The Quorum (19 page)

Neil woke with a terror-grip on his heart and a burning erection. He’d been sleeping on his front, bruised face into the pillow. The noise made him turn, grinding his duvet under him as he looked up.

He was under attack.

A further crash, the far curtains billowing. A tinkling of glass. Something small and heavy thumped onto the fold-out table, skittered across the surface, swept his reading lamp to the floor.

Pre-dawn light seeped in. Cloaking his duvet around his shoulders, he lifted himself off the bed and called, ‘Who’s there?’

Another crash. Force spent against a curtain, something slid down. He whisked apart the curtains. The sash window was broken, jagged shards left like broken teeth in the lower frame. In a blur, the upper pane exploded. A fist-sized stone hit his collarbone. Yelping, he dropped his duvet. A wave of cold draped him. He wore only low-hanging pyjama bottoms, his fast-dwindling penis stuck ridiculously out of the fly.

The stone, a chunk of rough concrete, had bounced onto the bed. Neil, bruised and scraped, wrestled with his old dressing-gown, wriggling into sleeves as he shoved out of the flat. He scrambled up the hall stairs and wrenched open the front door. In 57 varieties of minor pain, Neil stood on the doorstep in the growing dawn.

‘Bastards, bastards.’

He looked up and down the road. His windows were completely done for. The assault team must be nearby still, hiding, watching, snickering. The remains of night offered concealing shadows. He looked up and down again, wondering. The houses were the same as ever. An intelligence - vast, cool and unsympathetic - was directed at him. The Norwegian Neil Cullers.

His rage-flare damped. He shivered. Turning, he found the door had swung shut behind him. He was locked out. Reaching for his keys, he realised they were in his jeans back in the flat.

‘Bastard, bastard.’

Making a way by the dustbins, he took a look at the damage. He chose the most definitively broken window, and, with numb fingers, picked the last spikes out of the putty so he could crawl back in. Careful not to gash his hands, he settled bare feet on a carpet of splinters.

* * *

At 9.30 a.m., Sally walked down Cranley Gardens, hood of her transparent mac up against the drizzle. She’d loitered in the area for a month last year blending so well she was no more noticed than a lamp-post. Now Neil knew who she was (if he remembered), the job would be trickier.

There was the direct approach: as his saviour of New Year’s Eve, she could invite him for a drink and ask how things were going. She didn’t know how ethical or sensible that might be, but it was a temptingly easy option. She suspected Neil would take grim delight in telling people just exactly how things had been going, inside and outside his head. But it wouldn’t do to be caught between the client and Neil. The intricacies of their relationship weren’t her concern; besides, she suspected they were beyond human understanding.

Slowing as she passed Neil’s house, she saw his windows were broken. Every pane: either unusual or thorough. And only
his
windows. The other flats had been left alone. His curtains were drawn, a blue wall. It was as if the place had been mortared by insurgents. Sarajevo, N10.

A young-looking middle-aged man parked a Volvo outside the flat. Sally wondered if he were calling on Neil, but he locked his car with an automatic zapper and hurried off determinedly, heavy suitcase on wheels trotting after him like a robot dog.

She kept walking, thinking about the vandalism. It was the sort of thing the client would want reported. First, the New Year’s Eve beating, now this.

Neil isn’t exactly Mr Lucky, Mummy.

Good point, strange alien being. Maybe he has the knack of making enemies.

At the end of the Gardens, she paused to count to 100, and turned to stroll back. She didn’t hang about, partly because she was stranded suspiciously in the middle of a residential nowhere, partly because the cold sank ice needles into her toes.

A long dark car passed, light as a shadow on the road. Shed seen it before. An odd vehicle, its windows so opaque she swore the owner drove by sense of smell: the bonnet was the classic Rolls-Royce sharp-edged box but the rear was streamlined like a 1930s spaceship. Turning into Cranley Gardens, the car barely purred.

She followed as the car prowled through the Gardens, a cool predator with a vanity plate. SHADE 001. Passing Neil’s house again, nothing was different. He didn’t have a light on behind his curtains. He’d be under a blanket wishing his headache away. Yesterday, she’d scoped him struggling to the supermarket, half his face still a vari-coloured bruise.

SHADE 001 disappeared towards Highgate. It was time to check the Invader. Having a surveillance target within walking distance of the flat was unprecedentedly convenient. Neil didn’t own a car; if he took off into town, she could easily follow. Holmes had a magnifying glass, Marlowe a gun; her most useful detection tool was a London Transport bus-train-tube season ticket.

A blast of throttled noise shocked her. In a house nearby, someone with no finger-bones picked out a thrash metal
Dying Swan.
She paused to pity the neighbours. Hurrying on, she wondered if a deadly guitar chord could have shattered Neil’s windows.

* * *

The fire was on but the room wasn’t warm. He’d gone back to bed for as long as he could stand but hadn’t managed to sleep. Arctic gusts poured through empty window-frames. Invisible snow drifts piled around the chairs and against the walls.

When he finally decided to get up, he took off his pyjama bottoms to put on underpants and a vest, then pulled the pyjamas back on, finding the jacket at the bottom of the wardrobe. Over the ensemble, he tugged two pairs of socks (actually, four mismatched individual socks) and his jeans. He augmented the pyjama jacket with a rollneck sweater, a thick woolly jumper and his overcoat. As layered in by clothes as a wino, his crotch and elbows clogged, he was momentarily warm. Armoured, he could face the day.

He worked to extract treacherous ticks of glass from the carpet, his exposed extremities still suffering. His hands froze dead, nails bluish. Cold did more than paracetamol to dull the pain in his face.

Once more, he wondered why the Norwegian Neil Cullers were on his case. If he wasn’t sure she was in Romania, he’d suspect Tanya was on one of her crusade crazes. She was not a rational being.

Satisfied the floor was glass-free, he hunted for small change. There weren’t even any tens left in the electricity meter. The cupboard was bare. He went upstairs to borrow from Pel, who had the top-floor flat and was some sort of operator. In the forties, he’d have been a spiv.

Pel was on his futon with two girls Neil didn’t recognise, posing as a James Bond villain. They were watching a pirate video, a Japanese subtitled Clint Eastwood. A new microwave sat in a scad of foam packaging, cord wedged into a plugboard with matchsticks. The flat was a maze of stacked boxes. Offered a deal on a Korean VCR, Neil didn’t have a TV much less money. Pel told him to grab a handful of coins from the jar by the door. Neil thanked him, took the money, and got out. Leaving, he realised how warm Pel’s flat was. It smelled of fresh croissants and real coffee.

When he got downstairs, the second post had come. There was nothing for him. Nearby, a Hendrix-possessed maniac murdered a musical instrument with a chainsaw. If Neil were a stone-thrower by disposition, he’d bypass his own place and aim solid chunks at the guitar man’s flat.

Fighting the pips to jam enough change into the phone, he got through.

‘Neil, what is it?’ the landlord answered. ‘I’m very busy.’

‘My windows, Mr Azmi. They were broken this morning.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Broken. Someone broke them.’

‘You broke windows? Why?’

‘Not me. Someone else.’

‘Who? Why? How?’

‘I don’t know.’

Mr Azmi gave a rattling sigh Neil guessed was a swear word in Pakistani. It was the landlord’s responsibility to replace the windows. He’d be insured.

‘Mr Azmi, it’s cold. There’s no security. Anyone could get in and steal stuff.’

That didn’t impress Mr Azmi.

‘They could take the phone, wrench it off the wall, loot the coin-box.’

‘I’ll send one of my sons.’

‘Today?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The room is like a freezer.’

‘I’ll send one of my sons over.’

Mr Azmi hung up.

* * *

Sonja hadn’t been overpowered and reduced to a bag of squishy skin on a broken skeleton, so that was something.

‘Gurgle, gurgle,’ Sally said to her offspring, who returned in kind. The Invader pretended to be an ordinary baby.

‘Such a good little thing,’ the childminder said. ‘Not like my horror.’

They shared a diet lunch of cream cheese, pineapple and humus. The Invader and Sonja’s horror, Francis, took merciful naps. Sonja had taken a message from an Ayesha McPherson, Michael Dixon’s PA at Top Hat. When Sally returned the call, she was told Michael would like to make the arrangement for another commission. He was interested in anything she could find about Gary Gaunt, a book reviewer for the
Basildon Echo.
Sally said she’d get on the job. Despite wretched weather and general recession, her financial prospects were cheering. She felt like buying a celebration cardigan but decided to do the sensible thing and went shopping for baby clothes bargains.

* * *

Hendrix might be playing ‘Paranoid’ or ‘Carmina Burana’ or ‘Doodly-Acky Sacky, Want Some Seafood, Mama’. It was impossible to tell. Neil sat hunched over the fire, frozen hands jammed into his armpits, wondering about Norwegian Neil Cullers. It seemed he couldn’t make a move without someone aiming a baseball bat at his skull.

The doorbell rang, cutting briefly through the murder rock. Neil jumped. This must be one of Mr Azmi’s sons, come about the broken windows. It’d be too much to hope they could get a glazier this afternoon but Neil couldn’t take many nights effectively in the open. He’d do anything - report to the police, fill in forms, show investigators around - to help Mr Azmi make his insurance claim.

He went upstairs and opened the door. On the step was a man of about retirement age, erect like a career Army officer, bristly of moustache, weak of chin. The broken-and-mended strap of his shoulder-bag was much too short. Tufts of hair escaped his woolly hat.

‘Neil Martin?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Stan Gull, ELF,’ he said confidentially, looking up the street. A big black car dawdling by. Gull waited until it had passed before continuing, as if suspecting directional mikes. ‘We spoke on the telephone yesterday. I was in the district so I thought I’d establish contact. I’ve brought the back numbers of
Britannia Rules
and our membership bumph. Proud to have you on the rolls, Martin. We may be few but, with the rot and rancour, we grow by the hour. I expect you thought you were alone in your feelings...’

‘Well, er, I...’

‘Fear not, delivery is nigh. No room for slackers in the boats, Martin.’

He dumped his bag on the hall table and produced a large buff envelope which he handed over.

Nodding in Hendrix’s direction, Gull observed, ‘Fearful racket, what? Coloured, I’ll wager. We’ve their measure, Martin. Yes indeed, no napping on our watch.’

Neil opened the flap and slid out a slickly-produced, badly-designed magazine. It was glossy but felt slimy. The cover painting showed a crowd of heavily negroid faces over-stamped with an official not wanted in blood red. Straplines promised:
THE LIE OF THE HOLOCAUST
, a Historian Writes;
THE HOMO CONSPIRACY EXPOSED
, Growing Threat in the Open;
PROUD TO BE A RACIST
, Decorated Hero Declares! Gull smiled, a pervert sharing a pleasure. He had unbelievably polished false teeth.

‘The ELF needs young blood, Martin. Young British blood.’

The world spun out of control again.

‘Can I leave you a poster? To put up in the window.’

Gull unrolled a large two-colour poster; red and blue.
ENGLISH LIBERATION FRONT
written on a flapping Union Jack. ‘
BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE, END IMIGRATION NOW
!’ a caption blared.

Neil took the poster, too appalled to think.

‘Aren’t there two M’s in...’

‘Come the day,’ Gull said, slipping an arm around Neil, ‘your children will be rid of the invader.’

A young Asian in a sharp suit came through the front door. Zafir, one of Mr Azmi’s sons. He had an attempted moustache and a gold neckchain. Gull couldn’t have looked more aghast if he’d opened his eyes to find he was being fellated by a leper.

‘Neil,’ Zafir said, ‘about this damage...’

That dot high up in the sky was a falling piano, aimed directly at his head, growing by the second as it plummeted heavily Neil-wards.

Gull’s fingers stretched out to point shakily between Zafir’s eyes.

‘Put that away,’ Zafir said, smiling uneasily. ‘It might be loaded.’

‘There’s one now,’ he said. ‘A filthy alien...’

It was no use trying to roll up the poster before Zafir saw it. Mr Azmi’s son took in everything in a polaroid instant; it would develop in his head for minutes.

‘You, coon-features,’ Gull said, red in the face and spluttering, ‘clear off out of here and scurry back to your own subcontinent. Take your arranged marriages and spicy foods and cattle diseases with you, and give us back our newsagents, our churches...’

‘What’s all this about crack dealing?’ asked Zafir, interrupting. ‘Dadiji has gone spare. If it’s another scam of Pel’s, I can’t cover for him much bloody longer...’

Neil felt he had taken another blow to the head. He had to prove to his landlord’s son that he was not a Nazi. With righteous coldness, he dropped the copies of
Britannia Rules
on the floor and scraped his shoe on them. Then he held up the poster and, deliberately, ripped it in half.

Gull’s eyes grew, his false teeth gnashed.

‘Traitor to your race,’ he said, cornered. ‘What is this? A trap? I’m not afraid of you, alien. Or you, you white nig-nog. The proud blood of King Arthur and St George flows in these veins. It’s not afraid to be shed in the cause of England.’