The Quorum Read online

  ‘You do good work,’ he said, holding up a red folder.

  ‘I try to be thorough.’

  Indeed, over the weekend, she’d researched Mark Amphlett. She finished The Shape of the Now, written in his last year at university, 1981. Slimmer than she remembered from her first stab, the book was slyer than its keynote-speech-for-a-decade reputation suggested. The prescient dissection of the yet-to-come extremes of Thatcher Culture struck her as remarkably on-the-nail. Subsequently, he’d written one further non-fiction work (an unambitious History of Japanese Advertising) and a single novel, Envy. He’d produced and presented The Science of Seemliness, a cusp-of-the-nineties aesthetics documentary on Cloud 9, the Leech satellite channel. Though feelers extended into several mutating media, his main interest remained The Shape: it had a low circulation but astounding ad revenues, actually picking up in the recession. Available also in electronic format, it had outgrown its boom-and-bust readership to keep an enviable footing.

  The part of his history she already knew was shared with Michael Dixon and Neil Martin. Dr Marling’s, Ash Grove, West Somerset College, 1970-77. Even celebrities started as kids: Mark Amphlett started in a council house in a town he himself called the Backwater. Early photographs suggested his mother put a German helmet on him and cut off any hair that stuck out. To him, that must be a million years ago. She wondered what his parents made of him.

  Something happened then, something which explained now. But that wasn’t her business.

  ‘I was impressed with your postscript. Nobody has to work on New Year’s Eve.’

  She shrugged. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Nothing is an accident,’ he said, quoting the title of the first chapter of The Shape of the Now.

  He wore an unusual ring, a heavy mock-antique that didn’t go with his clothes. He had no other jewellery, not even a watch. Inset in stone was a letter ‘Q’.

  He was one of those who looked at you all the time, expecting you eventually to look away. In that, he was right; she’d taken in his face quickly and was now more interested in his office. There were fewer toys than she expected. Everything within reach of his desk had a use.

  ‘Michael and I have talked about you. I would like to extend the arrangement you had with him.’

  Suddenly, this interview made sense. There’d been a cabinet reshuffle. It happened often in dealings with firms of solicitors, even with the courts. Her old contact was promoted, fired, shifted sideways or otherwise off the case; she had to meet the new man or woman.

  ‘Do I report to you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It’s the same job but you’ll invoice The Shape. Square Deal Enterprises, actually. I’m not in business with Michael or the other party...’

  Mickey Yeo, unless she missed her guess.

  ‘...though we have projects in common. I’m taking over this matter.’

  ‘Neil Martin?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘You want to continue surveillance?’

  ‘There will be other considerations. The format will change. For the next six weeks or so, we’ll need regular, immediate situation reports. Nothing on paper is necessary. One or other of us will be in touch and you can keep us informed.’

  ‘Six weeks?’

  ‘Until the 14 th of February.’

  ‘Valentine’s Day?’

  ‘We’ll need Neil’s day-to-day set-up.’

  ‘That can be done, but it’s much more work. I imagine the findings will be unutterably dull.’

  A sharp smile.

  ‘I doubt that, Sally.’

  They were on first names.

  ‘Believe it, Mark. Anybody’s day-to-day life is boring.’

  And Neil Martin’s more than most.

  ‘We don’t need to know what brand of cornflakes he has for breakfast. Use your judgement on the detail. You’ve done well so far.’

  ‘Neil Martin doesn’t seem the breakfast type to me. Instant coffee made with hot water from the tap. If he has hot water.’

  ‘Very astute. Your fee will go up. I think we can find you £700 a week. And reasonable expenses.’

  Do the sums, Mummy.

  Six sevens. £4,200 by the middle of February.

  ‘I have other things current,’ she lied.

  His smile sharpened.

  ‘I think we can afford first call on your services. Would a non-returnable retainer of 2K above your fee compensate you for lost business?’

  ‘Golly, yes,’ she tried not to gulp.

  ‘I’ll have Laura-Leigh format a contract. Sally Rhodes Security Services, isn’t it?’

  He flicked open a box on his desk and toyed with a tiny metal boot, a piece from a Monopoly set. He looked away and through the window. A cold new year was creeping on. This was the morning people crawled back, puffy and bone-tired, to offices that hadn’t been heated for two weeks.

  ‘You’ll excuse me for asking, but...’

  ‘...how did I get into this unusual line of work? A degree in child psychology, no suitable job prospects, receptionist with a security firm, a couple of gigs for them, developed a taste for the chase, out on my own with a business-start loan, a few years snooping and shepherding, saved the world a couple of times, bad ankles and backache from standing about in the cold, near-bankruptcy in the recession, a couple of months as a TV researcher, time off to have a baby, another stab at being my own boss. And here I am.’

  ‘So you are.’

  ‘I like finding things out. Probably a neurotic compulsion.’

  Mark pondered her précis. She had the speech off by heart and would sometimes deliver it to the mirror. Her mother’s version, with snide comments, was much more entertaining.

  ‘You know I was at school with Neil,’ Mark said, gripping his boot in a fist.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder why we’re... Michael and Mickey and me... why we’re so attentive to Our Absent Friend?’

  She considered lying but decided against it. ‘Yes, naturally.’

  For a moment, his look was almost as quizzical as Dixon’s. She was being invited to expand on the thought.

  ‘Mark, it’s hardly my business. I provide a service. It’s legal, it’s not really unethical. Most of the time, I don’t know my motives for doing anything. Why should I try to fathom yours?’

  ‘Fair enough. Just be flexible. What we ask seems weird, I’m aware of that. As I said: nothing is an accident, everything has a purpose. We trust you; please extend the courtesy of returning that trust.’

  She touched her forehead. ‘Aye aye.’

  ‘Sally, you’re not what I imagined a private detective was like.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘If I wore a trenchcoat and carried a gun, I wouldn’t last long.’

  ‘You’re more like a... like a child minder.’

  ‘Got it in one. My speciality is custody cases, holing up at the seaside with a mixed-race kid to stop the father whisking it off to Tehran or Oporto. It’s always the father. I’ve also looked after supposedly kidnappable rich brats and, as far as I’m concerned, you can have ’em.’

  He dropped his boot back in its box and tipped the lid shut over it.

  She said, ‘You’re the only Style Guru I’ve met who’s kept his favourite Monopoly piece.’

  3

  1971-1977

  The Meets started in 1971. Mickey, whose parents had divorced, was with his Mum in London for Christmas, but Michael and Mark, Neil making up the Quorum, were marooned in the Backwater for the duration. Getting together at Michael’s on New Year’s Day, with Trevor Skelly, the S-Man Out, they played Monopoly. Mark was the boot, Michael the top hat, Neil an Airfix Hussar, Skelly the car; Mickey, whom they shuffled poverty-stricken around the board, was represented by a thimble-sized Dalek. Unconcluded after a dusk-til-dawn marathon, the Game lasted three years, mutating to encompass Campaign and Diplomacy. Financial empires became armed principalities, property wheeler-dealing segued into battlefield
conflict. Mickey joined when term started, ruthlessly catching up. Other boys, and Michael’s sister Candy, came and went, coopted for an afternoon or a term, then were destroyed or expelled, sacrificed by major players. Skelly lasted a year, his expansionist dictatorship tumbling when his family moved to Swindon. The power vacuum led to war between Mark and Mickey, a crisis settled only by Neil’s diplomatic achievement, the Brink’s Café éTreaty, signed after school and witnessed by a puzzled waitress. ‘I reckon you talk the most crap ever,’ she commented. She looked like Brie Simon, 1973’s idea of a sex goddess. In 1981, one of Michael’s first TV plays would be The Game, a nightmare comedy about superpower arms limitation talks which turn into a boys’ bedroom battle.

  * * *

  First they were the Four of ’Em, the Four of M: Michael, Mickey, Martin, Mark. That evolved into The Forum, the irregular magazine they put out under the aegis of Ash Grove, then (after the Princess Anne Wedding Special was banned) off their own bat. Mickey produced razor-lined artwork; Mark specialised in collages of found images; Michael formulated cynical essays; Neil contributed ‘Neil-Bites’, half-pages of prose that weren’t quite stories and weren’t poetry either. Never printing more than 150 copies, they were usually left with 90 of them; by the nineties, issues would change hands for up to £25.00. They became the Quorum when it was noticed how rare it was to get them all together at the same time. Like the balls which were supposed to roll into dents in the clown’s face, only three could be lined up; if the fourth got in, one of the others got loose. Someone was always left out.

  Each had outside interests. Having gone from Chopin to Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey put his piano lessons to use in a succession of bands. Mark was Chess Club King, a spider-like strategist who ruled the boards until the advent of Carole Wolley, the Brain Child whose merciless play made him give up the game. Neil and Michael competed to write novels, sometimes getting fifty pages down before losing momentum. Michael and Mickey went to the Loire with Michael’s parents and came back with lies about French girls that made Neil and Mark intensely envious. Neil got a Saturday job in a newsagent’s and was briefly rich on seven pounds a week. After an Eisenstein film at the Rat Centre, Michael declared himself a Communist and wrote off to join the Party, prompting Mark to a flirtation with the National Front that ended when he realised his favourite musicians were all black.

  * * *

  The Game was finally resolved in 1973. With school now comprehensive and co-educational, impressing girls was a higher priority than byzantine death-struggles. Brie Simon, cuddling a fanged Ingrid Pitt in the ‘X’ films they got into at the Empire, faded out of their consciousness, replaced by the leggy Penny Gaye, who later became a publicist, and the legendary Jacqui Edwardes, who kissed with her tongue. Over the summer, Michael surreptitiously gained a controlling interest in Neil’s empire, declaring an intention to reduce him to slavery; the Quorum drew up the Second Brink’s Café Treaty, founding an indissoluble secret alliance dedicated to Michael’s downfall. One climactic weekend, through the long night when the clocks went back, it ended: Michael was buried under the rubble in his bunker, the other major players reduced to flophouses in the Old Kent Road. Mark would remember more keenly his resentment when Neil casually changed sides during a battle, cutting down Mark’s cavalry, than the rift with Michael that came a year later when the fat git got off with Penny Gaye. In 1992, as Michael and Mickey tried to salvage a script from the ruins of Mausoleum Pictures, whose collapse had just taken down another fifth of the British Film Industry, Mickey called a meeting and reduced Michael to helpless laugh-spasms by reviving his old treatment of prisoners-of-war. Mickey straight-facedly suggested of the irresponsible producers who had sunk capital into a disastrous rap musical, Chillin’ London, ‘they should have their fuckin’ feet cut off and be told to walk home.’

  * * *

  They saw themselves as leaders of their generation. Neil and Michael alternated being first in English, Mickey was either top or bottom in art depending on how bored he was, Mark scored in history and maths. Aside from specialist subjects, they were academically erratic. At the end of the third year, they planned Death to Dr Marling’s, a historical fantasy about the centuries of suffering which were nearly over. Every evening they went to Michael’s and worked, but the school was finished before the script. They later realised they’d never have got Chimp’s permission to use the assembly hall for a pageant whose opening scene had Roger Marling singing ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ while roasting his first pupil on an open fire. Nevertheless, they were fascinated by performance. Having learned from the show they hadn’t got together, they spent terms carrying spears and reciting iambic pentameter in the Youth Theatre. In 1975, Michael persuaded the organiser, Ben Tindall, to let them mount revues as a counterpoint to traditional YT productions. Twice a year; Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night, the Forum took over the Arts Centre (they always called it the Rat Centre) and put on something increasingly more like a party than a play. Their first production was Twelfth Night ’76, remotely derived from the Shakespeare they’d done straight the year before.

  While becoming impresarios, just as they started Sixth Form College, they took serious interest in girls. When Michael announced he was going out with Penny, Mark didn’t speak to him for weeks. However, Carole, the first girl he ever really talked to, turned out to be just as screwed-up and interesting as he thought he was. Neil developed a sickening romantic obsession with Victoria Conyer; a year older, she never noticed, so far as anyone knew, whether he was breathing or not. Mickey used his powermouth to overcome a succession of under-age girls he referred to as ‘shag-hags’. He launched an extensive campaign to bed Jacqui Edwardes who, after a year, succumbed only to dump him instantly and get engaged to a twenty-five-year-old geriatric who sold drugs. While they were on a residential poetry course, Neil got off (for one night) with a girl from Wells named Clare. Michael and Penny became the college’s perfect couple; he was President of the Student Union, she was Social Secretary. Between them, they masterminded every disco, concert, show and party in the Backwater.

  * * *

  In 1977, for the first and only time, the New Year’s Meet was open to consorts. At Michael’s grandparents’ in Achelzoy, which he looked after when they were away; Michael and Mark brought Penny and Carole, Mickey turned up with a girl called Denise whom they never saw again, and Neil cheated by bringing Michael’s sister. While the others found private rooms, Neil and Candy had a day-long talk, imagining what they would all be in ten years: Michael an actor, Mickey a painter, Mark an MP, Penny the editor of Cosmopolitan, Carole a Professor of Thinkology, Denise a housewife, Candy a veterinarian, Neil a novelist. Their score was one and a half out of eight: Carole became a lecturer in Social Policy at Liverpool; the half was Denise, who almost certainly got married.

  In the evening, also for the first and only time, they had a séance, Scrabble letters arranged in a circle on a table. Hands on a glass that really seemed to move independently, they contacted a spirit who called itself Shad and claimed to have died (‘discarnated’, Michael said) in 1842. Candy asked about the future. For Michael, Shad spelled piles but wouldn’t confirm whether it meant wealth or haemorrhoids. For Carole, the letters were phd which was easy. For Neil, the word was deal. For Candy, gas, which upset Denise so much she broke the circle. They were relieved; pathetic fallacy or not, a thunderstorm started as they tampered with the beyond. Mark, rattled but sceptical, suggested that if they picked random words from a dictionary, they’d as easily apply to their lives. To prove his point, he picked ‘cephalopod’ and invited explanations. Later, the Forum decided to leave women out of Meets. Much later, Candace Dixon became Western Regional Director of British Gas, Carole became a Doctor of Philosophy and Michael did suffer a bad case of haemorrhoids.

  * * *

  The heavy shadows of Monty Python and Mad fell on the Quorum’s stage work. As early as 1978, Neil and Mark would be embarrassed that, given unprecedented freedom, they’d
been so conventional, but Mickey and Michael were recycling material well into the eighties. Michael and Neil wrote approximate scripts, tossing jokes between them as they took turns on Michael’s typewriter. Mark, intense and organised, was less director than ringmaster; on any project, there were days when he locked himself in a room and refused to talk to anyone until Neil begged him to come out and get involved again. Whatever band Mickey was in appeared and, with eerie regularity, broke up within weeks of the show. Mickey designed costumes, sets and posters, and recruited footsoldiers; actors, backstage people, ticket-tearers and, most vitally, audience members. Traditionally, by the interval, everyone swore never again to work with the others; but, when the curtains closed, they’d be eager to start again. They were most unified in enthusiasm after Midsummer Night’s Dribbly Fart, the show that was never restarted after drunken boneheads let off a fire extinguisher during Penny’s Tamsin impersonation. ‘It wasn’t planned,’ Michael said at the cast party, ‘but it was theatre.’

  Influenced by rumours of punk and soft drugs, they put on A Midsummer Night’s End in the summer of 1977, assuming they’d break up in the autumn when Mark and Neil went to Brighton University and Mickey to Art School in Leeds. Michael was taking a year off (to write a novel, he said), but planned on Cambridge in ’78. After the show, things changed. All were sorry and found it hard to imagine life without the others, but they were relieved at the same time. In The Shape of the Now, Mark would write ‘the end of any period, no matter how pleasurable it has been, is a liberation.’

  4

  MY KIND OF DAY

  MICHAEL DIXON

  I try to get up before seven and do forty-five minutes grunt-and-strain in the gym. My wife [actress Ginny Moon] sometimes manages to stir her great body and joins me to get in some skipping. She remembers dirty versions of playground rhymes and disrupts our work-outs since we’re too busy giggling to get a sweat. We do family brekky with our daughter [Melanie, eight]. I stick to Neal’s Yard muesli and fresh orange juice. First thing in the a.m. (don’t read this, kitten), Gin is unrecognisable as the glamour-puss from The Woman Who Did and looks like an ape, but Melanie is already breaking hearts. I’ve always been sickeningly lucky with women.