Tom Graham - Life on Mars - Borstal Slags

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 de fine 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.’