I watched the muscles flexing in his cheeks. For all his flattery, the offer of a uniform was a clever power play of his own. Everyone in the uniform would be under Tom Carradine’s command, myself included. The threat to the Metro-Centre had sharpened his reflexes, but he remained the fanatical youth leader, eager to sacrifice himself for his principles.
We approached the South Gate entrance. Above the cantilevered marquee were a pair of loudspeakers used for crowd control, operated from a kiosk outside the doors. Through the din of pipe bands and marching feet I heard a succession of amplified clicks and stutters as someone adjusted the controls.
Then a harsh voice boomed over our heads:
‘NOTHING IS TRUE! NOTHING IS UNTRUE . . . !’
Carradine stopped and held my arm, as if the sky was about to fall onto the dome and slide down the roof towards us.
‘. . . UNTRUE! NOTHING IS . . . HEAR YE . . . NOTHING IS TRUE . . . !’
Carradine broke away from me, racing through the startled shoppers staring into the air. The two marshals followed him, manhandling young mothers and old ladies out of their way. They rushed towards the control kiosk and seized a tall youth in a string vest and frayed denims who was waving the microphone like a club, trying to fend them off.
When I reached the kiosk he was lying on the ground and being viciously kicked by the marshals. Blood poured from his nose and left ear. I recognized Duncan Christie, striking the marble floor with his chin as if in an epileptic fit. Carradine was stamping on Christie’s hands, and pointing frantically at the microphone that swung from its cord, almost mesmerized by this threat to the Metro-Centre. He had lost his peaked cap, but a small boy in a sailor suit found it among the swirl of feet and handed it back to him. Carradine placed it defiantly on his head, momentarily disoriented.
‘Tom, take it easy . . .’ I held his shoulders, trying to calm the confused manager, then waved the marshals away from Christie. ‘It’s a prank—no one’s hurt.’
The marching bands filled the air, and the crowd pressed through the doors, Christie’s slogan already forgotten. Winded and bruised, the blood from his nose pooling on the marble floor, Christie lifted himself onto his knees. He looked up at me and nodded warningly, as if willing me to turn back from the Metro-Centre.
One of the marshals leaned down and bellowed into his face. Christie raised a hand to quieten him, then twisted away and lunged towards me, arms outstretched to seize my shoulders.
Carradine and the marshals threw themselves on him, struggling to control his long, violent body, skin and ragged clothes slippery with dirt and grease. They kicked his feet from under him, but as fists jarred his forehead an arm reached out to me. He seized my left hand and pressed a hot stone into my palm.
As Christie was dragged through the crowd I opened my hand, shielding it from any curious gaze.
Lying in my palm was a live round of ammunition.
WEIGHING THE ROUNDin my hand, I moved through the entrance hall and mounted the travelator to the central atrium. After the moments of ugly violence, the air in the Metro-Centre was pleasantly cool and scented. The ambient sound system played a pleasant melody of marching songs, a sweetened reworking in the Mantovani idiom of the Horst Wessel song and the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. The music was distant and unobtrusive, but almost everyone was in step.
Still shaken by the brutal attack on Christie, I held the bullet up to the light. I tried to read the symbols stamped on the base of the cartridge. Christie had fought to press the round into my hand, but his message was of the rather oblique kind that he favoured. I doubted if he was threatening me. At the same time this gift of a bullet, probably of the same type that had killed my father, carried a clear signal from Christie, and not one that I wanted to hear . . .
IN THE CENTREof the atrium the three giant bears stood on their podium, paws beating time to the music, an amiable trio whose button eyes saw nothing and everything. In their toylike way they displayed a touching serenity. At their feet were more offerings of honey and treacle, and several ‘diaries’ penned by admirers which detailed their imaginary lives. In a light-hearted moment David Cruise had suggested a commercial in which he attacked the bears and chopped off their heads, but I had vetoed this. For one thing, the bears reminded me of all the toys never given to me during my childhood.
I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine studio where Cruise was conducting his afternoon discussion programme. The open deck was filled with visitors, as close to Cruise as the tighter security allowed. I found a chair in the exhibition area and watched a monitor screen relaying the last exchanges of the programme.
Cruise was tieless, dressed in the shabby black suit and tired white shirt that was now his trademark, an ensemble I had based on the costume worn by the doomed heroes of gangster films, desperate men on the verge of madness. Cruise had lost weight, and his signature tan was whitened down by the make-up department, giving him a hungry and martyred gaze, the fugitive messiah of the shopping malls.
Cruise was holding forth to his circle of docile and obedient housewives.
‘. . . “community”, Angela? That’s a word I hate. It’s the kind of word used by snobby, upper-class folk who want to put ordinary people in their place. Community means living in a little box, driving a little car, going on little holidays. It means obeying the rules that “they” tell you to obey. Sheila, you don’t agree? Frankly, the hell with you. Go back to your little box and polish your little dinette. Community? I know what an Asian community is. I know what a Muslim community is. We all know, don’t we? Yes . . . I hate community. For me, the only real community is the one we’ve built here at the Metro-Centre. That’s what I believe in. The sports teams, the supporters’ clubs, the gold-card loyalty nights. Sheila? Just shut up. I want to say something that’s going to shock you. Ready? When I leave here and go home, how do I feel? Betty, I’ll tell you. I feel lonely. Maybe I drink too much and feel too sorry for myself. I miss you girls. Sheila, Angela, Doreen, and everyone watching. I miss your mad questions and your crazy, beautiful dreams. I have these odd ideas—yes, Sheila, those too—I want to tear down the old world and build a new order, something like the one we’re building together inside the Metro-Centre. I know I’m right, I know we can bring a new world to life. It’s started here inside the Metro-Centre, but it’s spreading all over the real England. If you can smell the motorway you’re in the real England. You can feel it, can’t you, Cathy? Deep inside you. No, not there, Sheila. Come and see me later and we’ll find it. Yes, I’m lonely, I don’t sleep well, part of me, frankly, is a little bit bonkers. But I’m right, I’ve seen the future and I believe. I want to do things even I can’t mention. I need you all, and I need you here . . .’
The peroration wound to its climax, as the key camera closed in on Cruise’s haggardly handsome face. The producer made his windup signal, the housewives sank back, looking stunned, and Cruise disconnected his microphone and dashed for his dressing room.
Within seconds, phone calls, emails and text messages would arrive from viewers desperate to help Cruise assuage his demons. There would be invitations to barbecues, honorary memberships of sports clubs, heartfelt ‘please, please’ calls. More recruits would pour in, drawn towards the Metro-Centre. This was a political movement, but one without any supporting bureaucracy of placemen and jobsworths. The will to power came from the bottom up, from a thousand checkouts and consumer aisles. The promises were visible and within arm’s reach in the displays of merchandise. Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen. His chat-show act, based on scripts I tailored around him, might be a performance, but it validated the hunger and restlessness of his audience. The housewives mailing their photographs to him were performing rituals of assent, expressing their longing for a faith beyond politics.