The Quorum (11 page)

Darkness was about him like a cloak, taking the shape of a motor car. In the back of his Rolls, Leech sprawled on black leather like a vampire in a coffin. But he did not sleep. Green figures scrolled on one monitor. Another screen showed Cloud 9’s twenty-four-hour News. Business must be done. The fax whirred constantly, feeding documents into his hand. He memorised as he read, then slipped paper into the in-car shredder. A part of his mind was always available for the governance of his earthly dominion.

The car prowled through the docklands. He had been born not far from here. When he returned now, it was as an emperor. Through one-way glass, he looked at empty streets. He owned them; if not now, then soon. Many houses were derelict, windows replaced with sheets of corrugated iron, over-full skips parked outside. Some terraces, like geriatric jaws holding their last few teeth, housed one or two elderly sitting-tenants. Bus shelters were demolished, schools abandoned, post offices closed, pubs firebombed. All support had been withdrawn. There was no transport, no commerce, no policing. Street lighting was intermittent. Large properties, once factories or warehouses, were burned-out shells. The district was in its last stages of withering. Even the homeless, sensing with ratwhiskers the terminal sickness, had moved on to other sites.

When this place was dead, Leech would supervise the erection of a dark and shining city. His pyramid, already the dominant shape on the skyline, would be its beating heart. He could already see predictive outlines of the buildings, shadows gathering substance above the roofs. The future would rise like a reef of black coral, structures clustering upon each other, inhabited bubbles spreading across the map, blotting out chalk marks on wet asphalt. Leech’s nameless city would be a sprawling cathedral, an act of worship in stone and steel and glass, a culmination that would endure centuries.

On the floor in front of him, in a cage too small for them, a dozen long-tailed mice crawled over each other, squeaking and shitting and gnawing. More servants for the Device, as ignorant and dedicated as the Quorum, as tiny in the scheme, as vital to the working of the purpose.

The approach to the traffic-lights was strewn with rubble and potholes, but the wheels effortlessly bypassed perils that would halt another vehicle. The Rolls braked at lights before turning into Cardinal Wolsey Street. Nobody crossed the road as the light was red. Nobody had crossed here for months. The amber light was smashed, so there was just a filament glow between red and green.

Leech considered a communication from Zurich, confirming matters discussed at the meeting seven hours ago. A sum the size of the GNP of a mid-ranking South American country had just been placed at his disposal. The surplus money was almost an irritation; like most truly rich men, he had no interest whatsoever in cold figures. He gauged success in other measures, some comprehensible in an infants’ playground, some beyond explanation.

The lights changed and the car made the turn-off. Entering Cardinal Wolsey Street was like passing from the snows of Tibet into the Valley of Shangri-La. The quality of light changed, the climate became temperate, a street-shaped shaft of sun sliced through cloud cover. Here, it only rained pleasantly between the hours of one and five in the morning, leaving the street clean and the plants watered every dawn.

On one side of the road was a well-kept park, boundaried by shining railings, neatly trimmed green grass shading into blighted wasteland. Families walked on the civilised zone, throwing frisbees with dogs and children. A uniformed keeper spiked leaves with a stick. Near the wrought iron gates, a stall sold eel pies and pickled herrings. A small band clustered in a gazebo, playing a selection of Gilbert & Sullivan to ranks of deckchairs. The tune was taken up and whistled by everyone in earshot. ‘The Ghosts’ High Noon’.

The residential side was a Victorian terrace of back-to-back, two-up/two-down dwellings, front steps polished to a shine, front gardens postcard perfect, front doors brightly painted, old-fashioned house numbers proudly displayed. A postman cheerfully delivered letters at dusk on a Bank Holiday. Sparkling-clean milk bottles waited by knife-sharp bootscrapers for tomorrow’s collection and delivery.

Fast-food containers did not accumulate in the gutter, dogs did not deposit faeces on pavement or park, cars were not abandoned or vandalised, graffiti did not mar red brickwork, the corner shop had no iron shutter.

As the car proceeded down Cardinal Wolsey Street, residents took note. The postman, leaning his bike against a wall, touched fingers to his peaked cap. A black woman wearing a Mother Hubbard, looked up from scrubbing a doorstep and grinned a welcome. A little boy in shorts stopped driving his hoop and gazed in adoration at the Rolls, almost falling on his cleanly scabbed knees to worship the demigod of the road.

There was only one lock-up garage in the street, at the far end, opposite the pub. The Rolls cruised towards it. As the car passed, people turned to wave or bow to its opaque windows. They were deferential, but made a point of not being creepy about it. This was the world as it should be; everyone sure of their place and comfortable in their station.

The garage door slid up into the roof, a maw-like dark opening. Suspension countered the bump as the car rolled up off the road across the pavement. If he had been holding a drink from the wet bar, the miniscus would barely have wobbled.

The garage swallowed the car. He disengaged monitors and punched the door code onto a pad. The Rolls opened with a slight hydraulic breath. Leech set his hat on his head, regarding himself in an ebony mirror to adjust the angle of the brim. Daintily picking up the cage of mice, he got out and stood for an instant, accustoming himself to the different, welcoming dark.

From outside, it was hard to believe the garage could accommodate a monster like the Rolls. Inside, the car was dwarfed in a hangar-like space that stretched thousands of yards. All interior walls and floors had been taken out, leaving a brick and tile shell, roof supported by chimney columns. The structure was shored by iron pillars and struts and spines. The concrete garage area was raised above the level of the rest of the works, which went down to bare, wet earth. Front doors were nailed shut, wire mesh baskets over letterboxes. Hundreds of windows were double-glazed and net curtained. The whole terrace was hollow, an enclosure the shape of Crystal Palace.

The noise of toiling men and machines, inaudible from the street, was overpowering. From others, he understood the smell was equally potent.

‘Derek,’ a waiting man said, making the horned sign with both hands, ‘blessed be...’

‘Blessed be,’ Leech replied, returning the arcane greeting and gesture.

Drache, his tame architect and acolyte, had a harmless fetish for ritual and ceremony. If black magic helped him understand his Deal, Leech chose to indulge him.

‘The auguries are encouraging,’ Drache babbled. ‘At midnight, the rubies turned black.’

Drache had made his sacrifices. A distinctive half-domino covered his empty eye-socket. The irregular red patch conformed to the contours of his face, outlining one side of his nose and extending from cheekbone to hairline. It matched his thigh-length leather coat.

Ceremonially, Leech handed over the cage of mice.

‘For the Device,’ he explained. ‘Living components.’

The architect accepted the offering solemnly.

‘Magic,’ he said.

‘Take care of them,’ Leech warned. ‘None must die. The participants in the ritual are all under my protection.’

Drache nodded, serious. He had heard this before, but it bore repeating. The acolyte understood sacrifice, but was sometimes unsubtle.

Above them and extending the length of the hollowed-out terrace, towered the Device. It clanked and screeched, every inch in motion, a crucified iron animal.

Drache took down a brass-nozzled hose that snaked out of the innards of the Device and removed the cap as if it were a speaking tube. He dropped the first mouse into the mouth and squeezed, gently nudging the animal along the rubber intestine into the works.

Glowing smuts pattered down, sprinkling the observation platform. The pain was so thick his senseless nostrils caught the stink. Leech knew now this would be the year. The Device was nearly complete.

‘The face of evil is always the face of total need.’

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS,
The Naked Lunch

A
part from a fitting in the tailor’s recommended by the prospectus, he hadn’t worn his uniform before the morning. Walking the length of town from his parents’ council house to Dr Marling’s Grammar School for Boys, he felt a freak in his blood-coloured cap. The badge on his roomy black blazer was an open wound. He’d never worn a tie; Mum would have to knot it for a further nine months before he got the knack. Estate kids jeered from the bus stop, shouting ‘snobby’ as Mark quickened his pace.

Two other boys from his year had got into Marling’s but he wasn’t in their gang. At Edge End Primary, his friends had been girls; any, like Juliet Kinross, who passed the eleven-plus went to the Girls’ Grammar. His brother Chris was at Hemphill Secondary Modern, where his sister Sue would go. When Liza, the youngest, finished Edge End, there wouldn’t be an eleven-plus exam; all three schools would be combined as Ash Grove Comprehensive.

On the first day of the first term, boys could use the front doors. Just before nine, there was already a bottleneck. For ever after, he’d trudge up the back drive. On his last day, in an unimaginably distant future, Mark would be permitted to leave as he first entered. A school leaver would then traditionally bung his cap in the river. But by that day, there’d be no caps, no Marling’s.

Beyond the front doors was the crush hall, antechamber to the assembly hall. Sports trophies shone in cases. High up was a sad-faced portrait, ‘Dr Roger Marling, 1768-1809’. A shield bore the school arms, a motto was inscribed on an hour-glass.

‘Tempus fuggit
,’ he said out loud.

‘Tempus fugit
,’ said a thin master in a black gown. ‘Don’t you know what that means, boy? You soon will.’

Alarmed to be talked at by so superior a creature, he hurried into Assembly. Despite the smell of polished wood floors, it was like a railway station packed with refugees. Over eighty uniformed new boys milled about. Plaques honoured old boys killed in wars or accepted by universities; the former was considerably longer. The first boy to speak to him was Alan Ward, who thought he knew someone who knew Mark. Wrong, he would exchange no more than a dozen words with Mark over the next seven years.

‘He was a clockmaker, zh-you know,’ another boy said.

Mark started. The speaker was not fat exactly, but ripe like an apple. His uniform a slightly lighter black, he was taller than nine tenths of the intake.

‘Dixon,’ he said, extending a hand like a grown-up. ‘Michael Dixon.’

Mark shook the boy’s hand.

‘Mark,’ he introduced himself.

‘They use surnames here,’ Michael explained.

‘Uh, oh, Amphlett.’

‘Bless you.’

He spelled out his name.

‘Acquainted with anyone in this rabble?’

‘Not really.’

‘Me neither. I’m here ’cause I got booted out of prep school. Smoking. Vile habit. Bit of a blow to the beloved parents.’

Mark goggled at the sophisticated felon. He was like the boys in the Jennings books. When he later mentioned this, Michael told him, patronisingly, it was time he graduated to P.G. Wodehouse.

Masters in academic gowns were stationed at vital points like guards. None wore the mortar-boards he’d been led by the
Beano
to expect. They shushed and the buzz died. ‘Caps off,’ a master announced. Mark snatched his from his head and folded it into a boomerang. Ranks formed, everyone unsure where they should stand, facing the stage.

A short man with a purple-edged gown stood at a lectern, a foot-tall hour-glass beside him. Mark recognised Brendan Quinlan MA (Cantab) from the early summer evening when Mum had taken him to an introductory talk about the school and its traditions.

‘Chimp,’ a boy said. For the first time, Mark, who’d been feeling ill, smiled. Mr Quinlan looked a little like a monkey.

The head, who’d never be anything but Chimp until he disappeared apoplectically in the changeover to Comprehensive in 1973, turned the hour-glass. Sand began to trickle.

‘He was a clockmaker,’ Michael whispered. ‘Dr Marling, I read in...’

‘You
boy,’
said Chimp, voice a cannon-blast, stubby finger jabbed, ‘
silence,
or suffer untold
torments’.

Michael instantly paled; Mark realised he really was a boy, not a grown-up pretending.

‘You probably think well of yourselves,’ Chimp told the intake, ‘because you were
clever
at your last school. Well, being clever at your last school just makes you
ordinary
here...’

* * *

As Chimp read off each surname, the intake divided into three forms. He found himself in 1W, taken by Mr Waller who’d taught him to pronounce
tempus fugit
but would be unable to prod much more Latin into him. Mark wouldn’t understand for years why the skeletal master was nicknamed Fats. He’d taught at Marling’s since the War and been named by boys long since grown up, faded ink names scrawled in the desks their successors now inherited.

Later he realised 1B (Bairstow) and 1U (Unwin) were assigned desks in alphabetical order so responses passed up and down rows as the register was called. Fats marched his form around the quadrangle to their classroom and let them sit where they wanted. Mark and Michael took desks one row from the back, Michael next to the window. Neil, the boy who’d said ‘Chimp’, was immediately behind Mark. The far corner behind Michael was empty.

After the register, Fats explained the timetable. At Edge End, a class stayed in one room all day; here forms changed each lesson. Mark knew English, history and mathematics from primary school, but science divided into physics, chemistry and biology and he’d do Latin and French. Tagged a ‘Roman Candle, he’d take his half-hour of religious education separate from 1W, with a few other Catholics in the year. As an RC, he was supposed to have a head start in Latin, but most of the class swiftly left him standing and he’d drop it after a year. Friday afternoon was for Games, rugby football in winter, cricket in summer.