The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  ‘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?’

  ‘Martin, Die You Nazi Filth.’

  ‘Excellent. Must go now.’

  ‘I’m not sure...’

  ‘I could talk with your parents. You’ve been getting my packages?’

  ‘Yes. No. No problem with the shop.’

  He hung up and got back to his seat. April, as ordered, had provided Denny with a tumbler of vodka. By his slot, he’d be sloshed enough to produce some sort of spectacle.

  Barry Gatlin, who had wild eyes and several rows of teeth, did a routine about famous turds. The audience laughed uncomfortably as the vein throbbed in the comedian’s forehead. He was a confrontational act. He always picked the most attractive woman in the first row and sexually harangued her.

  Tonight, Dixon’s On was fair-to-good. Nothing to compare with the show last year when Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, fuelled in the Green Room, re-enacted their nude wrestling scene from Women in Love. But nothing to be ashamed of either.

  Strutting around the studio, insulting the audience, Barry Gatlin prowled in search of a victim-for-the-night. In the end, he ignored the bottle-bleach blonde Michael assumed he’d go for, and picked Morag the MP.

  ‘Darlin’, darlin’,’ he said, teeth click-clacking, tongue darting like an angry lizard, jeans-crotch out-thrust. ‘How about a little Private Member’s Bill? My private member fits your bill’.

  Appalled, Morag pleaded for help but Michael edged away and let Bastard Barry get into his stroke. After this, anything Michael did would seem reasonable.

  * * *

  In the second ad break, April darted in with the log of phone complaints so far. Barry Gatlin was slipping: only forty-five viewers had been upset enough to call in, and twenty-three of those accused him of political bias rather than the usual appalling taste and crudity.

  ‘I’ve been pondering North London Nazis,’ he told the researcher. ‘Get Roily on to them. There might be a good contretemps in it if we had a strike force of skinhead überfilth on with Spike Lee next series.’

  ‘Nazis, right?’ April queried, unsure.

  ‘English Liberation Front, people like that.’

  ‘Wonderful, lovely, super,’ she said. ‘Outstanding idea. Admirable content. Quality programming.’

  She retreated as the countdown came again.

  ‘Okey-dory so far?’ he asked Denny. The singer gulped the last of his third vodka and gave a good-humoured, empty-eyed grin.

  ‘Fantasmashing,’ he said. ‘Welcome back from the huckstering, beloved viewers. Up next, and I sincerely mean up, is Luscious Lola Fogbotham, the Marlene of Macclesfield...’

  * * *

  The special guest was a Northern transvestite rapper plugging his album, There’s Nowt so Queer as Homosexuals. Then it was time for the star interview. The director said they had five minutes after the lead-in. The show was running exactly to time.

  ‘Tonight, we’re enormously proud and privileged to have as our hot-seat-sitter a man I for one can barely remember, but if zhou wake up Granny I’m sure she can explain zhust exactly who he is. Denny...’

  The singer smiled tolerantly, eyes wide and innocent. He was pretty far gone as he rambled weirdly into an almost-revealing interview. Michael chose his most devastating technique, opening with the question, ‘Well, whatever happened to you?’ and sitting back, eyebrows raised, while the camera fixed itself on the puffy face of the pop singer refusing to budge, as he tried to fill dead air with incoherent sentences.

  The audience held their breath as if watching open-heart surgery. Morag tried to butt in, perhaps to take the heat off Denny, but Michael gripped her arm and shut her up. At last, as Denny remembered his detox ordeal, tears sprang out of his eyes and Michael ended the torture. Tomorrow, it would be remembered. Hideous, but good television.

  ‘I had a good deal once,’ Denny maundered, ‘but I blew it.’

  When the agony was over, he announced the week’s competition, flashing a doctored photograph of a Royal Personage with his head down a toilet and asking the audience to phone the 0898 number at the bottom of the screen with funny captions.

  * * *

  Before the house band’s last number it was time for the What Gets Up My Nose slot. He always did it without a net: no script, no autocue, no nothing.

  ‘Zh’know what’s been Getting Up My Nose this week?’ he asked the camera. ‘Basildon.’

  The audience was mainly blank. Someone at the back tittered.

  ‘Zheah, Basildon. I mean: why is it there, what is it for? Who reads their newspaper? Zh’know, Basildon Echo was recently voted the Most Boring Local Paper in Britain. Congratulations Basildonians. Let’s take a look at it, shall we?’

  He took the paper out from under the desk and unfolded it.

  ‘The big headline feature is about someone from Department S opening a supermarket. Remember Department S, wrinklies? Pardon me while I hyperventilate. And a cat’s been saved from a tree. Major scoop there. Oh, and let’s not forget the council’s big decision on playgrounds. We’ve been waiting for that make-or-break moment for six months in our house.’

  He tore the paper up and threw it away.

  ‘Basildon, eh? Aren’t zhou glad zhou don’t live there. Or maybe zhou do. No, let’s face it, it’s nearly eleven o’clock on a Friday night. In Basildon, that’s past anyone’s bedtime. Basildon, wake up!’

  Morag,
whose constituency was uncomfortably near Basildon, laughed fit to explode her bladder. The director got in a few cutaways, during the routine.

  ‘Why did the old lady cross Basildon High Street? It’s a step in the right direction, away from bloody Basildon. Why does a Basildon fireman wear red braces? Rotten fashion sense. My wife’s just been to Basildon. Zhamaica? Bloody had to, mate. What’s the difference between a Basildon girl and the Titanic? Only 1500 men went down on the Titanic. Zhou know, if I owned Hell and Basildon, I’d live in Hell and rent out the Other Place.’

  The audience had gone beyond being puzzled and started laughing. The director gave him ten seconds.

  ‘Zhou know what’s black and white and crap all over? The Basildon Echo.’

  Denny, off-camera, had sunk his face into his hands. Tears dripped through his fingers. He had no idea where he was any more or what he’d said five minutes ago.

  ‘This has been Dixon’s On,’ Michael said. ‘Dixon’s off now. Good night and get lost.’

  * * *

  In the Green Room, he told everyone it’d been a great show. Bastard Barry tried to get past Morag’s hatchet-faced image manager; and the MP’s minders closed ranks to protect her. She looked disappointed. Michael wondered if her constituency committee would think deselection.

  Denny Wolfe lurched past, supported by the sound man. Michael waved him a good night. He staggered over and breathed a poison cloud.

  ‘Do you have a deal?’ Denny asked.

  Michael’s smile froze.

  ‘I had a deal,’ Denny said, tapping his sternum.

  Michael shook his cold hand.

  ‘It’s been real,’ he said.

  Denny was taken away and poured into a minicab, sent off alone back to the Where Are They Now? file. He hadn’t even plugged his Soul of the ’60s tour supporting the Swinging Blue Jeans, which was why he was supposed to be on the show.

  He watched the singer go, then turned to his minions, who formed a comforting crowd. April bothered him with more forms to be signed. Meaghan approached with spirits to wipe away his make-up. The director emerged and was thanked for sterling work.

  The Hostilities Table was swept clean of crisps and sandwiches as if army ants had swept through. The crew and guests slugged back Moroccan wine Michael wouldn’t wash his socks with.

  Ginny, who had been invisibly in the audience, swept in ostentatiously and kissed him in public. She must have known there’d be a paparazzo ready to grab a candid. She pressed her cheek to his and spread a smile as the flash popped.

  ‘Wacky one, Gin,’ said the photographer; obviously the man from the Comet.

  She shoved her tongue in his ear. He was dazzled by the lights.

  ‘It’s a Day in the Life of a Hyperstar spread, bunnikins,’ she told him, posing again.

  April had the tapes of the broadcast gathered and ready to be taken back to the office.

  ‘I never knew you had so much against Basildon, darling,’ Ginny said.

  ‘Zhust a bit of a laugh. Nothing serious.’

  ‘That’s not how it sounded from out there.’

  He waved her worries away. ‘All make-believe and magic, Gin. We’re just flitting shadows across the electronic gulf.’

  17

  1984-1992

  The Quorum prospered.

  Mark founded The Shape, launching in the summer of 1984 with the strapline ‘The future, now!’ Start-up capital from Derek Leech enabled the magazine to survive a loss-making five years and establish itself as a cultural presence. Covering politics, technology, fashion, and lifestyle sciences, the magazine became the rallying point of a generation of young thinkers, the beacon of a wider circle of youngish trend-followers. On its say-so, the reputations of designers and artists were made or mangled. Mark produced and presented television shows, asked and answered questions, was profiled by every newspaper, added words to the language. He appeared on as many humorous celebrity quizzes as heavyweight current affairs debates. Pippa returned to Real Press as an editor and worked on Michael’s first novels. Together, Mark and Pippa bought the cottage at Herron’s Halt. They always assumed they would eventually marry for tax reasons but distractions like a six-month trip to Japan kept intervening. As a ‘future consultant’, Mark was employed at generous fees by major corporations, suggesting market strategies which would enable them to profit from predicted social changes. Weirdly, by intuition rather than extrapolation, he was more often proved right than anyone could have expected.

  Michael was approached by Channel 4 to devise a format for a late night slot on Mondays. Dixon's On proved one of the first significant hits of the new station, providing a viewing experience akin to zapping between 100 channels as items jostled each other out of the way accompanied by squiggly graphics and ten-second music stings. In 1984, he met and married Ginny Moon, an actress then winning awards for The Woman Who Did, a Film on 4 adaptation of Grant Allen’s 1895 novel. Michael and Ginny played a quivering manager and a breathless depositor in a series of popular semi-erotic commercials for a high street bank. When Derek Leech launched Chums condoms, Michael and Ginny advertised them too, even though they had just had a baby, Melanie. In 1988, Leech’s Cloud 9 made a record-setting bid and bought Dixon's On from Michael’s production company, making him the first high-profile defector from terrestrial television. In 1989, Colin Dale, Michael’s long-in-the-writing first novel, appeared and was an instant bestseller, the TV rights being snapped up at once by a strangely spendthrift BBC. Colin Dale was followed by a sequel, Ken Sington, in which Colin, the ne’er-do-well everyman protagonist, is contrasted with Ken, one of life’s eternal and infuriating winners. Fans wrote in asking when the deserving Colin would finally best the unworthy Ken, but Michael knew the series was infinitely extensible so long as the characters remained as they were.

  Mickey spent 1984 working on Mephistophilis, a thrash oratorio performed at Castle Donington by The Mothers of Pain, with Lemmy guesting as Helen of Troy. The Möthers’s ‘Hell and Damnation’, with Mickey playing keyboards, became a rare heavy-metal single to break the pop charts. In the summer of 1984, twenty-six-year-old Hunt Sealey suffered a seizure that rendered 10 per cent of his brain inoperative. He lost random slices of his memory and was unable to continue his court battle, ceding ground to his opponent, even covering legal costs. Mickey responded with The Only Death of Krazy Glue, ending the character’s career. He returned to ZC by writing and drawing a two-year run of Circe, turning the title from moribund loss to market leader. An ambiguous villainess who had knocked about the ZC universe since the 1960s, Circe became the most popular female character in comics, the unconventionally sexual protagonist of a dark, scratchy near-future religious conspiracy saga. While in the States, Mickey took a long weekend to write City Hammer, a low-budget screenplay about a vigilante cyborg which was picked up by an independent production company. Allan Keyes, a wunderkind director, turned it into a midnight movie cult. The soundtrack album, featuring ‘Death Tonalities’ composed by Mickey, made almost as much as the film. When his score went over 1,000, he stopped counting shag-hags. In 1991, Real Press commissioned a graphic novel, granting him unprecedented control, and he responded with the groundbreaking Choke Hold, which pushed back the boundaries of violence in the medium to such an extent that it was praised by The Times Literary Supplement and condemned vigorously from the floor of the House of Commons.

  In early 1984, Neil Martin parted company from Anne Nielson and The Scam. Nearly ten years later, after every other strangeness, he would still wonder what happened...

  18

  9 JANUARY, 1993

  Just past midnight, she was woken by squeals. After changing and settling the Invader, it was hard to get back to sleep. In a too-big bed in a too-small room, she looked at shadows on the ceiling. Living in a front-room on a main road meant getting used to passing lights.

  Was there a Shadowshark prowling up and down Fortis Green Road?

  The gays in the upstairs flat were partyin
g. Considerate neighbours, they kept their speakers down but Eurodisco rhythms pounded into the floor. The building hummed and throbbed.

  Mark Amphlett unnerved her. On the phone earlier, he’d been distant and strained. She missed three-quarters of his meaning but detected in him an impossible envy of Neil. Perhaps the Path Not Taken is always a temptation, no matter how rough? She’d never understand men: their relationships were so exclusive, so intangible. At school, she’d had friends and enemies. Then they disappeared from her life forever. Mark and Neil and Michael were still in each other’s pockets after twenty years.

  What could have happened?

  One day she’d have to explain to the Invader about Connor. Wouldn’t that be a delight? Mummy, why don’t I have a Daddy like other children?

  She saw the dressing-gown on the back of her door as a figure. A tall man in black. Dents in the door became piercing eyes. The shadow of the lintel was the brim of a hat.

  I do not love thee, Dr Shade.

  She turned over and pushed her face into soft pillow, letting her head be half-swallowed. It’d be nice to have an unknown protector: a forgotten schoolfriend willing to pay anonymous money to have her watched over. Or maybe it wouldn’t be nice. Maybe it’d be frightening.

  * * *

  Just past midnight (Eastern Standard Time), Mickey was in an Irish bar in the Village. He commandeered an upright piano. Stubbing fingers against yellow keys, he rinky-dinked from Satie to Little Richard. He imagined he was a brutal dentist chiselling eighty-eight teeth out of a willing mouth.

  After two days with Heather, he had no more feeling in his crotch. New York was a cyanide gas, but he had anxiety spasms about London. The moves were falling in strange ways. He wasn’t sure Michael or Mark could handle it. Both sounded pixilated. Mark was usually the mainstay, cool and calculating; this year, he was in Michael’s edge-of-hysteria slot.