Millennium People Page 8

  ‘How many want to? They’re on our side.’

  ‘Almost. What about Heathrow? It’s the one real lead we’ve had. David, you’ve got to change your mind.’

  ‘All right, then. I’ll go back to Chelsea Marina and ask around. This clergyman, and the people close to Kay Churchill. I’ll see if I can contact Dr Gould.’

  ‘Good. We need to know what happened to Laura. A lot hangs on it, David…’

  There was more than a faint threat in her voice. She still wore the bath towel around her body, and was waiting for me to leave the room before tossing it onto the bed, a sure sign of a slight estrangement between us. She had decided that Laura’s pointless death carried some kind of defiant message that would at last bring closure to my first marriage.

  But already I knew that my quest for Laura’s murderer was really about my second marriage. Avoiding Sally’s stare, I remembered the furious knotting of her eyebrows when she took her first unaided steps in the orthopaedic ward at St Mary’s. Damp with sweat, her nightdress clung to her skin, and I could see the muscles coming alive in her thighs, diagrams of an ambivalent will to walk. We had exchanged confidences during my visits, friendly teasing with only the slightest hint of flirtation. But at that moment, as she hobbled towards me on her sticks, wrists white with pain and anger at herself, I had known that we would become lovers.

  As always, a perverse calculus refreshed and redefined the world.

  10

  Appointment with a Revolution

  LIKE EVERY OBEDIENT professional, I arrived punctually for my appointment with a revolution. At noon three Saturdays later, bruises faded and spleen settled, I parked my Range Rover in a side street off the King’s Road. I had called Kay Churchill soon after breakfast, watched by a mildly curious Sally. Against a background of angry middle-class voices, Kay answered in a shriek, and said she would meet me by the entrance to Chelsea Marina.

  ‘We’ll go on a field trip. You’ll be the David Attenborough of the suburbs…’

  Pleased that she remembered me, I walked along the King’s Road and turned left into a small riot. A police car was drawn up by the gatehouse, light flashing and radio squawking to itself. A crowd of more than a hundred residents were packed around the estate office. Most were women in weekend wear, freed from the tailored suits they wore in their surgeries and executive corridors. Their children were with them, faces lit by the sight of their mothers angry with someone other than themselves. A few cautious husbands hung around the fringes, warily joining in the din.

  Two policemen pushed through the crowd, trying to calm the protesters, and called to the speaker who was haranguing her neighbours. But their voices were lost in the boos and jeers, and a five-year-old boy sitting on his father’s shoulders tried to knock the peaked cap from a constable’s head.

  Ash-grey hair in furious disarray, the bones in her face displayed at their television best, cleavage deep enough to daunt every male gaze within a mile radius, Kay Churchill was in her element. She stood on a swivel chair taken from the estate office, thighs shown off as she teetered deliberately, heedless of anything but her fierce commitment. It was a pleasure to see her in full spate. The students watching her lectures on Godard and the New Wave had probably scripted their pornographic films long before she came up with the project.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked a young woman beside me, pushchair and child forgotten at her feet. ‘Parking meters? Speed humps?’

  ‘Maintenance charges. They’re going sky high.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘Kay’s locked the manager in his office. The poor man had to call the police.’

  An anxious male face peered through the glass door. He was clearly appalled by the hostile women jeering at him, a fearsome sight that struck at all the certainties of estate management. Kay produced a set of keys, which she waved at him and then dangled in front of the policemen. When they moved in, threatening to arrest her, she flung the keys over their heads. Hands on hips, she laughed good-naturedly as they were snatched from the air and tossed around the crowd.

  I joined in the applause and turned to leave, accepting that Kay would be too busy with her pocket revolution to bother with me. A second police car had arrived, and a harder-faced sergeant in the passenger seat was speaking into his radio. Within minutes this middle-class playgroup would be sent back to its toy cupboard.

  ‘Mr Markham! Wait…!’

  A slim woman wearing a white linen jacket, severe hair swept back from a high forehead, stopped me before I reached the entrance. Somehow she managed to smile and scowl at the same time, and reminded me of the official guides at scientific conferences in Eastern Europe. She looked me up and down, unconvinced by my tweedy appearance.

  ‘Mr Markham? I’m Vera Blackburn, a friend of Kay’s. She said you were joining us.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I watched the crowd hooting the police. The sergeant had stepped from his car and was coldly surveying the scene, like an abattoir director at a foot-and-mouth cull. ‘This isn’t my thing…’

  ‘Too childish?’ She stopped me from moving on, a firm hand on my lapel. She was thin but strong, with a muscular body honed on exercise machines. Her lips moved, as if she were forever biting back a cutting remark. ‘Or too bourgeois?’

  ‘Something like that.’ I pointed to the King’s Road. ‘I have my own problems with parking meters…’

  ‘It looks childish, and probably is.’ She stared at her fellow residents with half-closed eyes. ‘We really need your input, Mr Markham. Things are getting complicated.’

  ‘Are they? I’m not sure I can help.’

  I turned from her as more police entered the estate, larger men like the constables at Olympia. One of them stared at me, as if he recognized my face from an earlier demo.

  ‘Mr Markham, time to go. Unless you want to be beaten up again. We’ll wait for Kay at my flat.’

  Vera took my arm and steered me through the crowd, her bony hand as hard as a tiller. Kay Churchill stepped from her swivel chair into the shelter of her admirers. The two constables by the estate office had custody of the keys, and released the unhappy manager hiding behind his glass door. Sensibly, the demonstrators were dispersing.

  We walked along Beaufort Avenue to the centre of the estate. The herb gardens, the cheerful children’s rooms filled with sensible toys, the sounds of teenagers at violin practice, were given an odd spin by the notion of an imminent revolt. Most revolutionaries in the last century had aspired to exactly this level of affluence and leisure, and it occurred to me that I was seeing the emergence of a higher kind of boredom.

  We reached Cadogan Circle, where an apartment block stood beside the roundabout. Vera strode ahead of me in a brisk bobbing walk, like a whore with a soon-to-be-fleeced client, or a moody prefect at a girls’ school on some sly mission of her own. Waving her swipe card at a watching sparrow, she led the way into the foyer.

  ‘Kay’ll be along when she’s changed. All that indignation tends to make you steam…’

  ‘Half an hour – then I have to leave, revolution or no revolution.’

  ‘No problem. We’ll postpone it for you.’ She treated me to a quick grin. ‘Think of this as your Finland Station, Mr Markham.’

  We rode a small lift to the third floor. From her shoulder bag she took out a set of keys, and worked the triple locks of her front door like the entrance to a crypt. Her flat was sparsely furnished, with armless black chairs, a glass-topped writing desk that resembled an autopsy table, and low-wattage lamps that barely lit the gloom. This was a nightclub at noon. There were no books, and I sensed that this hard-minded young woman came here to erase the world. A chromiumframed photograph hung above the mantelpiece, a blow-up of herself in full Helmut Newton mode, all emotion eliminated from her face. But the room was a shrine to a desperate narcissism.

  She walked to the window and rolled up the blind onto a clear view of Beaufort Avenue. The protest had broken up, and families were strolling back to their houses.

  ‘
It’s over. At least we gave the manager something to think about.’

  ‘Locking him in his office?’

  ‘Sixth-formish? I know. But people have to work with the conventions they’re used to. Feasts in the dorm, fags behind the cricket pavilion, debaggings…’

  ‘You make it sound like a new kind of deprivation.’

  ‘In a way, it is.’ Vera sat down in a replica Eames chair that gave her an uninterrupted view of her portrait photograph. Leaving me to stand, she said: ‘It may not be obvious, but people at Chelsea Marina are very unsettled. There’s something stirring here.’

  ‘Really? It’s hard to believe.’ I sat on a black leather sofa. ‘It all looks very pleased with itself. No sign of rickets, scurvy or leaking roofs.’

  ‘Only on the surface.’ Vera glanced at her compact mirror. ‘My neighbours are the new poor. These aren’t City high-flyers, or surgeons with their own clinics and rich Arab patients flying in from the Gulf. Very few are self-employed. They’re middle managers, journalists, lecturers like Kay, architects working for big practices. The poor bloody foot soldiers in the professional army.’

  ‘Prosperous enough?’

  ‘They’re not. Salaries have plateaued. There’s the threat of early retirement. Once you’re forty it’s cheaper to hire some bright-eyed graduate clutching her little diploma.’

  ‘So there’s a backlash. But why here, at Chelsea Marina? It’s a fashionable area, close to the King’s Road…’

  Vera turned to stare at me. ‘Are you an estate agent? This place is a dump. Maintenance is almost nil but the charges keep going up. This flat cost me more than my father earned in his lifetime.’

  ‘There’s a wonderful view. Aren’t you happy here?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it.’ She sniffed her black nail polish. ‘Happiness? I like the idea, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort. Also…’

  ‘It’s not intellectually respectable?’

  ‘Exactly.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘We need some principles. Anyway, one of the lifts has been out of order for months. For two hours a day the taps don’t run. You have to plan when you need a shit.’

  ‘Talk to the management company. Your lease should guarantee prompt repairs.’

  ‘We do. They don’t want to listen. They’re in cahoots with a property developer who’d like us all out of here. They want to run the place down, buy us out and raze it to the ground. Then they’ll bring in Foster and Richard Rogers to design huge blocks of luxury flats.’

  ‘As long as you stay you’re safe. Why worry about what may never happen?’

  ‘It is happening. We’re being squeezed, and there’s nothing subtle about a hand grabbing your balls. The council have just painted double yellow lines everywhere.’

  ‘Can they do that?’

  ‘They can do anything. These are public streets. So they’ve graciously provided us with meters. Kay pays to park outside her own house.’

  ‘Why not move?’

  ‘We can’t.’ Her temper rising, Vera raised her fists and stared for sympathy at the ceiling. ‘For God’s sake, we’ve sunk everything into Chelsea Marina. We’re all locked into huge mortgages. People have sky-high school fees, and the banks breathing down their necks. Besides, where do we move to? Darkest Surrey? Some two-hour commute to Reading or Guildford?’

  ‘Heaven forbid. So you’re trapped?’

  ‘Right. Like the old working class in their back-to-backs. Knowledge-based professions are just another extractive industry. When the seams run out we’re left high and dry with a lot of out-of-date software. Believe me, I know why the miners went on strike.’

  ‘I’m impressed.’ With a straight face, I said: ‘Chelsea Marina, shoulder to shoulder with the old working class…’

  ‘It isn’t a bloody joke.’ Vera stared darkly at me, the bones in her forehead pressing through her pale skin. ‘We’re getting restless. The middle classes are meant to be the great social anchor, all that duty and responsibility. But the cables are dragging. Professional qualifications are worth nothing – an arts degree is like a diploma in origami. As for security, it’s nonexistent. Some computer at the Treasury decides interest rates should go up a point and I owe the bank manager another year’s hard work.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Concerned for her, I watched her fingers fretting with her compact, brows knitted fiercely. Though she made me uneasy with her quiet anger, I found myself almost liking her. ‘And where is this work? The TUC? Labour Party Headquarters?’

  ‘I’m…a kind of consultant.’ She waved airily, but her face was blank. ‘I used to be at the Ministry of Defence – senior scientific officer. I analysed depleted uranium residues scraped from Kosovan hillsides.’

  ‘Interesting work. And important.’

  ‘Not interesting, and not important. Now, I have another job. Far more valuable.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘I’m Richard Gould’s bomb-maker.’

  I waited for her to go on, aware that she was both teasing me and trying to tell me something. But she sat silently, eyebrows lifting as she savoured a favourite phrase. I said: ‘Dangerous, for you as well as everyone else. What sort of bombs do you make?’

  ‘Smoke bombs, percussion devices, slow-release incendiaries. No one gets hurt.’

  ‘Good. Nothing like the bomb at Heathrow?’

  ‘Heathrow?’ Surprised, she remembered to close her mouth, and then said quickly: ‘Definitely not. That was designed to kill. Heaven knows why. Richard says that people who find the world meaningless find meaning in pointless violence.’

  ‘Richard? Dr Richard Gould?’

  ‘You’ll meet him again, when he’s ready. He’s the leader of our middle-class rebellion. His mind is amazingly clear, like those brain-damaged children he looks after. In a way, he’s one of them.’

  She smiled to herself, as if thinking about a lover, but I could see the clear sweat that had formed on her upper lip, glistening like the ghost of a second presence, a secret self. She had been unsettled by my mention of the Heathrow atrocity.

  ‘These bombs,’ I asked. ‘What are the targets?’

  ‘It’s early days. Shopping malls, cineplexes, DIY centres. All that C20 trash. The regurgitated vomit people call the consumer society.’ Almost pedantically, she added: ‘They’re not really bombs – they’re acoustic provocations. Like the thunderflashes your friends let off at Olympia. Though once I did make a real bomb. Years ago…’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It killed someone. The intended target.’

  ‘For the Ministry of Defence? SAS? Special Branch?’

  ‘Defence, in a way. I was defending my father. After my mother died he met this awful woman. He hated her, but he was under her thumb. A real alcoholic, who wanted me to just fade away. I was twelve, but I was clever.’

  ‘You put together a home-made bomb?’

  ‘Using household ingredients, off the supermarket shelves. She and my father went to the pub on Sunday lunchtimes; she’d come back thick with drink, huge bladder ready to burst. While they were out I took the cover off the lavatory cistern, jammed the float and flushed away the water. Then I filled the cistern with household bleach, released the float and put back the cover. Next, I poured caustic soda crystals into the toilet bowl, and stirred away until there was a concentrated solution. Then I went downstairs and waited.’

  ‘The bomb was ready?’

  ‘All set to go off. They came back from the pub, and she headed straight for the toilet. Locked the door and emptied her bladder. Then she pressed the flush handle.’

  ‘And that triggered the bomb?’

  ‘Sodium hydroxide and sodium hypochlorite form an explosive mix, especially when violently stirred together.’ Vera smiled to herself, a steely little girl again. ‘The reaction gives off huge quantities of chlorine gas. Lethal stuff for an alcoholic with a weakened heart. I went and put on my party dress. My father was asleep in front of the telly. It was two hours before he broke
down the door.’

  ‘She was dead?’

  ‘Stone cold. By then all the gas had dispersed and the cistern had filled with water. My modest bomb had flushed itself away. Verdict: natural causes.’

  ‘An impressive debut. It led you to…?’

  ‘A degree in chemistry, and the Ministry of Defence.’ Vera’s eyes narrowed at me. ‘A sensible career choice, I think you’ll agree.’

  A satisfied smile played around her lips. The film of sweat had vanished, and I assumed that she had invented the story to give herself time to recover. But I realized that this lethal tale might just be true. The talk of bomb-making had been dangled in front of me, part of an extended tease that had begun as I lay half-drugged on Kay Churchill’s settee. Another door had opened into a side corridor that might lead towards Terminal 2 at Heathrow.

  The entryphone buzzed twice, and after a pause a third time. Vera stood up, spoke into the receiver and buttoned her jacket.

  ‘David, are you coming? Kay’s downstairs. We’re going on a field trip…’

  11

  The Heart of Darkness

  ‘DAVID, THINK OF Joseph Conrad and Mr Kurtz,’ Kay told me when we crossed Richmond Bridge. ‘You’re entering an area of almost total deprivation.’

  ‘Twickenham? The heart of darkness?’

  ‘You’ll be shocked.’

  ‘Tennis clubs, bank managers, the Mecca of rugby?’

  ‘Twickenham. A zone of intense spiritual poverty.’

  ‘Right…hard to believe.’ As Kay drove her Polo at a cautious speed, both hands on the wheel, I pointed to the pavements. They were crowded with prosperous natives emerging from the delis and patisseries, or gazing through the windows of busy estate agents. ‘No beggars rattling their tins, no malnutrition.’

  ‘Physically, perhaps.’ Kay nodded confidently. ‘It’s in their minds, in their customs and values. You agree, Vera?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Vera Blackburn sat behind me, a large sports bag clasped in one hand. She was carefully examining her teeth, part of the continuous inspection of her body that took up most of her conscious moments. She glanced briefly at the cheerful forsythia and polished cars. ‘Spiritually, it’s a vast Potemkin Village…’