The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  Then you worked it out, Mummy? Like a proper detective?

  She’d been hired between New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day. The dates bounded the Deal. The Quorum had only six weeks to make moves. Time enough. In under two weeks, the persecution had achieved its ultimate end.

  Was it over? Had the Quorum won?

  If Neil was out of the game, where did that leave the others? Where did it leave her?

  Another person might turn on her masters, undo the Device, pull the Deal apart. See cosmic justice done. She half-thought Leech wanted that of her. But if serving the Quorum left her wrung-dry and dead, how would she feel if she became Leech’s footsoldier?

  She held her baby.

  What did you do next, Mummy?

  Good question, kid.

  3

  9-11 JANUARY, 1993

  ‘I’ve got a plate in my skull,’ Dolar said, for the twelfth time, ‘a silver plate from like Vietnam, only I got it coming off a bike at Reading. I get interference from secret government stations. It’s why I’m here, man. I’m locked up cause I like know too much. It’s Mars. They’re all going to Mars, the pigs, the Royal Family, the gunmint. We’re like left gasping when the Earth’s air farts away through the ozone layer, but they’re gonna terraform this alien world and make it Earth II. There’re no aliens, like extraterrestrials, in UFOs, they’re gunmint spies, setting up this Exodus of the Establishment. It’s been coming a long time. Lenin knew all about the ecosphere, that’s why they killed him. The Nazis were part of it, and Aleister Crowley. Kennedy said he’d get to the bottom of it before Castro had him shot.’

  ‘And Elvis?’ Mark said, pointedly. The cell was a ten-foot cube; sharing it with Dolar was like being buried alive with a hyperactive stoat.

  ‘Elvis?’ the hippie said. ‘What’s Elvis got to do with anything? We’re into important issues like the survival of humanity, and you’re talking rock ’n’ roll icons.’

  Mark didn’t know where they were and no one, not even kindly WPC Cotterill, would deign to tell him. There’d been an overflow in Muswell Hill (not enough cells for the ‘rioters’) and some were bussed out to other holding facilities. Since he was lumped with Dolar, who addressed constables as ‘Earthling Pig’, not much sympathy was directed his way.

  In the next cell, ELF bruisers struck up an ‘oi’ chant of ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia Kicks Coon Arse’ as a black policeman walked by. Mark understood the Metropolitan Police underrepresented minorities; he suspected they’d drafted in a token black face to wander the cell corridor and irritate the arrested Neo-Nazis.

  He’d been in his clothes for what seemed a week. His chin was sandpapery when he twitched his lower lip across it. There was a toilet but he wasn’t able to use it in comfort when Dolar was awake. Several times, he’d unzipped and pointed, desperate to empty his strained bladder, but found himself unable to get a flow started. It was not pleasant.

  ‘The world, man,’ Dolar said. ‘It’s gone. Welcome to the Planet Shit.’

  * * *

  Lying face-up in the road, he was sure his arm was under the front wheel of the Rolls-Royce. When it drove off, his elbow would be crushed. If he sat up, he’d leave his forearm and hand stuck to the asphalt. But the car shifted its shadow, exposing him to the light, and he was unharmed. At least, unharmed by wheels.

  He could blink and breathe but nothing else. He was a passenger in his own body. It was as if he’d been injected with ice. People ran past. Someone trod on his hand. He heard glass breaking, shouts, sirens. The white sky blurred, black smoke drifting across it.

  Hands gripped him roughly and rolled him over. His face bumped the kerb. He felt his back pocket ripping away. That was his wallet gone. Seven credit cards and some cash. A picture of Pippa.

  A bruise was coming on his forehead. The shock of pain gave him back some control. He propped himself up. Cranley Gardens was burning. A thick cloud of stinging smoke wafted past him.

  He got slowly to his feet. He looked around for Sally but couldn’t see her. Michael was gone. Neil was lost in the melee. He was half-possessed, an inept dybbuk in his mental driving seat. He was still in control but had to issue irritatingly literal orders to himself, as if dealing with a primitive computer.

  Walk, don’t run. Leave.

  Police vans poured into the road. Constables in hastily assembled combat gear piled out, huddled behind shields, brandishing batons. They charged.

  He found railings and clung to them, still feeling as if he’d been zapped in the heart with a stungun. His train of thought kept dissolving in bursts of mental static.

  The house where Neil lived was seriously on fire. Distant fire engines clanged.

  Where was Sally?

  It was important he find the private detective.

  ‘You,’ a policeman said, ‘on your knees.’

  ‘Pardon,’ Mark thought, fuddled. ‘Fuck off,’ the dybbuk controlling his mouth said aloud, tentative but audible. ‘Fuck off and die?’

  A baton lashed his kneecaps and he sank in a prayer of agony. More hands grasped and patted him.

  ‘Clear,’ a policeman said.

  ‘Bin ’im.’

  He was wrestled along the pavement. Two policemen had him jammed in a wedge of perspex shields. He was shoved towards the open back of a van.

  * * *

  Without a wallet, he had no identification. He gave WPC Cotterill, the policewoman who was processing him, numbers for the town house and the country cottage. She tried - he was there as she made the calls - and got only machines. Pippa was either not back or out. There wouldn’t be anyone at The Shape until Monday morning, so no one there could identify him. She said they’d have to check the electoral roll, to prove he was who he said he was and lived where he said he did. Stupid people still give false names to the police though every record could be accessed by computers. He didn’t say anything but had a horrible feeling he wasn’t on the roll: at the last election he’d turned up at the polling station to find Pippa had erroneously filled in a form, disenfranchising him at both addresses. WPC Cotterill didn’t treat him - as did her Gestapo riot squad colleagues - as if he were solely responsible for the affray and arson in Cranley Gardens. Her approach was that his arrest was probably a mistake and she’d do her best to sort it out. In the meantime, he had to be photographed and fingerprinted. The ink would not wash off easily.

  They took his belt, scarf and bootlaces and stuck him in with Dolar, owner of Planet Janet. Their cell had a tiny, unattainable window-slit near the ceiling and was tiled, floor and ceiling as well as walls, like a shower bath. There was a bunk bed. Dolar greeted him as if he were a comrade from the barricades.

  * * *

  After a couple of hours, it came out that Mark was the author of The Shape of the Now. In his chapter on ‘Bad Influences’, he was highly critical of William S. Burroughs, whom Dolar regarded as the premier creative genius of the century. Ten years on, Mark hated debating anything in The Shape of the Now. That book was so closely argued and thoroughly thought-through that nothing anyone could say would make him concede a point. Unless someone had been through the process of researching and writing the book, they weren’t even qualified to enter the debate. Anyone who tried, always turned out to be the kind of addled half-clever kook he was stuck with now.

  Dolar’s three-hour harangue operated from a premise Mark could not accept: that Burroughs was worth more than the footnote he’d given him. At the end of the rant, he did revise his personal literary pantheon, out of spite. That niche where he’d once placed Burroughs, in the Gallery of the Hippie Hold-Outs between Vonnegut and Salinger, now seemed about right for Enid Blyton.

  Eventually, Dolar wound down and went to sleep. He rasped like a chainsaw. This was not the sort of thing that happened to Mark Amphlett. This, he realised with a profound coldness, was the sort of thing that happened to Neil Martin.

  * * *

  He woke in the night, and took a moment to remember where he was, to realise this
was not a further nightmare. Someone else was in the cell, crouched by the sink, a shaft of light brushing his head. He was balding and bearded, dressed in what was once, a million years ago, a suit.

  Mark hadn’t woken up. He was dreaming still.

  Leaning into the light, the new prisoner showed his face. It was Mark’s own, obscured by a fuzz of beard, forehead and cheeks deeply creased. He held a pair of broken glasses.

  ‘I let Michael drive,’ the other Mark said, Somerset accent absurdly thick. ‘Neil and Mickey could handle ’en, I knew that. Wanted to clear off, with Pippa, I did.’

  His own voice sounded different. Not the difference he heard when watching himself on TV. This was a stranger with his vocal cords. There was tiredness in every word.

  ‘I lost thic place. Noth’n ever come out right for I.’

  The other Mark tried to fit his glasses together on his face but they kept falling apart.

  ‘I’s like they bloke in Neil’s books,’ he said, an idiotic sad smile appearing. ‘The Eternal Loser.’

  From the shadows of the lower berth, Mark looked at himself. A crack of panic appeared in his dream, and he gripped the edges of the bunk, determined not to scream.

  ‘Neil done well for hisself, though,’ the other Mark said, with a horribly pathetic smile. ‘He deserves ’en, all the work he done.’

  The other Mark’s neck was scrawny, dirt in the lines under his ears. His fingernails were blueing and broken.

  ‘Michael and Mickey too. Real talents, they.’

  They couldn’t keep him in this cell much longer. He must go free soon.

  Musing, the other Mark said, ‘Wonder whatever happened to thic Pippa?’

  * * *

  In the morning, he was woken by gargling. Dolar turned to Mark and looked seriously, disapprovingly. He stood hairily naked at the wash-basin.

  ‘I really think you should like reconsider your statements on Bill Burroughs...’

  Mark turned his face to the wall. He considered praying. It had been a long time. They said Catholicism put a brand on your soul in infancy. He hadn’t thought much of his alleged religion since school. His sister Liza, pregnant and married at sixteen, had turned religious the way some people become drug addicts, and her occasional ill-spelled postcards - always asking for something - were full of ‘God’s Will’.

  ‘Burroughs really understands the way the world is put together, man. He knows all about the fish police from Jupiter.’

  Mark looked up at the bottom of the upper berth and tried to construct Sally Rhodes’s face in his mind. He never had connected with her. Perhaps that was when it’d all begun to fall apart.

  * * *

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t find you on the electoral register and all the numbers you gave us are unlisted.’

  WPC Cotterill, who had the sort of face usually found advertising frozen foods, was apologetic. She understood he was an innocent passerby who had the misfortune to be involved in a riot. It was unspoken that they would forget him insulting a police officer if he forget the baton across his knees. Last night the Chief Constable of Greater London had made a law and order speech, promising the instigators of the Cranley Gardens Troubles would be duly punished. Stiff sentences were expected.

  Mark recognised justice. In the end, he was guilty. If not for the Quorum, there wouldn’t have been a riot.

  He hadn’t been charged so they’d have to let him go soon, he thought. WPC Cotterill kindly told him the Chief Constable was claiming the Prevention of Terrorism Act ought to apply, which meant the police could keep hold of suspects for weeks without making any formal case.

  ‘Terrorism?’

  ‘The English Liberation Front are a political faction.’

  ‘They looked like a bunch of obnoxious yobs to me.’

  She asked him if he’d been fed properly. Would he like a cup of tea? Something to read?

  ‘I could do with a cell without a hot and cold running hippie.’

  She smiled sympathetically and told him he was well off. Among the other arrestees were a vanload of ELF stormtroopers who embarrassingly bumped into a panda car fleeing the scene of the crime. He could be in with them.

  ‘You could phone Pippa’s parents. They live in Scotland. The number was in my wallet but I can’t remember it offhand. It’s in Edinburgh. 031 something...’

  ‘What’s his surname?’

  His heart plunged. ‘McDonald.’

  ‘Anything more than Edinburgh?’

  ‘No. Sorry. Everyone calls Pippa’s Dad Jock, but I don’t think that’s his real name. It’s what they called him in the Army.’

  She tried to look bright. ‘Not much use, I’m afraid. But we’ll try!’

  * * *

  Sure Dolar was asleep, he tiptoed to the toilet. Blissfully, his bladder let go of fifteen cups of police tea. He directed the stream at the porcelain rather than the water. The quiet swish didn’t wake his cellmate.

  A low moan sounded out. Mark’s stream backed up, a crawl of urine clogging his urethra with a needle of pain.

  He turned and saw himself huddled by the sink. Moonlight shone like a shaky halo around the battered figure. The black streaks on the other Mark’s face were blood. One eye was bruised shut, a network of barely scabbed cuts cobwebbing his cheek. His suit was ripped along its seams. Black splotches of blood marred the lapels. Tonight he didn’t speak, just keened like an animal and hugged his knees, rocking back and forth.

  Mark sat on the cold floor and looked at himself.

  ‘Looks like we’re in the same boat,’ he said.

  * * *

  ‘I tried the magazine you mentioned,’ WPC Cotterill said on Monday morning, ‘The Shape?’

  It was obvious she had never heard of it. He’d have to do something about market penetration.

  ‘Thank God. Did you talk with Laura-Leigh?’

  She was puzzled. ‘They weren’t very helpful, I’m afraid. The girl thought I was asking for Mark Amphlett and said he wasn’t available.’

  She was trying not to say they doubted he was who he said he was.

  * * *

  On Monday afternoon they let Dolar out. A patient woman -Janet of Planet Janet fame - came to collect him and ease him through the station, calming his outbursts, signing papers as if picking up a sheep worrier from the dog-pound.

  ‘Remember Bill Burroughs,’ Dolar shouted as a parting shot. ‘He’s the man who knows...’

  Mark was left alone with his cold thoughts.

  * * *

  He imagined how many quadrillion McDonalds were listed in the Edinburgh area. He fantasised his saintly WPC calling all their numbers and asking for ‘Jock’.

  The corridor outside the cells was quieter than it had been. On Saturday, ELF goons and looters had shouted and taunted each other. Now Mark was one of the last remaining arrestees in custody.

  He couldn’t shake the cold out of his bones. The black ink on his fingertips seemed to have turned sticky. His knuckle ached under the weight of the Quorum Ring.

  When a constable came round with tea and a slice of bread and butter, he gave him a message to relay to WPC Cotterill, asking her to call Sally Rhodes Security Services. As his employee, Sally could identify him and get him out of here. At last, he felt he had done something positive.

  4

  11 JANUARY, 1993

  With Ginny returning Melanie to the rich kiddery, he was alone in the house, pretending to tidy his desk, when the papers came. The regular deliverer, a sprightly and conscientious pensioner on a slave-wage from his newsagent son, rang the bell. He dawdled to the door

  ‘There’s prob’ly been a mistake,’ the pensioner said, holding up a Basildon Echo. ‘I’ve never even seen this one before.’

  ‘No,’ Michael said, ‘that’s right. I put in a special order.’

  The paper man looked at him askew. It was inconceivable anyone should forsake the Ham and High for a Basildon paper. Michael didn’t have to explain himself to a tradesman. Today, th
e Echo should run his letter of comment. That should settle the hash for good.

  He had spent a full day drafting and redrafting a rebuttal of the infamous Gary Gaunt slurs. He’d read and reread Gaunt’s original review (much more detailed and waffle-headed than his Worst of Year mention) and could answer it on every point. He’d culled testimonial quotes from real newspapers. To the accusation that he was a ‘toothless Tom Sharpe’, he had an ultimate counter: an approving write-up by Tom Sharpe, from one of the Sunday heavies. He’d been tempted to photostat his dental records. Nothing wrong with his choppers.

  The Echo lay on his desk. Its front page headline declared ‘School Teacher Retires’. Hardly a circulation-grabber. ‘Inside: Full Jumble Sale Details’. His lip curled in a practised sneer.

  He wanted to savour the moment. In the kitchen, he made himself a Quorum coffee. Midnight black with a swirl of cream. Mark invented it on New Year’s Day in 1975, experimenting with Michael’s parents’ percolator. They’d vowed to standardise their coffee-drinking habits. Before, Michael had taken instant with milk and sugar and liked it.

  As he returned to the study, the long-case clock chimed half past ten. By now, he should be three and a quarter pages into a day’s work. He hadn’t even touched the computer. Last week, with the moves and the fading gasp of holiday chaos, he’d only managed a few hours (four pages). Later, he could catch up. If needs be, he could amphetamine through the night.

  After a swallow of caffeine, he looked through the Echo. Dull as day-old dishwater. Gardening, charity, weddings, funerals. When a Basildonian died, an obit could be headed ‘Another One Gone, And a Good Job Too’.

  After last week’s show, there’d been a gaggle of whine-ins from the Basildon area. Satire? We don’t do that here, guv.

  At last: Letters to the Editor.

  ‘Letter of the Week’ was from S.M. Charles, who was disturbed by ‘our slide towards a godless society in our attitude to the monarchy’. For that, No Sex Charles got the editor’s weekly basket of fruit, from Constantinou’s High Street Grocer. Next up was a platitudinous screed from a retired colonel with a drastic solution to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia. Yup, bomb the blighters!