Kingdom Come (21 page)

31

‘DEFEND THE DOME!’

A CAR APPROACHED,
tyres raking the gravel outside the entrance to the flats. Its headlights were on full beam, flooding the car park like a film set. I leaned through the rear passenger door of the Mercedes and stowed the shotgun on the floor, wrapped in my raincoat. Its butt rested on the transmission hump within easy reach of the driving seat.

The headlights of the visitor’s car still flared in my face. The driver stepped out, a burly man who left his engine running. He stared around him, bald head almost glowing in the dark, then recognized me.

‘Right . . . I thought you’d be here. Leave that and come with me.’

‘Who the hell . . . ? Dr Maxted?’

‘I hope so—nothing’s certain now. Look snappy.’

‘Wait . . . where are we going?’

Maxted stared at me as I hesitated, one hand moving towards the shotgun. He was exhausted but determined, his troubled face openly hostile as he peered at me. Wearily he took my arm.

‘Where? Your spiritual home—the Metro-Centre. For once you’re going to do something useful.’

‘Hold on . . .’ I watched the fires rising into the night sky and pointed to my Mercedes. ‘There’s a shotgun in the back.’

‘Forget it. If we need that, it’s already too late. We’ll take my car.’

‘You heard the news flash? About David Cruise?’

‘Someone put a bullet through him.’ Maxted stepped into the Mazda sports car. ‘On air! My God, I have to hand it to you people. Don’t tell me that was something you dreamed up?’

‘No . . .’ I slid into the cramped passenger seat. In the light reflected from the porch I could see Maxted’s swollen face, knuckle marks bruising his cheek. ‘Is he alive?’

‘Just about.’ Maxted reversed and ran over a rose display. He winced at the hooting horns and the din of traffic in the avenue, the shouts and cheering that had returned to Brooklands. ‘The bullet knocked out a lung—let’s hope he lasts the night.’

‘Who shot him? Do they know?’

‘Not yet. Some Bangladeshi who’s had his shop trashed once too often, maybe a Kosovan who’s seen his wife slapped around.’ Maxted accelerated down the narrow drive, then braked sharply as we reached the avenue, a free-for-all of stalled traffic, veering headlights and panic-stricken pedestrians. He shouted above the din. ‘One thing David Cruise had was an unlimited supply of enemies. That was part of his strategy. You know that, Richard. You planned it that way.’

I ignored this jibe, thinking of the hours I had spent in Cruise’s swimming pool, watched by the Filipina maids. ‘Where is he? Brooklands Hospital?’

‘The first-aid unit at the Metro-Centre. Until he stabilizes it’s too risky to move him. Let’s hope the unit is well equipped. I never thought I’d say it, but David Cruise is one person we need to keep alive.’

‘And if he dies?’

‘People here are ready to flip. Not just Brooklands, but all along the motorway towns. I don’t like what’s been going on, but the next chapter could be a lot nastier.’

‘Elective . . . ?’

‘Psychopathy? You’ve got it. Willed madness.’ Maxted swung the sports car into the traffic stream, a motorized babel of horns and whistles. ‘They don’t know it, but they’ve been waiting for the trigger. Sooner or later some nobody would turn up with the key and put it into the lock for them.’

‘And did he?’

‘Turn up? Oh, yes.’

‘Who?’

‘You.’ Maxted overtook a pick-up truck packed with banner-waving supporters. ‘You wrote the script for our pocket führer. A suburban Dr Goebbels . . . what did you think you were doing? Selling washing machines?’

‘Something like that. It worked.’

‘It worked too well. Late capitalism is scratching its piles and trying to figure out where next to shit. All the privy doors are closed except one. Buying a washing machine is a political act—the only real kind of politics left today.’

We sat in the stalled traffic, the air dinned by a rising clamour of horns. Supporters in St George’s shirts darted between the cars, drumming on the roofs. Everyone in the Thames Valley was converging on the Metro-Centre. It rose above the houses and office blocks, an immense white ghost, a mausoleum readying itself for death.

‘And the fire this afternoon?’ I asked Maxted, shouting over the noise. ‘At the dome?’

‘Don’t be taken in. That was David Cruise trying to light the fuse.’

‘It was a stunt?’

‘Absolutely. He needed to set off an uprising, but he knew he’d left it too late. He’d heard about the army units waiting at the racetrack.’

‘I saw them this afternoon. They look as if they mean business.’

‘They do.’ Maxted laughed into the raucous horns. ‘That must have sobered you up.’

‘I already was sober. I checked my father’s computer and read his diary. He wasn’t a St George’s supporter. He hated all the sports clubs and the whole Metro-Centre thing.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Now you’ve got someone better to look up to.’

‘He tried to infiltrate the movement and find who’s leading it. It’s just possible that’s why he was shot.’

‘Maybe.’ Two ice-hockey fans sat on the Mazda’s bonnet, beating time with their fists, and Maxted sounded the horn until they leapt away through the confusion of headlights. He bellowed at me: ‘No one is leading it. I’m sorry your old man was killed, but this is a bottom-up revolution. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Sangster and I were trying to damp it down. We wanted Cruise out of the studio and into the street where he could see what was going on. But reality was never his thing.’

‘Why haven’t the government moved in? Brooklands has been out of control for months.’

‘Not just Brooklands. The Home Office want to see what happens. The suburbs are the perfect social laboratory. You can cook up any pathogen and test how virulent it is. The trouble is, they’ve waited too long. The whole M25 could flip and drag the rest of the country into outright psychopathy.’

‘Impossible. People are too docile.’

‘People are bored. Deeply, deeply bored. When people are that bored anything is possible. A new religion, a fourth reich. They’ll worship a mathematical symbol or a hole in the ground. We’re to blame. We’ve brought them up on violence and paranoia. Now, what’s happening here?’

The traffic was moving around a Range Rover parked outside a Tudor-style mansion. A gang of sports supporters were breaking the car’s windows with iron bars. The driver, a shocked young matron in a sheepskin jacket, tried to remonstrate with them, pushing away one of the youths who was fondling her.

‘Maxted . . . we ought to help.’

‘No time.’ Head down, Maxted drove on, joining the main boulevard that ran to the dome. ‘We need to get you to the Metro-Centre before the roof lifts off.’

‘You want me to talk to David Cruise?’

‘Talk? Julia Goodwin says the man’s on a ventilator.’

‘Julia? She’s there?’

‘Sangster drove her from the refuge. Julia knows we have to keep Cruise alive.’

‘And what can I do?’

‘Take over from David Cruise. You know the production team, they’ll be glad to have you. You wrote the scripts so you should be word-perfect. Speak to the camera, urge everyone to go home and cool down. Say the whole sports-club programme is a PR exercise, a marketing experiment that failed. Cobble something together, but say you were wrong.’

‘I wasn’t wrong.’

WE ABANDONED THE
car five hundred yards from the dome. Maxted drove onto a traffic island, and we stepped out between the lines of cars and buses bringing supporters to the Metro-Centre from all over the Thames Valley. A huge crowd packed the open plaza, staring at the dome as if waiting for a message. They watched the display screens over the South Gate entrance, as two linkmen described Cruise’s battle for life in an emergency operating theatre set up in the first-aid station.

Maxted pushed through the spectators, showing his doctor’s ID card and shouting at a marshal who tried to turn us back. Behind us, headlamps flared along the perimeter road, the sweeping spotlights of police and military vehicles forcing their way through the traffic. An armoured personnel carrier rammed Maxted’s little Mazda and tossed it to one side. Heavy trucks with bull bars shouldered the smaller cars out of their way and shunted them brutally onto the verge. Squads of police in riot gear marched forward under a creeping barrage of megaphoned orders.

‘Richard! Snap out of it!’ Maxted seized my arm. ‘Head for the South Gate entrance.’

The crowd moved with us, a mulish mob forced by the police against the dome. Fights broke out, fists flailing through the workmanlike rise and fall of police truncheons. A young woman dropped to the ground, knocked senseless when she tried to defend her husband. Her children began to shriek, voices soon drowned by the blades of army helicopters cuffing the night air. Searchlights swept the storm of dust stirred by the downdraught, probing the more resolute sections of the crowd. Elite supporters’ clubs joined battle with the aggressive snatch squads seizing their marshals. A police horse reared, its padded legs flinching from the rain of baseball bats. The bitter tang of CS gas mingled with the stench of vomit.

The crowd yielded, retreating to the South Gate entrance. I steadied an elderly woman listening to her mobile phone. She tried to elbow me away, then cried out: ‘They want to close the dome!’

I shook her birdlike shoulder. ‘Why? Who want to?’

‘The police! They’re closing the dome!’

All around me the cry was taken up, a fearful mantra that flashed like a spectre from mouth to mouth.

‘Closing the dome . . . ! Closing the dome . . . !’

Everyone was shouting. The crowd surged towards the entrance, a frantic riptide that swept us with it, carrying us under the display screens, past the first-aid tables, through the doors and into the brightly lit haven of the entrance hall. People were stumbling, hands clutching each other, shoes lost in the stampede, consumers returning to their sanctuary, to their fortress temple and sacred asylum.

A new cry went up.

‘Defend the dome . . . !’

32

THE REPUBLIC
OF THE METRO-CENTRE

FLEEING FROM THE TEAR GAS
and the police truncheons, the last of the crowd burst past the doors into the entrance hall. The searchlights seemed to follow us into the dome, and the iron din of the helicopters drummed at the roof over our heads, the language of pain roaring through the cheerful interior light.

I tripped over a shopping trolley and fell to my knees, bringing down a black woman and two children who clung to my jacket. Tony Maxted had vanished, swept away by the rush. People were boarding the travelator, seeking safety in the vast interior of the Metro-Centre, waving their loyalty cards at the astonished counter staff who came to the doors of their shops.

I stood up, and noticed that I had lost my left shoe. Sandals, trainers, court shoes and even a pair of carpet slippers lay scattered among the abandoned shopping bags. I found my brogue beside a broken stiletto heel, and remembered a large woman in a fur coat stepping on my foot, then screaming abuse at me.

Beyond the doors a line of soldiers with shields and batons were dispersing the hundreds of spectators who had stepped from their cars on the perimeter road. Police constables in riot gear and vizored helmets now sealed off the entrance, and ignored the television cameras recording the scene from the location vans of the main news channels.

But already a modest fightback had begun. Spurred on by the camera lights, a group of marshals and supporters in St George’s shirts were bolting the outer doors. They sealed the manual locks, unwound a heavy hose from the emergency fire-control station and threaded the brass nozzle through the door handles.

The police ignored all this, taking for granted that they could break down the doors whenever they wanted. Two inspectors conferred, watching the marshals assemble a barricade of sales counters and display stands, clearly unconcerned by all this fierce determination. By neutralizing the Metro-Centre, the police had defused the threat of a civil uprising, and the ringleaders of any open rebellion had conveniently isolated themselves from their supporters outside the dome.

Sitting on a chair beside the enquiry desk, I peeled off my bloody sock and tied my handkerchief around my foot. I watched the marshals rallying their teams, admiring their doomed efforts to defend the mall. Many of the customers trapped inside the dome by the riot were now helping to build the barricade, and their commitment to the Metro-Centre was more than a set of slogans. They resented the police ambush, and the involvement of the army. The helicopters endlessly soaring over the roof were trying to intimidate them, and they had decided to stand their ground. Everyone cheered on a women’s judo team who carried a hamburger kiosk across the hall, leaking a trail of hot fat. Clapped by their menfolk, they swung the kiosk to and fro and launched it onto the barricade. Even the inspectors gave an admiring salute.

I STOOD UP,
trying to clear my throat of the dust and tear gas. The public-address system played a medley of Strauss marches, and the information screens announced the opening of a new crèche. Customers still sat in a nearby coffee house with their double espressos and Danish pastries. But for all their bravery, the Metro-Centre had struck its iceberg. I needed to find Julia Goodwin, and help her to move David Cruise to Brooklands Hospital before we sank together.

Outside the dome a column of riot vehicles and military trucks had drawn up. Spotlights were trained on the doors, turning the entrance hall into a giant hallucination of swerving shadows. The police had forced three of the doors, and a squad of a dozen constables approached the barricade, but for the moment made no attempt to dismantle it. A senior officer, an assistant commissioner of the Surrey police, began to address the watching crowd, fragments of his amplified message barely audible above the blare of the helicopters.

‘. . . from tonight the Metro-Centre will close for renovations . . . management in full agreement . . . concern for customers . . . for your own safety leave in an orderly way . . .’

At least five hundred people were crammed into the entrance hall and the nearby shopping aisles. Staff, sports-club supporters, customers caught in the riot, and passers-by driven by panic to seek refuge in the dome were together waiting for something to happen. Many wanted to leave, but fell silent as a militant minority shouted abuse at the assistant commissioner.

At a signal, the constables began to dismantle the barricade, first hurling aside the hamburger kiosk, slipping and sliding in the fat. Scuffles broke out in the watching crowd, and children shrieked at the grappling shadows projected by the spotlights onto the walls of the entrance hall.

‘Right . . .’ I shifted my weight from my injured foot, ready to join the exodus from the Metro-Centre. ‘It’s all over. Small revolution in Thames Valley . . .’

‘Not quite.’ Beside me an elderly man in a grey topcoat, briefcase in hand, smiled to himself in a resigned way. I had noticed him taking shelter behind the enquiry desk, and assumed he was leaving the dome when the riot began. He pointed to the staff entrance near the cloakrooms. ‘I fear we won’t see our beds tonight . . .’

Pushing aggressively through the crowd, and almost marching in step, was a group of marshals, Metro-Centre engineers in orange overalls, and some fifty supporters in St George’s shirts. At their head was Tom Carradine, still in his sky-blue public relations uniform, but no longer the earnest figure whose faith in the mall I found so touching. He seemed small but poised, as watchful and unsmiling as a bullfighter faced with a stupid but dangerous bull. Behind him, forming his personal bodyguard, were the two marshals who had hurled Duncan Christie to the ground as he tried to press a bullet into my palm. Both marshals carried shotguns that I assumed they had looted from the many gun shops in the dome. Carradine’s right hand was raised above his head, and he signalled to the marshals with small movements of his forefinger. He was confident and undaunted, glad to be rising at last to the supreme challenge that faced him.

Hard on the marshals’ heels came William Sangster, broad shoulders swaying from side to side, massive head ducking like a boxer’s before climbing into the ring. His eyes scanned the crowd, as if searching for any former pupils who were still playing truant. He smiled in a disoriented way, unsure of himself and what he was doing with these armed men.

A shot rang out, a sharp roar like the slamming of a door. The concourse fell silent. A raised shotgun pointed to the ceiling, as the faint smoke from its barrel faded on the sweating air. The assistant commissioner lowered his megaphone, and the constables dismantling the barricade stopped to wait for their orders.

Carradine handed the shotgun to the marshals. He took off his peaked cap, revealing his blond hair swept back from a surprisingly steep forehead. He listened to the silence that filled the entrance hall, and then spoke briefly into the microphone passed to him by a marshal. His magnified voice in its motorway accent boomed over the heads of the police and soldiers outside the dome.

‘The Metro-Centre is secure . . . Withdraw all army units . . . Repeat, the Metro-Centre is secure . . . We have hostages . . . Repeat, we have hostages . . .’

The sounds echoed through the mall, drumming against the roof. Carradine, the marshals and engineers were staring upwards, as if expecting salvation to descend from the sky. Even Sangster had stopped ducking his head and leaned back.

‘What are they doing?’ I kept my voice down and spoke to the elderly man standing wearily beside me. ‘They’re waiting for a miracle.’

‘Unlikely . . .’ He tried to summon a signal on his mobile, but gave up. ‘Still, you’re on the right track.’

‘These hostages? Who are they?’

‘That I can tell you.
We
are . . .’

There was a gasp from the crowd, and a hundred hands pointed to the ceiling of the security lobby, the narrow vestibule leading to the entrance hall. A steel fire door was slowly falling from its housing, shutting out the barricade, the assistant commissioner and his officers.

A deep metallic rumble like the clenching of a giant’s teeth filled the hall as the fire door settled onto the floor. The vibration moved away, a subsonic wave that seemed to take in smaller tremors from the exit doors of the dome, the answering calls from the furthest outposts of a vast vault that was sealing itself off from the world.

I stared at the heavy shield, and helped the elderly man to the chair by the enquiry desk. He thanked me and said: ‘Your foot’s bleeding.’

‘I know. Tell me—are we sealed in?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘The North Gate entrance?’

‘I imagine that’s also closed.’

‘And the side exits?’

‘Everything. The car parks and freight entrance.’ He raised a hand to calm me, seeing that I was agitated. ‘It’s the fear of fire, you see. Any draught would turn a small blaze into a furnace.’

‘Right . . .’ I was surprised by how calm he seemed, as if he had known what would happen and had detached himself from all the excitement long before it began. He stared in a regretful way at his useless mobile, resigned to the prospect of being unable to contact his wife. Trying to rest my foot, I asked: ‘I take it you work here?’

‘In Accounts. We tend to have a good idea what’s going on. Mr Carradine is a very determined young man, but these shopping malls haven’t learned how to cope with violence. When they do . . .’

‘War will move into the world’s consumer spaces? That’s quite a thought. Up till now, being a washing machine has been a safe option. There was a shooting here this evening.’

‘The television actor? I’m very sorry. It’s probably best not to know if it really happened.’ He shook my hand. ‘I’ll rest here for a bit. You’ll need to find a bed for the night. There’s a huge selection to choose from . . .’

He sat in his chair behind the enquiry desk, a grey-haired sphinx ready to answer all questions but ignored by the crowd drifting across the entrance hall and unable to find its bearing. Carradine and his entourage had set off on an inspection tour of their new domain, apparently uninterested in the fate of all those trapped inside the dome.

I walked over to the steel fire door, so massive that it muffled all sounds of police and army activity. An emergency escape panel was set into the fire door, and I was tempted to make a run for it, but its electrical locks would be too much for me.

Besides, a new and more interesting world was waiting for me inside the dome, a self-contained universe of treasure and promise. The crowd was drifting back into the mall, resigned to a future of eternal shopping. The republic of the Metro-Centre had at last established itself, a faith trapped inside its own temple.