‘And the Home Office?’

‘They don’t want it to end, though they’re being subtle about it. This is a huge social laboratory, and they’re watching from the front row as the experiment heats up. Consumerism is running out of road, and it’s trying to mutate. It’s tried fascism, but even that isn’t primitive enough. The only thing left is out-and-out madness . . .’

Maxted broke off as a squad of some fifty hostages trudged into the atrium, led by a marshal with a shotgun. They carried buckets and mops, brooms and aerosols of furniture polish, enough equipment to buff and shine the world. Surprisingly, they were in good spirits, as if determined to be the best cleaning squad in the dome.

Together they formed up below the mezzanine terrace, waiting as Carradine and Sangster walked down the steps where my father had met his end. An aide carried a pile of St George’s shirts, neatly pressed and store-new.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Maxted. ‘Don’t tell me Carradine is going to complain about the ironing. The siege must be over.’

‘Nice idea. But I don’t think so . . .’

Carradine briefly addressed the cleaning squad. Sangster prowled behind him, eyes searching the upper terraces under the roof. The marshal signalled to his force, and a dozen members of the squad lowered their brooms and buckets to the floor and stepped forward. Carradine moved along the line, shaking them by the hand and handing over a St George’s shirt.

‘Maxted—it’s some sort of sick game . . .’

‘No. It’s exactly what you see. They’re being sworn in. They’re no longer hostages and they’re joining the rebellion.’

‘Joining . . . ?’

Without thinking, I stood up, steadying myself against Maxted’s shoulder. I watched the dozen former hostages don their shirts, then move away in an informal group, exchanging banter with Sangster. They were at ease with themselves and the vast building, with the deep rose light that lit the entrances to the stores and cafes around the atrium. They were immigrants to a new country, already naturalized, citizens of the shopping mall, the free electorate of the cash till and the loyalty card.

‘Richard . . .’

Maxted spoke warningly, but I was watching the ceremony. At the last moment a thirteenth volunteer, a sturdy young woman in jeans and a biker’s leather jacket, stepped forward to volunteer. All doubts satisfied, she walked up to Carradine, came smartly to attention and claimed her St George’s shirt.

Holding my shoe in one hand, I began to limp forward, then felt Maxted take my arm.

‘Richard, let’s sit down and think . . .’

He guided me back to the bears. Carradine and Sangster moved away, and the marshal drilled off his depleted hostage squad, assigning them to a supermarket near the atrium.

Maxted took the blood-caked shoe from my hand. Smiling a little wanly, he tapped it against his free hand.

‘Richard, what were you doing? Any idea?’

‘Not much.’ I looked up at his almost kindly face. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘That’s what I mean. Now, go back to the hotel. I’ll see you later and we’ll find something to eat.’

‘But, Julia . . . ?’

‘I’ll see she’s all right.’ He handed me the shoe. ‘Dear chap, you were going to join them. The Metro-Centre finally got to you . . .’

36

SHRINES AND ALTARS

THE FIRST SHRINES had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

At dawn, when the last gunfire had died down, I stepped onto the balcony of my room at the Holiday Inn. No one within the dome had slept through the night, and a thin mist filled the shopping thoroughfares, a hazy fog of insomnia that haunted the arcades and pedestrian decks, in places dense enough to conceal an army marksman.

I assumed that the police commandos had withdrawn, and that the real danger, as always, came from one’s own side, from Carradine’s untrained militia. After thirty seconds on the balcony, inhaling the over-ripe air with its guarantee of another tropical day, I wiped the sweat from my face onto the net curtain and found my way to the bathroom.

Two bottles of Perrier were all that remained of my stock. Standing in the shower stall, I drank one and then poured the second over myself, feeling the vivid, carbonated stream bring my skin alive.

As usual, I avoided the washbasin mirror, where I would be joined by the tramp-like figure who shared the bedroom with me. Whenever I saw him, bearded and scarily calm, he moved towards me like a sharp-eyed beggar spotting a prospect. Then he flinched away from me, repelled by my body odour and the even more rancid stench of deep and dangerous obsessions.

Still nominally playing my role as David Cruise’s adviser, I was left alone by Carradine and his marshals as they rallied their three hundred supporters, kept careful watch on the few score remaining hostages and defended the Metro-Centre against the armed might of a government. Meanwhile I did my best to look after Julia Goodwin, scavenged through the abandoned supermarkets and brought her enough food to feed her four patients and herself.

I always stayed until she had forced herself through the tins of frankfurters, condensed milk and foie gras, rewarding me with a plucky smile. Her two volunteer nurses had long since left the dome and returned to their husbands and children, but Julia was still determined to stay to the end. I sensed that in caring for David Cruise, keeping him forever on the edge of death, she was performing a penance similar to the shared bed into which she had drawn me at my father’s flat.

We were now into the second month of the Metro-Centre siege, and time had begun to dilate in unexpected ways. Days of sweaty boredom merged into each other, broken by the unending quest for food and water as Carradine’s quartermasters opened another supermarket for a few hours. Then everything would change abruptly, as Carradine released four or five of the more exhausted hostages. In exchange, the bathroom taps ran for half an hour, enough time to fill the baths and lavatory cisterns and stave off the danger of a typhoid epidemic.

But the patience of the police and Home Office had run out. Unsurprisingly, their willingness to go for the long haul, in the hope that the mutineers would lose heart or fall out among themselves, seemed to fluctuate with public interest in the siege. The television crews around the dome had been drifting away for weeks, and a Home Office junior minister blundered badly when he described the seizure of the Metro-Centre as part of an industrial dispute, a sit-in by disgruntled staff. When the siege was dropped from the main TV bulletins and exiled to late-night discussion programmes on BBC2 I knew that there would be a show of strength.

At three o’clock that morning, as I lay on the sofa beside the window, trying to breathe the humid, microwave air, I heard helicopters crossing the dome. Searchlights swerved and loudspeakers blared. Stun grenades exploded against the metal panels high above the atrium, showering debris on the luckless bears. A powerful explosion blew a hole in the dome above the portico of the North Gate entrance. A joint army and police commando entered the mall, and swiftly overpowered the small group of rebels defending the entrance. Unable to raise the fire door, the commandos moved to their primary target, the eighty remaining hostages held in the banqueting hall at the Ramada Inn.

As it happened, two days earlier Sangster had moved the hostages from their squalid quarters at the Ramada Inn and marched them to the empty Novotel. When the commandos burst unopposed into their original target they found themselves stumbling through the darkness among overflowing latrine buckets. This gave Carradine and his armed defence units time to arrive on the scene and surround the Ramada Inn.