Getting Home (43 page)

As he finished speaking, his eye fell on Ted's untouched plate, on the juicy pink and white chunks of lobster tail dished into the rosy shell. There was acquisitiveness in his look. Ted had a strong urge to seize the crustacean by its long trailing whisker, whirl it around his head and throw it through the etched glass window into the street. Instead, he read through his resignation letter to the board of the Oak Hill Development Trust and signed it.

‘Uh – I have an idea,' Rod informed the
Family First
team.

‘Great,' responded the senior producer, who turned towards his new star presenter with a full-on earnest expression designed to eradicate any possible perception of sarcasm. ‘Let's hear it.'

‘It's kind of a consumer thing. I mean, I don't know if it's quite what
Family First
needs now that you're going in this new direction and everything …' He devoted hours to finding this character, the bear of little brain. He needed to be a naive, unthreatening figure whom everyone would dismiss and nobody suspect, the hot media equivalent of Clark Kent. In a group which he immediately discovered to be composed of paranoid careerists, this was hard. Most of them would suspect their own grandmothers of trying to outflank them and saw the rest of humanity as positively after their jobs. Making it worse, he was aware of a new energy in himself, the flame kindled by Stephanie and leaping higher every day as he explored this new role. If I can do this, he was asking himself, chewing up the opposition, what else can I do?

He went for sentimental, honest and caring, which in this company added up to stupid. He found himself some glasses, thin-rimmed large-lensed speccy things which would have been hot in the eighties, and dropped them frequently. He talked about his daughter all the time. He was polite and fetched people coffee. He wore plaid shirts in pastel colours. Unless he was on camera, he mumbled. It was a challenge, sustaining the role throughout a working day, but so far the audience were with him. Maria, the junior researcher, was listening now like a Titian Madonna, with her head on one side and a saintly expression of patience. The guys were expressing manly forbearance.

‘Consumer issue! How f-a-a-bulous!' Allie encouraged him, considering it dreamy that her new find should be so thick as to dig himself voluntarily into a ratings graveyard. He'd hardly been on the team two weeks and already Rod Fuller was bidding for whatever was worthy, earnest and an instant switch-off. She had successfully shunted him towards this feature on the supermarket of the future, made naturally with the co-operation of Magno. Wardrobe had found him a Norwegian sweater fuzzily hand-knitted in iceberg blue and glacier grey; it was scratchy, heavy as a greatcoat and much too hot but the dear boy, eager to please, was gamely wearing it draped over his shoulders.

‘What it is,' – he looked down at his notes; still terrified of fluffing the delivery, he had written himself a script – ‘is a look at the business of supermarket diversification …'

He had argued with Stephanie about how much Allie knew about Oak Hill and its problems. On his last visit to Church Vale to train her, he'd let the name come into the conversation, and got no reaction.

‘She doesn't know, she has no idea,' she assured him.

‘I know she's dumb, but nobody could be that dumb,' he argued.

‘When Stewart passed on the project, I didn't know, did I?' she rejoined with pain. The fact that her husband hadn't confided in her still stung. It spoiled her fantasies of joyful homecoming, she imagined herself flying into his arms, then hauling off and demanding, ‘But why didn't you tell me …?' Mr Capelli was promising positive news any day now, but at that moment Stewart would have got a mixed reception back home.

‘Allie never talks to her husband, she's probably got no idea what goes on with his business. But she is tied into everything financially, she told me that one day, hinting she'd be well off if they split, you know? So I'm going to propose a dummy feature and we can film all we want under cover of that.'

‘You'll never get away with it.' Stephanie found it delightful to tease him, now he was popping at the seams with confidence.

‘She's been talking to me about a report on the supermarket of the future. I'm going to go right along with that, which gets me out to Oak Hill with a camera. If she reacts – fine, we can reframe the story and I'll have to do some secret interviewing. If she doesn't, I can go out with a reporter, you can bring your surveyors out to be interviewed, we'll make exactly what'll be screened, and she'll never know. I'll make a dummy report on the supermarkets as well. Then I'll fix it so she sees the film before transmission, not the producer. And I'll show her the dummy.'

The level of energy around the table was falling fast. Maria appeared transfigured. The guys were nodding slowly. Allie, however, was reacting right along with the rest. Nearly six months of close physical contact with her on a regular basis had at least taught him to read her reactions.

‘Which means – uh – branching out into credit cards, financial services, mortgages, medical services, even crèches and day care. Destination shopping, with all kinds of attractions planned around the supermarket, parks, cinemas, play areas …'

‘So what's the actual story, do you think?' The senior producer spoke in the excessively gentle tones mothers use to persuade their infants to put the second brick on the first.

‘Well – ah – is it in the customer's interest, will it give these commercial giants strangleholds on our lives, what about the traditional shopkeepers, what about the reliance on the car, the development of car culture … you know the government estimates a growth in the number of cars on the road by over a hundred per cent by the year two thousand and twenty-five – I mean, do we really want that? Twice as many cars as there are now?' He felt the interest around the table sinking.

‘Yes, we get all that,' coaxed the producer, sensing a destination for this rambling argument, ‘but how do you suggest we make it mean something to our audience?'

‘We can just find some place they're building a new supermarket and ask the people who live there what they think about it. There's a new Magno going up somewhere near here!' Allie exclaimed. ‘It'll be as f-a-a-b as our sad fish story. I must say, I think that was the triumph of the last series.' Rod appeared delighted to have the burden of explanation taken from him. The rest of the team, sensing another thinly disguised commercial for Magno, drifted from indifference to profound boredom.

‘You're sure? How far have you looked into this?'

‘I – uh – did quite a bit of research, actually.' Rod had an impressive stack of files in front of him and he made as if to open one. ‘I've got the plans for the new complex Allie talked about and a retail industry analysis here going back five years, and a land-use survey done after a big hypermarket was opened outside Lyons which is supposed to be the real cutting-edge stuff. We can get some really great graphics out of it. Here's a copy.' He held it up for the table to see.

The senior producer nodded, impressed. For once Allie Parsons had dragged in a Himbo with half a brain. Allie herself was impressed. ‘Rod, that is so great,' she cooed. ‘Can you get it done for the first show? It'll just go really well with our kidnap wife. But not too negative, yes? Keep it upbeat. Maria, why don't you work on it with him?'

Maria scowled.

‘Who're the developers of this shopping complex?' the senior researcher enquired, resentful that the Himbo might alienate her affections.

Rod eyeballed him with utter sincerity. ‘It's a consortium. The major backer is Belgrave, probably our biggest commercial property group. It's a Magno supermarket. We like them, don't we?'

‘It's not really a
sexy
idea, is it?' The senior researcher smelt blood. ‘Won't it take years for all this to actually impact people's lives? Not very immediate, really. It's. all a bit … faceless, to me.'

‘Can you find a face for it? Like someone who actually has a supermarket mortgage? It's kind of a rule we have on the show, every idea has to have a face.' The senior producer was tapping his teeth with his pen, a sign of rapid thought.

‘Ah – well …' Shit. He hadn't thought of that. Rod scrubbed his fingers through his hair in alarm.

‘Oh, for Heaven's sake,' Allie interjected, ‘he'll find the people. You can't get gossip into a consumer feature, it just doesn't happen.'

‘People need gossip,' the senior producer ruled. ‘Now they all live in suburbs and nobody knows their neighbours, they just like to gossip about celebrities instead. I'll let it go this time because it's a good story, but in future I don't want any more ideas that we can't get a face for.' And so the senior producer gave Rod his blessing, adding, ‘And go easy on the graphics. Big zap factor with graphics.'

On Strankley Ridge the hawthorn hedges were blood red with berries. The cornfields were bare stubble waiting for the plough, and seagulls, foraging inland away from the autumn storms, walked proprietorially between the bare stalks. The sky was clear bird's-egg blue and drops of the heavy morning dew were still sparkling on the ground when Gemma turned the Lada off the 34 through a gap in the hedge before the dragon sculpture and rattled over the rutted ground towards the stone circle.

A minibus was parked in a patch of gravel to the right of the field entrance, and a squad of uniformed security men sat in it, staying out of the wind which thrashed the bushes and thrummed in the car's aerial. Gemma turned to the left, where two Volkswagen campers and a lopsided Citroen 2CV stood in the meagre shelter of the hedge. The force of the wind blew the grass blades horizontally over the ground like water-weed in a current.

Topaz got out of the Lada, her dainty feet loose in Flora's boots, her trim legs clad in black trousers, buttoning up her high-collared black jacket against the wind. Even as a world leader, Stalin knew the value of dressing in military style, claiming the authority of a uniform. Gemma, thinking the trousers looked impossibly clean, strode forward vigorously and splashed them with mud. ‘Hey!' protested her daughter.

‘Camouflage,' her mother growled. The wind tore her hair out of its braid and whipped it around her head. She put up both hands to hold it out of her watering eyes and see their way.

Their path was plain. In less troubled times it would have led from the Visitor Centre, a larch-lap hut with a plan of the site outside it, to the stone circle. The tractor had ruled Strankley Ridge for decades, the fields were vast and treeless, stretching past the horizon over the hilltops, and the hedges were few and neglected. The megaliths, mossy grey stones the height of a group of ten-year-old children, stood demurely in a ring of fine turf at the centre of a vast ploughed field, protected by an outer circle of earthworks, leaning towards each other as whispering three-thousand-year-old jokes.

The protesters had made camp right around the circle, pitching tents of every possible shape, size, ethnic derivation and viability in a random sprawl on the bare earth. There were few muddy patches; the weather had been dry and the good brown soil, speckled with chalky stones had been beaten into a maze of paths.

Flapping from two thin poles was a white banner, once probably a sheet, with
New Green Army HQ
lettered on it in an appropriate shade of emerald. From the power inlet to the Visor Centre ran a heavy-duty insulated cable looped on crazed posts and guarded by hand-painted lightning signs with the words
Fuckin'Lethal, Hands Off
on a signboard below.

A faint whiff of wood smoke blended into the gale and a skewbald horse stood patiently with its back to the wind, its tail blown between its legs. A couple of dogs ran crazily about but few people were evident. Topaz led the way around the guy ropes and between tent poles over to a man with an Inca wool hat tied under his goatee who was trying to weight the front flap of his igloo tent with a stone where the wind had torn the peg out of the ground.

‘We're looking for Crusty,' she shouted.

‘Nwah?' he answered, pulling aside one of his ear-flaps.

‘Crusty,' Gemma bellowed, making a tunnel with her hands to get the words out audibly.

‘Yurt.' And he pointed to a black tent pitched close to the biggest of the standing stones. A stove pipe poked from its apex, and wisps of smoke could be seen tearing from it.

There was no door to knock on, so Topaz yelled, ‘Hello, there!' into the teeth of the wind. Three or four voices made optimistic sounds from within, so she boldly pulled aside the entry flap and they ducked into the tent.

Out of the wind, the snugness and stillness of the interior stunned them for a moment. At its highest point, the yurt was big enough to stand up in, although the sides sloped down to a height of about five feet. By the glow of a light bulb masked by some shreds of batik they saw Crusty, looking exactly as he did on the TV news, with his bouncy six-inch dreadlocks hanging over his cherubic round eyes and his little black waistcoat buttoned over his boyish chest, kneeling by a cylindrical black stove and peeking into a hissing kettle.

‘Nice in here,' he observed, with his puckish smile. ‘Have a seat. Would you care for tea?'

‘Great,' said Gemma, hitting the floor next to a long-haired woman who sat cross-legged at the side of the tent, pessimistically examining mugs for cleanliness.

‘Why not?' Topaz answered, trying not to sound surprised. She registered a couple more people reclining at a breathable distance from the heat of the stove. Various piles of sleeping bags, pillows, cushions and carpet fragments lay about the interior and a tin trunk in the centre of the space stood as a table. In one corner an open laptop balanced on a pile of clothes. She selected a piece of old shag-pile carpet near her mother to sit upon. The trousers were tight and made it difficult to cross her legs properly so she sat to one side.