Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 16

'If we ever had a government that, for instance, gave everyone the legal right to a paid job, then perhaps we'd have a government that really meant business about social inclusion. But until that day, I reckon you can have all the DSI staff you like...'

Here he paused and smiled benignly out at his uncomfortable listeners.

'...Or don't like as the case may be,' he added, getting the tiniest little glimmer of a laugh. 'You can give them all the resources and all the best intentions in the world, but nothing is going to change.'

Here he paused. There was absolute silence. He smiled. It didn't seem to bother him at all that his audience was, to put it mildly, not exactly with him.

'And so,' Cyril said, 'what I've decided to do today is to give credit where it's due for once. You people are hard up and face all kinds of restrictions and intrusions in your lives. You take all kinds of abuse. You're called scroungers and parasites. But really you are doing it for the sake of the rest of us. You're helping to keep the economy on a steady track and keep inflation down. Give yourself a clap. You deserve it.'

A resentful trickle of applause petered out almost at once.

'What I've decided to do, in recognition of your services, is to get a medal struck for you. Here it is look...'

He reached into his jacket pocket and held up a large gold star-shaped medal on a striped ribbon.

'I'm calling it, the Hero First Cla.s.s of the Anti-Inflationary War. I would like to award it to all of you, but I'm afraid that isn't possible. So what I'm going to do is ask just a few of you to accept the medal on behalf of all the people of the Bristol Zones.'

In the silence, Cyril took a piece of paper out his pocket, slowly unfolded it, and put on his reading gla.s.ses.

'The first person I have in mind,' he announced, 'is seventy-six years old. As far as I can calculate, and she can correct me if I'm wrong, she has no less than seven children, eighteen grandchildren, nine great grandchildren, and two great great grandchildren, every one of them a Social Inclusion citizen living in one or other of the Zones. I reckon she's as well qualified as anyone to accept this medal. And so I'd like to call on Sharon Wheeler!'

A cheer went up from one corner of the hall and many hands pushed forward a tiny old woman with wispy grey hair. When she got to the stage, Cyril bowed low to her and pinned her medal to her chest.

'You got that wrong,' was all she would offer by way of an acceptance speech. 'It's ten great grandchildren and three great great grandchildren.'

'Typical b.l.o.o.d.y deskies,' someone shouted out. 'Never get anything right.'

People seemed to be beginning to enjoy themselves again.

'My next medal,' announced Cyril, 'goes to Wolfgang Amadeus Tonsil.'

A large black man stood up in a tight white suit and mirrored gla.s.ses, and a cheer went up as he came laughing and protesting to the stage. He wore a gold earring, a gold pendant and a gold wristband. Most impressive of all, when he opened his mouth he revealed a smile of solid gold.

'Mr Tonsil, I name you Hero First Cla.s.s, with a Special Commendation for Style,' announced Cyril, pinning the medal to his chest.

'Well, some people have got it and some haven't,' said Wolfgang Amadeus, taking a bow.

'And finally,' Cyril went on, 'I'd like to ask Mr Pedro Delaney of Daffodil Grove to come to the front. As far as I'm aware, Mr Delaney holds the record number of Restriction Orders of anyone in the Bristol Zones. Forty-three in all, according to my count. So it's a very great honour for us to have him outside of the Meadows here tonight.'

A tall, lanky and very shy white man made his way up to the stage.

'It's forty-four,' mumbled Pedro Delaney as Cyril pinned the medal to his shirt, 'and I'm back in court next week for number forty-five.'

Everybody cheered.

'And now,' Cyril said, 'before I finish, I'd just like to say a few words on the subject of... mammoths.'

There were a few slightly incredulous laughs.

'My grandson is a great authority on science,' Cyril said, 'and he tells me that one of the great achievements of the modern age is our ability to bring back to life long-extinct species. And of all those many species, my grandson says, surely the most glorious is the mighty mammoth of the steppes, who of course you can now see alive and in the flesh, any time you want to, here in Bristol Zoo.

'I sometimes wonder what it is like to be a mammoth in a zoo. Extinct for hundreds of thousands of years and then brought back to life again, not to roam the tundra like its ancestors, but simply to provide entertainment to gaping crowds. What a strange fate!

'But one thing I can tell you about mammoths is this. They are big. They are much bigger than mere elephants. You can easily see that when you look at them in their cages, but that doesn't really do justice to their true enormousness, because everything looks smaller when it's inside a cage. It's only when you see a mammoth out of a cage that you can really understand just how big a beast it is.'

At the back of the hall two large doors were pulled open. There were gasps and shrieks.

'Keep your hair on, everyone!' laughed Cyril. 'He really is perfectly tame!'

An aisle had been left clear through the middle of the tables. Along it, led by a keeper, plodded a fully-grown bull mammoth, five metres tall, with tusks so immense that each of them, if it could have been uncurled, would have been more than six metres long.

Right up to the front of the room the mammoth plodded. The guests could smell the warm, goatish stink of its coat, feel the heat of its body, hear its huge, deep, steamy breaths, as its keeper led it to the stage and helped Cyril climb up onto its s.h.a.ggy shoulders.

As soon as he was settled up there, the mammoth turned round again and marched ponderously back towards the door, with Cyril beaming and waving all the while to his former colleagues and his former clients, calling out names and good wishes, and flinging out handfuls of small plastic medals from a bulging polythene bag.

'Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye and good luck. Remember there are no deskies really, and no dreggies either. It's just a game we're playing, and one day we'll play a different one.'

'Wow. Who would have thought he was such a showman?' Jazamine said to Charles as they left.

They both a.s.sumed that this was the last they'd hear of him.

Chapter 12.

Carl had been awake most of the night and had not long managed to sink into a shallow and exhausted sleep when he was woken by his mother shrieking at him to come to the phone.

'It can't be Erik and them lot,' he told himself as he pulled on his jeans. 'They always use my mobile. I haven't even told them my landline number.'

Nearly two months had gone by since the death of Slug but Carl had since lived more or less constantly in a state of fear, which had further intensified when the police finally found Slug's body. It had all been on TV.

'Is that you Carl, mate?' asked a kindly high-pitched voice as Carl's mother returned to her TV and her can of Special Brew.

At once all the darkness of that evil night came rushing towards him down the phone line: the pale limbs of the trees in the torchlight, the gurgling of the hanged man, the intestines waving from side to side in the gla.s.s-like water...

'Uh, yeah. Yeah it's Carl.'

'It's only me, mate. It's only old Gunnar. Me and Laf were wondering if we could swing by in the car and pick you up? If you're not doing anything that is, my old mate. We wanted to talk about that little test for you. Have a bit of a chat and get it all sorted and that, mate. Know what I mean?'

Carl waited for them on a street corner near the Old England. He'd been there half an hour when a shiny black BMW pa.s.sed in front of him and pulled up a few metres further on. He'd been expecting the Renault van and would have taken no notice of the car if the familiar high voice hadn't called back to him.

'All right my old mate?'

Laf was at the wheel, Gunnar in the pa.s.senger seat. Both wearing suits and dark gla.s.ses, the two of them could have been the managers of a betting shop or a used-car dealership.

'How's it going then, mate?' asked Gunnar cheerily, as Carl climbed into the back seat.

It was hard to believe that the last time Carl had met him, Gunnar had been helping to hang a man.

'You're getting a bit fat, Carl,' observed Laf, who no one could accuse of being overweight. 'Too much beer, if you ask me. Too much beer and not enough action.'

Gunnar reached over to give Carl an affectionate prod in the stomach.

'Don't listen to old skin and bones here,' he said. 'I'm fat, mate. You're just well-built.'

Next thing they were at the Line, showing their IDs to the policeman in his bulletproof booth.

'All right there mate? How you doing?' Gunnar called up pleasantly.

'Not so bad,' said the Line officer, a little surprised by the friendliness.

'Have a nice day!' he called out as he opened the barrier and let them through.

Laf laughed.

'Anyone ever tell you can't fake ID cards, Carl?' he chortled. 'Well it's b.o.l.l.o.c.ks and Erik's proved it. Everyone says this national ID system here is state of the art but Erik managed to hack into it in half a day. We go to and fro across the Line like we were born and bred in these lousy Zones. The stupid computer thinks we really were.'

A vague memory came into Carl's head of a room lit by blue light and full of screens and cables. He remembered Erik saying that he was "something of a techie" and how he had hidden a bug in Slug's jacket without him knowing it.

'That's Erik for you, Carl mate,' said Gunnar. 'There's nothing our Erik can't sort out. Don't let his posh ways put you off. He's diamond, mate, he's pure diamond. Keep on the right side of him and you can't go wrong.'

They didn't mention Slug, or any aspect of their last meeting with Carl, back in that dark wood. Carl was relieved about this. Perhaps that episode really was all over? Perhaps it really could be regarded as never having happened at all?

Anyway, he thought, Slug was a f.u.c.king gra.s.s and Erik did warn him. So it was fair enough in a way, wasn't it?

Gunnar was all right he decided. They were both all right as long as you kept on the right side of them. Everything seemed much easier, now that he'd finally seen them again. They'd been growing into monsters in his mind, but here in the flesh and by daylight they were just two blokes.

Carl had lived all his twenty-five years in Bristol, and the attractive suburb of Clifton they now took him to was less than five miles from his mother's house, but he had only ever been here once before. That had been fifteen years ago when, at the age of ten, he'd been taken on a school trip to the famous suspension bridge across the Avon Gorge. The teachers had handed out sandwiches on the gra.s.s at the top of the cliff and one of them had lost her temper with Carl for leaning over the railings in spite of repeated warnings. But he had no recollection of these tasteful clothing shops, these craft shops, these wine bars and wholefood cafes.

'You telling me that this whole shop don't sell nothing but f.u.c.king candles!' he exclaimed 'I know mate,' said Gunnar soothingly. 'I know.'

'And what's the point of this?' Carl burst out, coming to a shop that sold hand-painted wooden toys. 'Any normal kid would smash one of these in two seconds flat.'

'Beats me, Carl mate,' Gunnar purred. 'I'm as baffled as you are.'

An intense but dazzlingly pretty young woman walked by in a very short green hand-knitted dress and white woollen tights, accompanied by a man in jeans and sweater with little wire-rimmed gla.s.ses and a closely trimmed beard. They were talking animatedly but they fell silent for a moment to look at red-nosed Carl in his pedal-pushers and polka dots, and to give each other a tiny knowing smirk.

'But I just thought the dynamics were all wrong,' the young woman then resumed. 'I just wasn't convinced by the piece.'

'I know, I know. One just longed to grab hold of the thing, didn't one, and edit it down to the conceptual bone? Yet it had a certain compelling urgency, don't you think? A sort of raw commitment...'

Two handsome middle-aged women were coming the other way.

'India was wonderful,' one of them was saying. 'I must admit I was reluctant to go at all after the dreadful disappointment of Thailand last year. But India is just so very much itself somehow I mean it has absorbed so many cultural influences over the centuries and made them its own that I suppose it just can't be turned into that kind of dreadful self-parody that has ruined Bangkok.'

Again, the glance at Carl in his clown suit, the knowing look at one another.

'Well, I'm so relieved, Tiffany. You were so very wretched after Thailand.'

'As you can see, Carl,' Gunnar said, 'this is one of the places where the posh people hang out in this town.'

'Posh?' muttered Carl. 'Too f.u.c.king right. I've never seen such stuck-up c.u.n.ts in my life.'

'Oh Carl, how could you?' simpered Laf in a cruel parody of the cultured voices around them. 'These are the beautiful people, my dear. The sensitive beautiful people, who know about the arts and culture and care so much, oh so very much, about the poor and the socially excluded.'

Gunnar put his arm protectively across Carl's shoulders.

'So how's this place make you feel, my old mate?'

'How would I f.u.c.king know?' asked Carl.

The very question seemed to him to be a bit posh in itself. It was the sort of thing that social workers asked their clients, and people on TV asked failed contestants in reality shows.

'Angry maybe?' asked Gunnar kindly. 'Does it make you feel angry at all, mate?'

'Nah, I don't give a s.h.i.t,' Carl answered.

'Well you're a f.u.c.king idiot then, Carl,' Laf told him.

A man with a great professorial mane of white hair came sweeping by in a green corduroy suit and a tie that seemed to be woven out of yellow string.

'You just have to go private, Gavin,' he was booming out to his younger companion, who might well have been his son. He too glanced in Carl's direction, but it was as if he saw right through him. 'There is simply no other rational choice in this city if you want your children to have any education at all.'

'Yeah, all right,' Carl said, 'angry then.'

'That's the way, my old mate,' said Gunnar, 'That's the way.'

He'd still got his arm across Carl's shoulders like a father or a kindly uncle.

'Now listen, Carl mate,' he said, 'how would you like it if you could do whatever you wanted here?'

'What d'you mean? I don't get you, mate.'

'He means, Carl,' explained Laf. 'How would you like it if you could trash these shops and burn these cars and f.u.c.k that posh tart in the green minidress? How would you like it if you could make those two posh old cows beg you for mercy instead of yammering on about their b.l.o.o.d.y holidays? How would you like to make that old toff with the white hair look at you, really look at you, and then just blow him away?'

'Yes, how would you like that, Carl my old mate?' said Gunnar.

'You're having a laugh with me, aren't you?'