Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (21 page)

‘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 perfectly 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.

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.

‘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.’