The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  They all looked at each other.

  ‘Let’s rock and roll,’ Michael said.

  6

  TWELFTH NIGHT, 1993

  Derek Leech International squatted in London Docklands, a wedge of dark. The black glass pyramid was often described as a newly landed spaceship; at once, spearhead of an invasion and monument to the defeat of Earth.

  In courtier’s velvet, Mark strode past ranks of flash cars to the doors. His cardkey parted glass slabs. A liveried guard passed a detector over his doublet and hose. He was ruled admissible, even allowed to keep the sword that came with the costume.

  A mannequin with a carved smile checked his invitation against her clipboard. He remembered her from a ballet Dorian Gray: she was the portrait, repulsive while her twin remained lithe and perfect, or maybe she’d danced Dorian, and another functionary, greeting at another entrance, had been the picture.

  From the atrium, he walked into the ballroom. The building’s hollow core was a new gothic silo. Impossible to heat, it was as cold as the wastes outside. Mark was sure he felt a rain-fleck on his numb cheek. Guests in Elizabethan court dress clustered in pools of spotlight. They turned to note his presence then resumed hushed talk, frosted breath clouding. Leech provided the costumes himself, ensuring a consistent look. He was a host who hired a production designer before a caterer.

  On a granite dais, a period troupe played ‘When That I Was And a Little Tiny Boy’. A performance artist in whiteface stood on a separate plinth, skewered by crossed light beams, repeating the first sentence of Twelfth Night in unpunctuated monotone.

  ‘...appetite may sicken and so die if music be the food of love play on give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die if music be the food of love play on give me excess of it that...’

  ‘He can do it for hours,’ breathed an admirer. ‘Hours and hours.’

  Mark had a rush of guilt: two years ago, The Shape had run a feature on the monotonist. When the time came, that should be worth ten minutes in the Devil’s barbecue pit.

  ‘...give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken...’

  Twelfth Night was also Epiphany, he remembered. But Leech’s revel reminded him more of the Masque of the Red Death.

  A dignified nude, blue but for a circle in the small of her back, approached with a salver of black and white hors d’oevres. The blue lady was a former Comet Knock-Out of the Year: a layer of dye prevented her gooseflesh wobbling, lending a peculiarly clothed aspect. He took a roll of black substance that looked like a dolly mixture but tasted of seafood.

  ‘Ho, varlet,’ he was hailed.

  Michael was red-cheeked, playing it up as Sir Toby, with Ginny Moon as his short-tempered Maria. She must be piqued not to be Viola.

  ‘Shouldn’t zhou be Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek?’

  ‘I’m a one-scene wonder,’ Mark admitted. ‘Gentleman, attending on the Duke.’

  ‘Love the danglies,’ Ginny said. ‘Are they real?’

  Mark’s padded jacket was hung with teardrop pearls.

  ‘The way to tell real from false is to roll them between zhour teeth,’ Michael told his wife. ‘Zhou can spot glass eyes that way as well.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ she said. ‘Perhaps Mark would be available later for a consumer test.’

  She prodded Mark’s breast with a sharp forefinger and tickled a pearl as if it were a nipple.

  ‘Lady, you are the cruel’st she alive,’ he quoted.

  ‘We did Twelfth Night for “O” level,’ Michael explained. ‘We did Shakespeare in the Zhouth Theatre, then put on our own version.’

  ‘You were Sir Toby,’ Mark remembered.

  ‘And zhou were Malvolio.’

  ‘God, yes. Mickey was Sir Andrew, doing Kenneth Williams.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘We were terrible.’

  ‘You still are,’ Ginny commented.

  ‘Too zhoung for “O” levels,’ Michael whispered in exaggerated aside, ‘has a GCSE or two, but scant real qualifications.’

  Before being cast in Victorian-Edwardian dramas of repressed women, sumptuous costumes and pretty manners, Ginny had been with the RSC. Her Shrew was well spoken of. Now, she was doing a Jackie Collins mini-series, playing an English bitch who loses her lover to Stefanie Powers.

  A shape shambled from the darkness, bells tinkling.

  ‘Here comes the fool, i’faith,’ Mark quoted.

  ‘How now, my hearts?’ Mickey replied, on cue. ‘Did you never see the picture of we three?’

  He was in a jester’s particolour, waving a pig’s bladder on a stick. Braids escaped from his three-belled cowl.

  ‘You can’t have been Sir Andrew and the clown,’ Mark said aloud.

  ‘Neil played Feste,’ Michael said.

  ‘Neil?’ Ginny asked.

  ‘No one,’ they all said at once.

  ‘If Neil were here, he’d be Malvolio,’ Michael said. ‘Crossgartered and stitched up.’

  It was as if ice-water were dashed in Mark’s eyes. Michael was drunk, he knew at once. When drunk, Michael always flirted with the possibility of revelation. He believed most in the Deal and was most its prisoner.

  ‘Such a cruel comedy, Twelfth Night,’ Michael continued. ‘Worthless, rich people torture a middlerank loser.’

  Mark and Mickey looked coldly at Michael. Ginny, though involved, was an outsider. It wouldn’t do to talk about the Deal, even obscurely, with her. She had the glazed look outsiders always got when the Quorum ganged up. They shared much that was trivial to the rest of the world.

  ‘Take comfort milady,’ Mickey said to Ginny. ‘Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.’

  ‘I marvel zhour ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal,’ Michael struck back, changing instantly from lusty Sir Toby to withering Malvolio.

  ‘I can’t believe you remember all this,’ Ginny wondered. ‘I’ve forgotten my sides from the Morse I did last month, let alone Shakespeare from years ago.’

  Michael made a groping lunge at Ginny and she screamed; their way of making up. Mark was grateful Pippa was still off with her parents.

  ‘Isn’t it sweet they still can’t keep their hands off each other?’ Mickey said, head on one side. ‘Fuckin’ cats in heat.’

  ‘By the way,’ Michael said, pausing in mid-assault. ‘Sally Rhodes?’

  Mark nodded assent. Michael knew what he meant.

  ‘Told zhou so.’

  Ginny, momentarily puzzled, was overwhelmed again. Michael grunted like a bear and regurgitated gobbets of Shakespeare.

  ‘How now, my nettle of India,’ he said, sorting through her skirts.

  ‘My masters,’ Mickey breathed, ‘are you mad?’

  That was a Malvolio line too. Pidgin Shakespeare was catching.

  ‘Educating us was a very great mistake,’ said Mark in a twentieth-century voice. ‘It has made us unbearable.’

  ‘Tell me about it, chum,’ Ginny said, wrestling Michael upright.

  A fanfare filled the vast space with noise. Everyone looked up to the black canopy. Indoor plants hung from the topmost tiers. Pterodactyls probably nested there. A scenic lift, lit from within, began a slow descent, crawling down the pyramid. The man inside was silhouetted by outward-shining lights. Guests gathered in a semi-circle around the lift-bed; they might indeed be courtiers. A stately and veiled Olivia stood alone.

  ‘Isn’t that Tamsin?’ Ginny asked.

  Michael shushed her; everyone here was Tamsin, or someone else of rank. A junior cabinet minister, a famously carnivorous publisher, a director about to go from Film on 4 to Hollywood, a scandalous architect, a bestseller-list thriller writer, a reformed rock legend. Even the naked waitresses were stars. Mark tried not to wonder if they all had Deals.

  Doors slipped open silently. Derek Leech - Duke Orsino, of course - emerged, posing an instant for flash-photographs, and descended wide steps to be among his people. A thin carpet of phosphorescent mist edged out of the
lift and spilled down the stairs, dissipating on engraved tiles.

  A woman darted forward to kneel and kiss Leech’s gloved hand, tonguing the ruby of his largest ring. In her forties, she fought the planned obsolescence of the human machine, face pulled back as if by Sellotape under her ears, generous body confined by a doublet that lifted and shaped her memorable torso.

  ‘Do you know who that is?’ Mark said, nodding. ‘Brie Simon.’

  Mickey was amazed. ‘Devil Daughter of Dracula? That Brie Simon?’

  ‘She was the first Comet Knock-Out,’ Michael explained to Ginny, who looked disapproving. She’d gone nude in The Woman Who Did, but it was necessary to the plot.

  ‘When I was fourteen, she was the summit of my shagging ambitions,’ Mickey said. ‘I’m at a party with one of my masturbation fantasies.’

  Michael gave out a full-throated Sir Toby Belch laugh, which attracted Leech’s attention. He helped Brie up and looked to the Quorum. As one, they automatically gave courtiers’ bows to the Master of the Deal.

  ‘D’you suppose I should try...’ Mickey thought out loud.

  ‘Might be like sampling a famous nineteenth-century vintage,’ Michael said. ‘Gone to vinegar.’

  ‘Don’t be sexist,’ Ginny criticised, ‘or I’ll hack off your bollocks and stuff them up your nostrils.’

  Mark was struck again by how unchanging, how ordinary, Leech was. Everyone else was obviously important, famous, vital. Without his costume, he’d look like a bank manager on a Monsters of Rock stage. Yet...

  ‘Remember when the allosaurus chewed off Brie Simon’s bikini top in Prehistoric Valley?’ said Mickey. ‘Hot fuck, I have to be on a New York flight at three, or I might have fulfilled another teenage dream. Since I killed Amazon Twazzock, there aren’t many left.’

  Brie Simon put an arm around Leech and leaned forward, allowing a look into her cold deep cleavage.

  ‘If I nail Brie Simon,’ Mickey told Ginny, ‘there’s only your mother left and my life is complete.’

  ‘You can have my mother.’

  Michael chuckled at Mickey’s tongue-dangling.

  ‘Guess who’s thinking of working for me in publicity on the INT front,’ Mark said, maliciously. ‘Penny Gaye.’

  Michael gulped, remembering. Ginny looked perplexed again.

  Mark slid off in search of drink. He watched Mickey and Michael pay homage to Leech, chatting and nodding, smiling and pretending.

  ‘Pensive?’ a woman asked.

  It was Tamsin, oddly unaccompanied. The singer had been married to Leech. She lifted her veil. She had lines but was lovely.

  ‘Have you just seen the bars?’

  ‘The bar’s over there,’ he said, indicating a low table where body-painted Knock-outs dispensed sparkling, insubstantial wines.

  ‘No, the bars,’ she explained, gripping an imaginary cage.

  He sipped fizz from a delicate glass flute.

  ‘I used to think it was a menagerie,’ she said, taking such elaborate care to pronounce every word that he knew she was drunk. ‘Then it was a prison. Now it’s a circle of hell.’

  ‘You’ve had too much,’ he was compelled to say.

  ‘The scary thing is he never lied. We knew what we were getting.’

  For Christmas, Mark had given Pippa I Know Where I’m Going, Tamsin’s latest album on CD. It was her best, most mature work. If Billie Holliday had been born white in Egham in 1949, she’d have grown up to be Tamsin.

  The legend gargled and tossed her flute into the air. It shattered quietly.

  ‘I know where I’m going, she sang, her voice a claw in the heart, ‘and I know who goes with me, I know whom I love, but the De’il knows who I’ll marry...’

  Unsure on her feet, she was incapable of less than perfection.

  ‘The De’il knows who I’ll marry,’ she sighed. ‘The De’il.’

  ‘Darling,’ interrupted Derek Leech, one word a hand of ice, ‘you’ve met Mark Amphlett.’

  ‘Mark,’ she said, eyebrow arched, arm out. Her immense hem gathered and fastened to her wrist, a billow of pale blue falling to the floor. He took her frozen hand and squeezed, unsure if he should kiss her knuckles.

  ‘Mark is a cutting-edge young man. He has seen the future and is making a place for us in it.’

  ‘That’s the deal,’ Mark admitted.

  Gently, without seeming to, Leech held Tamsin up. He chewed, neck muscles undulating his ruff. With serpent elegance, the multimedia magnate steered his ex-wife back to the light.

  Mark’s lungs hurt. Since Leech spoke he had not exhaled. Choking, he let out breath.

  ‘Too much vino?’ Mickey asked, belabouring him with his pig’s bladder. He held a small scroll of paper. ‘Brie Simon’s phone number. I’ll be back from the Big Apple by the next week. Then... va-va-voommm! As the Bard said, “He that is well-hung in this world need fear no colours.”’

  ‘“Hanged”, Shakespeare wrote.’

  Mickey’s pelvic thrust set his bells a-jingling.

  ‘Mickey, you’re a clown.’

  Mickey did a Jolson kneel, hands outstretched. A grin opened in his face, stretching like a slit throat from ear to ear.

  ‘He’s not a clown,’ Michael said, having ditched Ginny and slipped away, ‘he’s positively an Eozoon, simplest lifeform on Earth.’

  Mickey laughed and sloshed Michael with his bladder, which prompted Michael to go for his sword.

  Mark fingered one of the pearls on his doublet. As far as he could tell, it was real.

  ‘How did we get here from there?’ he asked. His friends didn’t hear the question. ‘We used to hate people like us.’

  Michael stood straight to recite. Mickey went for a low hold.

  ‘If these shadows have offended,’ Michael yelped, ‘fuck off.’

  7

  TWELFTH NIGHT, 1978

  Concentrating on the ground, he sat on the steps of the Rat Centre and hugged his knees. His brain sloshed in its skull-tank of cerebral fluid. Snow fell on his head and hands, tiny lashes of ice. He’d been sick twice and assumed he would be again. Feet passed either side of him and hurried away, leaving slushy tracks on deadly pavement. Snow thickened in the street, as if God wanted to draw a veil over the evening. That’d be quite all right with Michael.

  ‘Ground Control calling,’ Mickey said, voice distorting. ‘Earth to Planet Dixon.’

  ‘Houston,’ Michael gulped, ‘we’ve got a problem...’

  A burst of gurgling pain knotted his gut. A string of clear beery fluid hung like an icicle from his mouth. ‘Chunderball,’ Neil commented. Neil held the Forum’s vomit record: seven spasms, one binge. In ancient days, it was Michael handing the bucket and towel to his friend.

  Mark, the most nearly sober stood nearby, collar turned up, thin girlfriend waiting, desperate to clear off but unable to leave. Michael’s own squeeze might be about somewhere; he thought she’d tootled off with her own crowd.

  ‘It’s hard to credit,’ he mumbled. ‘She’s so stupid, zh’know. She doesn’t understand so much...’

  At the safety-pinned height of the biggest cultural revolution since Stravinsky, Alex was into Rod Stewart. Since Christmas, Michael had left six messages with Penny’s parents. Home from Poly, she hadn’t turned up tonight. He began to think they were seriously finished. When they broke up, he filled notebooks with agonised introspection, always assuming it temporary. Something happened to people who went away. To Penny, to Mark, to the others. Something secret and unshared, an initiation. They were off having the verifiable time of their lives.

  He was left behind in the Backwater, forgotten and floundering. Things were sick-makingly desperate.

  ‘This isn’t like us,’ he said.

  Neil shrugged. The lights of the Rat Centre went out.

  Other Forum shows had been shambolic disasters but exhilaration and defiance carried them off. Twelfth Night ’78 was the worst flop ever. If it were any more of a dog, it would require a licence. Nothing had really
gone wrong, Neil hadn’t fallen over, Mickey hadn’t savaged the piano with an axe. That might have added spontaneity to the mausoleum on stage. Mark, standing apart from the others, went through it without giving anything of himself. To compensate, Michael overstrained for reaction, any reaction. Heckling and cabbage would have been better than the sussurus of disinterest. The black hole of the auditorium swallowed their efforts. By the interval, much of the audience had drifted to the bar, too involved in their own talk to pay attention. In the last quarter of an hour, Mark joined them, leaving a gap on the stage the others had to revolve around. Every note sounded hollow, every line a stone tossed into a bottomless chasm. It really was kids’ stuff.

  In olden times, people hung around for invitations to Michael’s legendary Achelzoy parties. Half the kids in town lost their virginities at his grandparents’ house. Everyone first smoked drugs in the old coal-shed they called the Führer Bunker. Once Desmond had convulsions, writhing across the road in a blue sleeping-bag like a giant worm, causing a milk-float to swerve into a ditch. Tonight, they ducked out early, making apologies about vile weather, pointedly not mentioning the show. It was the end of an Empire.

  A car cruised down the road, leaving muddy tyre tracks in the thin snow-blanket. The horn honked and Mark went over: it was Desmond, on his way out to Achelzoy with a couple of die-hards.

  ‘We might be a while,’ Mark told him.

  Michael was supposed to be driving. His grandparents always left him their car so he could look after the place. They knew about the parties, but he made sure the place was tidied when they got back.

  A negotiation was underway. Neil volunteered to go with Desmond and open the house. Michael found keys in his jacket pocket and handed over. Mark convinced Pippa to go with the guys, promising to be along soon.

  ‘I think I’m driving Michael out,’ he explained. ‘It’s my contribution to keeping death off the roads.’

  Neither Neil nor Mickey could drive.

  Despite everything, a few were going to the party. Michael thought Alex might drag some of her minors along later. And he’d left a message for Penny.