Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text by Chris Beckett

stage.’
    Charles was appalled.
    ‘Surely you can’t hold Jazamine responsible for Tammy getting hold of slip? It wasn’t a locked unit, after all, and Tammy would have had opportunities every day to meet people who could get her some.’
    Janet Richards looked round at him sharply, her face a poker-player’s mask.
    ‘We are looking into her role, Mr Bowen. No judgement has been made as to responsibility. I’m sure your own agency has similar procedures in situations like this.’
    Mrs Wheeler, her eyes shining, looked from the Executive Director to Charles and back again, enjoying the rift that seemed to have opened up between the two officials and trying to understand it so that she could exploit it to the full.
    ‘Well she should be sacked,’ she said, ‘and other people should be sacked too. I don’t name any names, not yet, but I will, believe me, I will. It shouldn’t be allowed for a mother to be deprived of her daughter. That’s what I said to the people at the papers and they all agreed with me. They were very shocked I can tell you Mrs Richards. Very shocked indeed. And very interested too.’
    She stood up, smoothing down her skirt, though it still rode well above the lacy tops of the black stockings. Seeing Charles looking down, she archly caught his eye.
    ‘These deskies are all as bad as each other,’ she told Charles, shutting out Janet Richards completely. ‘They’re all useless, just like the man at the papers said, and I’m going to make sure that they pay for this. I don’t just want them sacked. I want them fucking punished , because it’s criminal what’s happened. And that’s not just me saying that either. It’s what the people at the papers said too.’
    She bent to pick up her little red plastic hand-bag from the table, deliberately doing so, Charles was convinced, in a way that would give him an opportunity to look up her skirt.
    ‘But you lot are all right,’ she told him, looking quickly round to see if he’d taken the opportunity. ‘Keep the Pakis out, I say, and the fucking Yanks. There’s way too many of them here already. I know your hands are tied but you lot are doing your best to keep England for us English people. And as for them shifters, stringing them up would be too good for them. Too good for them and, if you want my opinion,’ and here she gestured at Janet Richards, ‘too good for this lot too.’
    ~*~
    When Mrs Wheeler had finally gone, and he was alone in the office that had been set aside for him, Charles tried to call Jazamine, but there was only a recorded message:
    ‘I've gone away for a few days. If this is you, Charles, I’ll be back for our drink on Friday.’

Chapter 7
    On Friday night, in Thurston Meadows, Carl Bone went for a drink in the Old England, as he had done also on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. He was a stocky young man with thick, short, sturdy limbs, a round face, and large, gentle eyes. His fairish hair was done in spikes, with a shaven strip down each side of his head for fixing moodpads, and he wore loose red pedal pushers, a white shirt with large red polka dots, and shiny red boots. The ‘clown suit’, as it was called, was the standard outfit for young men in the Zones in that particular world at that particular time but somehow Carl didn’t quite manage to inhabit it. He’d lived all his life in Thurston Meadows and, apart from a couple of trips to Weston-super-Mare, had never ventured further from the Zone than the centre of Bristol, but he looked as if he’d have been much more comfortable in the country somewhere, milking cows, driving a tractor, trudging along a lane after a herd of sheep.
    The main bar of the Old England was meant to resemble a mediaeval banqueting hall. There were mediaeval maces and swords on the walls and mediaeval chairs shaped like thrones. There were even mediaeval dreamer sets and mediaeval dreamer-enhanced fruit machines humming and buzzing along the wall. Young men put money