James Ballard - Kingdom Come - A Novel

‘Christie . . . ? What the hell are we doing . . . ?’

I stood up, speaking to myself in a slurred mutter. Bowing his head, the man stepped back. For a few seconds he vanished behind the yucca, and then reappeared with a hand raised over his shoulder.

‘Christie . . . !’ My voice seemed to dent the dark water that lay listlessly against the beach. ‘Come down, man . . . You’re a target . . . !’

As I stumbled against the chair, knocking it onto the sand, the man hurled something towards me. I lost sight of the object as it flew through the misty air, but it landed ten feet from me, a bronze node that glinted in the scruffy sand.

I tried to steady myself, and felt the strong hands of a marshal grip my arms.

‘Mr Pearson?’ One of the burly weightlifters detailed to keep an eye on me had been sitting in the terrace bar when he heard my shout. ‘You’re not hurt?’

‘He missed me. It’s over there.’

‘I didn’t hear a shot. Let’s get you indoors.’

‘Indoors? We’re already indoors. Aren’t we?’ I was mulling this over as he steered me to the terrace steps. I had lost my chance of joining the hostage release from the South Gate entrance, but I needed to see the object on the beach.

In the moments before the marshal’s heavy foot stamped it into the sand I managed to clear my eyes, and recognized the same bullet and cartridge case that Duncan Christie had pressed into my palm outside the Metro-Centre.

VERY LITTLE HAD CHANGED, I told myself, but nothing was quite the same. By the end of the second week we were still convinced that we would soon be released from the Metro-Centre. That morning the remaining hostages emerged from their hotels, sleepless and dishevelled, and looking as if their dreams had attacked them. They selected a breakfast of sorts from the soft drink and confectionery shelves of the nearest supermarket, washed themselves in a litre of Perrier water, and then assembled in the South Gate entrance hall, ready to play their roles in an eternal baggage handlers’ strike.

By now nearly two thousand hostages had been freed, but those who remained were aware that their value to Tom Carradine and his mutineers had risen steeply. Barely a dozen were released each day, and Julia Goodwin no longer bothered to present her list in person. She had already despaired of me, and shook her head wearily whenever I appeared, asking about David Cruise’s health. Ask about your own health, her tired but punitive gaze seemed to say.

Out of duty, I hobbled to the South Gate entrance and joined the hostages patiently forming themselves into a queue. Tired of waiting, a group of parents with older children tried to force their way through the marshals guarding the fire door. Cheered on, they kicked aside the security rails and demanded to be released.

The reaction was prompt and violent. The marshals drew their batons, and the parents were pushed back with a show of force that hushed everyone in the entrance hall and left two of the husbands bleeding from head wounds. Behind his screen of bully-boys, Sangster watched all this with a resigned but understanding smile.

I wanted to talk to the head teacher, but I felt uneasy with him. He had begun to sway from side to side like a fourth atrium bear, keeping time to the music inside his head. His role was too ambiguous for comfort, and he had moved from hostage to principal ringleader without taking off his overcoat.

After the brutal response by the marshals everyone stared silently at the open floor where the scuffles had taken place. Bloody skid marks covered the tiles, and Sangster stepped forward and began to scrutinize them in a strangely obsessive way, like an anthropologist examining the foot paintings of a primitive tribe. Rousing himself from his reverie, he stepped through a service door and reappeared with a mop cart and bucket. Watched by the crowd, he swabbed away at the skid marks, squeezed out the bloodstained mop and worked it up and down the floor until the marble gleamed again. The hostages stared stolidly at their reflections but remained silent.

I said nothing to Sangster or Tony Maxted about my sighting of Duncan Christie, deciding to keep this to myself. The bullet thrown onto the beach, like the one he had pressed into my hand, was his way of reminding me that the Metro-Centre had killed my father, and that the agents of his death were now with me inside the dome. I kept my eyes on the high galleries, but Christie had disappeared into the mist that separated the seventh floor from the sky.

Rumours swerved around the Metro-Centre, phantoms that flew by day. I dozed for an hour behind the enquiry desk, and woke to find the hostages discussing the news that David Cruise had begun to revive in the intensive care unit. He had removed his oxygen mask and spoken to several witnesses about his determination to defend the Metro-Centre and return it to its rightful place in the M25 community.

I dismissed this as a near-hysterical fantasy, but Tom Carradine arrived and confirmed the good news through his megaphone. He looked confident and charismatic in his freshly pressed uniform, but almost too lucid for comfort, speaking with an amphetamine fluency, eyes bright and unblinking as he surveyed the exhausted hostages. Nonetheless, he announced that he would celebrate the good news by freeing a further fifty hostages. His decision was relayed to the police negotiators at their post beyond the fire door, and dominated the lunchtime television bulletins.

Everyone lined up for the selection, trying to look their worst as Carradine and Sangster moved along them. Parents did everything to irritate their already fractious teenagers, wives urged their middle-aged husbands to mumble and drool. Most of us were too tired to think of feigning exhaustion, but Sangster pointed to an ailing widow who had been injured by police truncheons and showed the effects of mild concussion.

The hostages accepted their fate, but a group of well-to-do Pakistanis were convinced that they had been deliberately ignored. They surrounded Carradine in a rage of indignation, shouting and thrusting at his shoulder. Sangster quickly signalled to the marshals, who forced back the gesticulating group and kicked open their parcels. To a chorus of jeers, they held aloft the silkily expensive underwear, then trampled the garments underfoot. The elderly barrister who was the family patriarch worked himself into a fury of anger, shouting abuse at Carradine and by chance spitting on his shirt. Batons were being drawn as I left the ugly scene.

I disliked the violence and limped back to the first-aid post, hoping to see Julia Goodwin. The marshals guarding David Cruise had seen enough of me for the day and turned me away, so I sat on the podium beneath the bears. Half an hour later I heard the emergency hatch clang shut as the last of the returnees stepped shakily into freedom.

About three hundred hostages now remained, and the same number of mutineers. The latter formed a hard core of supporters who had forsaken everything, their homes and families, their jobs and cars and loft extensions, to defend the Metro-Centre.

Despite their efforts, conditions in the dome were steadily deteriorating. Without the powerful air-conditioning units, the temperature inside the mall continued to climb. The supermarket floors were slick with melted ice cream oozing from their cabinets, and a foul air rose from the defrosting meat freezers. The water pressure was too low to fill the lavatory cisterns, and a farmyard stench enclosed the Ramada Inn where the dome’s director and senior staff were held prisoner. The Metro-Centre, once bathed in a cool and scented air, was turning into a gigantic sty.

At two o’clock that afternoon, when the hostages drifted off in search of lunch, they found all the supermarkets closed. They peered through the doors, rattling the chains and padlocks, until the public address system ordered them to assemble in the central atrium. Carradine appeared thirty minutes later, descending the staircase from the mezzanine, and informed us that lunch was off the menu until we cleaned up the supermarkets and returned them to their previously immaculate state. He called on everyone to remember their pride in the Metro-Centre, and repay the debt they owed the mall for transforming their lives. The hostages would be divided into ten work groups and each of these would be assigned a supermarket.