by Graham, Tom
The shadow stirred at last. It seemed to push back its shoulders as if about to attack. But Sam sensed it was all for show.
‘I’m right,’ said Sam, and he felt emboldened. ‘You’re not strong enough to beat me yet. You’re just trying to psyche me out before the showdown. You sad, pathetic bully. Well you might not be ready for this fight, but me …’
Sam lunged forward, hurling a blow at Gould, putting all the weight of his body behind it. He lost his balance and staggered forward, righting himself at once and throwing up his left arm to deflect a counterattack. But no attack came. The street outside the cinema was empty. Sam stared at Yul Brynner, and Yul Brynner stared back, but of Clive Gould there was no sign.
‘Run if you want to!’ Sam shouted into the empty street. ‘I’m not running any more! I’m done with running. I’m coming for you, Gould! I’ll find you, and I’ll beat you, and I’ll send you back to the hell you came from!’
His blood was up, he was ready for battle – but his enemy had quit the field. Sam brought his breathing under control and unclenched his fists. He wiped the sleeve of his leather jacket across his glistening forehead. His knees were shaking.
Despite the fear that Gould’s ghostlike appearance had instilled in him, Sam felt a strange surge of hope and defiance rising up from deep within him. Gould was getting stronger, but he still didn’t have what it took for the final duel. He would delay the final confrontation until he was more powerful – unless Sam could track him down before then and finish him once and for all.
And I can do it! If I can draw him into a fight before he’s ready for it, if I can provoke him into attacking me too soon. I can do it! I can win!
The sense that things were drawing at last to an endgame between these two mortal enemies renewed Sam’s energies, even revived his spirits. Victory – or at the very least, the possibility of victory – was at hand. The chance was coming for Sam to dispel Gould for ever. He had no choice – he had to win this fight. The price of failure was too high. And, when he at last defeated Gould, his and Annie’s future together would be wide open, like a shining plain beneath a golden sun, just as Nelson had shown him in the Railway Arms.
‘I’m not here to carry your burden for you,’ Nelson had told him. ‘That’s for you and you alone … Be strong! It’s the future that matters, Sam. Your future. Yours and Annie’s. Because you two have a future, if you can reach it. You can be happy together. It’s possible. It’s all very possible.’
Possible – but not guaranteed.
‘“Possible” is the best odds I’m going to get,’ Sam told himself. ‘Perhaps I can improve those odds with a little help. But who can I turn to?’
At that moment, he stopped, glancing across at a grimy, gone-to-seed, urban church out of which slow, wheezing music could just be heard. The organist was limbering up before the service. It took a few moments for Sam to place the tune. He hunted through his memory like a man rifling through a cluttered attic – and then, quite suddenly, he found what he was after.
‘“Rock of Ages”,’ he muttered to himself. And from somewhere at the back of his brain, words emerged to join with the tune:
While I draw this fleeting breath,
when mine eyes shall close in death,
when I soar to worlds unknown …
‘Something something dum-dee-dum, rock of ages, cleft for me.’
Like photographs in an album, old hymns had a potency that no amount of rationalism and scepticism could entirely stifle. Deep emotions were stirred – part nostalgia, partly unease, part regret, part hope. Sam thought of his life, and of his death, and of Clive Gould emerging from the darkness, and of Nelson, breaking cover to reveal that he was far more than just a grinning barman in a fag-stained pub – and he though of Annie, whose memory, as always, stirred his heart and gave his strange, precarious existence all the focus and meaning he could ask for.
Despite everything – the threats, the danger, the approaching horror of the Devil in the Dark – Sam felt happy. He knew it wouldn’t last, but, as long as it did, he let the feeling warm him, like a man in the wilderness holding his palms over a campfire.
Sam turned away from the church, strolled across an empty street devoid of traffic, and ducked into Joe’s Caff, a greasy spoon which served coffee like sump oil and bacon butties cooked in what seemed to be Brylcreem. There were red-and-white chequered plastic covers on all the tables, bottles of vinegar with hairs gummed to the tops and ketchup served in squeezy plastic tomatoes. Joe himself was a miserable, bolshy bugger who covered his fat belly in a splattered apron and never cleaned his fingernails. He let ash from his roll-up fall into his cooking, and checked to see if food was ready by sticking his thumb into it.
Sam loved the place. It was everything he could ask for from a greasy-spoon caff, and he wouldn’t have changed a thing about it.
‘Morning, Joe,’ he said as he strolled in, enjoying his brief inner glow of happiness. ‘Any news on that Michelin star yet?’
About the Author
Tom Graham left school at 14 without qualifications. He is a smoker, and says that writing the Life on Mars novels is the nearest thing he’s had to a regular job since he got banned from driving. He part-owns a greyhound called Arthur and his ambition is to get fruity with Raquel Welch (to be clear about it, that’s Tom’s ambition, not Arthur’s).
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
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Copyright © Kudos Film and Television Limited 2013
Cover image produced with the kind permission of John Simm and
Philip Glenister.
Tom Graham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Ebook Edition © 2012 ISBN: 9780007472598
Version 1
FIRST EDITION
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