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

after the next shot. ‘A fucking baby could do better than that.’
    ‘Yeah right,’ muttered the player without looking round, and he dropped another ball neatly into a pocket.
    Carl lapsed into silence. After a while, when the boys seemed to have forgotten his presence altogether, he turned back through the mediaeval archway, bought another beer and a whisky chaser and began to play a dreamer game called Slaughterhouse , in which he had to defend himself with butcher’s cleavers against an onslaught of mutant minotaurs.
    The great advantage of dreamers over the videogames that they’d replaced was that emotional response was unavoidable. People could get used to provocative images, however lifelike, however high definition, but dreamers went straight to the ancient animal core. For the next forty-five minutes Carl spent about half a day’s money on severing necks and limbs, opening bellies and dodging gouts of arterial blood, and, though the game was repetitive, the sheer visceral excitement which the moodpads pumped into his brain stayed as sharp and pure as ever, helping to obliterate the hurt of his rejection by the chunky girls and the men at the pool table.
    Eventually Shane Wheeler and Derek Stigg came in and he gratefully attached himself to them. Shane, who wore green pedal pushers, green boots and a T-shirt with green polka dots, was a fat and very short bald man about five years older than Carl, who managed the Dreamer hire store in the Zone’s shopping centre and maintained friendly relations with everyone. Derek, a tiny man with a face ravaged by eczema, was his assistant.
    ‘Has Kylie dumped you or what, Carl?’ Shane asked him after they’d all got drinks. ‘Only when I asked her she said she didn’t never want to see you no more.’
    ‘She dumped me ?’ Carl scoffed. ‘No way! I dumped her , mate. I fucking dumped her. She was doing my fucking head in, wasn’t she? Mind you, I blame the fucking deskies. I mean they took her kid off her, didn’t they? And she went fucking mental.’
    ‘I thought you were pleased they done that, Carl,’ said Derek, who wore black pedal pushers and a chequered shirt. ‘You said Kylie didn’t give a fuck about that kid and you wouldn’t treat a dog like she treated him! Plus you said he was a whinging little git and now he was out of the way it’d be all day in bed with Kylie and no distractions.’
    ‘Yeah, but she was crying and yelling and threatening to fucking top herself, wasn’t she? Plus she was up and down the fucking deskie office every fucking day and she didn’t want fucking sex no more or nothing. So I moved back with my mum didn’t I? Which then Kylie did try to top herself and her mum said it was down to me but it wasn’t. It was the fucking deskies. It’s down to them.’
    ‘Hear about that kid who did that disappearing act down at North Rec?’ asked Shane after a while.
    Carl seized his moment.
    ‘I’ll tell you something mate,’ he said eagerly. ‘That was Tammy Pendant, that was. She’s only my fucking cousin, yeah? She’s only…’
    ‘Hey look,’ interrupted Derek. ‘It’s that skull geezer again.’
    ~*~
    A thin and cadaverous man had just walked in. He was skeletal, yet not skeletal in a way that suggested weakness. He was stripped down, lean, a parchment-like layer of yellow skin stretched tightly across his fierce skull, and every movement he made suggested immense physical power.
    ‘Who the fuck is he?’ Derek said.
    The man’s grey-blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he wore wraparound dark glasses, so all that could be seen of his eyes was a faint gleam as he surveyed the room coolly, taking in the scene at his leisure. It had happened a few times lately: he’d come in, he’d surveyed the room, and then he’d left again without speaking to anyone.
    ‘I wouldn’t want to mess with that guy,’ Shane said.
    The Old England was not a gentle place – a fight broke out there almost every night –