The Quorum Page 9

  The noise of toiling men and machines, inaudible from the street, was overpowering. From others, he understood the smell was equally potent.

  ‘Derek,’ a waiting man said, making the horned sign with both hands, ‘blessed be...’

  ‘Blessed be,’ Leech replied, returning the arcane greeting and gesture.

  Drache, his tame architect and acolyte, had a harmless fetish for ritual and ceremony. If black magic helped him understand his Deal, Leech chose to indulge him.

  ‘The auguries are encouraging,’ Drache babbled. ‘At midnight, the rubies turned black.’

  Drache had made his sacrifices. A distinctive half-domino covered his empty eye-socket. The irregular red patch conformed to the contours of his face, outlining one side of his nose and extending from cheekbone to hairline. It matched his thigh-length leather coat.

  Ceremonially, Leech handed over the cage of mice.

  ‘For the Device,’ he explained. ‘Living components.’

  The architect accepted the offering solemnly.

  ‘Magic,’ he said.

  ‘Take care of them,’ Leech warned. ‘None must die. The participants in the ritual are all under my protection.’

  Drache nodded, serious. He had heard this before, but it bore repeating. The acolyte understood sacrifice, but was sometimes unsubtle.

  Above them and extending the length of the hollowed-out terrace, towered the Device. It clanked and screeched, every inch in motion, a crucified iron animal.

  Drache took down a brass-nozzled hose that snaked out of the innards of the Device and removed the cap as if it were a speaking tube. He dropped the first mouse into the mouth and squeezed, gently nudging the animal along the rubber intestine into the works.

  Glowing smuts pattered down, sprinkling the observation platform. The pain was so thick his senseless nostrils caught the stink. Leech knew now this would be the year. The Device was nearly complete.

  BOOK

  2

  DEALS

  ‘The face of evil is always the face of total need.’

  WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, The Naked Lunch

  1

  16 SEPTEMBER, 1970

  Apart from a fitting in the tailor’s recommended by the prospectus, he hadn’t worn his uniform before the morning. Walking the length of town from his parents’ council house to Dr Marling’s Grammar School for Boys, he felt a freak in his blood-coloured cap. The badge on his roomy black blazer was an open wound. He’d never worn a tie; Mum would have to knot it for a further nine months before he got the knack. Estate kids jeered from the bus stop, shouting ‘snobby’ as Mark quickened his pace.

  Two other boys from his year had got into Marling’s but he wasn’t in their gang. At Edge End Primary, his friends had been girls; any, like Juliet Kinross, who passed the eleven-plus went to the Girls’ Grammar. His brother Chris was at Hemphill Secondary Modern, where his sister Sue would go. When Liza, the youngest, finished Edge End, there wouldn’t be an eleven-plus exam; all three schools would be combined as Ash Grove Comprehensive.

  On the first day of the first term, boys could use the front doors. Just before nine, there was already a bottleneck. For ever after, he’d trudge up the back drive. On his last day, in an unimaginably distant future, Mark would be permitted to leave as he first entered. A school leaver would then traditionally bung his cap in the river. But by that day, there’d be no caps, no Marling’s.

  Beyond the front doors was the crush hall, antechamber to the assembly hall. Sports trophies shone in cases. High up was a sad-faced portrait, ‘Dr Roger Marling, 1768-1809’. A shield bore the school arms, a motto was inscribed on an hour-glass.

  ‘Tempus fuggit,’ he said out loud.

  ‘Tempus fugit,’ said a thin master in a black gown. ‘Don’t you know what that means, boy? You soon will.’

  Alarmed to be talked at by so superior a creature, he hurried into Assembly. Despite the smell of polished wood floors, it was like a railway station packed with refugees. Over eighty uniformed new boys milled about. Plaques honoured old boys killed in wars or accepted by universities; the former was considerably longer. The first boy to speak to him was Alan Ward, who thought he knew someone who knew Mark. Wrong, he would exchange no more than a dozen words with Mark over the next seven years.

  ‘He was a clockmaker, zh-you know,’ another boy said.

  Mark started. The speaker was not fat exactly, but ripe like an apple. His uniform a slightly lighter black, he was taller than nine tenths of the intake.

  ‘Dixon,’ he said, extending a hand like a grown-up. ‘Michael Dixon.’

  Mark shook the boy’s hand.

  ‘Mark,’ he introduced himself.

  ‘They use surnames here,’ Michael explained.

  ‘Uh, oh, Amphlett.’

  ‘Bless you.’

  He spelled out his name.

  ‘Acquainted with anyone in this rabble?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Me neither. I’m here ’cause I got booted out of prep school. Smoking. Vile habit. Bit of a blow to the beloved parents.’

  Mark goggled at the sophisticated felon. He was like the boys in the Jennings books. When he later mentioned this, Michael told him, patronisingly, it was time he graduated to P.G. Wodehouse.

  Masters in academic gowns were stationed at vital points like guards. None wore the mortar-boards he’d been led by the Beano to expect. They shushed and the buzz died. ‘Caps off,’ a master announced. Mark snatched his from his head and folded it into a boomerang. Ranks formed, everyone unsure where they should stand, facing the stage.

  A short man with a purple-edged gown stood at a lectern, a foot-tall hour-glass beside him. Mark recognised Brendan Quinlan MA (Cantab) from the early summer evening when Mum had taken him to an introductory talk about the school and its traditions.

  ‘Chimp,’ a boy said. For the first time, Mark, who’d been feeling ill, smiled. Mr Quinlan looked a little like a monkey.

  The head, who’d never be anything but Chimp until he disappeared apoplectically in the changeover to Comprehensive in 1973, turned the hour-glass. Sand began to trickle.

  ‘He was a clockmaker,’ Michael whispered. ‘Dr Marling, I read in...’

  ‘You boy,’ said Chimp, voice a cannon-blast, stubby finger jabbed, ‘silence, or suffer untold torments’.

  Michael instantly paled; Mark realised he really was a boy, not a grown-up pretending.

  ‘You probably think well of yourselves,’ Chimp told the intake, ‘because you were clever at your last school. Well, being clever at your last school just makes you ordinary here...’

  * * *

  As Chimp read off each surname, the intake divided into three forms. He found himself in 1W, taken by Mr Waller who’d taught him to pronounce tempus fugit but would be unable to prod much more Latin into him. Mark wouldn’t understand for years why the skeletal master was nicknamed Fats. He’d taught at Marling’s since the War and been named by boys long since grown up, faded ink names scrawled in the desks their successors now inherited.

  Later he realised 1B (Bairstow) and 1U (Unwin) were assigned desks in alphabetical order so responses passed up and down rows as the register was called. Fats marched his form around the quadrangle to their classroom and let them sit where they wanted. Mark and Michael took desks one row from the back, Michael next to the window. Neil, the boy who’d said ‘Chimp’, was immediately behind Mark. The far corner behind Michael was empty.

  After the register, Fats explained the timetable. At Edge End, a class stayed in one room all day; here forms changed each lesson. Mark knew English, history and mathematics from primary school, but science divided into physics, chemistry and biology and he’d do Latin and French. Tagged a ‘Roman Candle, he’d take his half-hour of religious education separate from 1W, with a few other Catholics in the year. As an RC, he was supposed to have a head start in Latin, but most of the class swiftly left him standing and he’d drop it after a year. Friday afternoon was for Games, rug
by football in winter, cricket in summer.

  Having established academic boundaries, Fats explained the judicial system. Minor offences (talking in class, late homework) were recorded in an exercise book: three meant detention, otherwise reserved for major offences (fighting, armed robbery). Three DTs meant a visit to Chimp, six strokes of the cane. In the second year, Mark would come within one minor offence of the cane, escaping only by convincing Fats he’d not been the one running around the bogs pulling the flush chains. Masters could also give lines (the long, hard, dreary sentence) or a slap with the rubber tubing of a Bunsen burner (the short, sharp, exciting sentence).

  Another punishment was a copy, a set of the school rules copied out by hand overnight, administered by prefects, identifiable by their tasselled caps, who caught a boy breaking any of dozens of rules: do not eat in the street, do not run in the school corridor, do not appear outside a classroom with cap off, do not appear in a classroom with cap on. In the first week, Hackwill of 5 V gave Mark a copy for something he hadn’t done, and he wrung his hand into a claw doing the punishment (he told Mum it was homework). Four small print pages, about three thousand words. He later discovered Hackwill, official and universally feared school bully, wasn’t a prefect but an offender himself, pressing the chore to a suitable victim.

  * * *

  By dinner, he understood the geography. Like many schools, it was laid out on the Benthamite model used by prisons: a quad (exercise yard) surrounded by rows of classrooms (cell-blocks), admin building towering above. Where Stalag 17 had a mined wasteland, Marling’s had playing fields. After three weeks of rugby, Mark decided he’d rather spend muddy Friday afternoons in a minefield.

  Instead of queuing in a cafeteria, boys were assigned tables. Mark’s table captain was Spit, a freckled fifth-former. When food was on the plates, Chimp would say grace from the stage; Spit always muttered ‘bow you heathens’. He had a sidekick, a tubby third-year named Grease who gobbled the leftovers until Spit, at Neil’s joke suggestion, put his furious friend on a diet. Spit would chuckle ‘it’s for your own good, Greasy’ and dole out a single roast potato. A devout Tory, Spit was the first politically-active person Mark encountered: Spit and Grease would get wrecked on cider and infiltrate Labour Party events to cause trouble. Mark didn’t mention his Dad was a Labour voter.

  To draw out the kids (all, apart from Michael, shellshocked), Spit talked about the constant they held in common, television. Mark was vaguely ashamed of having enjoyed kids’ programmes, though Neil piped up with embarrassing enthusiasm for The Wacky Races. This was the first year of Monty Python which, with unprecedented breasts and vomit, Michael and Mark both saw as significant, though Michael pointed out it was Do Not Adjust Your Set for grown-ups. In 1983, Mark would write an obit for Python in The Shape, denouncing the Oxbridge smugness which deemed it automatically absurd for scrubwomen to know about Sartre.

  During dinner hour, as Spit and Grease joshed and Michael and Neil joined in, Mark’s idea of Marling’s changed. In one scale was Latin, hours of homework and scarlet caps, but something he’d had to hide at Edge End (where he was called queer for not caring about football) was freed.

  17 SEPTEMBER, 1970

  The next day, 1W grew. There were 79 in the intake; in the rush to sort them into equal forms it wasn’t noticed that 79 wasn’t divisible by three. The school had three lots of 26 with one left over. A lost soul spent the first day shunted from room to room, passing notes of explanation. Chimp had decided to shove him in with 1W. There was an extra desk at the back, seat broken but usable if a boy didn’t mind having his bottom pinched. Ushered in like an escapee returned to the prison population, he had longer hair than anyone in the room and would be upbraided for it well into Ash Grove. His large and active hands were multicoloured with ink; Fats judged him instantly, ‘I suspect you are artistic, Yeo.’

  He took the free desk and the square was complete. Preliminaries over, the rest of their lives began.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Neil asked.

  ‘Michael,’ he explained.

  ‘We’ve already got a Michael,’ Mark said.

  ‘Zh-you be Mickey,’ Michael said. ‘’Twill spare confusion.’

  ‘Mickey?’ He seemed appalled.

  Five years later, Mark would notice Mickey’s Dad, by then his Mum’s employer, called his son ‘Mike’. He had been reborn and renamed forever and his own father had never known.

  ‘Silence at the back,’ said Fats. ‘Or it’ll be a minor offence for the four of you.’

  They sat straight and quiet, mortified.

  ‘Two Michaels, a Mark and a Martin. We have a tradition of Ms at Marling’s. Not always happy, but a tradition.’

  2

  2 JANUARY, 1993

  Shifting the Invader to another arm, she picked up the phone. The Invader wailed over anything the caller might be saying.

  ‘Hold, please? I have to rescue a baby from a robot-chef.’ She settled the Invader, features screwed together in the centre of its face, on a cushion.

  ‘Gurgle gurgle,’ she said, wiping dribble. The beginnings of a smile rewarded her. ‘Sorry,’ she said into the handset.

  ‘That’s quite all right, Ms Rhodes,’ replied a voice. Male, youngish, classless, precise.

  ‘Happy New Year’

  ‘Likewise. I’m Mark Amphlett.’

  She knew the name.

  ‘Pardon me for bothering. I thought it best this be dealt with sooner.’

  On TV, he looked about eighteen. Thin, sharp, penetrating: a stiletto.

  ‘I’m an associate of Michael Dixon’s.’

  ‘I saw you together on Have I Got News For You. You won...’

  ‘...but he was funnier. I’ve an interest in the business you pursued for Michael last year. It’d be useful if we met. Could you be available Monday morning?’

  ‘The fourth?’

  ‘Yes. About ten. I have an office in D’Arblay Street. The Shape’.

  ‘You’ve got a date.’

  He rang off. The Invader crawled towards the precipitous sofa edge, peering exploratively at the drop.

  Several people gave her Amphlett’s The Shape of the Now one Christmas. She’d never finished the book. She had seen The Shape at friends’ houses, a heavy square magazine. A few years ago, it was considered essential. ‘When in the future people think of the eighties,’ he once said, ‘I want them to think of The Shape.’ That must haunt him.

  ‘So, Mummy’s Little Millstone,’ she said, saving the Invader from an eighteen-inch plunge, ‘I’m visiting a Style Guru. What d’you think I should wear?’

  4 JANUARY, 1993

  She identified herself to a speaker marked with the square logo of The Shape. The door buzzed in and she faced an almost vertical staircase. Thankful she’d chosen flats not heels, she carefully climbed. A door opened above her head. Long legs came into view under a short, electric pink skirt.

  ‘Mind your footing,’ a voice said.

  A black girl with a perfect complexion helped her with the last few steps as if she were a grandmother.

  ‘An accident waiting to happen,’ she said, easing Sally through the door. ‘I’m Laura-Leigh. Mark will be with you instantly. Filter coffee or herbal tea?’

  Ask for proper PG tips, Mummy.

  ‘Rose hip, please.’

  Laura-Leigh reminded her of the strange women in sanitary-towel ads who go skydiving or shark-fishing while having their period. And smile about it.

  Michael Dixon had interviewed her in a sparsely-populated office, acres of glass covered by Venetian blinds, in a complex of production companies off Goodge Street. The Shape was run from comfortable loft-space in Soho. Drafting tables and computers combined with unfinished wood and original stone, an imposition of modernity upon the past.

  She sank into a low couch, insubstantial cushions stuffed into a futon frame, and kept her knees together. She’d chosen a tartan skirt, green blouse and hip-length darker green cardigan. Not striking (if she w
as noticed on the street, she wasn’t doing her job) but not shabby either.

  Laura-Leigh returned with tea, an alarming purple brew in a glass beaker with an aluminium handle arrangement.

  ‘Mark won’t be but a moment,’ she said.

  On a low glass-topped table, the last four issues of The Shape were laid out like a still life. A fan of brochures for connected enterprises suggested, with technographics, impenetrable mysteries of science.

  She sipped her tea (bland at first, but seductive) and picked up the last quarterly number of The Shape. Its cover, thick as cardboard, bore an image that might be a face or a tankful of goldfish. A glossy contents page, tiny black type wriggling in a square-metre of creamy space, promised the centenary of the airbrush, sixties ice-lollies, Jim Harrison and Interactive Narrative. She found an obituary for Amazon Queen.

  ‘Ms Rhodes,’ he said.

  She put down the magazine and stood. He shook her hand and looked at her as she looked at him. Taller than expected: she’d thought Style Gurus likely to be overcompensatory dwarves. Hair cut short, neat bald patch like a tonsure. Four-button, single-breasted suit, dark with subtle silver thread. Button-down collar, skinny keyboard tie. Prominent cheekbones, thin smile, sharp eyes.

  ‘Come into the Inner Sanctum,’ he said, sliding away a section of wall to reveal a priests’ hole lined with files and thick blank-spined books. A desk partitioned the room, a window looked out on the street. He slipped into a swivel chair in a tiny space behind the desk, and offered her either of two matched armchairs, low-slung black leather punchbags strung between chrome tubes.

  Still holding her beaker, she sat.