The Quorum (43 page)

As Pris spoke, a cute but fanatical gleam behind her tinted contacts, Michael was fascinated. She wore a filmy top that went transparent under lights. Her brassiere was an intriguing work of engineering, restraining breasts the size of small planets. Fifty-one per cent of the viewing public would hate her but she was going to be very, very popular. There was no doubt she was a woman, but she talked and gestured like a transvestite.

‘We see ourselves as messengers from God, wagging the flexible finger at those naughty-naughties who abuse position, sticking the thermometer of truth into the armpit of deceit. Pervo politicians, beware! Rapacious rock stars, look out! Mendacious movie brats, shudder! Be on your best behaviour, lest you take the
Grunge Plunge!’

He asked the question that had nibbled at him since April presented Pris to him in the Green Room.

‘Lover-doll,’ he said, ‘are zhou an albino?’

* * *

Mark pressed redial, listened to clicks, let the engaged tone sound for long seconds, broke the connection, pressed redial, listened to clicks, let the engaged tone sound for long seconds, broke the connection, pressed redial, listened to clicks, let the engaged tone sound for long seconds, broke the connection...

Before he could touch the redial button, the phone rang. He was startled. The bell was louder than he remembered. Louder than was possible.

Sally!

The receiver was in his hand. ‘Hello,’ he gasped, ‘Ss...’

‘Mark?’

It was another woman’s voice. Not Sally, but familiar...

‘Mark, it’s Pippa.’

‘P-p-p...’

‘Mam says you’ve been hassling her.’

He tried to remember Pippa. It wasn’t easy. There was something about her: Scots girl. Editor. Geology major. She said Neil
was a really nice bloke.

‘It’s been months, Mark.’

‘Pip...’

She was all right, he supposed. If you liked the type. But she wasn’t Sally Rhodes.

‘I want you to stop. I want you to grow up and stop.’

‘Pippa?’

‘Just let it go, Mark. Just let go.’

* * *

A dozen slates shot off the roof, jets of steam escaping. They clattered and smashed in the street. Life flickered through his mind. Moments stuck and repeated. Random moments.

He looked at two unfamiliar boys in the assembly hall, indicated the man at the lectern, and said ‘Chimp’.

People pressed around a rupture in the Device, ignoring steam that lobstered their faces, and fixed plates over a fissure.

He stood on stage in the Rat Centre, dressed as a jester, and recited ‘and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges’.

The Device’s fires poured together a ball of inferno.

He sat in the kitchen at Michael’s Gramma’s, talking with Mark’s girlfriend, wondering where the others were. Surprisingly, Philippa leaned over and stuck her tongue down his throat.

Girders wove around the fire.

He sat up in bed as Rachael broke the door down. This wasn’t how he’d fantasised the moment. His typewriter bounced off his headboard, grazing his cheek, falling on the floor. Rachael’s mouth was a circle of fury, her hands bird talons.

The Device was nearly finished.

‘Lois Lane?’ he asked. ‘Olive Oyl,’ she said.

On the monitors, he saw Leech. Impassive but approving. His one-eyed familiar was excited, raving at the success. But Leech expected no less.

He stood on his doorstep and faced the Nazi who put the screwdriver to Sally’s eye. He gave up.

A rain of sparks fell past his face.

* * *

A living pool outside the Fershluggenheim Museum gathered, extended arms to streetlamps and pulled itself into human shape. Blubber Boy shook off amorphousness. The Creech, Dead Thing and Circe had combined forces to defeat him, but he’d win. In Coastal City, good guys always won. A tiny sprite chirruped from a nook in the sidewalk. Mickey waded through the dispersing glop of the hero’s sloughed-off mass, the last of Blubber Boy pulling at his knees. Circe’s Enchantment of Bewilder made it hard to coordinate. The whole city stumbled.

The Effect passed and he was back in a New York night, somewhere near the Guggenheim.

‘Yo,’ someone said.

He assumed a fighting stance as a preparation for getting the shit kicked out of him again.

‘Yo,’ someone else confirmed.

A man in uniform approached cautiously, as if expecting Mickey to turn feral.

‘It’s him,’ the uniform said.

He recognised Raimundo, the Pyramid chauffeur. And clocked Raimundo’s supervisor. She stood by a small van, arms folded, watching.

‘Heth?’

He didn’t say anything else. Raimundo grabbed his arm and forced his wrist up between his shoulder-blades.

‘Careful,’ Heather warned. ‘He might be rabid.’

Something hot bit into his lower back. His brain frazzled and he heard and smelled the singing
zzzztt
of something electric. Pain came and went and his last strength vanished.

Raimundo shoved him towards the van. When Heather looked down at her clipboard, a curtain of hair shadowed her face.

‘Get him into the light,’ she ordered.

He gave no resistance. Heather compared his face with a photostrip on the clipboard.

‘Check, get him into the compartment.’

She went round to the back of the van and opened a door. The interior was a windowless box, hardly big enough to hold a man. Raimundo helped him up and showed him how to bend his useless limbs to fit the space. There was a light in the ceiling but, like the one inside a fridge, it went out when the door was closed.

He sat in the dark, rocked by aftershocks. The container was soundproofed. The van began to move.

* * *

The end-of-run party was noisy. He could tell from the rapid, hollow cheer of their patter which of his staff were with the gray gaunts. He found a spot where he got his back to a real wall and watched traitors conspire against him.

The
Dixon’s On
set was crowded with Top Hat staff and Cloud 9 brass, picking at canapés hed paid for, sloshing his wine. They clowned with the cameras. The house band blundered through numbers. His minions, freed of the shackles of the series, danced in a strobe-lit pit.

He saw a length of white hair whipping, burning his retinas. Ayesha had dyed her hair a very, very light blonde. Everyone said it was striking, but Michael got the real message. They could get so close to him he would never suspect.

Little did the gray gaunts know just how vigilant Michael Dixon could be, how ruthless. They had badly underestimated his character when they set out to ruin him.

A ruptured beer-barrel sprayed the Cloud 9 Vice-President of Light Entertainment and everyone cheered. The bigwig stood, Armani dripping froth, and laughed like a drain. Roily, a toady in search of a patron, handed over a towel.

April was drinking profusely, snorting relieved cackles, hugging people she’d see in eight weeks as if they were to be parted forever. He’d thought her reliable but now wasn’t sure. She was loyal but weak. She could be bought.

‘Mr Whippy-Wobble-Willie of Crab-Apple, Abergavenny says you’re all sacked,’ he muttered.

He wondered if Gary Gaunt himself were here, somewhere. A hat and some glasses and he could pass for normal. Hair dye and contact lenses, even.

There were many faces he didn’t recognise. Even those he knew well were not ruled out of suspicion. The albino might have spent years getting into place, preparing for the final assault.

Gary Gaunt could be anyone. Anyone anywhere.

‘Mikey,’ said a big scene-shifter smiling, arms spread, ‘what can I say...’

The scene-shifter stuck a quick fist into Michael’s gut. Air shot out of his lungs in a gasp.

‘That’s with love from Basildon.’

* * *

He replayed the conversation, certain of what he should have said, imagining how her reactions would have differed.

‘Don’t ask me to feel sorry for you.’

‘I tried to get out of the Deal. I was the one who tried.’

She half-turned, listening.

‘It could have been me, not Neil. It could have been any of us. We’re all victims.’

She saw the depth of his suffering, and got closer to him on the bench. Her clear eyes were forgiving.

‘We didn’t really understand. We were tricked. We were just kids.’

‘You sacrificed Neil?’

‘No, we sacrificed ourselves. We are the Perfect Sacrifices.’

‘Perfect?’

‘Like Aztecs elevated above the tribe for a year, granted their every wish, honoured and loved. They lie willingly on the altar as the priests cut out their hearts.’

She was shaking, moved.

‘Why is it so much worse for me? So much worse than for Mickey and Michael?’

‘Because you understand.’

She was right.

He reached for her.

‘Sally, I love you.’

‘Mark.’ she said, softly, ‘no.’

He went back to the beginning, and thought it through again, taking more care, thinking out what he wanted to say. Eventually, it must work out.

* * *

The door opened and he was hauled out of his compartment. Raimundo made a face. Mickey realised he must smell awful.

‘Remove him from his clothes,’ Heather said.

Raimundo attacked with a pair of tailor’s shears, snipping his kiddie coat and Wile E. Coyote T-shirt into removable sections. There was a light drizzle, icy but not clean.

Adjusting to the blobby light, he realised he was in a carpark at an airport. Queues of travellers with baggage watched without interest as he was stripped.

When Raimundo dug the shears into his waistband, he capitulated. Indicating that the chauffeur should back off, he undid his fly and unpeeled jean-legs.

In happier times, he’d left his underpants in Heather’s bed. Now, she looked at his skinny, shrivelled nakedness with unconcealed distaste.

‘Shame we can’t clean him up,’ she said, sliding a tartan bag across the tarmac. ‘Have him get into these.’

Raimundo unzipped the bag. There were clothes inside. Warm, clean clothes. His luck was changing. He was almost fully-dressed before he realised he was wearing a bank clerk’s turquoise suit from the early seventies. Lapels wider than the shoulders and flares like crinolines.

‘I’ll look a dildonian,’ he complained.

Raimundo raised a device that looked like a high-tech stapler, and a tiny arc crackled.

‘Fine by me,’ Mickey conceded.

He was allowed to keep his once-yellow socks - they’d have to be surgically removed along with 90 per cent of the skin - but was given a pair of stack-heeled platforms a size too small, which he painfully hauled on.

‘Satisfied?’ he asked.

Heather ventured close and examined him thoroughly. Her eyes were dispassionate and dangerous. She’d either forgotten or was deliberately ignoring whatever had passed between them.

Raimundo gave her the shears. She took his braids in her fist and neatly snipped off the lot.

‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Now, let’s get this package out of the country.’

* * *

‘It’s been dayglo dream, Mikey,’ Pris said. Her smile made dimples deep enough to lose a coin in. ‘We’ll do our bestest to keep your slot warm for when you come back in September...’

September!

‘...I’m sure we’ll work together again. Bye-now, kiss-kiss, love-love.’

Pris made a puckermouth at the air, gave a cheery little paw-wave, and sashayed out of the party. Five silent minders, whod been blending with the minions, took note and followed her, looking back for assassins.

His stomach still hurt. He looked around for the VP/LE -whod told him
Dixon’s On
would return in March - and saw the beer-soaked exec bopping with April and Ayesha in the pit.

Ignoring grinding pain, he made his way to the pit and shouted at the VP/LE. Eventually, he penetrated the man’s head.

‘When are we on again?’ he yelled.

‘Pardon,’ the VP/LE shouted, tugging his ear.

‘When is
Dixon's On
back?’

The VP/LE heard this time.

‘Can’t we schedule an interface next week?’

He wondered if he was ruptured. Nearby, Ginny grind-danced with Roily. April leaned against the side of the pit, holding her head. Ayesha listened quietly, glowing white hair falling half-way down her chest, eyes flashing red.

‘Tell me now,’ he insisted.

The VP/LE tried to seem sober. Stinking stains spread on his shoulders and lapels.

‘Cloud 9 wonder if we shouldn’t rest the format. Devise something more relevant to the nineties.’

‘Like
What a Fucking Grunge?’

‘Demographics on
Grunge
are highly positive, Michael. Advertiser response is startling. We see a 35 per cent improvement on slot profitability even
before
the first of the run.’

He saw the hand of the gray gaunts in this.

‘Mr Whippy-Wobble-Willie of Crab-Apple, Abergavenny says... stitch that!’

Michael headbutted the VP/LE.

* * *

In the dark, he thought back further. By his talk with Sally in Docklands, everything was lost. Nothing could have been changed.

It was 1983. That was the turning point. Mark should have coralled the others, forced them to endure the setbacks. Simply not turning up at the Meet wasn’t enough; he should have gone, and taken the others through the argument.

When they all crawled back to the Deal, they drew dotted lines across their own throats and said ‘cut here’.

If he had explained to Mickey and Michael, 1983 would have been a short-term disaster. By now, they would all be better. Not great, but good.

Michael would have written a few decent books, cult successes. Mickey would be drawing the Dr Shade strip in the
Argus.
Neil would be assistant editor of
The Shape.
Mark would be engaged to Sally Rhodes.

None of them would have any complaints. Though maybe they’d all be haunted by possibilities.