The Quorum (10 page)

Tanya had stuck to Neil through three jobs and five addresses. A normal person would have killed her within six months and thrown himself on the jury’s mercy.

‘We’ll need to replace her,’ Mark said. ‘Since she cleared out, Neil has drifted along in a species of complacent misery that could easily congeal into normality. Tanya kept the ground shifting.’

‘Remember how she fucked his van delivery job?’ Mickey grinned. ‘Took a load of photocopier paper and laid it out, sheet by sheet, on a field in Norfolk. Girl was an artist.’

He showed a lighting portrait of Tanya with horns and a tail and a sexy pout. They all laughed. Mickey crumpled the picture and tossed it into the fire, where it flared into ash.

‘All good things end,’ Michael concluded. ‘So much for the Gorse Girl. We’ll zhust have to be inventive again. ’Tis supposed to be our strength.’

* * *

They were all busy, even soon after the holidays. There were always more family and professional commitments, but New Year’s Day had been inviolate for twenty years. As he refilled the
cafetiere
, watched by Michael and Mickey, Mark sensed an image overlaid by snapshots. Different kitchens, different drinks, different clothes, but the same faces. Plus or minus facial hair, baby fat, glasses and zits. They’d been doing this since the first day of 1971.

They returned to the table with coffee the Quorum way: midnight black with a swirl of real cream, no sugar. The review of the report - which convinced Mark, at least, that Sally Rhodes was certainly worth holding over - was complete. Documents were spread out on the table, along with the photographs Ms Rhodes provided.

Catching up was like following an annual soap opera. He felt close, not only to Neil but to the supporting cast. In 1992, after Tanya hit the road, Neil worked off and on in a bookshop in Highgate Village. Mickey had done a signing there for
Choke Hold
; he reported Neil had showed up, sheepish in the presence of his superstar old mate, to work the till and talk over ancient history. The squat Tanya found hadn’t worked out, thanks to last year’s moves. With a reference from the owner of Planet Janet, Neil got into a bedsit near Muswell Hill. He was square with the DSS and his poll-tax fine was nearly paid off.

‘No actual progress,’ Michael concluded, ‘but no disasters either, no backsliding.’

Mark looked at the photos, all taken from a distance, mainly through windows. Neil in Planet Janet, reading a newspaper in the absence of customers. Neil in his dressing-gown in his bedsit, frying eggs. Neil sitting in a pub garden with half of something.

‘He has a life,’ Mickey said. ‘Not much of one, but it’s there. He’s off the sauce, never really got into the dope, a trickle of earnings, a place to kip. That puts him ahead of where he was last year.’

There had been a point, during the Czech beer fiasco, when it seemed likely Neil would be charged with fraud. With Tanya (herself hospitalised several times for depression and addiction) in his life, custodial mental treatment had always been a possibility.

‘I concur,’ Michael said, ‘Our Absent Friend has not, all considered, had a calamitous twelvemonth. So what are we going to do about it?’

I
n dream city, he ran down streets saturated with cold sunlight. Dr Shade’s Shadowshark pursued as smoothly as a fin through water. The Streak pumped pavement so fast he could wait in the future for his quarry to catch up. They were heroes. That excused the beating they’d give him. Behind their masks, they were half-familiar. He couldn’t remember their secret identities. Dr Shade pinned his arms and held him up like a target. At the top of a hill, the Streak posed, hands on spandex hips, laughing from deep in his gut. He extended a fist and, quicker than a thought, was up close. Four knuckles, one enlarged by a lightning-strike motif, loomed. The Streak punched Neil Martin out of sleep.

* * *

He lay under his duvet, head covered, feet frozen. The room would be a meat locker until he could get to the two-bar fire. A hundred miles across ice-threaded carpet.

One side of his head, from chin to eyebrow, pulsed. He still felt the impact. Probing the tender area, he found engorged swelling. Half his face was bruised. The dab of a fingertip was a prod from a hot pin. His teeth were dots of aching shrapnel. One eye was swollen shut, gummed with sleep-grit. He covered his disfigurement with a hand like the Phantom’s mask, an eyehole between fingers.

He wriggled the duvet over numb toes. His face hurt so much, mere cold wouldn’t make a difference. His breath frosted in a funnel above the bed. He hadn’t drawn the curtains; late-afternoon sun leaked through falling as light as snow on the floor.

He’d only been hit twice, three times at most. It’d taken maybe five seconds. How could boxers stand that kind of punishment for minutes at a time? The pain didn’t go away. It wrapped his head like a balaclava. Along with the serious agony in his face, he had the usual knife-thrust of Jack in the back of his skull.

Happy New Year. He hoped the offering would be sufficient to ward off the Norwegian Neil Cullers.

He shut the eye he’d been able to open and thought it away, erasing his memory. Arranging himself in his single bed like a corpse in a coffin, arms crossed on his chest, he used his patented time-travel method.

In the dark of his mind, he pictured the room around him, cataloguing furniture, the placing of bed in relation to door and windows, dingy, ribbed cream wallpaper sink unit next to the two-burner cooker, electricity meter by the fire, five Christmas cards on the mantelpiece.

Then he rearranged the components. Centring on his head, he morphed the space into the higher-ceilinged but smaller configuration of the room he’d shared with Tanya the Terrible in the squat in Colney Hatch. He lay on a square mattress plumped on the floor; it would have to be folded over if he wanted to get up and open the door. There was a damp patch on the ceiling, spotty mould in one corner.

He retreated further, shuffling through a dozen spaces where he had slept: flats, bedsits, shared houses, friends’ floors, hall of residence (for a term and a half), a tent at a festival.

At the end of his private time-tunnel was his bedroom. In his parents’ old house, the big one they sold when Dad retired from the VAT Office. He wasn’t too lanky to fit under the bedclothes. Pre-duvet sheets and blankets so tightly tucked his feet could never escape.

Models hung, slowly revolving in a solemn dogfight that pit a Sopwith Camel and the Pan-Am shuttle from
2001
against a Messerschmitt and Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang. Too old for the models, he was reluctant to deny, by throwing them out, a geologic age spent with stinky glue. He had Airfix soldiers in shoeboxes under the bed, jumbled in time paradox regiments of Afrika Korps, 18th Hussars, 7th Cavalry and Roman Legionaries. Their massed last stand would be on Michael’s parents’ barbecue area, napalmed with lighter-fluid. Forgotten heroes of outgrown battles deliquescing in a sea of blistering plastic.

Paperbacks were shelved in alphabetical order in a cabinet, mixing sci-fi he read on his own with books he had for English lessons:
At the Mountains of Madness
and
To Kill a Mockingbird, Conan the Usurper
and
Under the Greenwood Tree. Son of Mad, Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions
and
The Portable Mad
had their own section, stacked horizontally. He kept frustratingly incomplete runs of ZC comics in box-files: imported as ballast, they arrived months or even years out of order and any issue resolving a storyline was guaranteed never to cross the Atlantic.
Zowie,
a black and white digest, carried chopped-up reprints (‘pounds’ and ‘lift’ lettered over ‘dollars’ and ‘elevator’) of the Streak (‘faster than sound, faster than light, faster than time!’) and Lance Lake, Private Eye (Sir Lancelot reincarnated in Coastal City). He and Mickey Yeo swapped ZCs and shared the revelation that people who wrote and drew comic books had styles as much as book authors or pop groups.

A radiogram as big as a wash-stand stood by the bed; its vast dial promised frequencies for Budapest and Morocco and Hilversum (wherever Hilversum was), but delivered only bursts of static and, zeroed in on the ghosts of the Home Service and the Light Programme, Radio 4 and Radio 1. Only Michael had a TV in his room; the old black and white set, since his parents were the first to switch to colour. He relayed details of programmes on too late for Neil:
Monty Python’s Flying Circus,
which Michael could recite word for word as if he were a living book from
Fahrenheit 451,
and
Casanova,
which had tits in every episode. Jon Pertwee was
Dr Who,
Gerry Anderson had forsaken puppets for
UFO
and Mickey wore shirts like Peter Wyngarde’s in
Jason King.
Neil and Michael had a theory that the TV weirdness they liked started with the Bear on
The Andy Williams Show,
‘No cookies,’ they chanted, ‘not
now,
not
ever, never!’
Neil’s favourite programmes were
Doomwatch
and
Columbo;
his most hated
The Generation Game
and
On the Buses.

A pinboard was covered by pictures: Brie Simon, pouting voluptuously in
Devil Daughter of Dracula,
shared a pin-up corner with Jane Fonda as
Barbarella,
Madeline Smith, Suzi Quatro and Julie Ege; a map of Middle Earth had the adventurers’ route in Neil’s planned sequel to
Lord of the Rings
marked by a carefully plotted felt-tip line. A gallery of musicians featured David Bowie, Maria Callas, Tamsin, Alice Cooper and Steeleye Span. On a poster, the Streak grinned in a small whirlwind, masked face clear, costume blurred. A magazine cover showed Armstrong on the surface of the moon, Aldrin reflected in his bulbous gold visor. On the back of the door was the poster Mickey designed for the never-finished ‘dramatic extravaganza’ the Quorum tried to write for the last day of Grammar School,
Death to Dr Marling...

If he had that poster today, he could sell it in Planet Janet for a fortune.

For a moment, it was before him. An alternate universe in which he finished
The Revenge of Sauron,
the Quorum did not break up, University worked out. In this real world, Neil Martin was rich and famous and married to a fluffy woman who looked like a young Brie Simon. White planes of sunlight sprinkled the beautiful blue of his swimming pool as his wife broke the surface. Slow droplets fell from her ripe body as she hauled herself out of the water. He sipped a nectar cocktail and felt warmth on his tanned face and chest. Her touch was cool. Strawberry lips fixed to his, warm tongue slipping into his mouth.

His eyes snapped open. A crust broke in his bruise. The rubber band that had connected him to the present snapped back.

A hammer of pain fell on his head.

Universes shifted; Neil was plucked from his poolside palace, whisked across continua to Cranley Gardens, the taste of last night’s sick still in the back of his throat.

He’d lived here for seven months. It was officially a basement flat; the sink and cooker were in an alcove that could marginally be considered a separate room. Seven steps down from the hall with a payphone, a draughty toilet and a bathroom which never had hot water, no matter how long before bathing the heater was turned on. There were three other tenants, one of whom received stolen goods and early morning police visits that, being nearest the front door, it fell on Neil to handle.

The pain grew and he sat in bed, holding his head in his hands. His leg was frozen where he had been injected last night. He had pills somewhere. He held the hurt; it was something he owned outright.

‘Heartache and pain and misery and suffering,’ he hummed, ‘that’s what we got for fun around here...’

Late afternoon on a public holiday. The road outside was silent, an abandoned city. Apart from him, the house might be empty. The room was an Egyptian burial chamber plundered centuries before by tomb-robbers. The mummy of Neel-Mah-Teen was unknown to history, his offering of pain ignored by the Gods.

In underpants and a T-shirt, Neil walked across the carpet, shock-cold waking him, numb leg dragging. He made it to the alcove and the cupboard over the sink. There was a half-bottle of ketchup, a box of elderly tea-bags and a plastic container of wholegrain flour, along with the fifties utensils that came with the room. He found a pack of paracetamol, two still in the plastic-and-foil sheet. He dry-gulped them, experiencing no ad-style instant relief.

The fire had been left on when he collapsed last night (early this morning?) but the meter had run out. He had no fresh change but the coin-box had been broken into and not fixed, so he retrieved his much-used fifty-pence piece and fed it through again. He relished the tingy whirr that came from the fire as the current was restored, promising to settle the debt when Mr Azmi’s son came round to collect. He owed the tin box about five pounds.

The overhead bulb came on too; it must have been burning when he crashed.

Someone had helped him, he remembered. A kindly, exasperated woman. She guided him from the casualty ward and waited outside the house, in the first dingy light of dawn, as he got inside. Solicitous of his well-being, which was unusual. Molly? Sally? Sally. From the party. Olive Oyl. Some girl Dolar knew. Probably another incipient psychopath. Dolar introduced him to Tanya, and at first she’d been solicitous too, especially when he had some money and she hadn’t any. He wondered what Sally would look like with her hair down. She’d had good eyes and a thin, promising mouth.

He thought of venturing out to quest for groceries, then about boiling a saucepan of water for tea. His stomach wasn’t in the mood for food or drink and he doubted he could taste anything anyway. He’d have to clean a cup if he wanted tea and he’d been squeezing weak bubbles out of the washing-up liquid bottle for days.

He could think of no real reason not to go back to bed and sleep out 1993. But, after hovering a moment, he began to get dressed.

‘Never surrender,’ he told himself, unconvinced.