Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Hey, steady!’ called out the proprietor from his little alcove. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? You’ll bloody break something.’

  Charles rushed outside. There were cars passing. There were people walking by with umbrellas and raincoats. He couldn’t see the shifter anywhere.

  He ran back into the shop.

  ‘That man who came in just now, has he gone?’

  ‘Yeah he went, mate. What’s your problem anyway? You were going to smash something the way you were going!’

  ‘Do you know him? Do you know who he is?’

  ‘No. No, mate. I never saw him before in my life. Why? What’s he…’

  Charles went back outside. He didn’t know what to do. He thought of choosing a direction at random and running, in the hope of catching the man up. But there were so many possible directions to choose between.

  He found himself stooping down to pick up the shards of glass.

  ~*~

  Cyril Burkitt’s funeral had been arranged by his daughter at a parish church near his home in Westbury. It was one of those Victorian suburban churches built in gothic style to conjure up for its bourgeois parishioners the cosmic order of a mythical Middle Ages, and there were over a hundred people there. At the front were two or three pews of Burkitt’s relatives, headed by his daughter Sophie, elegant, brittle and gimlet-sharp in a smart new black dress and a hat with a black gauze veil. With her was her husband wearing rimless glasses and the distracted look of someone who really does not have the time. Between them were their two boys in their little suits and ties. The older boy, Adam, read a short poem in a clear, confident, private-school voice. Ben, the little one, cried. Sophie spoke a few rather ambivalent words about her dreamy dad.

  Then there were the deskies: policemen, administrators, social workers, from Thurston Meadows but also from Knowle South, New Hartcliffe and all the Bristol Zones where Cyril’s duties had taken him. With Jazamine and Charles among them, there were about thirty or forty altogether, deskies and their husbands and wives, come not only to mourn Cyril Burkitt but to express solidarity with one another in a time of danger. Janet Richards, Burkitt’s and Jazamine’s former boss, was also there. She had lost weight and her style of dress had moved several notches along the dimension that stretches from ‘business leader’ to ‘bohemian outsider’. Being sacked had changed her from the mouthpiece of the system to its victim – she was in the process of suing the DSI for wrongful dismissal – and her loyalties and priorities had quickly changed, as people’s do.

  ‘Cyril was one of the last of the old school,’ she said in a short tribute. ‘He represented an idea of social work and of public service going back to the days when it was not considered absurd to believe in a universal welfare state that was free at the point of delivery to anyone who needed it. He was a custodian of values which, in this brave new world, we are in danger of losing altogether. We must never stop fighting for the things he stood for.’

  She was not the only one there to describe the old welfare man as if he had been some kind of beacon, the unheeded prophet of a more just and human way.

  ~*~

  The third big group in attendance were the people who didn’t work in the Zones but actually lived there: the dreggies. Quite a number had made their way across the Line to Westbury and several of them stood up and paid their own tribute to the dead Senior Registration Manager.

  ‘There’s deskies and deskies,’ said Wolfgang Amadeus Tonsil, to whom Cyril had awarded a medal at his retirement party. ‘Lots of them, with all due respect to present company, are a total waste of space. But Mr Burkitt was a true gentleman.’

  Another speaker was an extremely fat woman named Tracey Parkin, who had been one of Burkitt’s ‘cases’ when he started out as a social worker and she was a child in care. She told the congregation that she was speaking on behalf of both her mother and herself because her mother had been so distressed about Mr Burkitt’s death that she had tried to poison herself with toilet bleach and was now in hospital receiving treatment.

  ‘He was a good man,’ said Tracey Parkin. ‘It didn’t matter who you were, you weren’t never just a dreggie to him. To Cyril Burkitt everyone was just a human being.’

  ~*~

  ‘This will sound awful,’ Charles said to Jazamine as they drove away afterwards in her car, ‘but did he really deserve all that acclaim?’

  It was dark now and snow was falling. Glittering flakes were pouring from the sky into the halos of the street-lights and the ground was already white.

  Jaz shrugged.

  ‘He was a kind man and that’s always appreciated.’

  ‘But was he really a custodian of the old values?’

  ‘Well, he certainly wasn’t comfortable with the present system, as he made quite clear at his retirement do.’

  ‘No. But he administered it anyway. He wasn’t any different from the rest of them in that respect, was he?’

  ‘Yes, but he let it be known that he didn’t like it. I suppose that was a sort of rebellion.’

  ‘I suppose so. I can see he felt like a kind of threat to Janet Richards when she was the ruler of Thurston Meadows. And now she’s been cast aside, I can see that she might find herself reinterpreting her feelings about him as a sort of respect. But he was just an eccentric really, wasn’t he? He didn’t have any alternative to offer?’

  ‘Not that he told anyone.’

  ‘And was it better in the old days?’

  ‘I’m not sure it was. I’ve sometimes had to look things up in old files from the days when Cyril started out and I think it was really much the same then as it is now. The boundary between “them” and “us” was less explicit in some ways. There was no actual SI citizenship category. But you should see the way they used to talk about people.’

  She looked at Charles.

  ‘But how can you of all people hold it against Cyril that he administered the system? I thought that was your big thing: being part of the system and not letting others do the dirty work on your behalf? It was pretty much the first thing you told me about yourself! At least Cyril chose a career as a social worker when he started out, which at least sounded like it might involve helping people. You became an immigration officer!’

  ‘Yes but…’

  Charles broke off. They had just passed a pair of weeping women, and it struck him that this was the second such group they’d passed.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ he said. ‘Something bad. I thought that first lot were people from the funeral, but that was over a mile back.’

  Jaz turned on the radio.

  ‘Emerging news… Carnage… Guns… Rape… Clifton… Fire… Pillage…’

  As the two of them tried to grasp what exactly the terrible event had been, the same words kept recurring. There had been a massacre in Clifton. It was thought that it had been carried out by shifters. No one yet knew how many had been killed.

  Charles switched on his phone and found a text message telling him to come into his office straight away.

  Chapter 15

  It had been late in the evening, two days previously, when Gunnar had called. Carl was lying on his bed in the dark, fully dressed. He hadn’t slept or been outside since he killed Burkitt. He’d barely eaten.

  ‘We’ve rented a flat just off Clifton High Street, where we’ve got everything stashed. Meet us there, all right Carl? I’ll tell you the rest then. It’s all a bit last minute for you, I’m afraid, mate. Most of the rest of us have been planning this for months. But we’ll fill you in, Carl my old mate, and I know you’ll do fine.’

  ‘Um. I don’t know if I’m – like – ready for this, Gunnar mate,’ Carl muttered. ‘You know, so soon after…’

  ‘I understand, Carl. I understand. It’s all a bit too much too fast eh? I know. And I’m ever so sorry about that. But I’m afraid you need to do it anyway, my old son, because we didn’t really cover our tracks on that Burkitt job. We were working on the basis that we’d all soon be out
of here, you see, so if you don’t come with us, the police will be onto you pretty soon. See what I mean, mate? I mean I don’t want to put you under pressure or nothing. But to be honest, you haven’t got much choice.’

  ~*~

  Carl had met the others in the tiny Clifton flat next morning. Apart from Laf and Gunnar and Jod and Micky, there were four young men there he’d never met before: Dave, Rick, Paddy and Wayne and a hard-looking young woman with a private-school accent who was introduced to him as Tess.

  ‘So we do the slip now, okay,’ said Laf, ‘then we go outside and spread out. When me and Gunnar give the sign, Jod, Micky, Dave and Tess will seal off the first street while the rest of us get to work on it, all right? Jod and Micky at one end, Dave and Tess at the other. And when we’re done we’ll move on to the other streets and carry on in the same way until the whispering starts. Soon as that happens, we need to link up together, okay, form a circle and wait for the slip to take us over the edge. And then we’ll be gone. Gone from this shithole for good.’

  There was a thin, nervous cheer. Laf handed out seeds and they swallowed them, then Gunnar distributed machine pistols which had been wrapped up and stuffed into shopping bags.

  ‘There you are, my old mate,’ he said to Carl. ‘You’ll be right as rain. Don’t forget to take off the safety catch.’

  ‘Okay,’ Laf said, ‘Jod and Micky, off you go. Turn left outside the door, and go up to the end of the street. Look in some shop windows or something, but keep watching out for me so you don’t miss it when I give the sign.’

  He sent out Dave and Tess next, then Rick and Paddy and Wayne. Finally it was Carl’s turn to emerge. A light snow was falling and the street was full of people shopping for Christmas. A mother walked past him with three little fair-haired boys in matching hats and coats, then two teenaged girls came in the other direction talking excitedly about someone called Justin, followed by an elderly man with a red scarf and a hat that was too big for him. Everyone seemed to Carl to be quite ordinary and human. They were posher than him, better educated, better off, but he couldn’t find anything about any of them that could make him hate them.

  He turned from the street and looked into the window of the nearest shop. It sold art supplies, and coloured Christmas lights were twinkling over a display of paints, canvasses and modelling clay. Beyond, in the warm glow of the shop itself, the owner was stocking a shelf with pencils from a cardboard box. She was a very tall woman in her late forties with long red hair and she was strikingly beautiful in a strong, statuesque, almost regal way. Yet at the same time there was something rather child-like about her, for she wore colourful clothes in primary colours and little childlike rainbow-coloured lace-up boots as if she had never quite managed to embrace adulthood. When she’d unpacked all the pencils, she looked round and saw Carl’s stricken face staring in at her. Her own face too became troubled for a moment – a little bit afraid, perhaps, but also troubled on his behalf - and then she gave Carl a small, cautious smile. She might be posh, Carl could see, she might be naïve, but she was also vulnerable and kind.

  Horrified, Carl turned back to the street. Laf was on the kerb on the far side of the road, craning up and down the street to check he had everyone’s attention. Gunnar was two shops down from Carl, cradling a lumpy little carrier bag against his large soft belly. Rick and Paddy were across the road near Laf with their backs to a display of woollen jumpers.

  ‘I know just what I’m going to get for Auntie Susan, Mum,’ said a little girl of five in a fluffy white coat, as she walked by hand in hand with her mother.

  Blood seemed to ooze from the buildings. Voices seemed to gibber and wail in the yellow sky. How could these people be so oblivious to the horror that was about to descend upon them?

  ‘Now!’ yelled Laf.

  He had taken his machine gun from its wrapper and was thrusting it into the air above his head.

  ‘Now!’ cried Gunnar in his little high voice.

  Laf fired a burst of shots at a passing taxi. At the top of the street, Jod and Micky joined in, followed immediately by Dave and Tess at the other end. One on each side of the taxi (the driver was slumped over his wheel), skull-faced Laf and fat Gunnar stood with their guns ready, watching the slaughter unfurl. Even now, Gunnar’s face showed no rage, no malice, only a kind of neutral concentration, but there was sweat pouring down his cheeks as he reached through the smashed window of the taxi, poured in petrol from a can, and set it alight.

  The others did as they pleased. Wayne fired a long raking shot across the shop fronts, watching as one window after another burst into icy shards. Rick fired at upper windows, picking people off as they ran to see what was happening. Paddy, with a strange fixed smile, set his gun for single shots, and chose his targets slowly and deliberately, one by one, from among those cowering in the street, and those trying to make a run for it.

  But Carl stood motionless in front of the art shop with his gun still in its wrapper.

  ‘Hey look at her in there, trying to hide out the back,’ Paddy yelled. ‘Let’s go in and get her.’

  He was pointing at the art shop. Carl didn’t move, but Rick and Wayne halted their firing and followed Paddy inside with big grins on their faces. They pulled the red-haired woman out from behind the counter and then, barking and whooping, they dragged her out into the street, that beautiful, statuesque, yet somehow childlike woman, a head taller than all of them, and pushed her to the ground, yelping and slavering like a pack of hyenas with a gazelle.

  Flame spewed upwards into the yellow snow. Carl sank to the ground and covered his face with his hands. The art shop woman let out hollow rhythmic cries.

  ‘Look at Carl,’ someone sneered. ‘The big baby bottled out.’

  He thought he’d be killed for his cowardice but the bullets never came. And after a while he heard the carnival of destruction moving away from him. There was no one here left to kill and the others were heading off to find new targets. Carl opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the corpse of the art shop owner, naked except for her rainbow-coloured boots, lying in a pool of blood. He threw up everything in his stomach.

  After some time he took a peek up the street, at the strewn bodies, the burning cars, the broken glass. He was looking for a little white fluffy coat and at the same time he was trying not to see it.

  Then he realised that he must have vomited out the seed of slip. He was scrabbling around in his own sick when three armed police officers found him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ one of them called out to him, taking him for a survivor in shock.

  The sky was dark now. Buildings and cars were burning and glittering snow was pouring into the flamelight over a street full of corpses. Apart from the police, Carl was the only living person there.

  ‘Are you hurt in any way?’ the police asked him.

  They were in shock too. In a neighbouring street they’d surrounded the perpetrators of the massacre and forced them to lay down their guns, only to watch as the killers linked hands and vanished to a place where they could never again be reached.

  ‘I didn’t shoot nobody, all right?’ Carl whimpered. ‘Here’s my gun look. It hasn’t even been fired. I was with them but I didn’t fucking shoot.’

  Chapter 16

  The police had cameras fitted to their guns, and the footage was released to the media so that everyone in the country could see the killers laughing and jeering in those last seconds before they disappeared.

  ‘Lovely to meet you all, boys, but we really must dash!’

  ‘What a shame you’re not allowed to shoot an unarmed person, eh?’

  ‘Wish we could…’

  There was a sudden silence. Just for a moment, as the falling snow was sucked into the space where they’d been, the killers seemed to linger on in ghostly form as swirling crystals of ice.

  ~*~

  Face recognition software showed that, with the exception of Tess, who was from Clifton itself, every one of the perpetrators cam
e from one or other of the Bristol Zones. (It was only some time later that it was discovered that the faces of the two ring leaders had been inserted into the DSI database by a highly skilled hacker.) And so, bowing to public pressure, the Social Inclusion Secretary invoked the emergency powers bestowed on him by Section 62 of the 1999 Act, and decreed that all registered citizens in the City and County of Bristol were to be restricted to their Zones of residence until further notice, ‘in the interests’ as the Act put it at subsection 62(7) ‘of maintaining neighbourly relationships with the wider community’.

  The army was sent in to help enforce this, but the government also created what was in effect a whole new branch of the armed forces, specifically to deal with shifters. It was to be known as Special Internal Security - or SIS – and it would bring together shifter specialists, like Charles, who’d hitherto been part of the immigration service, with military personnel, secret service people, police officers and others, under the leadership of an admiral called Sir John Rolly, who’d previously been head of Naval Intelligence. In mid-January, members of the still only half-formed Western Command of the SIS assembled in a hotel in the centre to Bristol to hear Sir John spell out the new agenda.

  ‘Point one,’ said Admiral Rolly, ‘From now on there will be absolutely zero tolerance of any manifestation of shifter activity.’

  He was a tall, broad-shouldered, vigorous man with close-cropped sandy hair, fierce grey eyes and glowing red skin made leathery by the rigours of an outdoor life.

  ‘New legislation,’ he barked out, ‘will ban cult words such as “Dunner”, “Igga” and so forth and make their use in graffiti etcetera a criminal offence. In any Zone where cult graffiti is widespread, pressure will be brought to bear on the whole community in the form of an even tighter regulation of movement within the Zones – anything up to and including a 24 hour curfew - and a complete closing down of electronic access to the outside world. We must get the message across to these Social Inclusion people that the party is over. It’s pay-up time for the years of government handouts they’ve received. Any graffiti, any intelligence about unreported shifter activity and we crack down on the community where it occurs until such time as that community hands over, so to speak, the vipers in its midst.’