The Quorum (17 page)

‘Don’t be sexist,’ Ginny criticised, ‘or I’ll hack off your bollocks and stuff them up your nostrils.’

Mark was struck again by how unchanging, how ordinary, Leech was. Everyone else was obviously important, famous, vital. Without his costume, he’d look like a bank manager on a Monsters of Rock stage. Yet...

‘Remember when the allosaurus chewed off Brie Simon’s bikini top in
Prehistoric Valley?’
said Mickey. ‘Hot fuck, I have to be on a New York flight at three, or I might have fulfilled another teenage dream. Since I killed Amazon Twazzock, there aren’t many left.’

Brie Simon put an arm around Leech and leaned forward, allowing a look into her cold deep cleavage.

‘If I nail Brie Simon,’ Mickey told Ginny, ‘there’s only your mother left and my life is complete.’

‘You can have my mother.’

Michael chuckled at Mickey’s tongue-dangling.

‘Guess who’s thinking of working for me in publicity on the INT front,’ Mark said, maliciously. ‘Penny Gaye.’

Michael gulped, remembering. Ginny looked perplexed again.

Mark slid off in search of drink. He watched Mickey and Michael pay homage to Leech, chatting and nodding, smiling and pretending.

‘Pensive?’ a woman asked.

It was Tamsin, oddly unaccompanied. The singer had been married to Leech. She lifted her veil. She had lines but was lovely.

‘Have you just seen the bars?’

‘The bar’s over there,’ he said, indicating a low table where body-painted Knock-outs dispensed sparkling, insubstantial wines.

‘No, the bars,’ she explained, gripping an imaginary cage.

He sipped fizz from a delicate glass flute.

‘I used to think it was a menagerie,’ she said, taking such elaborate care to pronounce every word that he knew she was drunk. ‘Then it was a prison. Now it’s a circle of hell.’

‘You’ve had too much,’ he was compelled to say.

‘The scary thing is he never lied. We knew what we were getting.’

For Christmas, Mark had given Pippa
I Know Where I’m Going,
Tamsin’s latest album on CD. It was her best, most mature work. If Billie Holliday had been born white in Egham in 1949, she’d have grown up to be Tamsin.

The legend gargled and tossed her flute into the air. It shattered quietly.

‘I
know where I’m going,
she sang, her voice a claw in the heart, ‘
and I know who goes with me, I know whom I love, but the De’il knows who I’ll marry...’

Unsure on her feet, she was incapable of less than perfection.

‘The De’il knows who I’ll marry,’ she sighed. ‘The De’il.’

‘Darling,’ interrupted Derek Leech, one word a hand of ice, ‘you’ve met Mark Amphlett.’

‘Mark,’ she said, eyebrow arched, arm out. Her immense hem gathered and fastened to her wrist, a billow of pale blue falling to the floor. He took her frozen hand and squeezed, unsure if he should kiss her knuckles.

‘Mark is a cutting-edge young man. He has seen the future and is making a place for us in it.’

‘That’s the deal,’ Mark admitted.

Gently, without seeming to, Leech held Tamsin up. He chewed, neck muscles undulating his ruff. With serpent elegance, the multimedia magnate steered his ex-wife back to the light.

Mark’s lungs hurt. Since Leech spoke he had not exhaled. Choking, he let out breath.

‘Too much
vino?’
Mickey asked, belabouring him with his pig’s bladder. He held a small scroll of paper. ‘Brie Simon’s phone number. I’ll be back from the Big Apple by the next week. Then... va-va-voommm! As the Bard said, “He that is well-hung in this world need fear no colours.”’

‘“Hanged”, Shakespeare wrote.’

Mickey’s pelvic thrust set his bells a-jingling.

‘Mickey, you’re a clown.’

Mickey did a Jolson kneel, hands outstretched. A grin opened in his face, stretching like a slit throat from ear to ear.

‘He’s not a clown,’ Michael said, having ditched Ginny and slipped away, ‘he’s positively an Eozoon, simplest lifeform on Earth.’

Mickey laughed and sloshed Michael with his bladder, which prompted Michael to go for his sword.

Mark fingered one of the pearls on his doublet. As far as he could tell, it was real.

‘How did we get here from there?’ he asked. His friends didn’t hear the question. ‘We used to hate people like us.’

Michael stood straight to recite. Mickey went for a low hold.

‘If these shadows have offended,’ Michael yelped, ‘fuck off.’

C
oncentrating on the ground, he sat on the steps of the Rat Centre and hugged his knees. His brain sloshed in its skull-tank of cerebral fluid. Snow fell on his head and hands, tiny lashes of ice. He’d been sick twice and assumed he would be again. Feet passed either side of him and hurried away, leaving slushy tracks on deadly pavement. Snow thickened in the street, as if God wanted to draw a veil over the evening. That’d be quite all right with Michael.

‘Ground Control calling,’ Mickey said, voice distorting. ‘Earth to Planet Dixon.’

‘Houston,’ Michael gulped, ‘we’ve got a problem...’

A burst of gurgling pain knotted his gut. A string of clear beery fluid hung like an icicle from his mouth. ‘Chunderball,’ Neil commented. Neil held the Forum’s vomit record: seven spasms, one binge. In ancient days, it was Michael handing the bucket and towel to his friend.

Mark, the most nearly sober stood nearby, collar turned up, thin girlfriend waiting, desperate to clear off but unable to leave. Michael’s own squeeze might be about somewhere; he thought she’d tootled off with her own crowd.

‘It’s hard to credit,’ he mumbled. ‘She’s so
stupid,
zh’know. She doesn’t understand so much...’

At the safety-pinned height of the biggest cultural revolution since Stravinsky, Alex was into Rod Stewart. Since Christmas, Michael had left six messages with Penny’s parents. Home from Poly, she hadn’t turned up tonight. He began to think they were seriously finished. When they broke up, he filled notebooks with agonised introspection, always assuming it temporary. Something happened to people who went away. To Penny, to Mark, to the others. Something secret and unshared, an initiation. They were off having the verifiable time of their lives.

He was left behind in the Backwater, forgotten and floundering. Things were sick-makingly desperate.

‘This isn’t like us,’ he said.

Neil shrugged. The lights of the Rat Centre went out.

Other Forum shows had been shambolic disasters but exhilaration and defiance carried them off.
Twelfth Night ’78
was the worst flop ever. If it were any more of a dog, it would require a licence. Nothing had really gone wrong, Neil hadn’t fallen over, Mickey hadn’t savaged the piano with an axe. That might have added spontaneity to the mausoleum on stage. Mark, standing apart from the others, went through it without giving anything of himself. To compensate, Michael overstrained for reaction, any reaction. Heckling and cabbage would have been better than the sussurus of disinterest. The black hole of the auditorium swallowed their efforts. By the interval, much of the audience had drifted to the bar, too involved in their own talk to pay attention. In the last quarter of an hour, Mark joined them, leaving a gap on the stage the others had to revolve around. Every note sounded hollow, every line a stone tossed into a bottomless chasm. It really was kids’ stuff.

In olden times, people hung around for invitations to Michael’s legendary Achelzoy parties. Half the kids in town lost their virginities at his grandparents’ house. Everyone first smoked drugs in the old coal-shed they called the Führer Bunker. Once Desmond had convulsions, writhing across the road in a blue sleeping-bag like a giant worm, causing a milk-float to swerve into a ditch. Tonight, they ducked out early, making apologies about vile weather, pointedly not mentioning the show. It was the end of an Empire.

A car cruised down the road, leaving muddy tyre tracks in the thin snow-blanket. The horn honked and Mark went over: it was Desmond, on his way out to Achelzoy with a couple of die-hards.

‘We might be a while,’ Mark told him.

Michael was supposed to be driving. His grandparents always left him their car so he could look after the place. They knew about the parties, but he made sure the place was tidied when they got back.

A negotiation was underway. Neil volunteered to go with Desmond and open the house. Michael found keys in his jacket pocket and handed over. Mark convinced Pippa to go with the guys, promising to be along soon.

‘I think I’m driving Michael out,’ he explained. ‘It’s my contribution to keeping death off the roads.’

Neither Neil nor Mickey could drive.

Despite everything, a few were going to the party. Michael thought Alex might drag some of her minors along later. And he’d left a message for Penny.

Only the few remained, the loyal rump of the Forum. Mark was patient but superior, a parent. Mickey’s eyes burned: Michael might be at the end of his party tether, but Mickey was bottled up, ready to burst. Like the night he finally popped Jacqui Edwardes or the time he duffed up Keith Lanier. Michael’s stomach was settling but pain remained in his mind. Tears froze on his cheeks.

Desmond drove off carefully. Falling snow danced in headlights.

The others felt defeat less keenly. They’d started new lives. The disaster confirmed that they should let it go. Mark was so intent on being an adult and Mickey so committed to punk that everything they’d worked on together over seven years was receding into memory. Neil seemed almost middle-aged, as if he’d vaulted into an unimaginable future where he was a travel agent.

A snowdrift accumulated about his shoes. Ice pellets hung in his trouser turn-ups. He was a living ghost, embarrassing friends as he dragged the dead past around on his chains. He wiped his face on his sleeve. Snow-speckles stuck to his eyelashes and nose. Focusing the power of his mighty brain, he made himself sober. He took out his car keys and held them in a fist, gripping cold metal tight enough to break the skin. Physical pain could dispel mental anguish, he had thought.

‘Let us depart,’ he said, standing carefully. Mark and Mickey followed him to the car.

* * *

‘I’m perfectly capable of driving,’ he insisted. He’d regained his balance. In the cold, he was straight.

Mark looked up at the sky, snow tumbling around him, and spread his hands in martyrdom. ‘I could have gone with...’

‘Let him be,’ Mickey said. ‘If the poison ain’t out of his system by now it never will be.’

Michael bent into the front seat and belted up. Mickey slid in next to him and, resigned, Mark crawled into the back.

Michael flicked a switch. ‘Wipers engaged.’

The windscreen was iced like a cake, thick precipitate furring the lower two-thirds. The wipers cut squeaky slices.

He turned the ignition.

‘Contact,’ he said.

‘Warp Factor Fuck,’ Mickey replied, seriously.

The car lurched forwards and Michael manoeuvred out of the parking space. Open road lay ahead. He put on a cassette of the Tom Robinson Band and thumped the wheel to ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’.

As they drove out of town, he concentrated on the road. Knowing he was over the limit always made him infuriatingly careful. Mickey and Mark chatted about snow. There’d be a big freeze on the moors. Earth was hard as iron, water like a stone. Scotland was cut off from civilisation. Radio stations were issuing dire travel warnings: if in doubt stay home, go back now, don’t do it, abandon hope. No one mentioned
Twelfth Night ’78,
which was more depressing than a gloomy autopsy.

‘There’s one thing we’ve got to get, Hayes,’ Mickey said.

‘What’s that?’ Mark recited.

‘Out of this business,’
they said together, and laughed.

* * *

He’d been making the trip from town to Achelzoy ever since he could remember, first with his parents, then on his own.

The more time his grandparents spent away, the more their house became a second home. He’d lived there for a solid week in November; hammering in frustration at the opening of
Julie Bee.
Alex stayed over three nights in a row. It was unnervingly like being married, or how he imagined being married. He noted the limitations of his fill-in girlfriend’s experience and intellect. Maybe it was impossible to follow Penny. He’d shared so much with so few people, it was hard for outsiders to crack the shell.

The Achelzoy road was as familiar as his own house. Michael could make the drive blindfolded, dead drunk and fast asleep.

‘This doesn’t look right,’ Mark said.

They were on a winding road across the moor, twisting from side to side. Slush clogged the wipers. Bowed trees, heavy with snow, lined the way. There was no other traffic.

‘We’re off the map,’ he said. ‘Look for signs.’

Mark suggested turnings they might have mistaken. Michael was sure he’d kept the right route. If anything was skewed, it was the road. Proceeding deliberately, he felt the car’s grip weakening, and sensed the thin film of black ice beneath snow-frosting. He did not intend to put Gramma’s car in a ditch.

A signpost was up ahead, leaning badly. Mickey craned to make it out.

‘Shepton Mallet,’ he said. ‘Two miles.’

‘That’s not remotely possible,’ Michael said. ‘We can’t be that far off course. We’d have had to motorvate for hours.’

‘It feels like fuckin’ hours,’ Mickey said. ‘Fuckin’ aeons.’

‘It’s only about fifteen minutes,’ Mark said. ‘We should be in Achelzoy.’

‘We’re out by Shepton Sodding Mallet, boyo,’ Mickey insisted. ‘We’re lost up our arseholes.’

Visibility was terrible. Snow whipped down, hail mixed in, rattling against the car. He took the Shepton Mallet turn.

‘We don’t want Shepton Mallet,’ Mark said.

‘No,’ Michael said. ‘But we know the way to Achelzoy from Shepton Mallet. If lost, no point in getting loster.’

Mark shrugged and slumped in his seat.

‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘Neil should be here. I should be with Pippa at your Gramma’s, waiting for you clods to show up.’

‘Don’t trust your woman with Captain Makeout Martino?’ asked Mickey. ‘Neil the Love Machine?’