Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Is that you Carl, mate?’ asked a kindly high-pitched voice as Carl’s mother returned to her TV and her can of Special Brew.

  At once all the darkness of that evil night came rushing towards him down the phone line: the pale limbs of the trees in the torchlight, the gurgling of the hanged man, the intestines waving from side to side in the glass-like water…

  ‘Uh, yeah. Yeah it’s Carl.’

  ‘It’s only me, mate. It’s only old Gunnar. Me and Laf were wondering if we could swing by in the car and pick you up? If you’re not doing anything that is, my old mate. We wanted to talk about that little test for you. Have a bit of a chat and get it all sorted and that, mate. Know what I mean?’

  ~*~

  Carl waited for them on a street corner near the Old England. He’d been there half an hour when a shiny black BMW passed in front of him and pulled up a few metres further on. He’d been expecting the Renault van and would have taken no notice of the car if the familiar high voice hadn’t called back to him.

  ‘All right my old mate?’

  Laf was at the wheel, Gunnar in the passenger seat. Both wearing suits and dark glasses, the two of them could have been the managers of a betting shop or a used-car dealership.

  ‘How’s it going then, mate?’ asked Gunnar cheerily, as Carl climbed into the back seat.

  It was hard to believe that the last time Carl had met him, Gunnar had been helping to hang a man.

  ‘You’re getting a bit fat, Carl,’ observed Laf, who no one could accuse of being overweight. ‘Too much beer, if you ask me. Too much beer and not enough action.’

  Gunnar reached over to give Carl an affectionate prod in the stomach.

  ‘Don’t listen to old skin and bones here,’ he said. ‘I’m fat, mate. You’re just well-built.’

  Next thing they were at the Line, showing their IDs to the policeman in his bulletproof booth.

  ‘All right there mate? How you doing?’ Gunnar called up pleasantly.

  ‘Not so bad,’ said the Line officer, a little surprised by the friendliness.

  ‘Have a nice day!’ he called out as he opened the barrier and let them through.

  Laf laughed.

  ‘Anyone ever tell you can’t fake ID cards, Carl?’ he chortled. ‘Well it’s bollocks and Erik’s proved it. Everyone says this national ID system here is state of the art but Erik managed to hack into it in half a day. We go to and fro across the Line like we were born and bred in these lousy Zones. The stupid computer thinks we really were.’

  A vague memory came into Carl’s head of a room lit by blue light and full of screens and cables. He remembered Erik saying that he was “something of a techie” and how he had hidden a bug in Slug’s jacket without him knowing it.

  ‘That’s Erik for you, Carl mate,’ said Gunnar. ‘There’s nothing our Erik can’t sort out. Don’t let his posh ways put you off. He’s diamond, mate, he’s pure diamond. Keep on the right side of him and you can’t go wrong.’

  They didn’t mention Slug, or any aspect of their last meeting with Carl, back in that dark wood. Carl was relieved about this. Perhaps that episode really was all over? Perhaps it really could be regarded as never having happened at all?

  Anyway, he thought, Slug was a fucking grass and Erik did warn him. So it was fair enough in a way, wasn’t it?

  Gunnar was all right he decided. They were both all right as long as you kept on the right side of them. Everything seemed much easier, now that he’d finally seen them again. They’d been growing into monsters in his mind, but here in the flesh and by daylight they were just two blokes.

  ~*~

  Carl had lived all his twenty-five years in Bristol, and the attractive suburb of Clifton they now took him to was less than five miles from his mother’s house, but he had only ever been here once before. That had been fifteen years ago when, at the age of ten, he’d been taken on a school trip to the famous suspension bridge across the Avon Gorge. The teachers had handed out sandwiches on the grass at the top of the cliff and one of them had lost her temper with Carl for leaning over the railings in spite of repeated warnings. But he had no recollection of these tasteful clothing shops, these craft shops, these wine bars and wholefood cafes.

  ‘You telling me that this whole shop don’t sell nothing but fucking candles!’ he exclaimed

  ‘I know mate,’ said Gunnar soothingly. ‘I know.’

  ‘And what’s the point of this?’ Carl burst out, coming to a shop that sold hand-painted wooden toys. ‘Any normal kid would smash one of these in two seconds flat.’

  ‘Beats me, Carl mate,’ Gunnar purred. ‘I’m as baffled as you are.’

  An intense but dazzlingly pretty young woman walked by in a very short green hand-knitted dress and white woollen tights, accompanied by a man in jeans and sweater with little wire-rimmed glasses and a closely trimmed beard. They were talking animatedly but they fell silent for a moment to look at red-nosed Carl in his pedal-pushers and polka dots, and to give each other a tiny knowing smirk.

  ‘But I just thought the dynamics were all wrong,’ the young woman then resumed. ‘I just wasn’t convinced by the piece.’

  ‘I know, I know. One just longed to grab hold of the thing, didn’t one, and edit it down to the conceptual bone? Yet it had a certain compelling urgency, don’t you think? A sort of raw commitment…’

  Two handsome middle-aged women were coming the other way.

  ‘India was wonderful,’ one of them was saying. ‘I must admit I was reluctant to go at all after the dreadful disappointment of Thailand last year. But India is just so very much itself somehow – I mean it has absorbed so many cultural influences over the centuries and made them its own – that I suppose it just can’t be turned into that kind of dreadful self-parody that has ruined Bangkok.’

  Again, the glance at Carl in his clown suit, the knowing look at one another.

  ‘Well, I’m so relieved, Tiffany. You were so very wretched after Thailand.’

  ‘As you can see, Carl,’ Gunnar said, ‘this is one of the places where the posh people hang out in this town.’

  ‘Posh?’ muttered Carl. ‘Too fucking right. I’ve never seen such stuck-up cunts in my life.’

  ‘Oh Carl, how could you?’ simpered Laf in a cruel parody of the cultured voices around them. ‘These are the beautiful people, my dear. The sensitive beautiful people, who know about the arts and culture and care so much, oh so very much, about the poor and the socially excluded.’

  Gunnar put his arm protectively across Carl’s shoulders.

  ‘So how’s this place make you feel, my old mate?’

  ‘How would I fucking know?’ asked Carl.

  The very question seemed to him to be a bit posh in itself. It was the sort of thing that social workers asked their clients, and people on TV asked failed contestants in reality shows.

  ‘Angry maybe?’ asked Gunnar kindly. ‘Does it make you feel angry at all, mate?’

  ‘Nah, I don’t give a shit,’ Carl answered.

  ‘Well you’re a fucking idiot then, Carl,’ Laf told him.

  A man with a great professorial mane of white hair came sweeping by in a green corduroy suit and a tie that seemed to be woven out of yellow string.

  ‘You just have to go private, Gavin,’ he was booming out to his younger companion, who might well have been his son. He too glanced in Carl’s direction, but it was as if he saw right through him. ‘There is simply no other rational choice in this city if you want your children to have any education at all.’

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ Carl said, ‘angry then.’

  ‘That’s the way, my old mate,’ said Gunnar, ‘That’s the way.’

  He’d still got his arm across Carl’s shoulders like a father or a kindly uncle.

  ‘Now listen, Carl mate,’ he said, ‘how would you like it if you could do whatever you wanted here?’

  ‘What d’you mean? I don’t get you, mate.’

  ‘He means, Carl,’ explained Laf. ‘How wo
uld you like it if you could trash these shops and burn these cars and fuck that posh tart in the green minidress? How would you like it if you could make those two posh old cows beg you for mercy instead of yammering on about their bloody holidays? How would you like to make that old toff with the white hair look at you, really look at you, and then just blow him away?’

  ‘Yes, how would you like that, Carl my old mate?’ said Gunnar.

  ‘You’re having a laugh with me, aren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Laf, ‘no wind-up, Carl. It’s what we’re planning. We’re actually going to do it. And I’ll tell you the beauty of it. The beauty is we’ll have swallowed seeds, so when the police come along we can laugh in their faces and disappear to a different world where they won’t ever be able to find us.’

  It was at this moment that the full glory of being a shifter finally dawned on Carl. This was what it could mean to be a warrior of Dunner. You could anything you liked – anything – and slip would wash it away as if it had never happened. Why would he care about the killing of Slug if he’d shifted to another world where Slug had never existed in the first place? Why not commit murder in these streets if he could take himself in the next moment to another set of streets where the murder had never occurred?

  A smile slowly spread over his broad and guileless face.

  ‘Sweet, man! That is fucking sweet!’

  ‘I think he’s finally got it, Laf my old mate,’ said Gunnar with a kindly little chuckle. ‘I think he’s finally got the idea.’

  He ruffled Carl’s hair.

  ‘That’s my boy. That’s my good old mate.’

  ‘Like I say, Carl,’ Laf went on. ‘We’re really going to do it. We’re planning it now. And you can be there, Carl. You can be with us if you want to, and if you’re still willing to take the test.’

  Carl laughed.

  ‘Yeah, no problem, mate, no sweat at all.’

  A grey-haired man in his fifties was walking by. When he saw Carl he did a double take.

  ‘Carl! Carl Bone! It is you! I didn’t expect to see you here. What a nice surprise!’

  Carl looked blank.

  ‘You remember me don’t you? You remember Cyril Burkitt?

  ‘Oh yeah! Hello Mr Burkitt!’

  He found he was pleased to see this familiar face from his past. It was good, somehow, to be able to show to Laf and Gunnar that there were other people in the world who took an interest in him, even here in this posh place where he hadn’t expected to know anyone at all.

  ‘How you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Not so bad, not so bad. Just came over here to do a little shopping. How are you doing yourself, Carl? It must be all of ten years.’

  Cyril glanced at Gunnar and Laf and smiled at them as if any friend of Carl’s was a friend of his.

  ‘All right, mate?’ said Gunnar in his little high amiable voice. ‘How you doing? Not turned out so bad has it?’

  ‘No it hasn’t. Nice to see a bit of sun at this time of year.’

  Cyril turned back to Carl.

  ‘Well, I won’t keep you from your friends. But I’ll tell you what, I’m retired now and I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. If you fancy calling by for a chat sometime you’d be very welcome. I’m always glad of a bit of company and I’ve often thought about you over the years and wondered how you were getting on. I’ll give you my address and number, look.’

  He opened his wallet and found a rather battered card.

  ‘Do get in touch, Carl. It would be good to see you.’

  ~*~

  When Carl turned back to his companions, they were looking at one another in an odd, knowing way.

  ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What’s the matter? He’s just an old geezer I knew when I was a kid.’

  Laf glanced over at Cyril’s card.

  ‘That’s a deskie, right?’

  ‘Yeah he is,’ said Carl, ‘but he’s all right. He’s a nice enough bloke. He don’t mean no harm.’

  Gunnar took the card from him.

  ‘Cyril Burkitt,’ he read aloud. ‘Well, what are the odds, eh, Laf? He’s only the bloke that Jod and the other two went after that time. He’s only the one that got away!’

  ‘Well, well,’ Laf exclaimed. ‘So he is!’

  The two shifters looked at each other again, and this time both of them nodded.

  ‘What?’ demanded Carl again. ‘What’s the matter? What are you two nodding and fucking smiling about?’

  ‘Well that’s your test isn’t it, Carl mate? ’ said Gunnar.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ said Laf. ‘We couldn’t have come up with a better one if we’d tried.’

  ‘What’s perfect? And what do you mean, that’s my test?’

  ‘It’s to go to his house,’ Gunnar said, ‘and – you know, mate – finish the job off.’

  ‘What? You mean…’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Laf, ‘we mean kill him.’

  Carl gave an incredulous laugh.

  ‘Oh no, he’s not that fucking bad, not for a fucking deskie, know what I mean?’

  ‘That’s not the point, Carl mate,’ Gunnar said patiently. ‘You’re still not getting it. It’s not about punishing him or nothing. It’s your test! See what I’m saying, mate? It’s what you’ve got to do to become a warrior. Are you with me, my old mate?’

  ‘You’ve got to make a sacrifice for Dunner,’ said Laf.

  ‘Fair enough if you don’t want to do it, Carl,’ said Gunnar reassuringly. ‘No hard feelings or nothing. But if you do want to be a warrior, that’s the test you’ve got to pass.’

  ‘After all, any fool can knock off someone they hate,’ Laf pointed out. ‘Any fool can do for someone that deserves it.’

  ‘Laf’s right there, isn’t he my old mate? That wouldn’t be a challenge at all.’

  Carl looked from one to the other, slowly absorbing the fact that they meant everything they were saying.

  ‘Think it over, Carl,’ Laf said. ‘We’ll call you in a couple of days and you can tell us what you’ve decided.’

  ‘Sorry if it all seems a bit sudden, mate,’ Gunnar said soothingly. ‘We know you can’t make a big decision like that on the spur of the moment, and we wouldn’t ask you to. Take your time, mate. Take your time. And meantime let’s forget all about it for now, eh, and see if we can’t find somewhere in this poncy place where we can get ourselves a decent pint.’

  ~*~

  Back home Carl’s mother was snoring in front of the TV, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, her dress hitched up over her pale thighs, a cigarette packet clutched in her right hand. There were empty beer cans strewn around her on the floor and, in her sleep, she’d squelched her foot into the uneaten half of a microwaved pizza, leaving a long skidmark of cheese across the grimy beige carpet

  As he often did when he felt anxious, Carl took some banknotes from his mother’s purse and put them into his wallet. It was a habit so old that he was hardly aware of doing it.

  I’ve got Burkitt’s card, Carl thought. I could phone him now and tell him all about this, and then he’d help me and I wouldn’t have to do for him.

  It was a good plan. He went to the phone and was about to dial.

  ‘O-KAY!’ cried the host of the daytime game show that was playing on the TV. For the last half hour he’d been gabbling away into a room where no one was even conscious. ‘O-KAY!’ he cried, as if this was the most exciting thing in the world. ‘Hold on to your horses people because now we – are – going to play DOUBLE – OR - QUITS!’

  Carl hesitated, then replaced the receiver.

  Fuck it, he thought. Burkitt couldn’t help me. Okay he’s nice but he’s piss useless.

  And look what had happened to Slug when he tried to go to the authorities. Erik and Gunnar and Laf had known at once what he was up to, hadn’t they? They’d got him wired without him realising it. And even without a wire, he thought, they’d probably still have known. They were shifters weren’t they? And everyone knew that shifters could
read people’s mind.

  Absent-mindedly Carl prised the cigarette packet from his mother’s hand, took out half a dozen cigarettes and stuffed them into the pocket of his tee-shirt. She wouldn’t notice six but she went wild if he took the whole packet.

  Anyway, he thought, the stupid git, if he goes round giving out his address and that, some fucker’s going to get him – yeah? – and if it’s not me it’s going to be some bugger else. So it don’t make no difference really. I’d only be doing what was going to happen anyway. I’d just be getting it over with.

  He tested each of the beer cans till he found one still half-full. He took a swig, then spat it out with angry disgust. His mother had dropped a cigarette butt into it.

  ‘Dirty cow!’

  He caught sight of himself in a mirror that hung on the wall: his round pale face, the ash and beer dribbling down his chin.

  I mean he’s had his life hasn’t he, he thought, wiping the mess away. He’s had a nice life already. When you think about it he’s done well out of geezers like me. So it’s my turn now isn’t it? My bloody turn.

  He was not one of the world’s great thinkers but even Carl could see the shallowness of his own argument and even he felt accused by his own reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Maybe I should phone him,’ he muttered.

  It never occurred to him to phone the police. It simply wasn’t part of his repertoire. The police were there to protect the outside world against the Zone, that was how he saw them, not to protect the Zone itself.

  Yeah but if I don’t do this, it’ll be me that gets it, won’t it? I’ll be the one in a tree with a fucking spear through me and fucking Gunnar going, ‘All right mate? No hard feelings or nothing!’ And then someone else will do for old Burkitt anyway.

  Tears came pricking into his eyes. He felt cornered and alone. He’d never really got on top of life. Even within the marginal world of the Thurston Meadows Zone he’d always been on the margins, blundering along, picking up the scraps that other people let fall.

  It’s Burkitt or me. I’ve got no fucking choice.

  Chapter 13

  ‘This is me as a baby.’

  ‘Blimey, Charles! You were a pudgy little thing.’