The Quorum (2 page)

She checked the bedside clock and saw it was before seven. Also on the table was the carton of Chums, one corner wrenched open. They’d come in handy after all. It’d have been hard to get aroused if she’d thought of Derek Leech leering off the pack at her. She turned the pack, putting Leech’s face to the wall.

Connor jumped on her bed, eager to get to it again but she had to get up to pee. As she left the bedroom, she realised he must be looking at her as she had looked at him. Last night, it had been dark. Putting on a dressing gown would kill the moment, so she went nude into the bathroom. After relieving herself, she looked in the long mirror and wasn’t too disappointed. When she was Connor’s age, she’d been almost chubby; with the years, she’d exercised and worried away the roundness. April said she envied Sally her cheekbones.

When she got back to the bedroom, Connor had already fit another condom over his swelling penis.

‘I started without you,’ he said.

* * *

Tiny told her she didn’t have to come to that week’s production meeting, but didn’t mean it. Sally was still waiting to wake up an emotional basket case but it hadn’t happened yet. She slept through the alarm more often and had stomach troubles, as if suffering from persistent jet-lag, but her thoughts were clear. She even dealt with mental time-bombs like the travelling toothbrush left in her bathroom. Perhaps after all these years, she was used to weirdness. Maybe she couldn’t survive without a stream of the unexpected, the tragic, the grotesque.

Networked on ITV at eight on Friday evenings,
Survival Kit
was an aggressive consumer show, proposing that life in the late twentieth century was frighteningly random and unspeakably dangerous. Tiny Chiselhurst was at once editor and presenter, and the show, in its fifth season, was the cash-cow that kept Mythwrhn Productions, a reasonably-successful independent, listed as rising. This series, Sally had helped Tiny, whose sarky humour was what kept viewers watching, expose a crooked modelling agency run on white slavery lines. Now she was switched to something that had little to do with the show itself and so was primarily an ornament at these meetings, called upon to report privately afterwards.

Tiny sat in the best chair at the round table as researchers, assistants, producers, directors and minions found places. He seemed to be made entirely of old orange corduroy, with a shaggy seventies mop and moustache. The meeting room was a windowless inner sanctum, eternally lit by grey lights, a crossbreed of padded cell and A-Bomb shelter. After reviewing last week’s programme, doling out few compliments and making Lydia Marks cry again, Tiny asked for updates on items-in-progress. Useless Bruce, fill-in presenter and on-screen reporter, coughed up botulism stats. Tiny told him to keep on the trail. The item hadn’t yet taken shape but was promising. What that meant, Sally knew, was that no sexy case - a ten-year-old permanently disabled by fish fingers, say - had come to light. When there was a pathetic human face to go with the story, the item would go ahead.

Finally there was the slot when people were supposed to come up with ideas. This was where performance could be best monitored, since ideas were the currency of television. She’d begun to realise actual execution of an item could be completely botched; what Tiny remembered was who had the idea in the first place. Useless Bruce was well known for ideas that never quite worked.

‘I was talking to a bloke at a launch the other night,’ said April. Someone said something funny, and she stared them silent. ‘He turned out to be a corporate psychiatrist at one of the investment banks, talks people out of jumping off the top floor when they lose a couple of million quid. Anyway, he mentioned this thing, “Sick Building Syndrome”, which sounded worth a think.’

Tiny gave her the nod and April gathered notes from a folder.

‘There are companies which suffer from problems no one can explain. Lots of days lost due to illness, way above the norm. Also, a high turn-over of staff, nervous breakdowns, personal problems,
sturfe
like that. Even suicides, murders. Other companies in exactly the same business with exactly the same pressures breeze through with
pas de
hassles. It might be down to the buildings they work in, a quirk of architecture that traps ill feelings. You know, bad vibrations.’

Sally noticed Tiny was counterfeiting interest. For some reason, he was against April’s idea. But he let her speak.

‘If we found one of these places, it might make an item.’

‘It’s very visual, Ape,’ said Bender, an associate producer, enthusiasm blooming. ‘We could dress it up with
Poltergeist
effects. Merchant bank built over a plague pit, maybe.’

Tiny shook his head. This was the man who’d stayed up all night with a camera crew waiting for the UFOs to make corn circles.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that suits us.’

‘Completely over-the-top,’ Bender said, enthusiasm vanishing. ‘We’re a serious programme.’

‘Thank you, April,’ Tiny said. ‘But Bender has a point. Maybe last series, we could have done this paranormal hoo-hah...’

‘This isn’t a spook story,’ she protested. ‘It’s psychology.’

Tiny waved his hand, brushing the idea away. ‘Remember the big picture. With the franchise bid, we mustn’t do anything to make the ITC look askance. It’s up to us to demonstrate that we pass the quality threshold.’

April sat back, bundling now-useless notes. Sally was used to this: it was all down to Tiny and he could be as capricious as any Roman Emperor at the games.

Roger the Replacement, one of the directors, had noticed a dry piece in the
Financial Times
about a travel firm considered a bad investment, which suggested further digging might turn up something filmable. British holidaymakers sent to unbuilt hotels in war zones. Tiny gave him a thumbs-up, and, since April wasn’t doing anything, assigned her to work the idea. The meeting was wound up.

In the Ladies, Sally found April gripping a sink with both hands, staring down at the plug, muttering ‘I hate him I hate him I hate him hate hate hate hate’.

* * *

After her exercise class, they had
al fresco
lunch in Soho Square. In summer, it was a huge picnic area; now, in early autumn, office workers - publishing, film, television, advertising - melted away, leaving the square to tramps and runners. He had sandwiches while she dipped Kettle Chips into cottage cheese and pineapple. Connor always pushed his idea that
Survival Kit
do a week-in-the-life-of-a-wino item, unsubtly pressuring Sally to take it into a production meeting. She’d tried to tell him it’d been done before but his excitement always prevailed. Today he pointed out the ‘characters’ who pan-handled in Soho, explaining their fierce territoriality.

‘You don’t notice til you’re on the streets, Sal. It’s a parallel world.’

On a bench nearby sat two men of roughly the same age, a pony-tail in a Gaultier suit and a crusty with filth-locks and biro tattoos. Each pretended the other didn’t exist.

‘It’s a pyramid. At the bottom, people get crushed.’

He was right but it wasn’t
Kit.
Besides, she was irritated: was he interested in her mainly as a conduit to the inner circle? With one of his lightning subject-shifts, Connor made a grab, sticking his ribena-sweetened tongue down her throat. His walkie-talkie chirruped and he broke off the kiss. It was just past two and lunch hour was officially over. He frowned as a voice coughed in his ear.

‘It’s for you,’ he said.

Knowing thered be trouble, she took the receiver. Tiny had been after her to use a portable phone. She was summoned to the Penthouse. Mairi, Tiny’s PA, conveyed the message. Tiny wanted to chat. Sally assumed she was going to be fired and dutifully trudged across the square to Mythwrhn.

She stabbed the top button and the lift jerked up through the building. Tiny had a suite of offices on the top floor which she hadn’t visited since her interview. Mairi met her at the lift and offered her decaf, which she refused. She wondered if the girl disapproved of her and Connor. She had the idea it wasn’t done to dally out of your age range or income bracket. At least, not if you were a woman. All the young middle-age male production staff had permanent lusts for the fresh-from-school female secretaries, runners and receptionists.

Tiny’s all-glass office was a frozen womb. He sat behind his desk, leaning back. She noticed again the figurine on its stand: a bird-headed, winged woman, throat open in a silent screech. It was an old piece, but not as old as some.

‘Know what that is?’ Tiny asked rhetorically, prepared to explain and demonstrate his erudition.

‘It’s the Mythwrhn,’ she pre-empted. ‘An ancient bird goddess-demon, probably Ugric. Something between a harpy and an angel.’

Tiny was astonished. ‘You’re the first person who came in here knowing that...’

‘I had an interesting career.’

‘You must tell me about it sometime.’

‘I must.’

The last time she’d seen a statuette of the Mythwrhn, she’d been on a nasty case involving black magic and death. It had been one of her few exciting involvements, although the excitement was not something she wished to repeat.

Without being asked, she took a seat. Apart from Tiny’s puffily upholstered black leather egg-shape, all the chairs in the office were peculiar assemblages of chrome tubing and squeaky rubber. As Tiny made cat’s cradles with his fingers, she was certain he’d fire her.

‘I’ve been thinking about you, Sally,’ he said. ‘You’re an asset but I’m not sure how well-placed you are.’

Her three-month trial wasn’t even up, so she wasn’t on a contract yet. No redundancy payment. At least the dole office was within walking distance of the flat. The poll tax would be a problem, but she should qualify for housing benefit.

‘Your experience is unique.’

Tiny’s confrontational, foot-in-the-door interviews with dodgy characters put him in more danger in any one series of
Survival Kit
than she had been in all her years of tracing the heirs of intestate decedents, finding lost cats and body-guarding custody case kids. But he was still impressed by a real life private dick. April said the term was sexist and called her a private clit.

‘You know about the franchise auction?’

The independent television franchises, which granted a right to broadcast to the companies that made up the ITV network, were being renegotiated. There was currently much scurrying and scheming in the industry as everyone had to justify their existence or give way to someone else. There was controversy over the system, with criticism of the government decision that franchises be awarded to the highest bidder. The Independent Television Commission, the body with power of life and death over the network, had belatedly instituted a policy of partially assessing bids for quality of service rather than just totting up figures. In the run-up to the auction, battles raged up and down the country, with regional companies assailed by challengers. More money than anyone could believe was being poured into the franchise wars. A worry had been raised that the winners were likely to have spent so much on their bids they’d have nothing left over to spend on the actual programmes.

‘Mythwrhn is throwing in its hat,’ Tiny said.

For an independent production company, no matter how financially solid, to launch a franchise bid on its own would be like Liechtenstein declaring war on Switzerland.

‘We’ll be the most visible element of a consortium. Polymer Records have kicked in, and Mausoleum Films.’

Both were like Mythwrhn, small but successful. Polymer used to be an indie label and now had the corner on the heavier metallurgists, notably the ‘underground’ cult band Loud Shit. Mausoleum distributed French art and American splatter; they were known for the
Where the Bodies Are Buried
series, although Sally knew they’d funnelled some of their video profits into British film production, yielding several high profile movies she, along with vast numbers of other people, hadn’t wanted to see.

‘Deep pockets,’ she commented, ‘but not deep enough.’

Tiny snapped all his fingers. ‘Very sharp, Sally. We have major financial backing, from a multi-media conglomerate who, for reasons of its own, can’t be that open about their support. I’m talking newspapers, films and satellite.’

That narrowed it down considerably. To a face the size of a condom packet, in fact.

‘We’re contesting London, which puts us up against GLT. So it’s not going to be a walk-over.’

Greater London Television was one of the keystones of the ITV net, long-established monolith with three shows in the ratings Top Ten, two quizzes and a soap. In television terms, it was, like its audience, middle-aged verging on early retirement. Mythwrhn had a younger demographic.

‘I’d like you to be part of the bid,’ Tiny said.

She was surprised. ‘I’m not a programmer or an accountant.’

‘Your special talents can be useful. We’ll need a deal of specialised research. In wrapping our package, it’d be handy to have access to certain information. We need to know GLT’s weaknesses to help us place our shots.’

This sounded very like industrial espionage. As a field, IE never appealed to Sally. Too much involved affording the client ‘plausible deniability’ and being paid off to sit out jail sentences.

‘You’ll keep your desk and your official credit on
Kit
but we’ll gradually divert you to the real work. Interested?’

Thinking of the Muswell Hill DSS, she nodded. Tiny grinned wide and extended a hand, but was distracted by a ringing telephone. It was a red contraption aside from his three normal phones, suggesting a hot-line to the Kremlin or the Batcave.

Tiny scooped up the receiver, and said, ‘Derek, good to hear from you...’

* * *

‘Since the franchise
schmeer
,’ April said, a drip of mayonnaise on her chin, ‘the whole building has gone batty.’

Sally ate her half-bap in silence. She wasn’t the only one diverted from usual duties and hustled off to secret meetings.

‘They should put valium dispensers in the loos.’