Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (14 page)

‘You’re joking, right?’

‘No, not at all. I could be
wrong
, I admit, but I’m not joking. It’s what I really think.’

‘Whew! Now that
is
weird.’

Jazamine picked up her cigarette lighter and turned it around in her hands, considering the implications.

‘So that’s another version of me out there? Is that what you’re saying? Another me who is just as real as this one? And that other me is
still
there somewhere, living her own life?’

‘Yes she is. Or so I think anyway. Just as real as you are and, up until very recently, actually one and the same person as you.’

‘That is
so
weird.’

Then she laughed.

‘The funny thing is that the other me is giving herself a hard time for not having stood up for Tammy’s wishes and not having fought against the stomach pump. And yet
this
me here is giving myself a hard time for not having prevented her from doing a shift. You can’t win, can you?’

Jazamine looked down at her lighter, then glanced up at Charles with a smile.

‘I guess there must be another Charles in that world too, yes? I wonder whether he and that other Jaz are having a drink together right now?’

Charles laughed.

‘That depends on whether she’s got one of the Charleses who decided to bend the rules when you asked him out, or one of the Charleses who decided to be a stickler and say no.’

Or one of the Charleses who decided to do a shift himself
, he added in his head.

~*~

‘You remember how you asked me why I do my job…?’ Charles said a little later

‘Yes. And I remember that you never answered!’

‘Well, I was just thinking. If you reckon it’s such an easy question, why don’t you tell me why you do yours?’

Jazamine picked up her cigarette lighter again and turned it about in her hands. She had rings on every finger, even on her thumbs, and, looking down at them, Charles suddenly thought there was nothing in the world more beautiful than a woman’s hands.

‘Well I’m sure it’s got something to do with the fact that I was adopted,’ she said.

‘Adopted? Like Tammy?’

‘No. Tammy
wasn’t
adopted, remember? She was placed for adoption but then Liz changed her mind at the last minute.’

‘In this world, anyway,’ Charles said.

‘What? Oh yes, I see what you mean. I can’t get my head around all this, Charles, but I do sometimes wonder how she would have turned out if she
had
been adopted. I mean she’s
very
bright. She could have done all kinds of things.’

‘She could have been the manager of an art gallery,’ he said.

‘Well, yes.’ Jaz frowned. ‘But why do you mention that in particular?’

‘I’ve no idea. It just came into my mind. So what’s it like, being adopted?’

‘Well, it’s different in each case I guess. It wasn’t terrible for me, but it wasn’t great either. My adoptive parents had decided to adopt because they thought they couldn’t have a baby of their own. But a year after they adopted me my mum fell pregnant and they had my sister Diane, who is much
less
like me than chalk is like cheese and
very
like Mum and Dad, and then after that my brother Dick came along, so I was definitely the odd one out. And then, well, they tried hard. They really tried to be fair. But somewhere inside I always knew that they felt differently about me than they did about their own flesh and blood. I could almost hear them guiltily thinking to themselves, “If only we’d waited another year we could have been a perfectly ordinary family without this annoying complication.” Not that they blamed anything on me. It’s just that it was an effort for all of us. Now I’ve left home it’s like we’ve all breathed a sigh of relief and gone our separate ways.’

She started making another cigarette.

‘So, to answer your question,’ she concluded. ‘I think I was drawn to the work I do because I identify with outsiders, kids like Tammy who don’t feel wanted. I think I wanted to grapple with all of that in some way, and this job gives me a means of doing that.’

She lit her cigarette and regarded Charles, narrowing her clever, playful eyes as she watched his face for signs of comprehension.

‘Mmm, yes, I see,’ he said slowly. ‘I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this.’

She laughed.

‘Rubbish! You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about!’

That was pretty much true. He didn’t really get it. He’d learnt to think about life and its decisions in a moral way, but never in a psychological one. He saw actions as being based on principles, or lack of principles, not on prior causes. But she seemed to find his bewilderment endearing, so he played it up.

‘Nope. Not a clue,’ he said

He suddenly felt extremely happy. What could be sweeter than being with someone who you like and are attracted to and who likes and is attracted to you, but at the very beginning, before ordinariness crept in, before the stage of giving it all names? When the touching began, he thought, and the kissing and the going to bed together and the saying ‘I love you’, that was actually a falling away, an attempt to compensate for the passing of this sweetness at the very beginning.

‘So,’ Jazamine persisted, ‘are you going to at least
try
and answer my question now?’

‘Well. Well I… Well actually I think I need a pee.’

~*~

The washbasins were in a white tiled alcove with mirrors around them. Charles had felt very cheerful out in the pub but now, as he washed his hands with no one around him but reflections of himself, his mood abruptly changed. Suddenly Jaz with her difficult questions and her directness, seemed dangerous and intrusive, and he wanted to go home, and draw the curtains and never see her again.

‘You’re exhausted,’ he told his reflection in the mirror. ‘You haven’t had a single night’s sleep of more than three hours in the whole of the last week. You’ve been working fifteen hour days. You’ve been dealing with frightened people. You’ve been contaminated by shifters. Every day you’ve had to stand on the very edge of the world and look down into the abyss. This is just stress and shifter contact. And she’s been under stress too. We’re both hyped up and it’s all a bit intense because of that.’

But a sense of dread stayed with him all the same. He had to make a conscious effort to turn away from the mirrors and step out from the safe anonymity of that white tiled alcove into the treacherous world outside.

~*~

Yet as soon as he returned to the warmth of the pub, and to the comforting babble of human voices, and to Jazamine, he felt warm and alive again. It was like passing between two different states of being.

‘Well, I have no idea if it’s got anything to do with why I chose this job,’ he said, ‘but both my parents died when I was a baby, and I was brought up by my unmarried great-aunt Tricia. I guess my experience was a little bit like yours. My aunt was a perfectly decent, conscientious woman but she was a bottled-up old thing, and parenting definitely wasn’t her vocation in life. She’d have very much preferred it if I wasn’t there.’

‘How did your parents die?’

‘It was a freak road accident. They were pushing me along in a buggy. Some idiot in a stolen car took a corner far too fast. He came up over the kerb and crushed the two of them against a wall. My parents died instantly, apparently, but the driver only ended up with a couple of broken ribs, and I wasn’t hurt at all. The buggy just rolled to a stop against a hedge, and I was found there quietly sleeping as if nothing had happened at all. That’s what I gathered from Aunt Tricia, anyway. She died a few years ago herself. ’

‘I feel like some air,’ Jaz said. ‘Shall we walk to another pub?’

~*~

On the corner of the street there was a patch of grass, with a bench, and a tree, and the glittering city stretched out beneath them. The two of them stopped to admire it.

‘It’s just a façade though, isn’t it?’ said Jazamine suddenly. ‘The suspension bridge, the gorge, the pretty terraces and hills. It seems such a nice friendly colourful place. Tourists come for miles to see it. And yet all the time, like a guilty secret, the people who pay the price for all this comfortable prosperity are hidden away out of sight in the Zones.’

‘Pay the price?’

‘Someone always has to be outside, surplus to requirements, so the rest of us can be secure and comfortable inside.’

He nodded.

‘I used to feel that way about the whole country, back in the days when I was doing ordinary immigration work. I heard some dreadful things - the hardships people had endured, the risks they’d taken to get here, the horrors they’d seen– and they often made me feel like we were living in some sort of cosseted nursery, a sort of Toytown, and that my job wasn’t just to keep those people out but to keep reality itself at bay.’

‘And now that you work with shifters?’

Charles gave a little snort of laughter.

‘Well now I don’t just
think
all this is unreal, I
know
it is. There are millions of Englands. Millions of yous, millions of mes, not to mention countless billions of other worlds which are very much like this one but where neither you nor I have ever existed and a whole different set of people are getting on with their lives. All this that we can see now is just a skin, just a thin and fragile membrane stretched out precariously across time.’

‘Maybe I just don’t have enough imagination,’ she said after a few seconds, ‘but I really can’t see why it matters so much if there are a lot of other worlds. I mean we’ve always known that there are billions of stars out there. It doesn’t make this planet any less real.’

‘Well you’re right, it’s not the
existence
of other timelines that’s the problem. It’s the fact that people move between them. They’re…’ Charles cast about for a way of saying it. ‘It’s like they’re tearing up the contract between us and time.’

‘The
contract
? I’m sorry, Charles, I don’t quite get that. I mean I can see it’s a problem when people commit crimes and disappear, but I’ve always assumed that the sort of people who become shifters are the same sort of people who do drugs: unhappy people who behave in a way that most of us wouldn’t even be tempted by. Horrible for them, a bit of nuisance for the rest of us, but no more than that. You make it sound like something much bigger, like some kind of… I don’t know, some kind of metaphysical threat, if that’s the right word, some kind of metaphysical threat to us all.’

Charles smiled.

‘Well, to be quite honest, you wouldn’t be the first one to tell me I’m a bit fixated on the whole business.’

Jazamine took his hand, and they looked out over the city for a while in silence. The truth was that at that moment even he couldn’t entirely see why he saw shifters as such a terrible danger to the world, and he knew this was because he was happy. When people were happy time didn’t matter. You could almost define happiness that way. It was when things were hard that people needed the faith that tied one minute to the next, like one of those human chains that rescuers make to get people out of floods or burning buildings. And shifters
broke
that faith.

He didn’t say all this though. He knew he’d come over as obsessed and over-earnest, and he didn’t want to spoil the moment.

‘One thing’s for certain,’ he said. ‘Shifters never really get the thing they’re looking for. They think they can run away from their problems and their mistakes, but the price they pay is… Well, I’ve never met one that was happy.’

‘But perhaps that’s because you’d have to be unhappy in the first place to want to do it? Like Tammy, for instance. She’s had more trouble in her fifteen years than ten people normally experience in an entire lifetime. You wouldn’t
believe
the things she’s been through. Shouldn’t we feel sorry for shifters rather than seeing them as a threat?’

‘But it isn’t just the shifters themselves who get hurt by what they do.’

Jaz laughed.

‘Charles. Why are we standing here getting cold and talking about your work?’

He laughed .

‘I don’t know. I certainly don’t
want
to talk about it.’

She turned to face him, taking both his hands in hers.

‘We’re both orphans in a way, aren’t we?’

Then they kissed. Just for a moment it seemed quite wonderful, as if in a dark, cold, hungry world, they had found a source of nourishment.

‘Oh Grandad, you don’t only get marsupials in
Australia
! You’re forgetting about the American opossum!’

On a Sunday morning, three weeks after Tammy disappeared, and one month before he was due to take early retirement, Cyril Burkitt went on an outing to Bristol Zoo with his daughter Sophie and her two boys. Adam, Sophie’s eleven-year-old, was a great authority on natural history and he recited a great many interesting facts as they walked round the cages.

‘Everyone knows that the cheetah is the fastest land animal Granddad, but I wonder if you know which is the slowest?’

The boy looked at his grandfather, realised he wasn’t listening, and answered his own question.

‘It’s the three-toed sloth of course!’

Cyril had retreated, as he so often did, into his own head. Sophie noticed this with distaste.

‘Come on, Dad!’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s try and enjoy this together, shall we? Look at these elephants here!’

Her temperament was as different from her father’s as the prosperous offices of her business consultancy in Bath were different from the hidden world of the Social Inclusion Zones.

‘They’re not
elephants
, Mum!’ said Adam in a shocked voice. ‘They’re
mammoths
!’

‘Mammoths?’

Cyril came alive at once, turning eagerly to watch the six gigantic animals being led past by their keepers. Of
course
they weren’t elephants! They were nearly twice the size! For no obvious reason his eyes filled with tears.

Embarrassed and a little repelled, Sophie turned away.

‘Did you know, Granddad, that the Bristol mammoths are 92% original mammoth genes, and only 8% elephant?’ said Adam, consulting the official zoo booklet. ‘The New York ones only average 80% and the Moscow ones 68%. That makes ours the most authentic mammoths in the world.’