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.’
‘You’re right. The bomb at the Metro-Centre was the signal. The damage to the dome was supposed to trigger a general uprising.’
‘It did.’
‘No. Tonight was just another football riot. Maxted and Sangster are being used. I don’t know about Geoffrey Fairfax. The real people behind the bomb want street revolution, something violent and ugly, spreading to all the motorway towns. With David Cruise as the Wat Tyler of cable TV, leading a new peasants’ revolt. Then the police and Home Office will move in. Close down the dome, wheel on the cucumber sandwiches and relaunch the kingdom of Surrey.’
‘It nearly happened.’
‘Not quite. David Cruise wouldn’t take the bait. He hasn’t spent all these years in television for nothing. He could see it was a set-up.’
‘But why? I hate the damned dome, but I don’t want to kill anyone.’
‘You’ve still got your job. There are people who were doing very nicely and feel left out. Power has moved to the Metro-Centre and the retail parks along the M25. It’s a new kind of consumerism—sponsored football teams, supporters’ clubs, marching bands, stadium lights blazing all night, cable TV. A lot of people don’t like it. The police, the local council, old-style businessmen who can’t get their noses in the trough. They want to discredit the Metro-Centre, and they’ll do anything to harm it.’
‘Tony Maxted? And Bill Sangster?’
‘They’re too amateurish. For Maxted the whole thing is a case study. One day he’ll write a book and get it adapted on BBC2. Sangster is different, how and why I don’t know.’
‘I do. Listen, he’s drawn to the madness of it all. Every day he has to hold his school together, a huge effort of will. Why bother? Secretly, he’s tired. He wouldn’t mind if the whole bloody place was flushed down the loo . . .’ She reached out to grip my hand. ‘Richard, I’m sorry about Brooklands, it’s been a nightmare for you . . .’
I sat back, glad to be with this spirited and chaotic young woman, even in this shambles of a night, which had left me more confused than ever. Part of me wanted to confront Julia Goodwin about my father’s fatal injury and the mysterious role played by Duncan Christie. She wore her unease over the old man’s death like a badly tailored shroud. Emotions crowded her face, competing for space among its frowns and grimaces. Like a child, her guilty feelings played around her mouth and bared teeth, fretting her tired eyes and the muscles of her cheeks. At times, her entire personality was a courtroom sitting in judgement on herself.
When we reached my father’s flat she turned carefully into the drive, then lost her bearings in the darkness. A privet hedge thrashed what was left of the windscreen, sending a shower of sharp beads across us. I took the wheel, forced the gear lever into neutral and let the car freewheel across the gravel. Julia peered into the driving mirror, wincing at a tiny nick on her forehead.
‘You ought to look at that.’ I helped her from the car. ‘There’s an old airline first-aid kit. Have a drink while I call a taxi . . .’
I HESITATED BEFORE
opening the front door of the flat, unsure how Julia would respond to my father’s presence in every leather armchair and ashtray. At first she was stiff and awkward, as if expecting him to appear and challenge her. But she seemed at home when she emerged from the bathroom, a plaster over her eyebrow. She circled the living room, warming her hands around the tumbler of brandy, smiling at the pipe stands and the chorus line of framed photographs. Had she been the last of my father’s lovers? I could imagine her in the kitchen, reminding him about his next flu jab as he cooked an omelette for her.
Surprisingly, she was at ease with me, and sat on the arm of my chair, a hand on my shoulder.
‘Richard? Are you holding on?’
‘Just about. That was one very bizarre day. I’m glad you’re here.’
‘I wanted to see it.’ She winced at the tireless seesaw of a distant alarm. ‘Richard, I warned you strange things are going on.’
‘I’m not sure what is going on. After lunch I met the local wild man of the desert—your friend Duncan Christie. Completely mad and completely sane at the same time. Then Maxted locked me up in his loony bin. I got out thanks to his blonde stooge, Sergeant Falconer, and the next thing I knew I was leading a riot. For ten minutes this huge crowd was actually following me.’
‘We have to follow someone. Poor devils, there’s nothing else in our lives.’
‘Not much, anyway. That’s why I made a very good living—everything we believe comes from advertising. Tonight was different, though. The Metro-Centre bomb was supposed to light a fuse, but it didn’t work.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t advertising anything?’
‘You’re right. There needs to be a message. Next time I’ll remember.’
‘Another wild man from the desert. Dear Jesus . . .’ She took her drink and sat on the coffee table facing me. ‘Listen, Richard. You’re waking up into the nightmare you helped to script. Go back to London. The suburbs are far too weird for you. Why did you leave your job?’
‘It left me. To tell the truth, I was sacked. Pushed out by a rival who knew all my weaknesses.’
‘How come?’
‘She was my wife. In fact, I’d reached the end of the road.’
‘With her?’
‘And with the advertising business. The economy is rolling along an endless plateau, and consumers are bored with the view. Something strange is needed to get them to sit up.’
‘How strange?’
‘Strange, and more than a little mad. That was my big idea. We even had a slogan—“Mad is bad. Bad is good.” We tried it out once, with a new micro-car, but people got killed. No one liked it after that.’
‘Terribly dull of them.’
‘That’s what I thought. Another of the great advertising breakthroughs that got nowhere.’
‘Its time will come.’ She brushed her hair back from her face, as if exposing herself to me, the removal of yet another of the veils that hung between us. ‘How well did you know your father?’
‘Hardly at all. My mother never got over his leaving her. For years she told me he had died in an air crash. Cheques would arrive on my birthday and she’d claim they came from the other side. I always thought high-street banks were outposts of heaven. The curious thing is that I’ve got to know him better since he died.’
‘I’m sure he was a fine man.’
‘He was. With one or two odd ideas.’
‘Interesting . . .’ She moved around the living room, and peered into the corridor that led to the bedrooms. ‘Can I snoop around? These days, you don’t see where your patients live.’
I followed her into the kitchen, and watched as she glanced at the modest array of herbs and spices. She patted the basil plant I had bought, tore off a leaf and raised it to a nostril. She was tired but stylish, clearly moved by the memories of the old man she had tried to keep alive for a few last hours. I trailed after her, already roused by her scent, a perfume of her own distilled from beauty, bloody-mindedness and chronic fatigue.
‘So this is where he slept?’ She stood in the doorway of my father’s bedroom, nose quickening at the dark, picking up the spoor of an old man’s body. She stepped forward and switched on the bedside lamp, then sat on the bedspread, smoothing the stress lines from the silk fabric.
‘Julia . . . ?’
‘Here . . .’ She beckoned me to sit beside her. As if without thinking, she loosened the top button of her shirt. ‘So . . . his head lay on that pillow. An old pilot’s dreams. Think of them, Richard. All those endless runways . . .’
‘Julia . . .’ I sat beside her and held her shoulders. I realized that she was shaking, a faint trembling as if she had caught a sudden chill, a cold draught from a door onto the dark that had come ajar. A desperate woman was sitting on my father’s bed, about to make love to his son for reasons that had everything and nothing to do with sex, the kind of clutching and violent love that only the bereaved ever experience.
She took my hand and slipped it inside her shirt, then placed it over her breast. ‘You don’t have to like me.’
‘Julia . . .’ I tried to calm her. ‘Not here. Let’s go into my bedroom. Julia . . . ?’
‘No.’ She spoke flatly, in an almost coarse voice. ‘Here.’
‘Dear, try to—’
‘Here! It’s got to be here!’ She turned a fierce gaze on me. ‘Can’t you understand?’