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.
23
THE WOMEN’S REFUGE
THE TRAFFIC INTO BROOKLANDS was slowing again, delayed by police setting up steel railings and no- entry signs, part of the lavish preparations for the weekend sports rally and parade. Several key football matches would take place that evening, and there were hard-fought finals in the rugby, basketball and ice-hockey competitions.
Cricket, as I noted whenever Julia asked me for the test-match scores, was not played in Brooklands or the motorway towns. Contact sports ruled the field of play, the more brutal the better. Blood and aggression were the qualities most admired. The hard tackle was the essence of sport, the kind of violence that flourished in the margins of the rule book. Cricket was too amateurish, its long-pondered intricacies trapped in a cat’s cradle of incomprehensible laws. Above all, it was too middle-class, and unconnected to the kind of impulse buying favoured by Metro-Centre supporters. Julia told me that she had captained the cricket team at her girls’ school, but her interest in the game was a whimsical stand against the far harder stadium values that now dominated Brooklands.
We were meeting at three, when her shift ended at the hospital. She hated the sports rallies, the unending din of marching bands that drummed at the windows above the wail of ambulances and fire engines. Usually she would be on duty, dealing with the human wreckage stretchered into the A&E triage rooms. Thinking of herself for once, she manipulated the rosters to give us a rare free weekend.
I hoped that I would share at least part of it with her, but she had recently kept me at arm’s length. We had yet to make love again after the uneasy night together in my father’s bed. Sex with me had been an act of penance, expiating some unadmitted guilt. Whenever we met she watched me warily, hair over her eyes as if to veil any telltale signs. But I was always glad to be with her. I loved her moods and bolshieness, the cigarette stubbed out in a slushy sorbet, the adversarial relationship with her car, the handsome black cat who slept beside her like a demon
