Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Ye… ye little lying whore!’ he hissed.

  Tammy laughed.

  ‘You’re nothing without your slip, mate, are you?’ she taunted him. ‘You’re fucking nothing. Just a pervy little Scotchman who no one’s ever given a fuck about and no one ever will! Not in a million fucking years!’

  She dropped down the far side of the fence and was off down the little back alley and into the streets that she knew so well, laughing out loud as she ran.

  ~*~

  She hid in a patch of shrubs on the edge of a playground. Children had made a network of tunnels and caves through it and she crawled into a hollowed out space in the middle before pulling out the bag of slip and swallowing one of the seeds: it tasted electric on her tongue. Then, shaken by the enormity of the step she’d just taken, she opened her phone and called her mate Jolene back in the Unit.

  ‘I’m doing a shift, Jolene. I’ve done a seed. I won’t fucking see you no more. I love you babe. Goodbye. Have a good life for me!’

  ‘Oh my God, Tammy!’ screeched Jolene. ‘Oh my God! Where the fuck are you? How could you do this to me you bitch? Oh my God I fucking love you, Tammy’

  Then Mr Johnson, the Unit manager, spoke in the background.

  ‘Who are you talking to Jolene? Is that Tammy?’

  Tammy hung up, turned off her phone and waited. After a while she took out the bag of slip and played with the strange glowing things for a bit. Then she grew tired of that and put them away again. She yawned and looked around, but there was nothing to see: only an old cigarette packet, a scrunched up page from a knicker catalogue, a used rubber hanging from a thorn, with its little yellow cargo bulging at its tip.

  She took a make-up case out of her pocket to check her face, but, when she saw herself looking back out at her from the little mirror, she snapped it hastily shut again.

  She lit another cigarette.

  ~*~

  Three hours later nothing had happened and Tammy was thinking about taking another seed just to make sure, when she heard someone outside.

  ‘She’s in here, Slug. Kev saw her go in from his window.’

  Then she heard Slug himself.

  ‘You in there Tammy, you bitch? Ye’re dead meat, you hear me? Ye’re going to fucking die.’

  ‘I’ll go in round here, mate, and see if I can smoke her out,’ said another man.

  Slug had been busy on his phone, it seemed, calling up the desperate men he called his mates, promising them a treat. She was in real danger.

  She tried to call the Unit but the phone there was engaged. She tried Jaz.

  ‘You have reached the offices of the Child Welfare Section. Thank you for calling. What you have to say is important to us. If you are calling about a child in danger please press 1 now. If you are calling to…’

  Tammy hung up. She started to call 9…

  ‘There she is Slug, I can fucking see her!’ someone yelled.

  A big male figure was squeezing through the tunnels in the thorn bushes. Tammy headed as fast as she could in the other direction, doubled up, with thorns catching her arms and face. But then there he was right in front of her: Slug himself and his metal baseball bat, his eyes shining with triumph.

  ‘Well, well, well…’ he leered, ‘this is a surprise.’

  ‘Oh shit, Slug,’ she pleaded, ‘don’t be like that. I was only pissing about, mate. Here’s your seeds. I’ll… Oh fucking hell. Jesus Christ!’

  ~*~

  Suddenly the entire world had become as thin and insubstantial as the skin of a soap bubble, quivering and about to burst. And voices were whispering all around her, voices that sounded like hers, repeating words like her own.

  ‘Here’s your seeds. Take your seeds. Have your seeds…’

  Slug recognised the signs before she did.

  ‘The thieving bitch!’ he wailed, lifting his bat. ‘She’s going to …’

  She had to push, Tammy suddenly realised as she threw up her hands to shield herself from the blow. The seeds took you to the edge but you had to push if you wanted to break through. She didn’t know how she knew this, but now she was here it just seemed obvious. It was as if she had been here before, or had always been here without realising it.

  The baseball bat was already descending when she finally broke through and felt herself falling. She screamed and clutched out at the air. Slug had vanished, the ground seemed to have disappeared from beneath her feet, and…

  But no, it was still there. The thorn bushes were still there. Even Slug and his friends were back again, just for a moment, though the daylight had suddenly become much brighter and they were all standing further away and in different positions, as if two different takes from a movie had been crudely spliced together without the slightest regard for continuity.

  But she had no time to take this in. The men disappeared again and there was a brick wall in front of her, and then a lorry in a downpour, throwing up a big sheet of dirty water as it swerved and blasted its horn. And then she was in a dingy front room with drawn curtains. There was a smell of urine and cigarette smoke and clothes worn continuously for days on end, and an ugly, fat, malignant woman was screaming at a little child:

  ‘Get your arse over her you little…’

  But Tammy was in another world again before the sentence was complete. And then another and then another. Trees and buildings skipped and danced around her. She was falling, she was falling, she was falling through the worlds.

  Chapter 4

  Up in Janet Richards’ office the miniature government of the Thurston Meadows Zone had assembled and was waiting impatiently for Charles’ news.

  ‘Mr Bowen! Thanks so much for coming straight up!’ Mrs Richards cried when he finally arrived from the police cells.

  Her eyes were shining with hope as she introduced him eagerly to Dick Thomas, ‘my police chief’, Dave Rickets, ‘my deputy’, Val Hollowby, ‘my Social Care Purchaser’, Trudy Spice, ‘my director of housing’, Ginny Frimp, ‘my health care co-ordinator’ and Ron Julip, ‘my director of logistics’. The seven of them had spent most of the morning in anxious conference, Dave Rickets at the computer downloading all the government circulars on shifters that he could find, the others round the pale pine table poring through the print-outs. Who had the circulars been copied to? When were they sent out? Which one of their little group was most at risk of being accused of failing to act?

  But, to answer that last crucial question, they really needed to know more about what had actually happened. And here was the expert who would tell them everything.

  ‘So, how did you get on?’

  They plied Charles with coffee and sandwiches. They offered him biscuits and glasses of water. There was a fug of fear in the room, a desperate hunger for shreds of reassurance.

  ‘Have they been here long? Do you think they’re alone?’

  Mrs Richard’s managers were seated round the table, of course, but in Charles’ imagination they were pushing and shoving each other to be the one to grasp hold of him, the one to crane into his face.

  ‘Furnish and Hassan have only been here couple of days,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got a great deal more out of them, other than some bits and pieces for our shifter database. Like many shifters Furnish claims to be a Warrior of Dunner. Hassan doesn’t go in for that Dunner stuff and he thinks Furnish is a fool, though the two of them arrived here together. I believe they arrived in Lockleaze, not here in Thurston Meadows, so you’ll need to think about how they managed to cross the Line into the Thurston Zone without anyone detecting them. Anyway, I gathered…’

  ‘Hang on,’ interrupted Police Chief Thomas, the one who’d be held responsible for any failure of Line security, ‘how do we know they arrived in Lockleaze and then crossed the Line? How can we be sure that they didn’t appear in the Zone itself?’

  ‘We don’t know. It’s a guess,’ Charles told him. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, I gathered from both of them that there are a number of other shifters here in Thurston
Meadows. Hassan is too sharp to be tricked into giving much away, but Furnish is easily flattered and ended up telling me quite a bit. It seems he’s heard that there are at least three or four different groups of shifters in the Zone. And of course that’s only what he’s managed to pick up in the couple of days since he arrived in this timeline. ’

  ‘Three or four groups!’ cried Janet Richards in horror.

  They had been stewing here all morning, rationalising, minimising, trying to persuade themselves that there wasn’t a reason to panic. And now this!

  ‘There’s one thing I’ve never understood about this business,’ said her deputy, Dave Rickets, finally abandoning the computer screen, ‘If this is really a drug which has the effect of dumping you somewhere else more or less at random, how can a group of people take it and all end up in the same place? Isn’t it all a bit far-fetched?’

  ‘I agree,’ said Janet Richards. ‘I can’t help thinking there must be a more prosaic explanation for all of this.’

  What exactly was worrying them, Charles asked himself. Was it that the universe itself had sprung a leak in their backyard? Was it that this whole world – this entire space of earth and sky and stars – had been revealed to be one of countless possible worlds, each one equally real, or equally unreal, and each one constantly dividing and dividing in every minuscule fraction of a second into more and yet more worlds? No. What they were worried about above all was that they were going to be criticised for not following procedures. That, it seemed, was as far as their imaginations stretched. And, though he remained professional and polite, he found himself despising them.

  ‘How do they cross over together?’ he said to Mr Rickets. ‘You’re certainly not the first to ask that. The other question people often ask is how can a drug bring over the clothes they wear and the things they have in their pockets?’

  ‘Well yes quite!’ exclaimed Ginny Frimp. ‘I was just wondering about that very thing. It does seem very farfetched, Mr Bowen. I mean I know there’s a mystery about how these people get here, given that they clearly aren’t foreign but they don’t have any identity that’s recognised by our systems, but we don’t really know if all this shifter stuff is true yet, do we? I think Janet’s right about there being a simpler explanation than parallel timelines and multiple universes.’

  ‘As far as I’m aware no one has any idea how they cross over together, or how they bring things with them,’ Charles said. ‘But, as someone once put it to me, trying to understand slip in terms of existing scientific knowledge is a bit like trying to understand a jet plane by examining its paint. There is some aspect of nature involved which is fundamentally different from the ones we feel we understand.’

  ‘Or so people claim,’ muttered Trudy Spice, large, grim and very reluctant to embrace anything which fell outside of the world she thought she knew.

  ‘They could have made it all up couldn’t they?’ suggested Ron Julip, the director of logistics.

  ‘So what about this Dunner business, then?’ asked the police chief impatiently. ‘This Dunner religion. Should that interest us in any way?’

  Charles smiled and slowly repeated a rhyme that Furnish had recited for him:

  ‘Woddy wiv ’is one eye,

  Dunner wiv ’is cock

  Frija wiv ’er big tits

  And two-faced Lok.’

  ‘That’s a religion?’ asked Trudy Spice.

  ‘It sounds more like the sort of thing you see on a toilet wall,’ muttered Ron Julip.

  The assembled managers all laughed heartily. Charles shrugged.

  ‘It isn’t like our idea of a religion, I agree. The god Dunner is a brawling thug. His father Wod is a champion boozer and a serial adulterer. But I suppose a religion like that appeals to the kind of people who are also attracted to the idea of being shifters. My guess is that somewhere out there is a world where either the old Germanic religion has managed to survive into modern times, or it has been revived in some way, and that shifters have encountered it there. Or possibly some of them come from there in the first place. It’s not the only cult that shifters follow, and of course many of them don’t follow a cult at all, but it’s certainly very popular with the particular type of shifter that gravitates towards the Zones.’

  He finished his sandwiches and pushed away his plate.

  ‘As I said, there are several groups of them here in Thurston Meadows. Furnish let slip that one group – and this one is a group of Dunner cultists – is headed by a man named Erik who he says is supposed to be very very clever and a “real psycho”. I don’t think Furnish himself has met the man but he’s apparently a pretty big wheel in the shifter network round here. I couldn’t get much out of Hassan. He was holding out for having his slip back in exchange for more information – his slip and Furnish’s in fact – but we obviously can’t do that. What is worrying is that Hassan didn’t contradict Furnish’s suggestion that one of the shifter groups is planning some kind of violent mischief. In fact he quite explicitly confirmed this, and said that he had more information which he would only give in exchange for the seeds.’

  ‘Mischief?’ they all cried together. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You couldn’t get anything else at all out of them?’

  ‘Hassan claimed he could give details if we gave him all the slip. I think they probably both swallowed seeds when they were arrested, so as to get away from here, but of course they still want seeds to take with them in case they don’t like the place they end up in.’

  ‘Well, why don’t we give him the stuff then?’ asked Janet Richards. ‘I mean if it will head off a problem here on the Zone, why not? Let’s do it!’

  ‘But that would be like giving a heroin dealer back his stash if he agreed to move to another neighbourhood!’

  There was silence. It seemed they didn’t find this idea quite as preposterous as Charles had assumed they would.

  ‘Well, I suppose so,’ said Mrs Richards, ‘but it seems a pity.’

  ‘In any case,’ Charles said, ‘I think Hassan may have been bluffing when he claimed to have more information. Obviously I don’t know for sure but, as I said before, I’ve got a strong sense that he and Furnish have only just arrived here. The main point is that you need to be on the alert. The thing that makes slip so dangerous is that people can use it to escape the consequences of their actions. These people really can get away with murder.’

  They all looked at one another.

  ‘Now if you’ll excuse me…’ Charles began, but he was interrupted by Janet Richards’ phone.

  Someone at the other end had more bad news.

  ‘How many people…? You’ve got cars on the way over…? Okay I’ll put you onto Dick.’

  She called her chief of police to the phone.

  ‘Some sort of disturbance on a recreation ground,’ she explained as she handed him the receiver.

  Oddly the new crisis appeared to have had a positively soothing effect on her, and she seemed much less tense as she returned to the table to join the rest of them. Thugs with baseball bats, fights in recreations grounds: this was the kind of trouble she knew and understood.

  ‘I’ve got three air patrols and six cars on this,’ said Dick Thomas the police chief, returning to the table ‘Some sort of petty gang fight I should think, but if this was to turn out to be the mischief you were talking about, Mr Bowen, then I think we’ve got it pretty well in hand.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Charles said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I really should get back down there and…’

  But he was interrupted for a second time by the phone. Janet Richards returned to it with a slightly theatrical sigh – she almost seemed to be enjoying having an audience - but her face fell as she listened

  ‘Vanished? In front of witnesses? How many? Missing from the Unit? Okay, I’m going to put you on to Val.’

  Val Hollowby came to the phone. The Social Care Purchaser’s gaunt, skeletal face became ev
en grimmer as she listened to whoever was on the other end.

  ‘But why wasn’t I notified earlier? Are you saying Jazamine didn’t follow procedures? Why wasn’t I told this girl was interested in shifters? Yes I know, but how can I support you if you…’

  ‘A fifteen-year-old girl went missing from outside our Assessment Unit this morning,’ Janet Richards explained to Charles. ‘She’s had a problem with absconding for years, apparently, so nothing new about that, even if her social worker does seem to have just let her go on this occasion. But the thing is that she was evidently at the centre of the incident in that recreation ground. It’s looking very much as if this could be another of your Dunner cases, Mr Bowen, because any number of people are now telling our officers that they saw her vanish into thin air.’

  Val Hollowby came off the phone.

  ‘The girl’s called Tamsin Pendant,’ she said, ‘a.k.a. Delaney, a.k.a. Blows. She’s fifteen years old. Lots of history, lots of problems. Physical abuse. Sexual abuse. Been in the care system for years. Lots of trouble there. Placements breaking down. Absconding. Drugs. And she's been talking a lot recently, or so I now gather, about shifters and seeds and Dunner and all that.’

  Suddenly she leaned forward, looking into Charles’ face with big watery eyes:

  ‘But you know, Mr Bowen, they all do all sorts of worrying things. It’s easy enough with hindsight to say we could have seen the signs, because there are always signs when you look for them afterwards! It’s not that we necessarily miss them at the time. It’s just that we can’t act on them all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Janet Richards shortly, ‘but I’m concerned that they didn’t let you know in this case. I’m concerned about the lines of communication. That’s something we’ll need to look at.’

  Janet Richards was putting down a marker. She was pointing out that a breakdown of communication had occurred at a level below that of one of her subordinates. It was a preliminary step in that old deskie dance of blame. And the Social Care Purchaser, understanding this instantly, darted her boss a look of pure hatred.