THE HEATHROW TOWNS had cleared the runway, lifted their wheels and were learning to fly, borne aloft on the bosomy thermals of the bright August sun. As I left the motorway and approached the outskirts of Ashford I could see the tasselled pennants flying from an out-of-town hypermarket, transforming this ugly metal shed into a caravel laden with treasure. St George’s flags flew from passing cars, and floated from shops and houses. The livery of the local football and athletics teams decked the town hall and the multi-storey car park, giving a festival kick to the noisy air.
A sports parade headed down the high street, led by a pipe band and a troupe of majorettes, bare-thighed schoolgirls dolled up in Ruritanian tunics and shakos emblazoned with the logo of the sponsoring superstore. They strutted past, forcing the traffic to stop for them, followed by teams waving to their supporters who crowded the pavements and office balconies.
Behind them came the marshals and stewards in St George’s shirts, marching smartly in time to the brass band that brought up the rear. Everywhere classrooms and workstations were abandoned as the hot pulse of civic pride and enthusiasm swept through this nondescript town. Any drop in output, any shortfall at the cash registers, would be more than made up by a surge in productivity and a few hours of overtime.
I sat in the stalled traffic and waved to a group of supporters who had spontaneously formed up behind the marshals, joining the parade as it marched to the coach park near the railway station. From there they would be bussed to Brooklands, spend the afternoon shopping in the Metro-Centre and then cheer on their teams in the local league.
Feet stamped past me, arms grazing my rented Mercedes. But I liked these people, and felt close to them. Many were middle-aged, white knees rising and falling, vigorous and unrushed. Their crusader shirts were covered with stitched medallions, in effect scout badges for adults, another of the schemes I had devised. Each bore the name of a local retailer, and gave their wearers the look of Grand Prix drivers. David Cruise and I expected a certain resistance, but the medallions were hugely popular, reinforcing the sense that people’s lives were only complete when they advertised the consumer world.
A vast social experiment was under way, and I had helped to design it. The neglected people of the motorway towns, so despised by inner Londoners, had found a new pride and solidarity, a social cohesion that boosted prosperity and reduced crime. Whenever I left the motorway near Heathrow I was aware of entering a social laboratory that stretched along the M25, involving every sports arena and housing estate, every playground and retail park. A deep, convulsive chemistry was at work, waking these docile suburbs to a new and fiercer light. The orbital cities of the plain, as remote as Atlantis and Samarkand to the inhabitants of Chelsea and Holland Park, were learning to breathe and dream.
As the brass band moved away I waited for the traffic to clear, for once in no hurry to escape from London. Three months after first meeting David Cruise, I had sold my Chelsea Harbour flat to a young brain surgeon. Our solicitors had finally exchanged contracts, after cliff-hanging weeks bedevilled by the surgeon’s sharp-eyed wife. She had spotted me pacing around an empty bedroom as she poked and pried, and misread my last doubts about moving permanently to Brooklands. ‘Where?’ she asked, when I explained my reasons for selling up. ‘Does it really exist?’
She suspected a secret flaw, perhaps a zeppelin mooring mast on the floor above or a sewage outfall ten feet below. She endlessly circled the dining room, visualizing the eternity of dinner parties that constituted her dream of the good life. The future for her was an escalator of metropolitan chatter so lofty that it generated its own clouds. When she left I squeezed her hand suggestively, trying to elicit a microsecond’s passion, a hint of sexual mischief, a saving flash of amorality. Go mad, I wanted to say, go bad. Sadly, she walked off without any response. But that was inner London, a congestion zone of the soul.
All the same, I had certain doubts over moving to Brooklands. I was leaving behind my baffled friends, my bridge and squash evenings, a former lover I was still close to, and even my ex-wife, with whom I had a spiky but intriguing bi-monthly lunch. Then there were all the pleasures and discontinuities of metropolitan life, from the cast room at the V&A to the shit in the letter box. To my friends I was apparently giving up all this in return for an obsessive quest to find my father’s killer.
I was still determined to track down the gunman who had shot my father, but for the time being his death was no longer centre stage. The Brooklands police claimed that they had failed to trace the Jensen’s owner. I assumed they were well aware that the car belonged to me, but had their own reasons for not questioning me about the bomb. Perhaps they feared that I would embarrass them by referring to the unsolved mystery of the Metro-Centre shooting. As long as I could, I preferred to keep out of their way and think about my father. In a sense I knew him far better than at any time in the past, but had I redeemed myself in his eyes? I doubted it. Meanwhile, I had stumbled on a far more important means of restoring my faith in myself. A new future waited to greet me: forgiving, full of surprises, and ready to redeem all my failures.
The traffic was still stationary in the high street, though the parade had gone and the police were reduced to playing some obscure game of their own. I rested my head against the window pillar, and looked up at the billboard above a TV rental store, advertising the Metro-Centre and its cable channels. There were now three channels, mixing sport, consumer information and social affairs, and they were popular viewing in the motorway towns.
The advertisement showed a grainy close-up of David Cruise, no longer the primped and rouged anchorman of afternoon television, but the fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film. He sat at the wheel of his car, staring at the open road and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him. An eerie glare lit the grimy windscreen and exposed every pore in his unshaved face. The chocolate tan had long faded. This David Cruise, though clearly the cable channels’ chief presenter, was closer to the desperate loners of trenchcoat movies, doomed men sleepwalking towards their tragic end.
How this gloomy scenario tied in with the infinite consumer promise of the Metro-Centre was unclear, and when I sketched out the scene for Tom Carradine and his public relations staff they had objected vigorously. But the director, set designer and even Cruise himself all instantly saw the point and carried the day for me.
Another Metro-Centre poster, almost the size of a tennis court, filled the side of a town-centre office block. It showed Cruise in a nightmare replay of a Strindberg drama, threatening and confused as he stared across a display floor of showroom kitchens, a husband who had woken into the innermost circle of hell.
The series of posters were stills from thirty-second commercials on the cable channels. They presented Cruise as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods – grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed. He would stare almost ecstatically at a battered dustbin, as if some revelation was at hand, or ring a doorbell at random and scowl at a startled housewife, ready to slap her or beg for sanctuary. In others he haunted the Brooklands racing circuit, the squeal of tyres like torture in his head, or followed a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse like a would-be child-abductor.
A surprisingly good sport, Cruise played the roles in a skilful and sensitive way, moving through a baleful consumer landscape of car showrooms, call centres and gated estates. The storylines were meaningless, but audiences liked them. Together they made sense at the deepest level, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their minds.
As Cruise’s media adviser, I had taken a gamble, but I was ready to spin the wheel and risk everything. Audience figures surged, and all over the motorway towns the first copycat posters soon appeared, playing on a suppressed need for the bizarre and the unpredictable. At the junction of Ashford High Street and the dual carriageway was a billboard advertising a local insurance company’s endowment policies. It showed a deranged young woman dragging a blood-spattered child across a deserted car park, watched by a smiling couple who picnicked beside a Volvo with a damaged wing.
I laughed generously at the clever in-joke. Like all the posters, it was advertising nothing except its own quirky waywardness. Yet the concept worked. Everywhere sales boomed, and the Metro-Centre activated two dormant cable channels. People from the Home Counties, and even from inner London, drove like tourists through the motorway towns, aware that these invisible suburbs were lit by a new fever. They cheered on the massed sports teams that strutted and wheeled around the Metro-Centre car parks, they straightened their shoulders as the marshals bellowed and stamped. They watched the disciplined files of marching athletes, the ceremonial hoisting of banners, the loyalty-card supporters chanting ‘Metro … Metro …’
Unknown to its busy executives and sales staff, the Metro-Centre had become the headquarters of a virtual political party, financed by its supporters’ clubs and gold-card memberships. It issued no manifesto, made no promises and outlined no programme. It represented nothing. But several St George’s candidates, standing on no platform other than their loyalty to a shopping mall and its sports teams, had won seats on local councils. Their chosen party political broadcasts were the thirty-second commercials I had devised for David Cruise.
To his credit, Cruise had done a superb job, justifying all my hopes for him. He agreed to every suggestion I put forward, eager to give everything to these tense if meaningless psychodramas. He coped manfully with the flood of valentines and marriage proposals, and never forgot that he was a talk-show presenter. His modest range was a large part of his appeal, and allowed every male viewer to think of himself in these haunted roles, and every female admirer to imagine herself as the heroine playing Jane to this neurasthenic Tarzan of the suburban jungle.
‘Years of failure,’ he often told me, ‘are the worst preparation for overnight triumph.’ And the best preparation? ‘Years of success.’
He was still affable and engaging, despite his sly pleasure in his new-found aggression. He would bully and abuse the self-immersed wives and dull husbands who appeared on his consumer programmes, yet without causing offence. His impatience with the dimmer guests, his clenched fists and evident stress, merged easily into the desperate characters he played in the noir commercials.
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 of the 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.