I SAT IN MY CAR outside Brooklands High School, waiting until the last of the pupils had left. Swarming past me, they filled the nearby streets with their noise and anarchy, a teenage rabble that would soon take over the world. I liked them all, the cruel and scruffy lads with their surrealist humour, and the cruel and queenly girls.
When the teachers had driven away I left the car and walked down the drive littered with sweet wrappers, cigarette papers and cola cans, the debris of an amiable plague. I entered the main hall, still echoing with the shouts and catcalls, filled with the reek of testosterone and unlaundered sports gear.
The head teacher’s secretary confirmed my appointment. Assuming that I was a would-be parent, certain to be disappointed at this oversubscribed school, she was cheerful and sympathetic. She told me that Mr Sangster was in the library but would join me shortly.
I waited outside his office for fifteen minutes, then set off in search of the head teacher. I guessed that William Sangster, one of Duncan Christie’s three witnesses, was none too keen to meet me, having done his bit to set free the man about to be charged with my father’s murder. Even a lifetime’s coping with disagreeable parents and education committees would be little help in dealing with a son desperate for revenge.
The library was a warren of dog-eared books, billets-doux and cigarette butts stubbed out in alcoves. Sangster had left a few seconds before me, and I listened to the sound of retreating feet in a corridor. I walked past the empty classrooms, nodded to a teacher marking exercise books beside her blackboard, and saw a tall man in a black overcoat turn quickly towards the gymnasium.
We crossed the sprung wooden floor together, separated by fifteen yards of polished surface but in step, taking part in a form of remote dancing. Sangster moved briskly, but I caught up with him as we entered a block of sixth-form classrooms.
He gave up with a resigned flourish and waited for me to join him, brushing the dandruff from his overcoat. He was an unnecessarily large man, with heavy arms and shoulders and a plump, babyish face, far younger than I expected. He avoided my offered hand, and I wondered if he was an impostor, a thirty-five-year-old actor who had somehow taken charge of a sink school and was already looking for a way out. He noticed my feet avoiding three condom sachets on the floor.
‘We’ve . . .’ He affected a mild stutter, pointing to the sachets, and smiled bleakly. ‘We’ve . . . taught them something. Mr—?’
‘Pearson. I have an appointment. Richard Pearson.’
He stared at my raised hand, as if I were trying to sell him a sex aid, and moved a deeply bitten forefinger from his babyish lips. ‘Right. Your father . . . ?’
‘. . . died after the Metro-Centre shooting. You were there.’
‘I remember.’ Sangster stared at the condom sachets. ‘Tragic, absolutely. You have my sympathies.’
He beckoned me into an empty classroom and led me on a tour of the form, then indicated a desk in the front row. When I sat down he prowled along the blackboard, pausing to erase a numeral in a maths equation, clearly one of those large men who never seem to know what to do with parts of their bodies. He looked down at his left arm, as if discovering it for the first time, unsure how to fit the limb into his mental picture of himself.
Impatient to get to the point, and tired of humouring this rather odd man, I said: ‘Mr Sangster, you’re obviously busy. Could we . . . ?’
‘Of course.’ He sat in the form master’s chair, and gave me his full attention, smiling in a genuinely friendly way. ‘Two of our parents were injured that day, Mr Pearson. You desperately want to find who killed your father. But I’m not sure there’s anything I can do.’
‘Well . . . in a sense, you’ve already done it.’
‘Is that so? How?’
‘You helped to clear Duncan Christie.’
Sangster sat back, head resting against the maths equation, tolerating my rudeness. ‘I testified that I saw Christie in the entrance hall when the shots were fired. I didn’t help to clear him. It’s not in my gift. It was an eye-witness statement.’
‘You were actually in the Metro-Centre?’
‘Naturally. There were two other witnesses who testified.’
‘I know. For some reason, that bothers me.’ Trying not to unsettle this highly strung head teacher, I put on my friendliest account-executive smile, a grimace I had hoped to abandon for ever. ‘You all knew him. Isn’t that odd?’
‘Why?’ Chair tilted back, Sangster watched me across the form master’s desk, blowing out his plump cheeks like a puffer fish estimating the size of its prey. ‘We wouldn’t have recognized him otherwise. Why would we pretend we’d seen him?’
‘That’s the nub of the problem. It’s difficult to think of a common motive . . .’
‘Mr Pearson, are you suggesting we conspired to free Christie?’ Sangster touched the blackboard behind his head, pretending to half-listen to me. ‘Three respectable witnesses?’
‘You are respectable. Almost too respectable. It’s possible you saw someone like Christie. You might think you saw him, and naturally you feel he’s innocent.’
‘He is innocent. Mr Pearson, I taught him. For three years I was his maths teacher, in this very classroom. In fact, he sat at that desk where you’re sitting now. Someone fired those shots, but not Duncan Christie. He’s too unreliable, too erratic. He does odd jobs for me, mending the fence or mowing the lawn. He works hard for five minutes and then his mind sails off, he drops his tools and disappears for a week. His brain is a kind of theatre, where he plays games with his own sanity. He did not shoot your father.’
‘Right.’ I eased myself out of the ink-stained desk. ‘As it happens, I agree with you.’
‘You agree? Good.’ Sangster stood up and brushed the blackboard chalk from his coat, reversed equations falling into dust at his large feet. He gestured me to the door. ‘But why . . . ?’
‘I saw him outside the magistrates’ court. He was acting the killer, just to wind everyone up. He only stopped when he recognized me and knew it wasn’t a game. The real assassin wouldn’t have done that.’
‘Well put.’ Sangster nodded sagely. ‘You’ve been through a lot, Richard, and you’ve kept your focus. It may look like a conspiracy, but many of us knew Duncan Christie and we didn’t want to see him framed . . .’
WE SET OFF along the corridor, Sangster’s huge bulk almost filling the narrow space. He had visibly relaxed, patting my shoulder as if I were a pupil who had displayed a sudden flair for differential calculus. He closed the door of his office, shutting out his intrigued secretary, collected two glasses and a bottle of sherry from a side table, and sat down at his desk. Still wearing his overcoat, he watched me sip the sweet fluid, his baby lips mimicking my own.
‘Parents’ sherry,’ he told me. ‘Makes a long day shorter. Think of it as a business aid.’
‘Why not? I feel for you. Trying to educate six hundred teenagers in the middle of a circus.’ I pointed to the dome visible through his windows. ‘So many Aladdin’s caves, a hundred neon palaces filled with treasure.’
‘The only real things are the mirages. We can cope with that. Still, I know how you feel, Richard. An old man is shot down for no reason. The one common factor is the Metro-Centre. Somehow it explains everything.’
‘My father and the whole consumer nightmare? I think there’s a connection. Most of the people here are going mad, without realizing it.’
‘All these retail parks, the airport and motorway culture. It’s a new kind of hell . . .’ Sangster stood up and pressed his huge hands to his cheeks, as if trying to deflate himself. ‘That’s the Hampstead perspective, the view from the Tavistock Clinic. The shadow of Freud’s statue lies across the land, the Agent Orange of the soul. Believe me, things are different here. We have to prepare our kids for a new kind of society. There’s no point in telling them about parliamentary democracy, the church or the monarchy. The old ideas of citizenship you and I were brought up with are really rather selfish.
All that emphasis on individual rights, habeas corpus, freedom of the one against the many . . .’
‘Free speech, privacy?’
‘What’s the point of free speech if you have nothing to say? Let’s face it, most people haven’t anything to say, and they know it. What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison? Consumerism is a collective enterprise. People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation.’
‘So being modern today means being passive?’
Sangster slapped his desk, knocking over his pen stand. He leaned towards me, huge overcoat bulking around him.
‘Forget being modern. Accept it, Richard, the whole modernist enterprise was intensely divisive. Modernism taught us to distrust and dislike ourselves. All that individual conscience, the solitary ache. Modernism was driven by neurosis and alienation. Look at its art and architecture. There’s something deeply cold about them.’
‘And consumerism?’
‘It celebrates coming together. Shared dreams and values, shared hopes and pleasures. Consumerism is optimistic and forward-looking. Naturally, it asks us to accept the will of the majority. Consumerism is a new form of mass politics. It’s very theatrical, but we like that. It’s driven by emotion, but its promises are attainable, not just windy rhetoric. A new car, a new power tool, a new CD player.’
‘And reason? No place for that, I take it?’
‘Reason, well . . .’ Sangster paced behind his desk, nail-bitten fingers to his lips. ‘It’s too close to maths, and most of us are not good at arithmetic. In general I advise people to steer clear of reason. Consumerism celebrates the positive side of the equation. When we buy something we unconsciously believe we’ve been given a present.’
‘And politics demands a constant stream of presents? A new hospital, a new school, a new motorway . . . ?’
‘Exactly. And we know what happens to children who are never given any toys. We’re all children today. Like it or not, only consumerism can hold a modern society together. It presses the right emotional buttons.’
‘So . . . liberalism, liberty, reason?’
‘They failed! People don’t want to be appealed to by reason any more.’ Sangster bent down and rolled his sherry glass across the desk, as if waiting for it to stand up on its own. ‘Liberalism and humanism are a huge brake on society. They trade on guilt and fear. Societies are happier when people spend, not save. What we need now is a kind of delirious consumerism, the sort you see at motor shows. People long for authority, and only consumerism can provide it.’
‘Buy a new perfume, a new pair of shoes, and you’re a happier and better person? And you can get all this across to your teenagers?’
‘I don’t need to. It comes with the air they breathe. Remember, Richard, consumerism is a redemptive ideology. At its best, it tries to aestheticize violence, though sadly it doesn’t always succeed . . .’
Sangster stood up, smiling to himself in an almost serene way. He gazed at his huge hands, glad to accept them as hard-working outposts of himself.
We left each other on the steps outside the entrance. I liked Sangster, but I had the distinct sense that he had already forgotten me before he waved and turned back to the school. I walked away, strolling through the sweet wrappers drifting across the path, through the cola cans and cigarette packets and condom sachets.
13
DUNCAN CHRISTIE
A BRASS BAND struck up a spirited Souza medley, fireworks threw umbrellas of gaudy pink and turquoise light over the layabed town, car horns sounded and voices booed and cheered, greeting the Metro-Centre blimp as it sailed across the dome, more dreamlike than anything that had filled our heads during the night. The weekend was an extended sports festival, sponsored by the Metro-Centre and packed with more promises than even William Sangster could have imagined.
As I made a late breakfast I listened to the buses and coaches bringing teams and their supporters from the motorway towns. Under the evening arc lights there would be a ‘Thames Valley Olympics’, featuring football and rugby matches, athletics meetings, ice-hockey elimination rounds and a series of marathons and road races. Sport and shopping would celebrate a two-day marriage, to be solemnized by David Cruise. The sky would be the wedding marquee, and southeast England was invited. On the Metro-Centre cable channel the announcers worked up their audiences, playing up the mano-a-mano rivalries of the contact sports, the ‘hate’ matches between hockey teams from the Heathrow area.
By two o’clock, when I finally reached the Metro-Centre, the largest crowd I had seen in Brooklands filled the plaza beside the South Gate entrance, a congregation of worshippers that would have filled a dozen cathedrals. Shoppers chatted to each other, vendors in official livery carried placards listing the day’s discounts in menswear, minced beef and Botox treatments. Security men murmured into their lapel radios, stewards in Metro-Centre tracksuits struggled to keep clear a railed passage from the perimeter road to the entrance.
Sports-club supporters were out in force, a suburban crusader army in their St George’s shirts. I parked my car in the basement garage, using the complimentary VIP pass supplied by Tom Carradine. Emerging from the lift, I found myself co-opted into a football squad running and skipping on the spot. The scent of their sweat and good cheer, the pain-blessed grunts and shouts, rose into the air towards the circling blimp. Nearby, a women’s athletics club were exercising gracefully, moving like a dance class through a repertory of cheerleader motions. Nowhere was there a single policeman.
The only sign of tension came from the perimeter road, where a battered pick-up truck had broken down by the kerb. But this was not a day for parking violations, the cardinal sin of suburbia in which everyone happily indulged, along with bouncing cheques and credit card overruns. Double-parking, like adultery and alcoholism, was a vital part of the social glue that kept the suburbs healthy.
I walked towards the stranded truck, where the crowd seemed thinner. Radios began to buzz and fret around me, the group hive coming to life in the presence of an intruder. A young man stood by the tailgate, unloading a refrigerator onto the pavement. Already a small crowd had gathered around him, mothers holding back their pointing children. A black woman sat in the driving cab as her daughter played beside her, reading a magazine and ignoring the crowd and her husband.
I had last seen the young man outside the magistrates’ court, and now for the first time I had a good chance of speaking to Duncan Christie.
THE LARGEST OF Christie’s deliveries was still to be unloaded, a double-cabinet refrigerator with chromium doors and an ice-cube dispenser big enough for a hotel bar. Exhausted by the effort of moving his cargo, Christie leaned against the tailgate and smiled at the Metro-Centre blimp lazing above him. He had recovered from his rough treatment at the hands of the police, but his face was bruised and sallow, as if the violent storms seething within him had left their shadows on his skin.
His scarred mouth, self-cropped hair—no doubt sheared with a power tool during a building-site tea break—and general air of neglect made him look erratic and unfocused, a methadone addict forever emerging from rehab. Everything about him, from his large feet in a pair of unmatched trainers to the tic that pulled at an infected ear piercing, fixed him firmly as an urban scarecrow designed to frighten away any circling security cameras.
But his eyes were calm, and he seemed to have made his peace with the lazy blimp five hundred feet above him, as if hoping that the cameramen in the gondola would photograph the modest display of goods he had unloaded from his pick-up.
Lined up along the kerb was a selection of kitchen appliances—a spin-dryer, two refrigerators, a trio of washing machines and a microwave oven. None was new, and rust leaked from their hoses. They were the familiar furniture of every kitchen in Brooklands, but there was something surrealist about their presence that unsettled the small crowd. A middle-aged woman next to me pulled at the leash of
her docile spaniel, prompting the beast to look up at me and growl menacingly.
‘Right, little beauty . . .’ Christie roused himself from his communion with the blimp and spat on his scarred hands. ‘Time to mount you, girlie . . .’
He seized the refrigerator around its waist, rocked it from side to side and walked it towards the lowered tailgate. He was stronger than I thought, with a stevedore’s hard arms, but the refrigerator was too heavy for him. When it tilted forward one of its doors fell open and trapped his right hand.
‘ . . . Jesus!’ Unable to move, the refrigerator pressing against his chest, he glared at the unmoving spectators. ‘Is none of you a fucking Christian? Maya!’
His wife watched all this through the rear-view mirror, assessed the situation and went back to playing with her daughter. I stepped forward and closed the refrigerator door, releasing Christie’s numbed fingers, then helped him lower the bulky machine to the ground. He leaned against it, a winded Samson clinging to his temple.
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you. A good deed these days takes courage.’
An elderly woman in a serge coat and pillbox hat peered at Christie, irritated by his apparent euphoria.
‘Can you hear me?’ she bellowed as he rolled his head. ‘You’re in the wrong place. Do you want a refund?’
‘Refund?’ Christie roused himself and surveyed the woman. ‘I don’t want a refund, madam. I want retribution.’
‘Retribution? You can’t get that here.’ The woman turned to her husband, who was nodding at the microwave as if recognizing a friend fallen on hard times. ‘Harry, what department is that?’
‘You’re not asking me?’
‘I am asking you.’
Still bickering, they wandered off towards a troupe of drum-majorettes snap-marching beside their pipe band.
Christie took up his position near the display of kitchenware. His manner was affable, but his eyes darkened as a squall blew through his mind. He was a Petri dish of mental infections, a smear-culture of grimaces and tics. He leaned behind the refrigerator and spat on the ground, then deployed himself like a salesman, turning a wild smile onto his customers.