Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Was that the test then?’ he asked Gunnar on the way back. ‘Have I passed the test?’

  ‘Oh bless you, Carl! That wasn’t a test, my old mate. I mean, being fair, you didn’t really do anything yourself did you? You just watched, didn’t you? If we’re honest, you just watched. No, we’ll have to sort the test out for you later, mate.’

  He sighed.

  ‘It’s a busy old time at the moment though, mate. We’ve got a lot on. A lot of tests, a lot of stuff to get together, a lot of plans. It might be a little while before we get back to you. But we will do, mate, don’t you worry about that. We’ll get back to you as quickly as we possibly can.’

  Chapter 11

  A small ceremony was held in the DSI office in Thurston Meadows to mark Cyril Burkitt’s departure. Janet Richards was there. So was Janet’s boss, the regional director Peter Silver. And about twenty or thirty DSI staff – social workers, administrators, policemen, teachers – had come to say goodbye, including Jazamine Bright.

  Janet Richards said a few words about Cyril’s long service and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the people of the Bristol Zones. Peter Silver, as was traditional, read out a few amusing extracts from Cyril’s personnel file. Then Cyril was presented with his farewell card, a book token, a stainless steel garden spade and a tearful kiss from his secretary Alice, who had organised the collection envelope and bought the token, the spade and the card.

  When it was his turn to make a speech, Cyril talked about the families he had worked with, first as a social worker, then as a social work manager and finally as a registration manager, and he spoke about the names that had kept recurring over his whole career – the Wheelers, the Pendants, the Delaneys, the Blows, the Tonsils… With each name he mentioned everyone laughed and gave a cheer of recognition. They’d all worked with members of these families. They all had tales they could tell.

  ‘…And it occurs to me,’ Cyril said, ‘that these are the Great Families of the Bristol Zones, the famous old bloodlines. If I’m going to say goodbye to my job properly, I should say goodbye to them as well as to all of you. So what I’ve decided to do is to hire a room in that conference centre up at the Zoo and throw a party for the Pendants and the Wheelers and all the rest of them, as well as for as many of you as can make it!”

  Everyone laughed, loudly and generously, not quite getting the joke but assuming that a joke was what it was, for Cyril was known for his off-beam sense of humour. And Cyril just stood there and smiled and waited until it dawned on his colleagues, one by one, that he wasn’t joking at all.

  ‘I’ve sent the invitations out this morning,’ he said. ‘You’re all invited. I’ll provide the food and drink.’

  ‘You should have seen Janet and Peter’s faces,’ Jazamine told Charles later. ‘You should have seen those frozen smiles!’

  ~*~

  No one had ever invited the dreggies to a retirement do before and Janet Richards tried all kinds of tricks to prevent it from happening. She suggested it posed a security risk and that Cyril would be in danger from the group of shifters who’d tried to kill him, but when Burkitt pointed out that the event would be invitation only and that he’d hired some bouncers to mind the door, she changed tack and suggested that it would reflect badly on the Zones if there was any trouble of disturbance.

  ‘I don’t mean reflect badly on our Department,’ she explained. ‘We’ve got broad shoulders after all! I mean reflect badly on the people you really care about, Cyril, the Zone residents themselves. Do you see what I mean? If there was any kind of problem at the Zoo, it might feed into the “dreggie” stereotype?’

  She even offered free use of a DSI community centre as an alternative, and food and drink at the DSI’s expense, but Cyril politely batted these suggestions aside. Janet might not like it but, at the time, in that particular world, there was still no law that could prevent Zone residents from crossing the line, unless they were under a restriction order.

  ~*~

  Jaz invited Charles to go with her to the Zoo party, but he was working late that day and didn’t arrive until it was already well under way. Burkitt had clearly spent a lot of money. There were long tables piled with food. There were glasses of champagne set out in rows with a team of catering staff at hand to replenish them. There was a DJ playing records on the stage. There were dozens of tables with white tablecloths and silverware and a vase of flowers on each.

  Most of the hundred-odd guests were residents of Thurston Meadows and the other Bristol Zones. Many DSI staff had stayed away. Those, like Jaz, who had turned up, found themselves not only in a minority but also having to relate to the Delaneys and the Pendants and the rest in a way that was completely different from what they were used to. However egalitarian their political convictions, however much they’d tried in their daily work to treat everyone with respect, the fact remained that when they’d met these people before it had always been in connection with problems – financial problems, housing problems, legal problems, problems with their children or their elderly relatives, problems with their neighbours – and always in a context where the deskies had the power: the power to give or withhold at the very least, but often also the power to compel.

  But here the dreggies were equals. Many of them in suits and ties or party dresses, they were simply fellow guests. Some were interesting and attractive, some tedious or hard to like, as the people at any party might be. They were just people, and so were the deskies, and this came as a surprise to both sides.

  Cyril himself moved from deskie to dreggie to deskie with a manic delight, introducing people to each other – ‘John, you must come and meet Harry here! He shares your obsession with old vinyl records. His whole front room is full of them!’ – embarrassing people by telling stories at their expense – ‘I know Rhoda has a reputation as one of the fiercest deskies in the business, but do you know she is absolutely terrified of spiders?’ – and launching off at the smallest pretext on long stories about the events of his life, whether long ago or very recent indeed.

  ‘It’s a cliché I know but it was as if time stood still. There I was, hanging on like grim death to this chap and thinking that in few moments one of them would beat my brains out, and yet I seemed to have all the time in the world. It wasn’t until it was all over and I was halfway home that I sort of rejoined the normal flow of time. It was as if I’d been underwater and had finally reached the surface. Oddly enough that was when I first got the idea for having this party at the Zoo….’

  ‘Poor Cyril,’ said Jazamine.

  ‘Why poor?’ Charles asked. ‘He looks like he’s having the time of his life!’

  ‘Yes I think he is. But tomorrow the time of his life will be in the past and then what will he do?’

  But at this point Cyril got up on the stage at the top of the hall, tapped on the microphone and asked everyone if he could have their attention.

  ~*~

  It was a long talk, rambling back and forth across time and between the various Bristol Zones, and moving from jokes and anecdotes to reflections on the changes he’d seen.

  ‘Of course when we started out,’ he said, ‘we didn’t have Zones, and we didn’t have a DSI. But even back then, when my job was protecting children, not managing registration conferences, I used to wonder why we worked almost entirely with people who were hard up or on benefits. Did rich people never hurt their children? Were families in Clifton incapable of neglectfulness?’

  ‘Of course they bloody are,’ growled someone in his audience.

  Cyril nodded.

  ‘Of course they are,’ he agreed. ‘I’m sure better-off families have plenty of those sorts of problems, but I suspect that nearly all of it goes unseen by public agencies, because well-to-do people have this thing called privacy, while poor people have always lived under surveillance. Social workers have meetings with their children’s teachers, schools talk to their doctors, doctors have chats with the police. It’s as if dreggies remain children all their lives
and need grown-ups there to watch over them.’

  There was a small rustle of anger across the hall. It seemed extraordinarily insensitive to use the derogatory term ‘dreggie’ to an audience in which dreggies were the largest group, and many of them had understandably taken exception to it.

  But Cyril went on as if he hadn’t even noticed.

  ‘All my adult life,’ he said, ‘there have been a million or more unemployed people in this country. Sometimes the figures go down and the government claims the credit. Sometimes the figures go up and the government blames either its predecessors, or the international economic situation, or both. But, regardless of these fluctuations, there have always been a substantial number of people without a job. It’s always seen as a problem, and something is always being done about it, but the fundamental fact remains unchanged.

  ‘And now of course, we have the DSI, the latest scheme in a long line that goes back to the days of the workhouse and the Poor Law. All you lot would be gathered together, that was the plan, and given a special status. And all us lot – social workers and health professionals and police and everyone, working together as one big team – would help you organise your lives, sort out your problems and get you back into the economy again as useful and productive citizens. That was the idea, and at one time I believed in it myself.

  ‘But then one day, quite suddenly, it came to me! We’re supposed to keep on battling but we’re not supposed to win. The government needs you lot to be out of work. That’s how they keep some sort of discipline in the labour force! That and immigration. You’re a warning to the working population not to shirk and not to demand higher wages. Everyone knows they’ve got to behave themselves or they’ll lose their job to someone who’ll do it for less, and end up living in dreg estates like you.

  ‘But here’s the complicated bit. The government might need a bunch of people out of work but it can never admit to leaving a million or two people on the scrapheap on purpose. Quite possibly its members can’t admit it even to themselves. So they always have to be seen to be doing something about it. Hence the DSI. Hence the new policy initiatives every second week. Hence our fine slogan: “Let’s tackle this together!”’

  Cyril laughed as he looked out at the uncomfortable faces.

  ‘Probably most of you have worked all this out long ago. It’s not an original thought – there are books by the dozen that’ll tell you exactly the same thing – but, as some of you may have noticed over the years, I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake. Slow or not, though, once I had realised this was the case, I began to see that most of what the DSI does is just for show. What looks like moving forward, turns out, again and again, to just be a fancy way of staying in the same place.

  ‘If we ever had a government that, for instance, gave everyone the legal right to a paid job, then perhaps we’d have a government that really meant business about social inclusion. But until that day, I reckon you can have all the DSI staff you like…’

  Here he paused and smiled benignly out at his uncomfortable listeners.

  ‘…Or don’t like as the case may be,’ he added, getting the tiniest little glimmer of a laugh. ‘You can give them all the resources and all the best intentions in the world, but nothing is going to change.’

  Here he paused. There was absolute silence. He smiled. It didn’t seem to bother him at all that his audience was, to put it mildly, not exactly with him.

  ‘And so,’ Cyril said, ‘what I’ve decided to do today is to give credit where it’s due for once. You people are hard up and face all kinds of restrictions and intrusions in your lives. You take all kinds of abuse. You’re called scroungers and parasites. But really you are doing it for the sake of the rest of us. You’re helping to keep the economy on a steady track and keep inflation down. Give yourself a clap. You deserve it.’

  A resentful trickle of applause petered out almost at once.

  ‘What I’ve decided to do, in recognition of your services, is to get a medal struck for you. Here it is look…’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and held up a large gold star-shaped medal on a striped ribbon.

  ‘I’m calling it, the Hero First Class of the Anti-Inflationary War. I would like to award it to all of you, but I’m afraid that isn’t possible. So what I’m going to do is ask just a few of you to accept the medal on behalf of all the people of the Bristol Zones.’

  In the silence, Cyril took a piece of paper out his pocket, slowly unfolded it, and put on his reading glasses.

  ‘The first person I have in mind,’ he announced, ‘is seventy-six years old. As far as I can calculate, and she can correct me if I’m wrong, she has no less than seven children, eighteen grandchildren, nine great grandchildren, and two great great grandchildren, every one of them a Social Inclusion citizen living in one or other of the Zones. I reckon she’s as well qualified as anyone to accept this medal. And so I’d like to call on – Sharon Wheeler!’

  A cheer went up from one corner of the hall and many hands pushed forward a tiny old woman with wispy grey hair. When she got to the stage, Cyril bowed low to her and pinned her medal to her chest.

  ‘You got that wrong,’ was all she would offer by way of an acceptance speech. ‘It's ten great grandchildren and three great great grandchildren.’

  ‘Typical bloody deskies,’ someone shouted out. ‘Never get anything right.’

  People seemed to be beginning to enjoy themselves again.

  ‘My next medal,’ announced Cyril, ‘goes to Wolfgang Amadeus Tonsil.’

  A large black man stood up in a tight white suit and mirrored glasses, and a cheer went up as he came laughing and protesting to the stage. He wore a gold earring, a gold pendant and a gold wristband. Most impressive of all, when he opened his mouth he revealed a smile of solid gold.

  ‘Mr Tonsil, I name you Hero First Class, with a Special Commendation for Style,’ announced Cyril, pinning the medal to his chest.

  ‘Well, some people have got it and some haven’t,’ said Wolfgang Amadeus, taking a bow.

  ‘And finally,’ Cyril went on, ‘I’d like to ask Mr Pedro Delaney of Daffodil Grove to come to the front. As far as I’m aware, Mr Delaney holds the record number of Restriction Orders of anyone in the Bristol Zones. Forty-three in all, according to my count. So it’s a very great honour for us to have him outside of the Meadows here tonight.’

  A tall, lanky and very shy white man made his way up to the stage.

  ‘It’s forty-four,’ mumbled Pedro Delaney as Cyril pinned the medal to his shirt, ‘and I’m back in court next week for number forty-five.’

  Everybody cheered.

  ‘And now,’ Cyril said, ‘before I finish, I’d just like to say a few words on the subject of… mammoths.’

  There were a few slightly incredulous laughs.

  ‘My grandson is a great authority on science,’ Cyril said, ‘and he tells me that one of the great achievements of the modern age is our ability to bring back to life long-extinct species. And of all those many species, my grandson says, surely the most glorious is the mighty mammoth of the steppes, who of course you can now see alive and in the flesh, any time you want to, here in Bristol Zoo.

  ‘I sometimes wonder what it is like to be a mammoth in a zoo. Extinct for hundreds of thousands of years and then brought back to life again, not to roam the tundra like its ancestors, but simply to provide entertainment to gaping crowds. What a strange fate!

  ‘But one thing I can tell you about mammoths is this. They are big. They are much bigger than mere elephants. You can easily see that when you look at them in their cages, but that doesn’t really do justice to their true enormousness, because everything looks smaller when it’s inside a cage. It’s only when you see a mammoth out of a cage that you can really understand just how big a beast it is.’

  At the back of the hall two large doors were pulled open. There were gasps and shrieks.

  ‘Keep your hair on, everyone!’ laughed Cyril. ‘He really is perfect
ly tame!’

  An aisle had been left clear through the middle of the tables. Along it, led by a keeper, plodded a fully-grown bull mammoth, five metres tall, with tusks so immense that each of them, if it could have been uncurled, would have been more than six metres long.

  Right up to the front of the room the mammoth plodded. The guests could smell the warm, goatish stink of its coat, feel the heat of its body, hear its huge, deep, steamy breaths, as its keeper led it to the stage and helped Cyril climb up onto its shaggy shoulders.

  As soon as he was settled up there, the mammoth turned round again and marched ponderously back towards the door, with Cyril beaming and waving all the while to his former colleagues and his former clients, calling out names and good wishes, and flinging out handfuls of small plastic medals from a bulging polythene bag.

  ‘Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye and good luck. Remember there are no deskies really, and no dreggies either. It’s just a game we’re playing, and one day we’ll play a different one.’

  ‘Wow. Who would have thought he was such a showman?’ Jazamine said to Charles as they left.

  They both assumed that this was the last they’d hear of him.

  Chapter 12

  Carl had been awake most of the night and had not long managed to sink into a shallow and exhausted sleep when he was woken by his mother shrieking at him to come to the phone.

  ‘It can’t be Erik and them lot,’ he told himself as he pulled on his jeans. ‘They always use my mobile. I haven’t even told them my landline number.’

  Nearly two months had gone by since the death of Slug but Carl had since lived more or less constantly in a state of fear, which had further intensified when the police finally found Slug’s body. It had all been on TV.