Kingdom Come (27 page)

40

EXIT STRATEGIES

AT LAST TOGETHER,
our hands gripping the head rail, Julia and I propelled the bed through the doorway of the first-aid post and set off for the South Gate entrance. After twenty yards we were both exhausted. Out of control, the bed veered into an overturned golf cart. The elderly couple who were Julia’s last patients lay strapped to the mattress. As we jolted through the scatter of roof debris they closed their eyes, alarmed by the erratic excursion and the panic that now gripped the dome. Bent over the head rail, I saw them trying to reassure each other that all would be well, neither believing it for an instant.

‘We’re almost there, Mrs Mitchell,’ I told her. ‘You’ll be home soon, warming the teapot.’

‘Home? I don’t think this is the right way, Mr Pearson. We usually go to the No. 48 bus stop. Dr Julia . . . ?’

‘We’ll find it, Mrs Mitchell.’ Julia winced as we slewed across a floor of broken glass, then clung to my shoulder when I straightened the bed’s wayward front wheels. ‘I’ll tell the driver to wait for you.’

‘Maurice . . . did you hear that?’ Mrs Mitchell’s sharp eyes noticed the dust clouds escaping through the fractured roof. ‘It’s all been such a fuss about nothing . . .’

The past, in its small but persistent ways, was returning to the Metro-Centre, though few of those left behind had Mrs Mitchell’s acuity. Carradine’s defenders at the South Gate entrance were falling back, many of them stunned by the controlled explosion that had blown down a section of the fire door. A few die-hard marshals were building a barricade beside the travelator, piling up café chairs and tables. Hostages ran in all directions, distraught and speechless after their forced stay in the Ramada Inn and Novotel. A few huddled in shop doorways, still clutching the carrier bags they held when the siege began. Julia shouted to them, urging them to leave. She pulled my arm and pointed helplessly to two hostages hiding among the mannequins in the window of a dress shop and trying to mimic their calm and plastic detachment.

Almost too weary to walk, she fell behind me, stumbling through the debris and dust. I stopped and took her arms, then made her sit at the foot of the bed.

‘Julia, stay there—I can push on my own . . .’

‘Just for a minute. Richard, where are the police?’

Blocked by a barricade, I reversed and manoeuvred the bed into a side thoroughfare that led past the Holiday Inn. The lake was black as death, a tar pit freighted with horrors, but elsewhere the lights were coming on. Neon tubes stuttered and steadied themselves, logos glimmered through the dust. Strip lighting flooded the shops and stores, revealing a hundred polished counters. Crazed patterns raced across the display screens, the brain tracings of a giant struggling to awake from its deranged sleep.

‘Richard . . . all these lights.’ Julia looked up in a dazed way at the arrays of gleaming bulbs. ‘They’re going to open for business . . .’

‘Not yet. Snipers, I guess. The police need to flush them out.’

I steered us past the Holiday Inn with its familiar glowing sign. The wave machine was stirring the sluggish water into a nightmare brew, but as we approached the South Gate entrance hall an even stranger smell surrounded us, a cool flavour that I had first scented as a child.

‘Richard? What is it?’ Julia stepped down from the bed and nervously filled her lungs. ‘It tastes of . . . trees and sky.’

‘Fresh air! We’re there, Julia . . .’

Ahead of us, though, were a dozen of Carradine’s marshals in St George’s shirts, shotguns and rifles strapped to their shoulders with the barrels facing the floor. They were disciplined and marching in step, but their heads were bowed, like a defeated team leaving the field after a fierce but losing struggle, each player communing with himself.

At their head was Tony Maxted, wearing a crisply white surgical coat that he had secretly saved for this moment. He was tired but confident, doing his best to encourage this breakaway group whom he had persuaded to call an end to the siege. He moved up and down their ranks, smiling and talking to each man in turn as they moved towards the waiting light.

Maxted flinched when another controlled explosion burst through a nearby emergency exit. The strap muscle beneath his bald scalp seized his skull and threw his head back. He stumbled and reached out to two of the marshals, then seemed to lose his bearings in the swirl of dust.

I leaned against the head rail, too weary to push. The entrance hall was covered with debris, and a section of the fire door lay in the sun. Masked figures in dark uniforms moved through the intensely lit air.

Behind us an even brighter glow illuminated the interior of the dome, turning an immense spotlight onto the underside of the roof. Shadows wavered and swayed from every doorway, like nervous onlookers unsure whether to believe their eyes.

Flames rose from the seventh-floor galleries around the atrium, lazy blades of light that seemed to wake together and race around the high keep of the retail citadel. Soon the top three decks were burning briskly, every balcony and doorway bursting into blooms of fire. The petrol-soaked settees and carpets, the demonstration dining rooms and ideal kitchens were giving themselves to their own fiery ends.

The platoon in St George’s shirts stopped to look back, tired faces revived by the fire, colour returning to their cheeks after the twilight weeks. They were roused by the sight of the Metro-Centre consuming itself, as if welcoming this last transformation.

‘Right! Keep going!’ Maxted strode down the ranks, clapping his hands, trying to wake them from their trance. ‘Come on, lads! We’re there . . .’

Debris was falling from the roof, clouds of super-heated dust that had burst into flame as air was drawn into the dome. I could feel the huge mall shifting its weight, its frame members flexing in the heat. A gale rushed past us, cooler air speeding through the vents of a furnace.

‘Wake up, the lot of you!’ Maxted struck one of the marshals on the shoulder, trying to rouse the man and hold his attention. ‘Let’s move! We’ll all be incinerated . . .’

The marshal turned, aware of Maxted for the first time. He seemed to emerge from a deep rigor, and seized the psychiatrist by the collar of his white coat. Other hands gripped his arms, forcing his body into a crouch. A tremor ran through the platoon, a spasm of anger, fear and pride. Together they turned their backs to the entrance hall. They moved forward, carrying Maxted like a totem at their head, running towards the blaze, his hoarse cries lost in the fierce drumming of the inferno.

41

A SOLAR CULT

‘WHAT HAPPENED
to Tony Maxted?’ Julia asked.

We stood by the police railings and gazed across the empty plaza at what remained of the Metro-Centre. Much of the dome was intact, a curved wall like the stand of a circular stadium. But the apex had collapsed, falling into the furnace of shops, hotels and department stores. Three weeks after our escape, smoke and steam rose from the ruin, watched by a dozen fire crews drawn up within fifty yards of the structure. A small crowd appeared each day, staring at the stricken mall as if unable to grasp what had happened. The Metro-Centre had devoured itself, a furnace consumed by its own fire.

‘Richard . . . poor man, are you still here?’

‘I’m not sure. It feels rather strange. In a way we shouldn’t be watching . . .’

‘No? Where should we be? Sweet man, part of you will be forever beachcombing near the Holiday Inn . . .’

She took my arm to reassure me, but kept a wary eye on my shifting moods. For the first time her hair was reined in over her left shoulder, exposing her face. Three nights under sedation at Brooklands Hospital, and long days of sleep in her bed at home, had transformed her from the haggard refugee I had pushed to safety from the dome. That morning I had heard from her for the first time, when she left a text message suggesting that she drive me to the dome.

Parking outside my father’s flat, she smiled approvingly when I crossed the gravel, stick supporting me as I swung my foot in its surgical boot. I knew there and then that she was at ease with herself and ready to be at ease with me. I had rescued her from the furnace of the Metro-Centre, and in the mysterious logic of the affections this single act erased her guilt over the part she had played in my father’s death. Victims had to pay twice for the crimes committed against them.

By contrast, I was still exhausted, barely able to keep awake, watching the TV news, hobbling around the flat and cooking boiled eggs that I found waiting for me the next day. But the sight of the Metro-Centre woke me. I was glad to be with Julia, and slipped my arm around her waist.

‘Richard . . . ?’

‘Sorry, I was dreaming. What happened to Maxted? They found his body yesterday. Hard to identify in all that ash. One thing you can say about consumer durables, they give off a lot of heat.’

‘Where was he?’

‘In the atrium. I think they tied him to one of the bears.’

‘What a hell of a way to go.’ Julia shuddered, tempted to unrein her hair. ‘He was rather devious, but I liked him. Why did the marshals turn on him? He was leading them out of the dome.’

‘They “flipped”. Willed madness, he called it. Remember Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia? It never occurred to Maxted that he could be the last victim.’

‘And Sangster? I don’t think he got out.’

‘Most people didn’t.’ I held Julia’s shoulder, trying to calm her. ‘Sergeant Falconer, Carradine, all those marshals and engineers who helped him seize the dome. The fire . . .’

‘Did Duncan Christie set it off?’

‘Hard to say. He wasn’t very good at anything. His wife has taken the child and disappeared. I hope he’s with them.’

‘If Christie didn’t start the fire, who did?’

‘No one. The army commander gave the order to turn on the lights. Once the police opened the doors the air flooded in. One spark somewhere was all it needed. Instead of flushing out any snipers they started a solar cult.’

Lips pursed, Julia listened to me. ‘So . . . Geoffrey Fairfax, Maxted, Sangster, Sergeant Falconer, Christie—the people who killed your father are all dead. Except for one.’

‘Julia . . .’ I dropped my stick and embraced her. She held her head from me, exposing her chin and neck, and I could see the scars brought to the surface of her skin like a guilty rash, a last flush of self-contempt. ‘You didn’t kill my father. If you’d known what Fairfax and Sangster had really planned you’d have stopped them.’

‘Would I?’ Julia forced her eyes to look away from the dome. ‘I’m still not sure.’

‘Something very dangerous was happening here. You needed to act.’

‘But the wrong people got hurt, as they usually do.’ Julia retrieved my stick and pressed it into my hand. ‘I have to get to the hospital—all these check-ups, they’re a disease in their own right. I’ll give you a lift home.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll stay here for a while. There are a few things . . .’

WE WALKED TO
her car, parked on the nearby kerb. She settled herself behind the wheel, watching me through the bright new windscreen as I arranged my mind.

‘Richard? You’re trying to say something?’

‘Right. Why don’t we meet this weekend—you can stay in my father’s flat?’

‘Your flat, Richard.’ She corrected me solemnly. ‘Your flat.’

‘My flat.’

‘Brave chap. That took some doing. You’re on—I’ll take my chances with a wounded man.’

‘Good. I’ll have to learn how to clean the bath.’

‘I’ll come, if you tell me something. I’ve been thinking about it all week.’ She pointed to the dome and the watching crowds, their impassive faces turned towards the plumes of smoke and water vapour. ‘When you and David Cruise started all this, did you know where it would end?’

‘I can’t say. Perhaps we did . . . in a way, that was the whole idea.’

SHE THOUGHT OVER
my reply, once again the serious young doctor, and drove away with a mock-fascist salute. I waved to her until she had gone, inhaling the last traces of her scent on the air. Tapping the ground before each step, I moved through the crowd and found a free place at the railings. The Metro-Centre was as much a tourist attraction as it had ever been. Visitors drove from the motorway towns to gaze at its smoking carcass, once the repository of everything they most valued. None of them, I noticed, was wearing a St George’s shirt. Tom Carradine’s seizure of the dome had sent a seismic jolt through the Heathrow suburbs, and the ground beneath our feet was still shifting.

The policewoman who carried out my debriefing told me that all marches and most of the sports fixtures had been cancelled. Post-match violence and racist attacks had fallen away, and many Asian families were returning to their homes. The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died. The once real possibility of a fascist republic had vanished into the air with all the vapourizing three-piece suites and discount carpeting.

I GRIPPED THE
police railing in both hands, the stick crooked over one arm. In some ways the dome reminded me of a crashed airship, one of the vast inter-war zeppelins that belonged to the lost era of the Brooklands racing circuit. But in other ways it resembled the caldera of a resting volcano, still smoking and ready to revive itself. One day it would become active again, spewing over the motorway towns a shower of patio doors and appliance islands, sun loungers and en-suite bathrooms.

I remembered my last moments in the dome, looking back at the fires that raced along the high galleries from one store to the next. In my mind the fires still burned, moving through the streets of Brooklands and the motorway towns, the flames engulfing crescents of modest bungalows, devouring executive estates and community centres, football stadiums and car showrooms, the last bonfire of the consumer gods.

I watched the spectators around me, standing silently at the railing. There were no St George’s shirts, but they watched a little too intently. One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.