The Quorum Page 6

  His memory was perfect, from the Isle of Dogs to this moment. The paths of the future were clear, too. Nothing was set in stone but the tendencies were definite.

  His jaws worked, grinding. No one remarked on the habit any more. He unlocked the lacquered box on his desk and took out four sets of file cards, lining them up as perfect stacks.

  Amphlett, Dixon, Martin, Yeo.

  These four - boys of seventeen or eighteen - were his children. If capable of human fondness, he was genuinely attached to them. Already, their lives were complicated and intertwined. Soon, a decision would be made. One must be separated and exalted above the rest. Four sharp, bright little lights. So much potential.

  BOOK

  1

  OFFERINGS

  ‘Capra may have suffered from what would be described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes as “the impostor phenomenon”, the fear common to many high achievers that their success is actually based on a fraud. Another psychologist who studied the phenomenon, Joan Harvey, has said that the sufferer also had the “obsessive fear that sooner or later some humiliating failure would reveal his secret and unmask him as a fraud. Some very famous people have suffered from the feeling all their lives, despite their obvious abilities.” In such people, “because each success is experienced either as a fluke, or as the result of Herculean efforts, a pattern of self-doubt, rather than self-confidence, develops,” and each success actually intensifies those feelings of fraudulence...

  ‘“First-generation professionals are very prone to feeling like impostors,” Harvey noted. “When people perceive themselves as having risen above their roots, it can evoke deep anxieties in them about separation. Unconsciously, they equate success with betraying their loyalties to their family.”

  ‘“Consciously,” she explained, those who suffer from the impostor phenomenon, “fear failure, a fear they keep secret. Unconsciously, they fear success.”’

  JOSEPH MCBRIDE, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

  1

  NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1992-1993

  She never had luck with this holiday. Over years, she’d dutifully endured disappointing parties and hoarse evenings in open-late pubs. The time she got it together to invite friends round, flu struck; she’d lain down an hour before guests arrived, shuddering uncontrollably in a backless dress, then forced herself to ignore the symptoms until past midnight. Last year, heavily pregnant, she’d stayed in watching TV, her mother plumped next to her on the too-small sofa. Now, here she was again: in the wars.

  While Neil Martin was x-rayed, Sally loitered in the hospital corridor still decorated with tinsel and holly. A teenager with cobweb skirts hung on the phone, nibbling a dummy as she explained to an exasperated parent.

  Neil probably wasn’t badly injured but the nurse wanted him to have a tetanus jab. A skull fracture or even concussion were unlikely; the head x-rays were just to be on the safe side.

  Casualty offered all human life. An angry policeman and a merely fed-up lawyer argued over a youth who’d broken an ankle writing-off a stolen car A rave-goer with dental braces and a Mongol scalp-lock had swallowed party pills which her friend said ‘looked like smarties’. A fatherly man sat quiet, hand wrapped in a red tea-towel after a mishap with a Christmas present, an electric knife. A bored Asian had been stabbed. Plus there were relatives, witnesses, professional busybodies and hangers-on.

  Sally was a professional hanger-on. She’d invoice for time and any expenses. Later she’d compose a note and fax the client a footnote. ‘We Never Sleep’, she could claim.

  The ravette yielded the phone. Taking in Sally’s bun-tied hair red cardie and long black skirt, the girl blurted ‘Olive Oyl’. Sally had change for coin-ops, cards for cardphones: part of the job. It was nearer three a.m. than two; Mum wouldn’t have stayed up even to note the video clock slip silently from 11.59 to 00.00. On the line, her own phone rang. Double-doors opened: a bag lady staggered in, swathed in ratty scarves. Sally wondered what horrible injury she’d sustained, but the weather-beaten virago turned out to be a relief driver come for the joyrider’s lawyer. This must be the worst night of the year for minicabs.

  ‘Mum?’

  The receiver was fussed with. Mum always got the cordless phone the wrong way up. A baby mewed in the background. The Invader was as likely to wake up screaming without a dead-of-night phone call but Sally still had a guilt-stab.

  ‘You said you’d be home hours ago. Where are you?’

  ‘Casualty,’ she said.

  Mum groaned silently. Other women’s daughters had husbands, careers, settled lives; Maureen Rhodes was stuck with a minimally self-employed single parent who typed reports on Christmas morning.

  ‘I’m not hurt,’ she assured Mum. ‘A guy at Dolar’s party...’

  * * *

  The party was a bus-hop away in Highgate Village. Dolar owned the shop where Neil did odd shifts behind the till. She’d seen him about well before the commission, wizardy in black velvet coat and dragon-badge-ringed hat. They had fringe friends in common but only really met when Sally started on Neil Martin. She’d probably have gone to the party anyway: having been cooped up with Mum and the Invader over the holiday, she could do with talking to someone in her age range and dancing off chocolate and leftover turkey.

  The invite said ‘come as your favourite comix character’. Fancy dress was a bother. The icy fog that descended before Christmas made Highgate Wood a haunted forest of sparkly frost and witch mist. Imagining Amazon Queen, her childhood heroine, with nipples frozen to knots and acres of goose-pimples between thighboots and brass bra, she decided on Olive Oyl. She pinned a collar to a cardigan, found an ankle-skirt that didn’t hobble her, fussed her hair into a ball.

  Protective colour, Mummy?

  Mind your own business, flesh of my flesh.

  ‘My hero,’ she said to her mirror pining for a sailor with forearm elephantiasis. Actually, Olive Oyl was a drip: fecklessly making up to Bluto then yelling to be saved from justifiable date rape. The only cartoon woman worse was Amy McQueen, knock-kneed alter ego of Amazon Queen, but she faked feebleness to stop her boyfriend guessing her double life. Sally did her lipstick. Like Amazon Queen and Dr Shade, she needed a secret identity. Under her cupid’s bow, she was Sally Rhodes, Investigator.

  After peeking in on the Invader and telling Mum she’d be home before one, she put on a coat and left. It was tenish. The 43 or the 134 would get her from Muswell Hill to Highgate Village in seven minutes. Two and a half hours of party, a walk through the wood, and 1993 would be here, full of chilly promise.

  Her year-end report was delivered. Dolar would have invited Neil but she didn’t have to pay attention. If anything, she was bored by the man she knew but had never met. The only curiosity was why the client was interested after so many years in so unexceptional a citizen.

  Hopping off the bus at the top of the Archway Road, she looked for the address, a garden flat near Planet Janet. A group ten paces ahead was obviously on course: a busty woman in a strategically torn uniform carried a plastic Oddbins bag heavy with bottles; apes with steel helmets, ammo bandoliers and toy weapons.

  Sally caught up as they waited on the sunken doorstep, hammering. The flat emanated light and the Rocky Horror soundtrack. A door opened; a guy in a green singlet decorated with question marks hugged the marine, then looked over her tooled-up primates.

  ‘Sergeant Grit and His Gorilla Guerillas,’ said the Riddler, ‘ZC Comics, 1942 to 1948, revived 1964. Created by Zack Briscow...’

  The platoon struck towards the kitchen, firing spark-guns. Sally was left behind. She didn’t know the Riddler by name but recognised him from the shop. She slipped off her coat and waited to be identified.

  ‘No,’ the Riddler said, shaking his head. ‘Afraid I don’t know you.’

  ‘Olive Oyl,’ she admitted.

  ‘Not a comic, really. Newspaper strip, Thimble Theatre, E.C. Segar.’

  She dumped her coat on an overburdened
stand. The Riddler moved on to a couple of hairy blokes tarted up as the Fat Slags. Dolar, the Wizard of Id, was hustled past by two eleven-year-old Amazon Queens, to a front room where music throbbed. He tried to stop but the Amazons, black armbands over their toffee-paper-jewelled Circlets of Power, pummelled him until he agreed to demonstrate the Time Warp.

  On the wall, cards were strung; snowy demons and bobble-hatted dragons outnumbered robins and Santas. In a nook, Top Cat nodded as a beergutted Green Lantern explained where John Major had gone wrong. Sally didn’t know anyone, masked or not, but it didn’t matter. Blending in was a speciality.

  In the kitchen, she added her Australian red to a bottle forest covering every surface. A trim, prematurely grey woman with a lightning-streak T-shirt over her leotard poured a polystyrene cup of rose. She introduced herself: Janet of Planet Janet fame, mother of the Amazon Queens, significant other of the Wizard of Id.

  ‘I’m Sally,’ she said, lost for self-description. ‘From the other side of the wood.’

  Janet had heard about the Invasion. Sally found herself in one of those Dreaded Baby Conversations that sprang like traps. She didn’t want to run through the backstory. At Christmas, Connor’s parents, so tactful she was irritated with herself for squirming, had sent a hamper of presents. The DBC died. Janet saw to the Fat Slags. Shunted aside, Sally dipped into Kettle Chips. When pregnant, they had been her craving. Having worked up to a three-bag-a-day habit, she was tapering off.

  ‘Lois Lane?’ someone asked.

  ‘Olive Oyl,’ she said.

  Neil Martin was perched on a tall stool, drinking steadily, bottle of Jack Daniels in his elbow-crook, long legs twisted under him. He was in civilian dress: baggy jumper hanging from wide shoulders, hair flopped over his forehead.

  From her usual distance, he was a bear who’d recently been ill and lost weight. Hunched into the wind, knuckly hands shoved into corduroy pockets. His date of birth was July 31, 1959 but she thought of him as pushing forty. Unexpectedly close now, he was younger than she’d perceived. His longish face was unlined, heavy-lidded eyes unsurrounded even by the faint crinkles she increasingly saw in her own face. He looked a bit like one of her earliest crushes, David Warner in Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment.

  ‘You’re not in costume,’ she commented, needing something to say.

  ‘Yes I am, child,’ he replied. ‘I’m Cary Trenton.’

  She frowned, missing the reference. These people were so deeply into their world of comics and science fiction and old television.

  ‘The Streak?’ he prompted.

  Janet was vaguely dressed as the Streak, an American hero from the 1940s who was still running. Literally; he had superspeed.

  ‘Well...’ Neil opened his arms and looked down at himself. He’d sloshed Jack on his jumper.

  It clicked and Sally couldn’t help shivering.

  ‘Cary Trenton,’ she remembered. ‘The Streak’s secret identity.’

  Neil made a one-sided grin and tipped whiskey into it.

  ‘Got it in one, Olive.’

  No matter how feeble Amy McQueen was, Cary Trenton was a loser she could (and did, when they teamed up in Dazzling Duo Stories) look down on. A nerd avant la lettre, Cary had unruly hair, bottle glasses, and a habit of falling over that prevented anyone from deducing he was the superconfident and dextrous Streak.

  ‘Superheroes,’ Neil sneered. ‘Amazon Queen, Popeye, Dr Shade, all of ’em. Flying overhead, getting between us and the sun. Why can’t they bloody grow up?’

  The stool balanced miraculously against the edge of the counter; he took a gulp and held it in his mouth, letting it seep down his throat. Sally was held, fascinated. What would she think, she wondered, if she didn’t know anything about this man?

  ‘Shaggin’ Streak,’ he said, flapping fingers at Janet. ‘I was at school with the bloke who draws the Streak, you know.’

  Sally did know.

  ‘Mickey Yeo. Smart biscuit. Wasting himself.’

  There were pictures of them all in the file. Dr Marling’s Grammar School for Boys, 1970-1973; Ash Grove Comprehensive, 19731975; West Somerset College, 1975-1977. In school uniforms, then clothes more antiquated than fashions of the Roaring Twenties. Grouped together, studied in seriousness or goofiness.

  ‘The Streak,’ he burped. ‘One whoosh and the bastard’s gone, gone, gone...’

  * * *

  In the dance room, a TV was on with the sound down. Running up to midnight, Clive James sprinkled wryness between news clips. Derek Leech’s face appeared, squeezed between breasts as he introduced the Comet’s Knock-Outs of the Year. Dancers paused to hiss; a fanboy complained that since the tabloid tycoon devoured ZC Comics, the stable of superfolk had been reduced. Amazon Queen, Sally was appalled to learn, had been sucked out of existence by a time-warp; not just killed, her whole life revoked.

  A 1969 compilation rattled ancient speakers and Sally’s teeth. She bopped with the smaller Dr Shade to ‘Dizzy’ and Tamsin’s ‘Aquarius’. Dr Shade was another Leech property: a strip in his ‘heavy’ paper the Evening Argus. In her TV researcher days, she once stepped into a life and came face-to-face with Derek Leech. He’d not seemed fiend-like, though she gathered most horror stories about him were, if anything, understated.

  Deserted by a temporary hero presumably not speeding off in a Rolls-Royce Shadowshark to combat Forces of Evil, she fended off the Fat Slags, who slam-danced to Thunderclap Newman. She was pleasantly squiffy: the music was loud enough for her not to have to talk; the Invader was at home, love-tentacles slopping out for her heart. Tomorrow, they’d go to Highgate Wood: fairy frosts and frozen trees; ten months wasn’t too early to experience the world outside the flat.

  1993 approached. ‘Israelites’ was interrupted; Dolar turned up the TV sound and channel-hopped. As she stopped dancing, Sally felt muscles pop in her legs. Since the Invasion, her exercise class had lapsed. Among celebrities on Channel 4, she glimpsed the client. Was it possible to enjoy a party in front of cameras? Dolar found Big Ben: the preliminary chimes had started. Everyone linked arms and waited for the peals.

  ‘That’s it,’ a Fat Slag said, ‘goodbye Czechoslovakia, hello European Customs’ Union.’

  Pumping arms, they remembered most of the lyrics of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The song collapsed: Sally was kissing and being kissed by people she barely knew. She broke contact when a gorilla put a hairy glove on her bottom. Party streamers rained in the overpopulated room. The taller Dr Shade, mysterious in wide-brimmed hat and concealing goggles, delicately pressed cold lips to hers. She kept her eyes open: across the room, Neil leaned against a door-jamb, barely supported by an Amazon Queen. Sally shrugged off Dr Shade, who enveloped a Ninja girl with his cape: she considered kissing Neil but he radiated grouchiness even to the Amazon Jailbait who stuck a chaste smacker on his cheek.

  Dolar, robes pungent with dope, came from behind and hugged Neil. He wished him a Zappy New Year. Neil managed a chuckle.

  * * *

  Within a quarter of an hour exhaustion set in. Her psychic link with the Invader gently tugged. A deadline-at-dawn, rock-around-the-clock, this-is-much-better-than-what’s-in-the-charts-nowadays, who’s-been-in-the-bog-for-an-hour?, neighbours-round-to-complain, sick-in-the-street, busted-by-the-police, joints-rolled-on-album-covers, empty-the-fridge party was shaping up. She’d do well to miss the dregs. To ‘Goo Goo Barabajagal’ she unearthed her coat.

  Waving a general goodbye, she slipped out. Neil sat on a low brick wall at the boundary of the front garden, holding his head, radiating the helplessness she associated with the Invader. He lived on her route home: in Cranley Gardens, of mass-murder fame, a large bedsit partitioned into a cramped flat. She’d walked past, attentively, dozens of times.

  He looked up at the skies with unfocused eyes. It would be foolish to get to know Neil Martin. He was responsible for her moderate prosperity; that she’d been able to restart her agency so soon was a fluke. Without the client’s interest in this befudd
led kitchen-sitter, she’d be a single parent queuing at the Department of Social Security.

  ‘Olive,’ he said. ‘Had your spinach?’

  He stood up, limbs not quite synchronised.

  ‘I’m walking down Muswell Hill Road. I’ll see you home.’

  He’ll tumble, Mummy. He’ll wonder how you know where he lives. It’s suspicious.

  Nonsense, darling child. When you’re older I’ll explain about hangovers. Tomorrow, he won’t remember my name.

  ‘You’re a heroine, Olive. Not like those supershits.’

  ‘Hurry up. This is a one-time offer.’

  Crisp cold air cleared her mind. Neil took a moment to coordinate, a dinosaur with separate brains for knees and elbows. From observation, she knew he was like this even without a pint of Jack in him.

  They crossed Archway Road and walked past the steps that led down to Highgate tube. A scattering of people were on the streets, mostly alcohol-fortified. The road, broad and well-lit, curved and dipped slightly as it threaded from Highgate to Muswell Hill, separating the forested patch of Highgate Wood from the smaller Queen’s Wood. Sally, confident there were enough huge and threatening forces in her life for her not to be bothered by ordinary dangers, walked at all hours. Dennis Nilsen, the local serial killer, had worked in the DSS, not lurked in the park.

  Almost out of the wood, Muswell Hill up ahead, Cranley Gardens a turn to the right: Neil concentrated on making his legs work.

  ‘Got any fags?’ someone asked, quickly. Suddenly in front of Neil, standing too close.

  Nearby: another young man, ungloved hands not in his pockets.

  ‘Cigs?’

  The questioner prodded Neil’s jumper. Neil looked puzzled at the pavement. He patted his pockets.

  ‘Smokes?’

  The questioner: jutting teeth, shell-suit. Eyes glittered, hostile. His friend: black guy, moustache wisp, oversized flat cap. Neil, half a head taller, looked sad.