The Quorum (12 page)

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.

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.’

S
hifting 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?’

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 was 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.

‘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?’