The Quorum (53 page)

He kept his eyes on the ground and got more lost. The numbering system of the houses was irregular and contradictory and Greg had to go round in circles for a while. He asked for directions from a pair of henna-redheaded teenage girls sitting on a wall and they just shrugged their shoulders and went back to chewing gum. One of the girls was pregnant, her swollen belly pushing through her torn T-shirt, bursting the buttons of her jeans fly.

Greg was conscious that even his old overcoat was several degrees smarter than the norm in this area and that that might mark him as a mugging target. He also knew he had less than ten pounds on him and that frustrated muggers usually make up the difference between their expectations and their acquisitions with bare-knuckle beatings and loose teeth.

It was a Summer evening and quite warm, but the estate had a chill all of its own. The block-shaped tiers of council flats cast odd shadows that slipped across alleyways in a manner that struck Greg as being subtly wrong, like an illustration where the perspective is off or the light sources contradictory. The graffiti wasn’t the ’80s hip-hop style he knew from his own area, elaborate signatures to absent works of art, but was bluntly, boldly blatant, embroidered only by the occasional swastika (invariably drawn the wrong way round), football club symbol or Union Jack scratch.

CHELSEA FC FOREVER. KILL THE COONS! NF NOW. GAS THE YIDS! UP THE GUNNERS. FUCK THE IRISH MURDERERS! HELP STAMP OUT AIDS: SHOOT A POOF TODAY
. And the names of bands he had read about in
Searchlight
, the anti-fascist paper:
SKREWDRIVER, BRITISH BOYS, WHITEWASH, CRÜSADERS
. There was a song lyric, magic markered on a bus stop in neat primary school writing, ‘Jump down, turn around, kick a fucking nigger. Jump down, turn around, kick him in the head. Jump down, turn around, kick a fucking nigger. Jump down, turn around, kick him till he’s dead.’

You would have thought that the Nazis had won the War and installed a puppet Tory government. The estate could easily be a ’30s science-fiction writer’s idea of the ghetto of the future, clean-lined and featureless buildings trashed by the bubble-helmeted brownshirts of some interplanetary axis, Jews, blacks and Martians despatched to some concentration camp asteroid. This wasn’t the Jubilee Year. Nobody was even angry any more, just numbed with the endless, grinding misery of it all.

Eventually, more or less by wandering at random, he found Harry Lipman’s flat. The bell button had been wrenched off, leaving a tuft of multi-coloured wires, and there was a reversed swastika carved into the door. Greg knocked and a light went on in the hall. Harry admitted him into the neat, small flat. Greg realised the place was fortified like a command bunker, a row of locks on the door, multiple catches on the reinforced glass windows, a burglar alarm fixed up on the wall between the gas and electricity meters. Otherwise, it was what he had expected: bookshelves everywhere, including the toilet, and a pleasantly musty clutter.

‘I’ve not had many people here since Becky died’ - Greg had known that Harry was a widower - ‘you must excuse the fearful mess.’

Harry showed Greg through to the kitchen. There was an Amstrad PCW 8256 set up on the small vinyl-topped table, a stack of continuous paper in a tray on the floor feeding the printer. The room smelled slightly of fried food.

‘I’m afraid this is where I write. It’s the only room with enough natural light for me. Besides, I like to be near the kettle and the Earl Grey.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Harry. You should see what my studio looks like. I think it used to be a coal cellar.’

He put down his art folder and Harry made a pot of tea.

‘So, how’s Dr Shade coming along? I’ve made some drawings.’

‘Swimmingly. I’ve done a month’s worth of scripts, giving us our introductory serial. In the end, I went with the East End story as the strongest to bring the doctor back...’

The East End Story was an idea Harry and Greg had developed in which Dr Jonathan Chambers, miraculously not a day older than he was in 1952 when he was last seen (or 1929, come to that), returns from a spell in a Tibetan Monastery (or somewhere) studying the mystic healing arts (or something) to discover that the area where he used to make his home is being taken over by Dominick Dalmas, a sinister tycoon whose sharp-suited thugs are using violence and intimidation to evict the long-time residents, among whom are several of the doctor’s old friends. Penelope Stamp, formerly a girl reporter but now a feisty old woman, is head of the Residents’ Protection Committee, and she appeals to Chambers to resume his old crime-fighting alias and to investigate Dalmas. At first reluctant, Chambers is convinced by a botched assassination attempt to put on the cloak and goggles, and it emerges that Dalmas is the head of a mysterious secret society whose nefarious schemes would provide limitless future plotlines. Dalmas would be hoping to build up a substantial powerbase in London with the long-term intention of taking over the country, if not the world. Of course, Dr Shade would thwart his plots time and again, although not without a supreme effort.

‘Maybe I’m just old, Greg,’ Harry said after he had shown him the scripts, ‘but this Dr Shade feels different. People said that when I took over from Donald, the strip became more appealing, with more comedy and thrills than horror and violence, but I can’t see much to laugh about in this story. It’s almost as if someone were trying to force Dr Shade to be Donald’s character, by creating a world where his monster vigilante makes more sense than my straight-arrow hero. Everything’s turned around.’

‘Don’t worry about it. Our Dr Shade is still fighting for justice. He’s on the side of Penny Stamp, not Dominick Dalmas.’

‘What I want to know is whether he’ll be on the side of Derek Leech?’

Greg really hadn’t thought of that. The proprietor of the
Argus
would, of course, have the power of veto over the adventures of his cartoon character. He might not care for the direction Greg and Harry wanted to take Dr Shade in.

‘Leech is on the side of money. We just have to make the strip so good it sells well, then it won’t matter to him what it says.’

‘I hope you’re right, Greg, I really do. More tea?’

Outside, it got dark, and they worked through the scripts, making minor changes. Beyond the kitchen windows, shadows crept across the tiny garden towards the flat, their fingers reaching slowly for the concrete and tile. There were many small noises in the night, and it would have been easy to mistake the soft hiss of an aerosol paintspray for the popping of a high-powered airgun.

AUSSIE SOAP STAR GOT ME ON CRACK: Doomed schoolgirl’s story - EXCLUSIVE - begins in the
Comet
today.

THE
COMET
LAW AND ORDER PULL-OUT. We ask top coppers, MPs, criminals and ordinary people what’s to be done about rising crime?

BRIXTON YOBS SLASH WAR HERO PENSIONER: Is the birch the only language they understand? ‘Have-a-Go’ Tommy Barraclough, 76, thinks so. A special
Comet
poll shows that so do 69% of you readers.

DEREK LEECH TALKS STRAIGHT: Today: IMMIGRATION, CRIME, UNEMPLOYMENT. ‘No matter what the whingers and moaners say, the simple fact is that Britain is an island. We are a small country and we only have room for the British. Everybody knows about the chronic housing shortage and the lack of jobs. The pro-open door partisans can’t argue with the facts and figures.

‘British citizenship is a privilege not a universal right. This simple man thinks we should start thinking twice before we give it away to any old Tom, Dick or Pandit who comes, turban in hand, to our country, hoping to make a fortune off the dole...’

WIN! WIN! WIN! LURVERLY DOSH! THE
COMET
GIVEAWAY GRID DISHES OUT THREE MILLION KNICKER! THEY SAID WE’D NEVER DO IT, BUT WE DID! MILLIONS MORE IN LURVERLY PRIZES MUST GO!

This is BRANDI ALEXANDER, 17, and she’ll be seen without the football scarf in our ADULTS ONLY Sunday edition. BRANDI has just left school. Already, she has landed a part in a film,
Fiona Does the Falklands.
The part may be small, but hers aren’t...

CATS TORTURED BY CURRYHOUSE KING?: What’s really in that vindaloo, Mr Patel?

DID ELVIS DIE OF AIDS?: Our psychic reveals the truth!

GUARDIAN ANGEL KILLINGS CONTINUE: Scotland Yard Insiders Condemn Vigilante Justice.

The bodies of Malcolm Williams, 19, and Barry Tozer, 22, were identified yesterday by the Reverend Kenneth Hood, a spokesman for the West Indian community. The dead men were dumped in an underpass on the South London Attlee Estate. Both were shot at close range with a small-bore gun, execution-style. Inspector Mark Davey of the Metropolitan Police believes that the weapon used might be an airgun. This incident follows the identical killings of five black and Asian youths in recent months.

Williams and Tozer, like the other victims, had extensive police records. Williams served three months in prison last year for breaking and entering, and Tozer had a history of mugging, statutory rape, petty thieving and violence. It is possible that they were killed shortly after committing an assault. A woman’s handbag was found nearby, it’s contents scattered. Witnesses report that Williams and Tozer left The Flask, their local, when they couldn’t pay for more drinks, and yet they had money on them when they were found.

The police are appealing for any witnesses to come forward. In particular, they would like to question the owner of the bag, who might well be able to identify the ‘Guardian Angel’ executioner. Previous appeals have not produced any useful leads.

A local resident who wishes to remain anonymous told our reporter, ‘I hope they never catch the Guardian Angel. There are a lot more nigger b*st*rds with knives out there. I hope the Angel gets them all. Then maybe I can cash my pension at the postoffice without fearing for my life.’

Coming Soon:    BRITAIN’S NEW-OLD NEWSPAPER. CHURCHILL’S FAVOURITE READING IS BACK. DR SHADE
WILL
RETURN. At last, the EVENING has a HERO.

From the
Daily Comet,
Monday July the 1st, 1991

Saturday mornings were always quiet at comic conventions. Every time Greg went into the main hall there was a panel. All of them featured three quiet people nodding and chuckling while Neil Gaiman told all the jokes from his works-in-progress. He had heard them all in the bar the night before, and kept leaving for yet another turn around the dealers’ room. They had him on a panel in the evening about reviving old characters: they were bringing back Tarzan, Grimly Feendish and Dan Dare, so Dr Shade would be in good company. At the charity auction, his first attempts at designing a new-look Dr Shade had fetched over £50, which must mean something.

He drifted away from the cardboard boxes full of overpriced American comic books in plastic bags to the more eccentric stalls which offered old movie stills, general interest magazines from the ’40s and ’50s (and, he realised with a chill, the ’60s and ’70s), odd items like
Stingray
jigsaws (only three pieces missing, £12.00) and
Rawhide
boardgames (£5.00), and digest-sized pulp magazines.

A dealer recognised him, probably from an earlier con, and said he might have something that would interest him. He had precisely the smugly discreet tone of a pimp. Bending down below his trestle table, which made him breath hard, he reached for a tied bundle of pulps and brought them up.

‘You don’t see these very often...’

Greg looked at the cover of the topmost magazine.
Dr Shade Monthly
. The illustration, a faded FitzGerald, showed the goggled and cloaked doctor struggling with an eight-foot neanderthal in the uniform of an SS officer, while the blonde Penny Stamp, dressed only in flimsy ’40s foundation garments and chains, lay helpless on an operating table. INSIDE: ‘Master of the Mutants’ a complete novel by REX CASH. Also, ‘Flaming Torture’, ‘The Laughter of Dr Shade’ and ‘Hank the Yank and the Hangman of Heidelberg’. April, 1945. A Badgerfield Publication.

Greg had asked Harry Lipman to come along to the con but the writer had had a few bad experiences at events like this and said he didn’t want to ‘mix with the looneys’. He knew Harry didn’t have many of the old mags with his stuff in and that he had to buy these for him. Who knows, there might be a few ideas in them that could be re-used.

‘Ten quid the lot?’

He handed over two fives and took the bundle, checking the spines to see that the dealer hadn’t slipped in some
Reader’s Digests
to bulk out the package. No, they were all
Dr Shades
, all from the ’40s. He had an urge to sit down and read the lot.

Back in the hall, someone was lecturing an intently interested but pimple-plagued audience about adolescent angst in
The Teen Titans
and
X-Men,
and Greg wondered where he could get a cup of tea or coffee and a biscuit. Neil Gaiman, surrounded by acolytes, grinned at him and waved from across the room, signalling. Greg gestured his thanks. Neil had alerted him to the presence of Hunt Sealey, a British comics entrepreneur he had once taken to court over some financial irregularities. Greg did not want to go through that old argument again. Avoiding the spherical Sealey, he stepped into a darkened room where a handful of white-faced young men with thick glasses were watching a Mexican horror-wrestling movie on a projection video. The tape was a third- or fourth-generation dupe, and the picture looked as if it were being screened at a tropical drive-in during the monsoon.

‘Come, Julio,’ said a deep American voice dubbed over the lip movements of a swarthy mad doctor, ‘help me carry the cadaver of the gorilla to the incinerator.’

Nobody laughed. The video room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer. The kids who couldn’t afford a room in the hotel crashed out in here, undisturbed by the non-stop Z-movie festival. The only film Greg wanted to see (a French print of Georges Franju’s
Les Yeux sans Visage)
was scheduled at the same time as his panel. Typical.

On the assumption that Sealey, who was known for the length of time he could hold a grudge, would be loitering in the hall harassing Neil, Greg sat on a chair and watched the movie. The mad doctor was transplanting gorilla hearts and a monster was terrorising the city, ripping the dresses off hefty
senoritas
. The heroine was a sensitive lady wrestler who wanted to quit the ring because she had put her latest opponent in a coma.