Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 11

'It's just a faade though, isn't it?' said Jazamine suddenly. 'The suspension bridge, the gorge, the pretty terraces and hills. It seems such a nice friendly colourful place. Tourists come for miles to see it. And yet all the time, like a guilty secret, the people who pay the price for all this comfortable prosperity are hidden away out of sight in the Zones.'

'Pay the price?'

'Someone always has to be outside, surplus to requirements, so the rest of us can be secure and comfortable inside.'

He nodded.

'I used to feel that way about the whole country, back in the days when I was doing ordinary immigration work. I heard some dreadful things - the hardships people had endured, the risks they'd taken to get here, the horrors they'd seen and they often made me feel like we were living in some sort of cosseted nursery, a sort of Toytown, and that my job wasn't just to keep those people out but to keep reality itself at bay.'

'And now that you work with shifters?'

Charles gave a little snort of laughter.

'Well now I don't just think all this is unreal, I know it is. There are millions of Englands. Millions of yous, millions of mes, not to mention countless billions of other worlds which are very much like this one but where neither you nor I have ever existed and a whole different set of people are getting on with their lives. All this that we can see now is just a skin, just a thin and fragile membrane stretched out precariously across time.'

'Maybe I just don't have enough imagination,' she said after a few seconds, 'but I really can't see why it matters so much if there are a lot of other worlds. I mean we've always known that there are billions of stars out there. It doesn't make this planet any less real.'

'Well you're right, it's not the existence of other timelines that's the problem. It's the fact that people move between them. They're...' Charles cast about for a way of saying it. 'It's like they're tearing up the contract between us and time.'

'The contract? I'm sorry, Charles, I don't quite get that. I mean I can see it's a problem when people commit crimes and disappear, but I've always a.s.sumed that the sort of people who become shifters are the same sort of people who do drugs: unhappy people who behave in a way that most of us wouldn't even be tempted by. Horrible for them, a bit of nuisance for the rest of us, but no more than that. You make it sound like something much bigger, like some kind of... I don't know, some kind of metaphysical threat, if that's the right word, some kind of metaphysical threat to us all.'

Charles smiled.

'Well, to be quite honest, you wouldn't be the first one to tell me I'm a bit fixated on the whole business.'

Jazamine took his hand, and they looked out over the city for a while in silence. The truth was that at that moment even he couldn't entirely see why he saw shifters as such a terrible danger to the world, and he knew this was because he was happy. When people were happy time didn't matter. You could almost define happiness that way. It was when things were hard that people needed the faith that tied one minute to the next, like one of those human chains that rescuers make to get people out of floods or burning buildings. And shifters broke that faith.

He didn't say all this though. He knew he'd come over as obsessed and over-earnest, and he didn't want to spoil the moment.

'One thing's for certain,' he said. 'Shifters never really get the thing they're looking for. They think they can run away from their problems and their mistakes, but the price they pay is... Well, I've never met one that was happy.'

'But perhaps that's because you'd have to be unhappy in the first place to want to do it? Like Tammy, for instance. She's had more trouble in her fifteen years than ten people normally experience in an entire lifetime. You wouldn't believe the things she's been through. Shouldn't we feel sorry for shifters rather than seeing them as a threat?'

'But it isn't just the shifters themselves who get hurt by what they do.'

Jaz laughed.

'Charles. Why are we standing here getting cold and talking about your work?'

He laughed .

'I don't know. I certainly don't want to talk about it.'

She turned to face him, taking both his hands in hers.

'We're both orphans in a way, aren't we?'

Then they kissed. Just for a moment it seemed quite wonderful, as if in a dark, cold, hungry world, they had found a source of nourishment.

Chapter 9.

'Oh Grandad, you don't only get marsupials in Australia! You're forgetting about the American opossum!'

On a Sunday morning, three weeks after Tammy disappeared, and one month before he was due to take early retirement, Cyril Burkitt went on an outing to Bristol Zoo with his daughter Sophie and her two boys. Adam, Sophie's eleven-year-old, was a great authority on natural history and he recited a great many interesting facts as they walked round the cages.

'Everyone knows that the cheetah is the fastest land animal Granddad, but I wonder if you know which is the slowest?'

The boy looked at his grandfather, realised he wasn't listening, and answered his own question.

'It's the three-toed sloth of course!'

Cyril had retreated, as he so often did, into his own head. Sophie noticed this with distaste.

'Come on, Dad!' she said briskly. 'Let's try and enjoy this together, shall we? Look at these elephants here!'

Her temperament was as different from her father's as the prosperous offices of her business consultancy in Bath were different from the hidden world of the Social Inclusion Zones.

'They're not elephants, Mum!' said Adam in a shocked voice. 'They're mammoths!'

'Mammoths?'

Cyril came alive at once, turning eagerly to watch the six gigantic animals being led past by their keepers. Of course they weren't elephants! They were nearly twice the size! For no obvious reason his eyes filled with tears.

Embarra.s.sed and a little repelled, Sophie turned away.

'Did you know, Granddad, that the Bristol mammoths are 92% original mammoth genes, and only 8% elephant?' said Adam, consulting the official zoo booklet. 'The New York ones only average 80% and the Moscow ones 68%. That makes ours the most authentic mammoths in the world.'

'Is that so, Adam?' asked Sophie, stepping in as the recipient of Adam's remark. 'Well that's certainly something for us to be proud of!'

When Cyril was woken by his radio the following morning, it was announcing the American government's decision to order the destruction of the New York mammoths. He lay there for a few minutes, alone in his double bed, imagining the great creatures falling.

'...According to a Presidential spokesman,' said the radio in his kitchen as he ate his toast, 'the mammoths, as the products of genetic engineering, represent a "usurpation of G.o.d's prerogative and therefore a form of blasphemy"...'

He swigged back his tea, climbed into his car and turned on his third radio of the day.

'...President Elisha Jones has ordered that the mammoths be burned and their ashes dispersed far out to sea in order to avoid contamination of American soil by what he called "unclean flesh, abominable to the Lord".'

Cyril sighed. He didn't feel so sad for the mammoths themselves, for they belonged in the past and had no real home in this world, but he was keenly aware of the hurt this would cause to his grandson Adam. It would bewilder his simple rational soul.

He set off on the ten-kilometre journey via the Portway, Ashton Gate and Bedminster to his place of work. He had been to and fro along this same road so many times before that it had come to seem as if he would go on the same way forever, but now the end was in sight. He would do this journey how many times was it? another twenty-seven times and then that would be it.

He imagined Adam taking the zoo booklet out from wherever he had carefully stored it, turning to the pages about mammoths and using a ruler to neatly cross out the statistics about the New York animals.

'Quiet night, Dave?' he asked the line officer as he pa.s.sed through the Thurston Meadows checkpoint at 8.45.

'Not bad,' the policeman replied. 'Dan Wheeler and a couple of his mates tried to shift some dodgy dreamy sets over the Line again, but we nicked them.'

Cyril smiled. The Wheeler/Pendant/Delaney clan were well known in the Zone and had become a kind of running joke for the people who worked there.

'Well, you've got to admire Dan's persistence,' he said. 'Holding down a steady job would be child's play by comparison.'

The policeman shrugged. 'Well, that's dreggies for you.'

There was a time when Cyril would have challenged the abusive epithet but now he let it pa.s.s. It was a bit late now to try and change the world.

Electronic readers in the road surface checked out the registration, cha.s.sis and engine numbers of Cyril's car as he pa.s.sed over the Line.

Now Cyril drove down Meadow Way, the central axis of the Thurston Meadows Zone, looking out with a bewildered, guilty affection at the people in the streets. He had worked on the Zone since it was built and knew many of them by name. Nowadays he seriously doubted whether his work had helped anyone and feared that he might have made things worse, but this had been his life, and contemplating the loss of it was like facing a second bereavement.

Here was old Janie Delaney, who lived in a third-floor flat with its kitchen so crammed full of piles of newspapers and magazines that she had to cook on a camping stove on the living room floor. Here was crazy 'Alien' Watson, ranting at the top of his voice on the corner of Magnolia Street about Sin and Filth and the End of the World, but pausing to give Cyril a friendly wave. Here was grossly obese Tracey Parkin for who, when she was a little girl, Cyril himself had gone to court to obtain an order to remove her from her chaotic and neglectful mother and place her with a foster-family in Clifton. Now she was pushing her own baby along in a buggy on the way to the DSI Family Centre. Her equally obese mother, Jenny, was shuffling along beside her, Tracey's constant companion and closest friend.

'What did we think we could achieve?' Cyril murmured. 'What did we think we were trying to do?'

The side roads had alphabetical names, beginning with Asphodel Way and b.u.t.tercup Drove and ending up with Yucca Walk and Zinnia Avenue. Then came the Zone's Central Square where there was a chip shop, a budget supermarket, a newsagent and, of course, a dreamer rental shop, with its lurid posters advertising games such as 'Warm Gore' and 's.e.x Heaven' and 'Ripper Killer'. The shops formed three sides of the square. On the fourth side was the seat of government, the DSI compound which Charles had visited for the first time the previous week. It had a large blue sign outside: The staff who worked there called it Fort Apache.

Another car pulled up next to Cyril's.

'Mr Burkitt!' the driver greeted him as they both climbed out. 'I believe I'm coming to the same meeting as you.'

Cyril stared blankly. He was finding it increasingly hard to remember faces. He blamed it on getting old but the problem wasn't really caused by a hardening of his physical brain so much as by his ever-increasing tendency to shut out the external world and deal with it only at the most superficial levels of his mind. Often he felt as if his body were a machine he operated by remote control from some far off hiding place where no one could find him.

'Oh... yes... Dr Rajman isn't it?'

The smart young man nodded. He was a Sponsored GP paid by the DSI to take on a quota of non-fee-paying patients who were on the Social Inclusion Register. The arrangement was a residue of the free National Health Service of the previous century.

'Of course the meeting isn't for another half an hour yet,' said Cyril.

'I know, but I've got a bone to pick with the finance people here and I thought I might as well sort it out while I'm over this way. They've sent me the wrong cheque three times in a row.'

Cyril smiled, a little sourly. Most young doctors did Sponsored work for a few years until they built up their own lists of private patients. In his experience, complaining about the DSI bureaucracy was one of the stages in a rite of pa.s.sage. It gave the doctors a principled reason for dropping their Sponsored work later on when the private work had picked up. ('Of course I'd have loved to have gone on helping out on the Zones, but I'm a doctor, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, not a filler in of forms!') Cyril placed his forefinger on the print reader outside the staff door and spoke into the voice checker: 'Cyril Burkitt. I've got Dr Rajman with me, who's come for the 9.30 registration conference.'

Up in Cyril's office his loyal secretary Alice had his coffee ready.

'How was your zoo trip with the boys?'

'I'll tell you what, Alice, I was glad to be coming in to work this morning for a rest. They wear me out!'

'Well I've got the agenda and the reports ready for your first meeting, so you're all set.'

Alice was the one who actually ran the system that Cyril was nominally in charge of. She made sure that papers were filed in the right places, that letters went out on time to where they were supposed to go and that Cyril, who was quickly bored by details, was adequately briefed about problems likely to come up. She also made his coffee for him, remembered his birthday, and reminded him about the birthdays of his daughter and his two grandsons.

'So, what do you reckon? Is this shifter business calming down yet?' asked Cyril, sipping from the warm cup and feeling the welcome zing of caffeine spreading out through his veins.

'Oh G.o.d I hope so,' said Alice. 'We've got enough to do without policemen and immigration officers and G.o.d knows what all over the place, haven't we? I'll just leave you to look over the reports now if you don't mind, Cyril, because I need to go and make some extra copies.'

'Do you think we really do any good here?' Cyril asked her. 'The DSI, I mean. Do you think it adds to the sum of human happiness?'

Alice laughed but didn't bother to answer as she hurried off the photocopier. She simply didn't think in those terms. She could work for a firm producing nerve gas and would still feel that she was doing her bit for the general good, just as long as she was allowed to remember people's birthdays and buy them cakes when they were feeling down.

She might be right too, Cyril thought. Perhaps the cog-wheels of the machine ground on in their own way regardless of human will. Perhaps some law of nature meant that it was impossible to devise a system that would do good without causing an equivalent amount of harm. If so, then the best mere humans could do was indeed to be as kind as they could be to those they found around them.

He barely glanced at the papers. He had done this job long enough to be able to extemporise. Instead he took his coffee to the window and looked out. His office was on the fifth floor, and he could see right across the Thurston Meadows Zone into the 'fringe' estate of Thurston Rise, just outside the Line, where the working-cla.s.s inhabitants clung precariously to their low-paid jobs and their standard white ID cards, free of the red stripe that marked out the cards of Social Inclusion citizens. Beyond Thurston Rise, and across the c.u.mberland Basin, was the real Bristol, that proud prosperous city, made wealthy and strong by slaves and tobacco and arms, shining on its hills.

The phone rang just as he finished his coffee.

'h.e.l.lo? Cyril Burkitt here.'

'Burkitt, you deskie swine,' whispered a voice from the depths of h.e.l.l. 'Listen carefully. Very soon you're going to die.'

'So how are you getting on with that deskie girl?' asked Fran Stevens.

Fran and Charles had driven over to Weston-super-Mare in Fran's new Audi to interview three young shifters the police had picked up an hour previously.

Charles was startled.

'How on Earth do you know about her?'

'Because Ted saw you in a pub with a girl who looked just like the social worker from Thurston Meadows who was in the papers. And I noticed that you had said nothing whatever about going out with anyone, which is secretive even for you, darling. And I put two and two together. You are seeing her, aren't you?'

'Well yes, I am. But keep it to yourself. We aren't really supposed to socialise with people we work with are we, let alone people who've been suspended because of...'

'Oh for goodness' sake Charles, why are you such a terrible fusspot about the rules? Maybe it would cause a problem if we socialised with shifters or illegal immigrants. But a social worker who once dealt with the same case as you? Please! You really ought to lighten up a bit, my dear.'

Charles had always struggled with the fact that other people treated rules as things to be evaded wherever possible. Didn't people see that speed limits were there for a reason? Didn't they see that if one person falsified an insurance claim it just meant that everyone else would end up paying for it? He didn't understand how people could be so cavalier about these things. And yet...

The stolen slip in his sock drawer surfaced very briefly in his conscious mind. He pushed it back down again.

'We're getting on pretty well,' he said. 'We seem to have a lot in common.'