James Ballard - Kingdom Come - A Novel

‘I’m trying to find who killed my father. The police have drifted away.’

‘They haven’t.’ Maxted waved me down. ‘Listen to me. I’m sorry about the old man. A cruel way for him to go. Sometimes the wheel spins and you see nothing but zeroes. A terrible accident.’

‘Accident?’ I rapped the table with my glass. ‘Someone fired a machine gun at him. Perhaps Duncan Christie or—’

‘Forget Christie. You’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘The police didn’t think so, until you and the other “witnesses” came forward. He was their chief suspect.’

‘The police always jump to conclusions. It’s part of their job, builds confidence with the public. You saw Christie today. He can’t concentrate long enough to mend a fuse, let alone carry through an assassination.’

‘Assassination?’ I turned to stare at the dome, which seemed to grow in size as it glowed in the fading light. ‘That implies someone very important. Who exactly?’

‘The target? Impossible to say. David Cruise?’

‘A cable-channel presenter? I once worked with him. The man’s a nonentity. Why would anyone want to murder David Cruise?’

Maxted simpered into his whisky. ‘There are folk here who’d give you a hundred reasons. He has a big power base. Sales are flat at the Metro-Centre, and without David Cruise they’d be in trouble. There’s even talk of him starting a political party.’

‘The kind that goose-steps? The Oswald Mosley of the suburbs? I don’t think he’d be convincing.’

‘He wouldn’t need to be. His appeal functions on a different level. It’s more your world than mine. Politics for the age of cable TV. Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception. Is Cruise up to that? I doubt it.’

‘Then who was the target? And who killed my father?’

‘Difficult questions, and obviously you want an answer . . .’

Maxted gestured at the air, as if trying to conjure a genie from the decanter, and I remembered him sitting in the front of Geoffrey Fairfax’s Range Rover, and the headlight signals outside the shabby Odeon. But I decided to say nothing, hoping that he would lead himself into a useful indiscretion. For all his bull-necked toughness, he was uneasy about something, and more vulnerable than I probably realized. I waited as he stood up and paced the carpet, retracing a half-remembered dance step.

Impatient for an answer, I said: ‘We could push the police a little harder. Find out who their main suspects are. Dr Maxted?’

‘The police? They’d be touched by your faith in them. They haven’t realized how much everything has changed out here. They’re not alone in that. People in London can’t grasp that this is the real England. Parliament, the West End, Bloomsbury, Notting Hill, Hampstead—they’re heritage London, held together by a dinner-party culture. Here, around the M25, is where it’s really happening. This is today’s England. Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along.’

‘That sounds as if they’re going to be frightened.’

‘They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad. Look around you, Richard. What do you see?’

‘Air-cargo warehouses. Shopping malls. Executive estates.’ As Maxted listened to me, nodding gloomily, I asked: ‘Why don’t people leave? Why don’t you leave?’

‘Because we like it here.’ Maxted raised his hands to stop me interrupting him. ‘This isn’t a suburb of London, it’s a suburb of Heathrow and the M25. People in Hampstead and Holland Park look down from the motorway as they speed home from their West Country cottages. They see faceless inter-urban sprawl, a nightmare terrain of police cameras and security dogs, an uncentred realm devoid of civic tradition and human values.’

‘It is. I’ve been there. It’s a zoo fit for psychopaths.’

‘Exactly. That’s what we like about it. We like dual carriageways and parking lots. We like control-tower architecture and friendships that last an afternoon. There’s no civil authority telling us what to do. This isn’t Islington or South Ken. There are no town halls or assembly rooms. We like prosperity filtered through car and appliance sales. We like roads that lead past airports, we like air-freight offices and rent-a-van forecourts, we like impulse-buy holidays to anywhere that takes our fancy. We’re the citizens of the shopping mall and the marina, the internet and cable TV. We like it here, and we’re in no hurry for you to join us.’

‘I don’t want to. Take it from me, I’ll leave as soon as I can.’

‘Good.’ Maxted nodded vigorously. ‘Brooklands is dangerous. You’re going to get hurt. The motorway towns are violent places. We’re not talking about a few individuals who go off the rails. We’re talking about collective psychology. The whole area is waiting for trouble. All these sports-club supporters, they’re just street gangs in St George’s shirts.’

‘My father might have been wearing one when he was shot. A retired airline pilot in his seventies? The Asian family in the next flat were frightened of him. They look at me as if I were National Front.’

‘Maybe you are, without realizing it.’ Maxted spoke without irony. ‘You have to think about England as a whole, not just Brooklands and the Thames Valley. The churches are empty, and the monarchy shipwrecked itself on its own vanity. Politics is a racket, and democracy is just another utility, like gas and electricity. Almost no one has any civic feeling. Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode. The great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph, led directly to today’s consumerism.’

I tried to reach the decanter. ‘In that case, why worry? Look around you here at Brooklands. You’ve found the earthly paradise.’

‘It’s not a paradise.’ Maxted tried to mask his scorn. ‘Brooklands is a dangerous and disturbed place. Nasty things are brewing here. All this racism and violence. Burning down Asian businesses. Naked intolerance for its own sake. And this is only the beginning. Something far worse is waiting to crawl out of its den.’

‘But if reason and light have triumphed?’

‘They haven’t. Because we’re not reasonable and rational creatures. Far from it. We resort to reason when it suits us. For most people life is comfortable today, and we have the spare time to be unreasonable if we choose to be. We’re like bored children. We’ve been on holiday for too long, and we’ve been given too many presents. Anyone who’s had children knows that the greatest danger is boredom. Boredom, and a secret pleasure in one’s own malice. Together they can spur a remarkable ingenuity.’

‘Let’s stuff baby’s mouth with sweets and see if he stops breathing?’

‘Exactly.’ Maxted watched me smiling into my drink. ‘I hope you were an only child. You’ve seen the people around here. Their lives are empty. Install a new kitchen, buy another car, take a trip to some beach hotel. All these sports clubs financed by the Metro-Centre are an attempt to boost sales. It hasn’t worked. People are bored, even though they don’t realize it.’

‘So a lot of babies are going to turn blue in the face?’

‘Not just babies. What’s happening here involves entire communities. All these satellite towns around Heathrow and along the motorways. There’s one thing left that can put some energy into their lives, give them a sense of direction. You’ve run advertising campaigns—any ideas?’