‘It lingers on. It shapes everything we do, the way we think. There’s scarcely a good thing you can say for it. Genocidal wars, half the world destitute, the other half sleepwalking through its own brain-death. We bought its trashy dreams and now we can’t wake up. All these hypermarkets and gated communities. Once the doors close you can never get out. You know all this, David. It keeps you in corporate clients.’
‘Right. But there’s one problem about this trash society. The middle classes like it.’
‘Of course they do,’ Joan chipped in. ‘They’re enslaved by it. They’re the new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years ago.’
‘So how do we free them? Bomb a few theme parks?’
‘Bombs?’ Dexter raised a hand to interrupt Joan. ‘How exactly?’
‘Violent action. A direct attack.’
‘No.’ The clergyman stared at the stained carpet. ‘No bombs, I think…’
Silence had fallen across the room, and I could hear the refrigerator in the kitchen working away, a metallic groaning at the ice face. Dexter released Joan’s hand, and turned to switch off the desk light, his performance over. Something had subdued him, and he fingered the scar on his forehead, trying to rub it away and at the same time make it more prominent, an oblique caution to himself. His Chinese girlfriend was watching him with a mixture of irritation and concern, aware that he had led himself onto dangerous ground that could never bear his weight. I wondered if he had allowed the Philippine military to use him in their aerial attacks on the guerrilla forces. Sitting beside me in the shabby room, he had a certain bleak dignity, but I almost suspected that he was an imposter.
I stood unsteadily by the window as they took their seats astride the Harley-Davidson. Kay had returned in her Polo and waved them goodbye from the gate. In their black helmets, sitting on this fat American machine, they seemed worldly in the extreme, the fashionably agnostic priest and his hyper-observant girlfriend, outriders challenging the placid streets around them.
In fact, they were completely detached from reality, with their naive talk of overturning an entire century. In pursuit of a new millennium, they had torn down a travel poster in a shopping mall, and society had assessed the cost to itself at £27.
Despite my injuries, I felt nearer to my goal. Most of the protesters I had met, like Angela at the Olympia cat show, were sane and self-disciplined, but there was a wilder fringe of animal rights fanatics who planted bombs under scientists’ cars and were prepared to kill. Had one of these madmen, focused on tourism and the Third World, strayed across the path of Kay, Stephen Dexter and Joan Chang? I needed to unpack their obsessions, and unroll them in the daylight like a cheap carpet.
I sat beside Kay as she drove me to a taxi rank in the King’s Road. She seemed content with the day’s activities, and I was grateful for her kindness to a fellow demonstrator. I admired her for the way she openly wore her insecurities like a collection of favourite costume jewellery.
As we were leaving Chelsea Marina a group of residents had gathered by the estate offices. Strong-willed and confident, they shouted down the young manager who tried to address them. Their voices, honed at a hundred school open days and business conferences, drowned the manager’s efforts to make himself heard.
‘What is it?’ I asked Kay, as she edged the car through the throng. ‘It looks serious.’
‘It is serious.’
‘Some paedophile on the prowl?’
‘Parking charges.’ Kay stared sternly at the luckless manager, who had taken refuge behind his glass door. ‘Believe me, the next revolution is going to be about parking.’ At the time, I thought she was joking.
‘THEY’RE ALL A little mad,’ I told Sally, pointing to the swirl of excited bubbles in the jacuzzi. ‘A strange fringe group. Huge obsessions floating around a cozy living room. It’s useful to see just how odd apparently sane people can be.’
‘So they’re harmless cranks?’
‘I’m not sure they’re harmless. They’re in the grip of some bizarre ideas. Abolish the 20th Century. Ban tourism. Politics, commerce, education – all corrupt.’
‘It’s a point of view. They are a bit.’
‘Sally…’ I smiled down at her, lying comfortably in the whirl-bath with a stack of fashion magazines, the picture of comfort and security. ‘See it in context. This is Kropotkin with pink gins and wall-to-wall Axminster. These people want to change the world, use violence if they need to, but they’ve never had the central heating turned off in their lives.’
‘They’ve got you going, though. You haven’t been so fired up for years.’
‘That’s true. I wonder why…?’ I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, hair springing from my forehead, face as tense as the Reverend Dexter’s. I seemed twenty years younger, the newly graduated man of science with an askew tie knot and a glowing desire to straighten out the world. ‘I might write a paper about the phenomenon. “The Upholstered Apocalypse.” The middle classes have moved from charity work and civic responsibility to fantasies of cataclysmic change. Whisky sours and armageddon…’
‘At least they cared for you. This doctor, Richard Gould – I looked him up on the net. He helped to invent a new kind of shunt for babies with hydrocephalus.’
‘Good for him. I mean it. He never let me see his face – why, I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps they were having you on.’ Sally caught my hand as I prowled the bathroom. ‘Let’s face it, dear. You’re just waiting to be shocked.’
‘I’ve thought about that.’ I sat on the edge of the bath, inhaling the heady scents of Sally’s body. ‘I’d been pushed around by the police, and they knew I was an amateur. Hard-core demonstrators never get knocked to the ground – far too dangerous. They do their thing and skip off before the rough stuff begins. Like Angela, the Kingston housewife at Olympia. Really quick on her feet, and happy to leave me to face the music.’
‘This film lecturer helped you. She sounds sweet.’
‘Kay Churchill. She was great. Completely scatty, but she saved me outside the court. I was in a bad way.’
I waited for Sally to sympathize, but she lay passively in the bath, playing with the bubbles on her breasts. The X-rays at the Royal Free Hospital had shown no rib fractures, but the cat fanciers’ boots had bruised my spleen, as Joan Chang predicted. Collecting me from the hospital, Sally glanced at the plates with a perfunctory nod. She was immersed in her own perpetual recovery, and had no wish to share her monopoly of doubt and discomfort with anyone, even her husband. In her mind, my bruises were self-inflicted, far removed from the meaningless injuries that presided over her life like an insoluble mystery.
‘David, towel…When are you going back to Chelsea Marina?’
‘I’ll give them a miss. They’re not the kind of people who set off bombs.’
‘But they mentioned Heathrow. You overheard them when they thought you were asleep. That was the first thing you said when the cab driver helped you up the steps.’
‘They were trying to impress me. Or impress themselves. They feed on conspiracy. This biker priest – he’s frightened of violence. Something happened in the Philippines, long before Heathrow.’
‘What about Dr Gould? When he was fourteen he was hauled before a juvenile court, charged with an arson attack on a Kilburn department store.’
‘Sally, I’m impressed.’ I watched her fasten the bath towel under her arms. ‘You should be working for the Antiterrorist