Supermarkets were open all day, for anyone hungry enough to venture between the aisles and risk blundering into a meat locker that incubated every known disease. Freezer cabinets as hot as ovens would suddenly burst from their hinges, each one a vent of hell exhaling a miasma that drifted over the display counters. After digging in the rubble of unwanted cans, I would finally find a few tins of pâté, artichoke hearts in vinegar, jars of butter beans as pale as death.
I would then make my way to Julia, climbing to the second-floor gallery that circled the atrium, take a service staircase to the mezzanine and rush the final few steps past the landing where my father had been shot. An exhausting route, but Julia depended on my modest shopping trips. Limping on my infected foot, which she ritually rebandaged, I made my twice-a-day runs like a gentleman caller in a city under siege. Julia slept in a bed next to the elderly couple, with whom she shared her rations. In the treatment room she made friendly small talk, her eyes on the supermarket bag, like an unfaithful wife determined to survive. She knew I had forgiven her, but she hated me to watch her eat, as if part of her rejected her own right to life. Like everyone, she waited for the siege to end. I urged her to join me in the Holiday Inn, but she refused to leave the first-aid post, the only refuge of sanity in the dome.
AT NOON, WHENthe shadows briefly left us to ourselves, a few people crossed the atrium and began praying to the bears. Loyal supporters too weak to work, they wandered around the dome, rattling the grilles of the empty supermarkets in the hope of finding something to eat. One or two of them had marked barcodes on the backs of their hands, trying to resemble the consumer goods they most admired.
I watched them as I moved along the second-floor deck, feeling sorry for them until I discovered that my favourite deli had been looted during the night. This Polish speciality shop had been a modest haven of eastern European delicacies, spurned by the sweeter palates of Brooklands man and woman. Now it had been stripped of everything remotely edible, its doors chained and padlocked.
Unable to face Julia with an empty shopping bag, I decided to climb to the third floor. Pulling myself up the hand rail was a huge effort, but I rested on every landing, and there was safety on the upper floors. Madness lay below like the mist that covered the atrium.
I reached the third-floor gallery and sat on the top step until my head cleared. Beside me, pools of liquid evaporated in the sunlight. I watched them shrink and dissolve, unsure if I was seeing a mirage. Other drops formed a trail along the arcade, splashes from a casually carried bucket. I dipped my fingers in the nearest pool and raised them to my mouth. Immediately I thought of my Jensen, and the familiar aromatic reek of filling stations.
Petrol? Ten feet away, outside a discount furniture store, was a set of wet shoeprints, a trainer’s sole clearly stamped on the stone floor. I stepped into the foyer and searched the three-piece suites, drawn up like a dozing herd.
Petrol, I was sure. I found the source in a demonstration dining room, a domestic universe of rosewood-effect tables, polished chairs and curtains swagged over glassless windows, missing only the dinner-party chatter relayed from a loudspeaker. A jerrycan stamped with the logo of the Metro-Centre motor pool sat under the dining table, its cap missing, giving off a potent stench in the overheated air.
I backed away from it, aware that the smallest spark would ignite the vapour. I left the store and moved along the deck. The arcade of furniture stores was an arsonist’s paradise, retail space after retail space filled with inflammable sofas and varnished cabinets.
Was this a last-ditch threat by Carradine and his Metro-Centre supporters? Six stores along the arcade, I found a second jerrycan in a bedding store, surrounded by a harem’s wealth of goose-down pillows, fluffy quilts and duvets. The aroma of a hundred filling stations, threatening but somehow enticing, drifted from the silent stores and rose into the haze below the roof.
Fifteen minutes later I reached the top floor, where a third jerrycan sat on the landing above the stairwell, petrol slopped around it. A police helicopter drifted over the dome, throwing its spidery shadows across the galleries, a flicker of rotor blades scrambling through the dead vines and yuccas.
Above the cuffing downdraught I heard the fracture-cry of plate glass falling to the floor. A display stand collapsed in the entrance to a kitchenware store, hurling saucepans and pieces of heavy ovenware onto the landing. I pressed myself against the wall, almost expecting a furnace of petroleum vapour to explode from the store.
Lying at my feet between a colander and a copper steamer was a police-issue firearm, a Heckler & Koch machine gun of the type that had killed my father. I stared down at it in a befuddled way, trying to grasp how it had become a useful kitchen aid for the busy Brooklands home-maker.
Without thinking, I picked the weapon from the floor, surprised by its weight. The firing pin was cocked, and I held the pistol grip, easing my forefinger around the trigger.
I peered into the darkened shop. A woman in a black police uniform, dishevelled blonde hair torn from her scalp, struggled among the scattered saucepans. She thrashed on the floor, kicking at a cascade of falling frying pans, a demented housewife attacking her own home. She lunged at a man who burst from the darkness, and seized him around the waist. He threw her aside and emerged into the light, feet sliding on the saucepan lids, like an enraged husband escaping for ever from suburban life.
He gasped at the air and turned to me, seeing me for the first time. His camouflage jacket stank of petrol, as if he were about to combust spontaneously in the sunlight. He calmed himself, and a scarred hand reached out for the machine gun that I pointed towards him.
Recognizing Duncan Christie, I stepped back and levelled the weapon at his chest. Christie edged forward, aware that I would probably miss him if I fired. His quirky mouth with its unhealed lips worked through a set of grimaces, some whispered message to himself. His hand tried to grip the barrel of the gun, but as he stared into my face, willing me not to fire, he recognized me through my beard.
‘Mr Pearson? Remember? Duncan Christie . . .’
Sergeant Falconer leaned against the doorway, too exhausted to throw herself at Christie. She gasped something into the radio clipped to her left shoulder, then signalled to me with her free hand.
‘Shoot him, Richard! Shoot him now!’
I watched Christie, well aware that I was holding the actual weapon that had killed my father. Looking at this hopeless misfit, sustained by a single obsession, I knew that his life was about to end, expiring in the sights of a police marksman waiting in the upper galleries.
‘Mr Pearson . . .’ Christie exposed his broken teeth. ‘You know what happened. She made me kill your father . . .’
Sergeant Falconer shouted in warning as Christie lunged towards me. I moved across the arcade, raised the weapon above my head and flung it over the rail.
‘Go!’ I shouted at Christie. ‘You know what to do! Run . . . !’
SERGEANT FALCONER STOODunsteadily among the clutter of saucepans, one hand on an injured knee, the other trying to tether her blonde hair to her head.
‘Mr Pearson? For pity’s sake, you’re madder than he is.’
‘I forgive him.’ I listened to Christie racing along the gallery below us, running through endless arcades of autumn fashions and television sets, fleeing from a universe of digital cameras and cocktail cabinets. ‘He can go—if he can find somewhere.’
‘Forgive him?’ Sergeant Falconer switched off her radio. The bruises on her forehead were showing through her pale skin, but she seemed far more determined than the uneasy woman I had seen making tea in Fairfax’s office. I guessed that she had put the murder conspiracy behind her and found a new compass bearing in her life. ‘Forgive him? For your father? It doesn’t matter.’