‘Westwick.’
There was no response. ‘You know, west of the city on the Thirty-one, near the airport?’ Topaz prompted. Her ears and nose, frozen outside, were now smarting with returning circulation and probably scarlet.
‘I know Westwick,’ agreed the eco-warrior. Crusty was giving nothing away. He stared meditatively at the roof of the yurt, sipping his tea from time to time.
‘Rich, isn’t it?’ asked the long-haired woman. ‘Another posh suburb.’
Crusty kept his gaze fixed on the top of the stove’s chimney. ‘Of course, one might argue that every suburb is an environmental catastrophe.’
There was some nodding around the edge of the tent and Topaz was encouraged. In plain but graphic terms, she outlined the potential scale of the Oak Hill disaster. ‘If they’re. allowed to go ahead with it, hundreds of homes will be destroyed and ten thousand workers will be living in a toxic environment,’ she concluded. In the soft, warm enclosure of the tent, with the faint howl of the wind outside, the splendid oration she had composed sounded rather muted.
After a pause, in which he finished his tea and replaced his mug tidily on the brass tray on the trunk top, Crusty addressed the empty space above their heads. ‘Strange,’ he remarked in a weary tone, ‘isn’t it, that although lots of people may well worry about the great global issues of our time – climate change, air pollution, fossil fuels – people don’t seem motivated to protest until some disaster is actually in their back yard. A disaster which may well be related, of course. But nobody wants to look at the big picture. Perhaps they just can’t understand it. Having their house knocked down, well, that they can understand.’
The acolytes gazed into their mugs and murmured agreement. It seemed the green knight intended to refuse the quest.
‘The whole history of the green movement is of growth from the bottom up.’ Topaz argued with marvellous fluency; she planned a thesis on the affair when it was over, and had the background section already completed. ‘Grass-roots, single-issue protests like ours drawing in the mainstream, multi-issue environmental organisations, who have embraced the potential of local movements and play a vital role in their success.’
‘The New Green Army is not exactly mainstream,’ Crusty corrected her with a hint of pained offence on his grimy face. ‘Maybe you should talk to Greenpeace.’
‘They don’t get involved locally. Their thing is national action. You must know that.’ Gallantly, Crusty inclined his head, acknowledging the hit. ‘Anyway, I think that compromise is essential with a multi-issue organisation, and the absolute refusal to compromise is the most effective weapon in political conflict.’
‘Not in my back yard.’ Crusty now smiled like a mischievous cherub: ‘That’s all you’re saying, actually.’
‘My back yard is your back yard,’ Topaz countered. ‘We’re all on this planet together.’
‘But some of us have bigger back yards than others. Some of us have enough money to pick out our own choice portion of planet and fence it in.’ Crusty reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced an old silver watch, which he opened to read the time. ‘And then we tell the rest of the world to fuck off. We seem to be able to forget that we’re still on the same planet as other people.’
Topaz swallowed, desperately searching her memory for another good Bolshevik argument. Then Gemma, who held that it was a mother’s duty to give her children the freedom to screw up big time when they insisted on bucking the energy of the universe, and who had been deeply absorbed in braiding her hair again, finally spoke up.
‘Look, Crusty,’ she said, ‘we want to hijack a TV show.’
‘Ah!’ exclaimed the eco-warrior, immediately putting away his watch with enthusiasm. ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Are we talking primetime here? Nationwide or what?’
As a physical entity, Chester Pike lived in a permanently impaired state. Flying to St Louis at least twice a week left most of his biological systems deranged. He was dehydrated, constipated and temporally disoriented. Josh Carman had supplied him with a whole shelf of drugs to regulate his sleep, his heart and his bowels, drain his legs of oedema and his sinuses of mucus and when necessary, for he was intent upon replacing Lauren within eighteen months and Chester was nothing if not goaloriented, to supply more blood into his perris which for some years had been acting as if it didn’t know quite which day of the week it was. Far from the BSD of legend, the organ remained small and wobbly. In this, Chester’s penis was in tune with the rest of his corporeal being. His mind, however, was still up to reading the date on whatever electronic mechanism might be his companion, whatever car he was in or whatever desk he sat behind. And his instinct, buried though it was under the accumulated abuse of a lifetime and unaccustomed as it was to being heard, still had a voice.
Chester’s instinct told him to drop by Oak Hill. On a home morning, when his driver collected him from Grove House, he was being driven out of Westwick to the Magno Southeast Building, which sprawled across several acres in an industrial park twenty miles down the 31 beyond the airport. Ted Parsons, sadly for he had in some measure liked the man, was history. The contractors clearing the Oak Hill site had been informed; Adam DeSouza had found a new project manager, starting the following week. For seven days, no one was minding the store. Chester disliked these situations; in his experience, when you gave destiny a flash of white underbelly like that, the great cosmic predator could never resist.
‘Turn off here,’ he ordered his driver through the limousine’s telephone. ‘I want to take a look at our little project.’
He did not register Stephanie in her Cherokee, driving Stewart’s surveyor colleague away from his clandestine interview, and she, thrilled in the process of her strategy working out, did not register Chester’s limousine, which in any case had dark windows.
As soon as the chain-link fence topped with razorwire came in view, and inside the site Chester saw a Channel Ten van painted searing blue and green, and a young woman with a camera and a man in a suit standing beside it, he knew he had been right.
Oak Hill was no longer a wasteland; vast excavations had taken place, and diggers were still working in them, scooping out the gravelly sub-soil and raining it into waiting trucks. Above their roar sounded the pounding of jack-hammers driving the first piles into the earth, and at the far end of the territory the first crane had been erected and was ponderously transporting girders to their last resting place. A two-storey stack of Portakabins housed the site offices, and their outer wall was faced with the signboards of architects, engineers, contractors and the Oak Hill Development Trust itself, appropriately embellished with an acorn and a leaf.
Chester made his driver stop by the Channel Ten-van. ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded, running down his window.
‘Good morning, sir,’ replied Rod Fuller, preparing to squat submissively by the vehicle door. Chester opted to get out and stand face-to-face, and Rod, catching sight of the documents scattered on the back seat and having retained some subliminal memory of the face of the husband of Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt-In-It, MD of Magno Southeast and sometime member of The Cedars although he had made it through the gym just the once, knew how to react.
‘Rod Fuller,’ he extended his hand, ‘from Family First, Channel Ten Television. And this is Maria D’Amico, our researcher. We’re making a short documentary feature on the supermarket of the future and we’re just getting some shots here of the place where the new Magno store will be opening next year.’
‘My name’s Pike,’ muttered Chester uneasily.
‘I know,’ blushed Rod. ‘I recognised you.’
Ever bufonious, Chester’s swelled a little around the thorax. They shook hands. ‘Allie Parsons,’ he said, ‘she’s on Family First, isn’t she?’
‘Our star,’ Rod confirmed proudly. ‘We’re back on the air the day after tomorrow. I’ve been in touch with your public relations people about this, of course. They’ve been most helpful.’
&nb
sp; ‘She’s a neighbour of mine around here,’ Chester made a proprietorial gesture towards the rest of Westwick outside the metal mesh.
‘Oh, you know her then.’ Rod was finding fresh irony in the ability of people to digest whatever quantity of gush he cared to extrude.
‘Clever woman,’ Chester announced. ‘Done well.’
‘Indeed she has,’ Rod agreed.
‘Well…’ Chester considered calling at the site office, but felt unequal to the task of talking to men who actually got their hands dirty. ‘Splendid. Glad we’ve been able to help. Look forward to seeing…’
‘We’ll send you a tape, sir,’ Rod promised, courteously closing the door of the limousine as Chester sank back into his seat. Dark clouds blew over the sky as they watched the great black vehicle glide away over the mud and disappear in the direction of the Broadway.
‘Why d’you come over all creepy when a guy with a limo shows up?’ The problem called Maria shifted the camera to her shoulder, ready for action. ‘And what was that survey stuff all about? He wasn’t talking super markets.’
‘Ah – he’s in a feature I’m putting up on sick buildings,’ Rod assured her. ‘I just needed a building-site for a background and this seemed a good opportunity. The limo guy’s Chester Pike of Magno. I just wanted him to go away. You know how civilians are about objectivity, they just don’t get it. He knows The Boss, for a start, as well as Allie. If he gets the idea we’re doing anything investigative they’ll pull the plug on us.’
‘Why do I get the feeling you don’t want anyone to know what this report’s supposed to be about? Especially not Allie?’
Maria was chewing gum cheerfully but her eyes were sharp. Having noted the dynamics of her relationship with Allie, Rod decided to take a chance. First he deployed the foxy grin. ‘What’s your opinion of Allie?’
‘Piece of work, since you’re asking.’
‘If her career took a new direction, would you feel a sense of loss?’
‘Are you kidding me? Listen, I’m the only woman researcher this show has ever had. She’s not exactly a sister. The best thing that could happen to me right now is her career could take a new direction and mine could keep right on going.’
‘How would that work out?’
‘Well, my contract’s a year, and it’s with the show, so even if the show was axed …’
‘You’d be OK.’
‘I’d be OK. Look, you want to tell me more, can we do it at lunch? This thing’s heavy and it’s going to rain any minute.’
They went to the Wilde At Heart and he told her almost everything.
All the way out to the office, Chester Pike sent faxes. He wrote: WHY WAS A CHANNEL TEN REPORTER FROM FAMILY FIRST OUT AT OAK HILL TODAY? GET BACK TO ME SOONEST. He faxed this to Adam, to Allie, to Magno’s publicity director and, on a last irrational impulse, to Ted. Adam spoke to the site foreman and, in reply, Chester got three memos citing a feature on the supermarket of the future. From Ted’s office he got a note from his assistant to say Mr Parsons was at Sun Wharf all day.
Even as, in a Channel Ten edit suite, Rod and Maria screened their dummy feature for Allie, Ted Parsons stopped by the Oak Hill site the next evening with a half-bottle of schnapps. Yuris, now employed as foreman on this far less skilled but far more lucrative job, liked a shot or two at the end of the day; it gave him the energy to get cleaned up and hit a few bars. Ted talked to him for quite a while about the questions the TV crew had been asking and the directions in which they’d pointed their camera.
Ted’s instinct had been talking to him ever since his wife had hired her personal trainer as co-host on her show. He connected Rod to Stephanie, Stephanie to her husband, her husband to the damning report on the site, and all of them to Gemma, a subject in which he remained highly interested. When he got home from Oak Hill, still glowing with schnapps, Ted dialled Gemma Lieberman’s number one more time, and Topaz picked up.
‘Your mother wouldn’t by any chance be part of some media conspiracy, would she?’ he asked, feeling ridiculous. The arctic silence at the end of the telephone banished the feeling immediately.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Topaz ordered.
‘Because I happen to know that Chester Pike of Magno has been sniffing around a certain Channel Ten TV crew and asking questions about why they were out at Oak Hill.’
‘We could ask you some questions about Oak Hill,’ was the vitriolic response.
‘It’s not my show any more,’ Ted said, feeling sad and happy simultaneously. ‘They threw me out last week. But that’s not why I called. I just called to warn you, if you needed warning, which of course you may not. I do care for your mother, you know. I
wish her success, I really do. Give her my love, will you, Topaz?
Goodbye now.’
21. Peace Assured
Rain fell in Westwick with regret. Drops fell lightly but intently from a pale pewter sky, bringing down the first serious fall of leaves of the season and inviting the community to contemplate the inevitable succession of life, death and rebirth.
The rain falling through the cherry trees on New Farm Rise made the empty street glisten. It chuckled into the gutters and streamed through the drains and caused Stephanie Sands to adopt a completely untypical expression of cynicism as she belted her son into the back of the Cherokee at 5.30 am.
Max removed his cute yellow sou’wester and placed it gravely on the seat beside him.
‘You will need it later,’ she told him.
‘It’s weird,’ he replied with sleepy confidence.
‘You have to walk to school today, remember?’
‘Uh.’
‘If it’s still raining, you’ll get wet.’
‘Uh.’
‘Your hat will keep the rain off.’
‘Can we go now?’
The air was humid and warm. The earth, even the sour, poisoned, paved-over earth of Westwick, smelled fecund. It was the season for the pousse d’automne, the most crucial growth period of the year when plants silently and invisibly reached their roots further down into the ground and reasserted their hold on life.
Mildew had tipped the shoots of the Souvenir de la Malmaison with its deathly white dust. The leaves were wrinkled, brown-edged and falling early; her rose was sick. Stephanie did not even consider that she could be out back spraying and mulching when the rain
stopped; today she was taking a more radical attitude to cultivating
her garden.
Half a mile away in Maple Grove the rain dripped relentlessly through the mighty branches of the old trees. At the corner of Church Vale and Grove End a front door opened and Moron stomped unhappily down the front path. After him came his master.
Ted Parsons pulled the hood of his sweatshirt firmly around his face and tied the drawstring under his chin. The raindrops stung his bare hands as he opened the gate in his picket fence and stepped into the street. Under the half-naked trees the downpour was less vigorous. With Moron following at a sullen trot, he jogged forward towards the church, picking his feet up over the fallen leaves.
Lately, Ted had taken to interviewing himself. Ted Parsons, the godfather of Maple Grove, talks about the legacy of Jackson Kerr. ‘What first brought you to Westwick?’ he would ask himself, the imaginary microphone alert for his reply.
‘Harrier Homes,’ he would reply. ‘I owe it all to Harrier Homes.’
There was a joke about Harrier Homes: which is the odd one out – AIDS, herpes, gonorrhoea and a Harrier Home? The answer is gonorrhoea, because you can get rid of it. A Harrier Home would typically be bought new by a dewy-eyed couple, upwardly mobile from the working classes, who knew no better than to be reassured by its impressive portfolio of guarantees and design awards. In twenty years, when their children were grown, the guarantees would have expired, the awards would be forgotten, the paint would have peeled, the plaster would be cracking off the walls and the foundations shifting like Irish dancers; the Harrier Home would be as worthless as a dw
elling could be.
After twenty-five years the couple approaching retirement would discover that the major investment of their lifetimes had been a turkey and resign themselves to rejoining the disadvantaged. They would cut their losses and sell, usually to another developer, who boarded up the property and waited until the majority of the estate was derelict before buying out the obstinate few resolved to die there and sending in the diggers. Harrier Homes extended the principle of built-in obsolescence to bricks and mortar. After thirty years, it was cheaper to knock them down than fix them up. Ted had been brought up in a Harrier Home, watching his father dedicate his meagre leisure hours to painting warped timbers and filling cracks in the walls which eternally reopened.
At the church, man and dog swung smoothly along the Broadway, heading for Alder Reach. It was many months since Ted had considered any other route. There was no sign of life at the Kwality Korner Store. It was 5.56 am.
At Alder Reach the Lieberman house blazed with light. In the kitchen, the cat scooted in through the cat flap and left a trail of muddy pawprints on the floor from the kitchen to the stairs. Topaz, careful of her charcoal worsted interview suit, removed them with a mop.
‘Fucking weather,’ Gemma announced. She was moving her wind chimes into the fame and public life quadrant of her house, which fell over the fireplace in what had once been the sitting room. ‘Have you got an umbrella, Flora?’
‘Why can’t I come?’ Flora demanded. ‘I can easily ride over after I’ve dropped the little ones off. It’s not fair.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ her mother agreed, ‘but it’s the way it has to be. Molly’s too young. Somebody has to make sure all the children get up and get dressed and get their breakfast and get to school and get to grow up and get a life. Normally, that’s my job. Today I have to save the world, so I am delegating the job to you. You should be honoured.’
‘Huh,’ her daughter replied. ‘I don’t see you getting much honour for it.’
Approaching the Lieberman house, Ted decided that running with his hood up looked wussy. With a little difficulty he untied the drawstring and let the hood fall. He ran his fingers through his hair, so it would slick back aerodynamically instead of getting plastered all-ways to his skull. Rain trickled down his neck and tickled his backbone. Behind him, Moron plodded onwards with his head down and his tail hanging, water running in rivulets off his coat.
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