The White Room (41 page)

He closed his eyes, tuned everything else out, held on to those feelings, those images.

The flames drew nearer, the smoke choked, blinded.

Black dots danced before his eyes.

Happiness. Love.

A loud whoom as the gas cooker in the kitchen exploded, sending a fireball hunting for a way out. It found the balcony.

Jack's eyes closed, he didn't see it coming.

It hit.

Jack smiled.

PART FIVE

The Future

At night he dreamed the city.

One straight road. A high street, stretching from the past to the future. A recurring dream of a recurring city. Always the same.

He was walking. From the past to the future. But he never got there. Wherever he stopped, in the dream, he was always in the present. He looked back, saw the past all grimy and sooty. Small and shabby. Depressing and squalid. He would look to the future and see light, dazzling and shining. See huge constructs reaching up and up, aspiring higher and higher. Radiant and beautiful. A city in the sky. Made the heart sing to look upon it. Utopia. He would imagine himself there, living in it. Then he would look around. Find himself back in the present.

The present was neither the black of the past nor the white of the future. It was always grey. Everyday grey. And he would walk, sometimes try to run, towards the future, but his dream legs couldn't move him fast enough. Couldn't outrun the grey present.

Always stuck. Always now. Always looking for desperate ways to barter himself forward.

He stopped walking, looked around. The present loomed up, all around him. Towering grey walls. They began to close in.

He looked around, tried to escape. There was no way out.

The walls moved in closer.

He began to sweat. He tried to run, but his legs wouldn't move.

The walls moved closer.

Closer. He stretched out his arms, could touch both sides with his fingertips.

He tried to shout, to raise the alarm, but when he opened his mouth he found he had no dream voice. Closer.

He tensed, anticipating being crushed.

Closer.

Then nothing. Silence. They had stopped moving.

He breathed a huge sigh of relief, then looked around. He couldn't move. He was trapped, powerless. Dream logic told him he would not be moving for quite a while. Dream logic told him this was because of his bartering. Trying to sell the present to buy the future.

He looked around, heart heavy, and tried to get used to his new environment. He had accepted his imprisonment to a degree that surprised him. He thought he would have fought. But deep down his dream self knew. He couldn't have fought these walls and won.

There was no door. But one of the walls had a window. Small, barred, high up. Through it he could just manage to see the gleaming, brilliant city of the future.

He sighed, slumped down.

The radiance of the future glowed through the bars, illuminating the cell of the present. He knew it was out there on the road, but he couldn't touch it, couldn't reach it.

He could just sit there, immobile, and bask in reflected glow of an unreachable utopia.

And that was all.

June 1974:

Sweatbox Reverie

Camera flashes, sharp and brief: a mini firework display at the small, square windows. A lurch as the sweatbox took a corner, scattering press outside, leaving running feet, jostling equipment and unanswered requests in its diesel slipstream.

Down the road and away.

From Leeds Crown Court to prison.

Dan Smith sat back, tried to steady himself against the hard metal seat, hard metal wall.

So sudden, he thought, so swift. No chance to put affairs in order, have meaningful goodbyes with loved ones, mentally prepare oneself for the contraction of one's world. Dan tried to sit still, think.

Dan knew he would have a lot of time to think.

Bribery and corruption, the judge had said. Bribery and corruption.

And conspiracy.

Six years.

Six years' loss of freedom. Of stigmatization.

Six years.

Bribery, corruption, conspiracy.

Rubbish.

Dan knew it was how the business worked. Give out cash bonuses and incentives to guarantee that the companies he represented would get the work. Make sure the contracts would go to the right companies. And they would be the right companies.

They would be the ones who shared the vision.

Dan's vision.

Building utopia.

The prosecution saw it differently:

J. G. L. Poulson – Architects. J. G. L. Poulson & Associates – Consulting Engineers. Construction Promotions. Ropergate Services – Bank and Project Coordinator. Ovalgate Investments. Open House Building. International Technical & Constructional Services. Worldwide Interiors. Water Reclamation. Science & Economic.

All Poulson's companies. All fronted by Dan.

All, as Dan insisted, sharing his vision.

Poulson already serving seven years. Andy Cunningham, former chairman of Durham County Council, getting five.

All giving money out to secure contracts.

To: BR. NCB. Gas Board. To civil servants. To other councils. To MPs both red and blue. To Reggie Maudling, the Home Secretary.

Not bribes, argued Dan. Business. He said it again: it was how the business world worked, the way things were done. Everyone did it.

But not everyone saw it that way. Not everyone shared his vision.

Dan lurched; half-fell off his seat, as the sweatbox took a bump in the road.

Sweatbox. A misnomer, thought Dan. It was beginning to get hot, to stink, true. To smell of all the men who had been in there. But not just sweat: other bodily excretions. Their piss. Their blood. Their tears. Their secret hopes and huge fears.

Trundling, bumping along.

Putting more miles between Dan and freedom.

Freedom. Losing that was bad enough. But not the most important thing Dan could have taken away from him.

Power. He had been stripped of his power.

The worst thing the court could have done, worse even than removing freedom from a man, was to remove power from a politician. Because that was all Dan had ever wanted, ever worked towards, ever craved.

Power.

His aphrodisiac. His drug of choice. His reason for living.

Power.

But not for its own sake. Not for nothing. There was no point in having it unless he could use it. And Dan used it. Felt it course through his body, flowing, like the Tyne to the North Sea.

Used it. Wielded it. Courted with it. Made it bend things into the shape he wanted them. Made his vision into reality.

The Challenge of the Changing North.

The
New
castle.

Dan's castle.

He had the knack, he had once been told, of getting inside people's minds, of making his dreams their dreams. He had never known if it was an insult or a compliment. But it was a description he was proud of.

The sweatbox rattled on its way.

Dan had had time to think. He would have a lot more.

And he would try not to be bitter.

Because he knew what had been done to him. And he knew why. To put him in his place. To remind him: so far and no further.

He had been to London, he had seen how it worked. He had been patronized, strung along, played. Subtly reminded he wasn't one of them.

He wasn't born of influence and affluence. He was a working-class lad from Wallsend. He hadn't been to the right schools, the right universities. He had left school at fourteen, gone to work. He didn't consider himself above the people. He considered himself
of
the people.

So far and no further.

Then slap him down.

There had been five previous attempts to get him this far. Five failed previous attempts.

One success.

He wasn't being paranoid; he wasn't seeing conspiracy theories where there weren't any.

Dan was sure of that.

The proof:

Poulson, Cunningham, himself: prison.

Reggie Maudling: nothing.

They would close ranks, protect their own. One law for the regions, the outsiders. Another for the Establishment. For Home Secretaries.

And he would try not to be bitter.

Bitterness didn't enter into it.

And to add insult to injury:

The Elms estate was crumbling.

The tower blocks were falling apart. Ralph Bell had cheated him, jerry-built the blocks using substandard materials. Everything needed replacing. And then there was the asbestos removal. Big, big headaches. Plus the fact that the tower blocks were becoming high-rise slums. Inner-city no-go areas.

And no Ben Marshall to clear it up. Still in a private room at the Nuffield, still not responding to stimuli, still a privately maintained vegetable. His ex-wife not having the heart or the authority to flick the switch. No clues as to his attacker. No one brought to justice.

Dan had visited him. He had expected to find Ben lying there with calmness and serenity, a hushed, reverent atmosphere. Instead he had found a misshapen-headed body, muscles and tendons contracted due to years of inertia, curled and wizened into a gnarled facsimile of agony, hooked up to drips and monitors, like the half-eaten carcass of a fly trapped in a spider's web. Dan hadn't stayed long.

Enter Dougie Shaw. The saviour. Looked and talked old school, thought and acted new school. The new owner of Northern Star. Now a subsidiary of London-based Calabrese Holdings plc. The company had been awarded the refurbishment contract. And they hoped to try to attract a new type of tenant. Or ‘client', as Dougie Shaw had called them in the paper. And Dan's plan for an indoor shopping centre in the heart of the city had been given the go-ahead. With Northern Star. Likewise the underground train system for Newcastle.

Dan had seen a photo of Dougie Shaw in the paper. A black tie do, Dougie all dicky bowed and jovial, cigar elongating, waistline expanding. Beside him Sharon, his wife. Clinging on to him like a drowning woman to a life raft. Ex-Mrs Smeaton, ex-Mrs Marshall. Like she came with the company. Now nipped and tucked beyond all recognition. But stretched skin and hormone therapy couldn't altogether disguise her bloated features, her vague-eyed, clumsy coordination. Her alcohol and prescription painkillers addiction tacit common knowledge.

Looking at it, Dan had sighed, shook his head.

Heard the rumours of a knighthood for London-born entrepreneur.

He would try not to be bitter.

The sweatbox turned another corner, began to slow down.

Almost there.

Dan's heart sank.

If I've done anything wrong, Dan had said before the trial, then I deserve punishment.

He hadn't done anything wrong. He firmly believed that. There were others far worse than him getting away with far more than him.

And they had no vision.

The sweatbox pulled up; a sudden halt, air brakes hissing.

Dan Smith sighed, looked at his hands.

No more vision.

No more power.

No more utopia.

The sweatbox pulled slowly forward, through the gates.

June 1972:

Archetypal Behaviour

Joanne placed the paintings on the table, looked at them.

A glass of wine sat at the edge of the desk lamp's illumination. In the background Neil Young sang that he was still looking for a heart of gold. She liked working this way, felt more creative, in tune with her work.

The paintings. Done by a child's hand, the first showed a sea in the middle of a storm. Huge, violent, thrashing waves. Rain lashing down. Dark clouds hanging in the sky. Off-centre was a small figure clinging to a piece of driftwood. A little girl.

She remembered the conversation that accompanied it:

‘The waves are huge,' the girl had said. ‘They can take your breath away. Drown you.'

‘And what's this little figure here doing?' said Joanne.

‘Trying to cling on. Trying to survive.' The girl frowned. ‘I was going to have her lying dead, but then I thought no. Let her live.'

‘And her mouth's open. What's she shouting?'

‘Dunno.' The girl had shrugged. ‘For help, I suppose.'

Joanne wrote in the notebook she kept by the side of the paintings. Compiled her report.

The second was of a shadowy, ill-lit backstreet. Joanne thought she recognized it as the West End of Newcastle. The tower blocks gave it away. From around a corner in this urban noir landscape, the girl had painted a lion in mid-pounce. Huge, mad-eyed, its jaws dripping blood.

The conversation:

‘Well,' Joanne had said, ‘that's scary.'

‘That's what they're like. That's what they do.'

‘Why is it on the street, though? Why isn't it in a jungle?'

The girl had shrugged. ‘I've never been to the jungle.'

Another few sentences in the notebook, another mouthful of wine.

Joanne's work: art therapy.

She had been practising for years, making real progress in what was becoming an increasingly respected field. She worked mainly with disturbed teenagers throughout Hertfordshire and the South-East, where she was based. Her signature work: a personality test based on the responses to a set of universal archetypes. She was highly praised for her work and for her results, but she refused to take too much credit for two reasons. The first was that Jung originally devised the test, and she had just adapted it for painted responses. The second was the fact that her clients had reached the stage where they wanted to come to terms with their predicaments, whatever they may be, and take positive steps to change their lives for the better. Joanne was the first step towards making that happen.

The first question: think of a colour.

‘Blue,' the girl had said.

‘Now think of three words to describe that colour.'