Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  He seemed to think that the occasion required him to talk like a character out of a Victorian novel.

  ‘This isn’t easy for me either, you know,’ protested Charles. ‘You were my father and mother in the other world, but I lost you before I got a chance to know you. But here… here you’re both alive, and…’

  He fumbled in his jacket pocket and took out a little packet of photographs. Here was the plump little baby with his mum and dad on that beach that was probably Bournemouth; here he was with Mr Bowen on the lawn of a small back garden; here he was in his buggy with his pretty young mother, both of them beaming out happily from the little faded square of photographic paper…

  Mrs Bowen took them from him and studied each one slowly and carefully before passing it to her husband. The two of them were obviously shaken by what they saw, but when Mrs Bowen finally spoke she seemed to have persuaded herself that the distress was all on Charles’ side.

  ‘I do see it must be very hard for you, Mr Bowen. It…

  ‘Mr Bowen? How can you look at those pictures and then just call me Mr Bowen?’

  The older man stepped in at once.

  ‘Now just a minute! My wife isn’t at all well and you will not speak to her in that tone!’

  If anything he was even more upset than his wife, but his distress was coming out in the form of anger.

  ‘I think Mr Bowen needs to go,’ said James.

  ‘Absolutely,’ his brother agreed. ‘Mum can’t be expected to cope with this!’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, all three of you!’ snapped Mrs Bowen. ‘Will you please stop fussing! It’s not going to kill me to give poor Mr… to give poor…’ she really had to struggle to make herself speak his name, ‘to give poor Charles here a few minutes of my time.’

  ‘No,’ Charles said. ‘That’s nice of you, but I think James is right. I’ve taken enough of your time already and I should go. I do appreciate the fact that you agreed to see me.’

  James was suddenly friendly and helpful.

  ‘Well you mustn’t walk to the station, Charles. Let me give you a lift. Shall I take your car, Father? It’ll save you having to move it to let me out. If we rush, Mr Bowen can get the 12.23.’

  But his father couldn’t answer him. He had turned away from all of the rest of them and was sobbing into his hands.

  ~*~

  At 7 a.m. Charles tried to call Jaz again, but her phone was still switched off.

  Well of course she was angry, he told himself. She had every right to be, and he’d just have to be patient. He’d have to look at it from her point of view, however hard he found that. He’d have to prove he’d really changed.

  He took the remaining seeds from his knapsack, wrapped them in tissue paper, and sealed them, with an unsigned note, into an envelope which he addressed to the SIS headquarters in London. Then he went straight out and put the envelope in the post.

  There! It was done! The wretched things were gone from him. And it was good to feel the coolness of the morning air and hear the birdsong and the traffic and the ordinary everyday voices of passers-by in the world he’d so nearly lost.

  Back at his flat, he sent an e-mail to his new boss at the SIS saying he wasn’t well and wouldn’t be coming in.

  ‘I believe that shifter contact has affected me,’ he wrote. ‘I’m having hallucinations and experiencing strange and troubling impulses which I don’t understand. I’m going to make an appointment with my GP and ask her to refer me to an appropriate specialist. Please in the meantime accept this as notice of my intention to quit the SIS.’

  It was easy, once you started. All you needed to do was turn the page and a new chapter began.

  Chapter 19

  Charles made himself a cup of coffee. In the street outside children were going down the hill in twos and threes on their way to school. He tried Jaz again on his landline but she wasn’t answering and her voicemail was still switched off. There was a week-old message waiting for him, though, from Susan, his old friend from university days.

  ‘Kept meaning to try and catch up with you after my thirtieth, Charles,’ Susan said. ‘It was lovely to see you there, but I was frustrated that we didn’t get a chance to talk. Anyway the reason I’m calling is I’m having another little party on Saturday fortnight. Not a big do like last time but Rick and Gemma are over from Australia. They said they’d love to see a few old friends from Uni days and so of course I thought of you. If you can come, it’d be great to see you.’

  As he put down the phone, Charles remembered the words he’d written that night after Susan’s last party, the foolish, self-aggrandising words:

  Let us put on armour,

  Let us wear breastplates of polished bronze,

  And cover our faces with ferocious masks.

  Let us be pure. Let us accept the cold.

  Let us foreswear the search for love.

  Let us ride in the bare places where the ground is clinker

  And the towers are steel…

  It struck him then how many people over the years had reached out to him just as Susan was now doing, offering their friendship, and how he’d always found a way of shaking them off, coming back to this hall of mirrors, hiding behind his armour and his painted shield.

  A sudden violent anger erupted inside him and he grabbed the nearest mirror and hurled it into the silvered glass of the one he’d carefully hung opposite it to achieve the effect of endless recursion that had fascinated him since he was a little child. Both of them shattered and crashed to the ground as he snatched down another mirror –an oval one with an oak frame – and did the same thing again. And now, without pausing for a moment, he went right through the flat, pulling the mirrors from the walls one by one and flinging them into each other until the floor was covered in broken glass and there wasn’t a single frame left hanging that had an intact mirror inside it.

  Charles was sweating, his heart was pounding, he had to lean on a doorpost to catch his breath, but he felt much better. He felt that he’d finished the job he’d started when he put the seeds in the post.

  He went to fetch a dustpan.

  He was back in the hallway of that semi-detached house in that leafy street. Mrs Bowen was there on her own and she was screaming at him as she pushed him and shoved him towards the open door.

  ‘How dare you come here! How dare you say you’re my Charles! My Charles died when he was a baby! He’s dead! He’s dead! I saw him myself, all crushed up in his buggy against that wall!’

  Charles swept up the glass and gathered together the empty frames. The walls were just walls again. Ovals and rectangles of unfaded paint were all that was left of those cold windows into unreachable worlds. He’d stop at a DIY store on the way back from the dump and pick up some paint.

  ‘I’ll write Jaz a letter,’ he told himself, as he wandered through his flat, looking for any other traces of his old existence. ‘I’ll tell her I’m sorry. I’ll tell her I threw away the seeds and the mirrors…’

  He was in the leafy street again, ringing a bell. The blue door opened and he saw himself. It was a Charles Bowen whose parents had never died. He was standing next to his mother.

  The switches would pass, he reminded himself. It would only be a day or two before they stopped coming at him like this.

  ‘I’d better just check, though,’ he muttered. ‘I’d better just make sure that there’s nothing left in that drawer.’

  The envelope hadn’t been sealed, after all, and a seed could have fallen out. He wouldn’t want to be ambushed by it years from now, when he thought all this had been left behind.

  He opened his sock drawer and pushed the socks around.

  ‘Nope, nothing.’

  There was a little disappointment there, he couldn’t help noticing as he pulled the drawer out and tipped its contents onto his bed, but he decided not to worry about that. It was like giving up smoking. There was bound to be some regret at first.

  He began separating the pairs of socks, c
hecking each one and then putting the two socks together again and dropping them back into the drawer. He’d replaced four or five pairs like this when he saw the solitary blue sphere lying there in the middle of his duvet.

  He had the strange sensation that something or someone, miles away, was reaching towards him, seeking him out, trying to pull him towards them. And then, right in front of his eyes, but without any visible motion taking place, what had been one sphere became two.

  Author’s Acknowledgement

  Marcher began as a group of six short stories: ‘Marcher,’ ‘Watching the Sea,’ ‘The Welfare Man,’ ‘The Welfare Man Retires,’ ‘Tammy Pendant’ and ‘To Become a Warrior’. They were among my most popular stories – the short story ‘Marcher’, for instance, won Interzone’s annual popularity poll – and one of them, ‘Tammy Pendant’, was also my most controversial.

  Marcher was first published in 2009 in the US, by Cosmos. The present edition is not simply a re-edited version of that book, however. It has been very substantially revised, with a completely different ending, a shift from 1st to 3rd person, and cuts and additions throughout the book. I regard the present version as the definitive one, and I am very grateful to Ian Whates for giving me this opportunity to have another crack at a book which I never felt I’d quite finished.

  I would also like to thank David Pringle and Sheila Williams for publishing the original short stories, and Sean Wallace for publishing the book first time round. Neil Williamson, Roy Gray, Tony Ballantyne and Clive Seale looked at drafts of this book (either the first version, the second version, or, in Tony’s case, both) and I’m extremely grateful to them for their time and their advice. I would also like to thank Niall Harrison for his review of the earlier version in Strange Horizons. I found his balanced appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses particularly helpful when reworking the book in its present form.

  Also available from NewCon Press:

  The Race

  Nina Allan

  Set in a future Great Britain scarred by fracking and ecological collapse, The Race is the stunning debut novel from Nina Allan, winner of the 2014 BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction and the prestigious Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for Best Translated Work.

  “Totally assured… a literate, intelligent, gorgeously human and superbly strange SF novel that will continually skewer your assumptions.”

  – ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  “Evocative and compelling, this is an irresistible read.” – E.J. SWIFT (author of Osiris and Cataveiro)

  “Nina Allan dissolves boundaries between literary fiction and SF, attending to the textures of memory, desire and loss even as she seeks out dark, fantastical visions of possible worlds.” – SAM THOMPSON (author of Communion Town)

  “A dark dystopia in the tradition of Piercy, Russ and Robinson, and a bold indictment on corporate greed – past, present and yet to come.” – JOANNA KAVENNA (author of The Birth of Love and Inglorious)

  The Peacock Cloak

  Chris Beckett

  The critically acclaimed second collection from one of Britain’s most assured short story writers and winner of the 2009 Edge Hill Prize.

  “Beckett takes the parochial and makes it universal in this fine, intelligent collection, evidence of an undeservedly underrated talent.” – Financial Times

  “He is an audacious writer, not afraid of examining big issues, but always through the humanising lens of fully rounded characters… Unmissable.” – The Guardian

  “Chris Beckett has to be one of our finest SF writers. His stories are always beautifully constructed, but at their hearts there is always something unnerving… We recognize these stories as SF, but they challenge us, they make us think about them; they explore human dilemmas and taken together, they explore different kinds of storytelling, different human conditions, and different imaginary universes.” – Strange Horizons

  “It’s a fabulous book that kept me entertained throughout, a whole collection of strong stories that did not let me down.” – SF Crowsnest

  Available now from NewCon Press via SpaceWitch.com and Amazon Kindle Store

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