Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 24

And there was another world where that lark also twittered in the sunshine beyond the little wood, and the little stream tinkled, and the wind ruffled one of a billion billion sets of leaves that were already diverging from each other, as random events at the subatomic level fractionally altered the trajectories of their growth.

In this world too, the whispering voices fell silent and the boundary of the world sealed itself, but here Charles and Jazamine were still both inside it. They'd seen into the teeming branches of the Tree, and they'd felt the membrane open to let them through, but they'd managed to hang onto one another and remain in the same strand of time.

'What are you playing at Charles?' said Jaz in a cold cold voice. 'What the f.u.c.k are you b.l.o.o.d.y playing at?'

She'd climbed out of the stream and was putting on her shoes. Both of them ached with a sense of longing that seemed almost too much to bear. The boundary that had cut them off again from the other worlds seemed like the slammed door of a prison cell, though what they'd missed and what they were grieving for, neither had no idea.

'Why not just dangle me over the edge of a cliff?' Jaz demanded. 'That would be interesting wouldn't it? You could find out if you were strong enough to hold me up. Then you could go home and discuss it with those friends of yours in your mirrors.'

'I just...'

'Oh shut up, Charles.'

'I had a switch. I understood something which I never...'

'I'm not interested, and I'm not listening.'

'I had a switch,' Charles said, 'and I finally figured out the answer to your question.'

Darkness was falling. Bright electric signs yellow, purple, pink shone out over takeaways and convenience stores. Traffic lights shifted from red to orange to green and back to red again, alternately releasing and holding back the mighty torrents of metal. Horns blared and brakes screeched as Charles drove across a red light he'd failed to notice.

'What I mean,' he said, 'is that I realised why I do this whole marcher thing.'

'Don't you think you should concentrate on driving?'

'It isn't about secretly wanting to get to the other side, as you've always thought. It's about the thrill of being on the edge. Once you cross over, you lose all that. You're just in some b.l.o.o.d.y old place again, some ordinary place that's no different from the one you left behind. And then all you can do is either settle for where you are, or go to the edge again. Some shifters admit as much. They know they won't ever get anywhere. It's all about the crossing over.'

'So what about that data you pinched? What about that big plan of yours to collaborate with other worlds?'

Charles snorted with derision.

'Oh come on! That obviously wasn't going to work! Where's having a map of the Tree going to get anyone? How can you hope to fill up a hole in the universe with a few bits of data on a b.l.o.o.d.y stick?'

'I don't know why you're asking me, Charles. It was your idea, if you remember.'

She didn't want to go back to his flat with him, or for him to come into her house.

'You sure you'll be all right on your own?' he asked, as he dropped her off there.

'I'll call a friend,' she said, climbing out of the car. 'And listen, Charles, I don't want to see you anymore. Ever. We're finished, and I really mean that.'

She didn't say goodbye. She didn't remind him to drive safely. She didn't turn to look back at him as she walked up to her front door.

His own flat seemed very bleak and cold, with all the curtains open to the night and the mirrors like holes into nothingness. It was as if no one lived there any more, as if he was looking into one of the worlds where Charles Bowen no longer existed.

He tried to call Jaz but her phone was switched off.

There was no question of sleep of course, and he couldn't bring himself to eat. He lay on his bed with the dark mirrors all around him. Over and over again, he heard Jaz screaming out as she fell away from him across the Tree. Over and over, he felt himself begin to fall. And over and over, his mind went back to the switch that had come to him at that very last moment.

Mr and Mrs Bowen weren't at home when the taxi from the station dropped him off and Charles rang the doorbell, but both of their sons were there to meet him. The older son was a business a.n.a.lyst called James, and looked like a slighter version of Charles himself. Griffith, the younger one, who was a medical student, was a strong, solidly built young man in jeans and a rugby sweater.

'Father has taken our mother out for a drive so we could have a chance to have a quick word with you first,' said James. 'You'll appreciate this has caused a good deal of upset for all of us. We're really worried about the effect it'll have on Mum.'

'She's been seriously ill recently,' said Griffith. 'In fact you may as well know that she's had cancer. To be honest a shock like this was the very last thing she needed. But of course typically of her she insisted on this meeting going ahead. She can't bear to think she's let anyone down.'

'Not of course that Mr Bowen could have been expected to know she'd been ill,' conceded James.

They led him into a prosperous living room.

'Well I'm sorry,' Charles said. 'It wasn't my intention to cause an upset.'

'Indeed,' said James. 'But... Well, Griff and I may as well come out and say it, when we read your letter we both strongly advised our mother just to say no to this. So did our father. It was only on her own insistence that...'

'She's hardly slept since we first heard from you,' said Griffith.

'We just ask that you keep this very brief,' said James, 'and for there to be no expectations as to, um, ongoing contact, or some sort of family relationship.'

'I see.'

'I don't profess to understand about shifters and all that. Griffith and I have been rather sheltered from the darker side of life, I'm pleased to say, as have our parents.'

'Well, as I explained on the phone, I am a shifter, but I've made myself known to the authorities and...'

A car crunched onto the gravel outside, the front door opened, and then, after what seemed a long wait, Mr and Mrs Bowen came in. He was a solidly built, austere-looking man of sixty, who looked very like Charles. She was a pretty woman of fifty-eight, graceful, fine-boned, but rather thin and frail. Though they were thirty years older, both were agonisingly familiar to Charles from the photos he'd pored over as a child.

James was solicitous towards his mother.

'Why don't you sit down here Mum? Can I fetch you a drink?'

'I'm alright,' she said, 'don't fuss.'

She walked straight over to the stranger, to Charles, and extended her hand for him to shake. He'd longed for this moment for nearly thirty years: longed for it, and forbidden himself to long for it, and then longed for it again anyway. Her hand was small and light.

'h.e.l.lo, Mr Bowen,' she said. 'I can't say that I really understand all this, but I suppose your mother was what? a sort of double of me?'

She'd been dreading this, but at the same time she'd been secretly fascinated by the prospect of meeting a kind of extra son, who even bore the name she and her husband had planned to give to that first baby she'd miscarried and then grieved and grieved for. But now he was there in front of her Charles himself could see this with complete clarity both her anxieties and her secret hopes were rapidly falling away. He wasn't her missing and longed-for child, he was just a stranger, and, though there was a pang of disappointment there, her overwhelming feeling was one of relief.

'My mother and you were actually the same person until the early seventies,' Charles told her. He saw her face relaxing, and felt the draining away of the last remnants of his own hopes. 'That was when your world and the world I come from split apart from each other.'

She shook her head.

'Oh dear. I'm getting confused already. I've read about these things of course but none of it makes any sense to me. What does it mean to say that the world split? Why didn't we notice?'

'The world splits all the time. It's splitting now as we speak.'

As he said this he felt for a moment the ghostly presence all around him of other versions of this room and of the five people in it, millions of them, moving off into their own separate futures, which themselves would split and split and split in every subsequent moment. If only he could disappear into one of them.

'In my branch of time, I was your first and only child. You'd planned to have more, but one day the two of you were walking down the street with me in a buggy and...'

Now the older man stepped in.

'I think we'll leave out the metaphysics if we may. We weren't sure of your reason for coming here but my wife and I agreed that we ought to... we ought to offer you at least one opportunity to... um... state your purpose.'

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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sers-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 Sat.u.r.day 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 gla.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.