Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Who was the last person to see her?’ Charles asked.

  ‘Her social worker, Jazamine Bright,’ said Val Hollowby, ‘and before that a free-lance therapist we use called Sarah Ripping. One of the Unit staff took her to a session with Sarah, and then Jaz collected her and took her back to the Unit. When Jaz dropped her off, Tammy announced that she was going to disappear and that Jaz would never see her again. For whatever reason, Jaz didn’t actually walk her back inside the Unit as she’s supposed to do but just dropped her off, and Tammy never went inside. It seems she’s been talking a lot lately about shifters and having shifter friends and so on, so it all fits together. Too late though, of course, as will doubtless be said at the inquiry.’

  Ms Hollowby gave a bitter little snort. ‘Though even if we had made the connection, I can’t see there’s much we could have done.’

  ‘Well my next job is to interview Jazamine Bright,’ Charles said.

  ‘She’s over in the satellite office at the moment,’ said Val Hollowby. ‘It’s about a mile from here.’

  ‘We’ll send for her!’ cried Janet Richards. ‘We’ll get her straight over. We’ve already booked an interview room for you. Would you like any more coffee, Mr Bowen? Or perhaps a cup of tea?’

  ~*~

  At this point the door opened and another member of Mrs Richards’ little government came in.

  ‘Sorry, I couldn’t get here earlier.’

  With his slightly lop-sided glasses and his threadbare suit, the newcomer struck Charles immediately as different from the others. He looked more like some sort of academic than a deskie, or maybe an artist or a poet. There was something dreamy and otherworldly about him.

  ‘I’ve been looking after my grandson while my daughter is away,’ the man explained, ‘and he’s gone down with flu. I’ve only just managed to line up someone to keep an eye on him.’

  A little stiffly, Janet Richards introduced him.

  ‘Charles, this is Cyril Burkitt, the Senior Registration Manager for the Zone.’

  The Senior Registration Manager, Charles noticed, not my Senior Registration Manager.

  ‘Senior Registration Manager?’ he asked. ‘Would you mind explaining what that is?’

  ‘Well, my job is to oversee the process which decides whether people should be on the Social Inclusion Register or not. Some people don’t want to be included in the Inclusion Register, you see. Some people would rather be excluded from the register and just be included. Or failing that, just be excluded, if you see what I mean…’

  He gave a little snort of a laugh. The others looked embarrassed.

  ‘The thing about Cyril,’ Dave Ricketts explained, as if he felt some sort of justification was necessary for the man’s presence, ‘is that, more than any of us, he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the residents of the Zone. He’s worked on this Zone for – what is it Cyril? – twenty years isn’t it?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Burkitt.

  ‘Twenty years. And it’s just incredible how much he remembers.’

  ‘Do you remember Tammy Pendant?’ Val Hollowby asked him.

  ‘Tammy Pendant? Yes of course I know her!’

  ‘Tell us what you remember of her history.’

  ‘Well I knew her first as Tamsin Delaney, then as Tamsin Blows. I was her social worker back in the days when I was a social worker. Her mother – Liz – gave her up for adoption at birth. She said she didn’t want the baby one bit. She said Tammy was the child of a rape. Anyway, Tammy was placed with adopters. They were going to change her name to Jessica I remember, Jessica Tamsin Ferne. But then, at the eleventh hour, Liz changed her mind and asked for her back. We could have tried to stop it through the courts – there were a number of reasons to worry about Liz as a parent – but we decided not to, a decision which turned out to be a bad mistake.’

  He sighed.

  ‘A very bad mistake, in fact, because the upshot was that poor Tammy was seriously abused in Liz’s care and we had to take her back out. But the damage had been done by then. She was older and more wounded and we couldn’t settle her in a new family. I don’t know what’s been happening in the last year or two, but I know she’s had one placement after another break down on her. The expectation of rejection has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess. If she’d been placed as a baby things might have been different.’

  He gave a weary shrug.

  ‘So what’s happened to her? She’s got involved with shifters has she? Where is she now?’

  ‘In another timeline most probably,’ Charles said. ‘Another universe.’

  ‘In another universe? You mean she’s…’

  ‘You see what I mean about Cyril, Mr Bowen?’ broke in Dave Rickets, as if to bring the conversation back onto less dangerous territory. ‘I told you his knowledge was encyclopaedic.’

  ‘It’s very strange,’ Cyril said, ‘that this should have happened today of all days, quite eerie in fact. I hadn’t thought about Tammy at all for ages, but this morning she’s kept coming into my mind.’

  He looked round at the others, realised they were all reluctant to meet his eyes, and turned instead to Charles.

  ‘I keep getting this vivid image of her,’ he said. ‘I can picture it quite clearly as I’m speaking to you: Tammy on her own in the middle of an empty field, under a dark grey sky and… and a bitter wind blowing.’

  ~*~

  In a field under a dark grey sky, Charles thought as he waited in an interview room for the social worker Jazamine Bright. It had been in his mind too: a field, a threatening sky, a biting wind and a dark, diffuse, all-pervading sense of dread. These things happened around shifters.

  He phoned his boss.

  ‘There’s way too much going on at once here, Roger, for me to able to deal with on my own. We’ve got two in custody who’ll disappear at any moment. We’ve got the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl. And on the top of that we’ve got the threat of some kind of violent incident instigated by another group of shifters. The deskies here don’t have a clue. All the signs were there to see that the Zone has been crawling with shifters for months but as usual they’re all completely in denial about the whole thing. I’m just not going to be able to deal with it all.’

  Roger was a bright man and an experienced manager but all his jobs until very recently had been in conventional immigration work, and he had no direct shifter experience.

  ‘I know you shouldn’t have to deal with this on your own, Charles. But – sod’s law I suppose – things are blowing across the whole region just now. Mike and James have been at Lockleaze all day, Judy’s turned up a hornet’s nest in Swindon, and Fran’s boarding school looks like it’s going to keep her busy for at least a couple more days. I’ll try and…’

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘I’ll have to get back to you later,’ Charles said, as he rose to greet Jazmine Bright. ‘Just see what you can do, okay?’

  ~*~

  ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  Charles couldn’t place her straight away. He recognised her alright: those slightly African features and the hair tied up in little bows. He knew she meant something to him too. He knew she was associated in his mind with feelings both bitter and sweet. But just for a second, immersed and preoccupied as he was in what was happening here, he couldn’t find the context.

  ‘But you said you were an immigration officer!’ she protested.

  Of course! Susan’s party! And Jazamine was that hard-to-remember name.

  ‘Well I am an immigration officer. It’s just that I’ve moved on from dealing with the national boundary, to…’

  ‘…to guarding the universe itself,’ she interrupted. ‘Wow!’

  She had seen right through him! That was how Charles felt. She’d taken one look at him and summed him up. He thought of the silly, adolescent, self-dramatising thing he’d written that night after getting home from the party – what had he called it? Marcher – and he swo
re to himself that he’d destroy it as soon as he got home. Out loud, though, he defended his ground.

  ‘Well, it’s important. Imagine if everyone could escape at will from the consequences of their actions.’

  She smiled, amused by his intensity. It was a reaction he frequently encountered. Most of the world, it seemed to him, was in denial about the fact that shifters really existed. The remainder – and this included even the other members of his own Section - was in denial about the implications.

  ‘I think Tammy’s main problem was having to deal with the consequences of other people’s actions,’ Jazamine said.

  ‘Yes, Mr Burkitt did say she was the child of a rape. And that she’d been abused. And he said he felt that the system had let her down by returning her to her mother when she was small.’

  ‘Yes, it did. Not that it’s possible to make the right decision every time, mind you. None of us can do that. We can’t read the future.’

  ‘Well no,’ Charles said, ‘and there isn’t one future anyway. The future is millions of alternatives.’

  ‘Well of course. That’s why it’s impossible to know in advance.’

  He was surprised by this answer. Not many people accepted so readily the principle of the Great Tree.

  ‘The child of a rape,’ he mused. ‘Imagine. Your very existence the result of a transgression.’

  ‘Transgression?’ said Jazamine with a smile. ‘That’s a very old-fashioned word!’

  ‘I think it just means crossing over. Crossing over a boundary.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, a little tartly. ‘I know what it means.’

  Well done Charles, he thought, you’ve been pompous and patronising already and she’s only been in the room for about a minute.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you’re right, there is something irresolvable about knowing that your existence is the result of a crime…’

  She told him a bit more of the history. It seemed that Tammy had often made threats to disappear.

  ‘But the thing is,’ Jazamine said, ‘up to now when she’s made these threats, she’s never gone any further than empty garages and places like that. She just holes up for a night or two until she gets picked up by the police, or until she gets fed up and returns of her own accord.’

  ‘I see. So you assumed this was the same kind of thing. Can you tell me what exactly happened this morning?’

  Jazamine told him about picking Tammy up from Sarah Ripping’s, the conversation in the car, the abandoned plan for a burger and Tammy’s parting shot as Jazamine dropped her off outside the Unit.

  ‘The bit I do feel badly about,’ she said, ‘is that Tammy did want to go for a burger with me. She can’t admit to wanting anything from anyone, of course. She can’t really admit that she likes anyone, not even to herself. But really she did want to have a burger with me, whatever she might have said, and I knew it. And I suppose if I hadn’t been so cross with her I would have gone ahead and taken her for one. And then maybe…’

  She made an impatient gesture of dismissal with her hand. Charles remembered how much he liked the way she moved.

  ‘But there’s no point thinking like that, is there?’ she said. ‘There’s always a what-might-have-happened.’

  He nodded.

  ‘What-might-have-happened. I suppose you could say that’s where the shifters come from. And the place they go.’

  She considered this for a moment, frowning, then gave an abrupt little nod.

  ‘What the agency is pissed off with me about, though,’ she went on, ‘is that I dropped her off outside the Unit and didn’t check her in with a member of staff. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you see. And now it’s all got to be looked into and a decision made by my bosses as to whether I get sacked, or a written reprimand on my file, or just a verbal warning. The fact is that it’s an open unit and kids can go out whenever they want. But…’

  Jazamine broke off with a shrug.

  ‘Well, never mind. The worst that can happen is that I lose this lousy job.’

  She pushed a large pile of manila folders across the desk.

  ‘These are Tammy’s files. Val tells me you may need to see them.’

  There were twelve of them at least. Tammy’s fifteen years of life must have taken up an entire drawer of a filing cabinet.

  ‘This is the most recent one,’ she said. ‘There’s some photos of Tammy in it, look. A really beautiful girl, don’t you think? Filmstar beautiful.’

  But right at that moment, Charles was noticing Jazamine. She had a delightful forthrightness about her, and there was none of that cowed, cringing quality that he had so detested in her fellow-deskies up in Janet Richards’ office.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll have a look at them. I’ll probably need to talk to the staff at the residential unit as well. And the therapist too.’

  He looked down at the picture. Tammy was beautiful, but he now realised that she was also familiar.

  ‘Oh! I saw her this morning! With an Asian woman, a rather large…’

  ‘Oh yes, that’d be Rita Fernandez from the Unit.’

  ‘I’ll need to talk to Rita then.’

  Charles remembered the feeling he’d had that morning when he’d seen Tammy with Rita, the sense of an approaching void. And now, quite suddenly, it felt as if the void was all around him: that emptiness, that feeling of vertigo and dread.

  Jazamine was watching him with a puzzled frown.

  ‘So is that all you need from me?’ she asked.

  He told her yes, for the moment, and she stood up.

  ‘Do you really believe in shifters and all that?’ she suddenly asked. ‘Isn’t it just a theory? Isn’t it more likely that Tammy is just off her head as usual in some empty garage somewhere and this is all just a great big wind-up?’

  ‘Officially yes, it is just a theory. But… well, I’ve actually seen people do a shift, right in front of my eyes. It’s happened to me a couple of times: people standing or sitting no further away from me than you are and then them just vanishing. You can hear the air rush into the vacuum where they’ve been, you can even feel it, and there’s nothing left of them but a sort of burnt electrical smell, and a… well a feeling, the feeling that shifters call fizz. It’s a bit like vertigo, like a weird kind of all-embracing vertigo, and at the same time it’s like... It’s like a kind of grief. I know I can’t prove that those people who disappeared in front of me went to another universe, but they certainly vanished, and no one has come up with an alternative story that’s any easier to believe.’

  ‘And people don’t come back?’

  ‘It seems not.’

  ‘So it’s as if she’s died in a way? Died to us in any case.’

  ‘To us, perhaps. But she hasn’t really died. Not only is she still alive, but she’s alive in this place and this point in time. It’s just that we can’t reach her.’

  Jazamine took hold of the door handle but didn’t turn it

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘when I said that thing earlier about you guarding the universe, it probably sounded very sarcastic. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I was just upset for Tammy. I don’t like to think of her all alone in some other… in some other place. I mean she’s always been alone really and she’s probably got far more of the skills to cope in a situation like that than you or me. But I still feel wretched for her… Plus I’m a bit spooked by the whole business if I’m honest. Which I guess you must get a lot of? Probably it even spooks you sometimes doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well… I’m used to it in a way. But yes, I’m like most people. I would prefer to think there was just one world.’

  ‘Just one world? I’m not sure I care how many worlds there are. It’s the thought of people disappearing from this one that freaks me out. But anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I didn’t mean to be rude, specially when I upset you at the party as well. I wouldn’t want you to think I had something against you because I really haven’t. You seem very nice. I like it t
hat you’re passionate about what you do.’

  Charles smiled.

  ‘Actually I found it very interesting what you asked me at the party. About why I do this job, I mean. Interesting and, well, sort of instructive. I wasn’t so much upset as…’

  He stopped, shook his head, and laughed.

  ‘Who am I kidding? I was upset, as you could obviously tell. But I found it interesting that I was. You gave me something to think about.’

  ‘Oh, well, good.’ Jazamine hesitated. ‘You don’t… um… fancy meeting up sometime, socially I mean, for a drink or something?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to but I’m not really supposed to… to socialise with…’

  ‘…people who are involved in your investigations? I see. Another boundary, eh? Another transgression to be avoided?’

  Her remorse about being sarcastic seemed to be remarkably short-lived.

  ‘Boundaries are important,’ Charles insisted, but it sounded lame and pedantic even to him.

  ‘So they are,’ she replied, ‘but they aren’t the only important thing. And some are surely more important than others.’

  ‘Well, yes. That is true.’ Charles suddenly smiled, as if just speaking these words had lifted some kind of burden. ‘And yes, I’d love to have a drink with you.’

  They exchanged phone numbers and arranged to meet the following Friday and then she left, and Charles was on his own in the room, feeling slightly dazed. But he shook himself and turned his attention to the files.

  She was a very pretty girl, this Tamsin Pendant, looking out at him from a photo taken on some institutional outing to the seaside. She was dazzling in fact. She looked sharp and ruthless too. She looked immensely powerful, even though she was so slight and so very young: powerful and dangerous and terribly vulnerable all at once.

  It was odd. He’d never met her, he was twice her age, and she came from a completely different background to him, yet he felt a connection of some kind with her, an affinity. Once again he saw in his mind the empty field and the darkening sky, and he realised that this was what shifters called a switch: he was seeing it through her eyes, hearing the cold wind through her ears. And off in the distance he could just make out…