Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 17

'No,' said Laf, 'no wind-up, Carl. It's what we're planning. We're actually going to do it. And I'll tell you the beauty of it. The beauty is we'll have swallowed seeds, so when the police come along we can laugh in their faces and disappear to a different world where they won't ever be able to find us.'

It was at this moment that the full glory of being a shifter finally dawned on Carl. This was what it could mean to be a warrior of Dunner. You could anything you liked anything and slip would wash it away as if it had never happened. Why would he care about the killing of Slug if he'd shifted to another world where Slug had never existed in the first place? Why not commit murder in these streets if he could take himself in the next moment to another set of streets where the murder had never occurred?

A smile slowly spread over his broad and guileless face.

'Sweet, man! That is f.u.c.king sweet!'

'I think he's finally got it, Laf my old mate,' said Gunnar with a kindly little chuckle. 'I think he's finally got the idea.'

He ruffled Carl's hair.

'That's my boy. That's my good old mate.'

'Like I say, Carl,' Laf went on. 'We're really going to do it. We're planning it now. And you can be there, Carl. You can be with us if you want to, and if you're still willing to take the test.'

Carl laughed.

'Yeah, no problem, mate, no sweat at all.'

A grey-haired man in his fifties was walking by. When he saw Carl he did a double take.

'Carl! Carl Bone! It is you! I didn't expect to see you here. What a nice surprise!'

Carl looked blank.

'You remember me don't you? You remember Cyril Burkitt?

'Oh yeah! h.e.l.lo Mr Burkitt!'

He found he was pleased to see this familiar face from his past. It was good, somehow, to be able to show to Laf and Gunnar that there were other people in the world who took an interest in him, even here in this posh place where he hadn't expected to know anyone at all.

'How you doing?' he asked.

'Not so bad, not so bad. Just came over here to do a little shopping. How are you doing yourself, Carl? It must be all of ten years.'

Cyril glanced at Gunnar and Laf and smiled at them as if any friend of Carl's was a friend of his.

'All right, mate?' said Gunnar in his little high amiable voice. 'How you doing? Not turned out so bad has it?'

'No it hasn't. Nice to see a bit of sun at this time of year.'

Cyril turned back to Carl.

'Well, I won't keep you from your friends. But I'll tell you what, I'm retired now and I've got a lot of time on my hands. If you fancy calling by for a chat sometime you'd be very welcome. I'm always glad of a bit of company and I've often thought about you over the years and wondered how you were getting on. I'll give you my address and number, look.'

He opened his wallet and found a rather battered card.

'Do get in touch, Carl. It would be good to see you.'

When Carl turned back to his companions, they were looking at one another in an odd, knowing way.

'What?' he demanded. 'What's the matter? He's just an old geezer I knew when I was a kid.'

Laf glanced over at Cyril's card.

'That's a deskie, right?'

'Yeah he is,' said Carl, 'but he's all right. He's a nice enough bloke. He don't mean no harm.'

Gunnar took the card from him.

'Cyril Burkitt,' he read aloud. 'Well, what are the odds, eh, Laf? He's only the bloke that Jod and the other two went after that time. He's only the one that got away!'

'Well, well,' Laf exclaimed. 'So he is!'

The two shifters looked at each other again, and this time both of them nodded.

'What?' demanded Carl again. 'What's the matter? What are you two nodding and f.u.c.king smiling about?'

'Well that's your test isn't it, Carl mate? ' said Gunnar.

'It's perfect,' said Laf. 'We couldn't have come up with a better one if we'd tried.'

'What's perfect? And what do you mean, that's my test?'

'It's to go to his house,' Gunnar said, 'and you know, mate finish the job off.'

'What? You mean...'

'Yeah,' said Laf, 'we mean kill him.'

Carl gave an incredulous laugh.

'Oh no, he's not that f.u.c.king bad, not for a f.u.c.king deskie, know what I mean?'

'That's not the point, Carl mate,' Gunnar said patiently. 'You're still not getting it. It's not about punishing him or nothing. It's your test! See what I'm saying, mate? It's what you've got to do to become a warrior. Are you with me, my old mate?'

'You've got to make a sacrifice for Dunner,' said Laf.

'Fair enough if you don't want to do it, Carl,' said Gunnar rea.s.suringly. 'No hard feelings or nothing. But if you do want to be a warrior, that's the test you've got to pa.s.s.'

'After all, any fool can knock off someone they hate,' Laf pointed out. 'Any fool can do for someone that deserves it.'

'Laf's right there, isn't he my old mate? That wouldn't be a challenge at all.'

Carl looked from one to the other, slowly absorbing the fact that they meant everything they were saying.

'Think it over, Carl,' Laf said. 'We'll call you in a couple of days and you can tell us what you've decided.'

'Sorry if it all seems a bit sudden, mate,' Gunnar said soothingly. 'We know you can't make a big decision like that on the spur of the moment, and we wouldn't ask you to. Take your time, mate. Take your time. And meantime let's forget all about it for now, eh, and see if we can't find somewhere in this poncy place where we can get ourselves a decent pint.'

Back home Carl's mother was snoring in front of the TV, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, her dress. .h.i.tched up over her pale thighs, a cigarette packet clutched in her right hand. There were empty beer cans strewn around her on the floor and, in her sleep, she'd squelched her foot into the uneaten half of a microwaved pizza, leaving a long skidmark of cheese across the grimy beige carpet As he often did when he felt anxious, Carl took some banknotes from his mother's purse and put them into his wallet. It was a habit so old that he was hardly aware of doing it.

I've got Burkitt's card, Carl thought. I could phone him now and tell him all about this, and then he'd help me and I wouldn't have to do for him.

It was a good plan. He went to the phone and was about to dial.

'O-KAY!' cried the host of the daytime game show that was playing on the TV. For the last half hour he'd been gabbling away into a room where no one was even conscious. 'O-KAY!' he cried, as if this was the most exciting thing in the world. 'Hold on to your horses people because now we are going to play DOUBLE OR - QUITS!'

Carl hesitated, then replaced the receiver.

f.u.c.k it, he thought. Burkitt couldn't help me. Okay he's nice but he's p.i.s.s useless.

And look what had happened to Slug when he tried to go to the authorities. Erik and Gunnar and Laf had known at once what he was up to, hadn't they? They'd got him wired without him realising it. And even without a wire, he thought, they'd probably still have known. They were shifters weren't they? And everyone knew that shifters could read people's mind.

Absent-mindedly Carl prised the cigarette packet from his mother's hand, took out half a dozen cigarettes and stuffed them into the pocket of his tee-shirt. She wouldn't notice six but she went wild if he took the whole packet.

Anyway, he thought, the stupid git, if he goes round giving out his address and that, some f.u.c.ker's going to get him yeah? and if it's not me it's going to be some b.u.g.g.e.r else. So it don't make no difference really. I'd only be doing what was going to happen anyway. I'd just be getting it over with.

He tested each of the beer cans till he found one still half-full. He took a swig, then spat it out with angry disgust. His mother had dropped a cigarette b.u.t.t into it.

'Dirty cow!'

He caught sight of himself in a mirror that hung on the wall: his round pale face, the ash and beer dribbling down his chin.

I mean he's had his life hasn't he, he thought, wiping the mess away. He's had a nice life already. When you think about it he's done well out of geezers like me. So it's my turn now isn't it? My b.l.o.o.d.y turn.

He was not one of the world's great thinkers but even Carl could see the shallowness of his own argument and even he felt accused by his own reflection in the mirror.

'Maybe I should phone him,' he muttered.

It never occurred to him to phone the police. It simply wasn't part of his repertoire. The police were there to protect the outside world against the Zone, that was how he saw them, not to protect the Zone itself.

Yeah but if I don't do this, it'll be me that gets it, won't it? I'll be the one in a tree with a f.u.c.king spear through me and f.u.c.king Gunnar going, 'All right mate? No hard feelings or nothing!' And then someone else will do for old Burkitt anyway.

Tears came p.r.i.c.king into his eyes. He felt cornered and alone. He'd never really got on top of life. Even within the marginal world of the Thurston Meadows Zone he'd always been on the margins, blundering along, picking up the sc.r.a.ps that other people let fall.

It's Burkitt or me. I've got no f.u.c.king choice.

Chapter 13.

'This is me as a baby.'

'Blimey, Charles! You were a pudgy little thing.'

'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 pa.s.ser-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 s.p.a.ces 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 gla.s.s 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 Gla.s.s. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed from the air.

'It's like a big prison camp,' she said.