Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  Tammy sensed the therapist’s desire to hurt her but was neither wounded nor surprised by it, for she lived in a world where vengeance for the smallest slight was a matter of routine. It didn’t matter anyway because the 3,600 seconds were almost over. There were only fifteen left, only ten, only five.

  ‘You!’ she said with a bark of laughter. ‘I’m running away from you!’

  And she was off.

  ~*~

  ‘Well well well!’ said the prisoner Wayne Furnish in a broad Bristol accent, as Charles came into the interview room. ‘The Ickies, eh? I thought you lot would be showing up soon.’

  Ickies! Charles could have clapped his hands with sheer professional pleasure. A familiar accent speaking a completely unfamiliar word: it was so typical, so diagnostic.

  ‘Ickies?’ he repeated as he sat down. ‘You’ll have to explain that to me, Wayne.’

  ‘Ickies! Incomer Control. That’s what you are, yeah?’

  IC – Ickies: Charles noted the expression and its etymology. It was the same sort of principle that turned ‘DSI’ into ‘deskies’.

  ‘Incomer Control? Never heard of it, mate,’ he replied with studied indifference.

  ‘Ah. Well I don’t come from round here.’

  ‘You don’t come from Thurston Meadows?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But from somewhere in Bristol? Your card says Daisyfields Estate, Bristol. Only thing is, there isn’t an estate here called Daisyfields.’

  Wayne narrowed his eyes. He was a stocky, bristling, red-haired man with a sunburned face the colour of brick.

  ‘Not from this Bristol,’ he said. ‘You know bloody well I don’t come from this Bristol, mate, or you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘So how did you get here?’

  ‘Slip of course.’

  ‘These seeds, yes?’

  Charles held out one of the plastic bags. For a moment Wayne’s dull eyes smouldered like the seeds themselves. Then he shrugged.

  ‘I ain’t bothered, mate. There’s plenty more out there.’

  ‘Did you swallow one when they picked you up?’

  ‘That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would.’

  ‘Well I’m not going to.’

  ‘Okay. Fair enough. Do you mind telling me a bit more about where you come from?’

  The shifter shrugged.

  ‘The place I come from is shit. This place is just as bad. But it don’t matter. I won’t be here long. I won’t be here long at all.’

  Charles nodded. There was a certain cockiness about the man that made him pretty certain that Furnish had swallowed a seed. If so, Charles’ task was simply to collect as much information as he could while Wayne and his friend were still here. He took the standard checklist out of his briefcase and started to go through it: What was the Prime Minister’s name where Wayne came from? Was there a king or queen? Was there a Thurston Meadows there? What was currently in the news? Who was the manager of the England football team?

  The idea was to build up a sort of map of the different worlds, the gradients of difference, the routes along which the shifters moved.

  ‘None of this shit matters to me,’ Wayne said after a bit. ‘Know what I mean? None of it matters. I’m a warrior of Dunner, I am. That’s why I got this hammer on my arm. I’m a warrior of Dunner and my home is the Big Tree. And if you want me to answer any more questions, mate, I need a cup of tea, a packet of cigs and a burger.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Charles went to the door and asked the PC outside to send for the things Wayne had asked for.

  ‘Three sugars!’ Wayne Furnish called out, enjoying his power.

  ‘So how many of you are there in this Zone?’ Charles asked him. ‘Apart from you and Jacob, I mean?’

  Furnish’s face became a parody of knowingness.

  ‘Why would I tell you that? And who’s Jacob?’

  ‘Oh go on, Wayne. What have you got to lose? You told me yourself you won’t be here for long.’

  ‘I’m not the only one, and that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘So is there one more, or two, or ten, or…’

  ‘That’s for me to know, mate, and you to find out.’

  Charles waited. Silence was powerful. Like a vacuum. And sure enough, Wayne couldn’t help himself from telling a little more.

  ‘Okay, I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said. ‘You people had better watch out because some of the others aren’t quite as nice as me, if you know what I mean.’

  Charles said nothing, knowing from past experience that it was a mistake to seem even slightly eager.

  ‘I reckon there’s people in this office here who are in for a bit of a surprise,’ Wayne eventually said. ‘Let’s just say that. A bit of a nasty surprise.’

  Charles shrugged, as if this information was of no interest to him at all.

  ‘So who was the President of America in your world, Wayne?’ he asked.

  A little scene came into his mind. It was like a memory, and it had appeared unbidden as memories often do, but wasn’t a memory. It wasn’t anything he’d ever actually done or a place he’d ever been, though he knew where it was and had seen it in the distance many times. It was a memory of standing in the dark on top of a hill. There were three other people with him and they were all standing in a row with their backs to a concrete radio mast. The mast had a single red light to warn aircraft of its presence, and something on the side of it was banging and clanging in the wind.

  ~*~

  ‘All right there Tammy?’ asked Jaz, as Tammy climbed into the car and huddled down, scowling, into her seat.

  ‘No, I’m fucking not alright,’ she muttered, but she was half smiling at the same time because Jaz was someone she liked. It was true that Jaz was a social worker, but she was funny and pretty and she wore sexy ear-rings.

  Jaz started the car. The arrangement was that she would take Tammy for a burger before she returned her to the Assessment Unit.

  ‘Tough session, eh?’

  ‘That Ripping bitch does my fucking head in. And don’t tell me this therapy will help me because it won’t make no fucking difference and you know it. That Ripping is just a creepy old cow who gets her kicks from poking about in other people’s lives.’

  Tammy pulled a face.

  ‘And her breath stinks,’ she added.

  ‘Four more sessions, Tammy,’ said Jazamine. ‘That was the deal. We agreed you could move out of the Roberts’ house and move back into the Unit, as long as you agreed to go for these six sessions to try and figure out what went wrong.’

  ‘Well I’m not going no more,’ said Tammy flatly. ‘So what are you going to do about it? Send me back to the Roberts? I’d fucking trash the place.’

  They came to the Line, the boundary of the Social Inclusion Zone. Jaz showed her ID to the cop and drove on through and out. Then she turned to Tammy.

  ‘Do you know what I wish? I wish that just once in your life you would discuss the pros and cons of something without immediately starting to make threats.’

  Stung, mortified, devastated, Tammy remained silent.

  ‘I mean apart from anything else,’ Jaz went on, ‘I spent literally days negotiating this deal for you, trying to convince people, trying to get the funding, trying to persuade people that you really were going to use your time in the Unit constructively this time and not just take up a valuable bed which someone else might have been able to make use of. And what do you do? You take all that work and just chuck it out of the window! It’s the same thing every time you decide you can’t hack one of your placements and want to go somewhere else. I feel as if you don’t give a damn.’

  Tammy gave an incredulous snort.

  ‘What? About you? Of course I fucking don’t! You’re just doing your job aren’t you? Plus you get paid good money for it. I mean, when you go off on your holidays in Greece and fucking Thailand, don’t tell me you’re thinking about me when you’re lying on the beach out there sunni
ng your fucking tits because you never. “Thank fuck I don’t have none of those bloody dreggies here to deal with,” is what you’re thinking isn’t it? You might as well admit it. So why should I care about you? You give me one good reason!’

  Jazamine was silent.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tammy, ‘and you can stuff the fucking burger while you’re at it. Take me back to the Unit. That’ll save you some of your precious time and money. Just take me back to the fucking Unit.’

  Jaz pulled the car over, did a three-point turn and headed back to the Line. This took Tammy completely by surprise.

  ‘Hey! What are you doing?’

  ‘Taking you back to the Unit. As you requested.’

  Tammy felt the rejection like a stab wound. She didn’t want to go back to the Unit. She wanted to have a burger with Jaz and to chat and laugh and wind her up about her ear-rings and her boyfriends and her trips abroad. She’d been looking forward to it all week. But nothing would make her admit to a thing like that. Nothing.

  ‘I’m sick of your games Tammy,’ said Jaz, ‘and I’m not going to play them any more.’

  Tammy shrugged.

  ‘Well, that’s all right then, because soon you won’t have to worry about me anyway. I’ve met a shifter. He’s got loads of slip and he’s going to give me some. I’m getting out of this shithole for good.’

  Jaz sighed. ‘More threats, Tammy?’

  She pulled up outside the Asphodel Assessment Unit.

  ‘See you next week.’

  ‘I told you. He’s got slip, Jaz. You won’t never see me again!’

  ‘Well that’s up to you,’ Jaz said with a shrug as she put the car back into gear.

  Desperate, fuming, terrified, Tammy watched her drive away.

  ‘You’re not supposed to leave me on my fucking own!’ she shouted. ‘It’s against the fucking procedures. You’re supposed to walk me in.’

  Then she took out her phone and called the shifter, Slug. She was shaking violently and she felt like being physically sick, but she made herself do it, and she made her voice tell another story.

  ‘I want you, Slug. I want you now.’

  ~*~

  The other prisoner, Jacob Hassan, was much more astute than Wayne Furnish.

  He was in his early twenties and he had tightly curled hair, a Roman nose and brown, freckled skin. Charles gathered he didn’t come originally from the same timeline as Wayne. They had arrived separately in another world and joined forces. Shifters often found temporary travelling companions.

  ‘I’m guessing there were four of you,’ Charles said, by way of an experiment, ‘and that you arrived in this world on Saturday night, below the radio mast on Lockleaze Hill.’

  ‘That’s crap,’ Jacob said, but his startled look made it obvious to Charles that his hunch had been right.

  It was actually pretty startling for him as well. How had he known? Where did that image come from? But he moved on quickly before the prisoner could see his surprise.

  ‘You’ve linked up with the shifter community here remarkably quickly, I must say,’ Charles said.

  Hassan shrugged. Charles pressed on.

  ‘Your friend Wayne says there’s trouble brewing for the people in this building.’

  Hassan laughed.

  ‘Yeah, I know all about that. I could tell you what they’ve got planned. I could even give you names. But I’m not going to, am I, mate? Not just for nothing, anyway.’

  ‘So what do you want in exchange?’

  ‘You know what I want, mate. I want the seeds back. All of them, mine and Wayne’s. Either that or you don’t get anything out of me. Not even the name of the Prime Minister where I come from. Not even the fucking England football manager.’

  He snorted.

  ‘You always ask that, don’t you? The England football manager. What the fuck do you want to know that for? It’s the same question in every fucking world.’

  ‘We can do you food, cigarettes, a drink,’ Charles told him. ‘We can do you anything within reason to make you comfortable, but we can’t give you back the seeds. We don’t agree with the stuff, do we? We’re trying to stop it spreading. That’s what this is all about.’

  Hassan shrugged. ‘That’s your problem, mate. No seeds no talk.’

  He folded his arms, sat back in his chair and looked away. He too knew the power of silence, but unfortunately it worked on him more quickly than it worked on Charles, and pretty soon he felt compelled to speak.

  ‘I’ll tell you why you people don’t like slip,’ he said.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Because slip is freedom, and that scares you.’

  Hassan half-turned towards Charles with a small sly smile.

  ‘You should try it sometime, mate. It’d do you good, I reckon. A new life. All the benefits of suicide and none of the drawbacks.’

  This was unexpected and Charles was a little shaken by it. Hassan noticed this with glee.

  ‘Yeah, look at you, you poor miserable bastard. You should definitely do it mate, definitely. It’d put a bit of life into you.’

  ~*~

  Slug couldn’t believe his luck. He came over at once in a beat-up old car and took Tammy back to his hideaway in a row of condemned low rise buildings off Beveridge Street. He’d broken into one of the ground floor flats and made a sort of den in the back room. There was a dirty mattress on the floor with a metal baseball bat beside it and a couple of porn-mags for reading matter. Slug was prone to wet himself when he had one of his many bad dreams, and the place stank of urine.

  ‘So ye want it now do ye, darling?’

  Straight away his hands were under Tammy’s tee-shirt and his tongue was pushing into her mouth.

  ‘Hey hang on, sweetheart,’ she purred in her silkiest voice, shoving him away. ‘I want it as much as you do but we’ve got all day, haven’t we? And we’ve got things to discuss.’

  ‘Yeah, like what?’

  ‘Like what turns you on of course, bullet-man,’ she said, straightening her top, ‘like what really turns you on.’

  Slug didn’t need any further encouragement, and began to recite a long but very predictable list: young girls with no knickers, young girls in white socks, young girls in suspenders… The usual pervy litany and Tammy knew it by heart.

  ‘And do you want to know what turns me on about you?’ she interrupted after a while, bringing his attention back to the matter in hand. ‘I like men who don’t give a shit about no one.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about no one,’ said Slug. ‘I’ve killed three men ye know. Three men with my ain hands. I’m a warrior I am. I’m a warrior of Dunner.’

  ‘I love that, and I love the fact that you’re a shifter and you’ve been to other worlds,’ said Tammy, though inwardly she laughed coldly at the idea of little Slug being a warrior of anything.

  ‘Loads ay other worlds,’ said Slug, ‘and I’ll go tae loads more tae. Nae bugger’s going to stop me.’

  ‘I’m scared you’ll go without me.’

  ‘No way, Tammy,’ said Slug. ‘Ye’re coming with me. Ye’re coming with me no matter what. No way am I giving ye up.’

  He was kneeling right in front of her now, and beginning to run his hands up under her clothes again. Tammy had to think quickly, make sure she played her cards in the right order.

  ‘I need a drink,’ she said. ‘You got some beer or something?’

  He went and fetched a six pack of Special Brew and for a while Tammy kept opening cans and pretending to drink, while making sure he had almost all of it.

  ‘I want to do it with you,’ she said after a bit. ‘I want to do it with a real warrior. But I want to see those seeds first. It might sound weird to you but the thought of them really turns me on.’

  Well anything that would turn her on was all right with Slug by now, so he went into another room and rummaged around in some secret place for a while before coming back with a big bag of seeds. It was like a bag of dying stars.

  �
��Let me hold them,’ said Tammy.

  After a moment’s hesitation he handed them to her.

  ‘What’s it like,’ she asked him. ‘Tell me again. What’s it like when you do a shift?’

  Slug laughed.

  ‘I cannae describe it really. It’s like the world sort ay dances round ye. And then ye get into the Tree and ye see all kinds ay weird things. Sometimes ye see, like, your ain life, but different. Like other lives ye might have had. Know what I mean?’

  He put his hand under her skirt. ‘But are we not getting off the subject here, sweetheart?’

  She saw him looking anxiously at his bag of seeds and decided the moment had come. Inwardly she steeled herself.

  ‘Do it to me now Slug,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wait no more.’

  It took about twenty seconds. When he’d done he began to cry, cuddling up to Tammy as if he was the child and she the grown-up. She stroked his head and called him baby, baby, my baby, and pretty soon, what with the Special Brew in his belly and the release of tension and the baby-mummy dream that Tammy was acting out for him, he was off to sleep, just exactly as she’d planned.

  ‘Just got to go and have a piss,’ murmured Tammy after a few minutes, the bag of seeds still clutched tightly in her hand.

  She lifted him off her, pulled on her clothes and slipped out into the back garden. It was completely overgrown. Brambles climbed over the rusty skeleton of a burnt-out car. Stinging nettles came poking through the springs of a rotted mattress.

  She put the seeds in her pocket, picked her way across the undergrowth and pulled herself up onto the wooden fence. For a moment she sat astride it, savouring her triumph. On one side were the overgrown gardens of abandoned Beveridge Street, on the other an alleyway that ran behind the backyards of the still-inhabited maisonettes of Joseph Row. But it wasn’t just some old Zone alleyway any more, it was her highway to freedom, her highway to other worlds.

  ‘Tammy? What ye doing?’

  Slug had his baseball cap in his hand, but what with the beer and the sleep and the sex he still hadn’t fully grasped what was happening. Tammy held up his bag of seeds and stuck out her tongue. His fanged mouth gaped. The hurt in his eyes, the disappointment, the sheer weariness, were bottomless. Just for a short while there, absurdly, against all the weight of previous experience, he had persuaded himself that she actually wanted him.