He remained the voice of the Metro-Centre, the ambassador from the kingdom of the washing machine and the microwave oven, but he was also the leader of a virtual political party whose influence was spreading through the motorway towns. Like other demagogues, he traded on the psychopathic traits in his personality. Yet he had emerged, not from the bitter streets and working men’s taverns of depression-era Munich, but from the hospitality rooms of afternoon TV, a man without a message who had found his desert.
THE LAST OFthe coaches sped down the dual carriageway, carrying teams and supporters to Brooklands, police outriders with their headlights flashing. The waiting traffic moved forward, impatient to set off in pursuit.
I squeezed through the amber, saluted by a beaming constable who waved me on. Despite my role at the Metro-Centre, I was thinking of Julia Goodwin. We would meet later that afternoon, when she finished her shift at the hospital, and already I envied the patients she would be touching with her worn and tired hands.
A vague sense of unresolved guilt hovered between us, as if she had aborted our child without telling me. But at least this edginess showed her fierce honesty. I guessed that she had been involved with Geoffrey Fairfax, Dr Maxted and Sangster in an attempt to exploit the Metro-Centre shooting for their own ends. The three men tried again on the night of the bomb attack, hoping to seize power with their puppet Bonaparte, the reluctant David Cruise. They had singed their eyebrows and now kept their heads down, but Fairfax had destroyed himself, either setting the bomb in my car or trying to defuse it.
The coroner, perhaps prompted by Superintendent Leighton, brought in a verdict of death by misadventure, but Fairfax was quickly abandoned by his legal colleagues. I was one of the few mourners at his funeral, mourning my Jensen as much as this eccentric solicitor, part-time soldier and full-time fanatic. Geoffrey Fairfax belonged to the past and a Brooklands that had vanished, while I had committed myself to the Metro-Centre and the memory of my father, to Julia Goodwin and the new Brooklands of the future.
23
THE WOMEN’S REFUGE
THE TRAFFIC INTO BROOKLANDS was slowing again, delayed by police setting up steel railings and no-entry signs, part of the lavish preparations for the weekend sports rally and parade. Several key football matches would take place that evening, and there were hard-fought finals in the rugby, basketball and ice-hockey competitions.
Cricket, as I noted whenever Julia asked me for the test-match scores, was not played in Brooklands or the motorway towns. Contact sports ruled the field of play, the more brutal the better. Blood and aggression were the qualities most admired. The hard tackle was the essence of sport, the kind of violence that flourished in the margins of the rule book. Cricket was too amateurish, its long-pondered intricacies trapped in a cat’s cradle of incomprehensible laws. Above all, it was too middle-class, and unconnected to the kind of impulse buying favoured by Metro-Centre supporters. Julia told me that she had captained the cricket team at her girls’ school, but her interest in the game was a whimsical stand against the far harder stadium values that now dominated Brooklands.
We were meeting at three, when her shift ended at the hospital. She hated the sports rallies, the unending din of marching bands that drummed at the windows above the wail of ambulances and fire engines. Usually she would be on duty, dealing with the human wreckage stretchered into the A&E triage rooms. Thinking of herself for once, she manipulated the rosters to give us a rare free weekend.
I hoped that I would share at least part of it with her, but she had recently kept me at arm’s length. We had yet to make love again after the uneasy night together in my father’s bed. Sex with me had been an act of penance, expiating some unadmitted guilt. Whenever we met she watched me warily, hair over her eyes as if to veil any telltale signs. But I was always glad to be with her. I loved her moods and bolshieness, the cigarette stubbed out in a slushy sorbet, the adversarial relationship with her car, the handsome black cat who slept beside her like a demon husband. Everything between us inverted the usual rules. We had begun with sex of a fraught and desperate kind, followed by a long period of wooing. As far as I knew, I had never let her down, and I hoped that one day she would finally forgive me for whatever she had done to my father in the past.
Waiting in the traffic that approached the Metro-Centre, I watched the columns of supporters marching to their assembly points in the residential side streets. Lines of coaches were parked under the sycamores and beeches, decked with St George’s flags. Supporters now came from as far as Bristol and Birmingham, attracted by the martial mood that gripped the town, ready to stamp through the streets, cheer their lungs out and spend their savings in the retail parks that sponsored the events.
Twenty thousand visitors occupied Brooklands every weekend. In the comfortable driver’s seat of the Mercedes, I marvelled at how disciplined they were, obeying the brusque commands of the stewards steering them to the Metro-Centre, thousands of suburban crusaders emblazoned with logos and moving as one. At synchronized intervals, in an effort to keep the middle-aged blood flowing, phalanxes of ice-hockey or basketball supporters would snap to attention and mark time on the spot, arms swinging like blades in a human wind farm.
Impatient to get home, I checked my text messages, hoping that David Cruise had survived for forty-eight hours without me. There was a brief message from Julia, saying that she would now be working until six at the Asian women’s refuge. Brooklands High School had broken up for the summer, and Sangster had lent part of the school to Asian women and children so intimidated by sporting revellers that they refused to go home.
Impatient to see Julia, I turned into the empty bus lane and drove to the nearest side street, then set off through the residential avenues crowded with coaches. Marshals were controlling the traffic, forcing private cars to give way to the lumbering behemoths. Most of the middle-class residents detested the sports weekends, so I picked a St George’s pennant from the rear seat and clipped it to the windscreen pillar, then put on my St George’s baseball cap. At the next checkpoint I was waved through by the marshals, and exchanged vigorous salutes with them.
The cap and pennant were a disguise, but one that worked. I hated the self-importance of these pocket gauleiters, but the sense of an enemy sharpened the reflexes and lifted everyone’s spirits. Visiting league teams and their supporters were seen as friendly citizens of the new federation of motorway towns, the conference of the Heathrow tribes. Everyone in Brooklands was a friend, but out there somewhere was the ‘enemy’, constantly referred to by David Cruise on his cable programmes but never defined.
At the same time, everyone knew who the real enemy was—subversive elements in local government offices, the county establishment, the church and the old middle classes, with their jodhpurs and dinner parties, their private schools and anal-retentive snobberies. I sympathized with the marching supporters, and was ready to back them in any confrontation. They had seized the initiative and were defining a new political order based on energy and emotion. They had re-dramatized their lives, marching proudly and in step with the military enthusiasm of a people going to war, while staying faithful to the pacific dream of their patios and barbecues. All this might be part of a huge marketing strategy, but I felt revived by the strutting swagger, the discipline and rude health. There was a hint of arrogance that could be dangerous after dark, but a dash of Tabasco spiced up the dullest dish.