Borstal Slags

by Graham, Tom

  He leant against a wall, pausing beneath a huge painted slogan that demanded from him SILENCE – DUTY – RESPECT in big, red letters.

  ‘Coward,’ he muttered. He felt a red-hot anger rising within him. ‘Pathetic, stinking coward.’

  He could see it all clearly now. Clive Gould had been the big villain back in the sixties, with money enough to buy off the police. Tony Cartwright had fallen in with all that corruption and bribery, but only out of fear. He knew the consequences of trying to be the one good man in a rotten town. But his conscience had got the better of him, and he’d made his stand, looking to incriminate Gould and have him convicted. But he couldn’t do it alone, he needed an accomplice – and that accomplice was McClintock, who back then must have been a regular copper just like Cartwright himself.

  He trusted McClintock. He trusted him with his life. But he picked the wrong man to rely on. McClintock didn’t have the nerve to go against Gould. He feared the consequences if they failed to nail him. And so he sold out his own colleague to save his skin.

  That treachery was what Sam had sensed the moment he arrived here at Friar’s Brook. Even before he passed the front gate, his heart had told him that something foul and corrupted resided within these walls. And then, at first sight of McClintock, he had felt an immediate sense of loathing, of repulsion. Instinctively, he had known that McClintock was rotten to the core.

  He betrayed Tony Cartwright, sending him to his death at the hands of Clive Gould. Annie was left fatherless …

  Perry had made it clear that, with Tony out of the way, Gould had his sights on Annie herself. Once he had washed her father’s blood from them, he would get his hands on Annie for his personal pleasure.

  Sam felt cold waves of sickness wash over him.

  Annie was so young, just a child – she was just a child …

  He tried to make his way along the corridor, but he stumbled, nearly fell. His head was spinning. The glimpses of horror that the Test Card Girl had shown him were starting to make awful sense. Everything he had seen told a story of Annie marrying a brute, and of that brute beating her and abusing her and battering her until, one day, he went too far.

  I know who that murderous brute is now. It’s Gould. He killed her, and that’s why she’s here in 1973. She’s dead – like me, she’s dead. Like everyone else here, she’s dead. Dead, we’re all dead, everybody’s dead!

  He felt a nauseous vertigo as his brain started putting the jigsaw puzzle of his life into some sort of order.

  I’m dead, he told himself. I know I’m dead. I jumped from that rooftop in 2006. I fell. I died.

  It was the stark reality of his situation that he had continually avoided thinking about too deeply. Sam had fudged it, ducked it, hid behind deliberate ignorance and the mantra that it was all too much for him to understand, that he was just a copper, a simple copper.

  But now, his head was reeling, and he could not blot out the thoughts.

  Dead, we’re all dead. Annie’s dead. Ray’s dead. Chris and Phyllis and all the others – and the Guv. The Guv’s dead and we’re all dead and everyone is dead!

  So what did that make this place?

  Sam looked around him at the cheerless borstal corridor, at the barred windows, the heavily bolted doors. He smelt the sharp reek of bleach in his nostrils. He looked up at the massive red letters: SILENCE – RESPECT – DUTY.

  ‘Is this heaven …?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Or is it …?’

  He violently shook his head to clear it.

  Keep it simple, he ordered himself. Keep it simple, or you’ll drive yourself mad. You’re here – this is 1973 – and an old murderous villain called Clive Gould wants to take Annie away from you. He killed her, and now he’s after her again, wanting to claim her as his own for ever. He’s reaching out for her, getting closer and closer. You must stop him. That’s all there is to think about. That’s the full story, as far as you’re concerned. All the rest is bullshit. It makes no sense and it wouldn’t help you even if it did. You’re just a copper. Life and Death and whatever’s in between, it’s not your concern. Ignore it. Don’t think. Stay focused. Keep it simple.

  It was all connected – Gould, McClintock, the threat to Annie. There was a line that ran through them, like a string through a necklace. The Test Card Girl saw it as Fate, McClintock saw it as his borstal regime – but both of them called it by the same name.

  ‘The System,’ he told himself. He was striding now, heading back to find Gene, fixed and focused, determined, resolved. ‘I have to break the System … McClintock and his System are behind the deaths here – and if I can break that System, I can break that Fate that has decreed Annie is to be dragged away from me. God knows how, but those two are related – this place, and Annie’s future. I don’t have to understand it – I’m just a simple copper – but I can change it. I can change everything. The System, and Annie’s future – I can change both of them for ever!’

  He reached the door to Mr Fellowes’s office and burst through it. Fellowes himself leapt up, startled. Gene and McClintock turned to face him. Sam stood there, panting, glaring, the door still juddering from when he’d smashed it open.

  ‘He’s learnt everything about how to make a dramatic entrance from me,’ explained Gene.

  Sam looked down at McClintock’s hands, scarred and disfigured from burns sustained long ago. Those pink, unnaturally smooth palms disgusted him. He was glad that McClintock had suffered, and that he still bore the stigmata of his suffering. It was the least he deserved.

  ‘It was you,’ Sam said, pointing straight at him.

  ‘I beg your pardon, young Detective Inspector?’ asked McClintock, primly running a finger along the gold chain of his fob watch.

  Sam strode across the office squared up to him, eyeball to eyeball.

  ‘I know,’ he breathed. ‘I know what you did.’

  ‘You seem overwrought,’ McClintock replied coolly. ‘Has something upset you?’

  Sam jabbed his finger into McClintock’s chest: ‘I’m not like you. I don’t betray my colleagues. I know what you did, you coward.’

  McClintock glanced across at Gene. ‘Well, Detective Chief Inspector Hunt, are you going to intervene?’

  Gene frowned, said, ‘Dunno. I don’t know what’s going on. What is going on, Tyler? You winding him up or something?’

  But this time Sam said nothing. He lashed out at McClintock. He couldn’t stop himself. But McClintock shoved him away. Sam came back at him. There was a tussle.

  ‘I know what you did, you bastard!’ Sam yelled at him. ‘And I’ll get you for it! I’ll break your bloody System and I’ll break you, you Judas!’

  And then, all at once, he found himself being hauled away by Gene. He fought, but the Guv’nor had him clamped in an armlock.

  ‘What’s going on here, Tyler? Tired and emotional? In need of a nap, eh? Little man had a busy day?’

  Sam opened his mouth to shout something, but a powerful blow to the stomach knocked the air clear out of his lungs. He fell in a gasping heap upon the floor. McClintock and Fellowes stood staring mutely at him.

  ‘Silence, respect, duty – the fast way,’ said Gene, standing over Sam’s prone body. ‘Anyway, something tells me it’s time we were going. Thank you for havin’ us. We’ve both had a lovely time.’

  They sat together in the Cortina, speeding back towards Manchester. Gene hunched moodily over the wheel, flooring the pedal. Sam brooded. Outside, a wet, wretched evening was settling over the moors.

  ‘You disgraced yourself back there, Tyler,’ growled Gene. ‘And, more importantly, you disgraced me. What the hell did you think you were doing, going off like a tit on heat? You’re worse than a bird, you are.’

  Sam looked about at the miserable terrain outside. The light was fading, the sky was becoming dark and threatening. He looked at the heavy grey clouds and wondered what lay beyond them. Was there a solar system out there: planets, stars, the whole vast universe stretching away to impossible
limits? Or was there something else: Heaven, Hell, angels, devils, or other things, stranger things, things Sam could not even begin to imagine?

  I’m just a copper, he told himself yet again. These questions are too big for me. I’m just a simple bloody copper …

  But he knew now that thinking like this was just an act of denial. He could duck the big questions, but only for so long, because, sooner or later, those big questions would come looking for him. Whatever was out there, it would not be denied. One day – one day soon – Sam would find himself face to face with the hard reality of his existence. The Devil in the Dark was real. It was as real as the Cortina Sam was now sitting in, as real as the Guv, as real as Annie or Chris or Ray or any of them. And that devil was getting close, now. Very close.

  ‘Why can’t you just act normal?’ Gene continued. ‘Always the same with you, Tyler – talking crap, acting like a divot, coming up with stuff no normal bloke ever would. And then you go and kick off like some fairy with a ferret up his Khyber and make me look like a right nugget. Why? For God’s sake, why?’

  Sam let out a sigh. Deep within himself, he willed everything to be just simple. He wanted Annie, and 1973, and his work in CID. For all their faults and all the trouble they gave him, it was what he wanted. They were simple. They were good. They were his life.

  But instead, it was all so impossibly complicated. Where was he? What was he? And how the hell was it all going to end? Was time passing? Would the years change? Would 1973 click over into 1974, on and on, into the future? Or would the same year start over again? Was he trapped in an eternal 1973, in an endless cycle, going round and round? And what if something were to happen to him here? What if he was killed in the line of duty, or if the Cortina left the road right now and went up in flames? What would become of him? Would he simply cease to be? Would he be catapulted into some other place, the same way he had been catapulted here? What were the stakes he was playing for here? Could he really save Annie by nailing McClintock? And, if he couldn’t, how bad could things get? What was the price of failing to protect Annie from that devil out there that was coming for her?

  ‘I’m just a copper,’ he said feebly.

  ‘You what, Tyler?’

  ‘I’m just a simple copper. It’s all too much for me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gene, nodding to himself. ‘Like that, is it? You’re losing it, Sammy. You’re having one them breakdowns, aincha? Like Dougie Devon down in D-Division. Remember when he came in wearing a maternity dress and a load of lippy caked over his gob like Danny La Rue?’

  Sam felt his heart labouring anxiously in his chest. A horrible, nameless panic was starting to settle over him. He felt a suffocating sense of claustrophobia – not physically, but in some deeper way, as if it were Fate itself that was enclosing him and from which he could not escape.

  ‘Dougie had an excuse, though,’ Gene was rambling on. ‘He had problems. I met his missus, I knew what he was putting up with at home. A right bleedin’ heffalump, I can tell you. But you, Tyler, what’s your ruddy beef, eh? Single fella, got a place of your own, got a bit of crumpet keeping warm on the side, got your health – now that in itself’s worth its weight, believe me – and you got your Uncle Genie looking after you. What’s to get hung up about?’

  Sam found that there was sweat running down his face and the back of his neck.

  ‘You should be ’appy as a sandboy, not talking shite and acting loopy.’

  The Cortina felt as narrow as the inside of a coffin. The sky above him felt as solid and as heavy as lead.

  ‘I don’t feel right,’ Sam muttered.

  ‘You’ve never been right, Tyler, not since the moment you came waltzing into my department.’

  Sam raised his hands to the side of his head. ‘I really don’t feel right. I need … some air …’

  ‘You’re not about to be sick, are you?’

  ‘I – I feel—’

  Gene shot him a ferocious look. ‘Don’t you dare chuck your chicken in my motor! Outside! Now!’

  Gene stamped hard on the brake. The Cortina lurched to a stop, and at once Sam threw open the door and sprang out. He sprinted blindly, leaving the road and blundering away across rough terrain, water and wet mud flying up about him as he went. The wide horizon lay ahead of him, glowering dimly, a mass of sullen clouds bearing down upon it. A grey curtain of distant rain swept silently across the distant hills. The world seemed cold and dead, a dank prison, a prison without walls, an eternal prison, enclosing him in an endless nightmare.

  ‘Where the hell are off to, you pukey wazzock?’ he heard Gene bellowing. ‘If you want to heave your carrots, you don’t have to do it up the top of bloody Ben Nevis! Tyler! Come back here!’

  Sam looked frantically about him. The world seemed to be spinning – the sky was rolling, the ground was heaving. Nothing was stable. Everything was illusion.

  He fell to his knees and plunged his hands into the wet mud. He felt the cold, the moisture, the rough grass, the sticky mire.

  ‘It is real!’ he yelled out. ‘I can see it! I can feel it!’ He grabbed a handful of mud and thrust it against his mouth. ‘I can taste it! It’s real! It’s really real!’

  It only seems real.

  Sam pitched forward and screamed into the earth, ‘I don’t understand!’

  A shadow fell across him. A hand in a black-leather string-back glove reached down and laid itself on his shoulder.

  Gently, calmly, Gene said, ‘All right, son. I’ve seen it before. I’m signing you off. No shame in that. ’Appens to the best of ’em.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Guv,’ Sam said, turning his mud-smeared face towards Gene. ‘I just – I just don’t understand.’

  ‘No,’ said Gene. ‘But I do.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Aye. I know what you need.’

  ‘What, Guv? What is it I need?’

  ‘What you need’s a bit of time off, a few stiff sherbets, and plenty of leg-over. You’ll be right as rain.’

  And from the expression on Gene’s face, Sam could see that he meant it. No sarcasm, no banter. He was talking man to man.

  Sam’s shoulders sagged. He felt disoriented, lost, and utterly alone.

  By the time they got back to the city, Sam had wiped most of the mud from his face and hands, and regained his composure – at least on the outside. But Gene had made his mind up to sign him off as temporarily unfit for duty.

  ‘What you need right now is some beer down your neck,’ he said, stopping the Cortina outside the Railway Arms.

  ‘I don’t need beer, guv.’

  ‘Oh yes you do. Booze, then home, then bed, and a bird if you can get it. And, if you’re on your tod, watch tons of telly. That’s your fitness regime, Tyler, until you’ve got yourself straightened out. No arguments. Dr Hunt’s orders.’

  ‘I don’t need straightening out, Guv, I’m fine, honest. I just … lost it for a moment.’

  ‘No kidding! Why did you have to be so bloody public about it?’ But then Gene raised his hand, silencing any further discussion. ‘Get your head down and get yourself sorted, Sam. Take a few days, as many as you need. We can manage. The department don’t hinge around you.’

  ‘Do me a favour, Guv. Don’t tell the others why I’m off. Tell ’em I’m—’

  ‘—down with the lurgy. Course I will. What do you take me for?’ Gene fixed him with an intense look, very serious and narrow-eyed. ‘You will get yourself sorted, won’t you, Tyler?’

  Sam nodded: ‘I’ll be right as rain, Guv. Scout’s honour.’

  ‘Now that is an oath not to be taken lightly.’

  He jabbed a thumb at Sam in a gesture that said, Right you, get out of my bloody motor.

  ‘Thanks, Guv,’ said Sam. ‘You know, for being understanding and that.’

  ‘I hope that ain’t the prelude to a snog, Tyler, I’m not that sort of boy. Now get in that pub and get bladdered. I’d join for a swift one but frankly I’ve seen enough of your face for one da
y, Sammy boy. Talk to Nelson. It’s his job to listen to self-pitying twats like you mooing on about themselves over a pint glass.’

  Feeling a sudden warmth for Gene, which was very rare indeed, Sam clambered out of the car. The Cortina’s engine roared, the tyres screamed, and the motor shot away into the night.

  Sam stood in the dark street, looking up at the blank sky. He was grateful he could see no stars. Stars would have sent his head reeling and spinning again.

  He patted his chest. It felt real and solid. He looked at the drizzle falling against the orange glow of the sodium street lamp, felt it tingle coldly against his hands and face. He watched a cat slink across the road, its emerald eyes glinting bright green as it shot him a glance. He watched a car pass, swishing through water pooled over a blocked drain.

  Details. Endless details. And all of them perfect.

  At the far end of the street, he glimpsed a small figure – a girl, standing half in and half out of the glow from a street lamp. She was motionless, staring through the night at Sam, unblinking. He had seen that stare all too many times already.

  She’s never going to leave me alone. She’s going to hound me for ever with her threats and her insinuations. Why? Why, for God’s sake?

  The windows of the Railway Arms glowed in the night, warmer and more inviting than they had ever seemed before. Repelled by the cold stare of the Test Card Girl, and unable to face going back to his cold, lonely flat, Sam pushed his way into the pub, like a moth drawn irresistibly towards the light.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: PORK SCRATCHING

  Sam was at once cocooned by the warmth and friendly fag-smoke reek of the Railway Arms. His heart was still heavy and his mind was still reeling, but he at least felt safe here. Perhaps it was the familiarity, or the smell in the air, or the promise of booze. Or perhaps it had something to do with Nelson, the Arms’ indefatigable landlord, who was stationed – as ever – behind the bar in readiness. Tonight, he was all togged up in his fineries: he had donned an extravagant shirt that depicted a rich Caribbean sunset (or was it a sunrise?) complete with sea, beach and wilting palm trees.