Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Read Online Free PDF Page B

please.’
    ‘No Tammy, not yet. You’ve got another twenty minutes with me, I’m afraid. That was the deal, wasn’t it? That’s what you agreed to.’
    The therapist smiled slyly.
    ‘I say “I’m afraid”,’ she said, returning to her chair. ‘But actually it’s not me who’s afraid, is it? It’s you. And I wonder if you know what it is you’re afraid of? Is it that you are afraid of being with me? Or is it perhaps…’
    She paused.
    ‘Or is it perhaps…’
    ‘Oh is it perhaps that I’m afraid of being with myself?’ Tammy finished her line for her in a rude hard voice: she had been sent to so many bloody therapists, and sat in so many beige-coloured rooms. But Mrs Ripping came scuttling back over like an excited crab:
    ‘Well done, Tammy. Oh well, well, done . That wasn’t easy I can see. That wasn’t easy at all. But that’s the hard part. If you can just hold onto that we’re halfway there.’
    She tried to take Tammy’s hand again, but Tammy wouldn’t yield it. Again Mrs Ripping laughed.
    ‘ Now where are you running off to, Tammy?’ she sang out. ‘Come back why don’t you? It’s safe here. It’s absolutely safe. I promise I’ll catch you if you fall!’
    Tammy couldn’t imagine how anyone would want to let their mind come to rest in this dreary room with its therapist sea shells, its therapist pot-pourri, its therapist clock coldly counting out the 3,600 seconds, one by one, that Mrs Ripping had been contracted to provide.
    She decided to turn her attention to the shifter, Slug. He was her project at the moment. He was the focus of her steely will. And he opened up much more interesting possibilities than anything she would find in here.
    ~*~
    She’d met Slug in the Old England, one of the three pubs on the Meadows Zone. She was coming out of the toilet there when he’d come sidling up to her and whispered in her ear, a greasy little Scotsman with a lank ponytail and black teeth.
    ‘I’m a shifter I am,’ he’d said.
    ‘Yeah, and I’m from fucking Venus.’
    ‘No, darling. I’m no’ bullshitting or nothing. Come wi’ me and I’ll prove it to ye.’
    Reluctantly she went with him to a corner where it was quiet and he took out a crumpled envelope from the inside pocket of his grimy jacket. There was an ID card in it with his picture on it. It had a bar code and a chip and a government logo, but it was nothing like the ID cards that Tammy knew, whether the red-striped cards issued to people in the Zones or the plain white ones used in the outside world. The logo was different and so were the font and the name of the agency printed on the top.
    She studied the writing on the card.
    ‘Steven? Is that your name?’
    ‘Aye, but everyone calls me Slug.’
    This made her laugh.
    ‘No’ like the wee animal!’ he added hastily. ‘It’s a word for a bullet. A slug o’ lead. Fuckin’ deadly.’
    ‘Like a bullet,’ Tammy repeated sceptically, for the wee animal seemed much more apt to her, the slimy wee animal that lived under stones.
    ‘Aye, and how about this then?’ asked Slug.
    He showed her a page from a newspaper with a picture of ‘the Prime Minister’ in it, though it wasn’t any prime minister Tammy had ever seen, and then some funny coins that were apparently British but were unlike any that existed in Tammy’s world, and finally a scrunched up TV guide which had a recent date but talked about programmes and channels that Tammy had never heard of. Even the channels that were familiar, like BBC 1, had different logos and unfamiliar schedules.
    For a few minutes, the Scotsman watched her handle these things, enjoying the power they had over her and the power they lent to him. Then, after checking that no one else was near, he produced a crumpled ball of silver foil and opened it up to reveal a single little shiny sphere.
    ‘That’s what we call a “seed”, sweetheart,’ he said, holding it in the shadow of a table so she could see how it smouldered with a