Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (8 page)

There was a knock on the door.

‘I’ll have to get back to you later,’ Charles said, as he rose to greet Jazmine Bright. ‘Just see what you can do, okay?’

~*~

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

Charles couldn’t place her straight away. He recognised her alright: those slightly African features and the hair tied up in little bows. He knew she
meant
something to him too. He knew she was associated in his mind with feelings both bitter and sweet. But just for a second, immersed and preoccupied as he was in what was happening here, he couldn’t find the context.

‘But you said you were an immigration officer!’ she protested.

Of course! Susan’s party! And
Jazamine
was that hard-to-remember name.

‘Well I
am
an immigration officer. It’s just that I’ve moved on from dealing with the national boundary, to…’

‘…to guarding the universe itself,’ she interrupted. ‘Wow!’

She had seen right through him! That was how Charles felt. She’d taken one look at him and summed him up. He thought of the silly, adolescent, self-dramatising thing he’d written that night after getting home from the party – what had he called it?
Marcher
– and he swore to himself that he’d destroy it as soon as he got home. Out loud, though, he defended his ground.

‘Well, it’s important. Imagine if everyone could escape at will from the consequences of their actions.’

She smiled, amused by his intensity. It was a reaction he frequently encountered. Most of the world, it seemed to him, was in denial about the fact that shifters really existed. The remainder – and this included even the other members of his own Section - was in denial about the implications.

‘I think Tammy’s main problem was having to deal with the consequences of
other
people’s actions,’ Jazamine said.

‘Yes, Mr Burkitt did say she was the child of a rape. And that she’d been abused. And he said he felt that the system had let her down by returning her to her mother when she was small.’

‘Yes, it did. Not that it’s possible to make the right decision every time, mind you. None of us can do that. We can’t read the future.’

‘Well no,’ Charles said, ‘and there isn’t one future anyway. The future is millions of alternatives.’

‘Well of course. That’s why it’s impossible to know in advance.’

He was surprised by this answer. Not many people accepted so readily the principle of the Great Tree.

‘The child of a rape,’ he mused. ‘Imagine. Your very existence the result of a transgression.’

‘
Transgression
?’ said Jazamine with a smile. ‘That’s a very old-fashioned word!’

‘I think it just means
crossing over
. Crossing over a boundary.’

‘Yes,’ she said, a little tartly. ‘I know what it means.’

Well done Charles
, he thought,
you’ve been pompous and patronising already and she’s only been in the room for about a minute.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you’re right, there is something irresolvable about knowing that your existence is the result of a crime…’

She told him a bit more of the history. It seemed that Tammy had often made threats to disappear.

‘But the thing is,’ Jazamine said, ‘up to now when she’s made these threats, she’s never gone any further than empty garages and places like that. She just holes up for a night or two until she gets picked up by the police, or until she gets fed up and returns of her own accord.’

‘I see. So you assumed this was the same kind of thing. Can you tell me what exactly happened this morning?’

Jazamine told him about picking Tammy up from Sarah Ripping’s, the conversation in the car, the abandoned plan for a burger and Tammy’s parting shot as Jazamine dropped her off outside the Unit.

‘The bit I do feel badly about,’ she said, ‘is that Tammy did
want
to go for a burger with me. She can’t admit to wanting anything from anyone, of course. She can’t really admit that she likes anyone, not even to herself. But really she
did
want to have a burger with me, whatever she might have said, and I knew it. And I suppose if I hadn’t been so cross with her I would have gone ahead and taken her for one. And then maybe…’

She made an impatient gesture of dismissal with her hand. Charles remembered how much he liked the way she moved.

‘But there’s no point thinking like that, is there?’ she said. ‘There’s always a what-might-have-happened.’

He nodded.

‘What-might-have-happened. I suppose you could say that’s where the shifters come from. And the place they go.’

She considered this for a moment, frowning, then gave an abrupt little nod.

‘What the
agency
is pissed off with me about, though,’ she went on, ‘is that I dropped her off outside the Unit and didn’t check her in with a member of staff. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you see. And now it’s all got to be looked into and a decision made by my bosses as to whether I get sacked, or a written reprimand on my file, or just a verbal warning. The fact is that it’s an open unit and kids can go out whenever they want. But…’

Jazamine broke off with a shrug.

‘Well, never mind. The worst that can happen is that I lose this lousy job.’

She pushed a large pile of manila folders across the desk.

‘These are Tammy’s files. Val tells me you may need to see them.’

There were twelve of them at least. Tammy’s fifteen years of life must have taken up an entire drawer of a filing cabinet.

‘This is the most recent one,’ she said. ‘There’s some photos of Tammy in it, look. A really beautiful girl, don’t you think? Filmstar beautiful.’

But right at that moment, Charles was noticing Jazamine. She had a delightful forthrightness about her, and there was none of that cowed, cringing quality that he had so detested in her fellow-deskies up in Janet Richards’ office.

‘Thanks, I’ll have a look at them. I’ll probably need to talk to the staff at the residential unit as well. And the therapist too.’

He looked down at the picture. Tammy
was
beautiful, but he now realised that she was also familiar.

‘Oh! I saw her this morning! With an Asian woman, a rather large…’

‘Oh yes, that’d be Rita Fernandez from the Unit.’

‘I’ll need to talk to Rita then.’

Charles remembered the feeling he’d had that morning when he’d seen Tammy with Rita, the sense of an approaching void. And now, quite suddenly, it felt as if the void was all around him: that emptiness, that feeling of vertigo and dread.

Jazamine was watching him with a puzzled frown.

‘So is that all you need from me?’ she asked.

He told her yes, for the moment, and she stood up.

‘Do you really believe in shifters and all that?’ she suddenly asked. ‘Isn’t it just a theory? Isn’t it more likely that Tammy is just off her head as usual in some empty garage somewhere and this is all just a great big wind-up?’

‘Officially yes, it is just a theory. But… well, I’ve actually seen people do a shift, right in front of my eyes. It’s happened to me a couple of times: people standing or sitting no further away from me than you are and then them just vanishing. You can hear the air rush into the vacuum where they’ve been, you can even feel it, and there’s nothing left of them but a sort of burnt electrical smell, and a… well a
feeling
, the feeling that shifters call
fizz
. It’s a bit like vertigo, like a weird kind of all-embracing vertigo, and at the same time it’s like... It’s like a kind of grief. I know I can’t prove that those people who disappeared in front of me went to another universe, but they certainly vanished, and no one has come up with an alternative story that’s any easier to believe.’

‘And people don’t come back?’

‘It seems not.’

‘So it’s as if she’s died in a way? Died to us in any case.’

‘To us, perhaps. But she hasn’t really died. Not only is she still alive, but she’s alive in this place and this point in time. It’s just that we can’t reach her.’

Jazamine took hold of the door handle but didn’t turn it

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘when I said that thing earlier about you guarding the universe, it probably sounded very sarcastic. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I was just upset for Tammy. I don’t like to think of her all alone in some other… in some other place. I mean she’s
always
been alone really and she’s probably got far more of the skills to cope in a situation like that than you or me. But I still feel wretched for her… Plus I’m a bit spooked by the whole business if I’m honest. Which I guess you must get a lot of? Probably it even spooks you sometimes doesn’t it?’

‘Well… I’m used to it in a way. But yes, I’m like most people. I would prefer to think there was just one world.’

‘Just one world? I’m not sure I care how many worlds there are. It’s the thought of people disappearing from this one that freaks me out. But anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I didn’t mean to be rude, specially when I upset you at the party as well. I wouldn’t want you to think I had something against you because I really haven’t. You seem very nice. I like it that you’re passionate about what you do.’

Charles smiled.

‘Actually I found it very interesting what you asked me at the party. About why I do this job, I mean. Interesting and, well, sort of instructive. I wasn’t so much upset as…’

He stopped, shook his head, and laughed.

‘Who am I kidding? I
was
upset, as you could obviously tell. But I found it interesting that I was. You gave me something to think about.’

‘Oh, well, good.’ Jazamine hesitated. ‘You don’t… um… fancy meeting up sometime, socially I mean, for a drink or something?’

‘Well, I’d like to but I’m not really supposed to… to socialise with…’

‘…people who are involved in your investigations? I see. Another boundary, eh? Another transgression to be avoided?’

Her remorse about being sarcastic seemed to be remarkably short-lived.

‘Boundaries are important,’ Charles insisted, but it sounded lame and pedantic even to him.

‘So they are,’ she replied, ‘but they aren’t the
only
important thing. And some are surely more important than others.’

‘Well, yes. That is true.’ Charles suddenly smiled, as if just speaking these words had lifted some kind of burden. ‘And yes, I’d love to have a drink with you.’

They exchanged phone numbers and arranged to meet the following Friday and then she left, and Charles was on his own in the room, feeling slightly dazed. But he shook himself and turned his attention to the files.

She
was
a very pretty girl, this Tamsin Pendant, looking out at him from a photo taken on some institutional outing to the seaside. She was dazzling in fact. She looked sharp and ruthless too. She looked immensely powerful, even though she was so slight and so very young: powerful and dangerous and terribly vulnerable all at once.

It was odd. He’d never met her, he was twice her age, and she came from a completely different background to him, yet he felt a connection of some kind with her, an affinity. Once again he saw in his mind the empty field and the darkening sky, and he realised that this was what shifters called a
switch
: he was seeing it through her eyes, hearing the cold wind through her ears. And off in the distance he could just make out…

But there was another knock on the door.

It was Janet Richards.

‘Charles, I need to tell you that I’ve been in touch with your line manager, Roger Young,’ said the Executive Director. ‘It’s about this offer by Hassan to talk if we hand back the… um…
slip
. I do appreciate your reasons for not wanting to accede to this and Roger told me that the line you took was
entirely
consistent with your agency’s policy, so please don’t take this as criticism in any way, but I just felt we needed to do everything possible to find out about this “mischief” that Furnish and Hassan talked to you about. And if that means handing over some of this slip stuff, well I know it’s not ideal, but the upshot of my phone conversation with your Roger was that he agreed to authorise you to do so. In fact it’s his decision that you
should
do so. He said to ask you to give him a quick call to confirm this.’

‘I see.’

‘Um, I don’t want to rush you, but these two men have been in custody for several hours and Roger was telling me that they could well disappear at any moment if they swallowed seeds themselves when they were arrested. I think you told us that yourself, in fact. So perhaps you could make that call and then go straight down to the custody suite? I believe you took possession of the slip yourself, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes, it’s here in my bag.’

‘Dick Thomas has lined up a very experienced detective who will join you in interviewing Hassan. Could you just make that call please Mr Bowen?’

‘Okay,’ Charles said, very reluctantly. But just as he was picking up his phone,
her
phone rang.

‘Hello. Janet Richards… Oh. I see…’

She turned back to him.

‘It seems we’re too late,’ she said curtly. ‘The custody sergeant reports that both Hassan and Furnish have disappeared. What a pity. I know you were following your own rules, but I do wish that…’

She broke off.

‘The sergeant particularly asked if you could go down there to speak to him and the officers on duty there,’ she said. ‘I gather this has rather shaken them up.’

~*~

The sergeant and two PCs were waiting for Charles with almost childlike eagerness. They showed him the empty cells and watched while he went into each of them and stood there, sniffing the air.

The smell in them was unmistakable: that same burnt, electrical, ozone tang that he’d just been describing to Jazamine.

‘Yes, they’ve done a shift all right,’ Charles told them. ‘Don’t worry. There was absolutely nothing you or anyone could have done.’

He looked round at the stunned faces of the sergeant and the two young officers, but found it hard to feel sorry for them. Information about shifters was readily available after all, in the papers, on TV, on the internet. Why didn’t people prepare themselves? Why did they persist in imagining they’d never encounter the phenomenon themselves?