Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 7

'Because I don't want one. Is that a good enough reason?'

All night his mind divided in the darkness, divided and divided and divided like bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish. Vivid images loomed; his mirrors became corridors to other worlds; his own voice spoke words that he hadn't chosen and didn't expect to say.

'The Vikings are coming!' he heard himself call out, as he ran through those dim and empty corridors. 'They're landing everywhere, and they're all along the horizon too!'

He came to a high pinnacle above an ocean. The water seethed with fish and octopuses and jellyfish and manatees and seals. Wayne Furnish and Jacob Ha.s.san stood on a headland in the distance, and, far below him, Janet Richards and her management team were sitting round a table on a dark little beach, drawing up an action plan while the waves lapped round their feet. A few yards away from them Cyril Burkitt was building sandcastles all by himself, with bare feet and rolled-up trousers, and a knotted handkerchief on his head.

This wasn't a dream. He was wide awake. His eyes were open. He could see the shadowy room around him, dimly illuminated by the streetlights outside. He could see the dark absences on the walls that were his mirrors, and he knew there weren't really corridors beyond them. But the visions still kept coming and, along with the visions, came the switches, the flashbacks to events he had never experienced, the fragments of other people's memories.

He was Tammy, hungry and cold in a Bristol where no one knew her, thinking about Jolene back in the Unit, and the fish fingers they'd have for tea there, and the warm little room she could have been sleeping in now, with her p.o.r.nopop posters on the walls...

He was Joseph Ha.s.san outside some late night club, looking for someone with a bit of fizz...

He was Cyril Burkitt waking up in the night in the double bed where he slept alone...

Why Burkitt? Charles wondered. He's not a shifter. But before he could think about that, something else happened, something that was perhaps a switch and perhaps not. Jazamine was present in the room.

'I could love you, Charles,' she whispered, holding out her hand, 'I could really love you.'

He sat bolt upright with a cry.

'No!'

Sweat was pouring from his skin.

She opened up her hand and offered him a glowing seed.

Towards dawn Charles saw again through Tammy's eyes that bleak field with the cold wind and the darkening steel grey sky. The image was so clear that he could make out the individual stems of yellow gra.s.s, the separate stones, the lumps of earth. In the distance was a razor wire perimeter fence with cranes and bulldozers parked alongside it, and Charles knew he didn't know how that the meadow was a building site, and that they were about to build a new Inclusion Zone.

Then his alarm bleeped. He jumped out of bed. And, as he did so, the universe split into three.

He could see it quite clearly, three tunnels stretching away into his mirrors, each containing the same familiar furnishings, the same clothes draped over the back of a chair, the same Charles. In one universe Charles call him Charles one-trillion-and-one ran straight to the seeds and swallowed one before he had time to change his mind. He didn't really know why he was doing it. He had some vague notion about going after Tammy Pendant, but perhaps the real reason was that, in that single moment, it was easier to act and be done with it, than to have the thought nagging away in his mind.

In a second universe Charles one-trillion-and-two was a stern frontier guard who would allow nothing to pa.s.s any part of the boundary that he'd set himself to defend.

'I will phone Jazamine from the office today and cancel the drink,' Charles one-trillion-and-two decided.

There were good reasons, after all, for the advisory guidelines about not socialising with people involved in investigations, and it was so much easier in any case to say no to all the things you wanted, than to try and pick and choose between them.

But in a third universe, Charles one-trillion-and-three made a different choice again.

'No. No seeds,' he told his many reflections. 'But I will see Jazamine. She's quite right. Boundaries are important, but they're not the only important thing.'

And then he did a very odd thing. He went into his tiny living room, opened the two plastic bags of seeds (which no one had yet counted) and removed five seeds from each of them, closing up the two bags afterwards and replacing them in his briefcase. The ten seeds he'd now stolen he placed into an envelope which he folded over, took into his bedroom and tucked away at the bottom of his sock drawer, right at the back, beneath the odd socks which he never used but never got round to throwing away. He had no idea why he did this, and this fact alone made it very easy for him to act and then forget about it, since his action had no connection with anything in his conscious mind.

He closed the sock drawer. He went through to the kitchen and made coffee. He forced down some toast. He went down into the street it was a crisp October morning and drove to Britannia House.

Chapter 6.

All eight of the desks in the Special Cases Unit were empty. Fran had ended up having to stay the night at the boarding school down in Dorset. (It turned out that the place was riddled with slip: 'Endless worlds!' had been scratched over the brick archway of the main school gate, pupils carried seeds as status symbols...) 'Brilliant job yesterday Charles, brilliant!' said Roger, emerging from his Perspex box. He was wearing his sincerest and most empathic frown to signal his heartfelt grat.i.tude and his recognition of the impossible task that Charles had taken on.

Charles handed over the two bags of seeds.

'Excellent!' Roger said. 'That's the biggest haul we've had for weeks.'

Charles nodded. He was very pleased to have taken so much slip out of circulation, and this was the case even though he'd reduced the size of the haul by keeping ten back for himself, and even though he'd come very close to using them not much more than an hour ago. These complications were in a separate compartment, a compartment which no one else need see, and which he himself could easily overlook in the bright light of day.

'I'm going back to Thurston Meadows now,' he said. 'There's a lot more to do.'

'That's good of you. I really appreciate it.'

'But if there are any more shifters to interview I'm not going to do it, all right? I didn't sleep all last night because of the fizz in my head.'

'I know you're under a lot of stress Charles and I...'

'It's not just stress Roger. Fizz is something else. You need to get your head round that, if you're going to run this section. You really do. I'll follow up on yesterday's investigation but I can't deal with any new cases.'

'Well there may not be any new cases Charles but if there are...'

'If there are, why don't you come over and interview them yourself? It would be a good experience for you. Or, failing that, why not get some of that lot to get off their a.r.s.es and do it?'

Charles gestured across the room to the case officers in the various sections of the conventional immigration service, the ones whose customers came in on ships and planes.

'Well, no promises,' Roger said carefully, 'but I'll see what I can do.'

When Charles arrived back at the DSI office in Thurston Meadows, Janet Richards came straight down. Really straight down. She was flushed and breathless. She must have run downstairs and along the corridors, so desperate was she to see him.

'Mr Bowen, I was wondering if you could help me out with something.'

She'd had a sleepless night too, Charles realised. She must have lain awake imagining the repercussions when the press and the government and the DSI hierarchy finally realised that she'd been presiding over a nest of shifter activity and had simply ignored the signs. Charles guessed she'd come into her office early just so as to pore over those old e-mails and guidelines and meeting minutes one more time in an effort to determine the extent to which she herself could be held to blame. And he realised he felt sorry for her. He'd been too harsh on these people yesterday. It was their world that was at stake here after all: their livelihoods, their reputations, their feeling of being in control, their sense of purpose.

'Tammy Pendant's mother, Liz Pendant, has come in,' she explained, speaking rather too quickly as if she'd already rehea.r.s.ed the words she wanted to say. 'Naturally enough she is very upset that her daughter has... um... disappeared, and she wants some answers. She's insisted on seeing me personally and, under the circ.u.mstances, it feels only right that I should agree to this, but obviously I'm not an expert on shifters and... oh... Dunner and all that, and I thought we would be able to... um... help her much better if you could possibly join me and um...'

She was terrified. She was actually not far from tears. Janet Richards, the Executive Director of the Thurston Meadows Social Inclusion Zone, the Queen and Prime Minister of this little world, was beside herself with fear at the prospect of meeting Tammy's mother.

They had small interview rooms down by the Zone Residents' reception area, with tables and chairs in pale pine, boxes of tissues for residents who were overcome by the telling of their woes, and panic b.u.t.tons to press when those woes erupted in less acceptable forms than tears. Each room had a door at the back which required a swipe card to go through it and a door at the front which led into the waiting room. They were another kind of airlock between the people who actually lived in the Zone and the deskies who came in from outside. They were like those isolation chambers in nuclear laboratories into which technicians reach with long radiation-proof gloves.

Janet Richards let Charles into one of these interview rooms through the back door and had him wait there while she went through the other door into the waiting room to collect Tammy's mother. The doors had windows in them made of reinforced gla.s.s which meant that Charles could watch the encounter. Tammy's mother was painfully thin, her skull clearly visible beneath the pale skin of her face, and her legs no thicker than broomsticks, yet this haggard and skeletal creature was wearing thick mascara, black lipstick and a tight red miniskirt in fake leather. She was sitting cross-legged beside the magazine rack and, as Janet Richards stooped down to greet her, she grinned, not a grin of amus.e.m.e.nt, or of friendliness, but a primal grin of power: a grin that made absolutely clear that Janet was the supplicant here, and Tammy's mother the one who would have to be appeased.

'Who's this then?' she asked as she was ushered into the interview room.

She looked Charles up and down appraisingly.

'This is Mr Bowen from the Immigration Service,' Mrs Richards told her. 'He's an expert on this whole shifter business and I thought it was important to have him here so we could provide you with as much information as we possibly could.'

'Good to meet you, Mrs Pendant,' Charles said. 'I'm sorry it had to be in these circ.u.mstances.'

Her skirt was so short that the tops of her black stockings were visible below it and her thin transparent top revealed a matching red bra that squeezed her almost non-existent b.r.e.a.s.t.s into two sharp points.

'I'm not Mrs Pendant, sweetheart. I just told this one that. I'm Mrs Wheeler. I haven't been Pendant for years.'

'Oh I'm sorry. Mrs Wheeler.'

'Not your mistake, darling. It's this lot,' said Tammy's mother. 'It's this f.u.c.king shower. Can't even get a person's name right. Let alone anything else.'

She had a fixed smile on her small pink mouth and her expression was not one of grief or anger, but of triumph. The deskies had told her long ago that she wasn't fit to care for her daughter and yet it was them, not her, that had allowed Tammy to disappear from the world. And to her this was a great victory, a cause for exultation. She had the upper hand at last.

'You can call me Liz, darling,' she told Charles, holding out a small bony hand, heavily burdened with rings. 'Nice to meet you, sweetheart.'

'Mr Bowen will be able to help us to understand what has happened to Tammy,' Janet said.

Liz Wheeler turned back to her.

'I know what's happened to Tammy. Everyone on the f.u.c.king Zone knows what happened to her. You lot let her get in with some Scotch shifter, she got some slip off him, and now she's gone. You lost my only daughter, Mrs Richards, my one and only daughter, and I want some answers, because you said you'd look after her and you didn't. And what I heard was that that Bright woman, that hippie Jazamine Bright, didn't do her job properly.'

She glanced slyly at Charles again, seeming to a.s.sume that, since he wasn't being blamed himself, he would surely be on her side.

'I've already been in touch with the papers,' she said, 'and I must say they seem very interested, very interested indeed. I haven't signed anything yet, but let's just say it's not for lack of offers.'

Charles saw Janet Richards quail and he wondered why she was so defensive. It was surely absurd for the authorities to take all the responsibility for what had happened to Tammy. Short of locking her up 24 hours a day, how could the DSI or anyone else have prevented her from getting hold of slip? But this wasn't at all the line that Mrs Richards took.

'What happened should not have happened, Mrs Wheeler,' she said. 'There can be no excuse for it and I can a.s.sure you that I am looking into the matter and will continue to make it my first priority until I've got to the bottom of what happened and identified who is to blame. As to Jazamine Bright, I can't comment on her role in this until the outcome of our investigations, but her actions will be looked into very carefully I can a.s.sure you. And I can a.s.sure you too that, unless and until she is able to demonstrate her competence and trustworthiness, she will not have any further contact with children and young people. I've already given instructions that she should be suspended pending investigations.'

Mrs Wheeler's eyes shone.

'You've sacked the little cow!'

'Well, suspended her, at this stage.'

Charles was appalled.

'Surely you can't hold Jazamine responsible for Tammy getting hold of slip? It wasn't a locked unit, after all, and Tammy would have had opportunities every day to meet people who could get her some.'

Janet Richards looked round at him sharply, her face a poker-player's mask.

'We are looking into her role, Mr Bowen. No judgement has been made as to responsibility. I'm sure your own agency has similar procedures in situations like this.'

Mrs Wheeler, her eyes shining, looked from the Executive Director to Charles and back again, enjoying the rift that seemed to have opened up between the two officials and trying to understand it so that she could exploit it to the full.

'Well she should be sacked,' she said, 'and other people should be sacked too. I don't name any names, not yet, but I will, believe me, I will. It shouldn't be allowed for a mother to be deprived of her daughter. That's what I said to the people at the papers and they all agreed with me. They were very shocked I can tell you Mrs Richards. Very shocked indeed. And very interested too.'

She stood up, smoothing down her skirt, though it still rode well above the lacy tops of the black stockings. Seeing Charles looking down, she archly caught his eye.

'These deskies are all as bad as each other,' she told Charles, shutting out Janet Richards completely. 'They're all useless, just like the man at the papers said, and I'm going to make sure that they pay for this. I don't just want them sacked. I want them f.u.c.king punished, because it's criminal what's happened. And that's not just me saying that either. It's what the people at the papers said too.'

She bent to pick up her little red plastic hand-bag from the table, deliberately doing so, Charles was convinced, in a way that would give him an opportunity to look up her skirt.

'But you lot are all right,' she told him, looking quickly round to see if he'd taken the opportunity. 'Keep the Pakis out, I say, and the f.u.c.king Yanks. There's way too many of them here already. I know your hands are tied but you lot are doing your best to keep England for us English people. And as for them shifters, stringing them up would be too good for them. Too good for them and, if you want my opinion,' and here she gestured at Janet Richards, 'too good for this lot too.'

When Mrs Wheeler had finally gone, and he was alone in the office that had been set aside for him, Charles tried to call Jazamine, but there was only a recorded message: 'I've gone away for a few days. If this is you, Charles, I'll be back for our drink on Friday.'

Chapter 7.

On Friday night, in Thurston Meadows, Carl Bone went for a drink in the Old England, as he had done also on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. He was a stocky young man with thick, short, st.u.r.dy limbs, a round face, and large, gentle eyes. His fairish hair was done in spikes, with a shaven strip down each side of his head for fixing moodpads, and he wore loose red pedal pushers, a white shirt with large red polka dots, and shiny red boots. The 'clown suit', as it was called, was the standard outfit for young men in the Zones in that particular world at that particular time but somehow Carl didn't quite manage to inhabit it. He'd lived all his life in Thurston Meadows and, apart from a couple of trips to Weston-super-Mare, had never ventured further from the Zone than the centre of Bristol, but he looked as if he'd have been much more comfortable in the country somewhere, milking cows, driving a tractor, trudging along a lane after a herd of sheep.

The main bar of the Old England was meant to resemble a mediaeval banqueting hall. There were mediaeval maces and swords on the walls and mediaeval chairs shaped like thrones. There were even mediaeval dreamer sets and mediaeval dreamer-enhanced fruit machines humming and buzzing along the wall. Young men put money into the dreamers, encountered terrifying demons, blew them to pieces, felt the deep surge of relief pouring directly into their lower brains, and put in more money. Young women put money into the fruit machines, felt the physiological arousal flowing out through their autonomic nervous systems, dropped in more coins. There was a smell of mediaeval ketchup and stale cooking fat. On the giant mediaeval TV screen the p.o.r.nopop superstar Alissa Venus was performing the number one hit 'Inside Me', wearing a transparent dress and a white lace thong.

Carl surveyed the scene. He registered three girls at a table near the door, three chunky, mumsy girls incongruously dressed in outfits almost as revealing as Alissa Venus's. (p.o.r.nopop was the currently acceptable style for girls, the night-out style, just as the clown suit was the style for men, which you wore whether it suited you or not.) He looked through a mediaeval arch with its crossed plastic halberds, and checked out the pool room. He strolled over to the dreamer sets, maintaining an elaborate pose of nonchalance all the while though he didn't feel at ease at all. An old, old anxiety gnawed away inside him as he looked round for some sort of niche for himself, some sort of grouping that would let him in or at least tolerate his presence. He bought himself a beer and went over to the three chunky girls.

'You all right?'

'Yeah we're all right,' they sighed.

'Want to come over and play on the dreamers?' Carl said, but he was too nervous to wait for an answer and pressed on without a pause. 'Mind you, they're s.h.i.t these dreamers. I got a way better dreamer at home. Way better. Ten times better than this c.r.a.p. My mate customised it, yeah? It does double-strength. You should feel the fear that baby can pump out, you should feel the f.u.c.king fear.'

He watched the round pink faces of the chunky girls for a glimmer of interest, but found none.

'Plus it's great for synching, my dreamer. You should try it. Best synch on the f.u.c.king Meadows. Come over and try it, and you'll see.'

Synching was a craze that had taken off about a year previously. It involved two or more people plugging into a dreamer set with the polarities of one set of moodpads reversed so that it became a rudimentary transmitter. The other partic.i.p.ants experienced whatever emotions were going on in the lower brain of the one wearing the reversed moodpad. It was widely used it as a prelude to s.e.x.

The girls looked at each other, stifling laughter.