The Quorum (16 page)

‘Kill ’em,’ he said, leaving the drinks.

Mickey crouched over the heater and sighed in mock orgasm as warm air billowed out his cloak.

Neil gulped his beer. Smoking gave him a thirst. Also, he wasn’t sure if he could still go through with all this.

‘I thought we agreed this was over,’ Mark said. He’d been quiet.

Last Summer, after the end of college, the Forum had staged
Midsummer Night’s End
on the assumption they would break up. In an
American Graffiti
end-of-an-era spirit, the entire class of ’77 came. Neil was surprised that many girls, and a few blokes, cried as it wound down. A generation, together since eleven (six, for some), split like an iceberg, chunks drifting off to different lives.

‘’Twas too good to give up,’ Michael said.

This post-Christmas bash was on a different scale; just the four of them. There would be music and there would be comedy, but the footsoldiers of earlier years were scattered. Neil understood there was quite a crowd. The deal was the Centre took the bar profits and didn’t charge for the use of the hall, so admission was free. A lot of people Neil hadn’t seen since summer had come. It was too soon for kids not to spend Christmas with their parents. The girls who’d tearfully said goodbye to best friends were together again, probably wondering why they’d cared so much. Since summer, everything had changed.

‘I’ve missed this,’ Michael admitted. He was in full Shakespeare drag, filched from the college drama department. ‘I’ve missed us.’

Neil wasn’t sure. The last three months, his first university term, had rearranged his ideas. One night in the kitchen, he’d tried to explain the Forum to new friends, reading extracts from scripts, increasingly aware how childish they were. Only Leo, a dope-head who missed all his lectures, really laughed. Fran, from Neil’s Introduction to Marx seminar, said entertainment wasn’t enough and waved Brecht at him. He was grateful Rachael knew nothing about this part of his life.

‘Who said zh-you can’t go home again,’ Michael declared.

‘Thomas Wolfe,’ Mark replied, either missing or making a point.

Mickey finished and extinguished the ceremonial joint. Quiet about his experiences up North, he was least enthusiastic, at first, about the comeback. At some point since September, he’d gained a scar on his chin. He was always the one who most easily got out of control. After
Midsummer Night’s End,
he cornered Keith Lanier, who made a point of crashing every gig in town without paying, and pinned him to the floor with a stool, gobbing mightily on his face. ‘I thought we’d never see him again,’ he explained, ‘so I reckoned, it was my last chance to do over the cunt.’

Twelfth Night ’78
was all down to Michael. In November, without telling the others, he’d made arrangements with the hippies who ran the Rat Centre. At the start of the vac, he presented them with a
fait accompli.
In three weeks, with the usual day off for Christmas, the Forum would throw together a show. He already had some material written; they’d rely on improvisation and music to get through gaps.

Considering the alternative was coming to terms with Bishop Berkeley, the reunion made sense. Also, he guessed it was important to Michael. Staying in the Backwater hadn’t been a good move; he felt he’d lagged behind. Cambridge acceptance or not, he made constant waspish remarks about ‘clever students’. He was supposed still to be going out with Penny, but after a few weekends hitching across country to be together they’d provisionally broken up. He was sure she was seeing someone at the Poly.

Michael said he’d written 1000 opening sentences, 100 opening paragraphs and three and a half opening chapters. And binned them all. His planned novel,
Julie Bee
, was an expansion of a
Midsummer Night’s End
sketch about punk rockers forced to form a government. Mark said
Julie Bee
was handicapped because no one in Backwater really knew anything (the local idea of a punk band was a Dr Feelgood rip-off). Michael, with a travel agent for a father and an assured Oxbridge place, was hardly best positioned to understand inner-city proletarian nihilism.

‘Afterwards,’ Michael said, ‘I’ve got the keys to Gramma’s house in Achelzoy. We can have the party there.’

Achelzoy was about nine miles out of town, a former island perched on its own hill in the flat expanse of Sedgmoor. After-production parties there were a tradition, since the Forum’s revues always coincided with periods Michael’s grandparents were away on holiday, innocently leaving it to him to feed their cats.

‘I don’t know,’ Neil said. ‘It’s snowing steadily.’

‘Great, we’ll be cut off and get cabin fever and eat each other.’

‘I said I’d go for a drink with Pippa and the parents,’ Mark said.

‘You can do that any time, Marko. This is a Forum party. Attendance is mandatory.’

Mark shrugged.

Desmond returned. ‘It’s ten minutes past supposed start-time,’ he said. ‘The crowds are restless.’

They all looked at each other.

‘Let’s rock and roll,’ Michael said.

D
erek Leech International squatted in London Docklands, a wedge of dark. The black glass pyramid was often described as a newly landed spaceship; at once, spearhead of an invasion and monument to the defeat of Earth.

In courtier’s velvet, Mark strode past ranks of flash cars to the doors. His cardkey parted glass slabs. A liveried guard passed a detector over his doublet and hose. He was ruled admissible, even allowed to keep the sword that came with the costume.

A mannequin with a carved smile checked his invitation against her clipboard. He remembered her from a ballet
Dorian Gray
: she was the portrait, repulsive while her twin remained lithe and perfect, or maybe she’d danced Dorian, and another functionary, greeting at another entrance, had been the picture.

From the atrium, he walked into the ballroom. The building’s hollow core was a new gothic silo. Impossible to heat, it was as cold as the wastes outside. Mark was sure he felt a rain-fleck on his numb cheek. Guests in Elizabethan court dress clustered in pools of spotlight. They turned to note his presence then resumed hushed talk, frosted breath clouding. Leech provided the costumes himself, ensuring a consistent look. He was a host who hired a production designer before a caterer.

On a granite dais, a period troupe played ‘When That I Was And a Little Tiny Boy’. A performance artist in whiteface stood on a separate plinth, skewered by crossed light beams, repeating the first sentence of
Twelfth Night
in unpunctuated monotone.

‘...appetite may sicken and so die if music be the food of love play on give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die if music be the food of love play on give me excess of it that...’

‘He can do it for hours,’ breathed an admirer. ‘Hours and hours.’

Mark had a rush of guilt: two years ago,
The Shape
had run a feature on the monotonist. When the time came, that should be worth ten minutes in the Devil’s barbecue pit.

‘...give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken...’

Twelfth Night was also Epiphany, he remembered. But Leech’s revel reminded him more of the Masque of the Red Death.

A dignified nude, blue but for a circle in the small of her back, approached with a salver of black and white
hors d’oevres.
The blue lady was a former
Comet
Knock-Out of the Year: a layer of dye prevented her gooseflesh wobbling, lending a peculiarly clothed aspect. He took a roll of black substance that looked like a dolly mixture but tasted of seafood.

‘Ho, varlet,’ he was hailed.

Michael was red-cheeked, playing it up as Sir Toby, with Ginny Moon as his short-tempered Maria. She must be piqued not to be Viola.

‘Shouldn’t zhou be Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek?’

‘I’m a one-scene wonder,’ Mark admitted. ‘Gentleman, attending on the Duke.’

‘Love the danglies,’ Ginny said. ‘Are they real?’

Mark’s padded jacket was hung with teardrop pearls.

‘The way to tell real from false is to roll them between zhour teeth,’ Michael told his wife. ‘Zhou can spot glass eyes that way as well.’

‘Sounds fun,’ she said. ‘Perhaps Mark would be available later for a consumer test.’

She prodded Mark’s breast with a sharp forefinger and tickled a pearl as if it were a nipple.

‘Lady, you are the cruel’st she alive,’ he quoted.

‘We did
Twelfth Night
for “O” level,’ Michael explained. ‘We did Shakespeare in the Zhouth Theatre, then put on our own version.’

‘You
were
Sir Toby,’ Mark remembered.

‘And zhou were Malvolio.’

‘God, yes. Mickey was Sir Andrew, doing Kenneth Williams.’

They both laughed.

‘We were terrible.’

‘You still are,’ Ginny commented.

‘Too zhoung for “O” levels,’ Michael whispered in exaggerated aside, ‘has a GCSE or two, but scant real qualifications.’

Before being cast in Victorian-Edwardian dramas of repressed women, sumptuous costumes and pretty manners, Ginny had been with the RSC. Her Shrew was well spoken of. Now, she was doing a Jackie Collins mini-series, playing an English bitch who loses her lover to Stefanie Powers.

A shape shambled from the darkness, bells tinkling.

‘Here comes the fool, i’faith,’ Mark quoted.

‘How now, my hearts?’ Mickey replied, on cue. ‘Did you never see the picture of we three?’

He was in a jester’s particolour, waving a pig’s bladder on a stick. Braids escaped from his three-belled cowl.

‘You can’t have been Sir Andrew
and
the clown,’ Mark said aloud.

‘Neil played Feste,’ Michael said.

‘Neil?’ Ginny asked.

‘No one,’ they all said at once.

‘If Neil were here,
he’d
be Malvolio,’ Michael said. ‘Crossgartered and stitched up.’

It was as if ice-water were dashed in Mark’s eyes. Michael was drunk, he knew at once. When drunk, Michael always flirted with the possibility of revelation. He believed most in the Deal and was most its prisoner.

‘Such a cruel comedy,
Twelfth Night,’
Michael continued. ‘Worthless, rich people torture a middlerank loser.’

Mark and Mickey looked coldly at Michael. Ginny, though involved, was an outsider. It wouldn’t do to talk about the Deal, even obscurely, with her. She had the glazed look outsiders always got when the Quorum ganged up. They shared much that was trivial to the rest of the world.

‘Take comfort milady,’ Mickey said to Ginny. ‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.’

‘I marvel zhour ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal,’ Michael struck back, changing instantly from lusty Sir Toby to withering Malvolio.

‘I can’t believe you remember all this,’ Ginny wondered. ‘I’ve forgotten my sides from the
Morse
I did last month, let alone Shakespeare from years ago.’

Michael made a groping lunge at Ginny and she screamed; their way of making up. Mark was grateful Pippa was still off with her parents.

‘Isn’t it sweet they still can’t keep their hands off each other?’ Mickey said, head on one side. ‘Fuckin’ cats in heat.’

‘By the way,’ Michael said, pausing in mid-assault. ‘Sally Rhodes?’

Mark nodded assent. Michael knew what he meant.

‘Told zhou so.’

Ginny, momentarily puzzled, was overwhelmed again. Michael grunted like a bear and regurgitated gobbets of Shakespeare.

‘How now, my nettle of India,’ he said, sorting through her skirts.

‘My masters,’ Mickey breathed, ‘are you mad?’

That was a Malvolio line too. Pidgin Shakespeare was catching.

‘Educating us was a very great mistake,’ said Mark in a twentieth-century voice. ‘It has made us unbearable.’

‘Tell me about it, chum,’ Ginny said, wrestling Michael upright.

A fanfare filled the vast space with noise. Everyone looked up to the black canopy. Indoor plants hung from the topmost tiers. Pterodactyls probably nested there. A scenic lift, lit from within, began a slow descent, crawling down the pyramid. The man inside was silhouetted by outward-shining lights. Guests gathered in a semi-circle around the lift-bed; they might indeed be courtiers. A stately and veiled Olivia stood alone.

‘Isn’t that Tamsin?’ Ginny asked.

Michael shushed her; everyone here was Tamsin, or someone else of rank. A junior cabinet minister, a famously carnivorous publisher, a director about to go from
Film on 4
to Hollywood, a scandalous architect, a bestseller-list thriller writer, a reformed rock legend. Even the naked waitresses were stars. Mark tried not to wonder if they all had Deals.

Doors slipped open silently. Derek Leech - Duke Orsino, of course - emerged, posing an instant for flash-photographs, and descended wide steps to be among his people. A thin carpet of phosphorescent mist edged out of the lift and spilled down the stairs, dissipating on engraved tiles.

A woman darted forward to kneel and kiss Leech’s gloved hand, tonguing the ruby of his largest ring. In her forties, she fought the planned obsolescence of the human machine, face pulled back as if by Sellotape under her ears, generous body confined by a doublet that lifted and shaped her memorable torso.

‘Do you know who that is?’ Mark said, nodding. ‘Brie Simon.’

Mickey was amazed. ‘
Devil Daughter of Dracula?
That Brie Simon?’

‘She was the first
Comet
Knock-Out,’ Michael explained to Ginny, who looked disapproving. She’d gone nude in
The Woman Who Did,
but it was necessary to the plot.

‘When I was fourteen, she was the summit of my shagging ambitions,’ Mickey said. ‘I’m at a party with one of my masturbation fantasies.’

Michael gave out a full-throated Sir Toby Belch laugh, which attracted Leech’s attention. He helped Brie up and looked to the Quorum. As one, they automatically gave courtiers’ bows to the Master of the Deal.

‘D’you suppose I should try...’ Mickey thought out loud.

‘Might be like sampling a famous nineteenth-century vintage,’ Michael said. ‘Gone to vinegar.’