The Quorum (7 page)

‘You’re No Good’ by the Swinging Blue Jeans came tinnily from the pink plastic radio.

Two girls ventured in and asked for him at the counter: Mama Gina nodded them towards him.

About fourteen: Jackie bands in their hair, white-cream dresses with cassata swirls of colour. Too close in age to be sisters. Best friends.

He took out his wallet.

‘We were told,’ the more intrepid girl began.

He opened his wallet. It was stuffed with tickets. The Searchers, Gerry & the Pacemakers, The Animals, Dusty Springfield.

‘Sold out for weeks, they said at the hall,’ the girl lamented.

The Beatles. This year, everyone wanted the Beatles.

‘Nothing is ever sold out.’

Nervous smiles.

He named a price. One girl gulped but the other opened a tiny handbag and took out a tinier purse. She unfolded notes and emptied small change on to the table.

‘Jan, where d’you get all that?’ her friend asked.

‘Mum.’

‘She know?’

Leech put two tickets on the table.

‘My pleasure, girls,’ he said.

‘You live over the shop?’ Tamsin said. ‘It’s just a box.’

It was a room with a bed. Leech rarely slept.

The bass player and the drummer sat on the bed. Denny Wolfe, the lead guitarist, crouched by the cold grate. Leech and Tamsin stood by the open window. She was the singer.

‘Thought you’d have a flash pad,’ the drummer said. ‘You must be rakin’ it in downstairs.’

Downstairs was the original Derek’s. Leech started in the King’s Road selling militaria, then rented rack-space to local designers. This year, old curtains with armholes would sell as swinging London fashions. There were five Derek’s now, dotted over London.

‘Money is only a tool,’ he said.

The musicians grinned. Boyish in cavalry sideburns and bright shirts. They would have six Top Twenty hits but only Tamsin would have a real career after the break-up. The drummer, now rolling a thin joint, would overdose in a New York hotel within ten years. Wolfe would strike a separate Deal but see little profit from it. The others would fade away.

Leech had had the management contract drawn up. Wolfe made a great show of reading it.

‘What’s your company called?’ Tamsin asked. ‘Derek’s Discs?’

‘Real Records.’

The drummer snorted and lit up. After a heavy toke, he passed the joint to Wolfe. Smoke, odourless to Leech, drifted towards the window.

Leech took out a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum and made a token of offering it round. No one took him up. He unwrapped all five oblongs and put them in his mouth. The ball would last for months.

The girl watched him closely.

‘You must love that stuff?’

He shrugged. ‘Only way to shut me up.’

Tamsin would marry him and, after three years, walk out claiming never to have known him. By then, she would be an official living legend. And he would still be a coming man.

Now, her face unlined and angular she looked at him. The light from the window hit her face exactly as it would on the first LP cover. She would never stipple her blackheads, but would redefine the word ‘beautiful’.

She leaned over and gently removed his sunglasses. He didn’t blink as she looked into his eyes.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Do you have a pen?’

‘This top’s too effing tight,’ the model complained, South London shrill, ‘pardon my French.’

Her name was Brenda but she called herself Brie. Blonde hair down to her waist, she knelt in six square-feet of sand. A blue space-hopper lay half-buried in front of a cyclorama of Mediterranean sky.

‘Bollocks, dearie,’ said Chaz, the photographer. He leaned into the shot to adjust the offending bikini.

‘Mind your bleedin’ hands, octopus,’ Brie said, slapping him away.

She was right. The striped cups squeezed her breasts, the straps bit her shoulders. Angry pink skin plumped around straining edges.

Leech sat in the shadows, champing the ends of a Biro. He wore his hat, brim down, to keep the studio lights out of his eyes. Since his take-over the
Daily Comet
had transformed from dying broadsheet into thriving tabloid. Its image was younger, more daring, more vital; yet offering a return to traditional values. Leech’s first great campaign ran under the banner of ‘I’m Behind Britain’.

Chaz, irritated with Brie, was nervous with the new boss hanging around. Everything else about the paper had changed, he must think the Beach Beauties were for the chop too.

The
Comet
Beach Beauties had been a national institution since the twenties. From knee-length costumes through to cutaway bikinis, these heroines of garage and barracks had married into titles, rocked governments and becomes hostesses on
The Golden Shot.
Brie, this year’s model, had been on television with Benny Hill and was cast in a film where Christopher Lee would suck her blood.

Brie squirmed under the lights and writhed in her top as if it were a hair shirt. Chaz’s bald spot was a sorely embarrassed red.

At first rival papers made jokes about the ‘with-it’
Comet.
The several fortunes Derek Leech had made in pop music and the rag trade did not qualify him as a latterday Lord Beaverbrook. Within a year of the
Comet’s
relaunch, the competition switched from sneering at his tactics to imitating them.

‘I’ll do myself a permanent damage,’ Brie whined, tugging at the constricting cups. Her pleasant face twisted in discomfort.

Chaz ignored her, muttering into his battery of camera equipment.

‘This all right, Mr Leech?’ he asked.

Leech walked onto the set and looked the girl over. Her head barely came up to his chest.

‘It’s agony, luv,’ she said.

‘Take it off,’ he told her.

She undid the clasp and shrugged. Her breasts breathed.

‘Take her like this,’ Leech told the photographer.

‘You can’t put tits in the
Comet
,’ he protested. ‘They’ll never stand for it.’

‘Let me worry about that.’

Chaz snapped off shots. Brie, suddenly giggly, posed naturally for the first time. She laughed and shaded her eyes, looking into the shadows at him. Leech knew exactly which exposure they would run: thumbnail in mouth, innocent and knowing, sexy but clean.

‘Knock out,’ Brie said.

Elizabeth II looked exactly as she did on a pound note, except for the safety-pin through her nose. ‘God Save the Queen’ was assembled from newsprint like a ransom note.

‘It’s a strong image,’ Leech said, placing the record sleeve on the table. ‘You have to admire that.’

Moore, the
Comet’
s notional editor gurgled outrage. He had come with the paper and still loitered nervously.

In the year-end ‘Derek Leech Talks Straight’ column, he was denouncing the Sex Pistols.

The
Comet,
swathed in the Union Jack throughout Jubilee year would brook no shilly-shallying.
Comet
‘Knock-Outs’ had posed as British heroines, climaxing on Jubilee Day with Brie Simon, at twenty-five the
grande dame
of naked breasts, kitted up as Britannia Herself.

1977 would be remembered not for celebration bonfires and patriotic bunting but for gobbing and pogoing. Real Records, buried in the heart of the Derek Leech media portfolio, had ridden the razor-blade along with the rest of the industry.

‘Shocking,’ Moore said, tapping the poster. ‘Some people have no standards.’

‘Indeed,’ Leech agreed. ‘Reproduce it with the column. Give the Queen vampire fangs. It’ll be stronger.’

Moore knew better than to object. He scuttled off.

Derek Leech Enterprises had manufactured cardboard Union Jack hats and tin ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ buttons. Both sold well, sometimes to the same customers.

The current office was not quite suitable. When the
Comet
was rehoused in the pyramid he would put up in London Docklands, things would be better arranged. That was in years to come. Leech already owned the site but the technology that would be housed there had not yet developed. The processes which would destroy the Fleet Street of hot-metal stirred inside the serpent’s egg, tentatively poking the shell.

His memory was perfect, from the Isle of Dogs to this moment. The paths of the future were clear, too. Nothing was set in stone but the tendencies were definite.

His jaws worked, grinding. No one remarked on the habit any more. He unlocked the lacquered box on his desk and took out four sets of file cards, lining them up as perfect stacks.

Amphlett, Dixon, Martin, Yeo.

These four - boys of seventeen or eighteen - were his children. If capable of human fondness, he was genuinely attached to them. Already, their lives were complicated and intertwined. Soon, a decision would be made. One must be separated and exalted above the rest. Four sharp, bright little lights. So much potential.

‘Capra may have suffered from what would be described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes as “the impostor phenomenon”, the fear common to many high achievers that their success is actually based on a fraud. Another psychologist who studied the phenomenon, Joan Harvey, has said that the sufferer also had the “obsessive fear that sooner or later some humiliating failure would reveal his secret and unmask him as a fraud. Some very famous people have suffered from the feeling all their lives, despite their obvious abilities.” In such people, “because each success is experienced either as a fluke, or as the result of Herculean efforts, a pattern of self-doubt, rather than self-confidence, develops,” and each success actually intensifies those feelings of fraudulence...

‘“First-generation professionals are very prone to feeling like impostors,” Harvey noted. “When people perceive themselves as having risen above their roots, it can evoke deep anxieties in them about separation. Unconsciously, they equate success with betraying their loyalties to their family.”

‘“Consciously,” she explained, those who suffer from the impostor phenomenon, “fear failure, a fear they keep secret. Unconsciously, they fear success.”’

JOSEPH MCBRIDE,
Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

S
he never had luck with this holiday. Over years, she’d dutifully endured disappointing parties and hoarse evenings in open-late pubs. The time she got it together to invite friends round, flu struck; she’d lain down an hour before guests arrived, shuddering uncontrollably in a backless dress, then forced herself to ignore the symptoms until past midnight. Last year, heavily pregnant, she’d stayed in watching TV, her mother plumped next to her on the too-small sofa. Now, here she was again: in the wars.

While Neil Martin was x-rayed, Sally loitered in the hospital corridor still decorated with tinsel and holly. A teenager with cobweb skirts hung on the phone, nibbling a dummy as she explained to an exasperated parent.

Neil probably wasn’t badly injured but the nurse wanted him to have a tetanus jab. A skull fracture or even concussion were unlikely; the head x-rays were just to be on the safe side.

Casualty offered all human life. An angry policeman and a merely fed-up lawyer argued over a youth who’d broken an ankle writing-off a stolen car A rave-goer with dental braces and a Mongol scalp-lock had swallowed party pills which her friend said ‘looked like smarties’. A fatherly man sat quiet, hand wrapped in a red tea-towel after a mishap with a Christmas present, an electric knife. A bored Asian had been stabbed. Plus there were relatives, witnesses, professional busybodies and hangers-on.

Sally was a professional hanger-on. She’d invoice for time and any expenses. Later she’d compose a note and fax the client a footnote. ‘We Never Sleep’, she could claim.

The ravette yielded the phone. Taking in Sally’s bun-tied hair red cardie and long black skirt, the girl blurted ‘Olive Oyl’. Sally had change for coin-ops, cards for cardphones: part of the job. It was nearer three a.m. than two; Mum wouldn’t have stayed up even to note the video clock slip silently from 11.59 to 00.00. On the line, her own phone rang. Double-doors opened: a bag lady staggered in, swathed in ratty scarves. Sally wondered what horrible injury she’d sustained, but the weather-beaten virago turned out to be a relief driver come for the joyrider’s lawyer. This must be the worst night of the year for minicabs.

‘Mum?’

The receiver was fussed with. Mum always got the cordless phone the wrong way up. A baby mewed in the background. The Invader was as likely to wake up screaming without a dead-of-night phone call but Sally still had a guilt-stab.

‘You said you’d be home hours ago. Where are you?’

‘Casualty,’ she said.

Mum groaned silently. Other women’s daughters had husbands, careers, settled lives; Maureen Rhodes was stuck with a minimally self-employed single parent who typed reports on Christmas morning.

‘I’m not hurt,’ she assured Mum. ‘A guy at Dolar’s party...’

* * *

The party was a bus-hop away in Highgate Village. Dolar owned the shop where Neil did odd shifts behind the till. She’d seen him about well before the commission, wizardy in black velvet coat and dragon-badge-ringed hat. They had fringe friends in common but only really met when Sally started on Neil Martin. She’d probably have gone to the party anyway: having been cooped up with Mum and the Invader over the holiday, she could do with talking to someone in her age range and dancing off chocolate and leftover turkey.

The invite said ‘come as your favourite comix character’. Fancy dress was a bother. The icy fog that descended before Christmas made Highgate Wood a haunted forest of sparkly frost and witch mist. Imagining Amazon Queen, her childhood heroine, with nipples frozen to knots and acres of goose-pimples between thighboots and brass bra, she decided on Olive Oyl. She pinned a collar to a cardigan, found an ankle-skirt that didn’t hobble her, fussed her hair into a ball.

Protective colour, Mummy?

Mind your own business, flesh of my flesh.

‘My hero,’ she said to her mirror pining for a sailor with forearm elephantiasis. Actually, Olive Oyl was a drip: fecklessly making up to Bluto then yelling to be saved from justifiable date rape. The only cartoon woman worse was Amy McQueen, knock-kneed alter ego of Amazon Queen, but she faked feebleness to stop her boyfriend guessing her double life. Sally did her lipstick. Like Amazon Queen and Dr Shade, she needed a secret identity. Under her cupid’s bow, she was Sally Rhodes, Investigator.