Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 10

One of the others was putting a spliff into Carl's hand. He had no idea what was in it but he inhaled anyway, and instantly pa.s.sed out.

A long time later he briefly became aware of himself being driven in a car again with his eyes covered, and then of himself alone stumbling through the cold empty streets of Thurston Meadows.

A light rain was falling and, a little way off, a police helicopter moved slowly across the orange sky, sweeping its spotlight back and forth across the streets and houses of the Zone.

Then he was kneeling in the doorway of his mother's house on Asphodel Drive and vomiting copiously all over the lino.

'That you, Carl?' his mother yelled at him from upstairs. 'Keep the f.u.c.king noise down, can't you? Some of us are trying to sleep.'

He could just make out the stairs and the living room door in the first grey light of dawn.

Chapter 8.

Six miles away, in that other Bristol outside the Zones, the public Bristol, the one that visitors came to see and the one that people referred to when they said what an attractive place Bristol was, Jazamine and Charles had also been in a pub that evening, a pleasant, woody, slightly shabby place called the Coachman's Arms near the top of Blackboy Hill, with all of Clifton and central Bristol laid out beneath it. They were sitting by the window, with a couple of pints and Jazamine's tobacco tin on the table in front of them.

'I'm sorry I didn't phone you,' Jazamine said. 'Being suspended turned out to be more of a shock than I'd expected. I thought I'd just go away for a bit until I'd got my head round it.'

'All by yourself?'

'Yes, I find that helps sometimes. I went to stay in a B & B over in Wales, a little place I know in the Black Mountains, and spent a few days walking around and thinking about things.'

She smiled.

'Which was a good idea, because I realised it really doesn't matter. The very worst that could possibly happen is that I get sacked. And it's only a job, and not such a great job either. If they do get rid of me, I might even end up thanking them in the long run.'

'That might be true for me as well.'

'It's been tough for you too?'

'Yeah. This shifter contact all the time is doing all kinds of strange things to my head, I'm working ridiculously long hours, and on top of that, as if we weren't busy enough already, we're constantly getting e-mails marked HIGH PRIORITY, with long lists of new procedures which are "mandatory for all staff".'

'I know those kinds of e-mails. Someone somewhere trying to prove that they've doing something. You've got no choice but to ignore them, but if something goes wrong, that isn't an acceptable excuse.'

Charles had been in Thurston Meadows every day, absorbing other people's fear and the strange influences that shifters left behind, until vertigo and longing and dread had become constant, always there whether he was waking or sleeping. And to make things harder, he'd been working in an increasingly public arena. The news of an unprecedented outburst of shifter activity had broken through into the front pages of the newspapers. The tabloids had been calling for incompetent deskies to be named and punished. The broadsheets had supplied their readers with artists' impressions of branching time streams alongside editorials demanding public enquiries.

'Admittedly, my boss has been able to use our raised profile to get some more help in,' Charles said. 'But I think the expanding workload has more than outstripped the extra staff.'

Jazamine lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

'I can't get this Tammy thing straight in my head,' she said. 'I actually woke up this morning convinced that I must have dreamed the whole thing.'

Halfway through blowing out the first luxurious cloud of smoke, she suddenly gave a cry.

'Jesus Christ! The weirdest thing! I just suddenly... remembered something. It just came into my mind. But... but it didn't really happen. This is so strange, Charles. I have a whole vivid memory in my head of a completely different sequence of events.'

Charles' professional ears p.r.i.c.ked up at once.

'Go on.'

'I can clearly remember a whole different story about what happened to Tammy. The whole thing popped into my mind just then, literally a couple of seconds ago. How weird. I expect it's the shock or the stress or something. I remember I was in a car crash once and it was a bit like this afterwards. The crash kept going round and round in my head, the sound of the impact and everything, as if it was happening all over again every few minutes. But that was a flashback to something I really had experienced. This was...'

'It's not the shock,' Charles said, 'or not just the shock anyway. It's the slip. It's very very weird stuff. Slip doesn't just break down the boundaries between timelines, it breaks them down between one person and another. Which means slip doesn't just affect the person who takes it but other people around them too, and people connected to them, and...'

'Well I remember this whole complete story. The police arrive just as that Slug character is about to pulverise Tammy with a baseball bat. He runs off. But she doesn't do a shift. She remains in this world. They confiscate a big bag of slip off her and take her down to the hospital to have the seeds pumped out of her stomach before they take effect. But Tammy refuses to give her consent. And then a big deskie crisis blows up, with everyone getting very breathless and excited and consulting their line managers, and their line managers' line managers, and their line managers' line managers' b.l.o.o.d.y line managers. What might we be criticised for? Would it be illegal to pump her stomach against her will? Would it be a dereliction of duty not to? Everyone is rushing about, having meetings, making calls. Janet Richards herself goes down to the hospital to plead with Tammy to change her mind.'

She shook her head.

'This is so strange. It all came into my head in an instant, all this detail. "Who's coming next then?" asks Tammy, when Janet Richards arrives to talk to her. "The f.u.c.king Pope? And what the f.u.c.k does it matter to all you people anyway whether I do a shift or not?"

'"Because we care about you, Tamsin," says Janet.'

Jazamine was a good mimic. She very convincingly captured the teen argot of the Bristol Zones, and the ber-sincerity of a senior deskie manager.

'So then, Tammy pleads with me to stand up for her and support her right to make her own choices. But I can't make up my mind what I should do any more than anyone else can, so I end up being totally useless. And in the end the consultant in charge gets fed up with all of us I'm sure I've never met the woman but I can see her face as clearly in my mind as if I had and she pumps out Tammy's stomach on her own authority.

'And then Tammy's mother shows up, her natural mother Liz, who is one of the...'

'I met her on Tuesday.'

'She is terrifying don't you think? I swear she'd cut your throat without a moment's hesitation if she thought it would be to her advantage, she'd stand and watch you burn. But anyway, in this... in this memory or whatever you want to call it...'

'We call them switches.'

'Okay, in this switch she shows up at the hospital and demands to know why we let Tammy be forcibly stomach-pumped without even consulting her.

'"Only I heard it's against her human rights," Liz says, with that horrible triumphant smirk of hers.' Again Jazamine's imitation was devastatingly accurate. '"And against mine too as her mother. And I heard that it's illegal, and that someone could get into very serious trouble. I've been to the papers and they said it's a scandal and it shouldn't be allowed." And all the time she's watching me and smiling and hoping that I'm really really scared.

'And then we all take Tammy off to a special secure unit where she can receive guess what? - therapy.

'"You know perfectly well therapy won't do nothing for me," Tammy tells me. "So why don't you tell me what's the point of all this? What's the f.u.c.king point? All this time and money wasted that you're always telling me is so hard to find. Why didn't you just let me go and I'd have been off your hands for good?"

'And then she says and this so typical of Tammy then she says, "And don't say it's because you f.u.c.king care because you know as well as I do that if none of this had happened you'd still have chucked me out of the Unit in two years' time and that would have been my lot as far as you people are concerned. If I'd come in for help after that you'd have told me I was too old and I wasn't f.u.c.king eligible no more. You'd have told me I didn't fit the f.u.c.king criteria."

'Which is quite true,' said Jazamine. 'We would. So why do we bother?'

'Does the fact that there are limits to what you can do mean there is no point in doing anything at all?'

Jazamine shrugged as she stubbed out the remains of her cigarette.

'So what you're saying, Charles, is that all this is just some sort of hallucination, right? Just some sort of weird side-effect of the slip?'

'An effect of the slip, yes. A hallucination, no. I think all that stuff really did happen. It's just that it happened in another timeline, another universe that split off from this one, just before Jaz was confronted by that shifter Slug in the North Rec.'

'You're joking, right?'

'No, not at all. I could be wrong, I admit, but I'm not joking. It's what I really think.'

'Whew! Now that is weird.'

Jazamine picked up her cigarette lighter and turned it around in her hands, considering the implications.

'So that's another version of me out there? Is that what you're saying? Another me who is just as real as this one? And that other me is still there somewhere, living her own life?'

'Yes she is. Or so I think anyway. Just as real as you are and, up until very recently, actually one and the same person as you.'

'That is so weird.'

Then she laughed.

'The funny thing is that the other me is giving herself a hard time for not having stood up for Tammy's wishes and not having fought against the stomach pump. And yet this me here is giving myself a hard time for not having prevented her from doing a shift. You can't win, can you?'

Jazamine looked down at her lighter, then glanced up at Charles with a smile.

'I guess there must be another Charles in that world too, yes? I wonder whether he and that other Jaz are having a drink together right now?'

Charles laughed.

'That depends on whether she's got one of the Charleses who decided to bend the rules when you asked him out, or one of the Charleses who decided to be a stickler and say no.'

Or one of the Charleses who decided to do a shift himself, he added in his head.

'You remember how you asked me why I do my job...?' Charles said a little later 'Yes. And I remember that you never answered!'

'Well, I was just thinking. If you reckon it's such an easy question, why don't you tell me why you do yours?'

Jazamine picked up her cigarette lighter again and turned it about in her hands. She had rings on every finger, even on her thumbs, and, looking down at them, Charles suddenly thought there was nothing in the world more beautiful than a woman's hands.

'Well I'm sure it's got something to do with the fact that I was adopted,' she said.

'Adopted? Like Tammy?'

'No. Tammy wasn't adopted, remember? She was placed for adoption but then Liz changed her mind at the last minute.'

'In this world, anyway,' Charles said.

'What? Oh yes, I see what you mean. I can't get my head around all this, Charles, but I do sometimes wonder how she would have turned out if she had been adopted. I mean she's very bright. She could have done all kinds of things.'

'She could have been the manager of an art gallery,' he said.

'Well, yes.' Jaz frowned. 'But why do you mention that in particular?'

'I've no idea. It just came into my mind. So what's it like, being adopted?'

'Well, it's different in each case I guess. It wasn't terrible for me, but it wasn't great either. My adoptive parents had decided to adopt because they thought they couldn't have a baby of their own. But a year after they adopted me my mum fell pregnant and they had my sister Diane, who is much less like me than chalk is like cheese and very like Mum and Dad, and then after that my brother d.i.c.k came along, so I was definitely the odd one out. And then, well, they tried hard. They really tried to be fair. But somewhere inside I always knew that they felt differently about me than they did about their own flesh and blood. I could almost hear them guiltily thinking to themselves, "If only we'd waited another year we could have been a perfectly ordinary family without this annoying complication." Not that they blamed anything on me. It's just that it was an effort for all of us. Now I've left home it's like we've all breathed a sigh of relief and gone our separate ways.'

She started making another cigarette.

'So, to answer your question,' she concluded. 'I think I was drawn to the work I do because I identify with outsiders, kids like Tammy who don't feel wanted. I think I wanted to grapple with all of that in some way, and this job gives me a means of doing that.'

She lit her cigarette and regarded Charles, narrowing her clever, playful eyes as she watched his face for signs of comprehension.

'Mmm, yes, I see,' he said slowly. 'I think I'm beginning to get the hang of this.'

She laughed.

'Rubbish! You don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about!'

That was pretty much true. He didn't really get it. He'd learnt to think about life and its decisions in a moral way, but never in a psychological one. He saw actions as being based on principles, or lack of principles, not on prior causes. But she seemed to find his bewilderment endearing, so he played it up.

'Nope. Not a clue,' he said He suddenly felt extremely happy. What could be sweeter than being with someone who you like and are attracted to and who likes and is attracted to you, but at the very beginning, before ordinariness crept in, before the stage of giving it all names? When the touching began, he thought, and the kissing and the going to bed together and the saying 'I love you', that was actually a falling away, an attempt to compensate for the pa.s.sing of this sweetness at the very beginning.

'So,' Jazamine persisted, 'are you going to at least try and answer my question now?'

'Well. Well I... Well actually I think I need a pee.'

The washbasins were in a white tiled alcove with mirrors around them. Charles had felt very cheerful out in the pub but now, as he washed his hands with no one around him but reflections of himself, his mood abruptly changed. Suddenly Jaz with her difficult questions and her directness, seemed dangerous and intrusive, and he wanted to go home, and draw the curtains and never see her again.

'You're exhausted,' he told his reflection in the mirror. 'You haven't had a single night's sleep of more than three hours in the whole of the last week. You've been working fifteen hour days. You've been dealing with frightened people. You've been contaminated by shifters. Every day you've had to stand on the very edge of the world and look down into the abyss. This is just stress and shifter contact. And she's been under stress too. We're both hyped up and it's all a bit intense because of that.'

But a sense of dread stayed with him all the same. He had to make a conscious effort to turn away from the mirrors and step out from the safe anonymity of that white tiled alcove into the treacherous world outside.

Yet as soon as he returned to the warmth of the pub, and to the comforting babble of human voices, and to Jazamine, he felt warm and alive again. It was like pa.s.sing between two different states of being.

'Well, I have no idea if it's got anything to do with why I chose this job,' he said, 'but both my parents died when I was a baby, and I was brought up by my unmarried great-aunt Tricia. I guess my experience was a little bit like yours. My aunt was a perfectly decent, conscientious woman but she was a bottled-up old thing, and parenting definitely wasn't her vocation in life. She'd have very much preferred it if I wasn't there.'

'How did your parents die?'

'It was a freak road accident. They were pushing me along in a buggy. Some idiot in a stolen car took a corner far too fast. He came up over the kerb and crushed the two of them against a wall. My parents died instantly, apparently, but the driver only ended up with a couple of broken ribs, and I wasn't hurt at all. The buggy just rolled to a stop against a hedge, and I was found there quietly sleeping as if nothing had happened at all. That's what I gathered from Aunt Tricia, anyway. She died a few years ago herself. '

'I feel like some air,' Jaz said. 'Shall we walk to another pub?'

On the corner of the street there was a patch of gra.s.s, with a bench, and a tree, and the glittering city stretched out beneath them. The two of them stopped to admire it.