Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
Title: Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 4,200
Summary: Because being trapped in 1973 is depressing enough without an empty flat on top of it, Sam buys a cat, invites Annie and Gene over to help him destroy his liver, and tries to figure out just where exactly he's supposed to be. Gen with a dash of Sam/Annie in the background.
In his in-between days, in between wanting to leave and wanting to stay, Sam bought a cat. He bypassed the kitten phase. He didn’t intend to be here that long. Instead, Sam answered an ad for rescued animal adoptions and came home with a sickly ten-year-old black cat that was as far from Ivanhoe as you could get while staying in the same species.
“What’s his name?” the sour-faced woman at the vet asked.
“Tom.”
She raised an eyebrow at him, looking eerily Phyllis-like doing so. He resisted the urge to tag “Ma’am” at the end of his sentences. “That’s unique,” she said. He wondered if it was possible for disapproval to physically drip from words.
Then Sam got it. “Not like the cartoon or ‘Tomcat.’ Major Tom.” She gave him a blank look. “It’s from the Bowie song.” No change. “David Bowie. Space Oddity.” Absolutely nothing. “This is Major Tom to ground control-really? You’ve never heard it.”
She pushed the forms at him. “Why don’t you just fill out the rest, sir? Without serenading me.”
Major Tom looked like what you’d get if you took a normal cat and chucked it through a wood chipper. The woman said she cleaned the rescued cats when they got them off the street; Sam wondered if that cleaning involved hanging them up and beating them like rugs. Even after a meal and the most terrifying bath Sam had even given, Major Tom still looked, at best, tattered. The cat curled up in the center of Sam’s bed and coughed pointedly at Sam. Sam looked at the ridiculously pricey antibiotics he’d bought. “Right then. Let’s do this.”
Annie stopped by his desk the next day. “Can we talk?” She had such a dead serious look on her face that Sam dropped everything and followed her. She took him to the roof. “It’s empty up here,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about being overheard. I know some people we work with aren’t as sensitive as others.” Ray’s name was not said but flashed like a neon sign in the air between them.
“What’s this about?” Sam asked.
Annie took a deep breath. “Sam, are you…depressed?”
“You mean more than usual?” She didn’t laugh. Sam supposed it really wasn’t that funny now that he thought about it. “I’m fine, Annie. I’m coping.”
“Sam.” She put a hand against his face and while he still didn’t know exactly what was going on, this wasn’t that bad. “I saw your wrists this morning. I know. We can get you help.” She took his hand and rolled up his sleeve; together they looked at his bandaged arms, wrapped in gauze wrist from to elbow. She touched his arm gently and looked up at him. “You don’t have to deal with this alone, but you have to be strong. This is not your way home.”
“Annie, thank you so much,” he said as sensitively as he could. “But I just bought a cat.”
She scrunched her forehead. Sam clearly had wandered off script. “Huh?”
He pulled down the gauze a bit so she could see one of the bite marks. “He really doesn’t like taking his medicine.”
She looked down at his arms with their mummy wrappings. “What, did you buy a tiger?”
Sam’s arms throbbed. “Possibly.” Sam tugged his sleeves down and frowned. “Really? Suicide attempt was your first thought?”
Annie squinted at the sky like something fascinating was happening where Sam wasn’t. “Oh, just, you know, psychology, makes you paranoid. And the, er, roof. Before.” She coughed. “We should go talk to Gene.”
Sam groaned. “You didn’t tell him.”
“I told him I should talk to you first,” she said apologetically. “It’s a good thing it’s just a cat; Gene was going to kill you himself.” At least Annie had been the one to speak to him. Gene Hunt’s suicide prevention intervention was most likely just a fist to the face and a couple jeers that he deemed suitably offensive to the mentally ill. Annie patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “You bought a cat? Why?”
Because he was trapped in 1973 and that was depressing enough without an empty flat on top. Sam shrugged. “Just a whim.”
They looked down at his arms. “Good luck,” she said.
Medicine happened twice a day for a month to hopefully clean out the cat’s diseased lungs. Major Tom, apparently, believed in more holistic treatments for illness. Maybe Annie was right; maybe Sam did harbor some self-harm tendencies. After all, there was no other explanation as to why Sam bothered to pin down Tom and pry open his mouth open when Tom was perfectly happy to demonstrate that five-sixths of a cat’s ends are sharp.
“Don’t hurry on my account, Tyler,” Gene said one early morning as he watched his DI wrestle with a cat. “It’s just a dead body. It’ll still be dead whenever Mr. Whiskers here says you can go.”
“Piss off,” Sam muttered, although he wasn’t sure whether it was directed to Gene or the squirming Tom. Fuck it. Sam wasn’t going to wait to deal with one rotten bastard because he was occupied with this one. He let Tom go who ran off as fast as he could back to the warm spot in the center of Sam’s bed. “I’ll do it when I get home.”
“You could always just drown the little monster.”
“Gene.”
“I can get you a good burlap sack.”
When Sam came home so late it was almost the next day, he found Major Tom in the bathroom, wheezing and shaking. They reached a truce of sorts after that. Tom got a treat after every dosage; Sam didn’t get his fingers gnawed off.
“I don’t get food when I listen to your whinging,” Gene said, another day, another body waiting.
Sam threw away the tuna can. “You’re absolutely right, Gene. Shall I cook you dinner after you punch me in the kidneys or when you draw breasts on my file folders?”
“I can switch to todgers if you’d prefer, Gladys.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Let’s just go.”
Major Tom always lolled by the door as Sam left, batting at Sam's feet as he walked out. Sam knew he’d spend most of the day lazing around the flat, apparently devoting his time to scratching up the carpeting and dropping dead bugs on Sam’s pillows, and this seemed to make him happy. Tom seemed to have fully embraced the luxuries of the indoors, namely the radiator and whatever scraps of food Sam forgot to tuck away.
Sometimes though, Tom’s feral nature stirred and he’d yowl at the door until Sam let him out to wander the streets for awhile. He used to-not worry, obviously, because Major Tom was a cat, a former street cat at that, and worrying would be completely ridiculous. But he’d feel some small twinge of concern that Tom would get hurt. After all, he was Sam’s responsibility.
But it wasn’t a problem. Tom would usually stroll back in a few hours later, let in by one of Sam’s neighbors who seemed perfectly willing to overlook that they were not technically allowed to have cats. It helped that a) Sam was apparently the only one Tom ever bit, and b) the mice problem was clearing up nicely. Sometimes he’d have a dead bird in his mouth, sometimes he’d just smell like shit, but Tom came back in one piece and seemed happy enough for having gone out. That was enough to assuage Sam’s concerns.
Until one unpleasantly, unexpectedly muggy July night, after they’d lived together for about two months, when Major Tom wandered out around two in the afternoon and hadn’t come home by midnight. It wasn’t strange for normal cats, Sam was pretty sure; Ivanhoe would leave for days. It was, however, just a touch out of character for Major Tom. Not that Sam dwelled on this or anything.
“I mean, of course I’m not worried,” he said, far enough into a bottle of wine to ramble to Annie. “It’s just that, you know, he is my cat, and his lungs are still shit and sometimes he’s fine running around and sometimes he isn’t and it’s pretty miserable out, but I’m not worried or anything. I just don’t want him dying on my watch, and he doesn’t like it when it’s too hot.”
Annie, far enough into a bottle of wine to let him ramble, giggled a bit. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
“The lady doth protest too much methinks,” he corrected. “Common misquote. And I’m not protesting.”
Annie sipped her wine with a smile Sam found uncomfortably fond. “Do you want to go out to look for him?”
“No. We’re here to finish up these reports,” Sam said. Annie raised an eyebrow and swirled her glass. “After we finish the wine. And it’s so hot out anyway, and this is what cats do right? Just wander round, stay out late, I dunno, hang out in the sewer? Besides, he could be anywhere. It’d be stupid.”
“We could look for a few minutes.”
Sam stood. “Well, if you insist.” He stuck out his hand and Annie pulled herself to her feet, groaning a little.
“But you’re not worried, of course,” she said with more amusement in her voice than Sam thought the situation warranted.
“Not at all.”
It was hard to find a cat in the city at the best of times, let alone when it was midnight and sweltering, and you were slightly drunk. Sam and Annie stumbled into each other as they winded a path through the muffled streets. “Major Tom,” Sam shouted, but he felt like a div hearing it bounce off the buildings, and he was fairly certain Tom didn’t know his own name.
“Thanks for coming with me,” he said.
Annie bumped her shoulder against his. “You thought I was gonna let you walk around alone so late? Someone’s got to keep you safe.”
“You’ve got my back, DC Cartwright?” he teased.
Annie leaned over and kissed him on his corner of his mouth. “Always.” She backed up, tinged pink and biting her lip, but her smile was decidedly cheeky. “That was the wine.”
Sam’s face felt warmer than the rest of him combined. “Of course.”
When they came back round to the flat, Major Tom was lying in front of Sam’s door, waiting to be let in. He stood and stretched with the lazy elegance exclusive to cats and looked at Sam like, What? You were worried about me? How silly. Sam scratched behind Tom’s ears and opened the door. Tom slunk inside and stole Sam’s chair.
“What an ingrate,” Sam said. He scooped up Tom and sat down, putting the cat in his lap. He purred quite happily. Sam ran one hand through Tom’s fur and poured Annie another glass with the other. They toasted nothing in particular while Tom purred in Sam’s lap. The rest of the evening blurred, but that moment he remembered: the welcome warmth of his drink, his flat, his cat, his friend.
Even the throbbing headache and general feeling that he should have stopped drinking after she left couldn’t take that away.
“Should it be eating that?” Annie asked a few weeks later as Sam cleared the plates by leaving them on the floor for Tom.
He reached down and stroked Major Tom who ignored him in favor of licking up the last drops of mutter paneer. “We have an agreement,” Sam said.
“Which is?”
“I give him treats, he stops attacking my feet in the morning.”
“Does it work?” Annie said as she walked to the kitchen.
“Well, he’s slower when he’s fat.” Food gone, Tom swaggered off, his belly swinging side to side like a pendulum. “It’s the same reason I keep buying Gene dinner.”
“All muscle, Sammy boy,” said Gene without looking up from his newspaper. “Stop pissing around and bring the whiskey over. And move your cat before I punt him. He’s rolling all over the paperwork.”
Annie returned balancing three glasses and the whiskey bottle. “I wouldn’t think you’d mind, Guv.”
Gene held out his hand; Annie passed over a glass. “If my pain of a DI is gonna bitch about filing, I don’t want cat hair floating around my desk every time he chucks casework at me.”
Rolling his eyes, Sam scooped Major Tom off the table (Christ, he had fussed the papers all out of order) and set him on the floor. Tom promptly hopped up into Sam’s lap. Sam petted him absentmindedly while he tried to find page one of his notes. “If Mason’s telling the truth, the Barker gang’ll be moving their funds out of the city before Friday. We’ll need to move quickly.”
Gene snorted. “That berk couldn’t tell the truth even if he knew it. We’ve got time.”
“He did corroborate David Murphy’s story,” Annie said.
“So did half the snouts in the city,” Gene said. “He risked nothing telling us that.”
Major Tom purred away in Sam’s lap while the three of them planned, debated, argued, cursed, and drank. After Annie and Gene stumbled home around three o’clock in the morning, a tentative plan of action sketched out and waiting for them in only a few hours, Sam collapsed on his bed, Major Tom curled by his side.
In his fitful sleep, the snap of the television turning on was enough to jolt him awake. Not tonight, he thought, please, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered. He begged that every time she came and she still kept coming.
“Sammy’s got a friend now.” The Girl glided toward him, as luminous in the dark as the telly she came from. “Sammy thinks he doesn’t need us anymore.”
I never needed you, you monster. It perched on Sam’s tongue, but terror gripped his lungs in a fist and stitched his lips together. He scrambled backwards, hit the wall, tried to keep going. He couldn’t think, he could never think, she made him stupid and fogged his brain. She was coming and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk, couldn’t run, and he was trapped, trapped, trapped, and she was an arms-length away, and-
“Ow!” Sam shot upright, catapulting Major Tom off of him. Wincing, shaking, he pressed a hand against his ear. When he pulled it away, his palm was red. “Christ, Tom.”
Except for them, the room was empty. The telly was dark.
Major Tom swished his tail and watched Sam bleed. Sam leaned back against the wall and waited for his heart to stop bursting. The bed shifted as Tom slinked over. He butted his head against Sam’s chin. “You could have just meowed,” Sam muttered, scratching behind Tom’s ears. “Works fine when you’re waking me up ‘cause you’re hungry.”
Thankfully Tom didn’t reply; Sam had reached his limit for crazy that night. When Sam fell asleep again-he hadn’t thought it possible, but even terrified people eventually crash-he fell asleep sitting up with his arms wrapped around Major Tom. He woke rested for the first time since he’d arrived in this godforsaken decade. Every night after, Sam slept with a hand on Tom as he slept on Sam’s chest, and Sam soon got used to the weight.
So when Major Tom died four months later, without pomp or circumstance, it felt like a punch to the stomach. Sam found him lying too still on the bed when he came home from work. He rested his hand on the cold fur and waited for a breath. He waited almost five minutes. Then he stepped back, pressed his palms against his tired eyes, and got a towel.
He’d known the cat wasn’t well. He wasn’t naïve enough to think he could fix that. The results of a decade on Manchester’s streets couldn’t be undone by good intentions and a decent home. The cat had to die, and the odds had always been on sooner rather than later. His death didn’t bring sadness as much as a weighty feeling of inevitability.
Sam sat on the bed, the quiet body of Major Tom wrapped in his makeshift funeral shroud lying in his lap. It was quite a while before Sam stood.
The animal hospital offered cremations and Sam spread the ashes in the canal. They were hardly the worst thing someone had dumped there and the thought of keeping the remains of his cat in a Tupperware struck Sam as pathetic and more than a little morbid.
Besides, Major Tom had always hated being cooped up.
“Where’s the little demon?” Gene asked as he raided Sam’s fridge. “Haven’t heard him yowling since I got here.”
Sam carefully buttoned up his shirt. There was a crime scene to get to, and Sam couldn’t waste time putting the fourth button into the fifth hole. He concentrated so hard on his task, he forgot to answer Gene’s question. “Alright, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
Gene’s head popped out of the fridge. “What, did he run off again?”
“Who?” Sam asked. He wished his shoes had laces he could focus on.
“Your cat, Sam.”
“Oh. No, he died. It’s okay, he was sickly. I really wasn’t that surprised.” Sam jerked his head at the door. “Come on, you were in a rush three minutes ago.”
“What? When?” Gene said. He almost sounded angry. Maybe he’d wanted to kill Tom himself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“About a week ago. It wasn’t a big deal. Let’s go.” And without looking back to see if Gene was following, Sam fled his flat. He wasn’t sad, he just knew Gene would make a thing out of it, and Sam couldn’t be arsed to deal with that.
True to form, at the pub that night, Gene let Sam buy him a pint. With aggressive joviality, Gene proposed a toast. “Good riddance to the mangy rag.”
Sam obligingly lifted his glass and drank.
Five drinks later, Gene leaned heavily on the table and told Sam about his mutt, Lucas. “Fucking Lucas,” he said. “Five stone, at least, and ugly as Phyllis in the morning.” From the next table over, Phyllis chucked a coaster at Gene.
The dog had been the Missus’s idea, something to greet Gene when he got home too late for her to stay up. “Every day,” Gene said, sloshing around his cup for emphasis, “the idiot sprinted at me the moment I opened the door. Just gobs of slobber and a wagging tongue that’d been licking arse and bollocks all day. The fat thing nearly killed me.”
Gene drank, the good long drink of the experienced. “Hit by a car in ‘69. Bled out in the street. It’s a shame. The Missus liked him.” Gene fixed Sam with an odd sort of stare, the kind where the emotion behind was anybody’s guess. Sam rested his head on his hand and stared back until Gene laughed and looked away.
“You know, some days I still flinch when I walk into me house.” Gene shook his head and drank. “Animals. The stupid things love you to death just ‘cause you’re there.”
Sam looked into his glass and drank to that too.
“It’s just us again, Sammy. No rude guests spoiling our party,” the Girl said. “What fun we’ll have together.”
What fun.
Obviously, Sam didn’t mourn Major Tom. Six months wasn’t a long time, not long enough to really get attached. And anyway, Major Tom was a cat-a partially blind, always hungry, slightly smelly, and occasionally violent cat-and he’d come with a prominent expiration date.
But sometimes Sam left out food before he could remember not to. He cursed Tom whenever he pulled another clump of fur from something in his flat. In the morning, he rose slowly, so anything on his chest had plenty of time to prepare. And when Sam woke in a cold sweat, he raised his hand without thinking, reaching for a comfort that did not weigh there anymore.
This time made him stupid. It turned his head around until he couldn’t find which way was up. What he knew for sure was this: Major Tom had been a part of something new, something he hadn’t had in 2006, something he hadn’t had the first time ‘round in 1973. Tom had needed him, and Sam taken care of him because that was what he did when someone needed him. Now Tom was gone, and the flat was empty, and Sam needed to know what still kept him here.
“Sam. Sammy.” He watched the telly from his bed, the forlorn sock puppet with his mother’s voice looking back. “Please wake up, Sammy. Please come home.”
Sam crawled out of bed and knelt in front of the television. “Mum, please,” he said, but he no longer knew how to end that sentence. He heard tears in her voice and he wanted them gone, but beyond that he was stumbling in the dark.
“Sammy, I need to know what you want. Please speak to me.” He raised his hand to the screen and felt nothing but the bite of static. “Darling, please. Please.” And now Ruth Tyler was weeping with the great heaving sobs that hadn’t tormented him since the early days of 1973, the first and the second time around. She wept like she had when he was child, and she had just come home from the late shift, and there still wasn’t enough money for the new trousers he needed, and all Sam asked was when Dad was finally coming home and if he’d be bringing gifts.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the telly, but his mother, bone-tired and grieving, could not hear.
“Oh, Sammy.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Sam leaned away from the television. “What?”
“Smile at me, sweetheart.” Her voice was hoarse with crying, barely above a whisper. He felt her hand on his cheek, a phantom sensation from across time or sanity or consciousness. He raised his hand to hers and felt only his face. “Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me and I’ll do it. I love you so much, Sam. We can live this forever, but, please, I need to know that this is right.”
Sam lowered his hand and closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he and his mum breathed together. “I love you, Mum.” He whispered it like a prayer.
“Give me a sign, darling. Anything.”
And Sam flicked the telly off.
After a moment he pulled out the plug. Then, suddenly exhausted to his core, he rose and climbed back into bed.
In his in-between days, in between deciding to stay and coming to grips with that, Sam bought a cat. A kitten, actually, a grey ball of fur that enjoyed falling asleep in the crook of Sam’s neck and kneading Sam’s bare skin when he woke. At five every morning, more reliably than an alarm clock and less resettable, he mewed in Sam’s ear until Sam dragged himself out of bed to set out some cat food.
Gene hated him instantly. He took to the new flat, though, just as quickly. He kicked the new couch thoughtfully. “Not bad, Sammy. You still need to buy a telly.” Gene peered into the bedroom while he fished out his flask. “Look, a proper bed and everything. Now you don’t have to shag Annie on a fold up cot.”
“And just think,” Annie said to Gene “when you pass out again because you’ve still no idea your liver’s capacity, we can drag you somewhere decent to sleep it off.”
“Play nice,” Sam said, leaning back in his new armchair (his nice new armchair, he’d forgotten what a decent chair felt like), his legs propped up on the coffee table. Gene sprawled across one end of the new couch, sinking into the corner and nursing his flask. Annie perched at the other end, head on hand, and watched the kitten play.
She nudged Sam’s feet with hers. “What did you end up naming the little guy?”
They watched the kitten maul a toy mouse. “David,” Sam said.
Gene snorted. “You’ve a Bowie fetish, Gladys.”
Sam tossed the mouse and sent David scrambling after it. “Does that make you two my Pips?”
“Depends. Does that make you a colored bird?”
All his life, Sam had expected something grand. Cymbals crashing, a choir singing, an angel coming down from the sky in a beam of light. Something that would finally tell him that, yes, this was exactly where he was supposed to be, so good job with your life plan, Sam, you’re done now.
He’d given up on the cymbals. The small pleasures that had seemed worthless his first try at this didn’t seem that small anymore. A city he loved. A job he was good at. A comfortable bed and a well-placed reading chair. Plenty of books. Even more records. Wine and whiskey in equal amounts and people to share them with. Silence in the night. Or laughter. Or purring.
And when all else failed, and he knew by now that it eventually would-well, that was later. This was now, and right now Annie grinned at him, Gene passed over the flask, and David unsheathed his claws and started the inevitable destruction of Sam’s new couch. This was the best Sam could expect. This was the most that 1974 promised.
And try as he might, Sam couldn't shake the feeling that this was going to be a good year.
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 4,200
Summary: Because being trapped in 1973 is depressing enough without an empty flat on top of it, Sam buys a cat, invites Annie and Gene over to help him destroy his liver, and tries to figure out just where exactly he's supposed to be. Gen with a dash of Sam/Annie in the background.
In his in-between days, in between wanting to leave and wanting to stay, Sam bought a cat. He bypassed the kitten phase. He didn’t intend to be here that long. Instead, Sam answered an ad for rescued animal adoptions and came home with a sickly ten-year-old black cat that was as far from Ivanhoe as you could get while staying in the same species.
“What’s his name?” the sour-faced woman at the vet asked.
“Tom.”
She raised an eyebrow at him, looking eerily Phyllis-like doing so. He resisted the urge to tag “Ma’am” at the end of his sentences. “That’s unique,” she said. He wondered if it was possible for disapproval to physically drip from words.
Then Sam got it. “Not like the cartoon or ‘Tomcat.’ Major Tom.” She gave him a blank look. “It’s from the Bowie song.” No change. “David Bowie. Space Oddity.” Absolutely nothing. “This is Major Tom to ground control-really? You’ve never heard it.”
She pushed the forms at him. “Why don’t you just fill out the rest, sir? Without serenading me.”
Major Tom looked like what you’d get if you took a normal cat and chucked it through a wood chipper. The woman said she cleaned the rescued cats when they got them off the street; Sam wondered if that cleaning involved hanging them up and beating them like rugs. Even after a meal and the most terrifying bath Sam had even given, Major Tom still looked, at best, tattered. The cat curled up in the center of Sam’s bed and coughed pointedly at Sam. Sam looked at the ridiculously pricey antibiotics he’d bought. “Right then. Let’s do this.”
Annie stopped by his desk the next day. “Can we talk?” She had such a dead serious look on her face that Sam dropped everything and followed her. She took him to the roof. “It’s empty up here,” she said. “You don’t need to worry about being overheard. I know some people we work with aren’t as sensitive as others.” Ray’s name was not said but flashed like a neon sign in the air between them.
“What’s this about?” Sam asked.
Annie took a deep breath. “Sam, are you…depressed?”
“You mean more than usual?” She didn’t laugh. Sam supposed it really wasn’t that funny now that he thought about it. “I’m fine, Annie. I’m coping.”
“Sam.” She put a hand against his face and while he still didn’t know exactly what was going on, this wasn’t that bad. “I saw your wrists this morning. I know. We can get you help.” She took his hand and rolled up his sleeve; together they looked at his bandaged arms, wrapped in gauze wrist from to elbow. She touched his arm gently and looked up at him. “You don’t have to deal with this alone, but you have to be strong. This is not your way home.”
“Annie, thank you so much,” he said as sensitively as he could. “But I just bought a cat.”
She scrunched her forehead. Sam clearly had wandered off script. “Huh?”
He pulled down the gauze a bit so she could see one of the bite marks. “He really doesn’t like taking his medicine.”
She looked down at his arms with their mummy wrappings. “What, did you buy a tiger?”
Sam’s arms throbbed. “Possibly.” Sam tugged his sleeves down and frowned. “Really? Suicide attempt was your first thought?”
Annie squinted at the sky like something fascinating was happening where Sam wasn’t. “Oh, just, you know, psychology, makes you paranoid. And the, er, roof. Before.” She coughed. “We should go talk to Gene.”
Sam groaned. “You didn’t tell him.”
“I told him I should talk to you first,” she said apologetically. “It’s a good thing it’s just a cat; Gene was going to kill you himself.” At least Annie had been the one to speak to him. Gene Hunt’s suicide prevention intervention was most likely just a fist to the face and a couple jeers that he deemed suitably offensive to the mentally ill. Annie patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “You bought a cat? Why?”
Because he was trapped in 1973 and that was depressing enough without an empty flat on top. Sam shrugged. “Just a whim.”
They looked down at his arms. “Good luck,” she said.
Medicine happened twice a day for a month to hopefully clean out the cat’s diseased lungs. Major Tom, apparently, believed in more holistic treatments for illness. Maybe Annie was right; maybe Sam did harbor some self-harm tendencies. After all, there was no other explanation as to why Sam bothered to pin down Tom and pry open his mouth open when Tom was perfectly happy to demonstrate that five-sixths of a cat’s ends are sharp.
“Don’t hurry on my account, Tyler,” Gene said one early morning as he watched his DI wrestle with a cat. “It’s just a dead body. It’ll still be dead whenever Mr. Whiskers here says you can go.”
“Piss off,” Sam muttered, although he wasn’t sure whether it was directed to Gene or the squirming Tom. Fuck it. Sam wasn’t going to wait to deal with one rotten bastard because he was occupied with this one. He let Tom go who ran off as fast as he could back to the warm spot in the center of Sam’s bed. “I’ll do it when I get home.”
“You could always just drown the little monster.”
“Gene.”
“I can get you a good burlap sack.”
When Sam came home so late it was almost the next day, he found Major Tom in the bathroom, wheezing and shaking. They reached a truce of sorts after that. Tom got a treat after every dosage; Sam didn’t get his fingers gnawed off.
“I don’t get food when I listen to your whinging,” Gene said, another day, another body waiting.
Sam threw away the tuna can. “You’re absolutely right, Gene. Shall I cook you dinner after you punch me in the kidneys or when you draw breasts on my file folders?”
“I can switch to todgers if you’d prefer, Gladys.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Let’s just go.”
Major Tom always lolled by the door as Sam left, batting at Sam's feet as he walked out. Sam knew he’d spend most of the day lazing around the flat, apparently devoting his time to scratching up the carpeting and dropping dead bugs on Sam’s pillows, and this seemed to make him happy. Tom seemed to have fully embraced the luxuries of the indoors, namely the radiator and whatever scraps of food Sam forgot to tuck away.
Sometimes though, Tom’s feral nature stirred and he’d yowl at the door until Sam let him out to wander the streets for awhile. He used to-not worry, obviously, because Major Tom was a cat, a former street cat at that, and worrying would be completely ridiculous. But he’d feel some small twinge of concern that Tom would get hurt. After all, he was Sam’s responsibility.
But it wasn’t a problem. Tom would usually stroll back in a few hours later, let in by one of Sam’s neighbors who seemed perfectly willing to overlook that they were not technically allowed to have cats. It helped that a) Sam was apparently the only one Tom ever bit, and b) the mice problem was clearing up nicely. Sometimes he’d have a dead bird in his mouth, sometimes he’d just smell like shit, but Tom came back in one piece and seemed happy enough for having gone out. That was enough to assuage Sam’s concerns.
Until one unpleasantly, unexpectedly muggy July night, after they’d lived together for about two months, when Major Tom wandered out around two in the afternoon and hadn’t come home by midnight. It wasn’t strange for normal cats, Sam was pretty sure; Ivanhoe would leave for days. It was, however, just a touch out of character for Major Tom. Not that Sam dwelled on this or anything.
“I mean, of course I’m not worried,” he said, far enough into a bottle of wine to ramble to Annie. “It’s just that, you know, he is my cat, and his lungs are still shit and sometimes he’s fine running around and sometimes he isn’t and it’s pretty miserable out, but I’m not worried or anything. I just don’t want him dying on my watch, and he doesn’t like it when it’s too hot.”
Annie, far enough into a bottle of wine to let him ramble, giggled a bit. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
“The lady doth protest too much methinks,” he corrected. “Common misquote. And I’m not protesting.”
Annie sipped her wine with a smile Sam found uncomfortably fond. “Do you want to go out to look for him?”
“No. We’re here to finish up these reports,” Sam said. Annie raised an eyebrow and swirled her glass. “After we finish the wine. And it’s so hot out anyway, and this is what cats do right? Just wander round, stay out late, I dunno, hang out in the sewer? Besides, he could be anywhere. It’d be stupid.”
“We could look for a few minutes.”
Sam stood. “Well, if you insist.” He stuck out his hand and Annie pulled herself to her feet, groaning a little.
“But you’re not worried, of course,” she said with more amusement in her voice than Sam thought the situation warranted.
“Not at all.”
It was hard to find a cat in the city at the best of times, let alone when it was midnight and sweltering, and you were slightly drunk. Sam and Annie stumbled into each other as they winded a path through the muffled streets. “Major Tom,” Sam shouted, but he felt like a div hearing it bounce off the buildings, and he was fairly certain Tom didn’t know his own name.
“Thanks for coming with me,” he said.
Annie bumped her shoulder against his. “You thought I was gonna let you walk around alone so late? Someone’s got to keep you safe.”
“You’ve got my back, DC Cartwright?” he teased.
Annie leaned over and kissed him on his corner of his mouth. “Always.” She backed up, tinged pink and biting her lip, but her smile was decidedly cheeky. “That was the wine.”
Sam’s face felt warmer than the rest of him combined. “Of course.”
When they came back round to the flat, Major Tom was lying in front of Sam’s door, waiting to be let in. He stood and stretched with the lazy elegance exclusive to cats and looked at Sam like, What? You were worried about me? How silly. Sam scratched behind Tom’s ears and opened the door. Tom slunk inside and stole Sam’s chair.
“What an ingrate,” Sam said. He scooped up Tom and sat down, putting the cat in his lap. He purred quite happily. Sam ran one hand through Tom’s fur and poured Annie another glass with the other. They toasted nothing in particular while Tom purred in Sam’s lap. The rest of the evening blurred, but that moment he remembered: the welcome warmth of his drink, his flat, his cat, his friend.
Even the throbbing headache and general feeling that he should have stopped drinking after she left couldn’t take that away.
“Should it be eating that?” Annie asked a few weeks later as Sam cleared the plates by leaving them on the floor for Tom.
He reached down and stroked Major Tom who ignored him in favor of licking up the last drops of mutter paneer. “We have an agreement,” Sam said.
“Which is?”
“I give him treats, he stops attacking my feet in the morning.”
“Does it work?” Annie said as she walked to the kitchen.
“Well, he’s slower when he’s fat.” Food gone, Tom swaggered off, his belly swinging side to side like a pendulum. “It’s the same reason I keep buying Gene dinner.”
“All muscle, Sammy boy,” said Gene without looking up from his newspaper. “Stop pissing around and bring the whiskey over. And move your cat before I punt him. He’s rolling all over the paperwork.”
Annie returned balancing three glasses and the whiskey bottle. “I wouldn’t think you’d mind, Guv.”
Gene held out his hand; Annie passed over a glass. “If my pain of a DI is gonna bitch about filing, I don’t want cat hair floating around my desk every time he chucks casework at me.”
Rolling his eyes, Sam scooped Major Tom off the table (Christ, he had fussed the papers all out of order) and set him on the floor. Tom promptly hopped up into Sam’s lap. Sam petted him absentmindedly while he tried to find page one of his notes. “If Mason’s telling the truth, the Barker gang’ll be moving their funds out of the city before Friday. We’ll need to move quickly.”
Gene snorted. “That berk couldn’t tell the truth even if he knew it. We’ve got time.”
“He did corroborate David Murphy’s story,” Annie said.
“So did half the snouts in the city,” Gene said. “He risked nothing telling us that.”
Major Tom purred away in Sam’s lap while the three of them planned, debated, argued, cursed, and drank. After Annie and Gene stumbled home around three o’clock in the morning, a tentative plan of action sketched out and waiting for them in only a few hours, Sam collapsed on his bed, Major Tom curled by his side.
In his fitful sleep, the snap of the television turning on was enough to jolt him awake. Not tonight, he thought, please, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered. He begged that every time she came and she still kept coming.
“Sammy’s got a friend now.” The Girl glided toward him, as luminous in the dark as the telly she came from. “Sammy thinks he doesn’t need us anymore.”
I never needed you, you monster. It perched on Sam’s tongue, but terror gripped his lungs in a fist and stitched his lips together. He scrambled backwards, hit the wall, tried to keep going. He couldn’t think, he could never think, she made him stupid and fogged his brain. She was coming and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk, couldn’t run, and he was trapped, trapped, trapped, and she was an arms-length away, and-
“Ow!” Sam shot upright, catapulting Major Tom off of him. Wincing, shaking, he pressed a hand against his ear. When he pulled it away, his palm was red. “Christ, Tom.”
Except for them, the room was empty. The telly was dark.
Major Tom swished his tail and watched Sam bleed. Sam leaned back against the wall and waited for his heart to stop bursting. The bed shifted as Tom slinked over. He butted his head against Sam’s chin. “You could have just meowed,” Sam muttered, scratching behind Tom’s ears. “Works fine when you’re waking me up ‘cause you’re hungry.”
Thankfully Tom didn’t reply; Sam had reached his limit for crazy that night. When Sam fell asleep again-he hadn’t thought it possible, but even terrified people eventually crash-he fell asleep sitting up with his arms wrapped around Major Tom. He woke rested for the first time since he’d arrived in this godforsaken decade. Every night after, Sam slept with a hand on Tom as he slept on Sam’s chest, and Sam soon got used to the weight.
So when Major Tom died four months later, without pomp or circumstance, it felt like a punch to the stomach. Sam found him lying too still on the bed when he came home from work. He rested his hand on the cold fur and waited for a breath. He waited almost five minutes. Then he stepped back, pressed his palms against his tired eyes, and got a towel.
He’d known the cat wasn’t well. He wasn’t naïve enough to think he could fix that. The results of a decade on Manchester’s streets couldn’t be undone by good intentions and a decent home. The cat had to die, and the odds had always been on sooner rather than later. His death didn’t bring sadness as much as a weighty feeling of inevitability.
Sam sat on the bed, the quiet body of Major Tom wrapped in his makeshift funeral shroud lying in his lap. It was quite a while before Sam stood.
The animal hospital offered cremations and Sam spread the ashes in the canal. They were hardly the worst thing someone had dumped there and the thought of keeping the remains of his cat in a Tupperware struck Sam as pathetic and more than a little morbid.
Besides, Major Tom had always hated being cooped up.
“Where’s the little demon?” Gene asked as he raided Sam’s fridge. “Haven’t heard him yowling since I got here.”
Sam carefully buttoned up his shirt. There was a crime scene to get to, and Sam couldn’t waste time putting the fourth button into the fifth hole. He concentrated so hard on his task, he forgot to answer Gene’s question. “Alright, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
Gene’s head popped out of the fridge. “What, did he run off again?”
“Who?” Sam asked. He wished his shoes had laces he could focus on.
“Your cat, Sam.”
“Oh. No, he died. It’s okay, he was sickly. I really wasn’t that surprised.” Sam jerked his head at the door. “Come on, you were in a rush three minutes ago.”
“What? When?” Gene said. He almost sounded angry. Maybe he’d wanted to kill Tom himself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“About a week ago. It wasn’t a big deal. Let’s go.” And without looking back to see if Gene was following, Sam fled his flat. He wasn’t sad, he just knew Gene would make a thing out of it, and Sam couldn’t be arsed to deal with that.
True to form, at the pub that night, Gene let Sam buy him a pint. With aggressive joviality, Gene proposed a toast. “Good riddance to the mangy rag.”
Sam obligingly lifted his glass and drank.
Five drinks later, Gene leaned heavily on the table and told Sam about his mutt, Lucas. “Fucking Lucas,” he said. “Five stone, at least, and ugly as Phyllis in the morning.” From the next table over, Phyllis chucked a coaster at Gene.
The dog had been the Missus’s idea, something to greet Gene when he got home too late for her to stay up. “Every day,” Gene said, sloshing around his cup for emphasis, “the idiot sprinted at me the moment I opened the door. Just gobs of slobber and a wagging tongue that’d been licking arse and bollocks all day. The fat thing nearly killed me.”
Gene drank, the good long drink of the experienced. “Hit by a car in ‘69. Bled out in the street. It’s a shame. The Missus liked him.” Gene fixed Sam with an odd sort of stare, the kind where the emotion behind was anybody’s guess. Sam rested his head on his hand and stared back until Gene laughed and looked away.
“You know, some days I still flinch when I walk into me house.” Gene shook his head and drank. “Animals. The stupid things love you to death just ‘cause you’re there.”
Sam looked into his glass and drank to that too.
“It’s just us again, Sammy. No rude guests spoiling our party,” the Girl said. “What fun we’ll have together.”
What fun.
Obviously, Sam didn’t mourn Major Tom. Six months wasn’t a long time, not long enough to really get attached. And anyway, Major Tom was a cat-a partially blind, always hungry, slightly smelly, and occasionally violent cat-and he’d come with a prominent expiration date.
But sometimes Sam left out food before he could remember not to. He cursed Tom whenever he pulled another clump of fur from something in his flat. In the morning, he rose slowly, so anything on his chest had plenty of time to prepare. And when Sam woke in a cold sweat, he raised his hand without thinking, reaching for a comfort that did not weigh there anymore.
This time made him stupid. It turned his head around until he couldn’t find which way was up. What he knew for sure was this: Major Tom had been a part of something new, something he hadn’t had in 2006, something he hadn’t had the first time ‘round in 1973. Tom had needed him, and Sam taken care of him because that was what he did when someone needed him. Now Tom was gone, and the flat was empty, and Sam needed to know what still kept him here.
“Sam. Sammy.” He watched the telly from his bed, the forlorn sock puppet with his mother’s voice looking back. “Please wake up, Sammy. Please come home.”
Sam crawled out of bed and knelt in front of the television. “Mum, please,” he said, but he no longer knew how to end that sentence. He heard tears in her voice and he wanted them gone, but beyond that he was stumbling in the dark.
“Sammy, I need to know what you want. Please speak to me.” He raised his hand to the screen and felt nothing but the bite of static. “Darling, please. Please.” And now Ruth Tyler was weeping with the great heaving sobs that hadn’t tormented him since the early days of 1973, the first and the second time around. She wept like she had when he was child, and she had just come home from the late shift, and there still wasn’t enough money for the new trousers he needed, and all Sam asked was when Dad was finally coming home and if he’d be bringing gifts.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the telly, but his mother, bone-tired and grieving, could not hear.
“Oh, Sammy.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Sam leaned away from the television. “What?”
“Smile at me, sweetheart.” Her voice was hoarse with crying, barely above a whisper. He felt her hand on his cheek, a phantom sensation from across time or sanity or consciousness. He raised his hand to hers and felt only his face. “Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me and I’ll do it. I love you so much, Sam. We can live this forever, but, please, I need to know that this is right.”
Sam lowered his hand and closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he and his mum breathed together. “I love you, Mum.” He whispered it like a prayer.
“Give me a sign, darling. Anything.”
And Sam flicked the telly off.
After a moment he pulled out the plug. Then, suddenly exhausted to his core, he rose and climbed back into bed.
In his in-between days, in between deciding to stay and coming to grips with that, Sam bought a cat. A kitten, actually, a grey ball of fur that enjoyed falling asleep in the crook of Sam’s neck and kneading Sam’s bare skin when he woke. At five every morning, more reliably than an alarm clock and less resettable, he mewed in Sam’s ear until Sam dragged himself out of bed to set out some cat food.
Gene hated him instantly. He took to the new flat, though, just as quickly. He kicked the new couch thoughtfully. “Not bad, Sammy. You still need to buy a telly.” Gene peered into the bedroom while he fished out his flask. “Look, a proper bed and everything. Now you don’t have to shag Annie on a fold up cot.”
“And just think,” Annie said to Gene “when you pass out again because you’ve still no idea your liver’s capacity, we can drag you somewhere decent to sleep it off.”
“Play nice,” Sam said, leaning back in his new armchair (his nice new armchair, he’d forgotten what a decent chair felt like), his legs propped up on the coffee table. Gene sprawled across one end of the new couch, sinking into the corner and nursing his flask. Annie perched at the other end, head on hand, and watched the kitten play.
She nudged Sam’s feet with hers. “What did you end up naming the little guy?”
They watched the kitten maul a toy mouse. “David,” Sam said.
Gene snorted. “You’ve a Bowie fetish, Gladys.”
Sam tossed the mouse and sent David scrambling after it. “Does that make you two my Pips?”
“Depends. Does that make you a colored bird?”
All his life, Sam had expected something grand. Cymbals crashing, a choir singing, an angel coming down from the sky in a beam of light. Something that would finally tell him that, yes, this was exactly where he was supposed to be, so good job with your life plan, Sam, you’re done now.
He’d given up on the cymbals. The small pleasures that had seemed worthless his first try at this didn’t seem that small anymore. A city he loved. A job he was good at. A comfortable bed and a well-placed reading chair. Plenty of books. Even more records. Wine and whiskey in equal amounts and people to share them with. Silence in the night. Or laughter. Or purring.
And when all else failed, and he knew by now that it eventually would-well, that was later. This was now, and right now Annie grinned at him, Gene passed over the flask, and David unsheathed his claws and started the inevitable destruction of Sam’s new couch. This was the best Sam could expect. This was the most that 1974 promised.
And try as he might, Sam couldn't shake the feeling that this was going to be a good year.