Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (17 page)

~*~

On second thoughts, it wasn’t that guy,
Cyril decided.
He hated me enough, that’s for sure, but he was just too law-abiding
to issue threats.

He remembered another young man, though, at a meeting a few weeks ago, a tiny little mouse of a man with a bewildered little face that was all crushed up like an old beer can.

‘You’ll be sorry, mate,’ the young man had said to Cyril as the meeting broke up. ‘You’ll be fucking sorry. I got friends, mate. I’ve got friends.’

It’ll be one of that chap’s mates
, Cyril thought,
some poor little runt like him.

There was a frantic rustling sound coming from WPC Karen Stimbling, who was beginning to think that the amiable but incompetent Sergeant Walker had given her the wrong file.

Cyril cleared his throat.

‘Yes… Now… Before going any further I need to remind the conference of the criteria for registration laid down under section 5 of the Act. We have to be able to agree that Stacey demonstrates what is called in the legal jargon ‘
substantial fecklessness’
in two or more of the so called ‘
core areas’
: Financial Affairs, Family Relationships, Basic Citizenship and Home Management. Secondly, as this is a contested case, we have to demonstrate that non-registration would be, in the words of the Act ‘
contrary to the public interest’.
Now if we can start with the first core area, which is Financial Affairs. Any comments here?’

Dickie Clarke immediately launched into a long and, to him, hilarious story of Stacey Rugg’s repeatedly vandalised electricity meter. He was enthusiastically endorsed by WPC Stimbling who found that she did at least have
that
piece of paper and was determined to make the most of it. In a shocked, breathless voice, she read out a list of no less than five separate criminal offences against the Western Electric Company.

~*~

I am an old man,
thought Cyril.

Since his early retirement package had been agreed he had spent a good deal of time looking back at his own life and gloomily punishing himself for the decisions ducked and the opportunities missed. When he had first got a job as a social worker all those years ago he had started out with some sort of vague intention of serving the downtrodden of the world. But ever since then he had taken the path of least resistance, falling into whatever niches became available after each of the many reorganisations of the welfare system that had taken place. Each step had somehow seemed reasonable and defensible at the time and yet he had eventually ended up doing a job that was, if he was honest, almost the complete antithesis of what he originally had in mind.

He was useless at it too, though whether this should be a source of pride or shame he wasn’t sure. He knew he was an embarrassment to the agency. He knew that the early retirement package had been agreed as a means of getting rid of him.

Maybe it was the DSI on the phone there
, he thought, with a grim little inner laugh.
Maybe they’ve hired a hit man to bump me off, so as not to have to pay my pension.

~*~

‘…and then of course there are the so-called lodgers,’ said Dickie Clarke, ‘but that’s another whole story…’

Another helicopter came by overhead. It was so low that, beneath its engine and the thrub-thrub-thrub of its blades, they could just faintly hear the crackling of its ground-link radio.

Dr Rajman drummed his fingers impatiently on the table.

Joy Frost glanced at her watch.

~*~

‘Do you often give seeds back to shifters?’ Charles asked, as they drove back from Weston in Fran’s immaculate car.

‘No, not often, but I’ve done it a couple of times. Some of them are
so
scared of these dead worlds. It just seems cruel not to let them have one little seed as a back-up. I mean I hate slip – you know I do! – but what difference does one lousy seed make? I know Mike has done the same. And Rami too. They don’t tell you about it because you’re such a stickler and they’re worried that you might feel duty-bound to snitch on them. But surely even you’ve done something like that at some time or another?’

‘No. I can honestly say it’s never even occurred to me.’

‘Haven’t you ever met a shifter before who was terrified of dead worlds?’

‘I have, yes, several. And I can remember at least one who begged me to give him a seed just like Andrea did there. But I never thought it was an option. It just seemed like one of those lines you don’t cross. I mean if they don’t end up using it to get out of a dead world, then they could give it to someone else, couldn’t they? Or, if the stories are true, they just could keep it by them and wait for it to divide into two or four or eight. So we’d be helping the stuff to spread and in the end we’d be bringing more shifters back to us.’

Fran clucked her tongue.

‘Yes, but when they’re
so
desperate.’

The world loomed strangely out at them. Trees, animals in fields, a stone house, a young woman with a child: everything was pregnant with mysterious significance, like objects in a dream. And within the car there was a similar intensity. Slip eroded the boundary between one individual and another. Each of them seemed to have almost direct access to one another’s minds and there was a feeling of deep connection between them, different though they were in age and outlook and background.

‘Sometimes I feel that there’s something about this world that’s obvious to everyone but me,’ Charles confessed. ‘It seems a straightforward thing to you that you should sometimes bend the rules and, now you tell me about it, I can see why. And yet in another way you lot stick to the rules, the basic spirit of the rules, and I…’

He broke off, realising he couldn’t go any further without telling her about the stolen slip in his sock drawer.

‘I’ll tell you what your problem is,’ said Fran shortly, ‘You spend far too much time talking to yourself inside your head and not enough talking with other people.’

They drove on for a few minutes in silence. Suddenly, and at the exact same moment for both of them, the face of a sallow surly-looking young man with a little wisp of a beard came into their minds, incongruously accompanied by the most intense feelings of love and longing. They both knew at once, without even having to think about it, that they were looking at Andrea’s boyfriend Tim as Andrea herself saw him.

Fran pulled over into a lay-by. Tears came streaming from her eyes. She snatched at a box of tissues on the dashboard, blew her nose.

‘I can’t drive anymore. I’ll kill us both.’

She looked rather soppy and foolish, her mascara running in black smears down her face, and Charles felt embarrassed and even a little repelled, though in his own mind too an intense grief was welling up.

‘It’s the slip,’ he told her, reluctantly putting an arm round her shoulders.

She turned on him angrily.

‘I
know
it’s the bloody slip you stupid boy. I’ve been in this job as long as you have, remember? Do you think it’s only you who feels and understands these things?’

‘No, I…’

‘Other people have minds too you know, Charles!’

‘Yes, I…’

‘Other people suffer as much as you do!’

‘I know. I just…’

Fran leant over and planted a moist kiss on his cheek.

‘Sorry my darling, you didn’t deserve that. You try so hard. And it wasn’t just the slip anyway. It was thinking about that silly girl Andrea on her own, and her losing her One True Love.’

She blew her nose again.

‘Well I suppose if she’d stayed with him,’ Charles offered, ‘he would have turned out to have feet of clay like the rest of us. At least now…’

‘At least nothing! Now she’ll never find that out. She’ll spend the rest of her life creeping about through the worlds, mooning over her lost love and thinking that if only she could have been with him, everything would have been wonderful. If she hadn’t lost him, perhaps she would have discovered for herself that he was just a big baby like her – if not more so, seeing as you men are all big babies anyway – and about as capable of making a commitment as…’

‘Why the anti-man stuff all of a sudden?’

‘Because… because those two men have gone and left her all on her own,’ she began, then started crying all over again.

Charles knew that Fran’s husband had left her for a younger woman and he dimly remembered her telling him once that her father had abandoned the family when she was a child. Things connect together, he thought. Life is like a piece of music with themes that repeat themselves over and over in different keys and arrangements and tempos. It wasn’t a particularly original thought, but it sort of
struck
him. And it occurred to him that if he understood this truth a little better, he would finally know how to answer Jaz’s question.

‘But you, Charles,’ she said. ‘You’re not like them at all. You’re so brave and proud and you’re so… so
lonely
.’

She drew him to her and gave him another kiss on the cheek. Suddenly Charles found himself pulling her towards him and pressing his lips against her mouth, her neck. They were both panting and she slipped her hand round his waist under his jacket. He’d undone the top three buttons of her blouse before he finally pulled himself back.

‘We’re in a
right
state aren’t we?’ he said, attempting a laugh. He opened the car door and climbed hastily out.

He realised as he spoke that his erection was clearly visible and he turned away hastily to hide it. He got out his phone to call for a taxi.

‘It’s ridiculous that we’re even
expected
to drive when we’ve just been dealing with shifters,’ he said, ‘let alone just after someone has actually vanished in front of us. It’s just ridiculous.’

His hand was shaking so much that he could hardly punch the buttons on the phone. With an equally wobbly hand, Fran buttoned herself up and passed him a tissue to wipe off the tears and make-up which she’d smeared across his face.

~*~

Stacey Rugg had her hair shaven off in parallel stripes from front to back in order to allow the closest possible contact between dreamer moodpads and her scalp. Many people on the Zone did the same thing, often also using souped-up dreamer units which gave double or treble the legal voltage in order to maximise the fear, the lust, the thrill… Stacey’s hands were tattooed with names and knives and hearts and her arms were cross-hatched with self-inflicted scars. All her front teeth were missing and her ears were riddled with holes from which hung bones, hearts, tear-drops and hammers. Imbedded in the skin of her forehead was an ornament called a Soulfire currently popular in the Zones, a fake gemstone containing a hologram that supposedly changed colour to match your mood. On her hip was a little scabrous feral child, his face smeared with something sticky and red.

Everyone went quiet, as they always did in these moments when they had finished picking over a ‘case’ and were confronted with the real human being. Dickie remembered, with a tiny pang of discomfort, an amusing but completely unfounded suggestion he had made earlier that Stacey was ‘on the game’. Karen Stimbling hoped that, in his summing up, Cyril would not repeat that she had called Stacey ‘obviously a complete and utter disaster’, which now seemed to her a little excessive, given that she had never met or heard of the woman until today.

Only Joy and Cyril looked Stacey in the eye.

‘Welcome, Stacey,’ Cyril said with old-fashioned courtesy. ‘Do have a seat. Let’s start by checking you know everyone here.’

The child, little Kaz, reached out across the table for one of the carafes of water that stood there. Stacey smacked him, hard, and everyone winced while Kaz began a pale thin sobbing.

‘Well, I know Miss Frost of course. I’ve known her since I was a kid. And I know him,’ Stacey looked at Dr Rajman. ‘He sorts out Wolfie’s inhalers and that.’

She suddenly treated them all to a smile of dazzling sweetness.

‘Yes and I know
her
,’ she went on in the incongruously rustic accent of the Bristol Zones. ‘I know Lisa Finch.’

WPC Stimbling was introduced.

‘And I’m Harriet Vere-Rogers,’ gushed the lay representative. ‘You don’t know me, Stacey, but I’m not a professional person like the other people here. I’m just an ordinary Bristol person like yourself.’

There was a moment’s silence while everyone absorbed the preposterousness of Mrs Vere-Rogers’ claim. Then Cyril cleared his throat.

‘Now, Stacey,’ he continued, ‘we understand that you don’t want to be registered as a Social Inclusion Status citizen. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about why?’

‘Well, not being funny or nothing, but, like, I don’t want to be a
dreggie
no more, know what I mean?’

‘I’m sure we all understand that, but I wonder if you’ve thought where you would live if you weren’t on the Social Inclusion register? Because of course you’d have to give up your tenancy here on the Meadows within six months.’

His tone was gentle and sympathetic but in reality his mind was far away. He had been here so many times before.

‘Well I hadn’t really decided about that yet, know what I mean? I thought I’d look in the papers and that, and try and get a place for me and the kids.’

‘What about money, Stacey? You know, don’t you, that only registered citizens can claim Social Inclusion Allowance? Able-bodied people don’t get benefits outside, except for very short periods in exceptional circumstances, not unless they’ve subscribed to a private scheme.’

Kaz, who’d now stopped crying, reached out again for the jug of water. Stacey distracted him by taking out a family-sized packet of fruit gums, ripping it open and giving him the lot, which he devoured in handfuls.

‘I could get a job,’ Stacey said, without much conviction.

‘Good for you, but then of course there’d be the care arrangements for the children…’

‘Wolfie’s in the nursery now and I been trying to get a place for Kaz.’

‘But you mustn’t forget, Stacey, that you only get subsidised daycare in the Zones. Outside you have to pay the market rate which is, oh…’