Kingdom Come (17 page)

‘Isn’t everything these days?’ Aware that they were both lightheaded with fatigue, I said: ‘Listen, I’ll talk to the police.’

‘The police?’ Sangster looked owlishly serious. ‘We didn’t think of that. Julia, the police . . .’

I let this pass. ‘Look, I hate the violence. I hate the racist attacks. I hate the protection rackets and the bully-boy tactics. But these people are a fringe.’

‘Only a fringe?’

‘A vicious fringe, admittedly. But very few people are involved. Wherever you find sport you find hooligans. Contact sports appeal to any riffraff looking for violence. Don’t judge what’s happening by what you see at night.’

‘Fair point,’ Sangster conceded. ‘Go on.’

‘Move around during the day. Disciplined crowds, everyone on best behaviour. I watched them an hour ago. Whole families out together—healthy, fresh, optimistic, keen to cheer on their teams. Friendly rivalry, heads held high.’

‘And the banners?’ Julia leaned across the table and gripped my wrist. ‘Have you seen them? Like Roman legions. It’s incredible.’

‘Right. Banners flying. There’s a new pride in the air, all along the motorway towns. People are more confident, more positive. The M25 was a backwater left over from Heathrow, a joke no one wanted to share. Dual carriageways and used-car lots. Nothing to look forward to except new patio doors and a trip to Homebase. All the promise of life delivered door to door in a flat pack.’

Sangster nodded, inspecting his deeply bitten nails. ‘And now?’

‘Revival! There’s a spring in everyone’s step. People know their lives have a point. They know it’s good for the whole community.’

‘And good for the Metro-Centre?’

‘Naturally. We provide the focus and fund the new stadiums and the supporters’ clubs. We use the cable channels to keep up the pressure.’

‘Pressure?’ Julia tried to unclench her fists, irritated by everything I said. ‘To sell your washing machines and microwaves . . .’

‘They’re part of people’s lives. Consumerism is the air we’ve given them to breathe.’

JULIA HAD TURNED
away, refusing to listen to me as she hunted through her handbag for her mobile phone. She stood up and patted me on the head. ‘There’s a call I need to make. I’ll be back in a moment.’

‘Don’t forget we’re having dinner tonight. Julia?’

‘I hope so.’ She paused at the door and stared hard at me. ‘The air they breathe? Richard, people breathe out as well as breathe in . . .’

24

A FASCIST STATE

‘RICHARD . . .’ SANGSTER TAPPED
the table with his heavy knuckle, recalling me to his inquisition. ‘I hope you realize what you’re doing.’

‘Not exactly.’ We sat at opposite ends of the table, undistracted by Julia’s presence. ‘You’re going to tell me.’

‘I am.’ Sangster examined his swollen hands, and picked a splinter from his thumb. ‘In a way it’s quite an achievement. Back in the nineteen-thirties it needed a lot of twisted minds working together, but you’ve done it by yourself.’

‘Is my mind twisted?’

‘Definitely not. That’s the disturbing thing. You’re sane, kindly, with all the genuine sincerity of an advertising man.’

‘So what have I done?’

‘You’ve created a fascist state.’

‘Fascist?’ I let the word hover overhead, then dissipate like an empty cloud. ‘In the . . . dinner party sense?’

‘No. It’s the real thing. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve been watching it grow for the past year. It’s been stirring in its mother’s belly, but you knelt down in the straw and delivered the beast.’

‘Fascist? It’s like “new” or “improved”. It can mean anything. Where are the jackboots, the goose-stepping Brownshirts, the ranting führer? I don’t see them around.’

‘They don’t need to be.’ Sangster watched me with a quirky smile that never completely formed, as if I were a destructive pupil he disliked but was unaccountably drawn to. ‘This is a soft fascism, like the consumer landscape. No goose-stepping, no jackboots, but the same emotions and the same aggression. As you say, there’s a strong sense of community, but it isn’t based on civic rights. Forget reason. Emotion drives everything. You see it every weekend outside the Metro-Centre.’

‘Sports supporters, cheering on their rival teams.’

‘Like Goering’s “gliders”? Anyway, these teams aren’t really rivals. They’re all marching to the same brass band. As for a true sense of community, people get that in traffic jams and airport concourses.’

‘Or the Metro-Centre?’ I suggested. ‘The People’s Palace?’

‘And a hundred other shopping malls. Who needs liberty and human rights and civic responsibility? What we want is an aesthetics of violence. We believe in the triumph of feelings over reason. Pure materialism isn’t enough, all those Asian shopkeepers with their cash-register minds. We need drama, we need our emotions manipulated, we want to be conned and cajoled. Consumerism fits the bill exactly. It’s drawn the blueprint for the fascist states of the future. If anything, consumerism creates an appetite that can only be satisfied by fascism. Some kind of insanity is the last way forward. All the dictators in history soon grasped that—Hitler and the Nazi leaders made sure no one ever thought they were completely sane.’

‘And the people in the Metro-Centre?’

‘They know that, too. Look how they react to your new cable ads.’ Sangster pointed a grimy finger at me, grudgingly forced into a compliment. ‘A bad actor howls from the roof of a multi-storey car park and we think he’s a seer.’

‘So David Cruise is the führer? He’s fairly benign.’

‘He’s a nothing. He’s a “virtual” man without a real thought in his head. Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate
Mein Kampf
. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements. It’s a fearful prospect, but consumer fascism may be the only way to hold a society together. To control all that aggression, and channel all those fears and hates.’

‘As long as the bands play and everyone marches in step?’

‘Right!’ Sangster sat forward, jarring the table against my elbows. ‘So beat the drums, sound the bugles, lead them to an empty stadium where they can shout their lungs out. Give them violent hamster wheels like football and ice hockey. If they still need to let off steam, burn down a few newsagents.’

Raising his arms as if to surrender, Sangster stood up and turned his back to me. As he read the messages on his phone I stared through the window. A taxi had pulled into the main entrance of the school, and stopped in front of the admin building.

‘Your taxi?’ I asked Sangster when he put away his phone.

‘No. There’s work I have to do here.’ He gestured at the fence, where the students were threading a strand of razor wire between the posts. ‘Meanwhile, we’re organizing a deputation to the Home Office—Julia, Dr Maxted, myself, a few others. I’d like you to join us.’

‘A deputation . . . ? Whitehall . . . ?’

‘The seat of power, so they say. We may not see the Home Secretary, but Maxted knows a junior minister he met on a television programme. Something has to be done—this thing is spreading along the M25, sooner or later the noose will tighten around London and choke it to death.’

‘What about the police?’

‘Useless. Whole streets are torched and they claim it’s football hooliganism. Secretly, they want the Asians and immigrants out. Likewise the local council. Fewer corner shops, more retail parks, a higher tax yield. Money rules, more housing, more infrastructure contracts. They like the bands playing and the stamping feet—they hide the sound of the cash tills.’

‘That’s today’s England. Whitehall?’ I looked away. ‘I’m not sure there’s a lot of point. What’s happening in the motorway towns may be the first signs of a national revival. Who knows, the end of late-stage capitalism and the start of something new . . . ?’

‘It’s possible.’ Sangster stood over me, and I could smell his stale, threatening clothes. ‘Will you join us?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Sangster held my shoulders in his huge hands, a bear’s grip. ‘Don’t think.’

WE LEFT THE
kitchen and stepped into the gymnasium. A line of Asian women and their children sat against the parallel bars, suitcases in front of them, new arrivals being processed by Dr Kumar.

‘Sad. Very wrong.’ I said to Sangster: ‘Their houses have been torched?’

‘No. But they’re fearful of what may happen tonight. Let me know about the Home Office delegation.’

‘I’ll get Julia to call you.’ I glanced into the women’s changing room. The antenatal clinic had ended, and the lockers holding the medical supplies were sealed. ‘Julia . . . Where is she?’

‘She’s gone home.’ Sangster was watching me with a faint hint of smugness. ‘A taxi came for her.’

‘I could have given her a lift. We’re having dinner tonight.’

‘Perhaps not . . .’

SANGSTER WALKED AWAY,
smiling to himself as he strode across the polished wooden floor. I nodded to Dr Kumar, who ignored me, and searched the side corridors for Julia. I was sorry she had left for home, irritated and distracted by Sangster’s talk of fascism. I suspected that he had deliberately provoked her into leaving. At the same time he had spoken with such force that he seemed to be making the case against which he was arguing. I intrigued Sangster because I was part of the fierce new world he was drawn to. Mathematics might be his subject, but emotion was the ungelded horse he rode so brutally. Not all the would-be gauleiters in Brooklands were manning traffic checkpoints.

In the playground an Asian woman passed me, swathed in dark shawls, a billeting docket in one hand, small son manfully trying to help her with the suitcase. Two Asian men approached, but neither offered any aid, so I stopped the woman and took the suitcase from her. Helped by the boy, I carried it to the classroom block and left it inside the entrance, where an older Asian woman halted me with a raised hand.

Catching my breath, I looked out at the dome of the Metro-Centre, its silver surface lit by a trio of swerving spotlights. On the M25 drivers were slowing to watch the parades, as they listened to David Cruise’s commentary on their car radios. The suburbs were coming alive again. A malignant fringe had done its damage, terrifying a blameless minority of Asians and east Europeans.

But a corpse had revived and sat up, and was demanding breakfast. The moribund motorway towns, the people of the Heathrow plain, were positioning themselves on the runway, ready to take flight.

25

LONELY, LOST, ANGRY

AS USUAL, TOM CARRADINE
was waiting at the kerb when I stopped near the South Gate entrance of the Metro-Centre. Before I could release the seat belt he had opened the door and switched off the ignition. Confident and enthusiastic, he was dressed in the new uniform of the public relations department, a braided powder-blue confection that might have been worn by one of Mussolini’s air marshals.

‘Thanks, Tom.’ I waited as he helped me from the car and locked the doors. ‘This gives a new dimension to valet parking. In my next life I’ll come back as a Merc or BMW . . .’

‘The VIP car park for you, Mr Pearson. The Jensen still being repaired?’

‘Well . . . I think it’s come to the end of its natural life.’

Carradine nodded promptly, but there was a sharp-eyed caution about him that had become more pronounced since the bomb in the basement garage. The Metro-Centre had been attacked, and every customer was now a potential enemy, forcing a revolution in his world view. For Tom Carradine the Metro-Centre was never a commercial enterprise, but a temple of the true faith that he would defend to the last yard of Axminster and the last discount holiday. He gazed at the great concourse in front of the dome, filled with crowds of shoppers, marching supporters in their team livery, wide-eyed tourists, pipe bands and majorettes. A TV camera on a crane circled the scene, ever vigilant for any fanatic with an explosive waistcoat. Narrowing his eyes, Carradine beckoned me forward. Two marshals preceded us, affably clearing a way through the press of people.

‘You’re wearing your new uniform,’ I said to him. ‘I’m impressed. I feel I ought to salute you.’

‘I salute you, Mr Pearson. You’ve done everything here. I’ll never forget you brought the Metro-Centre back to life. You and Mr Cruise. Everybody really loves the latest cable ad.’

‘The abattoir? Not too gloomy?’

‘Never. Existential choice. Isn’t that what the Metro-Centre is about?’

‘I think it is.’

‘Dr Maxted explained everything on his programme yesterday. By the way, Mr Pearson, the Metro-Centre tailor is calling this afternoon. He’ll be happy to measure you up for your uniform.’

‘Well, thanks, Tom.’ In an unguarded moment I had tried on one of the new jackets. ‘I’m not sure, though . . .’

‘Three rings, lots of scrambled egg on the cap peak.’

‘I know. I’m just a writer, Tom. I dream up slogans.’

‘You’re more than a writer, Mr Pearson. You’ve given us all heart again.’

‘Even so. It’s a little too military . . .’

‘We have to defend the Metro-Centre.’

‘I’m with you there. But is it in danger?’

‘It’s always in danger. We have to be ready, whatever happens.’

I watched the muscles flexing in his cheeks. For all his flattery, the offer of a uniform was a clever power play of his own. Everyone in the uniform would be under Tom Carradine’s command, myself included. The threat to the Metro-Centre had sharpened his reflexes, but he remained the fanatical youth leader, eager to sacrifice himself for his principles.

We approached the South Gate entrance. Above the cantilevered marquee were a pair of loudspeakers used for crowd control, operated from a kiosk outside the doors. Through the din of pipe bands and marching feet I heard a succession of amplified clicks and stutters as someone adjusted the controls.

Then a harsh voice boomed over our heads:

‘NOTHING IS TRUE! NOTHING IS UNTRUE . . . !’

Carradine stopped and held my arm, as if the sky was about to fall onto the dome and slide down the roof towards us.

‘. . . UNTRUE! NOTHING IS . . . HEAR YE . . . NOTHING IS TRUE . . . !’

Carradine broke away from me, racing through the startled shoppers staring into the air. The two marshals followed him, manhandling young mothers and old ladies out of their way. They rushed towards the control kiosk and seized a tall youth in a string vest and frayed denims who was waving the microphone like a club, trying to fend them off.

When I reached the kiosk he was lying on the ground and being viciously kicked by the marshals. Blood poured from his nose and left ear. I recognized Duncan Christie, striking the marble floor with his chin as if in an epileptic fit. Carradine was stamping on Christie’s hands, and pointing frantically at the microphone that swung from its cord, almost mesmerized by this threat to the Metro-Centre. He had lost his peaked cap, but a small boy in a sailor suit found it among the swirl of feet and handed it back to him. Carradine placed it defiantly on his head, momentarily disoriented.

‘Tom, take it easy . . .’ I held his shoulders, trying to calm the confused manager, then waved the marshals away from Christie. ‘It’s a prank—no one’s hurt.’

The marching bands filled the air, and the crowd pressed through the doors, Christie’s slogan already forgotten. Winded and bruised, the blood from his nose pooling on the marble floor, Christie lifted himself onto his knees. He looked up at me and nodded warningly, as if willing me to turn back from the Metro-Centre.

One of the marshals leaned down and bellowed into his face. Christie raised a hand to quieten him, then twisted away and lunged towards me, arms outstretched to seize my shoulders.

Carradine and the marshals threw themselves on him, struggling to control his long, violent body, skin and ragged clothes slippery with dirt and grease. They kicked his feet from under him, but as fists jarred his forehead an arm reached out to me. He seized my left hand and pressed a hot stone into my palm.

As Christie was dragged through the crowd I opened my hand, shielding it from any curious gaze.

Lying in my palm was a live round of ammunition.

WEIGHING THE ROUND
in my hand, I moved through the entrance hall and mounted the travelator to the central atrium. After the moments of ugly violence, the air in the Metro-Centre was pleasantly cool and scented. The ambient sound system played a pleasant melody of marching songs, a sweetened reworking in the Mantovani idiom of the Horst Wessel song and the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. The music was distant and unobtrusive, but almost everyone was in step.

Still shaken by the brutal attack on Christie, I held the bullet up to the light. I tried to read the symbols stamped on the base of the cartridge. Christie had fought to press the round into my hand, but his message was of the rather oblique kind that he favoured. I doubted if he was threatening me. At the same time this gift of a bullet, probably of the same type that had killed my father, carried a clear signal from Christie, and not one that I wanted to hear . . .

IN THE CENTRE
of the atrium the three giant bears stood on their podium, paws beating time to the music, an amiable trio whose button eyes saw nothing and everything. In their toylike way they displayed a touching serenity. At their feet were more offerings of honey and treacle, and several ‘diaries’ penned by admirers which detailed their imaginary lives. In a light-hearted moment David Cruise had suggested a commercial in which he attacked the bears and chopped off their heads, but I had vetoed this. For one thing, the bears reminded me of all the toys never given to me during my childhood.

I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine studio where Cruise was conducting his afternoon discussion programme. The open deck was filled with visitors, as close to Cruise as the tighter security allowed. I found a chair in the exhibition area and watched a monitor screen relaying the last exchanges of the programme.

Cruise was tieless, dressed in the shabby black suit and tired white shirt that was now his trademark, an ensemble I had based on the costume worn by the doomed heroes of gangster films, desperate men on the verge of madness. Cruise had lost weight, and his signature tan was whitened down by the make-up department, giving him a hungry and martyred gaze, the fugitive messiah of the shopping malls.

Cruise was holding forth to his circle of docile and obedient housewives.

‘. . . “community”, Angela? That’s a word I
hate
. It’s the kind of word used by snobby, upper-class folk who want to put ordinary people in their place. Community means living in a little box, driving a little car, going on little holidays. It means obeying the rules that “they” tell you to obey. Sheila, you don’t agree? Frankly, the hell with you. Go back to your little box and polish your little dinette. Community? I know what an Asian community is. I know what a Muslim community is. We all know, don’t we? Yes . . . I hate community. For me, the only real community is the one we’ve built here at the Metro-Centre. That’s what I believe in. The sports teams, the supporters’ clubs, the gold-card loyalty nights. Sheila? Just shut up. I want to say something that’s going to shock you. Ready? When I leave here and go home, how do I feel? Betty, I’ll tell you. I feel lonely. Maybe I drink too much and feel too sorry for myself. I miss you girls. Sheila, Angela, Doreen, and everyone watching. I miss your mad questions and your crazy, beautiful dreams. I have these odd ideas—yes, Sheila, those too—I want to tear down the old world and build a new order, something like the one we’re building together inside the Metro-Centre. I know I’m right, I know we can bring a new world to life. It’s started here inside the Metro-Centre, but it’s spreading all over the real England. If you can smell the motorway you’re in the real England. You can feel it, can’t you, Cathy? Deep inside you. No, not there, Sheila. Come and see me later and we’ll find it. Yes, I’m lonely, I don’t sleep well, part of me, frankly, is a little bit bonkers. But I’m right, I’ve seen the future and I
believe
. I want to do things even I can’t mention. I need you all, and I need you here . . .’

The peroration wound to its climax, as the key camera closed in on Cruise’s haggardly handsome face. The producer made his windup signal, the housewives sank back, looking stunned, and Cruise disconnected his microphone and dashed for his dressing room.

Within seconds, phone calls, emails and text messages would arrive from viewers desperate to help Cruise assuage his demons. There would be invitations to barbecues, honorary memberships of sports clubs, heartfelt ‘please, please’ calls. More recruits would pour in, drawn towards the Metro-Centre. This was a political movement, but one without any supporting bureaucracy of placemen and jobsworths. The will to power came from the bottom up, from a thousand checkouts and consumer aisles. The promises were visible and within arm’s reach in the displays of merchandise. Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen. His chat-show act, based on scripts I tailored around him, might be a performance, but it validated the hunger and restlessness of his audience. The housewives mailing their photographs to him were performing rituals of assent, expressing their longing for a faith beyond politics.

I walked between the cameras as the crew shut down their equipment, complimented the producer and his assistant on another superb effort, then let myself into Cruise’s dressing room.

He lay back in front of the picture window that overlooked the central atrium, generously saluting any concourse visitors who waved to him.

‘Richard! Did you see the show?’

‘You were great. Lonely, lost, angry. More than a hint of the mentally deranged. I almost believed you.’

‘It’s all true. I wasn’t acting.’ He sat up and grasped my hands. ‘I’m finding myself out there. I’m laying myself bare, tearing shreds off my flesh, letting the blood trickle over the mike. Things I didn’t know about myself. God, the stuff waiting to come out. All the psychic shit backed up for years.’

‘Don’t hold it in. People need that stuff. It’s pure gold.’

‘You think so? Really?’ He waited until I nodded vigorously. ‘I’m going mad so they can stay sane.’

‘The show’s over. Try to take it easy.’

‘I’m fine.’ He lay back and raised his hand, waiting for me to pass him his glass of vodka and tonic. ‘It takes me a while to land. I have to fly so high, there’s some strange weather up there. I spent years humiliating my guests and got nowhere. Now I humiliate myself and I’m a huge success. What do you make of that?’

‘It’s the air we breathe.’

‘You’re right.’ He pointed to a reproduction on his dressing table of one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, as if recognizing himself in this demented pontiff who had glimpsed the void hidden within the concept of God. On a bizarre impulse I had given the reproduction to Cruise, and he had taken a keen interest in it. ‘Richard, tell me again—what exactly is he screaming at?’

‘Existence. He’s realized there is no God and mankind is free. Whatever free means. Are you all right?’

‘Fine. I know the feeling. Sometimes . . .’

Still holding the glass of vodka, ready to place it in Cruise’s limply hanging paw, I sat in the armchair next to the sofa, the position of an analyst listening to a disturbed patient. These chat-show performances were changing Cruise. He had begun to resemble the distraught heroes he played in the commercials. His face was thinner and more angular, and he had the ashy pallor of a hostage released after years of captivity.

‘So, Richard. Sold your flat? Goodbye Chelsea, goodbye all those nancy dinner parties. You’re part of Brooklands now, you’re committed to the Metro-Centre. We’ll put you on salary.’