Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (2 page)

‘You know what,’ he said, ‘you’re quite right. I’m sure I must have had basically the same kind of argument with Mickey at various times about the police, the army – about any number of things – but I didn’t end up doing any of those jobs. So you’re right, there must have been something about this particular job that drew me, mustn’t there? Some particular thing. I wonder what it was? I’ve got no idea. Have you got any theories?’

She laughed.

‘Well of course not! I don’t know you, do I? How could I possibly say?’

‘It’s just that you sounded as if you might have an idea.’

She looked away from him for a moment, a little absent-minded movement that he suddenly found intensely graceful and sweet (so now he
was
aware of sex). Then she shrugged and turned back to him.

‘Well really, seriously, how
could
I know? But it’s something to do with boundaries isn’t it? Something that makes boundaries important for you.’

Charles had thought they were just having a conversation, an ordinary get-to-know-you conversation like you were supposed to have at parties. But now, completely unexpectedly, he found himself in completely different territory. For he was badly shaken by what she’d said, badly enough for it to be obvious.

‘I… um… I’m not sure that…’

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to…’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said and promptly changed the subject, uttering some jagged banalities about turning thirty and how – help! – the next big leap after that would be forty and then they’d all be middle-aged. Then he mumbled something about finding a bit of food and hurried off, without the slightest idea what had unsettled him so much.

~*~

He left the party soon after. He felt he had messed up one conversation and he wasn’t in the mood to start another. He walked the four miles home. Helicopters with spotlights circled as usual over the distant Zones. Groups of Saturday evening revellers passed by. An ambulance rushed whooping up Blackboy Hill.

He walked through the streets of Redland. The solid bourgeois houses were mostly wrapped up for the night, their curtains drawn tightly closed with only a glow round the edges to suggest the life within, but here and there he caught glimpses of book-lined living rooms, or families gathered in the flickering light of TV, or solitary figures frowning at computer screens. Gusts of wind rustled the few remaining leaves on trees overhead, a light rain fell, water trickled into gutters.

These were once open hills, Charles thought to himself as he came down from Redland onto the Gloucester Road. There would once have been a river running along here with rivulets and streams flowing down into it from the slopes on either side, where there were now just roads and houses.

Then it struck him that of course the rain still fell, the water still had to go somewhere, and the rivers and streams must therefore still be there. It was just that they were hidden away now and people didn’t call them rivers any more but drains and sewers and conduits. He remembered reading that a really quite substantial river, the River Frome, was buried under the city centre and flowed in darkness beneath the busy streets.

Presently he reached his front door, and climbed up the stairs to his austere little flat with its stripped floors and its walls hung only with mirrors. He switched on the lights and shut the night outside, and all around him his many reflections did the same.

He felt restless, agitated, as if something inside him was straining to get out.

~*~

A cold wind blew past the tall concrete TV mast on Lockleaze Hill and something rattled half way up it, some loose piece of metal up there being shoved around in the darkness by the restless air. At the top of the tower, a red light blinked and blinked and blinked, and trees swayed and sighed under the rain. But there was no one present to see any of this, no one to hear it, no one to feel the cold. The material world was all on its own, like the rocks on the surface of Mars.

And then suddenly four people were standing hand in hand beside the tower, blinking and gasping as if they’d emerged from under the sea, little droplets of sparkling light shimmering for a moment over their bodies and faces.

One of the four retched. Another began to weep. Another whooped with glee.

The city stretched out beneath them, and it was both familiar and completely new.

~*~

In the grounds of a boarding school in Dorset, three boys huddled round a torch in a small earth cave under the roots of a tree. It was a place where they came to smoke things and dream and imagine themselves in a world apart from the great redbrick pile on the hill above them, with its lessons, its rules, its boringly bourgeois expectations. They longed to be different. Outside in the darkness below them, rain fell into a river.

One of the boys opened a tobacco tin. In the torchlight its contents looked like half a dozen very small glass marbles.

‘Turn it off,’ instructed the boy who held the tin.

At once the tobacco tin became a tiny shrine, the spheres inside shining softly in the darkness with a lovely pure blue light.

‘They breed, you know,’ said the boy with the tin.

‘What do you mean they breed?’ asked the one holding the torch.

‘Exactly what I said. There are six seeds now, but look in here tomorrow and there might be seven or eight.’

‘Oh that
can’t
be true! That’s
got
to be one of those stories!’

‘Perhaps it’s
all
just a story,’ said the third boy, the quietest of the three, half-hoping this might really be so. ‘Perhaps they don’t do anything but shine.’

‘Well there’s one way to find out, isn’t there?’ said the first boy. ‘So are we going to do this? Or are we just going to sit here and talk?’

~*~

Cold white light shone from shop windows in an empty street in Swindon. It was three in the morning. Nothing was moving and complete silence reigned. A young girl huddled in the doorway of a TV shop. Beneath her black hood, she was inconsequential, almost invisible, in comparison to the sequence of bright images that paraded behind her across the screens: a fighter plane, a reporter, a game show host in a purple tie…

Two police officers appeared on the corner, a man and a woman, and started walking slowly down the street. The girl glanced in their direction, cursed, half stood up, and then gave a gasp, a sharp little gasp as if of pain… and disappeared. The police officers hadn’t even noticed her, but when they reached the TV shop the policewoman stopped and pointed out an image on one of the screens.

‘Look! It’s that escaped puma I was telling you about,’ she said.

They looked in at the brightly-lit images flicking by: a field, a farmer, a big black cat, a reporter in Wellington boots…

There was nothing left of the girl in the black hood, no trace of her at all except for a slight electrical smell. They both noticed, but neither of them knew what it was, and it was too faint to be worthy of comment. Yet the lingering smell awoke in each of them a terrible, overwhelming sense of loss, and at the same time a feeling of vertigo, as if a pit had opened up in front of them and some idiot voice inside their heads was telling them to jump. But, since neither of them had any idea that the feeling was shared between them, they didn’t speak of it – that would just have sounded weird - and they turned from the window and moved on in silence down the street, each one secretly grief-stricken.

‘I sort of like the idea of there being a few dangerous animals on the loose,’ said the policeman, bravely, after a while. ‘Do you know what I mean? It just makes the world seem that little bit more exciting.’

The policewoman nodded.

‘I wish I
was
a wild animal on the loose,’ she said. ‘I wish I was a puma or something, not just some cop in bloody Swindon.’

‘I know what you mean,’ the policeman said.

They stopped and looked at each other. It was as if they could see each other’s thoughts. And for a moment each of them contemplated seizing hold of the other and engaging in brutal and noisy sex, right there in the middle of the road.

~*~

In Bristol, in Leigh Woods, on the southern side of the Avon Gorge, three young men and three young women stood in a semi-circle around a fire. Facing them were three older men, one a small, almost scholarly figure in glasses and a rumpled suit, one a large fat man with blond hair and soft eyes, the third a thin, cadaverous, vulpine creature, with wiry, supple limbs. Two of the young men were holding a baby goat, its feet tied together. They’d stolen it earlier that day from a petting zoo in Westbury-upon-Trym.

‘Go ahead,’ commanded the scholarly man.

The fat man took the kid from the boys, and pulled back its head to expose the neck. The cadaverous man produced a knife. Its bright blade flashed in the firelight. The goat went into spasm as the knife bit, bucking and writhing and spurting out blood, but the fat man held on tightly and the cadaverous man kept on sawing. On and on he sawed, through windpipe and sinew and bone, until the head was completely severed. Then he impaled it on a spiked stick in front of the fire.

The man in glasses nodded. He dipped two fingers in the blood still flowing from the stump of the animal’s neck and anointed the foreheads of each of the young men and women in turn. He called on Dunner the thunder god and Tew the god of war to give them courage. He called on two-faced Lok to teach them cunning and ruthlessness. He called on big-breasted Frija, and on Freja, who all men desire, to make the men virile and the women fecund. And he called on Dunner’s father, almighty Wod, to choose the women as his shield-maidens and to let the men die fighting, so that they would all come home to him at Valour-hall.

In the darkness beyond the firelight, rain dripped from the trees and, on the far side of the river, a single car with a broken silencer accelerated noisily along the Parkway that ran along the bottom of the gorge.

The fat man opened a large cool-box and passed round cans of beer. The skull-faced man cut pieces of meat from the body of the kid and stuck them on sticks to be scalded in the fire. The meat was still warm, still trembling even, as if the goat’s terror had migrated somehow to every part of its body.

‘Eat and drink,’ said the scholarly man. ‘Eat and drink as you’ll eat and drink one day in Valour-Hall. And then listen for the voices. As soon as you hear them, join hands quickly and wait for the Tree to claim you.’

The young men and the young women ate the meat and drank the beer, talking and laughing loudly, making the weak and over-hearty jokes of people who are trying to cover up their fear.

‘Can you hear it yet?’ asked the fat man after a while.

No, they said, they couldn’t hear anything.

Another car swished down the Parkway towards Avonmouth and the sea.

‘Any voices now?’ asked the skull-faced man after some more time had gone by.

None, they said. The man with the suit smiled thinly.

‘There are, you know,’ he said. ‘You just need to be quiet and listen.’

Reluctantly, they stopped talking and let the silence in. For a moment they just heard the rain, the wind, another unseen car passing on the road on the far side of the gorge. And then the voices came, voices like their own, all around them, talking and laughing as they themselves had been doing only a few moments before.

‘Oh my God, it’s happening!’ cried out one of the women.

‘
It’s happening! It’s happening! It’s happening!
’ the voices repeated.

‘Hold hands!’ said a young man. ‘Hold hands quickly!’

‘
Hold hands!
Quickly quickly quickly.’

‘And now the Tree will take you!’ said the man in the suit.

He stood and watched, and the fat man squatted by the fire and watched, and the cadaverous man leaned on a tree trunk and watched, with the red fire glow in his face, until, all in the same instant, the six young people were gone. The flames guttered and flared as the air rushed into the vacant space.

~*~

Meanwhile, in warmth and electric light, Charles stood in front of the large round frameless mirror that hung over the mantelpiece in his tiny living room. Over the shoulder of his own image looking out at him, he saw the reflection of the back of his head in another mirror on the far side of the room, the back of a head that was itself looking into another mirror and seeing another version of his face. On each side of him still more reflections confronted themselves in still more mirrors, and reflections of mirrors, and reflections of reflections of mirrors, so it was as if he occupied an entire universe consisting only of endless iterations of himself.

And he had a sense of recursion not only in space but also in time. He saw his past selves too, stretching back and back over the years until they reached a small boy alone in a house, his face pressed against the glass, trying to find something new inside the mirror, something that wasn’t simply a copy of the empty grey room and his solitary self.

He had the thought that maybe all the people in the world, all the people in
all
the worlds, had only ever been a single small solitary being, peering into a maze of mirrors.

At quarter to nine on Monday morning, Charles parked his car outside a glassy office unit on an industrial estate near the intersection of the two motorways known in that universe, and in many others, as the M4 and the M5. The office unit was called Britannia House, and the Immigration Service was sandwiched in there between a carrier bag factory and a company that imported mobile phone components from China. His office was open plan. It had a green fitted carpet, white roof tiles and pine desks, forty in all, partitioned off from each other with Perspex screens, each one with its own flat screen monitor and its own desk lamp. In the room as a whole two thirds of the desks were occupied, but in the part of the room where Charles’ own section was accommodated – it was known as the Special Cases Unit – seven out of the eight desks were empty. Only Fran Stevens, a handsome, smartly dressed woman in her late forties, sat typing at her keyboard.

‘Where’s everyone?’ he asked as he put down his briefcase in the cubicle adjoining hers.