The Quorum (27 page)

‘Nipples like top hats.’

Frank lined up more drinks and said, ‘Compliments of the lady.’

Mickey waved a thanks and Neil, after a lingering look, turned away.

‘It’s hot in here,’ he said.

‘Nahh, it’s just cold outside.’

By now, Eugene would have done his business. He was supposed to leave a message with the printer’s and then meet Steve, who was waiting by the phone box on the corner to pick up the boards. Eugene was off home to collect his Academy Award and wait for his career to pick up.

Ingrid was dancing with another girl to ‘Shotgun’, darting her tongue at her partner’s nose.

‘Both ways, man, fuckin’ incredible,’ Mickey said, nudging Neil.

Ingrid the Animal wasn’t acting. Their best-paid footsoldier at £650, shed probably do this for free. She hadn’t asked for an explanation. The one time Mickey went back to her place to fuck, he’d been surprised to find a neat row of Penguin paperback Sartre on the shelf over her bed.

The intercom buzzed twice and Frank pretended to answer it. Mark was signalling that Eugene was through.

Michael came into the pub and overacted incredulous surprise. More drinks were provided. Neil, spluttering slightly, downed his in one again.

‘Zh’know what we’ve got?’ Michael said, eyes alight. ‘A
quorum
!’

They all laughed and drank again. Neil moved away from the bar to go to the toilet. As soon as he was unsupported, he began to sway and put his hand to his forehead.

‘Oooh,’ he said, ‘I can feel that.’

He made it across the room to the Gents. When the door shut behind him, everyone stopped talking and looked to Mickey and Michael.

‘Fine, everyone. Keep it up. Zhou’re getting an extra tenner apiece.’

There was a boozy cheer.

‘The switch at the printer’s was perfect,’ Mickey told Michael. ‘I nearly shat my spinal column, but it was a dream.’

‘He’s far gone, isn’t he?’

‘You know Our Absent Friend. Remember when we were kids? How about the college rag day when he sat in the Blake Street Annexe trying to nut himself with a hammer? Guy shouldn’t be allowed within a mile of alcohol.’

Neil came back from the bogs, noise picking up as he emerged. Another drink was ready for him.

‘I should make this my last,’ he said.

‘Nonsense, my boy,’ Michael said. ‘This is
reunion
. Nothing takes precedence over us...’

‘There’s Anne,’ Neil said. ‘You could come to the
Scam
party. Anne would love to meet you.’

Mickey leaned out of Neil’s eyeline and shook his head at Michael.

‘One more libation here,’ Michael said. ‘Bartender, further liquid dynamite is required.’

Mickey was fed up with the thin taste of whiskied water, but started sipping his next shot as Neil gulped his. A gaggle of Michael’s chorus boys, kitted as bikers, mingled with the shag-hags, bumping and groping. A tall black guy with a gold earring stripped off his net shirt and started rolling oiled pecs about. He was a model, Mickey knew. Ingrid slithered against his chest and started playing with her own top.

‘Get your tits out for the lads,’ the pretend-bikers chanted. Ingrid flirted with the idea, chewing a strand of stray hair.

The intercom buzzed three times.

Mickey and Michael clunked glasses. Mark had just placed a telephone call to the
Scam
party, claiming to be from the printer’s and wondering where the boards were. There was a slight risk the real printers had already done that, but they were less likely to have the number of the club where the party was.

Steve Dass, an ex-convict who’d written a book about prison edited by Mark’s girlfriend, slipped in unnoticed. He had wrapped the boards in a large sheet of brown paper.

Mickey nodded. Ingrid peeled her T-shirt off and held up her skaggy tits. She stole someone’s drink and cooled herself off by pouring cider into the hollow of her throat and letting it trickle.

‘That zhoung lady’s carried away.’

‘She ought to be,’ Mickey said.

Neil was actually almost the only man whose attention was completely on the act. He was too drunk to notice the oddness. Ingrid begged several of her dancing partners to lick her dry and they tentatively complied.

‘Where is this place?’ Michael asked Mickey. ‘It’s wildlife,’ he added, redundantly.

Mickey laughed and turned to Frank, easing his body away from the bar to make space between his stool and the footrail. Steve, standing next to him, steadily slipped his bundle onto the rail, sliding it behind Neil. Mickey leaned in close as Steve took away the brown paper. As instructed, he’d unzipped the folder leaving it hanging slightly open. Mickey could see the boards inside.

Ingrid smooched the black guy and quickly pushed him away. She face-fused a girl with antennae and staggered on, obviously intent on tongue-wrestling every man, woman and dog in the pub.

Neil wasn’t arguing they should leave. At crucial moments, he always went along with the moves. As ever, he was part of the Forum. Steve edged towards the door. Ingrid caught him and sank fingers into his slickered hair; spiking it as she mouthed the lower half of his face.

Several other shag-hags had divested themselves of outer garments. Peggy Lee sang ‘Fever’ and the scene, apparently set for an orgy, was ready for a St Valentine’s Day massacre.

The intercom buzzed four times. Anne Nielson had turned up, presumably in a state approximating high dudgeon, and barged into the printer’s. There, if Eugene had delivered it properly, she’d be given a message that Neil awaited her violent wrath in the pub down the road.

Ingrid had been listening for the signal and, in an instant, swarmed over to Neil and comprehensively rubbed herself against him. He put up a token resistance, drunkenly flapping arms as she tipped his stool against the bar, unzipping his fly and wrenching apart the front of his jeans.

‘Baby need some juice,’ she muttered.

Mickey and Michael moved aside to give the girl room. Neil held the bar and wriggled, trying to escape. She chewed his T-shirt out of his belt and exposed a lightly hairy belly. Frank pulled a pint and left it for Mickey to tip over gently. Bitter cascaded down the back of Neil’s jacket, slopping into the art folder; soaking the boards. Two weeks’ work ruined.

The pub doors pushed in. Mickey held his breath.

Neil looked up as Ingrid sucked a mouthful of flesh from his bare stomach and made a chewing motion. His jeans were around his thighs. He couldn’t help but laugh, though there was a seam of panic in his tickled giggling. Jerry Lee Lewis sang ‘Breathless’.

Anne Nielson had shorter hair than in her pictures. Her face was a blank sheet of fury. Mickey was glad he wasn’t the one who’d have to give her an explanation.

Michael hooked with his foot and Neil’s stool shot out from under him. He collapsed badly, the art folder breaking his fall, wet boards cracking under his weight. He gargled a scream as Ingrid pressed down like a wrestler, shoving tits into his face.

Michael turned away, unable to look. Mickey sat on his stool, cold sober, watching Anne walk across the room. Ingrid got out of the way and, hugging her chest, squirmed into the background. Neil, surprised again, half sat up and, seeing Anne, closed his eyes to make a wish.

‘W
here would we be without Neil?’

Good point, Michael thought. Trust Mark to think of the really scary question. If the Absent Friend gave up, would everything else in the Deal fall apart? Like Dorian Gray after stabbing the picture?

No time to worry now.

* * *

Returning from the scene dock - he’d said he was nipping off for a pee - he was besieged by minions.

Meaghan, the make-up girl, dabbed his face, filling in tiny lines around his eyes. She reshaped his hair and whisked a cloud of spray around his head. As he shut his eyes, April gave him a rundown of technical glitches. The sound man wired a mike into Michael’s flowery waistcoat and screwed in his earpiece. He was wired to the control-room. The director buzzed in his ear. Messages were handed to him, signatures were required of him, jokes were passed on.

Quarter of an hour to go.

* * *

Out there in the viewing audience were people he needed to reach. Before talking to them en masse, he had to make direct contact.

He had April bring him a mobile phone and stabbed out the number of the Tottenham Command Post of the English Liberation Front. He found a studio corner and hunched down, keeping outsiders away.

A weak-sounding old lady answered after several rings and he asked to speak with Stan Gull. After a half-minute of enervating -twelve minutes to air time! - doddering, Corporal Jones came on.

‘Gull here.’

‘You don’t know me,’ Michael said in a Northern purr, enunciating the ‘y’ in you, ‘but I’m a supporter o’ yewer cause.’

‘Cause?’

‘Keeping them blackies down, laura norder.’

‘Good man,’ Gull spluttered.

‘I’m with t’ Muswell Hill Police Station, and I thought you should know there’s someone making trouble. I’ve done my best to bury t’ complaints but there’s nobbut a little I can do. Ower sergeant is one o’ them loony lefties...’

‘Vermin,’ Gull snapped instinctively.

‘Too bloody right. Birching and hanging’s too good for ’em.’

Gull grunted approval.

‘Any rate, this troublemaker’s name is Neil Martin. His address...’

‘I know his address,’ Gull said, indignant. ‘We know all about Mr Neil Martin and his friends.’

‘T’ lads think he’s one o’ them journalist pooves, researchin’ a big exposé...’

‘Journalist? That is a new one. Fear not, the problem will be dealt with. Dealt with, with ruthless efficiency.’

‘Good,’ said Michael, hanging up. He stood and made April, who had been loitering, jump.

‘They want you on set,’ she said.

‘Coming, coming,’ he replied, tossing her the mobile phone.

* * *

He took his throne in the centre of the studio, between a young female politician and an elderly male pop star. The audience, who sat in ranks of raised seats, applauded, but the floor manager waved them quiet, telling them to save their hands for the on-air signal. Four cameras hovered like Daleks.

‘Chuffed to have zhou, Denny,’ he told the pop star. ‘Zhou were the idol of my childhood.’

The singer, shirt open to reveal a mat of dyed chest hair, grinned. Since the sixties, he’d only touched the charts in a duet with an alternative comedian, sending up one of his smouldering kitsch ballads. According to April, who’d researched him, Denny Wolfe had been a good guitarist with Tamsin’s first band before he struck out on his own. He had spent the last two months playing Buttons in Bolton.

‘And Morag,’ he said to the politician, ‘great to have zhou back.’

Morag Duff, severe jacket over a feminine dress, smiled exactly as her publicity agent advised. A humourless middle-of-the-road disciplinarian, she had an image problem. Doing
Dixon’s On
made her seem more approachable and disposed towards youth. She’d be a pussycat.

The studio clock gave them ninety seconds. The main lights went down, putting everyone in shadow. On a monitor he saw the last of the ads give way to a misleading trail for the late-night adult movie and a station ident as the disembodied continuity announcer (he assumed they were grown in vats in the Derek Leech Pyramid) plugged
What a Grunge!,
a soon-to-debut Cloud 9 series, and read out the lead-in. As the director counted down, Michael nodded along with the numbers.

‘Zero, and go...’

The house band played the theme tune - an up-tempo arrangement of Hank Williams’ ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’ - and the lights came up, spreading warmth across the studio floor; pinning the guests to their chairs. The floor manager waved as if signalling a bomber back to an aircraft carrier and the audience unloosed a burst of clapping. Applause popped in his ears like amyl nitrate in his nose. The you’re-on-television rush propelled him out of the seat. Bright light hugged him. He walked up to the camera with the glaring red light and grabbed its attention with a ‘hey, look at me’ gesture, then read his topical monologue from the autocue.

* * *

By the first ad break, Morag had practically wet her seat squealing and giggling. Denny was so floppily laid back it was hard to tell where he left off and his chair began.

They’d got the Big Heart slot out of the way to overwhelming ahhhing and sniffing from the studio audience. While the last lingering shot of the faithful cat mewing at her braindead mistress’s bedside was broadcast, he told Morag a filthy joke. When the camera came back to them live in the studio, he had his serious face ready and, as the politician choked on her own laugh, asked her what exactly her policy was on improved care for coma patients. As her face went scarlet, he imagined her publicity agent choking on a vol-au-vent in the Hostilities Suite.

After the ad break, there was a pre-filmed item in which famous women talked (and laughed) about penis size. Nearly seven minutes free.

* * *

At the back of the set, mike turned off, he worked the mobile phone again. The audience could see him but wouldn’t know what he was doing.

‘Gregory Residence,’ a woman’s voice said. Liz Gregory.

‘Might I speak to Jonathan please?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Tell him Mr Sington.’

There was urping in the background and Jonathan said he’d take it in the hall and it was about school. From the buzz of jingle-noise, he could tell the Gregory household was watching Cloud 9. He tried to remember his Sington voice, hoping it different enough from his own for Jonathan not to make the connection.

The boy came on.

‘Got a pen and paper, Jonathan?’

‘Uh, what? Yes.’

‘Good. You know a shop called Planet Janet? In the Archway Road.’

‘Yes, comics and things.’

‘Right. I’ve got another mission for you. The front of Planet Janet. Smash it.’

‘Um...’

‘This time I want a message around the stone. Get this exactly. Write: Martin, Die You Nazi Filth. Got that?’