The Quorum (40 page)

He sat in his dressing-gown in his living-room, not sure which of his suits to wear. They all had points worth considering.

* * *

Sally? Why Sally?

It was hard to say. Of all the people he knew, Sally was the only one who seemed outside the Deal.

Seemed.

He was unable to impute base motives to the woman. She alone had the clarity of vision. She had made Mark see his life from the outside, and he was still suffering from the aftershocks.

If she could be persuaded...

If she could forgive him, might he not be redeemed?

He found himself saying her name at odd moments, like an invocation, like a prayer.

Sally, Sally, Sally.

Je vous salue, Sally...

She was out there somewhere, judging him. He had to plead his case with her. He had to give her an explanation.

* * *

The office hadn’t tried to get in touch, so
The Shape
must be getting by without him. He should have let Laura-Leigh run the magazine months ago. He would have called, but he didn’t think he was in any condition to have anything to contribute. Besides, Laura-Leigh had (deliberately?) let him rot in jail. There might have been an editorial coup.

Should he have the main light on or off? It was dim in the room but not too dark to see. The central heating had failed, or been turned off and neglected. He was used to cold. It was his constant companion. He considered he deserved it.

A thin blank spine stood out on his bookshelves. Its whiteness - a negative gleam that would delight Melville - attracted his eye from across the room and he got up, tripping on the edge of a coffee-table, to examine the artefact. He hauled the volume free and discovered a white-covered book of empty pages. Scrawled in fading ink across a bare first page was a personal dedication from Mickey.

‘This word “damnation” terrifies not him...’

He sorted through his CD racks and found, still in its cellophane, a Mothers of Pain LP Mickey had performed on. The
City Hammer
soundtrack album. Mark had never played it. After several scrabbling attempts to slit the shrinkwrap with a blunt thumbnail, he stripped the outer layer and shoved the disc into the player.

It was horrible, of course. He didn’t know the first track -‘And the Horse You Rode In On’ - well enough to be precise, but something was missing. For a start, it was an instrumental and he was sure it had been recorded as a song. Mickey’s droning death-head lyrics should have resounded. No matter how he played with the balance of the speakers, the sound was lopsided. The guitars kept fading, making room for keyboards that were no longer in the mix.

He couldn’t find Mickey’s name on the cover. A credits block for the film described it as ‘Written and Directed by Allan Keyes’. There was a photograph of the band dressed as postholocaust warriors, grouped around an empty space where no one stood. The final track - ‘Look Upon My Works, Ye Wankheads, And Despair’ - was entirely blank.

Mark could imagine Mickey’s situation. His own predicament was more subtly terrible. It was hard to articulate just what was wrong, even to himself. But things had changed forever.

* * *

He telephoned Sally again. This time, she answered. He found he had nothing to say.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘hello...’

He held the receiver close, imagining her at the other end, face puzzled. His voice wouldn’t work. Nothing physically wrong with him beyond fatigue and a lack of appetite, but he was unable to speak.

‘Is this Mark Amphlett?’ she asked, disapproving.

He made a noise between a croak and a hiccough.

‘Mark?’

What inflexion did her voice have? Contempt? Pity?

‘Help me,’ he said, simply.

‘No.’

The connection was cut.

* * *

It could have been a fault on the line. She might not have hung up. With the buzzing phone in one hand, she would be paging through an address book. Maybe she’d memorised his number - something a detective should be good at - and didn’t need to look it up.

He recited his own number in his mind, imagining Sally pushing buttons on her phone. He calculated the time it should take for the connection to be made and put out his hand to answer.

His telephone didn’t ring.

Perhaps his number was written on a scrap of paper not easy to find on her untidy desk. He thought again of his number slowly this time. She could be finding the paper and making the return call. The phone should start ringing... now.

She did not call. She was not calling. She would not call.

He waited minutes, then snatched the phone and pressed the redial button. Sally’s number was connected. Her phone rang once and a machine cut in.

‘Sally,’ he said, interrupting her polite, cheerful message. Alarmed by the feeble sound of his own voice, he cleared his throat and waited. At the beep, he began again, ‘Sally, it’s Mark...’

She would pick up when she heard it was him. There must be things she wanted to talk about. Even if she could never forgive him, there were aspects of the Deal she must ache to understand. He knew her well enough to appreciate her need to know. She said that was why she was a detective.

‘Sally, please pick up...’

She could have left the house. She could have been on her way out when he called the first time. She could...

There was a jiggle and the connection was cut. The dial tone sounded. It could be a fault. Another fault. More likely, the same fault. A faulty connection, always cutting off after a half-minute. Sally had not necessarily cut him off.

He pressed redial again. An engaged tone. She was calling him back. He hung up and waited for the phone to ring.

* * *

After half an hour he called the operator and reported a fault on Sally’s line. He was informed that it was at her end. The party must have left the phone off the hook. He was thanked for his concern. Implicitly, he was called an interfering loon and told to fuck off.

Uncaring, he dressed. If his clothes matched, he didn’t notice. Even a newly cleaned and pressed suit felt as if it had been worn for days and slept in.

He couldn’t remember sleep.

He called Pippa in Edinburgh. Now it didn’t matter, he had the number easily to hand. Her mother answered, surprised to hear from him, and asked how he had been. He hung up.

Where
was
Pippa?

He called Mickey’s New York hotel and was told there was no Mr Yeo registered. He had to spell out the name.

He called Derek Leech’s emergency number. A private line only a handful of intimates were granted access to, a portable phone always by Leech’s hand. A recorded message told him the number was discontinued.

He called Sally again. Still engaged.

Engaged.

It occurred to him he knew little about Sally. She might be married with kids. She was in her mid-thirties, he judged. If anything, a little older than him. It was impossible to get that far in life without forming attachments. The first time she talked with him on the phone, there’d been a child. A baby.

No, in her line of work, she was on her own. Divorced, maybe. She had agreed she was like a child minder. The baby might not be her own.

Could she be gay? No.

He called again. Still engaged.

Should he go around and see her? He didn’t want another scene. Maybe he should leave her alone for a few days.

He had to explain himself to her. If she could forgive him, he might have a chance.

A chance for what?

* * *

Pain cut through his open-eyed doze. Either his knuckle had expanded or the ring of office had shrunk. A cheesewire noose of hot agony constricted around his finger, needles transfixing the bone, tiny explosions rupturing the joint.

He slipped the ring off easily. The pain stayed in his finger. There was no apparent swelling or abrasion. The hurt was inside, nestled and entrenched.

He put the ring in a drawer.

* * *

Over and over, he reread Faustus’s final soliloquy, like a contract lawyer looking for a loophole. But... ‘the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. The Devil will come and Faustus
must be damned’.

At the very end, Faustus tries to go back on the Deal. ‘Ugly hell, gape out! Come not, Lucifer; I’ll burn my books...’

The gentle Goethe gets Faust out of the Deal - ‘if a man makes continuous efforts, we can save him’ - but the merciless Marlowe goes through with the bloody business of perdition.

‘O, help us, heaven! See, here are Faustus’s limbs, all torn asunder by the hand of death. The devils have torn him thus.’

‘Ugly Hell’ claims the scholar and ‘cut is the branch that might have grown full straight... Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall, whose fiendish fortune may exhort the wise only to wonder at unlawful things whose deepness doth entice such forward wits to practice more than heavenly power permits.’

It was necessary, Mark now believed, to come to terms with the concept of Damnation.

* * *

‘I’d like to talk with a priest,’ he said.

The kid slipped off his earphones - Tamsin tinnily sang ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ - and said, ‘I’m a priest.’

The kid - well, he was younger than Mark, late twenties, maybe thirty, but in shape, face unlined - wore jeans, a rollneck jumper and a windbreaker. He’d been doing a subconscious shimmy as he raked twigs and crisp packets from a patch of grass.

‘I’m Father Menzies,’ the kid said. ‘Will I do, or would you like someone older?’

He couldn’t let Menzies think he was prejudiced. Enough older people took Mark seriously when he was in his twenties. Why shouldn’t he be as open-minded? But he was so far from the church his only experience was with Bing Crosby or Max Von Sydow. If he was taking this seriously, he wanted the collar and the black suit.

‘You’ll do.’

‘Beezer,’ Menzies said. ‘Let’s get inside, where it’s warmer.’

The church was modern, a local government office with stained-glass windows. It was in a quiet residential patch where Sunday seemed to last through the week.

Menzies took Mark into a cluttered office. A framed poster for
Saturday Night Fever
hung behind his desk.

‘That changed my life,’ Menzies said.

‘You wanted to be a disco dancer?’

‘No, a priest. Travolta’s brother is a priest in the picture. He lapses...’

Now he was here, Mark was embarrassed. He hoped nobody he knew would find out. He’d picked a church out of the Thomson Local Directory. He hadn’t telephoned ahead. He wasn’t having good fortune with phones.

‘Sit down,’ Menzies said, shifting box files off a wonky chair. ‘Coffee?’

‘Thank you. Black with a swirl of cream.’

‘Top of the milk?’

‘That’s fine.’

Menzies busied himself with a kettle.

‘Father...?’

‘Call me Kevin. And you’re...?’

‘Mark,’ he admitted. ‘Amphlett.’

The worst that could have happened did. Menzies turned and looked at him again, eyes penetrating.

‘The Shape of the Now?
That Mark Amphlett?’

Mark nodded, ashamed.

‘I read that when I was in the seminary. We had some great arguments about it. I wasn’t always on your side. Brilliant stuff, though.’

Menzies handed over a cup of instant with blobs of congealed milk floating in it.

‘Sorry about the vile brew. I wish Sister Chantal were here. She’s a fan of yours.’

This wasn’t going to work. Perhaps he should ask for the sacrament of confession and give Father Menzies the whole Deal. No, that would take hours. And the shame might be too much. He remembered Sally’s eyes. One glance like that was enough for one life.

‘Are you writing another book?’

Mark saw a way. ‘Yes. That’s why I’m here.’

‘You rather played down religion in
The Shape of the Now,’
Menzies said, not meaning a reproach. ‘Though the chapter about style spirituality is dead-on. Some of the kids who come through here, with three-month crazes for saintliness, should be forced to memorise it like a catechism.’

It was just his luck to get a chatty priest.

‘There are some concepts I’d like the Catholic viewpoint on, and I was wondering if you’d mind if I asked you some questions...’

Menzies grinned. ‘It’d be an honour. I’m not exactly the Pope, though. I can’t speak for all of us.’

‘You’d get an acknowledgement.’

‘No need,’ he said, shrugging skyward. ‘By the way, were you born in the church?’

‘I didn’t realise it was obvious.’

Menzies smiled, congratulating himself. ‘I can spot one from one hundred paces. Some people are the same about gays. Me, I used to think Liberace was just a bit overfond of his mother. But a Roman Candle, that’s unmistakable.’

‘I haven’t heard that since school.’

‘What, about Liberace being gay?’

‘No, Roman Candle. They used to call us that.’

‘It’s harmless. I did a sermon on it once. I like the implication. You know, a bright, burning, wonderful light.’

‘I’m interested in Salvation.’

Menzies chuckled. ‘That’s what they all say.’

‘No, not like that...’

‘I’m sorry. Just my feeble wit. I use humour as a protective mechanism. Chan never lets me get away with it. She’s a real nun.’

‘The concept of Salvation. What does it mean? Today, what’s the church’s teaching?’

‘Salvation? Our reward in Heaven. A spiritual state. Not something you win - don’t trust people who shout “I am saved and you’re not” - but something you have to accept.’

Mark thought Max Von Sydow would tear this kid apart. But he pressed on.

‘And Damnation?’

Menzies wrestled with the idea, tried his best to be serious. He wasn’t comfortable. He probably didn’t know many good Damnation jokes.

Mark persisted. ‘What do you think of Damnation in the nineties?’

‘We’re past the lake of burning fire and toasting forks and eternal agony, I hope. Now, we’re talking about Perdition, the state of being lost. When we say we’re lost, it’s literal. We’ve strayed beyond the Love of God. It’s not His fault. It’s ours.’