I remembered leaving the Brooklands circuit with him. As we sat in the rear seat of the Lincoln, I had told him that my father had visited the racetrack as a boy. Almost without thinking, Cruise reached out and gripped my hand, sealing a comradeship fused in the fire of terrorism. And for all his blandness, a personality as soft and depthless as a TV commercial, he had stood up to Tony Maxted and Sangster, refusing to play their game.
‘I ADMIRE YOU for turning them down,’ I told him as the Filipina girls drifted silently between us, taking away the breakfast trays. ‘They were offering you the keys to the kingdom.’
‘Or Guildford Prison.’ Cruise lightly touched the tiny bottom of the older Filipina. ‘They had everything set up, the crowd going wild, the follow-up bomb, a complete circus. They wanted me screaming from a balcony. A suburban dictator based at the Metro-Centre—can you imagine it?’
‘I can. Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating—too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’
‘That was the idea.’ Cruise studied his empty glass, as if in mourning for the first drink of the day. ‘Kill a few people and everyone thinks they’ve had a good time. Not for me—it’s always safer to stick to what you know nothing about. In my case, sport and home improvements. Forget about right-wing cliques hiding behind their family crests.’
‘I have. But the groundswell was still there. I could feel it in the crowd. They wanted you to lead them. You’re the figurehead who stands in everyone’s mind for the Metro-Centre. You keep the supporters’ clubs on their toes, you can say what everyone secretly feels about immigrants and asylum seekers. You’re the star in every housewife’s dreams . . .’
‘Too much me . . . that’s the problem. I have to carry the whole Metro-Centre.’ Cruise lay back, eyes lowered, lips forming and reforming a series of half-smiles, the signal that he was about to be sincere. ‘Listen, Richard—you have to understand. I’m a fake.’
‘Come on . . .’
‘No. I play a role. I’m still an actor, I act being a sports commentator. Do I know anything about sports? Between you and me, almost nothing. I’ve never sliced a tee shot, never potted a black, never scored a try or missed a penalty.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘No. In fact, it’s a help. The best commentators know nothing about sport. Their commentaries are the kind that viewers would give. “He’s playing a straight bat, she’s concentrating on winning . . .” Bloody silly. I’m in the looking-glass business, I give the public the kind of face they want to see in the bathroom mirror when they get up. Someone who shares their boredom and tells them a visit to the Metro-Centre is the answer to all their problems.’
‘You do a great job. I was outside the town hall last night. They like you.’
‘Who knows? They cheer, then they boo.’ Cruise leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘You may not believe it, Richard, but when I was young most people disliked me. Instinctively. They disliked the friendly smile, the bonhomie. They thought I was acting all the time. Even my parents avoided me. My father was a working-class GP. He specialized in hypochondria, it was the easiest to cure. My mother was a full-time case study. They scrimped and saved to send me to a private school; now I have to hide the accent and pretend I come from some Heathrow suburb. Every time we meet I know they think I’ve failed.’
‘You haven’t. People here believe in you.’
‘Don’t say that. If enough people believe in you, it’s a sure sign you’ll end up nailed to a cross. It’s a job, an assignment. Sometimes I feel I’m not up to it any more.’
‘You are up to it, and it’s not just a job.’
I waited, as Cruise seemed to sink into a trough of introspection and self-pity. He lay back in the sun lounger, his body stirring like a snake trying to shed its skin, a sleek carapace that lost its lustre as he watched. Then he sat up, shaking himself free of any self-doubt, and threw his empty vodka glass into the swimming pool. The flat surface dissolved into a rush of fleeing waves, which Cruise watched like a crystal-gazer stirring the future.
‘Richard?’ He beckoned to me. ‘Go on. I think you have a few ideas for me.’
‘Right. I’d like to lay something out. A different approach.’
‘That’s good—the Metro-Centre could use some help.’
‘And you’ve got exactly what it needs. A new kind of politics is emerging at the Metro-Centre, and you’re in the perfect place to lead it.’
‘Once, maybe . . .’
‘Now. I see you as tomorrow’s man. Consumerism is the door to the future, and you’re helping to open it. People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure. They don’t want a jackbooted fanatic ranting on a balcony. They want a TV host sitting with a studio panel, talking quietly about what matters in their lives. It’s a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box. Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason, they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics. And you’re at the leading edge. In fact, you could practically run the country.’
‘The country? Now I am worried . . .’ Cruise gripped the arms of his lounger, overcoming the temptation to stand and pace up and down. He looked at me with the intense gaze he turned upon the guests on his daytime show, and I could see that everything I said had already crossed his mind. ‘You’re right—I can lead them. I know it’s there, inside me.’
‘It’s there, all right. Believe me, David.’
‘I do a lot of charity work, opening retail parks, big hypermarkets out on the M25—it helps viewers get cabled up to the Metro-Centre. There are millions of people out there, in all those towns around Heathrow. They’re bored, they want to be tested. They’ve got the two-car garage, the extra bathroom, the timeshare in the Algarve. But they want more. I can reach them, Richard. One problem, though—what’s the message?’
‘Message?’ I stood up, raising my hands so that Cruise stayed in his seat. ‘There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics. You’re not some fuhrer shouting at his storm troops. That’s the old politics. The new politics is about people’s dreams and needs, their hopes and fears. Your role is to empower them. You don’t tell your audiences what to think. You draw them out, urge them to open up and say what they feel.’
‘Avoid slogans, avoid messages?’
‘No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want. Your job is to set the stage and create the climate. You steer them by sensing their mood. Think of a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. They decide where they want to go.’
‘How big is this herd? A million? Five million?’
‘Maybe fifty million. Think of the future as a cable TV programme going on for ever.’
‘Sounds like hell . . .’ Cruise chuckled in a guilty way to himself. ‘But five million, now that’s a very big afternoon audience. How do I control them, impose some kind of focus? The whole thing could start to go mad.’
‘Mad? Good. Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no one is really looking. You say turnover is going down at the Metro-Centre?’
‘Not down. It’s a sales plateau. A sure sign there’s a steep cliff nearby. We’ve done everything.’
‘Everything? You’ve tried the classic friendly approach, giving the customers what they want. Or what you think they want. You need to try the unfriendly approach.’
‘Tell them what they ought to want?’ Cruise waved this away. ‘It doesn’t work.’
‘No. It’s too authoritarian, too nanny state. It’s not new politics.’
‘And what is that?’
‘The unpredictable. Be nice most of the time, but now and then be nasty, when they least expect it. Like a bored husband, affectionate but with a cruel streak. People will gasp, but the audience figures will soar. Now and then slip in a hint of madness, a little raw psychopathology. Remember, sensation and psychopathy are the only way people make contact with each other today. It won’t take your viewers long to get a taste for real madness, whether it’s a product or a political movement. Encourage people to go a little mad—it makes shopping and love affairs more interesting. Every so often people want to be disciplined by someone. They want to be ordered
