20
THE RACING CIRCUIT
I LEFT HER SLEEPING
in my father’s bed. It was still dark when I woke at four, uneasy with the odd contours of the mattress, the narrow hollows of an old man’s hips and shoulders, and the more unsettling imprint of his mind. Julia lay beside me when I sat up, then turned and nestled easily into the aged pilot’s mould. A strange night passage had exhausted her. Restless dreams followed a fierce act of love. She had seized me as if I were a demon to be pinioned, a delegate from my father’s grave. Sex with me was part atonement and part restitution, an act of penance.
I sat on the bed, stroking the cloud of dark hair, and gripped her free hand, hoping to force something of my affection into her. There was a faint answering pulse, like a thank-you note slipped under the emotional door, and she sank into a shallow morning sleep that would last for hours.
I needed to get out and run the streets before anyone else was up. As I pulled on my tracksuit I carried out a quick inventory of myself. A bleak list: I missed my car, my job, my friends in London. I missed my father, whom I had never known, and I missed the quirky but likeable young doctor I had met at the hospital, with whom I had shared a bed but scarcely knew any better. Some kind of guilt and unease separated us, despite all the warmth I clearly felt for her. Had she failed my father in some way during his last hours in the intensive care unit? Sitting astride me, she made love as if trying to resuscitate a corpse. I listened to her breathing, a child’s small burps and swallows, sounds shaped like bliss, and thought of the daughter that Julia and I might have one day.
But I needed to leave the flat and visit the Brooklands circuit, and hear the ghosts of engines rumbling in the dark.
A carton of orange juice in my hand, I jogged out of the estate and set off for the racetrack half a mile to the south. Around me the residential streets were still silent, the suburbs of nowhere, immaculate pavilions that reminded me of the stylish tombs on the mortuary island in the Venice lagoon.
A section of the Brooklands embankment rose through the darkness, thirty feet high at its peak, its ridge line cut by an access road. I ran through this narrow corridor, and then stopped at the beach of ancient concrete. I thought of my father visiting the track in the 1930s, a small boy stunned by the reek of fuel oil and expensive perfume, the scent of glamour and danger. Spectacular crashes filled the newsreels of the day, heroic deaths that were England’s answer to the dictators across the Channel, and expressed the kingdom’s unconscious need for war.
‘Hello . . . ? You down there . . . come up and join me. You get a better view of the race . . .’
Above me, on the upper slope of the embankment, a man was strolling through the darkness. He wore a white tuxedo, as if he had strayed from an all-night party. He beckoned to me with an actorish gesture, but moved cautiously along the pitted concrete, as if a lifetime of treacherous floors had taught him to be wary of any surface. Seeing that I was too out of breath to climb up to him, he made his way down the slope.
I waited for him to reach me, and noticed an American car parked on the road below. A chauffeur in a peaked cap leaned against a door, smoking a cigarette and drawing small sketches on the dark air with its red tip.
‘Right . . .’ David Cruise took my hand, smilingly easy and avuncular, as if greeting a new contestant onto his cable show. ‘It’s worth going up there, you can still feel the slipstream. Listen—did you hear that?’
‘Hold on. A Bugatti, I think. Four carburettors, or maybe a Napier-Railton.’
‘That’s it!’ Pleased that I had played my role in his little routine, Cruise shook my hand. ‘Mr—?’
I introduced myself, but Cruise waved my name into the misty dawn air, taking for granted that he was too famous to identify himself. Without being aware of it, he was playing to the camera, which I sensed was somewhere beyond his favourite left profile.
‘Good, good . . .’ He savoured the air, as if relishing the tang of burnt rubber. ‘Wonderful . . . unlimited horsepower, twenty-litre engines. Nothing like it today. We have the technology, but we can’t build a dream.’
‘Formula One? No?’
‘Come on . . . millionaires in asbestos suits plastered with logos. This was the real thing.’
‘More than the Metro-Centre?’
Cruise stopped to glance at me as we made our way down to the Lincoln. ‘The Metro-Centre? I wish I could see it lasting seven years, let alone seventy.’
He gazed over the dark rooftops of the town, where the last haze of smoke from a few smouldering cars merged into the morning mist. At the football stadium the giant screens were still lit, showing an intermission commercial to the deserted stands. His screen self spoke to an elderly team supporter about her new bedroom suite, his hand bouncing the mattress as if inviting her for a romp.
Cruise silenced me with a raised fist, and stopped to watch himself. His mouth mimed in response to his signature repertory of engaging smiles, the shy grimaces that expressed a deep interest in his studio guests.
Despite the dim light, I could see him clearly in the pale aura of suburban fame that surrounded him. The dark was his medium, the deep blackness disguised as the interior of a TV studio. I was struck by how small he seemed, though he was almost six feet tall, with the kind of muscled physique found among gym users. He was bantering and easy-listening, but never ironic about himself. A minor deity should never express doubt over his own existence. In every way he was a creature of afternoon television, with a head of silver hair sculpted to show off the lower half of his face and hide his high forehead and the inner coldness of his eyes. Long ago he had convinced himself that he liked and felt at ease with ordinary people, and the illusion had sustained him.
A brief cascade of sparks flared beyond the north stand of the stadium, a warehouse put to the torch, an insurance scam taking advantage of the night’s fires.
Cruise winced and turned towards his car. ‘Madhouse—looting, arson, broken windows . . . there was a bomb at the Metro-Centre. As if we haven’t got enough problems.’
‘I saw the damage. The police took me into the basement.’
‘You were there? Brave man. They planted the bomb in someone’s car.’
Cruise had reached the Lincoln, where the driver stood by the open passenger door. I decided to take a chance, and said: ‘My car, as it happens.’
‘Your car?’ Cruise paused before getting into his rear seat. He noticed me for the first time, a face in a studio crowd that the director had pinpointed through his earpiece. ‘They blew up your car? Poor man. You must have been shocked.’
‘I was. An old Jensen. Beautiful car: nothing worked, including the rear lock.’
‘Obliterated? Thank God the bomber was killed.’ Cruise pointed to the silent embankment. ‘And that’s why you came here, to the racing circuit. You wanted to hear those engines again. The authentic thing, like your Jensen.’
‘You might be right.’
‘I am right!’ Cruise held my shoulders in a pair of powerful hands, as if comforting a bereaved contestant. ‘I know—that’s why I came. It’s a ruin, but it’s the only part of Brooklands that’s real.’
‘The Metro-Centre is real.’
‘Please . . .’ He took my arm. Deep in thought, he walked me away from the Lincoln. ‘Listen, I’ve seen you before?’
‘Yesterday. Outside the Metro-Centre. You arrived for your afternoon show.’
‘No. Somewhere else. Years ago.’ He stared into my face with the cold eye of a pathologist recognizing a cadaver. ‘You were younger, tougher, more ambitious. Your voice was higher, you ordered me around. God, I needed that job. What business are you in?’
‘Advertising.’
‘That’s it! The crazy Skoda commercial. I played the dangerous driver. Everyone thought it was mad.’
‘It was mad. That was the idea.’
‘My agent warned me not to do it. Too weird, he said. I’d be typecast. Fat chance, I hadn’t worked for a year. It turned out I was too big for the car, they couldn’t see my eyes. But after that I never looked back. My agent was fighting them off. In a way, thanks to you . . . ?’
‘Richard Pearson. You were very good.’
‘No, I was still trying to act. A big mistake in this business. You have to be yourself. That takes a lot of working at. Every one of us is a cast of characters. I told myself I was a director putting on a new play. All these people turn up at the audition, and they’re all me. Some are more interesting than others, some are more real, some can reach your heart. This happens every morning when I wake up. I have to choose, and I have to be ruthless. You understand that.’
‘Absolutely. It’s a matter of finding the right roles. The kind of roles where you don’t need to act.’
‘That’s it. I remember, last year you won an industry award. At the Savoy, I saw you collect it . . .’
Cruise straightened up, leaving his thoughts to float away across the embankment. I assumed that I would soon be forgotten, the creator of his career left here like the Ben Gunn of this concrete beach.
Then I noticed that the driver had walked around the Lincoln to the offside. Both passenger doors were now open.
‘Richard . . .’ Cruise’s sunburnt hand took my elbow, steering me towards the car as if moving a lucky contestant to his prize. ‘Let’s have some breakfast at my house. There are one or two things we need to talk over. You can give me your advice. Already I feel we can work together . . .’
21
A NEW POLITICS
‘BROOKLANDS? THE WHOLE PLACE
is off its rocker. I just don’t get it.’ David Cruise screwed up his paper tissue and threw it at the camera mounted on a tripod beside the swimming pool. ‘What on earth was happening last night?’
‘I think you know.’ I watched the surface of the water, as calm and eventless as plate glass. ‘An attempted putsch.’
‘Putsch?’
‘A palace revolution.’
Cruise grimaced into his make-up mirror. ‘Where’s the palace?’
‘We live in it. The Metro-Centre and all the retail parks between here and Heathrow. You and me and the people who watch your TV shows.’
‘Not enough of them—that’s the problem. Who was meant to lead this revolution?’
‘You know that as well. You were.’
‘Me? I’ll remember, the next time I need a dressing room and a courtesy car. Some revolution, some palace . . .’
WE WERE SITTING
by the indoor pool attached to Cruise’s house on the Seven Hills estate, an exclusive Weybridge community once home to the Beatles, Tom Jones and other pop celebrities. The domed glass roof—a deliberate echo, I assumed, of the Metro-Centre—resembled an observatory open to the heavens, but the only star ever watched by David Cruise was himself.
The house was a substantial Tudorbethan pile, its rooms large enough to serve as squash courts, furnished like an out-of-season hotel. In an office next to the cloakrooms the day staff negotiated the fees for Cruise’s charity engagements and dealt with his fan mail. As soon as we arrived, Cruise scanned his faxes and emails, then led me through the empty rooms to the swimming pool, where we lay back in sun loungers beside the bar. Two docile Filipina girls served us breakfast—pawpaw, coffee and lamb cutlets—but Cruise was more interested in his large vodka.
I watched him settle his fleshy body in the lounger, white tuxedo and ruffed shirt well displayed. As we walked through the rooms of this mansion he had seemed bored by it, and vaguely suspicious of what was supposed to be his own home, aware that it was little more than a stage set.
Despite myself, I rather liked him. He discounted his own success, and was searching for some kind of certainty in his life, though his entire career was built on illusion and a set of emotional three-card tricks. His manner was overbearing, but he was deeply insecure and forever manipulating me into flattering him.
Meanwhile I decided to carry out an experiment, my last attempt to spring loose from the web of conspiracies that was responsible for killing my father. So far I had achieved almost nothing, playing the amateur detective who blundered into danger, perpetually dazed by the doors slammed in his face.
But in one area I was a complete professional, in that electric realm where advertising and popular taste met and fused. Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career. At Brooklands there were no ethics committees to keep an eye on me, no strategy meetings forever urging caution, and no ambitious wife waiting for me to make a mistake. If I could change the mental ecology of this uneasy Surrey town, and release the wayward energies of its people, I might penetrate the polite conspiracies that held them down, and find why my father had died so pointlessly.
For the moment, at least, I had made my first valuable ally. David Cruise was the most important person I had met in Brooklands, and one of the few who was ready to talk. He seemed vulnerable, eyeing me cannily over his vodka, as if he felt that the Metro-Centre bomb was aimed at him. This cable presenter, housewives’ pin-up and local ombudsman probably lacked a single friend.
I remembered leaving the Brooklands circuit with him. As we sat in the rear seat of the Lincoln, I had told him that my father had visited the racetrack as a boy. Almost without thinking, Cruise reached out and gripped my hand, sealing a comradeship fused in the fire of terrorism. And for all his blandness, a personality as soft and depthless as a TV commercial, he had stood up to Tony Maxted and Sangster, refusing to play their game.
‘I ADMIRE YOU
for turning them down,’ I told him as the Filipina girls drifted silently between us, taking away the breakfast trays. ‘They were offering you the keys to the kingdom.’
‘Or Guildford Prison.’ Cruise lightly touched the tiny bottom of the older Filipina. ‘They had everything set up, the crowd going wild, the follow-up bomb, a complete circus. They wanted me screaming from a balcony. A suburban dictator based at the Metro-Centre—can you imagine it?’
‘I can. Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating—too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’
‘That was the idea.’ Cruise studied his empty glass, as if in mourning for the first drink of the day. ‘Kill a few people and everyone thinks they’ve had a good time. Not for me—it’s always safer to stick to what you know nothing about. In my case, sport and home improvements. Forget about right-wing cliques hiding behind their family crests.’
‘I have. But the groundswell was still there. I could feel it in the crowd. They wanted you to lead them. You’re the figurehead who stands in everyone’s mind for the Metro-Centre. You keep the supporters’ clubs on their toes, you can say what everyone secretly feels about immigrants and asylum seekers. You’re the star in every housewife’s dreams . . .’
‘Too much me . . . that’s the problem. I have to carry the whole Metro-Centre.’ Cruise lay back, eyes lowered, lips forming and reforming a series of half-smiles, the signal that he was about to be sincere. ‘Listen, Richard—you have to understand. I’m a fake.’
‘Come on . . .’
‘No. I play a role. I’m still an actor, I act being a sports commentator. Do I know anything about sports? Between you and me, almost nothing. I’ve never sliced a tee shot, never potted a black, never scored a try or missed a penalty.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘No. In fact, it’s a help. The best commentators know nothing about sport. Their commentaries are the kind that viewers would give. “He’s playing a straight bat, she’s concentrating on winning . . .” Bloody silly. I’m in the looking-glass business, I give the public the kind of face they want to see in the bathroom mirror when they get up. Someone who shares their boredom and tells them a visit to the Metro-Centre is the answer to all their problems.’
‘You do a great job. I was outside the town hall last night. They like you.’
‘Who knows? They cheer, then they boo.’ Cruise leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘You may not believe it, Richard, but when I was young most people disliked me. Instinctively. They disliked the friendly smile, the bonhomie. They thought I was acting all the time. Even my parents avoided me. My father was a working-class GP. He specialized in hypochondria, it was the easiest to cure. My mother was a full-time case study. They scrimped and saved to send me to a private school; now I have to hide the accent and pretend I come from some Heathrow suburb. Every time we meet I know they think I’ve failed.’
‘You haven’t. People here believe in you.’
‘Don’t say that. If enough people believe in you, it’s a sure sign you’ll end up nailed to a cross. It’s a job, an assignment. Sometimes I feel I’m not up to it any more.’
‘You are up to it, and it’s not just a job.’
I waited, as Cruise seemed to sink into a trough of introspection and self-pity. He lay back in the sun lounger, his body stirring like a snake trying to shed its skin, a sleek carapace that lost its lustre as he watched. Then he sat up, shaking himself free of any self-doubt, and threw his empty vodka glass into the swimming pool. The flat surface dissolved into a rush of fleeing waves, which Cruise watched like a crystal-gazer stirring the future.
‘Richard?’ He beckoned to me. ‘Go on. I think you have a few ideas for me.’
‘Right. I’d like to lay something out. A different approach.’
‘That’s good—the Metro-Centre could use some help.’
‘And you’ve got exactly what it needs. A new kind of politics is emerging at the Metro-Centre, and you’re in the perfect place to lead it.’
‘Once, maybe . . .’
‘Now. I see you as tomorrow’s man. Consumerism is the door to the future, and you’re helping to open it. People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure. They don’t want a jackbooted fanatic ranting on a balcony. They want a TV host sitting with a studio panel, talking quietly about what matters in their lives. It’s a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box. Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason, they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics. And you’re at the leading edge. In fact, you could practically run the country.’
‘The country? Now I am worried . . .’ Cruise gripped the arms of his lounger, overcoming the temptation to stand and pace up and down. He looked at me with the intense gaze he turned upon the guests on his daytime show, and I could see that everything I said had already crossed his mind. ‘You’re right—I can lead them. I know it’s there, inside me.’
‘It’s there, all right. Believe me, David.’
‘I do a lot of charity work, opening retail parks, big hypermarkets out on the M25—it helps viewers get cabled up to the Metro-Centre. There are millions of people out there, in all those towns around Heathrow. They’re bored, they want to be tested. They’ve got the two-car garage, the extra bathroom, the timeshare in the Algarve. But they want more. I can reach them, Richard. One problem, though—what’s the message?’
‘Message?’ I stood up, raising my hands so that Cruise stayed in his seat. ‘There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics. You’re not some führer shouting at his storm troops. That’s the old politics. The new politics is about people’s dreams and needs, their hopes and fears. Your role is to empower them. You don’t tell your audiences what to think. You draw them out, urge them to open up and say what they feel.’
‘Avoid slogans, avoid messages?’
‘No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want. Your job is to set the stage and create the climate. You steer them by sensing their mood. Think of a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. They decide where they want to go.’
‘How big is this herd? A million? Five million?’
‘Maybe fifty million. Think of the future as a cable TV programme going on for ever.’
‘Sounds like hell . . .’ Cruise chuckled in a guilty way to himself. ‘But five million, now that’s a very big afternoon audience. How do I control them, impose some kind of focus? The whole thing could start to go mad.’
‘Mad? Good. Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no one is really looking. You say turnover is going down at the Metro-Centre?’
‘Not down. It’s a sales plateau. A sure sign there’s a steep cliff nearby. We’ve done everything.’
‘Everything? You’ve tried the classic friendly approach, giving the customers what they want. Or what you think they want. You need to try the unfriendly approach.’
‘Tell them what they ought to want?’ Cruise waved this away. ‘It doesn’t work.’
‘No. It’s too authoritarian, too nanny state. It’s not new politics.’
‘And what is that?’
‘The unpredictable. Be nice most of the time, but now and then be nasty, when they least expect it. Like a bored husband, affectionate but with a cruel streak. People will gasp, but the audience figures will soar. Now and then slip in a hint of madness, a little raw psychopathology. Remember, sensation and psychopathy are the only way people make contact with each other today. It won’t take your viewers long to get a taste for real madness, whether it’s a product or a political movement. Encourage people to go a little mad—it makes shopping and love affairs more interesting. Every so often people want to be disciplined by someone. They want to be ordered about.’
‘Exactly.’ Cruise slapped the arm of his chair, and listened to the echo move around the pool. ‘They want to be punished.’
‘Punished, and loved. But not like a fair-minded parent. More like a moody jailer, watching them through the bars. There’s a sharp slap waiting for people who don’t head straight for the furniture sales, or pay up for the new loyalty card.’
‘They’ll walk away.’
‘They won’t. People need a little bit of abuse in their lives. Masochism is the new black, and always has been. It’s the mood music of the future. People want discipline, and they want violence. Most of all they want structured violence.’
‘Ice hockey, pro rugby, stock-car racing . . .’
‘That’s it. The new politics is going to be a little like pro rugby. Try it out on your next consumer show. Don’t change your style, but now and then surprise them. Show an authoritarian edge, be openly critical of them. Make a sudden emotional appeal. Show your flaws, then demand loyalty. Insist on faith and emotional commitment, without exactly telling them what they’re supposed to believe in. That’s new politics. Remember, people today unconsciously accept that violence is redemptive. And in their hearts they’re convinced that psychopathy is close to sainthood.’