Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text by Chris Beckett Page A

into the dreamers, encountered terrifying demons, blew them to pieces, felt the deep surge of relief pouring directly into their lower brains, and put in more money. Young women put money into the fruit machines, felt the physiological arousal flowing out through their autonomic nervous systems, dropped in more coins. There was a smell of mediaeval ketchup and stale cooking fat. On the giant mediaeval TV screen the pornopop superstar Alissa Venus was performing the number one hit ‘Inside Me’, wearing a transparent dress and a white lace thong.
    Carl surveyed the scene. He registered three girls at a table near the door, three chunky, mumsy girls incongruously dressed in outfits almost as revealing as Alissa Venus’s. (Pornopop was the currently acceptable style for girls, the night-out style, just as the clown suit was the style for men, which you wore whether it suited you or not.) He looked through a mediaeval arch with its crossed plastic halberds, and checked out the pool room. He strolled over to the dreamer sets, maintaining an elaborate pose of nonchalance all the while though he didn’t feel at ease at all. An old, old anxiety gnawed away inside him as he looked round for some sort of niche for himself, some sort of grouping that would let him in or at least tolerate his presence. He bought himself a beer and went over to the three chunky girls.
    ‘You all right?’
    ‘Yeah we’re all right,’ they sighed.
    ‘Want to come over and play on the dreamers?’ Carl said, but he was too nervous to wait for an answer and pressed on without a pause. ‘Mind you, they’re shit these dreamers. I got a way better dreamer at home. Way better. Ten times better than this crap. My mate customised it, yeah? It does double-strength. You should feel the fear that baby can pump out, you should feel the fucking fear.’
    He watched the round pink faces of the chunky girls for a glimmer of interest, but found none.
    ‘Plus it’s great for synching, my dreamer. You should try it. Best synch on the fucking Meadows. Come over and try it, and you’ll see.’
    Synching was a craze that had taken off about a year previously. It involved two or more people plugging into a dreamer set with the polarities of one set of moodpads reversed so that it became a rudimentary transmitter. The other participants experienced whatever emotions were going on in the lower brain of the one wearing the reversed moodpad. It was widely used it as a prelude to sex.
    The girls looked at each other, stifling laughter.
    ‘In your dreams, mate,’ one of them said with a snort.
    Carl pressed on. He hadn’t seriously expected any of them to come back with him. All he was really aiming for was light-hearted banter. He just wasn’t getting it right.
    ‘Hear about that girl doing a shift over at North Rec?’ he asked.
    It was old news. The girls yawned.
    ‘Yeah, of course.’
    ‘Well guess what.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That Tammy Pendant. She’s only my fucking cousin!’
    ‘So what?’ said one of the girls.
    She looked at the others and they all tittered.
    ‘Well, I’m just saying…’
    But what was he just saying? What was his point? He had nothing else to add. The only purpose of his comment had been to claim a relationship with this temporarily famous person, in the hope that some of her visibility would rub off on him.
    ‘Come on, Janey,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘Come over and do some synching at my place, why don’t you? I promise you, it’s the best fucking dreamer on the Meadows.’
    ‘Fuck off, Carl,’ Janey said.
    ‘“Fuck off, Carl”,’ Carl mimicked back, trying to make a joke of it, but no one laughed.
    Presently he wandered over to the young boys over at the pool table with the vague idea of picking a fight.
    ‘You’re fucking crap, you know that? Give me that fucking cue, mate, and I’ll show you how to play pool.’
    No one answered. No one so much as looked at him.
    ‘That’s not how you do it,’ said Carl,