LIKE ENGLISH LIFE as a whole, nothing in Brooklands could be taken at face value. I passed the next three days in my father’s flat, trying to make sense of this outwardly civilized Home Counties town – a town whose civic leaders, prominent solicitors and police chief were taking part in a pocket revolution. Had I stumbled into a conspiracy that was now shaping itself around me? And had my father been one of its instigators?
The stadium riot, orchestrated by Geoffrey Fairfax under the eyes of the police superintendent, had shaken me badly. Sipping rather too much of the old man’s malt, I watched the car park outside the flats, hoping to see Mr Kumar and convince him that I had not joined the attack on him. During the mêlée someone had punched my forehead, and the imprint of a signet ring starred the skin over my left eye. Staring at myself in the hall mirror, I could almost see Duncan Christie’s bruised face emerging through my own.
All in all, my first taste of street politics left me feeling like an out-of-condition rugby forward in a collapsed scrum. How, at the age of seventy-five, had my father coped with the violence and thuggery? In the evening, watching television with the sound down and the curtains drawn, I listened to the stadium crowds cheering on the Metro-Centre teams. Ambulance sirens wailed through the streets, and fire engines clanged their way to the shabby districts between Brooklands and the M25.
A hard night lay over the motorway towns, far harder than central London’s pink haze. Under the cover of a packed programme of sporting events, an exercise in ethnic cleansing was taking place, with the apparent connivance of the local police. I remembered Sergeant Falconer flashing her headlights at Fairfax’s Range Rover. Using the supporters’ clubs in their patriotic livery, they were moving against the immigrant population, harassing them out of their run-down streets to make room for new retail parks, marinas and executive estates.
But more than a land grab was going on. Every evening there were soccer, rugby and athletics matches, where Metro-Centre teams competed with rivals from the motorway towns. Illuminated arrays glowed through the night like the perimeter lights of a colony of prison camps, a new gulag of penal settlements where the forced labour was shopping and spending.
The matches ended, but then came the drumming of fists on car roofs, a tribal call to violence. The Audis, Nissans and Renaults were the new tom-toms. Every day the local newspaper reported attacks on an asylum hostel, the torching of a Bangladeshi takeaway, injuries to a Kosovan youth thrown over the fence into an industrial estate. Metro-Centre stewards, the reports usually ended, had ‘headed off further violence’.
On his afternoon cable channel, David Cruise smirked knowingly to his guests. I watched this third-rate actor, on the surface so handsome and likeable, putting his well-polished gloss on the ugly violence.
‘… I don’t want to blow the Metro-Centre’s trumpet, but consumerism is about a lot more than buying things. You agree, Doreen? Good. It’s our main way of expressing our tribal values, of engaging with each other’s hopes and ambitions. What you see here is a conflict of recreational cultures, a clash of very different lifestyles. On the one side are people like us – we enjoy the facilities offered by the Metro-Centre, and depend on the high values and ideals maintained by the mall and its suppliers. Together they probably do a better job of representing your real interests than your Member of Parliament. No disrespect, and no emails, please. On the other side are the low-value expectations of the immigrant communities. Their suppressed womenfolk are internal exiles who never share the dignity and freedom to choose that we see in the consumer ideal. Right, Sheila?’
As always, his guests nodded their firm agreement, sitting in their black leather sofas in the mezzanine studio, the giant bears behind them. But that night brought attacks on Asian businesses by gangs of rugby and ice-hockey supporters, and a warehouse of cheap knitwear burned to the ground. And, as always, the police arrived ten minutes after the fire engines. Almost nothing appeared in the national press, where the incidents were lumped in with accounts of sporting violence and binge drinking in provincial towns.
What role had my father played in all this? I thought of the old pilot sitting at his workstation in the cluttered utility room, with the ironing board and its stack of St George’s shirts, surrounded by his sinister library, a shrine to the extremist gods. Was he a casualty of an ultra-right coup, an elderly foot soldier who had lost his balance on the slippery grass of a political turf war? Conceivably, he was not an innocent bystander but the real target of the assassin.
Had the shooting at the mall been an attempt to damage the Metro-Centre? In a special feature on mega-malls the Financial Times reported that turnover at the Metro-Centre had failed to grow for the past year, as its novelty wore off and its customers were drawn to more downmarket retail parks in the area.
The shooting, with its dead and injured customers, had cost sales, whatever Tom Carradine claimed. But no well-run conspiracy would have hired a misfit like Duncan Christie. At the same time I found it hard to believe the witnesses who came forward to clear him. I thought of Julia Goodwin, sitting between the beefy marshals in the rear of Fairfax’s Range Rover, while Fairfax consulted his war map.
I wanted to meet her again, but everything about her was almost too elusive. At the Holiday Inn, beside the placid waters of the artificial lake, she had been nervous and aggressive, a little too devious about her reasons for attending my father’s funeral. At the same time I was sure that she wanted to tell me something about his death, perhaps more than I cared to know.
The entire evening had been an elaborate ruse, a clumsily handled tour of Brooklands and its accident black spots. She had known that the race riot would take place, and wanted me to witness it. But was she trying to warn me away, or recruit me into her suburban conspiracy? Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.
Thinking about this moody young doctor, I carried my whisky into the utility room. I was slightly drunk as I gazed at the silent computer and the biographies of fascist leaders. I rested my glass on the ironing board and touched one of the St George’s shirts. Almost without thinking, I picked up the shirt, shook it loose from its geometric folds and pulled it over my head.
I stood in front of the mirror, aware that the street brawl had made my skin glow. My father’s shoulders had shrunk in his last years, as I had seen from photographs of him, and the shirt gripped my chest like the embrace of an approving parent.