The Quorum (18 page)

Mark grunted a laugh. ‘Not a problem, I think,’ he said. ‘And don’t let Pippa hear you call her “my woman”. She’s an independent person.’

Mickey made a face.

‘This doesn’t feel right,’ Michael admitted.

The turn-off was a rutted single-track across moorland. They cut into virgin snow; no other traffic had been through recently. Shepton Mallet passed for a big town, the road to it should be a major artery.

‘I don’t like the sound of the engine,’ Mark commented.

‘It probably hates the sound of you,’ Mickey said.

The car was coughing and straining. With the heating up full blast, it was almost uncomfortably warm inside. If the engine died, the interior would fridge instantly.

‘I spent Jubilee night in this machine,’ Mickey commented. ‘I don’t ever want to do that again.’

That had been at another party, of historic interest: the night Neil fell into the sea while impersonating Sir Francis Drake.

‘We’ll be in Achelzoy soon,’ Michael insisted. ‘Trust me.’

‘We trusted you to put on a show,’ Mark said. ‘Look what happened.’

Stabbed to the heart, Michael gripped the steering wheel. There was quiet in the car, only low music continuing. In a flash, he imagined halting, ordering Mark and Mickey out in the middle of an arctic nowhere, leaving them to the snow, clever student smugness frozen solid.

‘I’m solo from now,’ Mickey said. ‘Or maybe I’ll get a band together in Leeds.’

‘Zhour mother told mine zhou weren’t going back,’ Michael said, doling out spite. ‘Apparently, zhou haven’t done real work since zhou got into Art School.’

Mickey, who’d edged around the subject for weeks, said ‘Even if I chuck school, I’m not sliming back to the Backwater. You don’t know what it’s like in fuckin’ reality, Dixon. It’s not a Beatles film. We can’t live down each other’s throats forever.’

The car stalled, caught again, carried on. A huge place-sign was ahead, hanging over the road like a gibbet.

WELCOME TO SUTTON MALLET
.

‘Sutton
Mallet,’ Mickey said. ‘Where the fuck is Sutton Mallet?’

‘Nowhere,’ Mark breathed. ‘We’re nowhere.’

Michael had lived in Somerset all his life and never heard of Sutton Mallet.

Dark buildings were around, roofs thick with snow, drifts sandbagged against stone walls. A single streetlamp was stranded at a road fork, its tiny light a candle in an over-arching canopy of dark. The car died. He put on the handbrake. They sat in the middle of nowhere. For a moment, he was tempted to slump asleep against his safety belt, let snow pile up around the car. Eventually a burrow-like hump would form. The Quorum could be buried like Saxon chieftains in their chariot, and rediscovered by archaeologists of the future.

* * *

With the lights on, Mark went through all the maps in the car. Sutton Mallet wasn’t obvious on any of them. Michael sat, defeated. Mickey was getting angry, which made him unpredictable.

‘Neil should be here,’ Mark insisted, ‘not me.’

‘Fuckin’ Sutton Mallet,’ Mickey swore.

‘It’s very small,’ Michael said. ‘Look.’

There were at most five houses around the junction. None showed a light.

‘And they all go to bed early.’

Actually, the buildings, dead and impassive as sarsen stones, were more like barns than houses. Only a few windows, high up on walls. Under snow, the roofs might be thatch.

‘I hate Sutton Mallet,’ Mickey said, unreasonably. ‘All my life, Sutton Malleteers have picked on me, got in my way, stopped me doing things.’

‘I swear I’ve been here before,’ Mark said. ‘The shapes are familiar.’

Michael tried the choke again. The engine didn’t catch. Its cough was drawn-out, asthmatic.

‘I don’t want to push it,’ he said.

‘It’s getting cold,’ Mark said, breath frosting. The lights were on a separate circuit, but it was impossible to keep the heater on if the engine wasn’t running.

‘Wee bit parky,’ Mickey snarled.

Michael had run out of ideas. He watched snowflakes stick to the windscreen, each flake a pointillist dab added to an all-white abstract. It was almost restful.

‘Sodomise this for a game of soldiers,’ Mickey said, straining his seatbelt. ‘I’m going out to get directions. There must be some bloody one up in Nowhere City.’

Mark wasn’t sure and began a protest, but Michael, suddenly very tired, didn’t intervene. Mickey opened the door and stepped out, hugging his cloak around his thin body.

‘Shivering shit,’ he said. ‘My balls just shrivelled to raisins. I may be some time.’

He slammed the door after him and staggered off into the snow.

‘A very gallant gentleman,’ Michael said.

‘Bone-stupid.’

‘That too.’

Mickey was gone instantly, vanished. Michael and Mark sat in growing cold.

‘What was that about Mickey dropping out?’ Mark asked.

Michael shrugged. ‘Mum heard the story, I only had it second hand. He was scrapping again. Apparently, he’s lucky not to be up on a charge.’

‘You think he’d tell us,’ Mark said. ‘We’re his friends.’

‘Some things zhou don’t tell zhour friends.’

Like how difficult it really was to write. He had no excuses, no distractions. Michael should be able to fill page after page. He had his outline. He knew what he wanted to say. But words wouldn’t come. The zh-curse had seeped into his brain, tripping his thoughts. Michael saw his friends disappearing into shining futures, leaving him stranded in the Backwater. He told them his Cambridge place was set, but actually he had to retake the entrance exam again in spring. Maybe he’d pass, maybe not. There was always Hull, he shuddered.

‘How long do zhou think we should give him?’

‘How long has it been?’

‘Forever.’

‘Zhust a few minutes, surely?’

Michael hugged himself. His coat was padded, but cold crept in around his belly and extremities. His face was frozen.

‘I’m going after Mickey,’ Mark announced.

‘We shouldn’t leave the car.’

‘If you can’t move it, who could steal it?’

Mark was right.

‘He’ll have left footprints. Easy to follow.’

Michael undid his belt and got out into the blizzard. His knees hurt as he unbent his legs. He felt empty. He looked back at Mark, whose hands were deep in his coat pockets.

‘Turned out nice again?’ he said.

* * *

Mickey’s prints were fast filling with fresh snow. He’d trailed around the largest of the barn-structures (looking for a door?) and cut off into a field. Here his boots sank deep into unmarred snow, leaving obvious holes.

‘Why did he go away from the houses?’ Mark asked.

Michael would have shrugged a don’t-know, but was shivering too much.

‘This is an “I don’t like the looks of this” moment,’ Mark said.

‘Neil should be here, not zhou.’

Three months ago, Michael had been natural leader of the Forum. Now he’d pushed them into a disaster and got them lost and broken them up. He was tired of people asking him what to do. He didn’t know what he should do himself.

For a moment, Michael was afraid it was a trick. Mark and Mickey had plotted to lure him out where he could be abandoned to silent snows.

The lamplight was way behind them. Huffing and blundering, they stumped across the snow-carpeted field. There’d be thinly iced ditches buried here, waiting like elephant traps.

‘“Often in later life,”’ Michael said authorially, ‘“Neil Martin would remember that night and wonder what had become of his vanished friends...”’

Mark laughed. At the dawn of recorded time, he’d been the first person to understand Michael’s humour.

‘What’s that?’ Mark asked.

Ahead were three large lumps.

‘I don’t know about the one in the middle,’ he said, meaning the dark, angular shape, ‘but the other two look like snowmen.’

One was a Christmas card Frosty, three bun-shapes on top of each other. When they got close, he saw a face made of a carrot and chips of coal. On the head was an exploded top hat, like his old
Monopoly
piece. The other was a slumped and half-melted pile, stones and sticks poking out. Hard to make it out as anything, it might be a snowsquid.

‘Cephalopod,’ Mark said. ‘At last.’

The shape in the middle was a corrugated iron hut, about the size of a horsebox or an alderman’s family vault. Warmth spilled from it. Red light seeped through joints. Near the hut, snow melted.

Mark stepped forward and tripped over something. It was not another snowman.

‘Mickey,’ he blurted.

Michael and Mark knelt. Mickey was blue and chattering, rivers of snow in the folds of his cloak. They helped him up. He was almost conscious, his skin cold even to their chilled touch.

‘He might have the beginnings of exposure,’ Michael said.

Mickey muttered, ‘Fuck a duck’.

They struggled towards the hut. The iron sheets seemed to have an underglow, as if blowtorches played against them from the inside. Mark held Mickey while Michael fumbled a wire and cork latch with ungloved, senseless hands. The hut was simply sewn together with rings of wire and plumped in the field.

With a nails-down-a-blackboard wrench, the door came open. A small fire burned inside the hut. Clouds of eye-stinging, sweet-smelling smoke billowed out and swept around. Michael coughed but relished the caress of hot air. After minutes of dark, flamelight hurt his eyes.

Behind a smoky pile of burning logs, someone sat crosslegged. He wore dark trousers and shoes, but was naked from the waist up. Soot-streaks crossed his chest like war paint.

Michael, smitten by heat and cold, sank to his knees outside, reaching for fire. He didn’t care if he burned his hands, just so long as he was warmed. Mark and Mickey stood behind him, leaning exhausted on each other. The man behind the fire looked at them, chewing. His eyes held fires.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘welcome.’

* * *

The air was different inside the hut. The smoke didn’t bother Michael any more. It wasn’t dope but it gave him a strange buzz. His head clear, he thought faster, as if he breathed pure electricity. He knew this was one of the key hours of his life.

‘Three of the Four,’ Leech said, mildly. ‘I believe we have a Quorum.’

Mark didn’t say Neil should be here instead of him.

‘I am here to explain how the world works.’

Michael nodded, understanding. Leech spoke like a careers counsellor, calm and measured, understanding and disinterested. Michael vaguely knew who the man was.

‘You have potential, promise,’ Leech admitted. ‘That is nothing to do with me. I can guarantee absolutely that you will all, even your Absent Friend, live long and healthy lives. None of you will die before the mid-point of the twenty-first century.’

Leech raised a white hand. He spat something into the fire. It hissed like a live thing. The hut rattled with wind and snow. Michael wasn’t shivering any more.

‘Do you understand sacrifice?’ Leech asked.

They all nodded.

‘Really
understand
? I doubt it. Nothing is accidental, nothing comes without suffering.’

He lowered his hand into the fire. Flames licked around skin, darting up between outspread fingers. He smiled again, unconcerned.

‘You don’t have to burn,’ he explained. ‘Not if you don’t want to.’

He took his unmarred hand out of the fire and laid it in his lap.

‘For some people, pain is an option.’

If it were a trick, it was a good one.

‘First, think of all you want. Imagine a future and fill it.’

Michael understood. It wasn’t just wealth and fame and achievement. It was something complete and perfect and eternal. It was as if he saw the first page of his biography, knowing the chapters were filled in every detail. His life was inevitable. Mark and Mickey wound in and out of it, heroes of their own lives. And Neil was intertwined too. He might be the missing corner, but everything would depend on him.

‘Here’s the Deal,’ Leech said. ‘You know who I am, you know what I represent...’

In the firelight, his face was red. His teeth shone sharp.

‘You will each have the future you deserve but I require sacrifice. Perfect sacrifice.’

‘You want our souls?’ Mark asked, disbelieving.

‘I have no interest in intangible quantities. I do not claim to know what comes after this. My dominion is entirely of the world.’

In the heat, Michael was again cold. A cloud hung under the roof, swirling smoke looking for a way out.

‘I want pain, here and now,’ Leech explained. ‘Lifelong pain. It is the only currency that has any real value.’

‘This Deal doesn’t seem that hot,’ Mickey ventured.

Leech grinned. ‘Did I say the pain had to be yours?’

Neil dreamed of giant superheroes.

In four ragged colours, the Streak and the Amazon Queen tussled in Muswell Hill Broadway. Sometimes they fought but mainly they fucked. Violent as an earthquake, their sex radiated devastation through North London. Sainsbury’s was a flattened mass of rubble and spoiled foodstuffs, Alexandra Palace a spreading fire. Neil ran and panicked with the crowd. Underfoot was a heavy carpet of red velvet, Amazon Queen’s cloak draped over pavement and buildings, knee-high wrinkles tripping crowds. With a shift of the lovers, he was trapped between the Midland Bank and a twenty-yard-long thigh. A wall of tanned muscle rolled towards him. He was held for a moment between Amazon Queen’s smooth tonnage of flesh and the cash-dispenser, then scraped along the wall. Popped free, he sprawled into a side road. Others ran, but he was fascinated. He looked back at the costumed gargantuas. The Streak pulled out and changed position. Drops of ejaculate burst against rubble like waterbombs. Amazon Queen was on her hands and knees, her great head thumping the bus shelter. Her unbound hair lashed the road like a torrent of whips. The Streak thrust in and out faster than the eye could register. Lightning cracked all around. Amazon Queen made fists and tore at the road, ripping up patches of hot asphalt. An explosive crash broke through the dream, shattering him awake...

* * *