Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 8

'In your dreams, mate,' one of them said with a snort.

Carl pressed on. He hadn't seriously expected any of them to come back with him. All he was really aiming for was light-hearted banter. He just wasn't getting it right.

'Hear about that girl doing a shift over at North Rec?' he asked.

It was old news. The girls yawned.

'Yeah, of course.'

'Well guess what.'

'What?'

'That Tammy Pendant. She's only my f.u.c.king cousin!'

'So what?' said one of the girls.

She looked at the others and they all t.i.ttered.

'Well, I'm just saying...'

But what was he just saying? What was his point? He had nothing else to add. The only purpose of his comment had been to claim a relationship with this temporarily famous person, in the hope that some of her visibility would rub off on him.

'Come on, Janey,' he said after a few seconds. 'Come over and do some synching at my place, why don't you? I promise you, it's the best f.u.c.king dreamer on the Meadows.'

'f.u.c.k off, Carl,' Janey said.

'"f.u.c.k off, Carl",' Carl mimicked back, trying to make a joke of it, but no one laughed.

Presently he wandered over to the young boys over at the pool table with the vague idea of picking a fight.

'You're f.u.c.king c.r.a.p, you know that? Give me that f.u.c.king cue, mate, and I'll show you how to play pool.'

No one answered. No one so much as looked at him.

'That's not how you do it,' said Carl, after the next shot. 'A f.u.c.king baby could do better than that.'

'Yeah right,' muttered the player without looking round, and he dropped another ball neatly into a pocket.

Carl lapsed into silence. After a while, when the boys seemed to have forgotten his presence altogether, he turned back through the mediaeval archway, bought another beer and a whisky chaser and began to play a dreamer game called Slaughterhouse, in which he had to defend himself with butcher's cleavers against an onslaught of mutant minotaurs.

The great advantage of dreamers over the videogames that they'd replaced was that emotional response was unavoidable. People could get used to provocative images, however lifelike, however high definition, but dreamers went straight to the ancient animal core. For the next forty-five minutes Carl spent about half a day's money on severing necks and limbs, opening bellies and dodging gouts of arterial blood, and, though the game was repet.i.tive, the sheer visceral excitement which the moodpads pumped into his brain stayed as sharp and pure as ever, helping to obliterate the hurt of his rejection by the chunky girls and the men at the pool table.

Eventually Shane Wheeler and Derek Stigg came in and he gratefully attached himself to them. Shane, who wore green pedal pushers, green boots and a T-shirt with green polka dots, was a fat and very short bald man about five years older than Carl, who managed the Dreamer hire store in the Zone's shopping centre and maintained friendly relations with everyone. Derek, a tiny man with a face ravaged by eczema, was his a.s.sistant.

'Has Kylie dumped you or what, Carl?' Shane asked him after they'd all got drinks. 'Only when I asked her she said she didn't never want to see you no more.'

'She dumped me?' Carl scoffed. 'No way! I dumped her, mate. I f.u.c.king dumped her. She was doing my f.u.c.king head in, wasn't she? Mind you, I blame the f.u.c.king deskies. I mean they took her kid off her, didn't they? And she went f.u.c.king mental.'

'I thought you were pleased they done that, Carl,' said Derek, who wore black pedal pushers and a chequered shirt. 'You said Kylie didn't give a f.u.c.k about that kid and you wouldn't treat a dog like she treated him! Plus you said he was a whinging little git and now he was out of the way it'd be all day in bed with Kylie and no distractions.'

'Yeah, but she was crying and yelling and threatening to f.u.c.king top herself, wasn't she? Plus she was up and down the f.u.c.king deskie office every f.u.c.king day and she didn't want f.u.c.king s.e.x no more or nothing. So I moved back with my mum didn't I? Which then Kylie did try to top herself and her mum said it was down to me but it wasn't. It was the f.u.c.king deskies. It's down to them.'

'Hear about that kid who did that disappearing act down at North Rec?' asked Shane after a while.

Carl seized his moment.

'I'll tell you something mate,' he said eagerly. 'That was Tammy Pendant, that was. She's only my f.u.c.king cousin, yeah? She's only...'

'Hey look,' interrupted Derek. 'It's that skull geezer again.'

A thin and cadaverous man had just walked in. He was skeletal, yet not skeletal in a way that suggested weakness. He was stripped down, lean, a parchment-like layer of yellow skin stretched tightly across his fierce skull, and every movement he made suggested immense physical power.

'Who the f.u.c.k is he?' Derek said.

The man's grey-blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he wore wraparound dark gla.s.ses, so all that could be seen of his eyes was a faint gleam as he surveyed the room coolly, taking in the scene at his leisure. It had happened a few times lately: he'd come in, he'd surveyed the room, and then he'd left again without speaking to anyone.

'I wouldn't want to mess with that guy,' Shane said.

The Old England was not a gentle place a fight broke out there almost every night but this stranger had a savage quality which all three of them recognised as being in a different league.

'You're not f.u.c.king kidding,' said Derek. 'I wouldn't go near him.'

'f.u.c.k that!' Carl said, abruptly standing up.

He was twenty-five years old but had never held a job for more than a few weeks, never had a place of his own to live. He had lived on a couple of occasions in the flats of girlfriends in both cases older women with mental health problems but it had never lasted long and he had always returned in the end to his mother. He had no aim in life, no direction of travel, no coherent plan that reached further ahead than the next weekend. Yet there was still something inside him that yearned to break out of the confines in which he lived, and the message of nearly all the movies he had ever seen and all the dreamer games he had ever played was that changing things required decisive acts of courage.

He'd also drunk four pints of beer and one whisky.

'You've been in here a few times, mate,' Carl said, tapping the cadaverous man on the shoulder, 'but you never talk to no one. Who the f.u.c.k are you?'

Watching from their fake thrones, Shane and Derek waited for the stranger to floor Carl on the spot, but the skull-faced man just gave a dry laugh.

'I'm Laf, who the h.e.l.l are you?'

'I'm Carl. What kind of name is Laf for f.u.c.k's sake?'

The skull faced man smiled indulgently.

'It's short for Olaf. It's a warrior's name. I'm a warrior of Dunner.'

Carl put on his very poor imitation of an American accent.

'Warrior of Dunner, huh?'

Laf laughed.

'You don't know what the f.u.c.k I'm talking about, do you?'

That actually wasn't completely true. Carl had heard of Dunner, and knew that he had something to do with shifters, but he wasn't exactly sure what Laf meant by 'warrior of Dunner' and didn't want to hazard a guess, so he continued with his American impression anyway.

'No I don't, buddy,' Carl drawled. 'But I reckon you're talking out of your a.s.s.'

This time Laf did not smile. His expression became distant and he looked away coldly, allowing his gaze to take in the young men round the pool table, and the chunky girls, and the four old drunks at the bar who came in every night and drank until they were ordered to leave. He finished his survey with a single contemptuous glance at fat Shane and tiny Derek giggling in their thrones, then turned back again to Carl.

Carl was expecting violence. He expected a sudden punch for his insolence, or perhaps to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck, and he was squaring himself up in readiness, determined to give as good as he received. But Laf merely snorted.

'This place is s.h.i.t,' he observed. 'I've been here four or five times now and I've not yet seen one real man or one real woman here. Just sacks, just sad defeated little dreggie sacks of nothing.'

'Yeah?' said Carl, who drank there nearly every night.

Laf turned and looked at him, and Carl had the odd feeling that, from behind those dark gla.s.ses, those smouldering eyes were not just looking at his face but somehow probing right into his mind.

'Having said that,' Laf remarked, 'I've had my eye on you and I reckon you've got at least a bit of fight left in you. A bit of fight in there somewhere, even though you don't know it yourself. I mean you're a complete d.i.c.k, of course anyone can see that but you're the first one who's had the b.a.l.l.s to actually come up to me. Not like those runty little friends of yours over there.'

Derek and Shane visibly cringed as the skull-faced man glanced back across at them, but they needn't have worried. He looked straight back at Carl, thought for a moment and then nodded.

'Yup,' he said. 'I reckon I'm going to give you a go.'

'What d'you mean? Give me a go at what?'

Laf gave a taut smile.

'I'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine,' he said. 'We may have a proposition to put to you.'

'What about?'

But the skull-faced man's attention had already moved on.

'You'll find out presently,' he said absently, 'Let's go.'

'What? Where to? Now?'

Without bothering to answer, Laf led the way out of the pub, walking with long quick strides.

'Right,' he said, when they were sitting inside a white Renault van out in the car park. 'I don't want you to see where we're going, so you'll have to wear these.'

He handed Carl a pair of wraparound gla.s.ses similar to his own.

'Before you put them on,' Laf said, 'get out your ID.'

Carl got out the red-striped plastic card with its DSI ident.i.ty chip which was necessary to exit the Thurston Meadows Zone.

'You got any restriction orders on that?' Laf asked.

'Nope,' Carl said, 'not at the moment.'

Laf nodded.

'Okay, give me the card then and put on the gla.s.ses.'

The gla.s.ses pressed up against Carl's face like swimming goggles. They were completely opaque.

'I feel like a f.u.c.king d.i.c.k with these on.'

Laf started the engine.

'Well you are a d.i.c.k. I've already told you that. But you'll be even more of a d.i.c.k than I thought if you even think of taking those off before I say so.'

With that, the skeletal man pushed down the accelerator and threw the car at high speed across the Thurston Meadows Zone. They reached one of the Line checkpoints Carl couldn't tell which - and Carl heard Laf hand their ID cards up to the duty officer. Then they were off again, though this time at a slower pace: the police were fussier about speed limits outside the Zones.

When the car stopped again, some twenty or thirty minutes later, all Carl could tell about the place they'd reached was that it was very quiet and that there were damp concrete walls around him. It could have been some disused industrial site or the communal hallway of one of any number of condemned blocks of flats. The silence was almost total, but the smallest sound was magnified by echoes.

Some distance behind him, a sliding metal door clanked shut. Laf took him by the elbow and guided him forward, then Carl heard a key turn in a lock and the creak of another door swinging open in front of him.

'You can take off the gla.s.ses now.'

They were in a corridor with doors down both sides. One of the doors opened and there emerged from it a very big and very fat man with a kind pink face and long pale eyelashes, like those of a Jersey cow.

'h.e.l.lo there, mate! I'm Gunnar,' the fat man said in a little mild high-pitched voice that seemed quite out of proportion to his size.

'This is Carl,' Laf told him. 'A new recruit. A possible new recruit.'

'Pleased to meet you, Carl me old mate,' said Gunnar, offering a small soft hand. 'The more the merrier, mate. The more the merrier.'

He led the way back into the room he had just emerged from. It was dim and damp like a cave, with a single orange light bulb hanging from the ceiling and large dark mirrors facing each other from each of the end walls. The rest of the wall s.p.a.ce was plastered with lurid comic-book pictures of Nordic G.o.ds: muscle-bound Dunner with his hammer, Wod the sorcerer king with his one mad eye, and Frija, the G.o.ddess of s.e.x and fertility, with her enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s that perpetually oozed milk from their thick brown nipples.

'This is Slug,' Gunnar said, indicating a small dark figure with a ponytail huddled in one corner. From Gunnar's tone Carl could tell that Slug was not a prestigious figure. 'Slug, this is Carl.'

Slug, sulkily smoking hashish in a home-made waterpipe, refused to acknowledge Carl's presence. He just huddled himself up even tighter and turned away his face.

'Don't mind him, Carl mate,' said Gunnar, chuckling good-naturedly in his small high voice. 'He's had a bad day. Know what I mean?'

'The stupid plonker,' said Laf. 'He only let some little schoolgirl nick all his slip off him and then do a shift with the lot.'

'What? You mean Tammy Pendant?' said Carl. 'You mean this is the geezer who was after her with the bat?'

He was about to mention the thing about Tammy being his cousin, but changed his mind.

'The very same,' said Laf. 'She'd only persuaded him to let her hold his slip while he gave her one.'

He laughed.

'That'll teach you, Slug,' he jeered at the Scotsman. 'That will teach you for being a dirty little perv.'