Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Well there may not be any new cases Charles but if there are…’

  ‘If there are, why don’t you come over and interview them yourself? It would be a good experience for you. Or, failing that, why not get some of that lot to get off their arses and do it?’

  Charles gestured across the room to the case officers in the various sections of the conventional immigration service, the ones whose customers came in on ships and planes.

  ‘Well, no promises,’ Roger said carefully, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’

  ~*~

  When Charles arrived back at the DSI office in Thurston Meadows, Janet Richards came straight down. Really straight down. She was flushed and breathless. She must have run downstairs and along the corridors, so desperate was she to see him.

  ‘Mr Bowen, I was wondering if you could help me out with something.’

  She’d had a sleepless night too, Charles realised. She must have lain awake imagining the repercussions when the press and the government and the DSI hierarchy finally realised that she’d been presiding over a nest of shifter activity and had simply ignored the signs. Charles guessed she’d come into her office early just so as to pore over those old e-mails and guidelines and meeting minutes one more time in an effort to determine the extent to which she herself could be held to blame. And he realised he felt sorry for her. He’d been too harsh on these people yesterday. It was their world that was at stake here after all: their livelihoods, their reputations, their feeling of being in control, their sense of purpose.

  ‘Tammy Pendant’s mother, Liz Pendant, has come in,’ she explained, speaking rather too quickly as if she’d already rehearsed the words she wanted to say. ‘Naturally enough she is very upset that her daughter has… um… disappeared, and she wants some answers. She’s insisted on seeing me personally and, under the circumstances, it feels only right that I should agree to this, but obviously I’m not an expert on shifters and… oh… Dunner and all that, and I thought we would be able to… um… help her much better if you could possibly join me and um…’

  She was terrified. She was actually not far from tears. Janet Richards, the Executive Director of the Thurston Meadows Social Inclusion Zone, the Queen and Prime Minister of this little world, was beside herself with fear at the prospect of meeting Tammy’s mother.

  ~*~

  They had small interview rooms down by the Zone Residents’ reception area, with tables and chairs in pale pine, boxes of tissues for residents who were overcome by the telling of their woes, and panic buttons to press when those woes erupted in less acceptable forms than tears. Each room had a door at the back which required a swipe card to go through it and a door at the front which led into the waiting room. They were another kind of airlock between the people who actually lived in the Zone and the deskies who came in from outside. They were like those isolation chambers in nuclear laboratories into which technicians reach with long radiation-proof gloves.

  Janet Richards let Charles into one of these interview rooms through the back door and had him wait there while she went through the other door into the waiting room to collect Tammy’s mother. The doors had windows in them made of reinforced glass which meant that Charles could watch the encounter. Tammy’s mother was painfully thin, her skull clearly visible beneath the pale skin of her face, and her legs no thicker than broomsticks, yet this haggard and skeletal creature was wearing thick mascara, black lipstick and a tight red miniskirt in fake leather. She was sitting cross-legged beside the magazine rack and, as Janet Richards stooped down to greet her, she grinned, not a grin of amusement, or of friendliness, but a primal grin of power: a grin that made absolutely clear that Janet was the supplicant here, and Tammy’s mother the one who would have to be appeased.

  ‘Who’s this then?’ she asked as she was ushered into the interview room.

  She looked Charles up and down appraisingly.

  ‘This is Mr Bowen from the Immigration Service,’ Mrs Richards told her. ‘He’s an expert on this whole shifter business and I thought it was important to have him here so we could provide you with as much information as we possibly could.’

  ‘Good to meet you, Mrs Pendant,’ Charles said. ‘I’m sorry it had to be in these circumstances.’

  Her skirt was so short that the tops of her black stockings were visible below it and her thin transparent top revealed a matching red bra that squeezed her almost non-existent breasts into two sharp points.

  ‘I’m not Mrs Pendant, sweetheart. I just told this one that. I’m Mrs Wheeler. I haven’t been Pendant for years.’

  ‘Oh I’m sorry. Mrs Wheeler.’

  ‘Not your mistake, darling. It’s this lot,’ said Tammy’s mother. ‘It’s this fucking shower. Can’t even get a person’s name right. Let alone anything else.’

  She had a fixed smile on her small pink mouth and her expression was not one of grief or anger, but of triumph. The deskies had told her long ago that she wasn’t fit to care for her daughter and yet it was them, not her, that had allowed Tammy to disappear from the world. And to her this was a great victory, a cause for exultation. She had the upper hand at last.

  ‘You can call me Liz, darling,’ she told Charles, holding out a small bony hand, heavily burdened with rings. ‘Nice to meet you, sweetheart.’

  ‘Mr Bowen will be able to help us to understand what has happened to Tammy,’ Janet said.

  Liz Wheeler turned back to her.

  ‘I know what’s happened to Tammy. Everyone on the fucking Zone knows what happened to her. You lot let her get in with some Scotch shifter, she got some slip off him, and now she’s gone. You lost my only daughter, Mrs Richards, my one and only daughter, and I want some answers, because you said you’d look after her and you didn’t. And what I heard was that that Bright woman, that hippie Jazamine Bright, didn’t do her job properly.’

  She glanced slyly at Charles again, seeming to assume that, since he wasn’t being blamed himself, he would surely be on her side.

  ‘I’ve already been in touch with the papers,’ she said, ‘and I must say they seem very interested, very interested indeed. I haven’t signed anything yet, but let’s just say it’s not for lack of offers.’

  Charles saw Janet Richards quail and he wondered why she was so defensive. It was surely absurd for the authorities to take all the responsibility for what had happened to Tammy. Short of locking her up 24 hours a day, how could the DSI or anyone else have prevented her from getting hold of slip? But this wasn’t at all the line that Mrs Richards took.

  ‘What happened should not have happened, Mrs Wheeler,’ she said. ‘There can be no excuse for it and I can assure you that I am looking into the matter and will continue to make it my first priority until I’ve got to the bottom of what happened and identified who is to blame. As to Jazamine Bright, I can’t comment on her role in this until the outcome of our investigations, but her actions will be looked into very carefully I can assure you. And I can assure you too that, unless and until she is able to demonstrate her competence and trustworthiness, she will not have any further contact with children and young people. I’ve already given instructions that she should be suspended pending investigations.’

  Mrs Wheeler’s eyes shone.

  ‘You’ve sacked the little cow!’

  ‘Well, suspended her, at this stage.’

  Charles was appalled.

  ‘Surely you can’t hold Jazamine responsible for Tammy getting hold of slip? It wasn’t a locked unit, after all, and Tammy would have had opportunities every day to meet people who could get her some.’

  Janet Richards looked round at him sharply, her face a poker-player’s mask.

  ‘We are looking into her role, Mr Bowen. No judgement has been made as to responsibility. I’m sure your own agency has similar procedures in situations like this.’

  Mrs Wheeler, her eyes shining, looked from the Executive Director to Charles and back again, enjoying the rift that seemed to have opened up between the two officials
and trying to understand it so that she could exploit it to the full.

  ‘Well she should be sacked,’ she said, ‘and other people should be sacked too. I don’t name any names, not yet, but I will, believe me, I will. It shouldn’t be allowed for a mother to be deprived of her daughter. That’s what I said to the people at the papers and they all agreed with me. They were very shocked I can tell you Mrs Richards. Very shocked indeed. And very interested too.’

  She stood up, smoothing down her skirt, though it still rode well above the lacy tops of the black stockings. Seeing Charles looking down, she archly caught his eye.

  ‘These deskies are all as bad as each other,’ she told Charles, shutting out Janet Richards completely. ‘They’re all useless, just like the man at the papers said, and I’m going to make sure that they pay for this. I don’t just want them sacked. I want them fucking punished, because it’s criminal what’s happened. And that’s not just me saying that either. It’s what the people at the papers said too.’

  She bent to pick up her little red plastic hand-bag from the table, deliberately doing so, Charles was convinced, in a way that would give him an opportunity to look up her skirt.

  ‘But you lot are all right,’ she told him, looking quickly round to see if he’d taken the opportunity. ‘Keep the Pakis out, I say, and the fucking Yanks. There’s way too many of them here already. I know your hands are tied but you lot are doing your best to keep England for us English people. And as for them shifters, stringing them up would be too good for them. Too good for them and, if you want my opinion,’ and here she gestured at Janet Richards, ‘too good for this lot too.’

  ~*~

  When Mrs Wheeler had finally gone, and he was alone in the office that had been set aside for him, Charles tried to call Jazamine, but there was only a recorded message:

  ‘I've gone away for a few days. If this is you, Charles, I’ll be back for our drink on Friday.’

  Chapter 7

  On Friday night, in Thurston Meadows, Carl Bone went for a drink in the Old England, as he had done also on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. He was a stocky young man with thick, short, sturdy limbs, a round face, and large, gentle eyes. His fairish hair was done in spikes, with a shaven strip down each side of his head for fixing moodpads, and he wore loose red pedal pushers, a white shirt with large red polka dots, and shiny red boots. The ‘clown suit’, as it was called, was the standard outfit for young men in the Zones in that particular world at that particular time but somehow Carl didn’t quite manage to inhabit it. He’d lived all his life in Thurston Meadows and, apart from a couple of trips to Weston-super-Mare, had never ventured further from the Zone than the centre of Bristol, but he looked as if he’d have been much more comfortable in the country somewhere, milking cows, driving a tractor, trudging along a lane after a herd of sheep.

  The main bar of the Old England was meant to resemble a mediaeval banqueting hall. There were mediaeval maces and swords on the walls and mediaeval chairs shaped like thrones. There were even mediaeval dreamer sets and mediaeval dreamer-enhanced fruit machines humming and buzzing along the wall. Young men put money into the dreamers, encountered terrifying demons, blew them to pieces, felt the deep surge of relief pouring directly into their lower brains, and put in more money. Young women put money into the fruit machines, felt the physiological arousal flowing out through their autonomic nervous systems, dropped in more coins. There was a smell of mediaeval ketchup and stale cooking fat. On the giant mediaeval TV screen the pornopop superstar Alissa Venus was performing the number one hit ‘Inside Me’, wearing a transparent dress and a white lace thong.

  Carl surveyed the scene. He registered three girls at a table near the door, three chunky, mumsy girls incongruously dressed in outfits almost as revealing as Alissa Venus’s. (Pornopop was the currently acceptable style for girls, the night-out style, just as the clown suit was the style for men, which you wore whether it suited you or not.) He looked through a mediaeval arch with its crossed plastic halberds, and checked out the pool room. He strolled over to the dreamer sets, maintaining an elaborate pose of nonchalance all the while though he didn’t feel at ease at all. An old, old anxiety gnawed away inside him as he looked round for some sort of niche for himself, some sort of grouping that would let him in or at least tolerate his presence. He bought himself a beer and went over to the three chunky girls.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah we’re all right,’ they sighed.

  ‘Want to come over and play on the dreamers?’ Carl said, but he was too nervous to wait for an answer and pressed on without a pause. ‘Mind you, they’re shit these dreamers. I got a way better dreamer at home. Way better. Ten times better than this crap. My mate customised it, yeah? It does double-strength. You should feel the fear that baby can pump out, you should feel the fucking fear.’

  He watched the round pink faces of the chunky girls for a glimmer of interest, but found none.

  ‘Plus it’s great for synching, my dreamer. You should try it. Best synch on the fucking Meadows. Come over and try it, and you’ll see.’

  Synching was a craze that had taken off about a year previously. It involved two or more people plugging into a dreamer set with the polarities of one set of moodpads reversed so that it became a rudimentary transmitter. The other participants experienced whatever emotions were going on in the lower brain of the one wearing the reversed moodpad. It was widely used it as a prelude to sex.

  The girls looked at each other, stifling laughter.

  ‘In your dreams, mate,’ one of them said with a snort.

  Carl pressed on. He hadn’t seriously expected any of them to come back with him. All he was really aiming for was light-hearted banter. He just wasn’t getting it right.

  ‘Hear about that girl doing a shift over at North Rec?’ he asked.

  It was old news. The girls yawned.

  ‘Yeah, of course.’

  ‘Well guess what.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Tammy Pendant. She’s only my fucking cousin!’

  ‘So what?’ said one of the girls.

  She looked at the others and they all tittered.

  ‘Well, I’m just saying…’

  But what was he just saying? What was his point? He had nothing else to add. The only purpose of his comment had been to claim a relationship with this temporarily famous person, in the hope that some of her visibility would rub off on him.

  ‘Come on, Janey,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘Come over and do some synching at my place, why don’t you? I promise you, it’s the best fucking dreamer on the Meadows.’

  ‘Fuck off, Carl,’ Janey said.

  ‘“Fuck off, Carl”,’ Carl mimicked back, trying to make a joke of it, but no one laughed.

  Presently he wandered over to the young boys over at the pool table with the vague idea of picking a fight.

  ‘You’re fucking crap, you know that? Give me that fucking cue, mate, and I’ll show you how to play pool.’

  No one answered. No one so much as looked at him.

  ‘That’s not how you do it,’ said Carl, after the next shot. ‘A fucking baby could do better than that.’

  ‘Yeah right,’ muttered the player without looking round, and he dropped another ball neatly into a pocket.

  Carl lapsed into silence. After a while, when the boys seemed to have forgotten his presence altogether, he turned back through the mediaeval archway, bought another beer and a whisky chaser and began to play a dreamer game called Slaughterhouse, in which he had to defend himself with butcher’s cleavers against an onslaught of mutant minotaurs.

  The great advantage of dreamers over the videogames that they’d replaced was that emotional response was unavoidable. People could get used to provocative images, however lifelike, however high definition, but dreamers went straight to the ancient animal core. For the next forty-five minutes Carl spent about half a day’s money on severing necks and limbs, opening bellies and dodging gout
s of arterial blood, and, though the game was repetitive, the sheer visceral excitement which the moodpads pumped into his brain stayed as sharp and pure as ever, helping to obliterate the hurt of his rejection by the chunky girls and the men at the pool table.

  Eventually Shane Wheeler and Derek Stigg came in and he gratefully attached himself to them. Shane, who wore green pedal pushers, green boots and a T-shirt with green polka dots, was a fat and very short bald man about five years older than Carl, who managed the Dreamer hire store in the Zone’s shopping centre and maintained friendly relations with everyone. Derek, a tiny man with a face ravaged by eczema, was his assistant.

  ‘Has Kylie dumped you or what, Carl?’ Shane asked him after they’d all got drinks. ‘Only when I asked her she said she didn’t never want to see you no more.’

  ‘She dumped me?’ Carl scoffed. ‘No way! I dumped her, mate. I fucking dumped her. She was doing my fucking head in, wasn’t she? Mind you, I blame the fucking deskies. I mean they took her kid off her, didn’t they? And she went fucking mental.’

  ‘I thought you were pleased they done that, Carl,’ said Derek, who wore black pedal pushers and a chequered shirt. ‘You said Kylie didn’t give a fuck about that kid and you wouldn’t treat a dog like she treated him! Plus you said he was a whinging little git and now he was out of the way it’d be all day in bed with Kylie and no distractions.’

  ‘Yeah, but she was crying and yelling and threatening to fucking top herself, wasn’t she? Plus she was up and down the fucking deskie office every fucking day and she didn’t want fucking sex no more or nothing. So I moved back with my mum didn’t I? Which then Kylie did try to top herself and her mum said it was down to me but it wasn’t. It was the fucking deskies. It’s down to them.’

  ‘Hear about that kid who did that disappearing act down at North Rec?’ asked Shane after a while.