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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