Life on Mars: Borstal Slags

Just across from them was Phyllis, all made up and kitted out in her finest glad rags, but looking as scowly faced and unimpressed as ever. She shot Sam a sour look that said a girl like that – settling for a no-good little ’Erbert like you.

‘Give me a break guys,’ Sam whispered to himself, emerging from his fantasy and taking another swig of beer. Then he settled back again, let sleep tug at his eyelids and the emanations from the TV wash over him like a lullaby.

INT: GRACE BROTHER’S DEPARTMENT STORE – DAY

With her bright orange hair and thick multi-coloured make-up, Mrs Slocombe folds her arms and looks disapproving.

MRS SLOCOMBE: That new girl who’s started – Miss Belfridge, she calls herself. Nothing but a floozy! She’s in line for a promotion already, and all because she wiggles her hips and flutters her eyelashes!

Captain Peacock looks at her across the top of his glasses.

CAPTAIN PEACOCK: Do you feel ready for a promotion, Mrs Slocombe?

MRS SLOCOMBE: I do! I’m totally up for it, Mr Peacock! If only someone would give me one!

CAPTAIN PEACOCK: If I had the power, Mrs Slocombe, I’d happily give you one right now.

Mrs Slocombe simpers and pats her orange hair.

Nearby, Mr Spooner and Mr Humphreys overhear their conversation.

MR SPOONER: Promotion? Personally, I’m not much interested in climbing the corporate ladder. What about you, Mr Humphreys? Would you rather be on top?

MR HUMPHREYS: Ooh, I’m quite happy near the bottom.

The TV burbled on.

Slipping back into his wedding fantasy, Sam tried to ignore the faces of his colleagues amid the pews. Damn it all, this was his dream! Those bastards had no right to gatecrash it!

He tried to fill his imagination with the image of Annie in her bridal gown. She looked – and how could she not? – wonderful. He allowed a pale aura of light to shimmer around her, a soft-focus haze that gave her an almost ethereal radiance. Subtly – perhaps a little tackily – he made her eyes glint alluringly beneath her veil as she turned to smile at him.

The priest stepped forward to read the wedding service. But Sam’s imagination decided on a cruel casting decision.

‘Oh no, not you!’

There was a panatela smouldering unashamedly in the priest’s gob. He tugged at his dog collar to loosen it, sniffed, glanced about, and reached under his cassock to flagrantly shepherd a wayward bollock.

‘Shall we crack on with and adjourn to the bar?’ grunted Father Hunt. ‘The padre is parched.’

‘You’re just bloody spoiling it, Guv. You’re always bloody spoiling it.’

INT: GRACE BROTHER’S DEPARTMENT STORE – EVENING

Later that evening, everyone’s working late.

Bald, jug-eared Mr Rumbold appears dressed in an overcoat and carrying an umbrella. With him is an extremely attractive young new employee, Miss Belfridge. Mr Rumbold is clearly excited by her company.

MR RUMBOLD: Since we’re finishing late tonight, I promised to accompany the lovely Miss Belfridge safely to her front door.

CAPTAIN PEACOCK: Isn’t that rather out of your way, Mr Rumbold? You don’t live anywhere near Miss Belfridge.

MR HUMPHREYS: I can give you a lift home, Miss Belfridge. I’ve got my mother’s motorbike and sidecar.

MISS BELFRIDGE: But Mr Humphreys, I thought you were completely the other way.

MR HUMPHREYS: (Purses his lips) That’s a wicked rumour.

Drifting on the outskirts of sleep, Sam tried to rearrange his fantasy. He blotted out Gene and Ray and the others and tried to replace them. But who with? He wanted to imagine Annie’s father proudly escorting his beautiful daughter up the aisle, but Sam had no image of the man.

I don’t really know anything about Annie’s father, he thought, sleepily sipping more beer, and sliding further into the warm bath of sleep. In fact, I don’t know much about her past life at all. Bits and pieces. She may have mentioned something about brothers. Are they in the Force too? Does she come from a police family? And what about her childhood, all those years before I met her?

He began to imagine old boyfriends she might have had over the years. There would have been no shortage of willing candidates. Spotty, callow-faced youths, trying to impress her at the disco, or deep-voice uniformed coppers with little intelligence and even less imagination, offering her a future of child-rearing and domestic servitude.

Sam felt waves of jealousy lap at the edge of his dozing mind. To think that he could so easily have missed his chance with Annie, that he might have lost her to some schoolyard boyfriend or dull-as-ditchwater lug in uniform. Just to imagine her with somebody else made his muscles tighten and his stomach clench.

But she’s not with somebody else – she’s with me. More or less. Pretty much. In a manner of speaking.

There was no husband, emerging from the shadows to reclaim his runaway bride. Whatever the Devil in the Dark may be, it was not Annie’s husband. It was impossible. It was unthinkable!

MR HUMPHREYS: Wait there, Miss Belfridge, while I get my motorcycle things. I stuck my helmet round the back.

CAPTAIN PEACOCK: Stuck it round the back, Mr Humphreys? I hope you haven’t put it anywhere that might cause a blockage.

MR HUMPHREYS: It’s only a small one, Captain Peacock. I could probably stick it anywhere and nobody would notice.

MRS SLOCOMBE: Well I hope you don’t try sticking it under my ladies’ counter, Mr Humphreys! I’d certainly notice! There’s no room down there to accommodate your helmet.

MR HUMPHREYS: Are you giving me backchat, you orange-haired bitch? Jesus Christ, you need to learn some bloody manners!

Since when did Quentin Tarantino start directing Are You Being Served?, Sam thought. He forced his eyes open and looked at the TV screen, and was disturbed to see Mr Humphreys stride furiously across to Mrs Slocombe’s counter and lay into her with both fists. As Mrs Slocombe went down, curling into a foetal position, Mr Humphreys slammed his foot into her, over and over again, aiming kicks at her back, her legs, her head.

MR HUMPHREYS: Still feel like showing me up in front of people, do you? I can’t hear you, you cheap little bitch! Do you still feel like showing me up! Answer me, you filthy whore!

I don’t remember this episode, Sam thought dopily. I must be dreaming. This can’t be real – this must all be some sort of—

‘No, Sam – it’s very real,’ said a horribly familiar voice. The Test Card Girl was standing right beside his chair, clutching her blank-eyed dolly. ‘Can’t you see who the lady is – the one lying on the ground, being hurt?’

His voice thick and slow with sleep, Sam muttered, ‘It’s Mrs Slocombe.’

‘Is it, Sam? Or is it really somebody else …?’

Forcing his eyelids apart, Sam peered at the screen. Mr Humphreys – not that it looked at all like Mr Humphreys any more – was still kicking the hell out of a woman on the ground. But, where there had been orange hair and a frilly blouse and frumpy shoes, there was a much younger woman, with dark hair and a paisley-pattern one-piece jumpsuit and platform boots.

‘I – can’t see her face …’ Sam slurred sleepily.

‘She keeps it covered when he beats her,’ the Test Card Girl said. ‘But you don’t need to see her face to know who she is. Come on, Sam – you’re asleep, but you’re still a policeman. Work it out. The answer’s obvious.’

Sam felt ice run through his veins. Sleep fell away. He sat bolt upright, fully awake, fully alert.

‘Make it stop,’ he ordered.

‘You can’t change the past, Sam,’ the Girl said.

On the screen, the appalling beating continued.

‘I said make it stop!’

The Test Card Girl gently touched Sam’s sleeve, as if to console him. ‘He’s a horrid man, isn’t he. She should never have married him.’

Sam leapt to his feet, crazily lunging at the TV set to save the girl on the floor. He’d grab that evil, bullying bastard – he’d grab him and give him a beating – the biggest damned beating of his life! He’d batter him to a pulp! He’d stamp him into the ground! He’d kill him! He would really kill him!

But all at once, Sam found himself standing alone, in silence. Wherever he was, it wasn’t his flat. He looked about him, saw drab, brown walls and a set of flimsy and quite obviously fake lift doors. To either side of him stood a couple of small shop counters with an array of suits and trousers behind one of them, a selection of ladies’ undergarments behind the other.

‘It’s Grace Brothers …’ Sam muttered in disbelief. ‘I’m actually in Grace Brothers.’

It was as rickety and unconvincing in reality as it looked on TV. A cheap set, pieced together and dressed courtesy of the BBC scenery department.

‘Just a set,’ Sam said to himself. ‘A set – with three walls …’

He turned slowly towards the non-existent fourth wall. What would he see? An array of huge old BBC cameras, and the seats for the studio audience behind them? Or would there actually be another wall there, enclosing him, sealing him in?

Sam turned – and gasped. There was no fourth wall, but neither were there cameras or an auditorium. Instead, there was the universe. Stars – billions of them – swirling slowly and breathtakingly around the luminous hub of the galaxy.

The Test Card Girl appeared beside him and took his hand. Her skin was warm. Surprisingly warm. Together, she and Sam looked out across the glittering cosmos.

‘Makes you feel very small, doesn’t it?’ the little girl said. ‘A single life can’t mater all that much, can it, Sam – not compared to all this?’

‘It matters,’ said Sam softly.

‘The woman you saw being beaten, Sam – you know who she is.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you love her.’

‘Yes.’

‘But she doesn’t matter, Sam. Look at all these stars. Too many to count. And what you can see is only a fraction of the whole. The woman you love is less than a grain of sand in the desert.’

‘She matters.’

‘But how?’

‘Because …’ Sam tried to think. He was just a copper, not a philosopher, not a poet. He was out of his depth. And the glittering panorama of stars and galaxies was making his head spin. ‘She matters because she matters.’

‘That’s no answer, Sam.’

Sam freed his hand from hers and looked about him. He turned from the vastness of the universe to the confines of a bawdy seventies sitcom, and then back again. He couldn’t help himself – he just had to laugh.

‘Okay,’ he said, forcing himself to get his head around things. ‘Grace Brothers on one side, Infinity on the other. Very good. Excellent. Well done. Now – please – what the hell are you trying to tell me with all this?’

He planted himself squarely in front of the Test Card Girl and fixed her with a mocking, confrontational look.

‘Spit it out. You’re my resident Sigmund Freud. Let’s have it. What the hell does all this represent?’

The Girl looked up at him, and her eyes went cold. She said flatly, ‘It represents the System.’

‘What system? The solar system?’

‘No, no. The System you’re trapped in.’

She used her dolly’s hand to indicate the TV set, with its fake walls and prop dressing.

‘It’s not real, Sam, but even so you still can’t escape it. These make-believe walls enclose you. They confine you – and they define you.’

‘I – don’t understand.’

‘You think you can escape the System, Sam, but you can’t. You can run around, kid yourself, score a few petty victories, tell yourself that you’ll win in the end – but it’s not so. Everything is fixed, set in place, unchangeable – like all those stars out there. You can more easily rearrange the universe, Sam, than alter the fate that awaits you – you and Annie.’

Sam took a step away from her and clenched his fists. ‘I’m not accepting that.’

‘There is a terrible power coming after Annie. It is linked to her, Sam. It is married to her.’

‘No.’

‘It was married to her in life and it’s still married to her now it’s dead.’

‘None of this is true.’

‘It’s coming for her, Sam, and it will find her, and it will drag her down to somewhere very, very unpleasant. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It’s the System, Sam. It’s all set. You can’t change it.’

‘You’re showing me dreams! It’s nothing! Pictures in my head! I know where I am. Right now, right now, I know exactly where I am! At home. Asleep. In a chair. With Are You Being Served? on the telly. Everything is normal! Whereas all this crap you’re showing me here’ – he angrily swept his hand to indicate the stars and the stage set about him – ‘all this bullshit, it’s just loony pictures you keep putting in my head!’

The Test Card Girl shook her head slowly, with mock sadness, and said, ‘I’ll tell you where you are, Sam – where you really are. You’re lying in a coffin, six feet down in a Manchester graveyard.’

‘That’s the future!’ Sam retorted. ‘That’s thirty years from now!’

‘You’re rotting, Sam. You glimpsed it yourself, remember? In the ghost train, in Terry Barnard’s fairground?’

Sam froze.

‘Tell me what you saw there, Sam.’

‘I saw …’ he said, and he found himself trying to swallow hard in a dry throat. ‘I saw something. I saw whatever it is that’s after us, that’s after Annie …’

‘Did you? Or did you just see yourself?’ the Test Card Girl asked. ‘You’re a mouldering corpse, Sam. The worms have got into you. They’re eating you from within. Your eyes are already gone. They’re just two holes now, filled with maggots.’

‘It wasn’t me I saw, it was that devil out there!’ Sam howled. ‘I am alive! The here and now is 1973, and in 1973 I am alive!’

‘No, Sam. You’re dead. You’re dead, and you’re lost – not in one place, not in another – somewhere in-between—’

‘I am alive!’

‘You’re fooling yourself, Sam.’

‘If I am, then I’m happy with that! I came back here by choice. I came back here because I want to be here. I came back here for colour, and feeling – and Annie. I came back here for life. I don’t understand what it all means, and I don’t want to understand. I just want to live my life.’

‘You have no life, Sam. And neither does your beloved Annie. Or that horrid man you work for, the one who smells of ciggies and is always shouting. Or any of you.’

‘Bullshit! They’re all alive! Of course they’re alive! And as for me, I’m more alive than I’ve ever been!’

‘If you’re all so alive, Sam, then what are you all doing here? This isn’t a place for the living, Sam.’

Sam wanted to yell at this little brat to keep her lies to herself, but deep down he knew that she wasn’t lying at all. Indeed, he had long since suspected what she was telling him, though he had fought against the knowledge, suppressed it, blotted it out with his police work, with his clashes with Gene, with his feelings for Annie, with that constant internal mantra that said, I’m just a copper, not a philosopher – I’m just a copper, not a philosopher – I’m just a copper, not a—

‘You don’t need to be a philosopher to work it out, Sam,’ the Test Card Girl said. ‘A simple copper is more than able to see what’s what.’

‘I’m alive,’ Sam declared.

‘No, you’re dead.’

‘I’m alive, and so is Annie.’

‘She’s dead too. So’s your horrid boss man. So are your friends in CID. All dead, Sam. You know that. You won’t accept it, but you know it. Think about it, Sam. You know you’re dead – you remember – you remember jumping from that roof and falling—’

Sam turned away, shaking his head, but the girl’s voice would not stop.

‘You remember, Sam. The others, they don’t remember. They’ve been here too long. They should have moved on by now. And if you stay long enough, Sam, you’ll start forgetting too. You’ll forget you had a life before this one. You’ll become like them. Lost, Sam. Lost.’

There were tears in Sam’s eyes now. He dashed them furiously away, but more came. He was thinking of Annie, of the life she’d had before this one. Had she, like Sam, come from the future? Or had she come from a life even further back than 1973? And how had that life ended? How had she died?

‘You know how she died, Sam. It was a horrible death.’

‘Stop it.’

‘Painful. Nasty.’

‘I said stop it!’

‘And it wasn’t quick, Sam.’

‘I don’t want to be in this damned dream any more, you filthy little bitch!’

‘Awake, asleep, whatever.’ The girl shrugged. ‘And calling me names won’t help you, Sam. Look at that vast universe out there. You can’t just wish it away. What will happen to you, Sam? Do you think you can carry on like this for ever, drifting in the gaps between this world and that one? You all have to move on one day. You, and your guv’nor, and your little friends in CID, and Annie too.’

‘I’m not going anywhere! I’m staying here, in nineteen-bloody-seventy-bloody-three with Annie! I am staying! We are staying!’

‘You think so? You think that you’ll keep hold of your darling Annie when that thing drags itself out of the darkness and comes for her? Will you go with her to the horrid place he’ll take her to? Could you even find that place? And, if you did, what then? Oh, Sam, it’s all so complicated. So complicated – and so hopeless! Better to give up on it all.’

Sam’s thoughts were crashing about inside his mind like waves tormented by a storm. Tears were flooding down his face now. He looked for answers, comebacks, words of defiance, but all he could find was a numb, silent horror deep within him. He knew the girl was telling him the truth. He knew that whatever it was that was prowling through the darkness towards his darling Annie was beyond his powers to defy. It would find her, it would drag her away – and there was nothing Sam could do to prevent it.

He felt small, cold fingers gently taking hold of his hand.

‘I can help you, Sam. I can make you fall asleep so that all this nastiness and confusion is forgotten. No pain, Sam, just rest. Hold onto my hand and I’ll lead to you to a place where you can go to sleep.’

‘I’m asleep already.’

‘Not deeply enough. Hold onto my hand.’

‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here. I’m staying with my Annie.’

‘You know that’s hopeless, Sam. Hold onto my hand. I’ll take you away. And whatever happens to Annie – well, Sam, you’ll never know. It’ll be better that way. Better not to know, not never ever ever. Hold onto my hand, Sam. Hold onto my hand.’

But Sam had had enough. His mind was reeling from all this vertiginous metaphysics. He thrust the Test Card Girl’s hand away and shoved past her, blundering into Mrs Slocombe’s display of ladies’ apparel. Comically huge brassieres and girdles fell across him. He dashed them aside and raced for the doors at the back of the set. Slamming into them, he felt them sag under his weight. They were just painted plywood, braced at the back and fixed down with stage weights. Sam battered at the doors, but they would not open. They shook and lurched and groaned and shuddered, but still they stood firm.

Sam hammered at them with all his strength. He began shouting. He was still shouting when he found himself face down on the floor of his flat in a pool of spilt brown ale, the TV grandly playing the national anthem and primly reminding him to please turn off his set.

CHAPTER FOUR: ANNIE CARTWRIGHT, GIRL DETECTIVE

Monday morning. Sam arrived at the grey, slablike building that housed CID. Reaching the concrete steps that led up to it, he paused, taking in the pale sky, the first rays of the sun, the high-up scraps of ragged grey cloud.

A normal sky. A normal Manchester morning.

He breathed in the air.

Car fumes – the whiff of distant cigarette smoke – normal, all so normal …

He patted a concrete wall.

Normal.

He patted himself, felt his body solid and real beneath his leather jacket and slacks.

Normal. Everything’s normal. If this is death, then death is normal. It’s just normal.

And permanent? Would all this seeming normality last? And if so, for how long?

That’s a question nobody can answer. Not knowing why you’re here, and how long you’ve got – not knowing the answers to the big questions is well, it’s just normal.

‘Situation normal,’ he said to himself. ‘Everything might have changed for me but, in some ways, nothing’s changed at all.’

The mantra started up in his head once again: I’m not a philosopher, I’m just a copper. I’m not a philosopher, I’m just a copper.

It blotted out the crazy dreams of the night before. It smothered Sam’s suspicion that nothing about him was real, that it was all just illusion. It muffled the ice-cold terror within him that awful things were going to happen, that horror and pain were just over the horizon, that hell itself was drawing near.

I’m just a copper. I’m just a simple copper. I do my job and nick the bad guys and keep my head down because I’m just an oh-so-simple copper.

Up in A-Division, Sam found all the desks empty, all the phones unmanned. Everybody – Chris, Ray, a motley assortment of blokes from the department, and even Annie – was clustered together on one side of the room. What had attracted them was a huge white contraption, about which a rep in a pinstriped suit fussed and tinkered.

‘What’s all this?’ Sam asked.

‘A new gadget, ordered in on trial,’ said Annie. And then, looking intently at him, she frowned and added, ‘You all right, Sam?’

‘Bad night’s sleep, that’s all,’ he smiled. Her eyes were bright and clear, her skin was gently flushed around the cheeks, her hair was glossy. Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all, seeing as she’s supposed to be dead.

I’m just a copper. I don’t understand these things. Annie’s alive. We’re all alive. That’ll do for me – and to hell with the crazy bloody nightmares!

‘They want to start sticking these new machines in the offices all over, Boss,’ put in Ray, speaking without taking the fag from his gob. ‘Not that the Guv’s too keen on it.’

He nodded towards Gene’s office, where the man himself was visible as a brooding, lurking shape behind frosted glass.

‘I’m sure your guv’nor will change his tune when he sees what this little beauty can do,’ said the rep. With a knowing smile, he pressed a button and the cumbersome device clanked and juddered, emitting a sudden sweep of light.

‘Look out Boss, the bloody Martians have landed!’ grinned Chris, turning to Sam.

‘Not Martians, sir,’ grinned the rep proudly. ‘The future.’

‘The future’s not always such a great place to be,’ put in Sam.

The rep turned that oily smile towards him: ‘Ahh – there speaks a man who’s stuck in the past. But let me see if I can bring you up to date, sir. Look.’

The machine slowly disgorged a sheet of paper that reeked of chemicals. The rep swept up the sheet and flourished it proudly.

‘See for yourselves, gentlemen, madam. Look at the quality of that reproduction. Pristine. Beautiful. Reliable. No more mucking about with messy old carbon paper or wasting time typing up duplicates. The Xerox 914 is the automated office secretary you’ve always dreamt of!’

‘She’s not the stuff of my dreams,’ sniggered Chris. ‘Secretaries are supposed to have – well, you know – a right ol’ set o’ melons.’