J. G. BALLARD

Kingdom Come

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

London W6 8JB

4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2006

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 2006

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction copyright © Deborah Levy 2014

Interview copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2007

‘Remaking the World’ copyright © J. G. Ballard 2007

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Cover by Stanley Donwood, from a photographic copperplate etching.

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2006 ISBN: 9780007290109

Version: 2014-07-11

Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction by Deborah Levy Part I Chapter One: The St George’s Cross Chapter Two: The Homecoming Chapter Three: The Riot Chapter Four: The Resistance Movement Chapter Five: The Metro-Centre Chapter Six: Going Home Chapter Seven: Snakes And Ladders Chapter Eight: Accidents And Emergencies Chapter Nine: The Beach At The Holiday Inn Chapter Ten: Street People Chapter Eleven: A Hard Night Chapter Twelve: Neon Palaces Chapter Thirteen: Duncan Christie Chapter Fourteen: Towards A Willed Madness Chapter Fifteen: The Prisoner In The Tower Chapter Sixteen: The Bomb Attack Chapter Seventeen: The Geometry Of The Crowd Chapter Eighteen: A Failed Revolution Chapter Nineteen: The Need To Understand Chapter Twenty: The Racing Circuit Chapter Twenty One: A New Politics Part II Chapter Twenty Two: The Trenchcoat Hero Chapter Twenty Three: The Women’s Refuge Chapter Twenty Four: A Fascist State Chapter Twenty Five: Lonely, Lost, Angry Chapter Twenty Six: A Bullet In The Hand Chapter Twenty Seven: An Anxious Intermission Chapter Twenty Eight: The Old Man’s Quest Chapter Twenty Nine: The Stricken City Chapter Thirty: Assassination Chapter Thirty One: ‘Defend The Dome!’ Chapter Thirty Two: The Republic Of The Metro-Centre Part III Chapter Thirty Three: The Consumer Life Chapter Thirty Four: Work Makes You Free Chapter Thirty Five: Normality Chapter Thirty Six: Shrines And Altars Chapter Thirty Seven: Prayers And Wool-Wash Cycles Chapter Thirty Eight: Tell Him Chapter Thirty Nine: The Last Stand Chapter Forty: Exit Strategies Chapter Forty One: A Solar Cult PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS: J. G. Ballard talks to Sarah O’ Reilly REMAKING THE WORLD by J. G. Ballard About the author By the same author About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION BY DEBORAH LEVY

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.

J. G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

J. G. BALLARD, our greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild, intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood ‘the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space’.

When I was a young writer in the 1980s, Ballard first came to my attention after I read his luminous, erotic story collection, The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.

When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under Tales of Alien Abduction or Marsh Plants and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, Surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious. I was just starting to write but Ballard made me feel less lonely. Perhaps more significantly we shared the dislocation of not being born in Britain. Home was the imagination. I too was attracted to the paintings of de Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives. Ballard was going to make worlds we had not seen before in British fiction. When asked, after the success of Empire of the Sun, why it took him so long to write in a less disguised way about his childhood experience at the internment camp in Lunghau, his beautiful answer was that is took him ‘twenty years to forget and twenty years to remember’. Of course, images from Shanghai and the war were laid forever inside him. I have always thought that his books, with the exception of Crash, which seems to me an abstract attempt to grieve for his dead wife, were already written in that one room he shared with his parents between 1943 and 1945. The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

Good on you Jim.

There is a great deal of rather strained legend-making when it comes to Ballard, but it is the witty, deadpan, open-minded American journalist and pianist, V. Vale, founder of the tremendous RE/Search Publications and champion of Ballard since 1973, who in my view tracked his thought drifts most sensitively in various interviews. I have never regarded Ballard as a kind of psychogeographer of postmodernity; his most enjoyable fiction is more Dada than Debord.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head – and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home.

What was it that Ballard offered to me as a young female writer? It is more to do with what he did not offer. He preferred social theory to social realism. I was not going to run to Ballard’s books to learn how to write a ‘well rounded’ character, for God’s sake. His characters are more like tannoys to broadcast his arguments and ideas. But I did love his gloomy, unbelievable male psychiatrists, cinematically lit, groomed, suave and perverse, sipping a stiff gin and tonic in towelling robes while they observe (and possibly medicate) everyone else freaking out around them. The well-mannered narrators in the later novels (Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdom Come) are mostly mild, middle-class, manly men. Their destiny is to become inflamed Nietzschean men, excited to finally understand that they too would like to punch their fists through the boredom of the empty, greedy, good life with its fragile veneer of civilisation. Yet I have always regarded Ballard as quite a humane writer, a paternal writer, steering us through the ruins of his dystopias via the mindset of his apparently rational avatars – always endearingly baffled to discover their own suppressed urges.

I enjoyed his noirish female characters too (many of them doctors), enigmatic instead of domestic, emotionally unavailable, sexually experimental, sometimes tanned and thuggish, as in Cocaine Nights, or vulnerable but corruptible as in Kingdom Come – but the great thing is that they do not want the male lead to marry them and are never about to roast a chicken.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart.

All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard’s prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come.

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …

Kingdom Come is an exuberant, crazed, maverick, twenty-first-century re-staging of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents. We have our usual Ballardian narrator, a decent chap, former advertising executive Richard Pearson, who, while driving down the slow lane of the M25, is surprised to find the indicator ticking as if it has a mind of its own. Pearson obeys his car’s invitation to turn down a slip road, which ‘I had somehow known was waiting for me’. Ballard believed our unconscious plans a number of assignments for us. The slip road leads to the small motorway town of Brookfields, near Heathrow. Pearson’s father, a retired air pilot, has been killed by a deranged mental patient who opened fire, apparently at random, on the crowds shopping at the Metro-Centre, a massive mall in the centre of this town. Pearson suspects there is more to find out about his father’s death and begins his investigations – with the oedipal help of the attractive female doctor who attended to his dying father, and who for some reason has sex with his son.

There are no space ships hovering above the Metro-Centre, with its ‘humid, microwave air’, but the minds of the citizens who shop there have definitely been abducted by hyper-consumerism.

At the sales counter, the human race’s greatest confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.

The former advertising executive starts to uncover the drives of the savage consumers of Middle England who lug home refrigerators, toasters, televisions, beat up Asian shop keepers and lavish affection on the three giant teddy bears sitting in the atrium of the Metro-Centre. Naturally, these Disneyesque toys are pierced with bullet holes.

Kingdom Come is a sort of fairy tale in which ‘a more primitive world’ is ‘biding its time’. The blades of knives on display in the mall’s hardware store menacingly form, ‘a silver forest in the darkness’. Ballard explores the pre-rational nationalism that replaces politics, the mass spectacle of St George’s flags waved at the endless parades and sports matches. ‘No Sieg Heils, but football anthems instead. The same hatreds, the same hunger for violence, but filtered through the chat-show studio and the hospitality suite.’

It seems that for Ballard, the labyrinthine Metro-Centre is as enthralling as de Chirico’s brooding Italian archways and piazzas. Once again he will chase his obsessions and try to convince us that the modern personality most likely to survive late capitalism will be the elective psychopath.

If Freudian theory is waving to us through the St George’s flags, Ballard makes sure its fingernails are bitten raw. As he has often stated, his literary aim was to find the hidden wiring in the fuse box of modernity. In the case of Kingdom Come, consumerism slips into ‘soft’ fascism. As a former advertising executive, Richard Pearson knows that ‘all he is good at is warming the slippers of late capitalism’ and the future is ‘a cable TV program going on forever’, a barcode, CCTV camera and a parking space. And what about dreams?

The Metro-Centre is dreaming you. It’s dreaming all of us.

Kingdom Come does nothing less than perform keyhole surgery on late capitalism’s heart of darkness.

Stockholm, 2014

PART I

1

The St George’s Cross

THE SUBURBS DREAM of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world …

Wishful thinking, I told myself as Heathrow airport shrank into the rear-view mirror, and more than a little foolish, an advertising man’s ingrained habit of tasting the wrapper rather than the biscuit. But they were thoughts that were difficult to push aside. I steered the Jensen into the slow lane of the M4, and began to read the route signs welcoming me to the outer London suburbs. Ashford, Staines, Hillingdon – impossible destinations that featured only on the mental maps of desperate marketing men. Beyond Heathrow lay the empires of consumerism, and the mystery that obsessed me until the day I walked out of my agency for the last time. How to rouse a dormant people who had everything, who had bought the dreams that money can buy and knew they had found a bargain?

The indicator ticked at the dashboard, a nagging arrow that I was certain I had never selected. But a hundred yards ahead was a slip road that I had somehow known was waiting for me. I slowed and left the motorway, entering a green-banked culvert that curved in on itself, past a sign urging me to visit a new business park and conference centre. I braked sharply, thought of reversing back to the motorway, then gave up. Always let the road decide …

Like many central Londoners, I felt vaguely uneasy whenever I left the inner city and approached the suburban outlands. But in fact I had spent my advertising career in an eager courtship of the suburbs. Far from the jittery, synapse-testing metropolis, the perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25 were virtually an invention of the advertising industry, or so account executives like myself liked to think. The suburbs, we would all believe to our last gasp, were defined by the products we sold them, by the brands and trademarks and logos that alone defined their lives.

Yet somehow they resisted us, growing sleek and confident, the real centre of the nation, forever holding us at arm’s length. Gazing out at the placid sea of bricky gables, at the pleasant parks and school playgrounds, I felt a pang of resentment, the same pain I remembered when my wife kissed me fondly, waved a little shyly from the door of our Chelsea apartment, and walked out on me for good. Affection could reveal itself in the most heartless moments.

But I had a special reason for feeling uneasy – only a few weeks earlier, these amiable suburbs had sat up and snarled, then sprung forward to kill my father.

At nine that morning, a fortnight after my father’s funeral, I set off from London towards Brooklands, the town between Weybridge and Woking that had grown up around the motor-racing circuit of the 1930s. My father had spent his childhood in Brooklands and, after a lifetime of flying, the old airline pilot had returned there to pass his retirement. I was going to call on his solicitors, see that the probate of his will was under way, and put his flat up for sale, formally closing down a life that I had never shared. According to the solicitor, Geoffrey Fairfax, the flat was within sight of the disused racetrack, a dream of speed that must have reminded the old man of all the runways that still fled through his mind. When I packed away his uniforms and locked the door behind me, a last line would draw itself under the former British Airways pilot, an absentee parent I once hero-worshipped but rarely met.

He had left my strong-willed but highly strung mother when I was five, flown millions of miles to the most dangerous airports in the world, survived two attempted hijackings and then died in a bizarre shooting incident in a suburban shopping mall. A mental patient on day release smuggled a weapon into the atrium of the Brooklands Metro-Centre and fired at random into the lunch-hour crowd. Three people died, and fifteen were injured. A single bullet killed my father, a death that belonged in Manila or Bogotá or East Los Angeles, rather than in a bosky English suburb. Sadly, my father had outlived his relatives and most of his friends, but at least I had arranged the funeral service and seen him off to the other side.

As I left the motorway behind me, the prospect of actually turning the key in my father’s front door began to loom in the windscreen like a faintly threatening head-up display. A large part of him would still be there – the scent of his body on the towels and clothes, the contents of his laundry basket, the odd smell of old bestsellers on his bookshelves. But his presence would be matched by my absence, the gaps that would be everywhere like empty cells in a honeycomb, human voids that his own son had never been able to fill when he abandoned his family for a universe of skies.

The spaces were as much inside me. Instead of dragging around Harvey Nichols with my mother, or sitting through an eternity of Fortnum’s teas, I should have been with my father, building our first kite, playing French cricket in the garden, learning how to light a bonfire and sail a dinghy. At least I went on to a career in advertising, successful until I made the mistake of marrying a colleague and providing myself with a rival I could never hope to beat.

I reached the exit of the slip road, trailing a huge transporter loaded with micro-cars, each shiny enough to eat, or at least lick, toffee-apple cellulose brightening the day. The transporter paused at the traffic lights, an iron bull ready to rush the corrida of the open road, then thundered towards a nearby industrial estate.

Already I was lost. I had entered what the AA map represented as an area of ancient Thames Valley towns – Chertsey, Weybridge, Walton – but no towns were visible around me, and there were few signs of permanent human settlement. I was moving through a terrain of inter-urban sprawl, a geography of sensory deprivation, a zone of dual carriageways and petrol stations, business parks and signposts to Heathrow, disused farmland filled with butane tanks, warehouses clad in exotic metal sheeting. I drove past a brownfield site dominated by a massive sign announcing the Heathrow South extension with its unlimited freight capacity, though this was an empty land, where everything had already been sent on ahead. Nothing now made sense except in terms of a transient airport culture. Warning displays alerted each other, and the entire landscape was coded for danger. CCTV cameras crouched over warehouse gates, and filter-left signs pulsed tirelessly, pointing to the sanctuaries of high-security science parks.

A terrace of small houses appeared, hiding in the shadow of a reservoir embankment, linked to any sense of community only by the used-car lots that surrounded it. Moving towards a notional south, I passed a Chinese takeaway, a discount furniture warehouse, an attack-dog kennels and a grim housing estate like a partly rehabilitated prison camp. There were no cinemas, churches or civic centres, and the endless billboards advertising a glossy consumerism sustained the only cultural life.

On my left, traffic moved down a side street, family saloons hunting for somewhere to park. Three hundred yards away, a line of shopfronts caught the sun. A suburban town had conjured itself from the nexus of access roads and dual carriageways. Rescue was offering itself to a lost traveller in the form of neon signs outside a chain store selling garden equipment and a travel agent advertising ‘executive leisure’.

I waited for the lights to change, an eternity compressed into a few seconds. The traffic signals presided like small-minded deities over their deserted crossroads. I lowered my foot onto the accelerator, ready to jump the red, and noticed that a police car was waiting behind me. Like the nearby town, it had materialized out of the empty air, alerted by the wayward imagination of an impatient driver in a powerful sports car. The entire defensive landscape was waiting for a crime to be committed.

Ten minutes later I eased myself onto a banquette in an empty Indian restaurant, somewhere in the centre of the off-motorway town that had come to my aid. Spreading my map over the elderly menu, a book of laminated pages unchanged for years, I tried to work out where I was. Vaguely south-west of Heathrow, I guessed, in one of the motorway towns that had grown unchecked since the 1960s, home to a population that only felt fully at ease within the catchment area of an international airport.

Here, a filling station beside a dual carriageway enshrined a deeper sense of community than any church or chapel, a greater awareness of a shared culture than a library or municipal gallery could offer. I had left the Jensen in the multi-storey car park that dominated the town, a massive concrete edifice of ten canted floors more mysterious in its way than the Minotaur’s labyrinth at Knossos – where, a little perversely, my wife suggested we should spend our honeymoon. But the presence of this vast structure reflected the truism that parking was well on the way to becoming the British population’s greatest spiritual need.

I asked the manager where we were, offering him the map, but he was too distracted to answer. A nervous Bengali in his fifties, he watched the traffic moving down the high street. Someone had thrown a brick at the plate-glass window, and the scimitar of a giant crack veered from ceiling to floor. The manager had tried to steer me into the rear of the empty restaurant, saying that the window table was reserved, but I ignored him and sat beside the fractured glass, curious to observe the town and its daily round.

The passers-by were too busy with their shopping to notice me. They seemed prosperous and content, confidently strolling around a town that was entirely composed of shops and small department stores. Even the health centre had redesigned itself as a retail space, its window filled with blood-pressure kits and fitness DVDs. The streets were brightly lit, cheerful and cleanly swept, so unlike the inner London I knew. Whatever the name of this town, there were no drifting newspapers and chewing-gum pavements, no citizenry of the cardboard box. This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was an end state of consumerism. I liked it, and felt a certain pride that I had helped to set its values. History and tradition, the slow death by suffocation of an older Britain, played no part in its people’s lives. They lived in an eternal retail present, where the deepest moral decisions concerned the purchase of a refrigerator or washing machine. But at least these Thames Valley natives with their airport culture would never start a war.

A pleasant middle-aged couple paused by the window, leaning against each other in a show of affection. Happy for them, I tapped the broken glass and gave a vigorous thumbs up. Startled by the apparition smiling a few inches from him, the husband stepped forward to protect his wife and touched the metal flag in the lapel of his jacket.

I had seen the flag as I drove into the town, the cross of St George on its white field, flying above the housing estates and business parks. The red crusader’s cross was everywhere, unfurling from flagstaffs in front gardens, giving the anonymous town a festive air. Whatever else, the people here were proud of their Englishness, a core belief no army of copywriters would ever take from them.

Sipping my flavour-free lager – another agency triumph – I studied the map as the manager hovered around my table. But I was in no hurry to order, and not merely because I had a shrewd idea of the sort of food on offer. The one fixed point on the map was my father’s flat in Brooklands, only a few miles to the south of where I sat. I could almost believe that he was waiting behind his desk, ready to interview me for a new post, the job of being his son.

What would he see, in those make-or-break thirty seconds when the interviewee entered his room? Applicant: Richard Pearson, forty-two years old, unemployed account executive. Likeable, but can seem slightly shifty. One-time secret smoker and former junior Wimbledon player with right elbow spur. Failed husband completely outwitted by his former wife. Good-humoured and optimistic, but privately a little desperate. He thinks of himself as a kind of terrorist, but all he is good at is warming the slippers of late capitalism. Applying for the post of son and heir, though very hazy about duties and entitlements …

I was very hazy, and not only about my father.

A week before his death I drove a close friend to Gatwick airport, at the end of my happiest months in many years. A Canadian academic on a year’s sabbatical, she was flying back to her job in the modern history department at Vancouver University. I liked her confidence and humour, and her frank concern for me. ‘Come on, Dick! Jump! Bale out!’ She talked of my joining her, perhaps finding work in the media studies department. ‘It’s an academic dustbin, but you can rattle the lid.’ She knew I had been eased out of the agency – my last campaign had been an expensive fiasco – and urged me to look hard at myself, never an inviting proposition. I started to miss her keenly a month before she left, and was more than tempted to pull the ripcord and join her.

Then, at the Gatwick departure gate, she discovered my passport in her handbag, zipped away in a side pocket since our return from a Rome weekend. Baffled, she stared at the war-criminal photo. ‘Richard … ? Who? Dick, my God! That’s you!’ She shrieked loudly enough to alert a security guard. I took this as a powerful unconscious signal. Vancouver and an escape into academia would have to wait. If someone who liked me and shared my bed could forget my name at the first glimpse of a departure lounge I needed urgently to reinvent myself. Perhaps my father would help me.

I finished my lager, watched by the manager, who had come to the window and was staring uneasily at the sky above the multistorey garage. I was about to ask him about the St George’s badges worn by many of the passers-by, but he turned the ‘Closed’ sign to the street and retreated quickly to the rear of the restaurant. Sirens sounded, and groups of shoppers gazed up at the clouds of smoke floating across the precinct. Two police cars sped by, roof lights flashing.

Something had happened to disturb the deep consumerist peace. The manager disappeared into his kitchen, and a woman’s voice cried in alarm. Leaving enough cash to settle the bill, I folded the map, unlatched the door and let myself out of the restaurant. A fire engine bullied its way through the crowd, siren turning the air into a headache. I followed on foot, pushing past the pedestrians who stared at the darkening sky.

A few hundred yards from the town centre, near the road I had taken from the motorway, a car was burning on the perimeter of a modest council estate. Residents stood in their front gardens, arms folded as they watched the flames rise from a battered Volvo. A policeman discharged his fire extinguisher into the passenger cabin, while a fellow officer held back the crowd. They were staring at the shabby house of one of their neighbours, where a policewoman stood by the front door, gazing in a resigned way at the untended garden. Splashes of white paint traced a gaudy slogan over the masonry, and I assumed that an unpopular arrival had sullied the atmosphere of the estate, perhaps a released murderer or a paedophile exposed by the local vigilantes who had torched the car.

I eased my way through the onlookers, many still carrying their shopping bags, viewing the scene like an unexpected publicity display in a dull department store. Their expressions were hostile but wary, and they ignored the fire engine that pulled up behind them. They took their lead from three men in St George’s shirts who stood beside the gate, employees of a local hardware chain whose logo was stamped on their breast pockets. Their muscular, slightly paranoid presence reminded me of stewards at a football match, but there was no stadium anywhere nearby, and the only sport was taking place outside this seedy semi.

‘What’s going on? Is someone hiding inside … ?’ I spoke to a stocky woman muttering to herself as her wide-eyed daughter stared up at me. But my voice was drowned in the crowd’s roar. The villa’s door had opened, and a bearded man in turban and black robe stood on the step, beckoning to the anxious faces in the hall behind him. Above the door was a small ceramic plaque bearing an Arabic inscription, and I realized that this modest suburban house was a mosque. I was present at an outbreak of religious cleansing.

Instructed by the policewoman, the imam urged his followers into the garden. Three Asian youths in jeans and white shirts emerged into the light, followed by an elderly Pakistani man and a woman in a jellaba carrying a suitcase. Heads lowered, they moved through the now silent crowd, guarded by the firemen and police. As she passed me, the woman stumbled on the kerb, and I caught the stale, sweat-stained odour from her robe, the reek of fear.

I raised my hands to help her, but a strong shoulder knocked me off balance. Two of the hardware store assistants in St George’s shirts blocked my path, narrowed eyes staring over my head. I tripped onto one knee beside the Volvo, my hands pressed against a charred rag of plastic seating. Legs stepped over me, shopping bags swinging past my face. Without comment, the policewoman lifted me onto my feet, then walked me through the crowd to her car, where the imam sat alone in the back seat. His small congregation had vanished into the smoky air.

‘You’re with him?’ The policewoman opened the passenger door for me. ‘You can sit up front … ?’

‘No, no. I’m passing through. I’m a tourist.’

‘A tourist? We don’t get many of those.’ She slammed the door and turned away from me. ‘Next time try Brooklands Metro-Centre. Or Heathrow … everybody’s welcome there.’

I walked back to the car park, no longer surprised that the policewoman thought of a shopping mall and an airport as tourist attractions. I had witnessed a very suburban form of race riot, which had barely disturbed the peaceful commerce of the town. The shoppers grazed contentedly, like docile cattle. No voice had been raised, no stone thrown, and no violence displayed, except to the old Volvo and myself.

I drove out of the car park, following a sign that pointed to Shepperton and Weybridge, glad to be leaving this strange little town. I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger. The decision by the estate-dwellers to reject the imam was an exercise of consumer choice.

Everywhere St George’s flags were flying, from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices, as this nameless town celebrated its latest victory.

2

The Homecoming

JOURNEYS SELDOM END when I think they do. Too often a piece of forgotten baggage goes on ahead and lies in wait for me when I least expect it, circling an empty carousel like evidence being assembled before a trial.

Airports, arrivals and the departure of one old pilot filled my mind as I entered Brooklands an hour later. Around me was a prosperous Thames Valley town, a pleasant terrain of comfortable houses, stylish office buildings and retail parks, every advertising man’s image of Britain in the twenty-first century. I passed a bright new sports stadium like an open-air nightclub, display screens showing a road-safety commercial that merged seamlessly into an elegant pitch for a platinum credit card. Brooklands basked. Prosperity glowed from every roof shingle and gravel drive, every golden Labrador and teenage girl riding her well-trained nag.

But I was still thinking of the frightened Muslim woman being escorted from the tiny mosque, the acid stench of her robe and the smell of terror that no perfume could mask. Something had gone seriously wrong in the Thames Valley, and already I identified her with my father, another victim of a malaise even deeper than shopping.

Three weeks earlier my father – Captain Stuart Pearson, formerly of British Airways and Middle East Airlines – set off on one of his regular Saturday afternoon outings to the Brooklands Metro-Centre. Still vigorous at seventy-five, he walked the eight hundred yards to the retail complex that was the west of London’s answer to the Bluewater mall near Dartford. Joining the crowd of shoppers, he crossed the central atrium on his way to the tobacconist that stocked his favourite Dunhill leaf.

Soon after two o’clock, a deranged gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing three shoppers and wounding fifteen more. The gunman escaped in the confusion that followed, but the police soon arrested a young man, Duncan Christie, a day-release patient with a criminal record and a long history of public disturbance. He had carried out an eccentric campaign against the huge mall, and a number of witnesses saw him flee the scene.

My father was hit in the head by a single bullet, and lost consciousness as fellow shoppers tried to revive him. With the other wounded he was taken to Brooklands Hospital, then transferred by helicopter to the specialist neurology unit at the Royal Free Hospital, where he died the next day.

I had not seen my father for several years, and in the hospital mortuary failed to recognize the tiny, aged face that clung to the bony points of his skull. Given the fifteen years he had spent in Dubai, I expected almost no one to attend the funeral service at the north London crematorium. A group of elderly BA pilots saw him off, grey but stalwart figures with a million miles in their ever-steady eyes. There were no local friends from Brooklands, but his solicitor’s deputy, a sympathetic woman in her forties named Susan Dearing, arrived as the service began and handed me the keys to my father’s flat.

Surprisingly, there was a representative from the Metro-Centre, a keen young manager from the public relations office who introduced himself to everyone as Tom Carradine, and seemed to see even this morbid event as a marketing opportunity. Masking his professional smile with an effort, he invited me to visit the mall on my next trip to Brooklands, as if something good might still come from the tragedy. I guessed that attendance at the funerals of shoppers who had died on the premises was part of the mall’s after-sales service, but I was too distracted to brush him off.

Two young women slipped into a rear pew as the recorded voluntary groaned from a concealed vent, a music that only the dead could appreciate, the sound of coffins straining like the timbers of storm-tossed galleons. One of the women laughed as the chaplain launched into his homily. Knowing nothing of my father, he was forced to recite the endless scheduled routes that Captain Pearson had flown. ‘The next year Stuart found himself flying to Sydney …’ Even I let out a giggle at this.

The women left as soon as the service ended, but I caught one of them watching me from the car park as the friend hunted for her keys. Dark-haired, with the kind of dishevelled prettiness that unsettles men, she was too young to be one of my father’s girlfriends, but I knew nothing about the old sky-dog’s last days. She waited irritably when her friend fumbled with the door lock, and tried to hide in the passenger seat. As their car passed she looked at me and nodded to herself, clearly wondering if I was too louche or too frivolous to match up to my father. For some reason I was sure that we would see each other again.

The traffic into Brooklands had slowed, filling the six-lane highway built to draw the population of south-east England towards the Metro-Centre. Dominating the landscape around it, the immense aluminium dome housed the largest shopping mall in Greater London, a cathedral of consumerism whose congregations far exceeded those of the Christian churches. Its silver roof rose above the surrounding office blocks and hotels like the hull of a vast airship. With its visual echoes of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, it fully justified its name, lying at the heart of a new metropolis that encircled London, a perimeter city that followed the path of the great motorways. Consumerism dominated the lives of its people, who looked as if they were shopping whatever they were doing.

Yet there were signs that a few serpents had made their home in this retail paradise. Brooklands was an old county town, but in the poorer outskirts I passed Asian shops that had been vandalized, newsagents boarded up and plastered with St George’s stickers. There were too many slogans and graffiti for comfort, too many BNP and KKK signs scrawled on cracked windows, too many St George’s flags flying from suburban bungalows. Never far from the defensive walls of the motorways, there was more than a hint of paranoia, as if these people of the retail city were waiting for something violent to happen.

Unable to breathe inside the low-slung Jensen, I opened the window, preferring the roadside microclimate of petrol and diesel fumes. The traffic unpacked itself, and I turned left at the sign ‘Brooklands Motor Museum’, moving down an avenue of detached houses behind high walls. My father had made his last home in a residential complex of three-storey apartment buildings in a landscaped park, reached by a narrow lane off the main avenue. As I drove between the privet walls I was still trying to prepare a few pat answers for the ‘interview’ that would decide my fitness for the post of his son, an application that had been turned down nearly forty years earlier.

Unconsciously I reapplied for the post whenever I met him – he was always affectionate but distant, as if he had run into a junior member of an old cabin crew. My mother sent him details of my school reports, and later my LSE graduation photograph, but only to irritate him. Luckily, I lost interest in him during my teens, and last saw him at the funeral of my stepmother, when he was too distressed to speak.

I had always wanted him to like me, but I thought of the single piece of baggage on the deserted carousel. How would I react if I found a framed photograph of myself on his mantelpiece, and an album lovingly filled with cuttings from Campaign about my then successful career?

Holding the door keys in my hand, I stepped from the car and walked across the deep gravel to the entrance, half expecting the neighbours to emerge from their flats and greet me. Surprisingly, not a window or curtain stirred, and I climbed the stairs to the top-floor landing. After a count of five, I turned the key and let myself into the hallway.

The curtains were partly drawn, and the faint light seemed to illuminate what was unmistakably a stage set. This was an old man’s flat, with its leather armchair and reading lamp, pipe rack and humidor. I almost expected my father to appear on cue, walk to the rosewood drinks cabinet and pour himself a Scotch and soda, take a favourite volume from the bookshelf and peruse its pages. It needed only the telephone to ring, and the drama would begin.

Sadly, the play had ended, and the telephone would never ring, or not for my father. I tried to wave the scene away, annoyed with my own flippancy, a professional habit of trivializing the whole of life into the clichés of a TV commercial. The unopened mail on the hall table struck a more sombre note. Curiously, several envelopes carried black bands and were addressed to my father, as if he himself would read them.

I walked across the sitting room and drew the curtains. The bright garden light flooded through the scent of stale tobacco and staler memories. In front of me, looming across the houses and office buildings, was the silver dome of the Metro-Centre, dominating the landscape to the west of London. For the first time I realized that its presence was almost reassuring.

For the next hour I moved around the flat, opening desk drawers and kitchen cupboards, like a burglar trying to strike up a relationship with a householder whose home he was ransacking. I was introducing myself to my father, even though I was paying him a rather late visit. I shook my head a little sadly over his spartan bedroom with its narrow mattress, part of a widower’s self-denial. Here an old man had dreamed his last dreams of flight, a reverie of wings that overflew deserts and tropical estuaries. I opened the wardrobe and counted his six uniform suits, hanging together like an entire flight crew of senior captains. On the dressing table was a set of silver-backed hairbrushes that I assumed he had given to my stepmother, memories that would greet him each morning of this gaunt but still glamorous woman. Another memory of married years was an ancient bottle of Chanel, contents long evaporated. Pressing the cap, I picked out a faint scent, echoes of a much-loved skin.

In the bathroom I opened the medicine cabinet, expecting to find a small warehouse of vitamin supplements. But the shelves were bare apart from a denture wash and a packet of senna pods. The old man had kept himself fit, using the rowing machine and exercise cycle in the spare bedroom. In the utility room beyond the kitchen was an ironing board and a table with the maid’s electric kettle and biscuit tin. Behind the piles of ironing and a row of heavily starched shirts was a workspace with a computer and printer, a few books stacked beside it.

I went back to the sitting room and scanned the shelves, with their rows of popular novels, cricket almanacs and restaurant guides to airline destinations: Hong Kong, Geneva, Miami. At some point I would go through his desk, hunting out share certificates, bank statements, tax returns, and assemble a financial picture of the estate he had left, money more than useful now that I was unemployed and likely to remain so.

But I left the drawers closed. I had learned enough to grasp that I scarcely knew this old man, and probably never would. I was looking for myself, but clearly I had played no part in his life.

In the centre of the mantelpiece was a framed photograph of a youthful airline captain standing with his crew beside a BOAC Comet, presumably my father’s first command. Gallant and confident, he looked ten years younger than his crew, and might have been my junior brother.

On either side of the photograph was a set of smaller frames, each containing a woman’s holiday snapshot. One showed a cheerful blonde legging her way out of a sports car. A second blonde posed in tennis whites beside a Cairo hotel, while a third grinned happily in front of the Taj Mahal. Others smiled across nightclub tables and lounged by swimming pools. All the women in this trophy corridor were happy and carefree; even the rather intense thirty-year-old in a fur coat whom I recognized as my mother seemed briefly to revive in front of my father’s camera lens. The display was oddly endearing, and already I liked the old pilot and decided I would get to know him better.

I drew the sitting-room curtains, ready to leave for my appointment with Sergeant Falconer at Brooklands police station, who would bring me up to date with the investigation into the tragic shooting. Trying not to think of the deranged youth who had fired into the crowd of shoppers, I looked out at the Brooklands racing track half a mile away. A section of the embankment had been preserved as a monument to the 1930s, the heroic age of speed, the era of the Schneider Trophy seaplane race and record-breaking flights, when glamorous women pilots in white overalls lit their Craven A cigarettes as they leaned against their aircraft. The public had been seized by a dream of speed no advertising agency could rival.

A faint smell had entered the room, the tang of an expensive but unpleasant cologne. Standing in the shadows beside the drawn curtains, I saw a thickset man in a black suit pause in the doorway, right hand feeling for the light switch on the wall. In his left hand he carried what seemed to be a stout metal truncheon, which he raised to test the darkness.

Willing myself to keep my nerve, I breathed steadily and edged away from the window, hidden from the intruder by the sitting-room door. In the light reflected from the framed photographs on the mantelpiece I could see the heavily built visitor still hovering in the hall, unsure whether to enter the room. Then I tripped over a pair of my father’s golf shoes, stumbled and knocked the shade from the standard lamp beside the desk. The intruder flinched back, the truncheon above his head, searching for a target. I threw myself at the door, shoulder-charging it like a rugby prop forward, and heard the man’s hand hit the wall, shattering the face of his wristwatch. He turned in a flurry of huge arms, sweat and hair oil, but I pinned the door against his hand, forcing his pudgy fingers to drop the truncheon.

I lost my balance and fell across the leather armchair. When I stood up and pulled back the door, gasping at the scented air, the man had gone. Feet sounded unevenly down the stairs, the limping gait of someone with a fractured kneecap. Another door slammed, but when I went to the sitting-room window the car park and gardens were silent.

I drew the curtains and opened the windows, then sat in the armchair and waited for the intruder’s scent to disperse. I assumed that I had been so awed by my father’s flat that I had forgotten to close the front door after me when I arrived. The visitor with the truncheon had behaved more like a housebreaker or a private detective than a neighbour calling to offer his sympathies.

When I left for my appointment with Sergeant Falconer, I found the ‘truncheon’ on the floor beside the door. I picked it up, unrolling a heavy magazine, a copy of the Journal of Paediatric Surgery.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.