Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  Electronic readers in the road surface checked out the registration, chassis and engine numbers of Cyril’s car as he passed over the Line.

  ~*~

  Now Cyril drove down Meadow Way, the central axis of the Thurston Meadows Zone, looking out with a bewildered, guilty affection at the people in the streets. He had worked on the Zone since it was built and knew many of them by name. Nowadays he seriously doubted whether his work had helped anyone and feared that he might have made things worse, but this had been his life, and contemplating the loss of it was like facing a second bereavement.

  Here was old Janie Delaney, who lived in a third-floor flat with its kitchen so crammed full of piles of newspapers and magazines that she had to cook on a camping stove on the living room floor. Here was crazy ‘Alien’ Watson, ranting at the top of his voice on the corner of Magnolia Street about Sin and Filth and the End of the World, but pausing to give Cyril a friendly wave. Here was grossly obese Tracey Parkin for who, when she was a little girl, Cyril himself had gone to court to obtain an order to remove her from her chaotic and neglectful mother and place her with a foster-family in Clifton. Now she was pushing her own baby along in a buggy on the way to the DSI Family Centre. Her equally obese mother, Jenny, was shuffling along beside her, Tracey’s constant companion and closest friend.

  ‘What did we think we could achieve?’ Cyril murmured. ‘What did we think we were trying to do?’

  The side roads had alphabetical names, beginning with Asphodel Way and Buttercup Drove and ending up with Yucca Walk and Zinnia Avenue. Then came the Zone’s Central Square where there was a chip shop, a budget supermarket, a newsagent and, of course, a dreamer rental shop, with its lurid posters advertising games such as ‘Warm Gore’ and ‘Sex Heaven’ and ‘Ripper Killer’. The shops formed three sides of the square. On the fourth side was the seat of government, the DSI compound which Charles had visited for the first time the previous week. It had a large blue sign outside:

  The staff who worked there called it Fort Apache.

  ~*~

  Another car pulled up next to Cyril’s.

  ‘Mr Burkitt!’ the driver greeted him as they both climbed out. ‘I believe I’m coming to the same meeting as you.’

  Cyril stared blankly. He was finding it increasingly hard to remember faces. He blamed it on getting old but the problem wasn’t really caused by a hardening of his physical brain so much as by his ever-increasing tendency to shut out the external world and deal with it only at the most superficial levels of his mind. Often he felt as if his body were a machine he operated by remote control from some far off hiding place where no one could find him.

  ‘Oh… yes… Dr Rajman isn’t it?’

  The smart young man nodded. He was a Sponsored GP paid by the DSI to take on a quota of non-fee-paying patients who were on the Social Inclusion Register. The arrangement was a residue of the free National Health Service of the previous century.

  ‘Of course the meeting isn’t for another half an hour yet,’ said Cyril.

  ‘I know, but I’ve got a bone to pick with the finance people here and I thought I might as well sort it out while I’m over this way. They’ve sent me the wrong cheque three times in a row.’

  Cyril smiled, a little sourly. Most young doctors did Sponsored work for a few years until they built up their own lists of private patients. In his experience, complaining about the DSI bureaucracy was one of the stages in a rite of passage. It gave the doctors a principled reason for dropping their Sponsored work later on when the private work had picked up. (‘Of course I’d have loved to have gone on helping out on the Zones, but I’m a doctor, god damn it, not a filler in of forms!’)

  Cyril placed his forefinger on the print reader outside the staff door and spoke into the voice checker: ‘Cyril Burkitt. I’ve got Dr Rajman with me, who’s come for the 9.30 registration conference.’

  ~*~

  Up in Cyril’s office his loyal secretary Alice had his coffee ready.

  ‘How was your zoo trip with the boys?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Alice, I was glad to be coming in to work this morning for a rest. They wear me out!’

  ‘Well I’ve got the agenda and the reports ready for your first meeting, so you’re all set.’

  Alice was the one who actually ran the system that Cyril was nominally in charge of. She made sure that papers were filed in the right places, that letters went out on time to where they were supposed to go and that Cyril, who was quickly bored by details, was adequately briefed about problems likely to come up. She also made his coffee for him, remembered his birthday, and reminded him about the birthdays of his daughter and his two grandsons.

  ‘So, what do you reckon? Is this shifter business calming down yet?’ asked Cyril, sipping from the warm cup and feeling the welcome zing of caffeine spreading out through his veins.

  ‘Oh God I hope so,’ said Alice. ‘We’ve got enough to do without policemen and immigration officers and God knows what all over the place, haven’t we? I’ll just leave you to look over the reports now if you don’t mind, Cyril, because I need to go and make some extra copies.’

  ‘Do you think we really do any good here?’ Cyril asked her. ‘The DSI, I mean. Do you think it adds to the sum of human happiness?’

  Alice laughed but didn’t bother to answer as she hurried off the photocopier. She simply didn’t think in those terms. She could work for a firm producing nerve gas and would still feel that she was doing her bit for the general good, just as long as she was allowed to remember people’s birthdays and buy them cakes when they were feeling down.

  She might be right too, Cyril thought. Perhaps the cog-wheels of the machine ground on in their own way regardless of human will. Perhaps some law of nature meant that it was impossible to devise a system that would do good without causing an equivalent amount of harm. If so, then the best mere humans could do was indeed to be as kind as they could be to those they found around them.

  He barely glanced at the papers. He had done this job long enough to be able to extemporise. Instead he took his coffee to the window and looked out. His office was on the fifth floor, and he could see right across the Thurston Meadows Zone into the ‘fringe’ estate of Thurston Rise, just outside the Line, where the working-class inhabitants clung precariously to their low-paid jobs and their standard white ID cards, free of the red stripe that marked out the cards of Social Inclusion citizens. Beyond Thurston Rise, and across the Cumberland Basin, was the real Bristol, that proud prosperous city, made wealthy and strong by slaves and tobacco and arms, shining on its hills.

  The phone rang just as he finished his coffee.

  ‘Hello? Cyril Burkitt here.’

  ‘Burkitt, you deskie swine,’ whispered a voice from the depths of hell. ‘Listen carefully. Very soon you’re going to die.’

  ~*~

  ‘So how are you getting on with that deskie girl?’ asked Fran Stevens.

  Fran and Charles had driven over to Weston-super-Mare in Fran’s new Audi to interview three young shifters the police had picked up an hour previously.

  Charles was startled.

  ‘How on Earth do you know about her?’

  ‘Because Ted saw you in a pub with a girl who looked just like the social worker from Thurston Meadows who was in the papers. And I noticed that you had said nothing whatever about going out with anyone, which is secretive even for you, darling. And I put two and two together. You are seeing her, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well yes, I am. But keep it to yourself. We aren’t really supposed to socialise with people we work with are we, let alone people who’ve been suspended because of…’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake Charles, why are you such a terrible fusspot about the rules? Maybe it would cause a problem if we socialised with shifters or illegal immigrants. But a social worker who once dealt with the same case as you? Please! You really ought to lighten up a bit, my dear.’

  Charles had always struggled with the fact that other peop
le treated rules as things to be evaded wherever possible. Didn’t people see that speed limits were there for a reason? Didn’t they see that if one person falsified an insurance claim it just meant that everyone else would end up paying for it? He didn’t understand how people could be so cavalier about these things. And yet…

  The stolen slip in his sock drawer surfaced very briefly in his conscious mind. He pushed it back down again.

  ‘We’re getting on pretty well,’ he said. ‘We seem to have a lot in common.’

  Fran pulled into the car park of Weston police station. The two of them climbed out.

  ‘Someone’s done a shift already,’ Fran said immediately.

  Charles nodded. Like her, he could feel the agitation in the air, the sense of rupture. The spooked faces of the desk staff, and their effusive welcome, only confirmed what the two of them already knew. (Who were they really? Nobodies, minor civil servants at the bottom end of the great chain of government. And yet their work had exposed them to psychic experiences which most people had no inkling of.)

  ‘Just vanished,’ said the custody sergeant, a fat Welshman with a handlebar moustache. ‘Two of them. Vanished just like that. No one’s touched the lock. No one’s moved the bars on the window. I can’t understand it. They’ve disappeared from a locked cell.’

  ‘No one can understand it, dear,’ Fran said soothingly. ‘No one can. It’s just one of those things. Fish swim, birds fly, shifters shift. But you’ve still got one left, haven’t you? Take us straight to him, and we’ll see if we can get some sense out of him before he disappears in a puff of smoke as well.

  ‘You’ll want these won’t you?’ the sergeant said, producing a plastic bag and two tobacco tins, each containing slip. ‘Only I’d really like to get them off my hands.’

  Fran dropped them into her shoulder bag.

  ‘We’ll give you receipts a bit later if that’s alright,’ Charles said. ‘We ought to go and see this chap before he disappears.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the custody sergeant. ‘Only it’s not a chap, it’s a girl.’

  ~*~

  Andrea was a pale willowy creature with huge grief-stricken eyes, a mass of wispy red hair and a long wispy greenish dress. Her face was innocent as a tiny child’s and she wore facial jewellery in her nose, her ears, her lips and her eyebrows. She was about eighteen.

  ‘You’re the DMO are you?’ she asked. (DMO. Charles noted the term with a certain stamp-collector satisfaction: it was another one he hadn’t heard before.) ‘I don’t think you can pump me out now, it’s too late. It’s been in my system for a good three hours. I’m going to go any minute. Tim and Gary have gone already haven’t they?’

  ‘Yes they have,’ Fran said. ‘You felt them go did you?’

  She nodded. Tears sprang to her eyes. Fran reached across the desk and squeezed her hand.

  ‘Were you good friends?’

  Andrea covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Fran, stroking the girl’s hand. ‘A bit more than just friends, eh?’

  Charles had one of those flashes of insight that you got around shifters, not a big one, not a great chunk of memory or anything, but just a sense of what sort of being it was that looked out of Andrea’s eyes. She was a passive creature. She had always looked for someone else to take charge and give her direction. From the beginning of adolescence, when adult responsibility began to loom, she had been searching for a source of purpose in her life which wouldn’t require the exercise of will, for independent will was something she simply didn’t possess. Conventional illegal drugs had been her first haven – ecstasy, acid, speed – conventional drugs and the people that came with them, people who told a story about themselves which transformed an essentially passive and escapist activity into a romantic tale of rebellion, heroism and victimhood. And then she’d met a shifter called Tim who said that drugs were only fit for children.

  ‘All they can give you is daydreams,’ he told her. ‘Like children’s fairy tales. That’s why druggies are into elves and gnomes. But slip is for grown-ups. It doesn’t give you illusions. It lets you shake off the world itself.’

  ‘Tim was my one true love,’ Andrea told Fran, wiping her face with the tissue that Fran had given her. ‘My only love. The love of my life. We promised we’d always stay together.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Fran, still holding her hand. ‘You poor old thing. That is hard. That is very hard.’

  Charles always had difficulty understanding the complex relationship between people’s public personas and their inner selves – it was another question which troubled him in a way that it didn’t seem to trouble other people – and he had never quite got Fran. She held ferociously right-wing views and, back in the office, she was vociferous in her contempt for shifters, who she liked to describe as ‘overgrown babies’. But he’d noticed before that, when actually face to face with shifters, she could often be much more gentle and understanding than he was.

  ‘I wish you could pump me out,’ Andrea said. ‘I’m really scared.’

  ‘I’ll go and see if we can get a doctor then,’ Fran said. ‘It might be worth a try.’

  She went to the door and called for the custody sergeant.

  ‘Because you’re on your own this time?’ Charles asked Andrea, trying to emulate Fran’s humanity. ‘Is that why you’re so scared of doing a shift?’

  ‘No it’s not that. I’ll be on my own whether I do a shift or not.’

  ‘So what is it then?’

  ‘Before we came to this world we went through a dead world.’ She looked into his face with her haunted, innocent eyes. ‘Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Yes of course.’

  ‘It was horrible. Horrible. There were… There were skeletons everywhere. Skeletons, but with dried skin still on them, in cars and on the streets, and… Well, it was hard to find a place where you could be away from them. Everything was in ruins, everything dead. There was no grass, no plants. Even the trees were dead. And the sky was dark, even in daytime, full of these big black oily clouds. I wanted just to go, but Tim and Gary insisted on looking around. I hated it, but we had spare seeds then and we were all together, so I could just about cope. I knew we could get away and I knew I couldn’t end up there on my own. ’

  She began to weep.

  ‘I couldn’t bear to find myself in a place like that and not be able to escape. I just couldn’t bear it. But it could happen, couldn’t it, because I don’t have a spare seed? The police took them all off me, all except the one I swallowed. Can’t you just give me one seed back? Just one?’

  ‘A dead world, eh?’ said Fran as she sat down again. ‘We’ve heard lots about them haven’t we, Charles?’

  Charles nodded. It was one of the many things that they had found out (these nobodies, these minor civil servants). It was one of the many things that the world didn’t seem to want to hear: the fact that on many different branches of time the human race was already extinct, and in some of them not just humans but life itself.

  ‘They’re getting the doctor for you now, dear,’ Fran told Andrea.

  ‘That won’t help,’ the pale girl said. ‘The slip’s got into my blood now. It’ll only be a few minutes. I’m beginning to hear the whispering…’

  She snatched at Fran’s hand.

  ‘Please!’ she pleaded. ‘Just one seed. I promise you that if I get to a world where there are people I’ll bury it, I’ll flush it down the toilet, whatever you want. But just in case I wind up in a dead world, please, please, please let me have just one.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Charles said, ‘I can see why you’re worried, and I don’t blame you, but we can’t give out seeds. Our job is to…’

  ‘Oh come on Charles, lighten up,’ said Fran, reaching down for her bag and taking out one of the tobacco tins. ‘You can see how frightened she is. What’s one seed here or there going to matter?’

  She opened the tin, took out a seed of slip and pushed it across t
he desk to Andrea.

  Andrea grabbed it, tears filling her eyes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘you are really kind. I could see that as soon as you came in. I know it’s…’

  She broke off with a soft moan. There was a popping sound, a sudden rush of air across the room, and she had gone.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Charles muttered.

  Fran ran her hands over her face.

  ‘No sleep for us tonight,’ she sighed. ‘Pictures and voices all night long. What do we do this for, eh Charles? What on Earth do we do it for? Why don’t we just transfer to Avonmouth docks or somewhere like that, proper immigration work dealing with sensible things like stowaways on boats. That’s what I signed up for.’

  She picked up her bag and stood up. They smelt the familiar electrical smell and felt the familiar yearning.

  ‘It’s like a hole opening up in the ground in front of you isn’t it?’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Charles. I need a cigarette.’ Fran rapped on the door of the interview room. ‘That poor, poor silly girl. But at least now if she winds up in a dead world, she’ll have a chance of getting away.’

  ~*~

  ‘Good morning everyone,’ Cyril Burkitt said. ‘It’s 9.30, so perhaps we should make a start. Most of you know me but for those who don’t my name is Cyril Burkitt and I am the Senior Registration Officer for the Thurston Meadows Social Inclusion Zone. This is a Contested Initial Registration Conference within the meaning of the Social Inclusion (Citizenship Categories) Act 2001. It concerns Stacey Rugg of 34 Lilac Flats, Rose Way. Ms Rugg will be joining us in ten minutes.’

  He’d been through this routine so many times that he could do the introductions pretty much on automatic pilot, thinking about other things while his mouth still talked. And what he was thinking about right now was the threatening voice on the phone. He was trying to place it, trying to work out exactly what it meant.

  All of sudden, it came to him. Of course! I know who that was!

  Into his mind had come the vivid image of a smart young man who only a few weeks ago had been the subject of a meeting such as this. His shirt was beautifully ironed, his hair immaculately combed and he had watched Cyril constantly. All through the meeting, whenever Cyril looked his way, there were the man’s blue eyes, watching him when he was speaking, watching him when he was listening to others speak. And when the man himself was talking, though he referred repeatedly and obsessively to law books bulging with post-it notes, his eyes still constantly returned to Cyril, and to Cyril alone.