Carradine gazed triumphantly at the glum faces and listened to Sangster whispering in his ear. He then announced that the work groups would take part in a competition. The team that did the best job of cleaning and waste disposal during the next week would be allowed to leave the dome.
As the hostages dispersed, queuing to collect their mops and pails, I caught up with Sangster, still smiling slyly to himself.
‘Richard? Good . . .’ He laid a huge arm across my shoulders. ‘Rather a neat wheeze, don’t you think?’
‘ “Work Makes You Free”?’
‘Who said that? It’s very true. It keeps alive the sporting instinct, and gives them something to live for. At the same time it weeds out the stronger and more determined elements.’
‘Those who might cause trouble?’
‘We can’t lose. A sick hostage is much more valuable than a robust one. And less dangerous. Don’t worry, I’ll see that you’re excused from cleaning duties.’
‘I’m very grateful. It’s good to have a friend in high places. As it happens, I can barely walk.’
‘Your foot?’ Sangster frowned with distaste at my bloodstained bandage. ‘We could find you a sedentary job. Rinsing mops, say? Is it psychosomatic?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll ask Tony Maxted.’
‘I would.’ Sangster stared at me with a straight face, then broke into a cheery grin. ‘You want to stay here, Richard. You know that.’
‘I don’t agree.’
‘Of course you do. This place is your . . . spiritual Eden. It’s all you have to believe in.’
‘Never. Tell me—the siege, when will it end?’
‘Let’s wait and see.’ Sangster seemed almost gleeful at the remote prospect. ‘That’s what’s so interesting. This isn’t about the Metro-Centre: it’s about England today. Now, go back to your room and rest. You’re too valuable to be ill. When David Cruise wakes, you’ll be there to cheer him up.’
‘Will he wake?’
Sangster turned to wave. ‘He’d better . . .’
I WATCHED THEhostages shuffle to their workstations, with all the enthusiasm of patients ordered to clean their own hospital. Discipline ruled, and a more martial spirit prevailed. The cartons of perished pizzas, the shoals of rotting fish fingers, the thousands of cartons of rancid milk were stripped from the shelves and carted away to the refuse hoppers in the basement. Carradine and Sangster introduced a strict rationing system, and we queued for our modest meals of corned beef, pilchards and baked beans.
Negotiations continued with the police, who were increasingly impatient as the release of hostages slowed, but the lack of violence forced them to bide their time. A full-scale assault would leave scores of hostages dead, and the Metro-Centre was a sniper’s paradise. More to the point, floor-to-floor street battles would inflict millions of pounds’ worth of damage on the unprotected merchandise.
A few hostages, the last of the sick and elderly, were released. On the portable radio that Maxted gave to me in an attempt to keep up my spirits, I listened to an account of their debriefing. All the freed hostages were carefully searched for any plundered jewellery, watches and cameras, but from the very start of the siege none had been found. No one had slipped a single fountain pen or gold chain into their pockets. The consultant psychologists were baffled by this, but a likely explanation struck me a few days later when I wandered through a large furniture emporium near the Holiday Inn.
Vaguely searching for a more comfortable mattress than my fever-sodden berth in the hotel, I stood in the entrance to the store as the pilot lights shone on the freshly waxed floor. A work party had moved through the ground level, and the tang of polish hung on the unmoving air, making me feel almost giddy. By sweeping out these temples to consumerism, by wiping and waxing and buffing, we made clear that we were ready to serve these unconsecrated altars. Every shop and store in the Metro-Centre was a house of totems. We accepted the discipline that these appliances and bathroom fittings imposed. We wanted to be like these consumer durables, and they in turn wanted us to emulate them. In many ways, we wanted to bethem . . .
WATER LAPPED ATmy feet, a cooling stream that drained away the fever in my bones. Half asleep in my deckchair beside the lake, I listened to the wavelets tapping at the sand. Somewhere was the rhythmic murmur of deep water, the same tides that my father had sailed as he circled the globe.
The chair legs sank into the wet sand, tipping me forward. I looked down to find the water swilling around my ankles. The lake had come alive, its surface rolling towards the shoreline.
Someone had switched on the wave machine. I stood up as dark water sluiced across my feet, covered by a slick of lubricating oil. Two engineers stood outside the Holiday Inn, working at the fuse box that controlled the lighting arrays around the roof and terrace. Bars of strip neon glowed and dimmed as the emergency generator pushed out its erratic current. Moving through the fuses, the engineers had switched on the wave machine. Roused in its watery vault, the machine stirred and woke, driving the deep water across the lake.
I stepped back onto the dry sand, as the waves washed through the debris of beer cans and cigarette packets, receding when the undertow sucked them into its deeps. A stronger wave rolled in, nudging a greasy freight of floating magazines and a soggy raft that I guessed was a waterlogged cushion from a restaurant banquette, trapped for weeks under the wave machine’s paddle.
The lumpy parcel, crudely lashed with rope and duct tape, drifted towards me, and with a last heave bumped against my chair. As I stepped forward, about to kick it back into the water, the undertow turned it onto its side. A figure with human features lay trussed inside a small carpet, perhaps a piece of teak statuary that one of the hostages had tried to hide before leaving the Metro-Centre.
A wave washed over the figure, dispersing the glaze of oil and dirt. Eyes with intact pupils stared up at me, and I recognized the blanched face of the Pakistani barrister I had seen remonstrating with Carradine.
Behind me, the engineers switched off the current. A last wave rolled across the beach, its foam hissing among the beer cans. With a faint sigh, the undertow retrieved the body and drew it down towards the dark floor of the lake.
35
NORMALITY
DAVID CRUISE WAS DYING, among stuffed elephants and kangaroos, surrounded by cheerful wallpaper and plastic toys, in sight of the television studio that had created him.
The Metro-Centre’s first-aid post, now housing an intensive care unit, occupied a suite of rooms below the mezzanine, usually visited by small children who had scraped their knees and pensioners with nosebleeds. For the present, the toys were corralled inside a playpen, and the reception room once manned by a kindly sister was filled with beds commandeered from a nearby store. The six patients lay on luxurious mattresses, unwashed pillows leaning against quilted boudoir headboards. Almost all were elderly hostages unable to keep up with Carradine’s more dictatorial regime.
Tony Maxted was crouching on a chair beside a white-haired woman, trying to extract a broken dental plate. He waved to me and pointed to the treatment room. He seemed unsurprised to see me, though every morning he urged me to make the most of my Sangster contacts and join the few hostages still leaving the dome.
Julia Goodwin, though, seemed surprised when I walked into the treatment room. Pale and nerveless, her neck flushed by a persistent rash, she was almost asleep on her feet, trying to break the seal on a bandage pack while searching for a stray hair over her eyes. As always, I was glad to see her, and had the odd sense that as long as I was with her, emptying the pedal bins and foraging for packets of herbal tea, she would be all right. An absurd notion, which reminded me of my childhood motoring trips with my mother, when I strained forward to watch the road as she argued with herself over the traffic lights.