Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Yeah, I’m afraid I was. Here’s me with my dad in the back garden of our old house when we lived in Walthamstow.’

  ‘He looks very like you.’

  ‘Yes he does. He was thirty when they had me and Mum was twenty-eight, so when this picture was taken he would have been pretty much the age that I am now. Here’s my mum with me in the buggy. I guess it’s the same buggy that I was in when…’

  Charles let the sentence tail away.

  ‘Your dad must have been taking the picture,’ Jaz said. ‘Look at you both beaming away at him! Your mum was a very pretty woman wasn’t she? She looks nice too. Warm.’

  ‘Yes, I think she looks lovely. “She’d do anything for anyone,” my aunt Tricia always used to say. Here’s one of all three of us on the beach, look. Tricia reckoned it must have been Bournemouth. I guess they must have asked some passer-by to take the picture.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful picture, Charles. And it looks like the three of you really got on well together.’

  ‘I think so too. Of course the annoying part is that I don’t actually remember. I don’t remember any of this. Not even faintly.’

  ~*~

  After several weeks of suspension from work Jazamine had been reinstated in her job. An investigation by the DSI’s inspectorate, Offsinc, had concluded that the senior management of the Thurston Meadows Zone had been guilty of such a catalogue of errors and oversights that Jaz’s failure to comply with procedures could be interpreted more as a symptom of general malaise than an individual error on her part. Janet Richards had been sacked and her entire management committee had been moved to other jobs, but Jaz herself was in the clear. She and Charles had been out celebrating the end of her first week back at work, and now they were back in Charles’ flat, its drawn curtains shutting out the cold night, its many mirrors creating the illusion that its two rooms extended sideways on and on into a series of other warm and well-lit spaces and were not in reality bounded by two layers of brick with nothing beyond but cold night air.

  ‘What is it about mirrors that you like so much Charles?’ Jazamine asked, as he handed her a drink and sat down beside her.

  ‘I don’t really know, but I always have liked them. In fact some of my very earliest memories are of me pressing my face up to the full-length mirror in Tricia’s bedroom in Windsor, trying to see what it was like in the part of the mirror world you couldn’t normally see, or trying to catch my reflection doing something different when it thought I wasn’t looking. Sometimes I’d gather up all the movable mirrors in the house and angle them so I could see what I looked like from behind or from the side.’

  ‘Oh dear. Did you really spend a lot of time doing things like that?’

  ‘I did actually, specially when I was little. Tricia was always busy with her own things – she was involved with a lot of charities – and of course I was too young to go out and do stuff on my own. There was a lot of empty time to fill.’

  ‘Did you ever imagine yourself climbing right through the glass like Alice in the story?’

  ‘Yes I did! I imagined going through the mirror and then through the door of the mirror room into the parts of the house that the mirror couldn’t show. I imagined they’d be different from the rooms in Tricia’s house, just like the rooms in Through the Looking Glass. But how did you know that?’

  ‘Because I used to dream about impossible things too. I used to have these syrupy daydreams about my real family, specially my real mum. How she’d show up one day and everything would make sense, everything would fall into place and I wouldn’t feel like an outsider ever again. Of course it didn’t turn out that way when I met her in fact. It didn’t turn out like that at all.’

  The conversation was starting to make Charles feel uneasy. He changed the subject.

  ‘Tell me more about Thurston Meadows,’ he said, though they’d already talked at some length about her return to the Zone. ‘Tell me more about what you noticed when you went back.’

  Jazamine studied his face for a moment before answering, registering his discomfort. Then she turned her attention to the random question he’d snatched from the air.

  ‘It’s like a big prison camp,’ she said.

  A spate of apparently motiveless murders across the country had been blamed on various combinations of shifters and people from the Zones. In the press the two categories, shifters and dreggies, were increasingly being conflated and some newspapers were now demanding that the Zones be ‘sealed off’ or placed under military control.

  ‘Shut it all away, that’s what it comes down to,’ Jaz was suddenly full of rage. ‘Shove all the trouble and misery into a box and close the lid. And then nice middle class folk in the suburbs can get back to taking their kids to their violin lessons and going to their book groups, and planning their holidays in their little cottages in France where it’s all so wonderful because they welcome children in restaurants. Who cares about the poor whites and the Arabs and the Africans tearing each other apart in their Zones d’Assistance? When you’re in a foreign country you don’t even have to know the dreggies are there.’

  Charles laughed.

  ‘Where did all that come from?’

  Jaz didn’t answer at first. She just took out her tobacco tin and rolled herself a cigarette.

  ‘I’m a cuckoo in the nest,’ she said. ‘My natural family were… Well, dreggies. I grew up in one world, but I belong to the other.’

  She broke off, saw that she’d made him feel excluded, and reached out her hand.

  ‘But you’re between two worlds too!’ she said. ‘That’s what we have in common.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘I really do,’ she said, drawing him to her and kissing him on the lips. ‘We’re two of a kind. I sensed that the first time I saw you, standing in front of that mirror you gave to Susan. You looked so beautiful and so alone, not knowing who to talk to.’

  She kissed him again.

  ‘Maybe it’s bedtime now. What do you think?’

  ~*~

  ‘What exactly does slip look like?’ Jazamine asked later, after they’d had sex and were lying side by side.

  ‘It’s… Well, it comes in little transparent spheres and…’

  Charles broke off. He’d just remembered that there were seeds in a folded envelope at the bottom of his sock drawer, only a couple of metres away. It had come as quite a shock.

  ‘What?’ Jaz demanded. ‘Why are you staring at me in that weird way?’

  ‘Would you like to see some seeds?’

  She sat up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve actually got some right here in my chest of drawers. Would you like me to show them to you?’

  ‘You’re just winding me up.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m not.’

  He got out of bed and pulled out the envelope from under his socks.

  ‘Hold out your hand.’

  He emptied the envelope into her palm. She was completely naked except for the rings on her fingers and thumbs, and the seeds in her open hand seemed like fallen stars in the hand of some beautiful pagan goddess.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me you are allowed to keep these, Charles? In an unlocked drawer in your bedroom?’

  He hesitated. Never having shared this, never having spoken about it even to himself in his own mind, he had never quite grasped until now just how bizarre his behaviour had been. Bizarre to have stolen the seeds in the first place. Bizarre to have all but forgotten about them. Bizarre to have suddenly decided to show them to Jaz.

  ‘No,’ he confessed. ‘I stole them. If anyone found out I would be instantly dismissed from the civil service, and I’d probably go to jail.’

  She poked them round in her hand.

  ‘Twelve of them,’ she said. ‘Twelve different worlds.’

  ‘No. I only took ten.’

  ‘There are twelve,’ she said. ‘Look! See for yourself!’

  He couldn’t deny it. There were indeed twelve a
nd yet he quite distinctly remembered counting them out: five from the stash of Joseph Hassan, five from Wayne Furnish.

  ‘So it’s actually true,’ he murmured.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That seeds reproduce themselves.’

  ‘Oh come on!’ She turned her hand this way and that so she could watch the little glowing spheres rolling back and forth. ‘I’ve heard people say that, I must admit, but surely it has to be one of those silly myths?’

  ‘That’s what most people think. My agency has impounded literally thousands of the things. We count them up, lock them away in safes, and then we take them and count them again, and there are never, ever any more of them. The opposite in fact: over the years, the number slowly goes down.’

  ‘Well that seems a whole lot more plausible. Ice cubes melt, mothballs evaporate, lots of things vanish over time. But who ever heard of an inanimate object that could reproduce itself? I mean how could it? How would that possibly work?’

  ‘I know. How could it, without any means of obtaining matter or energy from its environment? But that sort of question comes from thinking about these things in the wrong way. They might look a bit like pills, but they’re really not that at all.’

  ‘So what on Earth are they then?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  Jaz peered down at the little blue spheres in her palm.

  ‘How weird,’ she said at last, ‘to hold something right here in my hand that’s such a complete mystery.’

  Charles nodded.

  ‘There are so many things about them that are mysterious. Where did they come from? Who made them? How do they manage to keep on glowing indefinitely? How do they disappear after a while when someone swallows one, yet can’t be broken by force and can’t be dissolved by any known chemical substance? You’ve got to ask yourself if they are really made of matter at all.’

  ‘And yet I can see them, and touch them.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, I think they’re made of some kind of primal stuff that’s prior to time and space, prior to matter and mind.’

  He looked down at the little spheres.

  ‘Shifters have their own explanation as to why our impounded seeds don’t divide and theirs do. They say it’s because seeds have to be in the right environment.’

  ‘Surely you just miscounted,’ said Jazamine. ‘That’s the simplest explanation. I mean you just said yourself that impounded seeds never increase in number.’

  ‘I’m sure I didn’t miscount Jaz. I really am sure. They have reproduced. What I don’t get is why it’s happened here.’

  ‘Well, if it happens at all, why not here?’

  ‘Because, like I said, the shifters claim the environment has to be right. They divide in a shifter’s pocket, but they diminish in a government safe.’

  ‘So the right environment is…?’

  ‘That’s the bit that’s puzzling me. You know what fizz is, don’t you? That kind of emotional force field that shifters seem to create around themselves? ’

  ‘Yes, of course. You’ve often talked about it.’

  ‘Well shifters say it’s fizz that activates the seeds and makes them divide. It’s the presence of fizz.’

  ‘Okay, and…?’

  ‘Well these were in my sock drawer for god’s sake! My sock drawer! I’ve never had a shifter in this place.’

  ‘Or so you thought,’ Jaz said.

  ‘What do you mean, so I thought? I’ve never had a break-in, and if shifters had broken in, believe me they’d have found and taken these. No, the only people who’ve been here are you and a few friends, and I can assure you I’d know at once if any of them were shifters.’

  ‘Me, a few friends, and you.’

  He stared at her.

  ‘What are you suggesting? That I’m a shifter?’

  She smiled, the mysterious naked goddess with her hand full of stars, but she didn’t answer.

  ‘Oh come on, Jaz! What a weird thing to say! Self-evidently I’m not a shifter! Self-evidently! Not only have I never done a shift but I’m opposed to everything shifters stand for. You know that. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I’ve given up most of my life these past few years, my working life and most of my private life as well, to the cause of trying to stop shifters and take this stuff out of circulation.’

  Jaz regarded him silently for a few seconds.

  ‘Well…’ she began, then stopped.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Well… I’ve still got to get my head around the idea of seeds full stop,’ she said, though he could tell it wasn’t what she’d been about to say, ‘never mind whether they can breed or not.’

  She looked down again at the little shining things in her hand.

  ‘Is it really true that if we took some of these, we’d end up in another world?’

  ‘Definitely. And pass through many more on our way there.’

  ‘Would we both end up in the same world?’

  ‘Yes, if we held onto each other.’

  ‘Well come on then, Charles,’ she whispered.

  ‘Come on what?’

  ‘Come and kiss me,’ she said laughing. ‘What did you think I meant?’

  And she closed her hand tightly around the seeds.

  ~*~

  That same night, Gunnar and Laf picked Carl up in the white van and took him across the Line and through the wintry city to the suburb of Westbury where Cyril Burkitt lived. It was yet another part of his own home town which Carl had never seen or heard of.

  Laf stopped several streets away from Cyril’s house.

  ‘It’s along there, Carl,’ said Gunnar, referring to his Bristol A-Z. ‘You take the first right and the second left, then the first right again, and there you are in Canterbury Close. It’s number twenty-three. 23 Canterbury Close. So don’t get lost, will you?’

  ‘Fuck off. Of course I won’t.’

  Carl opened the door and was climbing out when Gunnar stopped him.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Carl!’ Laughing, the fat man reached down to pull a knapsack out from under his seat. ‘I think you’ll need this won’t you, my old mate?’

  ‘Dickhead,’ said skull-faced Laf. ‘Get back in the car.’

  As Carl got back in again, Gunnar opened the knapsack to reveal an automatic pistol in a transparent plastic bag.

  ‘This is the safety catch, and this is a silencer so there won’t be any loud bangs or nothing.’

  He ripped open the plastic bag and tipped the naked gun back into the knapsack.

  ‘There’s ten bullets in there,’ Laf told him, ‘so when he’s down, empty the lot into the bastard, know what I mean? Into his head, yeah? Only don’t stand too close, or you’ll end up a right mess.’

  ‘No sweat, mate,’ said Carl, though he was sweating profusely. ‘No worries at all.’

  ‘And after that, remember, just calmly walk out like we told you, Carl,’ said Gunnar. ‘Calm as you like. Close the door behind you and walk back here. All right my old mate? Remember all that? The best of luck with it then, mate.’

  ‘No worries.’

  Laf passed him a spliff.

  ‘I don’t need no wacky baccy to give me the bottle for this job, mate,’ said Carl. ‘It’s no problem. No problem at all.’

  ‘Oh no, Carl,’ interceded Gunnar. ‘Laf isn’t being funny or nothing! We just thought a bit of a puff might make it a bit more of an occasion for you, Carl. Make it something to remember.’

  Carl took a couple of drags. Then he hung the knapsack over his shoulder and walked off down the quiet suburban street, the bare twigs of cherry trees making frosty haloes around the orange street lights. As he took the first right turning, a car pulling out of a driveway paused to let him pass.

  ‘Cheers!’ muttered Carl politely.

  He took the second left. The occupants of the house on the corner hadn’t drawn their curtains and he could see them inside: a man, a teenaged boy and a grandmother, in the bluish glow of the TV. They were watching a comedy show. H
e could hear the waves of laughter.

  He took the right turning into Canterbury Close. Here was number 3, number 5, number 7. They were watching the same TV show in all three houses. Carl could hear the laugher and see the flickering blue glow round the edges of the curtains. He walked past 9, 11 and 13. A small child opened a door, picked up a pair of red Wellington boots she’d left outside, scowled at Carl, and quickly closed the door again. He passed 15, 17, 19 and 21…

  It had never really struck Carl that someone like Burkitt had a home and a life of his own. Burkitt was just a deskie. He and the other deskies inhabited the DSI office in the Central Square of the Meadows Zone by day, and at night they simply disappeared. But now it turned out that Burkitt had a front garden, and an empty milk bottle on his doorstep, and a little path from the gate to the door made out of bricks. It turned out that he had coloured glass in his front door arranged in a flower pattern, and a brass doorknocker shaped like a woman’s hand, and curtains in the bay window that were too short and didn’t meet in the middle. Carl could see a cosy-looking room through the gap between the curtains – it was lined with books, and there was a gas fire going and classical music on the CD player – and when he leaned right forward, he could see Burkitt himself in there, on his own, reading the paper, with a cup of tea by his elbow on a little table.

  When Carl rang the bell, Burkitt looked up frowning, trying to work out who it could be at this hour, and anticipating hassle. But his face lit up as he opened the door.

  ‘Hello, Carl! Well, well, what a nice surprise! I didn’t think you’d really come. I didn’t think you’d have the time for an old deskie like me!’

  He had on a cardigan, and brown slippers, and what Carl called old-man jeans. He hadn’t shaved for a day or two.

  He don’t look like a deskie, really, Carl thought. Just some old geezer.

  ‘Come on in, Carl, come on in. Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee or something?’

  ‘Yeah, cheers,’ Carl said, ‘tea’.

  They went through to a big kitchen at the back which to Carl looked like something from some glamorous TV makeover show: wood everywhere, a stone floor, granite-topped work surfaces. He didn’t notice how shabby it was and how badly in need of a clean.