The Quorum

by Kim Newman

  Bender popped his head into the alcove. When he saw only her, his face fell.

  ‘Have you seen Ape?’

  ‘She was here,’ Sally told him. ‘She must be in the building.’

  Bender looked as if he’d pulled a couple of consecutive twenty-four hour shifts.

  ‘No matter,’ he said, obviously lying. ‘This is for her.’

  He gave her a file, which she found room for on her desk.

  ‘She’s not really supposed to have this, so don’t leave it lying around. Give it to her personally.’

  Bender, a tall man, never looked a woman in the face. His eyeline was always directed at her chest. In an awkward pause, Sally arranged her cardigan around her neck to cover any exposed skin. The associate producer was a balding schoolboy.

  ‘We were all sorry about, um, you know...’

  Sally thanked him, throat suddenly warm. She didn’t know why Bender was loitering. Had April taken up with him again? Considering the vehemence of her comments, it was not likely. Or maybe it was.

  ‘If you see... when you see Ape, tell her...’

  There was definitely something weird going down. Bender really looked bad. His usual toadying smoothness was worn away. He had an angry red mark on his ring-finger. It had probably had to be sawn free, and serve him right.

  ‘Tell her to return the files ASAP. It’s important.’

  When he left, she decided to try work therapy. A minion named Roebuck was reputedly interested in being bribed to let Mythwrhn peek at GLT’s post-franchise proposals. He’d contacted Tiny and it was down to her to check his standing. Being suspicious, she guessed Roebuck was her opposite number in GLT’s Spook Dept trying to slip the consortium dud information. She only had a name and she wanted an employment history. There were several people she could phone and - since everyone in television had at some point worked for, or at least applied to work for, everyone else - her first obvious choice was Mythwrhn’s own personnel manager. If he had Roebuck’s CV on file, it might have clues as to his contacts or loyalties.

  As she bent over in her chair to reach her internal directory from her bottom drawer, her stomach heaved. Gulping back sick, she hurried to the Ladies.

  * * *

  One loo was occupied but the other was free. Apart from a midmorning cup of tea, there was nothing to come up but clear fluid. It wasn’t much of a spasm and settled down almost immediately. She washed her face clean and started to rebuild her make-up. The lighting in the Ladies was subdued and the decor was ugly, walls covered in wavy lumps like an ice cave. She supposed it had been designed to prevent loitering.

  Pomme came in for a pee. She greeted Sally cheerfully, and, after a quick and painless tinkle, chatted as she made a kiss-mouth and retouched her lips.

  ‘That bleedin’ door is stuck again,’ Pomme said, nodding at the occupied stall. ‘Or someone has been in there for a two-hour crap.’

  Sally looked at the shut door. There was no gap at the bottom to show feet.

  ‘Have you noticed how that happens in this building?’ Pomme said. ‘Doors lock when you ain’t lookin’, or come unlocked. The lifts have lay-overs in the Twilight Zone. Even them security keys don’t work most of the time. Must be bleedin’ haunted.’

  The PA left, her face requiring considerably less help than Sally’s. Finally, Sally was satisfied. She put her make-up things back in her bag. Turning to leave, she heard a muttering.

  ‘Hello,’ she asked the closed door.

  There was a fumbling and the ‘occupied’ flag changed. The door pulled inwards.

  ‘April,’ she said, looking.

  The woman lolled on the closed toilet, eyes fluttering. She’d had a bad nosebleed and her man’s dress shirt was bloodied. The bottom half of her face was caked with dried blood and flecked with white powder. Sally hadn’t known she did coke. Or that things could get so bad with a supposedly ‘fun’ drug. April tried to speak but could only gargle. She pinched her nose and winced, snorting blood.

  Sally wondered if she should get two tampons from the dispenser and shove them up April’s nose. Instead, she wet a paper towel and tried to clean April’s face. Her friend was as compliant as an exhausted three-year-old. Most of the blood was sticky on the floor of the stall.

  ‘Pressure,’ April said, over and over, repeating the word like a mantra. ‘Pressure, pressure, pressure...’

  Sally wondered how she was going to get April out of the building and home without anyone noticing. She told April to stay while she went and got her coat and bag. When she came back, April was standing and almost coherent.

  ‘Sal,’ she said, smiling as if she hadn’t seen her for days, ‘things are just fine up here. Except for...’

  Sally tried to put April’s hat on her, but she wasn’t comfortable and kept tilting it different ways, examining herself in the mirror. Her shoulders heaved as if she alone could hear music and wanted to dance. Sally settled the coat around April’s shoulders and steered her out of the loo.

  The lift was on the floor, so she was able to get April straight in. If she could get her down to Reception and out into the square and find a cab, she could say April was taken ill. A nasty gynaecological problem would go unquestioned. Those were mysteries men didn’t want to penetrate.

  She stabbed the ground floor button and the doors closed. If they got quickly past Heidi, she could limit the damage. But the lift was going up, she realised. To the Penthouse. April was almost writhing now, and chanting ‘pressure, pressure, pressure’ until the word lost all meaning.

  She slipped an arm around April’s waist and tried to hold her still. April laughed as if tickled and a half-moustache of blood dribbled from one nostril. The doors parted and Tiny got in. He was hunched over in an unfamiliar position of subservience, grinning with desperate sincerity as he looked up to his companion. The other man, a human reptile of indeterminate age and indistinct features, was someone Sally recognised from the front of a condom packet.

  ‘Sally, April,’ Tiny said, so overwhelmed by his master’s presence that he didn’t notice their state, ‘have you met Derek?’

  Sally prayed to be teleported to Japan. The magnate, who kept going in and out of focus as if it were unwise to look at him with the naked eye, smiled a barracuda smile that seemed to fill the lift. She’d always thought of Derek Leech as a James Bond villain, with a high-tech hide-out in an extinct volcano and a missile silo concealed beneath his glass pyramid HQ in London Docklands. A human spider at the heart of a multi-media web, he sucked unimaginable monies from the millions who bought his papers, watched his television, made love with his protection, voted for his bought-and-paid-for politicians. But in person, he was just another well-groomed suit.

  Leech nodded at them. Sally tried a weak smile, and April, snorting back blood and residual traces of nose powder, radiated warmth and love before fainting. She slithered through Sally’s grasp and collapsed on the floor, knees bunched up against her breasts.

  ‘That’s happened before,’ Leech said. ‘Embarrassing, really.’

  * * *

  Three days into April’s ‘leave’, Bender went up to the Penthouse while Tiny was out recording an interview about the franchise bid. After voiding his bowels on Tiny’s granite-slab desk-top and hurling the Mythwrhn statuette through the picture window, he crawled out through shattered glass and stood on the narrow sill while a crowd gathered below. Then, flapping his arms like the failed Wright Brother, he tried to fly over Soho Square. Ten yards from the persistent smear that marked the site of Connor’s death, Bender fell to asphalt, neck broken.

  It had not been unexpected, somehow. Sally noticed people were marginally less shocked and surprised by Bender than they’d been by Connor. The office had a wartime feel; the troops kept their heads down and tried not to know too much about their comrades. Everyone secretly looked for jobs somewhere else.

  Roger the Replacement went into hospital after a severe angina attack. He was thirty-eight. While he was away, his wif
e came to clear out his things and told Sally that he now planned to take a year off to consider his career options.

  ‘What’s the point,’ the woman said. ‘If he’s dead, he can’t spend it.’

  ‘True,’ she conceded.

  Tiny took to wandering around chewing his moustache, checking and double-checking everyone’s work. Still wrapped up 101 per cent in the franchise bid, he suddenly became acutely aware that Mythwrhn’s current product would influence the ITC decision. The consequences of being blamed for failure would be unthinkable. Off to one side on ‘other projects, she was spared the worst but the Survival Kit team suffered badly from the sudden attack of caution. Items toiled on for months were suddenly dropped, wasting hundreds of hours; others, rejected out of hand, were re-activated, forcing researchers to redo work that had been binned. In one case, the company was brought very close to Lawsuit County as a hastily slapped-together exposé of dangerous toys named a blatantly innocent designer rather than the shoddy manufacturer.

  ‘I blame Derek Leech,’ Useless Bruce said out loud in the meeting room as they waited for an unconscionably late Tiny.

  ‘Shush,’ Lydia Marks said, ‘this place is probably bugged.’

  ‘Tiny’s completely hung up on the bid and Kit is suffering. Plus Leech has this Mephistopheles effect, you know. I swear reality bends wherever he stands.’

  There were mumbles of agreement, including Sally’s. There was something else she blamed Derek Leech for, considering the reputation of his products. She thought she was pregnant.

  * * *

  First, her doctor congratulated her in the spirit of female solidarity; then, interpreting her blank expression, she dug out a leaflet and said that at Sally’s advanced age, she could probably justify an abortion on health grounds. So it was official: thirty-five was ‘advanced’. Also, Sally was unmistakably ‘with child’. She wondered if her mother would be pleased. And whether she could stand another upheaval.

  There wasn’t time to talk with Dr Frazier, since she had to rush from the Women’s Clinic to a meet with the GLT Deep Throat. Miraculously, Nick Roebuck seemed to be a genuine defector. He wanted old-fashioned money and a shot at a position with the consortium if and when they took over the franchise. Someone reputedly sharp who knew GLT from the inside was convinced enough the consortium were going to win to gamble his career on it. That should be good news for Mythwrhn.

  In the cab, Sally held her belly as if she had a stomach ache, trying to feel the alien lodged in her. A tiny Connor, perhaps, dribbled through a ruptured Chum? Or a little Sally, wormshaped but an incipient woman? Half the time she thought her body had betrayed her; then she was almost won round by the possibilities. All her contemporaries who were going to have babies had already done so. Shed be the last of her generation to give in.

  Roebuck had arranged to meet her at a sawdust-on-the-floor pub in Islington, well off the media beat. The cab cruised Upper Street, looking for the sign.

  Sally had seen hard-edged women turn mushy-gooey upon producing a baby. She wondered if she’d ever even met a child she liked, let alone whether she was a fit mother. She corrected herself: fit single mother. Christ, should she even tell Connor’s parents? There was some of their son left after all. Did she want to invite those strangers into her life, give them a part of her baby?

  The cab drew up outside the pub and she paid the driver. Inside, a few glum men were absorbed in their pints. It was midafternoon and beer was half-price to the unwaged. She supposed they called it ‘the miserable hour’. A country and western song on the juke-box proclaimed ‘If They Didn’t Have Pussy, There’d Be a Bounty on Their Pelts’.

  She spotted Roebuck at once, at a corner table. Shiny of suit and face, scalp red and glistening under thin strands of crosscombed blond hair. Apart from the barmaid, Sally was the only woman in the pub. She let Roebuck buy her a Perrier (until she decided what to do about the baby, she was off the gin) and listened to him gibber inconsequentially as he fiddled with the satchel he’d brought the papers in. He was nervous to the point of terror, as if he expected GLT shock troops in black balaclavas to burst in and execute him.

  ‘May I?’ she said, reaching for the goods. ‘Just a taste.’

  Roebuck looked appalled.

  ‘It could be old copies of the Independent,’ she explained.

  Reluctantly, he handed over. The satchel was almost a schoolkid’s accessory, not at all like the slimly imposing briefcases common in the business.

  ‘I trust this’ll go in my favour,’ Roebuck said.

  ‘I’m sure the consortium will do well by you.’

  She looked at a few sheets. There were authentic audience figures, with alarmed notes scrawled in the margins. A couple of thick documents marked ‘HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL’ outlined proposed changes in GLT production and transmission schedules. Without a close examination, she guessed the purpose was to cut short term production costs to cover the losses GLT would sustain ponying up for a winning bid. She was almost satisfied to find a confidential memo from the board, insisting the company try to buy back its squandered percentages of Cowley Mansions before a raider took over completely.

  ‘This seems to be in order,’ she said.

  Roebuck nodded, face burning. Palpable desperation sweated off the man. He gripped the table to prevent his hands shaking. Sally wondered how low the consortium’s unseen campaign would get. Roebuck had looked around throughout the meeting, as if searching for a familiar face.

  ‘It’ll stop now,’ he said. ‘Won’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Disgust bulged through fear for a moment and he got up, barging out of the pub, leaving her with the satchel. A couple of others left almost immediately.

  She gathered the papers. She’d win untold brownie points for this coup, but didn’t know how much of it was her doing. As she left, she noticed an almost-full pint abandoned on a table by the door. The man who’d sat there had struck her as familiar. Broad, undistinguished, in overalls. With a spine-scrape of fear, she wondered if he might be the van driver.

  Out in the street, she couldn’t see Roebuck or the nondescript drinker who could have been following him. So much to think about. She looked for another cab.

  * * *

  A man in a suit was dismantling April’s desk, sorting through every scrap of paper and odd object in its tardis drawers. April had a system whereby every unwanted freebie and done-with document was shoved into a drawer until it disappeared. Tiny was either overseeing the job or ordered to be present at the dissection. The suit worked like a callous surgeon, calmly incising closed envelopes and packets. Sally wondered if he were from the drug squad.

  ‘This is Mr Quilbert,’ Tiny said, ‘our new security manager.’

  Quilbert smiled and shook her hand limply. She instantly pegged him as a cuckoo slipped into the Mythwrhn nest by Derek Leech. He had one of those close-to-the-skull haircuts that disguise premature baldness with designer style.

  ‘We’ve lost an important file,’ Tiny said. ‘Bender might have given it to April.’

  ‘I didn’t think they were talking,’ she said. ‘Well, not recently.’

  ‘Nothing scary,’ Quilbert said, ‘just stats about the building. There was a security survey in there.’

  ‘We can get a copy from the consultants,’ Tiny said, ‘but it’d be embarrassing.’

  Quilbert slit open a packet and slid out a pornographic magazine in Hungarian.

  ‘That’s from one of last year’s items,’ Tiny said. Quilbert smiled tightly and dumped it on the pile.

  ‘Have you tried asking April?’ she suggested.

  ‘A bit tricky,’ Tiny said. ‘She’s had a relapse. They’ve had to put her under restraint.’

  * * *

  She took the file, which she’d sincerely forgotten about, home, hoping it might help her understand the tangle of mysteries. Besides, an evening poring through arcane security lore seemed more comfortable than an evening phoning
her mother and announcing a compromised ‘blessed event’.

  There was a new security guard, in a black one-piece bodysuit, installed in Reception, presumably on Quilbert’s orders. She was sure his X-Ray vision would perceive the documents she was smuggling out but he was too busy trying to cosy up to Heidi. That hardly suggested fearsome efficiency.

  She made herself tea and sat on her sofa, television on but with the sound down. The file Bender had given her for April was tied with red ribbon. She let it lie a moment and drank her tea. On the screen, an interracial couple argued their way to a cliffhanging climax on Cowley Mansions. The soap’s storylines had become increasingly bizarre: Peter, the gay yuppie, was discovered to be ‘pregnant’, a long-unborn twin developing inside his abdomen; Joko, the cool black wastrel, was revealed to be a white boy with permanently dyed skin, hiding out; and Ell Crenshaw, the cockney matriarch who ruled the top floor, spontaneously combusted the week the actress demanded a vast salary hike. Either the writers saw a Leech take-over as inevitable and were devaluing the property before the new landlord arrived, or GLT had ordered audience-grabbing sensationalism in the run-up to the auction.