The Quorum (24 page)

Sally gave an interested look, drawing him out.

‘Not
that
kind of fixation,’ he smiled. ‘That, I could have handled. Believe me. It was a delusional thing. This girl, Rachael, got the idea I was persecuting her. Yeah, me. It was the seventies, drugs all over: just say yummy, you know? One night, she popped her toast and attacked me. It was this insane frenzy. She wrecked the room, screaming abuse at me. It was surreal. For a moment, I thought she was going to shove a pair of scissors into my throat. And she never let up. After that night, it went on for weeks. She got her friends to join in. Would you believe it, they sabotaged my typewriter? And there were other “accidents”. She’s press secretary for the Greens these days. Rachael Rosen.’

She sipped orange juice. They were in the Tin Woodsman, the pub opposite Planet Janet. She still doubted this was a good idea but had learned more in five minutes of chat than days of walking ridiculously up and down Cranley Gardens. In her bag on the table, a cassette was recording.

‘After it got really bad, I walked. At the end of the spring term, we had a takeaway exam. I couldn’t make sense of the questions so I went home without saying anything to anyone. There wasn’t anyone to say anything to. My parents went spare. All that education gone to waste. God, it was fifteen years ago. I got a part-time job as a hospital porter, but that didn’t last.’

He talked about his disasters as if they’d happened to someone else. Probably a denial process, off-loading blame onto external forces.

‘I have a degree in child psychology,’ said Sally. ‘It hasn’t done me much good. I left university to be a receptionist.’

Neil shook his head and looked at his empty glass. ‘What do you do now?’ he asked.

She avoided the question. ‘Can I get you another?’

Embarrassed, he patted empty pockets. ‘I’d spring for a round, but...’

‘It’s okay. I’m earning.’

After the briefest hesitation, he accepted a second drink. She got him another pint.

‘I need this,’ he said, hefting bitter. ‘So far, this year has been a nightmare. If I had an income, I’d become an alcoholic.’

* * *

Having established that Neil was doing a fill-in day at the Planet, she set up opposite the shop to watch comings and goings. Knowing he’d stay put, she found a phone box and called Ayesha McPherson.

‘Not much tale to tell,’ she explained. ‘I’ll have it typed up and fax it later. Gary Gaunt is a twenty-two-year-old trainee reporter. He does book reviews and obits for the
Basildon Echo
, the occasional flower show or 100th birthday. He’s a recent graduate in journalism, lives with his parents, straight, but no girlfriend, in good health. White, five-six, slight build. You’d say no distinguishing marks except he’s sort of an albino, dead white hair, pinky eyes.’

She was thanked and told a cheque would be in the post. From Michael Dixon’s assistant, Sally believed it. Ayesha said Michael might want her to proceed further.

‘I don’t think there’s any further to proceed, unless Mr Dixon has anything specific he wants to know.’

A familiar long dark shape slid past.

On impulse, Sally asked, ‘Does a big black car ring bells? A Rolls, but some sort of customised model?’

Ayesha, puzzled, said she couldn’t think.

‘Just a long shot,’ Sally said, watching SHADE 001 dawdle at traffic lights. She imagined the machine growling.

Ayesha said they’d be in touch, and hung up.

So long as no one was queuing, Sally stayed in the box, receiver to her ear, mouthing song lyrics. Watching SHADE 001 slip towards Finchley, she realised why it was familiar: it was a Shadowshark, like the one Dr Shade drove in the newspaper strip. Considering the vanity plate, she guessed the driver must be a fanatical fan. Someone rich enough to have Rolls-Royce make a vehicle to order. As a kid, she’d wanted an Amazon Queen Atom Chariot until she found out the car Mary Ann Mobley drove in the TV series couldn’t actually do more than thirty miles per hour. Did the Shadowshark’s owner wear a black hat and cape and infra-red goggles, and carry a brace of silver-plated automatics?

Whoever the Dr Shade wannabe was, she bet he was a constant customer at Planet Janet. She looked across the road at the shop. There was a vampire display in the window. A snarling cutout Dracula loomed over a selection of fanged books, videos and comics. Neil’s head could just be seen among bobbing rubber bats. It must be a relief not to be stuck in his windowless basement.

Why were Michael Dixon and Mark Amphlett interested in nobodies? A reversal of the Mark Chapman/John Hinckley syndrome? Celebrities obsessed with failures.

It’s the latest ‘in’ craze among the power people, Mummikins. Adopt a nonentity.

A pensioner struggled up the Archway Road towards the phone box. Sally vacated her shelter stepping into blasting winds. The thick scarf she wrapped around her lower face was damp with condensed breath. This sort of job was less unpleasant in June. The Gary Gaunt commission was more comfortable: she’d telephoned him at the
Echo
with a bogus market research questionnaire, getting his personal details as if filling in a form, then asking him what films he’d seen in the last month. He liked
Reservoir Dogs
but wondered why he’d wasted money on
Chaplin.
They chatted for twenty minutes and he tried to impress her with expressions like ‘genre’ and ‘biopic’. By contrast, this was cold and frustrating. She wouldn’t count the day a success unless she learned something new. Hanging around purposelessly in subzero temperatures was not efficient information-gathering.

Well aware this was a bad precedent, she decided to talk to Neil. Stepping off the kerb to cross the road was like stepping off a bridge.

* * *

On the Friday morning, the Planet was underpopulated. Neil was at the front till, chin in his hands, looking disconsolately at a lopsided bat. The young man who’d been the Riddler at Dolar’s party was at a desk at the back of the shop, available to field any enquiries. A tiny girl with purple lipstick and filed teeth was three chapters into a hardback vampire novel she wasn’t going to buy. A thin-moustached man lurked in the ‘adults only’ section, breathing heavily on the shrinkwrappers of French
bandes dessinées.

The Riddler spotted her and waved familiarly, eyes betraying fuzziness about who exactly she was. He had the kind of memory which retained the identity of a special guest villain in the July 1957 issue of
Dazzling Duo Stories,
but was unable to summon the names of real people he’d met last week.

‘Neil,’ she said, suddenly nervous. ‘Hi.’

He looked up, long face blank. His bruise was mostly gone but half his face still didn’t match. She realised he’d been dozing.

‘Sally, remember? Sally Rhodes? From New Year’s Eve? Sigh, my hero?’

He flinched like a dog who assumes any human will beat it, but tried a smile. She guessed from the red in his eyes he’d had a bad night.

‘Olive Oyl?’

‘How are you feeling?’

He looked briefly up to heaven and made a sad-funny face. ‘You don’t want to know.’

She shrugged in sympathy. ‘I can imagine.’

‘Actually, I don’t think you can.’

‘Try me.’

‘You’d think I was the Ancient Mariner. It’s a long story. I’m under a curse.’

Not wanting to push it, she pretended to look around. Paperbacks were displayed in separate shelves for science fiction, horror, fantasy, true crime and ‘slipstream’; comics were in their own racks. Planet Janet had sections for film stills, posters, hobby kits (why
would anyone want an eighteen-inch Pumpkinhead for £99.99, Mummy?)
and videos.

‘What’s hot?’ she asked the Riddler.

Choke Hold,
he said. ‘Best graphic novel of the nineties.’

She picked one from a stack on a table. It was a hardback comic like the
TinTin
adventures she read as a child, only five times the price. The writer-artist was Mickey Yeo.

‘He did a signing here,’ the Riddler added. ‘The man’s a saint.’

Mickey Yeo was the missing corner of the square. If she met him, she’d have the whole set. She opened
Choke Hold
at random. The pages were fully painted and scratchy, broken into designs less like panel grids, more like cracked mirrors. Mad-eyed people with wild hair throttled each other, ravings scuttling in jagged spaces between the pictures.

‘It’s about the Boston Strangler,’ the Riddler told her. ‘Mickey’s doing it as a rock opera next.’

Charming. What’s the sequel,
The Dennis Nilsen Book of Plumbing Tips?

On one page the Strangler, face a crosshatched blotch as if the artist tried to obliterate it, wound a rope around the long neck of a male victim. The purple and red face, with wide eyes and bulging tongue, looked vaguely like Neil.

‘There’s something sick here,’ she said aloud.

‘It’s not for kids,’ the Riddler said. ‘It’s for adults.’

‘I’m not sure adults can handle this stuff,’ she said. ‘Kids are tougher. Do you have any Hergé?’

Brightening, the Riddler pointed. She decided to buy
The Crab With the Golden Claws
and
The Cigar of the Pharaohs.
Next year, when sentience set in, she’d share them with the Invader. She paid for the
TinTin
books and asked Neil if he’d been back to the hospital. He tried not to answer, a child not wanting to discuss undone homework or uneaten greens.

‘You should look after yourself,’ she said. ‘No one else will.’

‘If I’m patched up, I’ll only get broken again.’

She could believe that.

After a pause, he said, ‘But thank you for getting me to Casualty. I probably didn’t say that then. I was, um, ah, you know... incapable?’

He’d just groaned as she steered him home. She was mildly surprised he remembered her.

‘You owe me your life, you know,’ she said.

He was sheepish, furtive. He didn’t seem comfortable talking with people. Or was it just with women?

The Riddler announced it was Neil’s lunch hour and came to take over the till.

‘I’m going for a drink over the road,’ she said, ‘want to come?’

* * *

‘When I say it’s a curse, it’s just bad luck,’ he said, explaining to himself as much as to her. ‘A
phenomenal
run of bad luck. You’d find it hard to believe so many catastrophes could happen to one man in one life. If the rain’s gonna fall, it’ll fall on me. If the cat’s gonna piss, it’ll piss on me.’

Strangely, he wasn’t bitter, just puzzled. She thought he’d be disappointed to win a lottery. If things were uniformly terrible, his life made some sense.

‘Jobs, relationships, houses, anything. I’m a disaster area, me. Those New Year’s Eve guys, at least they didn’t bullshit before putting the boot in. It was over with quickly, you know. Usually, I get a month or so of unrealistic expectations before anyone buys a knife and works out where my back is.’

She kept quiet. Did her professional commitment to Mark Amphlett and Michael Dixon count as a betrayal of Neil’s trust?

‘When I first came to London, ’81 or ’82, there were a couple of months when things almost fell in place. I was working on a magazine. Not much money, but interesting. There was an American girl, Anne. Then, somehow, I lost it...’

As he talked, she studied his face: under the last of his bruising and the tiredness around his eyes, he was still youthful, unformed. All marks on him were temporary, as if his life had never really begun. She felt like telling him to wash his face and get back in the trenches, but, from the dossier she’d compiled, she knew he was more likely to sit here with a pint someone bought for him until he switched from supplementary benefit to state pension.

‘Bad things happen to me,’ he said. ‘If I had talent I could be the greatest blues singer ever to come out of North London.’

‘You’re too funny to sing the blues. Face it, you just aren’t miserable enough.’

‘Nope. Not miserable. Just numb.’

His glass was empty and she didn’t think buying him another pint was a good idea. If he turned up drunk at the Planet and lost his part-time job, it’d be her fault. As an investigator she subscribed to the Prime Directive non-interference in native cultures. It was her business to report on subjects, not change their lives.

The barman, telephone held to his chest, shouted out, ‘Is there a Neil Martin here?’

Neil looked up, surprised.

‘Phone call,’ the barman said. ‘Don’t make it a habit.’

From her observations, she knew Neil always had a pub lunch in the Tin Woodsman when he worked in the Planet. She’d noted it in her report last year. But he seemed to think he was difficult to find.

He went to the bar and took the receiver listening intently.

She checked her cassette recorder. It was still running, near the end of a side. She turned the cassette over. After six weeks, she’d be qualified to write
Neil Martin:
A
Biography of a Nobody.
Maybe that should be subtitled
Bad Things Happen to Me?
It would be a relief to get back to tracing runaway kids and loitering in Boots to deter shoplifters.

Her eye caught by a movement, she looked across the pub. A man in a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black coat was slipping into the Gents, like an angular shadow. The last scrap of his darkness whipped beyond the slamming door. Perhaps it wasn’t a coat but a cloak, trailing the floor. A sinister touch.

Shaking his head, Neil came back to the table.

‘Anything important?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Just another Nazi Death Threat.’

She laughed.

‘No, seriously. An NF splinter group called the English Liberation Front want to kill me. I think it’s a computer error. They’ve mixed me up with someone who gives a shit.’

He sat down, looking fed up.

‘I might know people who could do something about that,’ she said.

She still had at least three friends on the police and had shared witness protection with rent-a-muscle from the big agencies. Maybe she could call in favours.

‘Best if you stay out of it. People around me run the risk of sustaining severe mental damage.’