The Quorum Page 8

  Catching up was like following an annual soap opera. He felt close, not only to Neil but to the supporting cast. In 1992, after Tanya hit the road, Neil worked off and on in a bookshop in Highgate Village. Mickey had done a signing there for Choke Hold; he reported Neil had showed up, sheepish in the presence of his superstar old mate, to work the till and talk over ancient history. The squat Tanya found hadn’t worked out, thanks to last year’s moves. With a reference from the owner of Planet Janet, Neil got into a bedsit near Muswell Hill. He was square with the DSS and his poll-tax fine was nearly paid off.

  ‘No actual progress,’ Michael concluded, ‘but no disasters either, no backsliding.’

  Mark looked at the photos, all taken from a distance, mainly through windows. Neil in Planet Janet, reading a newspaper in the absence of customers. Neil in his dressing-gown in his bedsit, frying eggs. Neil sitting in a pub garden with half of something.

  ‘He has a life,’ Mickey said. ‘Not much of one, but it’s there. He’s off the sauce, never really got into the dope, a trickle of earnings, a place to kip. That puts him ahead of where he was last year.’

  There had been a point, during the Czech beer fiasco, when it seemed likely Neil would be charged with fraud. With Tanya (herself hospitalised several times for depression and addiction) in his life, custodial mental treatment had always been a possibility.

  ‘I concur,’ Michael said, ‘Our Absent Friend has not, all considered, had a calamitous twelvemonth. So what are we going to do about it?’

  3

  NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1993

  In dream city, he ran down streets saturated with cold sunlight. Dr Shade’s Shadowshark pursued as smoothly as a fin through water. The Streak pumped pavement so fast he could wait in the future for his quarry to catch up. They were heroes. That excused the beating they’d give him. Behind their masks, they were half-familiar. He couldn’t remember their secret identities. Dr Shade pinned his arms and held him up like a target. At the top of a hill, the Streak posed, hands on spandex hips, laughing from deep in his gut. He extended a fist and, quicker than a thought, was up close. Four knuckles, one enlarged by a lightning-strike motif, loomed. The Streak punched Neil Martin out of sleep.

  * * *

  He lay under his duvet, head covered, feet frozen. The room would be a meat locker until he could get to the two-bar fire. A hundred miles across ice-threaded carpet.

  One side of his head, from chin to eyebrow, pulsed. He still felt the impact. Probing the tender area, he found engorged swelling. Half his face was bruised. The dab of a fingertip was a prod from a hot pin. His teeth were dots of aching shrapnel. One eye was swollen shut, gummed with sleep-grit. He covered his disfigurement with a hand like the Phantom’s mask, an eyehole between fingers.

  He wriggled the duvet over numb toes. His face hurt so much, mere cold wouldn’t make a difference. His breath frosted in a funnel above the bed. He hadn’t drawn the curtains; late-afternoon sun leaked through falling as light as snow on the floor.

  He’d only been hit twice, three times at most. It’d taken maybe five seconds. How could boxers stand that kind of punishment for minutes at a time? The pain didn’t go away. It wrapped his head like a balaclava. Along with the serious agony in his face, he had the usual knife-thrust of Jack in the back of his skull.

  Happy New Year. He hoped the offering would be sufficient to ward off the Norwegian Neil Cullers.

  He shut the eye he’d been able to open and thought it away, erasing his memory. Arranging himself in his single bed like a corpse in a coffin, arms crossed on his chest, he used his patented time-travel method.

  In the dark of his mind, he pictured the room around him, cataloguing furniture, the placing of bed in relation to door and windows, dingy, ribbed cream wallpaper sink unit next to the two-burner cooker, electricity meter by the fire, five Christmas cards on the mantelpiece.

  Then he rearranged the components. Centring on his head, he morphed the space into the higher-ceilinged but smaller configuration of the room he’d shared with Tanya the Terrible in the squat in Colney Hatch. He lay on a square mattress plumped on the floor; it would have to be folded over if he wanted to get up and open the door. There was a damp patch on the ceiling, spotty mould in one corner.

  He retreated further, shuffling through a dozen spaces where he had slept: flats, bedsits, shared houses, friends’ floors, hall of residence (for a term and a half), a tent at a festival.

  At the end of his private time-tunnel was his bedroom. In his parents’ old house, the big one they sold when Dad retired from the VAT Office. He wasn’t too lanky to fit under the bedclothes. Pre-duvet sheets and blankets so tightly tucked his feet could never escape.

  Models hung, slowly revolving in a solemn dogfight that pit a Sopwith Camel and the Pan-Am shuttle from 2001 against a Messerschmitt and Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang. Too old for the models, he was reluctant to deny, by throwing them out, a geologic age spent with stinky glue. He had Airfix soldiers in shoeboxes under the bed, jumbled in time paradox regiments of Afrika Korps, 18th Hussars, 7th Cavalry and Roman Legionaries. Their massed last stand would be on Michael’s parents’ barbecue area, napalmed with lighter-fluid. Forgotten heroes of outgrown battles deliquescing in a sea of blistering plastic.

  Paperbacks were shelved in alphabetical order in a cabinet, mixing sci-fi he read on his own with books he had for English lessons: At the Mountains of Madness and To Kill a Mockingbird, Conan the Usurper and Under the Greenwood Tree. Son of Mad, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions and The Portable Mad had their own section, stacked horizontally. He kept frustratingly incomplete runs of ZC comics in box-files: imported as ballast, they arrived months or even years out of order and any issue resolving a storyline was guaranteed never to cross the Atlantic. Zowie, a black and white digest, carried chopped-up reprints (‘pounds’ and ‘lift’ lettered over ‘dollars’ and ‘elevator’) of the Streak (‘faster than sound, faster than light, faster than time!’) and Lance Lake, Private Eye (Sir Lancelot reincarnated in Coastal City). He and Mickey Yeo swapped ZCs and shared the revelation that people who wrote and drew comic books had styles as much as book authors or pop groups.

  A radiogram as big as a wash-stand stood by the bed; its vast dial promised frequencies for Budapest and Morocco and Hilversum (wherever Hilversum was), but delivered only bursts of static and, zeroed in on the ghosts of the Home Service and the Light Programme, Radio 4 and Radio 1. Only Michael had a TV in his room; the old black and white set, since his parents were the first to switch to colour. He relayed details of programmes on too late for Neil: Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which Michael could recite word for word as if he were a living book from Fahrenheit 451, and Casanova, which had tits in every episode. Jon Pertwee was Dr Who, Gerry Anderson had forsaken puppets for UFO and Mickey wore shirts like Peter Wyngarde’s in Jason King. Neil and Michael had a theory that the TV weirdness they liked started with the Bear on The Andy Williams Show, ‘No cookies,’ they chanted, ‘not now, not ever, never!’ Neil’s favourite programmes were Doomwatch and Columbo; his most hated The Generation Game and On the Buses.

  A pinboard was covered by pictures: Brie Simon, pouting voluptuously in Devil Daughter of Dracula, shared a pin-up corner with Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Madeline Smith, Suzi Quatro and Julie Ege; a map of Middle Earth had the adventurers’ route in Neil’s planned sequel to Lord of the Rings marked by a carefully plotted felt-tip line. A gallery of musicians featured David Bowie, Maria Callas, Tamsin, Alice Cooper and Steeleye Span. On a poster, the Streak grinned in a small whirlwind, masked face clear, costume blurred. A magazine cover showed Armstrong on the surface of the moon, Aldrin reflected in his bulbous gold visor. On the back of the door was the poster Mickey designed for the never-finished ‘dramatic extravaganza’ the Quorum tried to write for the last day of Grammar School, Death to Dr Marling...

  If he had that poster today, he could sell it in Planet Janet for a fortune.

  For a moment, it was before him. An alternate
universe in which he finished The Revenge of Sauron, the Quorum did not break up, University worked out. In this real world, Neil Martin was rich and famous and married to a fluffy woman who looked like a young Brie Simon. White planes of sunlight sprinkled the beautiful blue of his swimming pool as his wife broke the surface. Slow droplets fell from her ripe body as she hauled herself out of the water. He sipped a nectar cocktail and felt warmth on his tanned face and chest. Her touch was cool. Strawberry lips fixed to his, warm tongue slipping into his mouth.

  His eyes snapped open. A crust broke in his bruise. The rubber band that had connected him to the present snapped back.

  A hammer of pain fell on his head.

  Universes shifted; Neil was plucked from his poolside palace, whisked across continua to Cranley Gardens, the taste of last night’s sick still in the back of his throat.

  He’d lived here for seven months. It was officially a basement flat; the sink and cooker were in an alcove that could marginally be considered a separate room. Seven steps down from the hall with a payphone, a draughty toilet and a bathroom which never had hot water, no matter how long before bathing the heater was turned on. There were three other tenants, one of whom received stolen goods and early morning police visits that, being nearest the front door, it fell on Neil to handle.

  The pain grew and he sat in bed, holding his head in his hands. His leg was frozen where he had been injected last night. He had pills somewhere. He held the hurt; it was something he owned outright.

  ‘Heartache and pain and misery and suffering,’ he hummed, ‘that’s what we got for fun around here...’

  Late afternoon on a public holiday. The road outside was silent, an abandoned city. Apart from him, the house might be empty. The room was an Egyptian burial chamber plundered centuries before by tomb-robbers. The mummy of Neel-Mah-Teen was unknown to history, his offering of pain ignored by the Gods.

  In underpants and a T-shirt, Neil walked across the carpet, shock-cold waking him, numb leg dragging. He made it to the alcove and the cupboard over the sink. There was a half-bottle of ketchup, a box of elderly tea-bags and a plastic container of wholegrain flour, along with the fifties utensils that came with the room. He found a pack of paracetamol, two still in the plastic-and-foil sheet. He dry-gulped them, experiencing no ad-style instant relief.

  The fire had been left on when he collapsed last night (early this morning?) but the meter had run out. He had no fresh change but the coin-box had been broken into and not fixed, so he retrieved his much-used fifty-pence piece and fed it through again. He relished the tingy whirr that came from the fire as the current was restored, promising to settle the debt when Mr Azmi’s son came round to collect. He owed the tin box about five pounds.

  The overhead bulb came on too; it must have been burning when he crashed.

  Someone had helped him, he remembered. A kindly, exasperated woman. She guided him from the casualty ward and waited outside the house, in the first dingy light of dawn, as he got inside. Solicitous of his well-being, which was unusual. Molly? Sally? Sally. From the party. Olive Oyl. Some girl Dolar knew. Probably another incipient psychopath. Dolar introduced him to Tanya, and at first she’d been solicitous too, especially when he had some money and she hadn’t any. He wondered what Sally would look like with her hair down. She’d had good eyes and a thin, promising mouth.

  He thought of venturing out to quest for groceries, then about boiling a saucepan of water for tea. His stomach wasn’t in the mood for food or drink and he doubted he could taste anything anyway. He’d have to clean a cup if he wanted tea and he’d been squeezing weak bubbles out of the washing-up liquid bottle for days.

  He could think of no real reason not to go back to bed and sleep out 1993. But, after hovering a moment, he began to get dressed.

  ‘Never surrender,’ he told himself, unconvinced.

  LEECH

  CARDINAL WOLSEY, STREET, 1993

  Darkness was about him like a cloak, taking the shape of a motor car. In the back of his Rolls, Leech sprawled on black leather like a vampire in a coffin. But he did not sleep. Green figures scrolled on one monitor. Another screen showed Cloud 9’s twenty-four-hour News. Business must be done. The fax whirred constantly, feeding documents into his hand. He memorised as he read, then slipped paper into the in-car shredder. A part of his mind was always available for the governance of his earthly dominion.

  The car prowled through the docklands. He had been born not far from here. When he returned now, it was as an emperor. Through one-way glass, he looked at empty streets. He owned them; if not now, then soon. Many houses were derelict, windows replaced with sheets of corrugated iron, over-full skips parked outside. Some terraces, like geriatric jaws holding their last few teeth, housed one or two elderly sitting-tenants. Bus shelters were demolished, schools abandoned, post offices closed, pubs firebombed. All support had been withdrawn. There was no transport, no commerce, no policing. Street lighting was intermittent. Large properties, once factories or warehouses, were burned-out shells. The district was in its last stages of withering. Even the homeless, sensing with ratwhiskers the terminal sickness, had moved on to other sites.

  When this place was dead, Leech would supervise the erection of a dark and shining city. His pyramid, already the dominant shape on the skyline, would be its beating heart. He could already see predictive outlines of the buildings, shadows gathering substance above the roofs. The future would rise like a reef of black coral, structures clustering upon each other, inhabited bubbles spreading across the map, blotting out chalk marks on wet asphalt. Leech’s nameless city would be a sprawling cathedral, an act of worship in stone and steel and glass, a culmination that would endure centuries.

  On the floor in front of him, in a cage too small for them, a dozen long-tailed mice crawled over each other, squeaking and shitting and gnawing. More servants for the Device, as ignorant and dedicated as the Quorum, as tiny in the scheme, as vital to the working of the purpose.

  The approach to the traffic-lights was strewn with rubble and potholes, but the wheels effortlessly bypassed perils that would halt another vehicle. The Rolls braked at lights before turning into Cardinal Wolsey Street. Nobody crossed the road as the light was red. Nobody had crossed here for months. The amber light was smashed, so there was just a filament glow between red and green.

  Leech considered a communication from Zurich, confirming matters discussed at the meeting seven hours ago. A sum the size of the GNP of a mid-ranking South American country had just been placed at his disposal. The surplus money was almost an irritation; like most truly rich men, he had no interest whatsoever in cold figures. He gauged success in other measures, some comprehensible in an infants’ playground, some beyond explanation.

  The lights changed and the car made the turn-off. Entering Cardinal Wolsey Street was like passing from the snows of Tibet into the Valley of Shangri-La. The quality of light changed, the climate became temperate, a street-shaped shaft of sun sliced through cloud cover. Here, it only rained pleasantly between the hours of one and five in the morning, leaving the street clean and the plants watered every dawn.

  On one side of the road was a well-kept park, boundaried by shining railings, neatly trimmed green grass shading into blighted wasteland. Families walked on the civilised zone, throwing frisbees with dogs and children. A uniformed keeper spiked leaves with a stick. Near the wrought iron gates, a stall sold eel pies and pickled herrings. A small band clustered in a gazebo, playing a selection of Gilbert & Sullivan to ranks of deckchairs. The tune was taken up and whistled by everyone in earshot. ‘The Ghosts’ High Noon’.

  The residential side was a Victorian terrace of back-to-back, two-up/two-down dwellings, front steps polished to a shine, front gardens postcard perfect, front doors brightly painted, old-fashioned house numbers proudly displayed. A postman cheerfully delivered letters at dusk on a Bank Holiday. Sparkling-clean milk bottles waited by knife-sharp bootscrapers for tomorrow’s collection and delivery.
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br />   Fast-food containers did not accumulate in the gutter, dogs did not deposit faeces on pavement or park, cars were not abandoned or vandalised, graffiti did not mar red brickwork, the corner shop had no iron shutter.

  As the car proceeded down Cardinal Wolsey Street, residents took note. The postman, leaning his bike against a wall, touched fingers to his peaked cap. A black woman wearing a Mother Hubbard, looked up from scrubbing a doorstep and grinned a welcome. A little boy in shorts stopped driving his hoop and gazed in adoration at the Rolls, almost falling on his cleanly scabbed knees to worship the demigod of the road.

  There was only one lock-up garage in the street, at the far end, opposite the pub. The Rolls cruised towards it. As the car passed, people turned to wave or bow to its opaque windows. They were deferential, but made a point of not being creepy about it. This was the world as it should be; everyone sure of their place and comfortable in their station.

  The garage door slid up into the roof, a maw-like dark opening. Suspension countered the bump as the car rolled up off the road across the pavement. If he had been holding a drink from the wet bar, the miniscus would barely have wobbled.

  The garage swallowed the car. He disengaged monitors and punched the door code onto a pad. The Rolls opened with a slight hydraulic breath. Leech set his hat on his head, regarding himself in an ebony mirror to adjust the angle of the brim. Daintily picking up the cage of mice, he got out and stood for an instant, accustoming himself to the different, welcoming dark.

  From outside, it was hard to believe the garage could accommodate a monster like the Rolls. Inside, the car was dwarfed in a hangar-like space that stretched thousands of yards. All interior walls and floors had been taken out, leaving a brick and tile shell, roof supported by chimney columns. The structure was shored by iron pillars and struts and spines. The concrete garage area was raised above the level of the rest of the works, which went down to bare, wet earth. Front doors were nailed shut, wire mesh baskets over letterboxes. Hundreds of windows were double-glazed and net curtained. The whole terrace was hollow, an enclosure the shape of Crystal Palace.