The Quorum (25 page)

‘That’s an odd way of putting it.’

‘No, really. People I know have a habit of cracking up. They discover fiendish malevolence inside them. They become Norwegian Neil Cullers. No matter how big and wet my pleading eyes are, they like nothing better than applying that big old club to the back of my head and seeing what colour my brains are as they squirt out of my nostrils. I don’t mean you, of course. Honestly. But it’s best to stay safe.’

He looked around the pub. There were a few other late lunch drinkers.

‘No one looks an obvious Fascist,’ she said.

‘Undercover Nazi Zombies. They’re the worst kind.’

She looked at her watch. Sonja was supposed to go off duty at two.

‘Curses,’ she said, gathering her bags and scarf. ‘My child minder will kill me.’

He looked at her again, or perhaps for the first time. ‘You need a child minder?’

‘For a child, funnily enough.’

‘You have a child?’

‘Obviously. Eighteen monthish. Unplanned. Terribly sweet. Half an orphan.
Don’t
ask about the father.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ he said, worried.

‘I bombed a building for him,’ she said, knowing he wouldn’t take her seriously.

His eyes became guarded, as if she were turning into a Norwegian Neil Culler.

‘Don’t worry. My arson days are over.’

‘I’m relieved to hear it.’

Good. That was the sticky part of any relationship over. Explaining about the Invader had become a chore. She understood Neil’s half-ashamed, eager-tentative recital of his lifelong losing streak. After you piled the fifth tragedy onto the others, everything started to come out farce.

‘Anyway, must dash,’ she said. ‘See you around, Neil.’

Dazed, he replied ‘See you’.

She left him with his empty glass and, unaccountably excited to have got so much out of the way, hurried off up Muswell Hill Road. It was strange to pass in mundane daylight the spot where the louts beat Neil up. As she passed the last 100 yards to the flat and Sonja and the Invader, she felt a slight stitch. Without really knowing anything new, she felt she had a mental grip on the commission.

M
ark had skipped the Meet as an experiment. It was their last and only act of rebellion. Despite everything, he was proud he’d been the one to test the Deal, the control subject who exposed himself to the plague
without
taking a miracle cure, proving the drug worked by his horrible death.

In 1983, late on the evening of February the 15 th, Mark and Pippa were involved in a road accident on Oxford Street. The incident was entirely the fault of a swerving taxi, but Mark was breathalysed and found to be over the blood-alcohol limit. The taxi driver was beyond reach with brain damage and his insurance company refused to compensate Mark because of the drunk-driving conviction. Pippa’s neck was scarred and she had seven operations, which left a quarter of her face nerveless. Mark slipped an intravertebral disc and spent months in and out of hospital. Each time the problem seemed to clear up, further complications were discovered. Impatient with the National Health, both opted for private medical care, which left them teetering near bankruptcy. Pippa lost her job and Mark was unable to fulfil a commitment to a series of TV lectures based on
The Shape of the Now.
Sometimes Mark would visit the institutionalised taxi driver and look into his empty eyes, wondering...

In 1983, Michael finally cleared his decks of chat shows and personal appearances and took four months off, turning down all TV offers to write his long-delayed first novel, a comic nightmare of the near future entitled A
to
Z. After a month of planning and researching, he began writing on February the 1st. He turned out precisely ten pages of prose a day. It was the easiest task hed ever set himself, like copying something already finished and perfect. On page 151, the book stopped coming. Months passed in a blur; he began every morning by typing ‘Chapter 16’ and ‘page 151’ on a fresh sheet of paper and sat for up to seven hours, mentally paralysed, straining for the lost flow. Just as he thought he saw the glimmer of a way past page 151, he was struck with severe piles, a condition far more painful and entirely less hilarious than hed always imagined. By the time the golfballs of agony ringing his rectum subsided, A
to Z
seemed the work of a stranger. He filed the manuscript in a fire and called his agent so many times the poor woman started to have her assistant allege she was in a meeting at all hours of the day.

In 1983, Mickey tired of spending a week every year adding up figures scrawled on the backs of old envelopes and hired an accountant. A preliminary audit showed irregularities in his income tax returns over the last four years and the government dunned him. An investigation left him liable for tax on monies never received from the merchandising of Krazy Glue, his character. Hunt Sealey, the alternative publisher who’d brought the strip to wider attention, turned out to have an extremely alternative system of bookkeeping, which involved keeping money warm in his personal account and pleading poverty whenever anyone asked him about it. Exorbitant lawyers embroiled Sealey and Mickey in a tangled suit over the question of who precisely owned which rights. The legal wars sapped Mickey’s energies and prevented him from meeting a deadline on what would have been a groundbreaking series for ZC, plunging him into career limbo just as Alan Moore and Frank Miller Jr were getting widespread media recognition and everyone started to take comics as seriously as Mickey always said they should. Missing out the kudos that should have been his, he watched others take his ideas and make industries of them. Krazy had a major resurgence when Sealey had other people write and draw the strip. He flooded the market and slapped an injunction on Mickey that he desist from further exploiting his own creation.

It was a cold, unreal year. The Derek Leech International building opened in September. Fleet Street, Wardour Street and Bloomsbury offices closed and companies were removed to a wasteland beyond the river. Late in autumn, after coming out of hospital for the fourth time, Mark ran into Mickey at a book launch. Mickey punched him in the face but was dissuaded from further battering his friend when Mark reminded him, ‘You need me next year.’
Private Eye
ran a humorous item about the altercation. Delirious from anal pain and shifting constantly in his seat, Michael spent a weekend motoring around Somerset in search of Sutton Mallet, finding a few signposts but no trace of the village. Several times, he thought himself on the right road only to be disappointed as he drove into Shepton Mallet. Throughout, the Quorum tried to arrange appointments with their sponsor but were unable to penetrate the barrier of personal assistants and vice-presidents surrounding Derek Leech.

* * *

By the end of 1983, Neil was more settled than he’d been since school. Moving to London, he’d fallen in with a crowd who were putting out
The Scam
, a fortnightly alternative listings magazine. First, he hung around hellish offices in Holborn doing odd jobs, making bad coffee, running messages, writing picture captions. After proving himself willing by reviewing films and records nobody else wanted to (he became the only person he knew who had seen the sequels to
Porky’s
and
Friday the 13th
but not the originals), he began to get journalistic assignments, interviewing Hackney councillors, following up police cases, profiling indie bands. He also started seeing Anne Nielson, the spiky American news editor of
The Scam.
She was, he realised, the first woman he’d slept with more than five times. Anne had her own problems - an incomprehensible transatlantic family history that matched his catalogue of fluke horrors - but she was funny, tough and surprising. She taught him a bit about writing, patiently going through his copy with a vicious pencil, showing him which priceless words he could do without. They talked about moving in together in the new year but as it was they lived more in the office than in their flats.

It was as if his Wilderness Period was over. For the first time since the Forum broke up, Neil actually enjoyed Christmas. 1984, that science fiction year, arrived.

I
n the first years of
The Shape,
no one left before eight o’clock. When money was tight, everyone pitched in and worked through amphetamine nights. Now, at six on Friday, he was alone in his Inner Sanctum. The outer offices held untenanted quiet. Having Macbethed his way to a swivel-throne, his reward was not guilty madness but a featureless plateau of achievement. Once the moves were out of the way, he’d headhunt a managing editor for the magazine and move on to other projects. Cloud 9 wanted him to produce a documentary about electronic art and he was increasingly taken with the possibilities of INT. He should write another book; a follow-up to
The Shape of the Now
for the Millennium,
The Strength of the Soon.

Just after six, as she’d done every night since their meeting, Sally Rhodes telephoned to give a preliminary report of her day’s work. He put her on the speaker.

‘Sally, good evening.’

‘Mark, hi. Nothing much new today. I had a drink with Neil at lunchtime.’

He thought about that.

‘Good. Excellent initiative.’ He leaned back in his chair, imagining Sally in the dark beyond his desklamp’s circle of light.

‘A name came up. A neo-Nazi group, the ELF. I’ve hit the press cuttings on them. English Liberation Front. The usual disappointed imperialists and racist skins. They have it in for Neil.’

‘Oh?’

‘A petty
führer
doorstepped him and was rubbed the wrong way. They’ve got intelligence on him. They phoned a threat to the pub. It might be serious.’

Michael was stirring that particular pot. Mark assumed any information on Neil funnelled to the ELF came from him.

‘Do you want me to find out more? I can call in police favours. They’ll have criminal records.’

He hoped Michael was nippy enough to keep out of her way. She could be paid for but not bought. If she went native, she could be a mighty inconvenience.

‘Hang fire on that for the moment. If the ELF do anything active, we’ll reconsider. In the meantime, concentrate on Neil.’

‘Okay.’

Where was she? In a call-box or her flat? He couldn’t hear any background noise.

‘The other thing is I keep running into Dr Shade.’

‘The cartoon character?’

‘Yes. Him, or someone who has his car. A Rolls-Royce Shadowshark. Very nifty.’

‘Weird,’ he commented, suppressing an unbidden shiver.

‘Registration SHADE 001. I’m not sure if it’s dogging Neil, following me or just cruising Muswell Hill and Highgate. There was a guy in the pub dressed all in black, with a Dr Shade hat. And a couple of Dr Shades at that New Year’s party.’

He thought about Dr Shade. A comics connection sounded like Mickey.

‘How is Neil bearing up, by the way?’ he asked.

‘Bearing up?’

‘His general attitude? What is it?’

‘Hard to say. He describes himself as “numb”. I think he enjoys being gloomy. Like Eeyore.’

‘Eeyore?’

‘From
Winnie the Pooh.’

‘Of course. The donkey.’

He imagined her holding her breath before slipping in the question bothering her.

‘Is there anything I should know?’ she asked. ‘About Neil?’

‘He’s not dangerous.’

‘No, it’s not that. If there’s danger, I think Neil is in it.’

She was a conscientious footsoldier, which might be a problem. The more she applied herself, the more likely she was to question. Michael and Mickey preferred stupider tools, but he thought the challenge was precisely to use intelligent people. It was a question of balancing risk and reward.

‘Mark, what am I? A spy or a bodyguard?’

He was careful. ‘I have no personal feelings against Neil. He is important to me. He wouldn’t thank me for taking an interest, but I believe his welfare is my responsibility.’

‘Yours.’

‘Mine. Ours. You have a past. Everybody does. You must have unfinished business?’

She didn’t answer that. He remembered her face. He imagined she was more striking now, with slight hollows in her cheeks, than she’d been when younger and plumper.

‘Sally, what do you think of him? Neil?’

A pause. ‘I like him. He’s funny.’

‘Interesting choice of adjective.’

Funny? Michael and Mickey were the funny ones. Mark, as always, was serious.

‘But you like him?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s... ah... he’s a survivor.’

Pippa had said he was funny too, the one time they had met. Twelfth Night, 1978. With a cold chill, Mark remembered Sutton Mallet.

‘Do you think... um... women would find him attractive?’

‘I’m a woman.’

‘Yes.’

She spoke rapidly. ‘It would depend. That’s not something I can really report on. I, ah, well... I don’t have much judgement with men.’

‘Sally, do you like
me
?’

A pause. A long pause. ‘Mark, you’re a client.’

‘Of course. I understand. I’m sorry. Scrub that.’

‘Is there anything else?’

He tapped his teeth with his thumbnail.

‘No,’ he said, at last. ‘Just keep up the good work. In case I haven’t told you recently, we’re pleased with you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll talk with you tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow is Saturday.’

‘You can reach me at my home number. Town, not country.’

‘Fine.’

He cut her off before she could hang up. It was dark in the Inner Sanctum. He only had his desklight on. Through the window, he saw Soho people thronging to short-lived bistros, gaggling outside the jeweller’s shops, shivering in fashionably unsuitable clothes.

Funny? Neil, funny?

He called home and got the machine. Pippa wasn’t back from Scotland yet. He thought a moment, then didn’t leave a message. He fiddled with his ring of office. Since he had been wearing it, his knuckle ached slightly. He hoped it wasn’t the beginnings of arthritis or RSI. Pippa would be on a train, reading a manuscript. Sally would be fussing over her baby. Neil would be in his basement, alone.