Furiously, the man grabbed a brick and hurled it against the remains of a wall.
‘Got a temper on ’im, this lad,’ winked Ray.
‘P’raps he should go up against big ’Enry,’ said Chris.
‘That’s what you said before.’ The man in the leather jacket jabbed his finger at Chris. ‘When I first came here, you said – you said I looked like I’d gone ten rounds with big Henry. It’s what you said when I first walked through that door.’
‘What door, boss?’ asked Chris.
Where the door had once been there was now only a ragged hole and heaps of rubble.
‘Ain’t no door here,’ said Ray, chewing his gum. ‘Ain’t nothing no more.’
‘All broken,’ said Chris.
‘All gone.’
‘Busted.’
‘Like you, boss. Broken, and busted.’
The man in the jacket looked from Chris to Ray and back again. ‘What do you mean by that?
‘There’s nothing here for you,’ said Ray, fishing out a cigarette from his breast pocket and sparking it up. ‘You could have gone back where you belong. You had your chance. But you threw it away. You threw yourself away. Don’t you remember?’
Chris turned his fingers into a pair of walking legs and mimed them running, jumping, plummeting. He made a long, descending whistle that ended with a splat.
The man in the jacket backed away, his hands clutching the sides of his head. His mind was reeling. Memories were swilling wildly about inside his skull: of standing atop a high roof with the city laid out all around him; of making a decision, and then starting to run. He remembered sprinting, leaping, falling, an expanse of hard concrete rushing up to meet him.
‘Topped yourself, boss,’ said Chris, taking back his copy of Soapy Knockers and leafing through it. ‘Smashed yourself to pieces.’
‘And everything else along with you,’ put in Ray, letting smoke trail from between his lips. ‘Just look around. See what you done.’
‘I remember …’ the man stammered, trying to piece together the jostling fragments in his mind. ‘The year was … It was 2006. There was an accident. I got … I got shot …’
‘Run over,’ Chris corrected him. ‘Very nasty.’
‘Run over … yes, yes,’ the man said, starting to see the pattern of events forming. ‘And I woke up … But it wasn’t 2006 any more … It was nineteen … It was nineteen-seventy … nineteen-seventy …’
‘… three,’ Chris and Ray intoned together.
‘Nineteen seventy-three. Yes, that was it,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t know if I was mad, or dead, or in a coma …’
‘Or a mad, dead bloke in a coma,’ piped up Chris. ‘Three for the price of one.’
‘But I did know I had to get back home, back to my own time, back to 2006. And I did it. I got there. But then, it was like … It felt like …’
‘Being dead?’ suggested Ray.
‘Being in a coma?’ added Chris. ‘Being a mad dead bloke in a coma all over again?’
‘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