We set off.
I began to wonder why I’d bothered. Sally spoke to us through a husky microphone and a young man passed amongst us handing out brightly coloured brochures and maps, designed to fill in the gaps which took up most of the actual view. It was a building site. Structures loomed in the mist, but the place seemed most like a germinal suburban housing estate with pretensions towards community.
I took notes. I ran my eye over the documents, tried to line up the plan with the current reality. I noticed that the fair haired man was not taking notes, and that the handouts lay ignored on the seat beside him. He seemed to be texting. It annoyed me, for some reason.
There were questions — few of them anything to do with what Sally was telling us or showing us. They were instead about the costs, the funding, the amount of government money which would be required, about over-runs and contracts and timescales. Someone asked about the rumours of poison on the land. Another about the removal of allotments and the destruction of wild habitats. Sally was very good. She gave no impression of dissemblance or reticence, answered as fully as she was able, and was not shy about admitting, or claiming, that she didn’t know. She’d find out. She took notes. I glanced at the fair haired man. Still no interest. A news anchor, maybe. Still texting. I looked again, at his phone. He seemed to be holding it sideways, and was squinting at it. He was keeping it low, but he was pointing it out the window. He was not texting, he was filming.
Ridiculously — like a good schoolboy — I gasped, or twitched somehow. Whatever it was, he turned his head and looked at me. He still had on his face the affable half smile that he’d worn since I’d first seen him. He smiled more broadly now. Then he gave me a big wink, and looked back to his phone.
It went on far too long. Eventually we stopped at a mound of rubble beside a cleared space. We took Sally’s word for it that this was the stadium itself. She went through its various meaningless statistics, and I looked at the artists’ impressions. I found it hard to imagine anything so large existing in a space which seemed now so small. And I was having a great deal of trouble imagining how a group of people — who it was up to me to create — would go about attacking something that not only did not exist, but which seemed, at this moment, so unlikely.
— Sally, may I?
— Lloyd, yes?
It was him, the filming anchor man. Lloyd rang no bells. I watch enough news, but I couldn’t place him. His laminated badge was stuck somewhere behind his jacket.
— I presume that since the site was chosen, all access to it has been strictly controlled. But what stops — what prevents — one of our more imaginative villains from having already, miles from here, where they make those huge girders so neatly piled to our left, stuffed one of the things with C4 or plutonium or what have you, ready to detonate in the middle of the opening ceremony, just as the Beckhams light the flame?
There was much laughter. Sally laughed as well. Lloyd smiled widely, and glanced at me, and gave me another of his winks. I glared at him.
— Well, said Sally, you can be assured that the materials that arrive on the site are subjected to security checks, just as the people are.
— How so?
— How?
— Yes, what happens to them? Are they X-rayed, analysed? How are they checked?
— I’m not quite sure Lloyd. I can get someone in site security to get in touch with you if you like.
— Oh, yes please.
— So, the seating …
— Are they all checked?
— All what?
— All the materials? Will each girder in that pile have been examined, or will you just test a representative sample?
— You know Lloyd, I have no idea. But it’s an interesting question. I’ll get Matt Grainger to get in touch with you. Is that OK?
— Yes, Sally, thank you so much.
I stared at him, a cold patch of shock spreading out over my insides. He was not an anchor. I was beginning to fear that he was … I must have been looking at him very strangely, for he glanced at me, and then looked again, and raised his eyebrows and half shrugged, questioningly. I shook my head, looked down at my notes.
We arrived at a large temporary structure, not unlike a circus tent. We were ushered in for a video presentation. A man talked to us. We were given tea, coffee, biscuits. We were allowed to mingle with some engineers, a couple of sporting people, someone on the organizing committee. It was all a blur to me. I kept my eye on Lloyd. Perhaps not very discreetly, as Sally appeared at my side out of nowhere, insisting that she introduce me.
— Clive, this is Lloyd Page. You two should compare notes. It’s the first time I’ve had two novelists on the same tour.
He shook my hand firmly, and when he heard the word novelist he smiled, and clasped my hand in both of his.
— Clive …?
— Drayton.
— Clive Drayton! Of course! What a pleasure to meet you. I very much enjoyed your last book. Very much. I simply don’t understand why it wasn’t shortlisted.
— Thank you, I said. Quietly. I was stuttering in thought. Novelist. What was he talking about? Shortlisted for what? Sally drifted away.
— Well, I’m intrigued I must say. As to your interest. How fascinating. It’s no surprise to hear of interest from the genre chaps, the hacks like me. But from a literary writer such as yourself, to be focussing on an event like this … well, it’s intriguing, as I say. I don’t suppose you want to tell me what your angle is?
— Angle?
— I’m presuming it’s a novel of course? Am I wrong?
— No, I, yes, it’s a novel.
— Well well. How fascinating. And good too. At last a writer who won’t be in direct competition with me.
— I don’t … I don’t understand.
— Oh, well, you know the type of thing I write. My DCI? Billy Flint? Ex S.A.S.? You probably haven’t read the books. I’m not surprised. I don’t read the bloody things myself, I just write them.
He laughed loudly, and I remembered him from the television. Late Review. Maybe that books quiz on BBC 4. Sometimes he reviewed the papers on Sky News. I swallowed some sort of giant knot of misery. It stuck in my chest.
— Third time I’ve been on this damned tour. It’s useless, but I like to keep an eye on how the details change. And they do. The figures alter every time, just a little. And from my point of view — how to blow the place up — it’s full of deliciously tempting holes. Full of them. My Billy is a lummox really, but he gets things done, as they say. I’m going to have him stumble over a plot. An hunchy sort of thing. Ephemeral. He senses it. Then there’ll be disbelieving superiors, woman trouble, all of that. Tends to be a high body count in the Billy Flint books. This one might just top them all.
He winked, again. I was silent, the flood in my chest obstructing all thought.
— That makes six now.
— Six?
— Yes. That I know of. No doubt there are others of course. But Sally has told me of three, I know Candy Frame is working on something, and now you. Six, isn’t it?
— Six novelists?
I thought I was going to be sick.
— Yes. Not a single original idea between us. Still, it’s big enough. And obvious enough. Of course people want to do it. Though you’re the first non-genre one as I say. That I know of. Fascinating.
I didn’t hear much more of anything Lloyd Page said. Something inside me went under. I watched his mouth move. I watched his good looks animate and express, his fair hair falling over his tanned skin like sand on a distant shore, becoming more distant with each flailing moment.