Tom Graham: Blood, Bullets and Blue Stratos

‘Yes,’ said the man in the jacket. ‘It did feel like being a mad dead bloke in a coma. And I realized then I didn’t belong there after all. I belonged here, in 1973.’

‘But this ain’t 1973, boss,’ said Ray, staring flatly at him. ‘It ain’t nowhere.’

‘Hell, maybe,’ shrugged Chris.

‘Same thing,’ said Ray.

‘No,’ said the man. ‘No, that’s not true. I came back to 1973. I jumped off a rooftop in 2006, and I landed here — in ’73 — where I belong.’

‘You landed nowhere,’ said Ray. ‘Sorry, boss — you ballsed it up. You should’ve stayed in your own time. There’s nothing here for you — no life, no future. Still … Too late now. Too late.’

The man in the jacket seemed about to faint. He reached out to a desk for support, found it was as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke, stumbled, and fell against a broken wall.

‘He’s done his head in, Chris,’ said Ray, a grin just beginning to flicker beneath his moustache. ‘Must have been when he hit the ground.’

Chris nodded sadly. ‘Bumped his noodle. Concussion.’

‘And then some.’

‘Skull would have shattered like a vase.’

‘Brains all over the place.’

‘Scrambled eggs.’

‘Stewed tomatoes.’

Ray winced. ‘And his dear old mum called in to identify the scrapings.’

‘Bet that did her head in,’ Chris suggested.

Ray nodded, drawing deeply on his cigarette, narrowed eyes fixed on the man in the jacket. ‘Bet it did. Still — he reckons he did the right thing.’

‘I … I did the right thing,’ the man in the jacket said, straightening up and trying to sound as if he believed it. ‘I had to come back here … I had to.’

‘If you say so, boss,’ shrugged Chris.

‘It was important to come back. I–I know it was important …’

Ray laughed. ‘You know nowt. Not even your own name.’

‘I know who I am.’

‘Tell us then. Who are you? Eh? Go on.’

The man in the jacket opened his mouth, but was silent. Ray snorted with derision, and then Chris began laughing too. And, as they laughed, a cold wind moaned, and, like pillars of sand, the figures of Chris and Ray evaporated, along with the desks and filing cabinets.

‘Don’t you go!’ the man in the jacket cried out. ‘I know who I am!’

‘You ain’t no one, not any more,’ grinned Ray, and with that he and Chris were gone.

‘I know who I am!’ the man yelled into the empty room. ‘We were a team. There were you two, and me, and the woman over there … And a fella. A big fella. The boss. Our boss. The guv’nor. That’s it! He was our guv . And we were all coppers. You remember. You remember me . My name’s … Oh, for God’s sake, you remember my name, it’s … My bloody name is …’

He stuttered, stammered, then punched the air in fury. What the hell had happened to him? Why couldn’t he remember? Was his mind as smashed and broken as everything else round here?

Smashed … Broken …

As if reading his thoughts, the roofless walls about him groaned and shifted. Great cracks shot across the bare plaster like zigzags of lightning, filling the air with choking clouds of dust. Masonry began to topple and crash. Even the floor heaved and fractured.

Covering his mouth and nose with one hand, and wildly fending off the cascades of shattered brickwork coming down about him, the man in the leather jacket stumbled his way back into the bleak valley. Throwing himself clear, he turned and watched the shell of the police station crumple in on itself, like the brittle remains of an Egyptian mummy crumbling away on exposure to the air. In seconds, there was nothing standing — just another mound of rubble amid many, wreathed in an aura of concrete dust that began slowly to settle.

As the man in the leather jacket got back on his feet, there came an unearthly noise, very different from the crack and blast of collapsing masonry. It was a weird, scraping, groaning sound that instantly released a flood of memories in the man’s mind: teatime; waiting for the telly to warm up; a whirling tunnel of light; a terrifying theme tune that sounded like the scream of a killer robot; a sofa behind which he felt compelled to hide.

The man glanced anxiously about, then clambered frantically to the crest of a heap of twisted girders to get a wider view. A blue police box slowly materialized in the flat base of a valley amid the wreckage. The sound ceased, and for some moments the box sat silent and inert. Then the door opened, and a woman emerged — the woman, the woman whose face he could see in his mind’s eye but whose name had completely eluded him.

‘Annie …’ The man breathed, and his heart leapt at the sight of her. ‘Annie Cartwright …’

But she was not quite as he remembered her. Her dark hair had turned mousy blonde; she was dressed in a drab pinafore dress and dull, floral-pattern blouse the man was sure he had never seen her wear before. Why? Why had she made herself look like Jo Grant from some old episode of Doctor Who ?

‘Where are we?’ she said, speaking to somebody behind her. ‘Doctor?’

Like Annie, Jon Pertwee had changed too. The grey bouffant was the same, as was the velvet smoking jacket, ruffled shirt and floppy bowtie; but the gut was stouter, the chest more barrel-like, the stance more confrontational, the aftershave more potent. The hair and costume were the Doctor’s, but the man inside them was an altogether different animal.

The man in the leather jacket felt a sickening lurch of recognition. That was him, that was the fella — it was the guv.

‘What is this place, Doctor?’ Annie asked.

‘A chuffing shite-hole, luv,’ Doctor Hunt replied, scowling about at the bleak landscape. ‘Looks like I’m going to have reprogram the TARDIS’s intergalactic coordinator circuits with the toe of my size-twelve boot.’

‘We’re not staying, then?’

‘Not unless you fancy taking a slash in the gravel like a white-arsed collie. C’mon, luv — bounce your clout back in the box and get us a brew on the go.’

He smacked Annie’s backside as she disappeared back into the TARDIS, then jammed a half-smoked panatella into his gob as he took one last, unimpressed look around.

‘Gene!’ the man in the leather jacket cried out, the name coming to him in flash. ‘Gene Hunt! Guv. Wait. Don’t go.’

Gene sucked on the cigar, oblivious of the man’s cries.

‘Gene! Please! Don’t leave me here!’

Gene disappeared inside the TARDIS and slammed the door. A heartbeat later, the police box began to dematerialize.

‘No! Wait, Guv! It’s me! Don’t leave me here! We’re a team! We’re a team, you rotten bastard!’

Just before the TARDIS disappeared entirely, the doors opened enough to reveal Gene’s hand, two fingers flicking a ‘V’, before they and the blue police box evaporated entirely.

‘Don’t leave me here. I want to go home! ’

All at once he was struggling against something that smothered and suffocated him, and in the next moment he found himself caught up in tangled bed sheets, his face sunk deep into a sweat-soaked pillow. He sat up, getting his breath back, and glared about him, momentarily shocked to find that the wasteland of rubble had been replaced with the familiar surroundings of his flat: beige and brown wallpaper, flower-patterned lampshades, a huge black-and-white TV with clunky buttons, a hot-water boiler that took forever to warm up. Beyond his nicotine-coloured curtains, a cold grey day was dawning over Manchester. From some distant street came the wail of a panda car. Somebody in a nearby flat was playing ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ on a tinny transistor radio.