the siege would end that day. But neither Carradine nor the Home Office was ready to compromise. All morning a dishevelled crowd waited in the entrance hall, arguing with the marshals who guarded the fire door. Others drifted away with their fractious children, already bored by the fourth ice cream of the day. They sat at the café tables in the central atrium, like passengers abandoned by their airlines. I strolled among them as they checked their watches, reassuring each other that they would be home in an hour.
Carradine and his marshals had other ideas. They realized that once they survived the period immediately after the dome’s seizure the crisis would pass and their power would grow. The concern of both the general public and the Home Office would move from the future of the Metro-Centre to the safety of the hostages. Carradine’s engineers were working hard on the Metro-Centre’s power supply, ensuring the most efficient use of its oil reserves. Carradine ordered that the under-roof lighting arrays should be switched off. Many of the shops and stores seemed to recede into an inner darkness, an uncanny transformation. As people moved down the unlit aisles, searching for tin-openers and disposable wipes, the strange gloom gave the impression that an air raid was imminent. Entering one of the larger hardware stores, I felt my way past the counters, surrounded by hundreds of knives, saws and chisels, their blades forming a silver forest in the darkness. A more primitive world was biding its time.
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