29
THE STRICKEN CITY
THERE WAS TOO LITTLE AIR
in the flat. Even with the windows open, I felt suffocated. Schemes and conspiracies were leaping out of trap doors around me, then evaporating into mist. I needed to clear my head, and the only place in Brooklands untouched by the Metro-Centre was the racing circuit, a monument to a far saner dream of speed.
I left the flat and went down to my car. The chanting crowd at the athletics ground, the bursts of cheering and the commentator’s relentless harangues, together bruised the afternoon. The din drummed against the windows of nearby houses, turning a pleasantly sunny day into a summer in Babel.
I drove through the residential avenues towards the circuit, past the wrought-iron gates and the St George’s flags. Every day a few more of them flew from improvised flagpoles, or flapped weakly from brass porch lanterns, a feeble attempt to ward off the roaming supporters’ clubs, ensigns of surrender that marked the capitulation of a powerful class.
Half a mile from the circuit the road was closed by a police barricade. Officers stood by their car, signalling the traffic towards a detour. Ignoring their advice, I turned into a side street, but the next approach road was sealed off by police tapes. Detour signs sent the traffic on an endless tour of half-timbered houses, and I had a momentary vision of Brooklands’ entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets.
Glad of the chance to walk, I parked outside the entrance to a nursing home and set off on foot. Police patrolled the junctions, but there was little traffic near the racing circuit. I crossed the perimeter road, and approached the section of embankment.
As always, I could hear engines running in the distance, the deep-throated roar of unmuffled exhausts and the hacking gasps of carburettors hungry for air. Only a small section of the circuit remained, but in my mind, and in my father’s mind, the great track was intact. The banked surface still carried the sports cars that raced for ever through faraway afternoons, in a happier world of speed and glamour and elegant women in white helmets and overalls.
Engines sounded, but not in my head. I followed the path alongside the access road that cut through the embankment. The car park beside the industrial estate in the centre of the circuit was filled with police and military vehicles. Dozens of camouflaged vans and canvas-topped trucks were backed onto the embankment. Buses converted to mobile diners, pantechnicons loaded with aerials and communications gear, and flat-bed trailers carrying three huge bulldozers were parked on the runway of the disused airfield within the circuit. Dozens of police and soldiers in overalls crossed the runway to a metal warehouse in the industrial estate, commandeered as a temporary barracks.
I was walking through the vehicle park of a large invasion force, and assumed that it was about to rehearse the seizure of Heathrow Airport after a terrorist attack. A soldier sat in the driving cab of a camouflaged truck, smoking a cigarette as he studied a road map.
I walked across to him, but a police car with lights flashing left the road and climbed the embankment behind me, its wing grazing my knees. A constable leaned from his window and waved me away without speaking, then watched me until I left the circuit.
I walked back to my car, surprised by the scale of this military operation. Vehicles were still arriving, stopped and checked by military police. Aldershot, the chief garrison town of the British Army, was only a few miles beyond the M25, and I guessed that a large-scale civil-defence exercise was under way.
When I reached my car I paused to look up and down the deserted avenue. The detour signs were still in place, and the St George’s flags hung slackly from the garden gates. But a complete silence lay over the town. The amplified commentaries and communal singing had died away, and for the first time in days, if not weeks, no one was cheering.
A young woman ran towards me from the drive of the nursing home, propelling a pushchair with a startled child. She seemed distraught, buttons bursting from her blouse, and I raised my hands to calm her.
‘Let me help you, please . . . are you all right?’
I assumed that she was a bereaved relative, and was ready to comfort her. But she pushed past me, swearing when she tripped on the kerb. She pointed wildly at the sky.
‘The dome’s on fire!’
‘The dome? Where?’
‘It’s on fire!’ She waved at the rooftops. ‘They’re burning down the Metro-Centre!’
She fled with her child, the last inhabitant of a stricken city.
30
ASSASSINATION
A SILENCE LOUDER
than thunder lay over Brooklands. I could hear the traffic moving along the M25, and pick out the engines of individual trucks and coaches. Stadiums and athletics grounds had emptied, and all evening fixtures were postponed. Everyone was waiting for news from the dome.
Like most people, I spent the afternoon watching my television set. From the living-room windows I could see the narrow column of white smoke that rose from an emergency vent in the roof of the Metro-Centre. In the still air it climbed vertically, trembled and then dispersed into the cloud cover.
I guessed that an electrical fault in the air-conditioning plant was to blame. The fire would be brought under control and the rumours of arson promptly scotched. But the ITN and BBC news teams reporting from the South Gate entrance were uncertain of the cause, and unable to assess the damage. The reporters both confirmed that the dome had not been evacuated, and reassured any relatives watching that there were no casualties. A view of the central atrium, taken with a concealed camera, showed the strolling crowds, the three bears swaying and jigging to the music, and no signs of panic.
By contrast, the Metro-Centre’s three cable channels talked up the threat, claiming that unknown arsonists had tried to burn down the dome. Relays of announcers spoke of serious damage costing tens of millions of pounds, and of sinister enemies determined to raze the entire structure to the ground.
Live coverage showed David Cruise at the forefront of the battle, wearing a red helmet and firefighter’s suit. In a series of handheld shots from the basement garage, he stepped from the cabin of an emergency vehicle, conferred urgently with a white-faced Tom Carradine and a team of Metro-Centre engineers, and pressed his healing hands to the maze of pipes and cable ducts in the generator room. Gasping into his oxygen mask, he shared bottles of a well-advertised mineral water with an exhausted fire crew. When he addressed the camera he was in no doubt about the threat to every Metro-Centre customer and every sports-club supporter. Rubbing his flushed forehead, his cheekbones stylishly marked with a dark commando stain, he said:
‘All of you out there . . . this is David Cruise, somewhere in the front line. Listen to me, if I can still get through to you. We need your support, every one of you watching. Make no mistake, there are people out there who want to destroy us. They hate the Metro-Centre, they hate the sports clubs and they hate the world we’ve created here.’ He coughed into his oxygen mask, brushing aside the attractive paramedic who tried to calm him. ‘This time we’ll have to fight for what we believe. The people who did this will try again. I want you all to be ready. You created this, don’t let them take it away. There are enemies out there, and you know who they are. If I don’t see you again, you can be sure I went down fighting for the Metro-Centre . . .’
AN HOUR LATER
the smoke still rose from the roof, a white plume almost invisible in the late-afternoon light. A BBC journalist had entered the basement, and reported that the source of the fire was now clear. A large hopper filled with cardboard cartons had been set ablaze, but this was under control.
David Cruise, however, was closer to the action. He climbed from an inspection hatch and wearily doffed his helmet, then whispered hoarsely about the dangers of igniting the Metro-Centre’s oil stores. ‘We’re talking about timed devices,’ he darkly informed his cable viewers. ‘Be on the alert, and check your garages and basements. Every one of us is a target . . .’
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK
he would address his cable audience from the mezzanine studio. I watched him play his role, an extra now promoted to be the star of his own towering inferno. The engineers around him looked vaguely embarrassed, but Cruise was completely sincere, the naturalized citizen of a new kingdom where nothing was true or false. Most of his audience probably knew that the fire in a rubbish hopper was a ruse designed to rally support for the Metro-Centre, for reasons not yet clear. They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as a credible alternative to the truth. Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised. They preferred lies and mood music, they accepted the make-believe of David Cruise the firefighter and defender of their freedoms. Consumer capitalism had never thrived by believing the truth. Lies were preferred by the people of the shopping malls because they could be complicit with them.
Sadly, real fires burned on the outskirts of Brooklands. By the early evening a huge crowd had gathered outside the Metro-Centre, a suburban army dressed in its St George’s shirts. Sports clubs formed up and marched away, heading for the outskirts of the town as if to defend the walls of a besieged city. As I feared, outbreaks of burning and looting soon struck the Asian and immigrant housing estates.
But the gangs were quick to find other targets. Bored by the punch-ups with desperate Bangladeshis and exhausted Kosovans, they attacked the further-education college near the town square with its irritating posters advertising classes in cordon bleu cooking, archaeology and brass rubbings. The public library was another target, its shelves swept clear of the few books on display, though the huge stock of CDs, videos and DVDs was untouched.
Other gangs invaded the Brooklands Cricket Club, where they defecated on the pitch, and the Gymkhana Riding School, a stronghold of the would-be middle class, which was swiftly put to the torch. The TV news showed wild-eyed horses galloping through the Metro-Centre car parks, their singed manes alive with sparks. Even the police station and magistrates’ court were under threat, cordoned off by a thin blue line of officers in riot gear.
Ominously, the BBC reported that fights were breaking out between the supporters’ groups—unable to find any new enemies, they were turning on themselves.
I WAS TRYING
to phone Julia Goodwin, and warn her that the Asian women’s refuge was in danger, when David Cruise began his address to his new ‘republic’, transmitted live from the mezzanine studio in the Metro-Centre. He had swapped his fireman’s overall for a stylish combat jacket, but the make-up girls had left untouched his ruffled hair and oily bruises on his cheeks. He was fighting off his own hysteria, aware that his sports clubs might rampage through a modest county town, but the referee was about to blow the whistle and there would be no extra time. What the television reporters still called football hooliganism was what central government termed civil insurrection. The army and police were waiting.
Cruise leaned forward into the camera, ready to rally his loyal audience, and unable to resist his familiar cheeky smile. But as he opened his mouth, displaying his strong teeth and muscular tongue, he seemed to slip from his chair. A spasm of indigestion brought a hand to his chest, and his eyes lost their focus. He swayed to one side, elbow sliding across the desk, and tore the lapel microphone from his jacket. He reached out to clutch at the air, eyes rolling under their lids. His smile seemed to drift away, an empty smirk deserted like an abandoned ship. He held himself upright, and then fell forward from his chair, head across his bloodstained script.
Five seconds later, the screen went blank. There was a brief silence, and then a deep roar rose from the Metro-Centre as the crowd watching the screens above the South Gate entrance let out a cry of anger and pain, the visceral bellow of an animal goaded at the point of death. The sound rose over Brooklands, drumming at the windows and echoing off the nearby roofs.
I turned to the Channel 4 news. The reporter stared uneasily at her autocue, ready to interrupt herself.
‘We’re hearing reports . . . of an assassination attempt at a Brooklands shopping mall. Eyewitnesses claim that a lone gunman . . . we don’t know yet if—’
I switched off the set and stared at the darkened room. Someone had shot David Cruise, but I found it difficult to cope with the notion that he had been seriously injured. I knew him too well, and had helped to create him. He was so pervasive a figure, dominating almost every moment of my life at Brooklands, that he had long since become a fictional character. He had floated free into a parallel space and time where celebrity redefined reality as itself. His anguished slide across the table, the desperate way in which he had torn the microphone from his bursting chest, had been the latest episode in the series of noir commercials I had devised for him. In fact, I had switched off the set to avoid turning back to the cable channel and seeing the consumer product that sponsored the episode.
But already I was forgetting David Cruise. Julia Goodwin would be at her wits’ end, trying to protect her Asian women from the ferocious backlash that would soon follow. Bereft of their champion and cable philosopher, the supporters’ clubs would go berserk, attacking anything in their sights.
I strode into the hall and unlocked the cupboard where I stored my suitcases. My father’s golf bag, clubs untouched for months, leaned against the rear wall. I pulled out the heavy leather bag, felt between the putters and drew my father’s Purdey shotgun into the light.
On the shelf above was a box of twelve-bore shells, enough to see off any hooligans trying to ransack their old school. Nothing was true, and nothing was untrue. But the real was making a small stand against the unreal.