The Quorum Read online

  ‘Don’t smoke,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  The questioner jabbed. Head turning, Neil missed getting a broken nose. He folded against railings, blood blurting from a nostril. The black guy loped forward and tilted on one hip, jabbing a shoe-toe above Neil’s ear. He spun and stumbled. Sober and tense, Sally looked into the white man’s little face and made fists.

  People were coming from behind, interrupting. The black guy knelt to punch Neil in the side, then pulled his friend’s sleeve. They ran off without trying to take anything or touch her. A long dark car cruised by, fanning light on the road. Fleeing shadows became spider-limbed straggles. Dr Shade in pursuit of evil-doers?

  She let out steamy breath. Neil gulped porridge into the gutter. People around: Gorilla Guerillas, costumes and make-up half gone. Sergeant Grit waited for Neil to finish being sick and helped him up. A tissue wiped a rope of clear fluid from his mouth.

  The gorillas apologised as if it were their fault. Once the Sergeant was sure Neil was okay, she wanted to go home and not be dragged to a cop shop. Who wanted to be detained all night, dressed as a mercenary monkey, not be able to give a decent description, for something not serious?

  When the Gorillas trooped off, Sally was left with Neil. She should take him to Fortis Green Hospital. A flappy hand pressed to his face, blood smearing between his fingers, he was pliable. He followed meekly as she led him up towards Woodside Avenue. This was another New Year’s Eve she wouldn’t look back on fondly.

  2

  NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1993

  ‘Are we quorate?’ Mark asked.

  Mickey gave an ‘aye’ and wrapped thin hands around his coffee mug for warmth. His shoulders shivered in his immobile fringed, white jacket. Despite the log fire, the country cottage froze in winter.

  Michael raised a languid hand and eased himself into the best armchair. He wore last night’s tuxedo, loose tie-ends on silky lapels. He’d been chubby as a child; sleek now, he still had a fat boy’s manner.

  ‘Three of Four,’ Mark said, formally. ‘Most but not All. We are a Quorum.’

  He pulled his forefinger cracking the knuckle. The ring, looser on him than on Michael, felt momentarily strange. As host, Mark was the new Ring. He stood in front of his fire, warmth seeping through the back of his jeans, and looked to the outgoing officer. Michael was Mark’s oldest friend; they’d met in September 1970, minutes before Neil came along, a full day before Mickey.

  ‘Open the fuckin’ shampoo, mate,’ Mickey said. He spoke BBC English to his parents but addressed the rest of the world like Bob Hoskins playing a football hooligan. It came from mixing too much with rock musicians.

  ‘Zhust getting up speed,’ Michael said, shaking the magnum. He had trouble with ‘J’ and ‘Y’ sounds; thanks to television, it had gone from defect to mannerism to distinguishing mark. The Spitting Image impressionist had the trick better than Michael.

  Michael eased off the stopper staunching an explosion under a teacloth. He tipped champagne froth into three tankards, then, after bubbles settled, poured overly generous measures.

  ‘Our Absent Friend,’ they said, clashing tankards like Musketeer swords.

  Mark would have chosen Chateau Pétrus (’82 should be about drinkable), but Moet was classic beyond vulgarity. Michael was the traditionalist, inclined to inherited complacent confidence. Mickey was the anarchist, a vegetarian in a £3000 leather jacket. Self-made Mark balanced the triad, careful, precise and right. They’d always been a perfect diagram of the class system; upper (Michael), upper middle (Neil), lower middle (Mickey) and working (Mark). Fortune, the Deal and attempts to rewire social genotypes hadn’t made a difference. Neil might be a street away from cardboard city, but their old headmaster, Chimp, would still rate him above a proletarian interloper like Mark.

  Settled, Michael knee-perched a slimline briefcase designed to be as much like a high-powered laptop computer as possible for an item of luggage. He tapped out an entry code, the case hissed open. Three red folders were produced, sealed with gold tape and old-fashioned wax.

  ‘Photocopied, sad to report,’ Michael said.

  Mark rubbed the seal. Imprinted was a stylised Q, descendant of the colophon Mickey designed, one art lesson at Marling’s, for their earliest documents. The seal matched the red-gold device inset in black marble on the ring. At the end of the day Michael would hand over the seal and the other instruments of office.

  Mickey finger-snapped wax away and riffled through the pages.

  ‘There’s a fuckload here,’ he commented.

  ‘Ms Rhodes is admirably thorough. One of our more efficacious footsoldiers. I recommend we hold her over for a further zhear’

  Mark ummed the suggestion. As Ring, that would be his decision.

  ‘This ante-meridiem, Ms Rhodes faxed me. I infer one of zhou will know why...’

  Mark had no idea. Mickey tried to shrug, again failing to move his amazing colossal jacket. He scratched the beaded braids that fell from half of his scalp. The other side of his head was shaven, running to stubble after a few days without the razor. Chimp would have popped his pacemaker if anyone showed up at Assembly with a haircut like that.

  ‘I didn’t expect her to remain at her post over the vac, but our Ms Rhodes takes commitments seriously. Here...’

  He unscrolled a sheet of fax paper from his case. Mark, nearest, took it and read.

  January 1, 1993

  Between 12.30 and 1.00 a.m., while walking along Muswell Hill Road, Neil Martin was assaulted by two young men. X-rays show no serious injury. After a tetanus jab, he was discharged from Fortis Green Casualty c. 4.00 a.m. The incident was not reported to the police. Martin claims he did not recognise his attackers.

  Rhodes

  Mark passed the fax to Mickey.

  ‘After midnight,’ Michael said, ‘the Deal was technically in force. Thus far we’ve abided by informal agreement not to make moves until Twelfth Night. ’Tis a tricky precedent and might well queer whatever Game Plan we decide on.’

  ‘Nada to do with me, mate,’ Mickey said.

  Michael’s eyebrows raised like sideways question marks. His quizzical look was often caricatured.

  ‘Nor me,’ Mark said. ‘I’ve always been against actual violence. My reading of the Deal rules it out. Otherwise, we might as well put on ski-masks every year and go after Our Absent Friend with axe-handles. Surely, the point is that, in the end, Neil always does it to himself. We just show him the way and stand back.’

  ‘That’s a new reading,’ Michael said. ‘I quite like it. Might well play in Chingford. Zhes indeedy.’

  They were here, but Neil was not. No: they were here, because Neil was not. The Quorum could (and had done so, many times) debate the Deal for hours. It was brutally simple in essence, but inordinately intricate if examined in any depth.

  Michael retrieved the fax and slipped it into his own folder.

  ‘Act of God then?’ he said. ‘Improbable, but hardly our first Divine Intervention.’

  ‘More like an Act of Thug,’ Mickey commented.

  * * *

  This New Year’s Eve had been easier to arrange than the last few. His schedule was more ordered than Michael’s or Mickey’s; also, he had more space. With Pippa in Edinburgh for Hogmanay, Mark could have either the town flat or the country cottage. He chose the cottage, though it meant driving down late at night after dinner with London friends, a software designer and her art director husband.

  The frost on the fields was so heavy it wouldn’t completely thaw by nightfall. Thick mist obscured anything more than a dozen yards off. The cottage was clustered with a few others in Herron’s Halt, a savage corner of Sussex. His neighbours were a sit-com creator, a theoretical physicist and an ancient who remembered the Halt before it was a Londoners’ retreat. Pippa, a senior editor at Real Press, sometimes brought authors here for extensive manuscript autopsies. There was less chance of interruption than in Islington.

  Mark got up early to set a fire in the b
ig room. Even so, he managed five hours alone under an antique bedspread in the tiny master’s room. The others, on adrenalin or amphetamines, had done without sleep.

  Michael had called at his Hampstead address to collect Ms Rhodes’ fax but had hardly paused between his television bash and the drive. He’d guested last night on the Big Breakfast End of the Year Show on Channel 4, flirting with Zsa Zsa Gabor (whose name he could pronounce superbly). He turned up before Mickey, in a 1950s touring car the length of a yacht, hair as smooth as a twenties’ gigolo, bearing the magnum of Moet.

  Before the Meet, Michael returned the paper Mark had prepared about Interactive Narrative Technology. He’d match the £100K seed money Mark was putting up. If Mickey came in, the Quorum would buy the ground floor of a tower Mark expected to be a monolith by the twenty-first century. Once zap-the-alien games, This is Cinerama remakes and feelie-porno palled, creative applications would multiply exponentially.

  ‘What about Leech?’ Michael asked.

  ‘He’s in,’ Mark confirmed. ‘With no limit. In cold cash, he can match us and take us, but I’m locking patents and copyrights in our names. Derek needs us; he’s a money mover, he never created anything.’

  ‘Except the Deal.’

  ‘That’s business, not art.’

  Mickey arrived in a red MG with a model, stick-thin but for her chest, famous for an instant cappuccino commercial. Mickey, who refused to learn to drive, had persuaded her to chauffeur him to the country and then piss off back to her toy-box without him. Still coasting on last night’s buzz, he had been at a ZC party on a Thames pleasure boat.

  ‘They had a funeral for Amazon Twat,’ Mickey said. ‘Some feminist arsehole gave me stick about totalling the dynamic dyke.’

  Mickey’s latest comic project was an apocalyptic shake-up of the ZC universe.

  ‘If they thought she had it shitty, wait ’til they see what I’ve got planned for the Streak,’ he cackled.

  Mickey hadn’t made it to his Camden cave, though he’d hit a bed for at least an hour. As she left, the Countess of Creamy Coffee contrived to look angry without creasing her perfect and expensive face. The notion of instant cappuccino struck Mark as barbaric.

  ‘Our Sponsor made a wham-bam appearance near dawn,’ Mickey said, meaning Leech, ‘hovered over the river in an assault copter wished us 1993 over the PA, then buzzed off to Zurich.’

  Three years ago, Leech had taken over Pyramid, a Hollywood studio founded before World War One. Twenty-five subsidiaries down the spread-sheet, this incidentally netted ZC Comics, Mickey’s major publisher along with sundry music, hotel, theme park and television interests. He also owned Real Press, a third of Mark’s Square Deal Enterprises, the Cloud 9 satellite net, more newspapers than anyone could list, restaurants in twelve capital cities, a once-famous boutique chain on the comeback trail, Chums condoms, and a shape-shifting glob of record companies.

  ‘The whole world is wired up to Derek Leech,’ Mark said.

  ‘So whassername - Tanya? - ain’t on scene any more?’ Mickey said, after a close reading of the report. ‘Shame. She was a tasty temptation.’

  Having appropriated the biscuit barrel, Mickey chain-nibbled custard creams. At Marling’s, the wiry little boy was nick-named the Stomach. During their secondary education, he’d consumed more school dinner than the rest of them put together. As he chewed, he sketched on the flipsides of Sally Rhodes’ report pages, roughing out blank identikit faces, scratching in staring eyes and sharp teeth.

  Mark sat at the head of his oak table and poured more coffee. Colombian, Strength 7. Refreshments were his duty under the Code Michael, the charter of Rights, Responsibilities and Privileges Michael had drawn up, after full consultation among the Forum, in 1972.

  ‘I’m not altogether certain we turned the Tan-zh... the Tanya situation to our optimum advantage,’ Michael said, long cigarette held vertical between his fingers. ‘We ultimately gave her enough to cash out. With her influence removed, Our Absent Friend has stabilised in the water.’

  ‘No woman, no cry,’ Mickey suggested, feathering spectacular eyebrows onto a harpie.

  Tanya Gorse was Neil’s on-off girlfriend, a sixties survival with enough personal problems and personality defects to keep a soap opera going for a decade. The most effective way to pull her strings was an occasional anonymous envelope stuffed with £20 notes. Most people get in trouble when they run out of money, but her peculiar gift was to wreak most havoc when she had capital to underwrite her latest whim. Once she bought into a scheme whose collapse stranded Neil in a flat full of bottles of rapidly-perishing Czech beer besieged by angry creditors. She had a knack for picking the most potentially violent partners for the most risk-imperilled ventures. Neil was caught up in Life With Tanya for so long, his own ambitions atrophied. Last March, she’d put a wedge of cash down on a Harley and taken off in search of a revolution.

  ‘Playing Easy Rider behind the former Iron Curtain,’ Mark noted, ‘she’ll probably start a world war.’

  According to Sally Rhodes, Tanya was currently bouncing in a Bucharest heavy-metal club, den mother to post-Ceausescu bike boys. For Christmas, she’d sent Neil a postcard of a monument to Vlad the Impaler.

  ‘Fucked off in style, though,’ Mickey chuckled. ‘Signing him up to make the rest of the payments on the bike. The heavies last night were probably from Sick Eddie.’

  ‘Why would anyone engage in a business transaction with a cove whose friends call him Sick Eddie?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Don’t think he gives ’em a choice,’ Mickey replied.

  Mark tried to imagine Tanya and Neil together. Having never met the woman, his idea of her was formed by photographs and scraps of disjointed information. He had talked with her on the telephone and been surprised by her sweet, Northern voice. She didn’t sound like the Mistress of Mindfuck.

  ‘I wouldn’t rule out a return,’ he said.

  Michael pondered. ‘Unlikely, Mark. Even Our Absent Friend wouldn’t climb back into bed after she dumped his accoutrements...’

  To finance her Mission to Moldavia, Tanya sold Neil’s stereo and his records. She even unloaded most of his clothes for a fast fifty quid on a stall in Camden Lock.

  ‘...and killed his fuckin’ cat,’ Mickey added.

  While experimenting with Ecstasy, Tanya had tied the animal’s collar to her bike and set off, slowly at first, to see if it could keep up.

  ‘It wasn’t Neil’s cat,’ Mark said. ‘He was just looking after it.’

  ‘Even fuckin’ better mate,’ said Mickey, drawing a pancaked pussy with splatted-out eyes. ‘With Tibbles a long red smear on the North Circular, it’ll be a cold day in my arsehole before his auntie trusts him again. We were worried about her, remember? Too normal, too settled, too calming. Take it from me, that was another beautiful Tanya move.’

  In the dossier Mickey assembled on Tanya when he was Ring, there were photos: in a 1961 party-dress hugging the little brother whose eye she’d later put out; serial numbers held up against a cheesecloth blouse during her first dealing arrest, very ’68 in a Tamsin hairdo; most recently, leaning in a scuffed jacket against a brick wall outside a pub, grin showing where she was missing teeth. She’d met Neil when he sat in for the drummer of a shortlived pub band she fronted. The group took its name from her signature song, ‘Poison Ivy’.

  ‘The girl shat gold,’ Mickey said, almost wistfully. ‘No way would he have her back.’

  Mickey had a fascination crush on Tanya. She was like the girls in the Skinhead books he cited as a major literary influence. His dad had managed the Garden Shop where Mark’s Mum worked but he had strange ideas about working-class rebellion. He kept up an alternative career torturing keyboard instruments, often guest-appearing with supergroups. He was an unofficial fifth wheel with The Mothers of Pain, who had done the thrash score for his video nasty, City Hammer.

  ‘In the past, we’ve underestimated Our Absent Friend’s capacity for embracing the awful,’ Mark observed. �
�Maybe we should take the trouble to find out exactly where Tanya is? We could always send her a plane ticket.’

  Tanya had been a great move and Mark was reluctant to retire her.

  ‘I think she’s over and gone,’ Michael said. ‘Wonderful while she lasted, but out of the equation now.’

  ‘Fuckin’ right,’ put in Mickey. ‘Girl like that comes along once in a lifetime. She was the Ultimate Skag, like a Blind Date Terminator. All she does is fuck, eat, sleep and ruin lives.’

  Tanya had stuck to Neil through three jobs and five addresses. A normal person would have killed her within six months and thrown himself on the jury’s mercy.

  ‘We’ll need to replace her,’ Mark said. ‘Since she cleared out, Neil has drifted along in a species of complacent misery that could easily congeal into normality. Tanya kept the ground shifting.’

  ‘Remember how she fucked his van delivery job?’ Mickey grinned. ‘Took a load of photocopier paper and laid it out, sheet by sheet, on a field in Norfolk. Girl was an artist.’

  He showed a lighting portrait of Tanya with horns and a tail and a sexy pout. They all laughed. Mickey crumpled the picture and tossed it into the fire, where it flared into ash.

  ‘All good things end,’ Michael concluded. ‘So much for the Gorse Girl. We’ll zhust have to be inventive again. ’Tis supposed to be our strength.’

  * * *

  They were all busy, even soon after the holidays. There were always more family and professional commitments, but New Year’s Day had been inviolate for twenty years. As he refilled the cafetiere, watched by Michael and Mickey, Mark sensed an image overlaid by snapshots. Different kitchens, different drinks, different clothes, but the same faces. Plus or minus facial hair, baby fat, glasses and zits. They’d been doing this since the first day of 1971.

  They returned to the table with coffee the Quorum way: midnight black with a swirl of real cream, no sugar. The review of the report - which convinced Mark, at least, that Sally Rhodes was certainly worth holding over - was complete. Documents were spread out on the table, along with the photographs Ms Rhodes provided.