Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (28 page)

The cabby was chattering on, but Chris was too tired from the journey back to London to pay any attention. He stared out of the window, taking a rare opportunity in his travels with the Doctor to watch the passing of an ordinary day in a different century. It had started to drizzle and the pedestrians in the city were now walking hurriedly through Soho. The streets they walked on were drab and grey. The cities of Chris’s day were neon bright, garish and loud; every available space taken up with advertising messages and images, the walkways which stretched between the mile high towers alive with the chatter of a thousand races.

Across the street a dreary tailors advertised ELITE STOCKING REPAIRS. 1/6

PER STOCKING. That was another thing, Chris mused, here everyone wore the same sort of clothes. Variations on a suit. Casual wear didn’t appear to have been invented yet. The only people who wore jeans were the workmen drinking tea from flasks as they put up office blocks over the last remaining bomb sites. Everyone else on the streets looked as if they were on their way to a job interview. The air of formality in the city was stifling. And beneath the veneer of bland respectability, you could never really know what people were like, or what was really going on in their lives.

Patsy appeared at the window of the taxi, looking concerned. ‘There’s no one at the Tropics. Not even Saeed and Andrew, and I’ve never known them rise before late afternoon. Strange.’

Chris shrugged. ‘So what now? Do we wait?’

‘No,’ Patsy said, coolly appraising the situation. ‘Mother feared that the Tropics was under surveillance – it would be safer if we stayed out of Soho.

We’ll go back to my place.’

‘Your place?’ Chris exclaimed. Of course Patsy would have a home here. It was just that – why was that so hard to imagine?

‘Hammersmith, please, driver,’ Patsy said, as she climbed in next to Chris.

She looked at him and smiled. ‘What?’ she asked, after a moment.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

158

Patsy’s home turned out to be a large house on the river, a little way down from Hammersmith Bridge. Patsy put the nameless boy to bed in one of the many bedrooms and then led Chris into a darkened sitting room. The room reminded Chris of a funeral parlour – stuffy and formal. It was hard to imagine anyone living in the room.

‘Nice,’ Chris commented out of politeness, although he was feeling uncomfortable. Cut flowers were everywhere in the room, on every surface. There were so many that several bouquets were still wrapped in paper and had been left neatly stacked on the floor. All the blossoms were dry and wilting.

Chris narrowly avoided stepping on a wreath. He remembered Patsy saying that she was a widow, but that her husband had died five years ago. He wondered who the wreath was for. ‘Did somebody die?’

‘What? Oh, those.’ Patsy paused and turned back to the hearth where she was preparing to build a fire. ‘Oh, they’re just from admirers, you know, my fans.’

‘Your fans send you wreaths?’

‘Oh you know what fans are like.’

‘Evidently not.’

He picked up the wreath, a small card was attached.
With deepest sympathy
on your recent loss.
‘Patsy, what’s this?’

Patsy crossed the room and lifted the wreath out of his hands. ‘Leave it, Chris,’ she said curtly, ‘those things give me the creeps.’ She threw the flowers on to an ornate sidetable which was already brimming with bouquets.

‘OK, OK, I’m sorry,’ he muttered, and suddenly realizing he had nothing to do with his hands, he stuffed them into his pockets.

The room appeared to be a shrine to her late husband. Large photographs of the two of them together adorned the walls, smaller pictures were mounted in a series of frames which sat on a baby grand piano in the corner of the room.

Robert Burgess had been a fat, middle-aged man in life. He looked as though he drank too much. There was a large wedding photograph over the fireplace. Patsy was looking happy but vacant in the picture. She was plastered in make-up and her wedding dress squeezed her bust together, exaggerating her figure to almost comic proportions. Her new husband was holding her arm tightly in his, a smug expression on his plump, glossy face.

Chris took an instant dislike to the dead man.

Patsy stood up from the hearth as the first flickers of flame licked at the wood. She caught sight of Chris staring at the picture and sighed. ‘I’ve been meaning to get rid of all of those.’

‘Why? He must have been so important to you to keep them up for all this time. It’s only right that you’d want to remember him.’

159

Patsy shrugged. ‘He’s dead, he’s gone. What use is all of this to me now?’

She patted the pockets of her jacket. ‘Damn, I’m out of smokes. I think the housekeeper keeps some menthol in the kitchen. I won’t be a minute.’

Chris smiled. ‘I’ll go. You always get so ratty when you can’t have your fix.’

Patsy smiled, warmly. ‘That’s right. Bring them upstairs, I’m going to run a bath.’

Chris found the cigarettes tucked away in the cutlery drawer of the small tidy kitchen and, obediently, trotted upstairs with them.

‘Are you decent?’ he asked, knocking on the bathroom door.

‘Not particularly, come on in.’

The bathroom was luxurious; white tiled with gold fittings. Framed gold discs decorated the walls.

‘My late husband’s triumphs,’ Patsy commented dryly, from the centre of a huge circular bath, which was full of frothy bubbles. ‘Of which I was the last.’

Chris sat awkwardly on the edge of the bath keeping his eyes very consciously on the metal circles on the walls. He handed Patsy her cigarettes.

She took them from him and then made a playful grab for him, trying to pull him into the bath, but he was too quick for her and leapt back into the room.

‘Spoilsport,’ she moaned, hanging on the rim of the bath. ‘Christopher, come on in. There’s room for two. Actually there’s room for about eight. I mean, can’t you just lighten up and have some fun, for Christsakes!’

‘I. . . ’ Why was this so difficult? It reminded him of something. As if he’d been here before. In exactly this situation.
I’m not worthy of you,
he heard himself saying. To Roz. He’d said that to Roz, while they’d kissed, selfconsciously and awkwardly, back in Little Caldwell.

‘Forget I mentioned it,’ Patsy snapped, and pushed herself away from the side. ‘If you don’t want me, that’s fine.’

‘It’s not that. . . it’s just. . . ’ Chris started and then ran out of words. Patsy sat in the middle of the bath and pushed her blonde hair away from her face, exposing dark roots near her scalp.

‘It’s just what, Christopher?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

And started to tug off his shirt.

Tilda Jupp pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor and the little open-topped MG sports car leapt forward, skidding around the tight country bend before hurtling on into the morning light. ‘An old flame gave it to me. Nifty, eh?’

‘Madam, are you aware of the speed limit?’ Harris shouted against the wind. Perched on the tiny back seat, he was beginning to wish that he had 160

brought his warrant card with him. They’d only been on the road for an hour and this woman had already committed over a dozen serious traffic offences.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Chief Inspector,’ she barked brightly. ‘The only positive aspects of being in the countryside are clear roads and no police officers.’

‘Present company excepted, I hope?’ Harris shouted, hanging on to his hat with one hand.

Miss Jupp eyed him through her driving goggles with open suspicion. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said, and narrowly missed a head on collision with a tractor.

The Doctor was in the passenger seat wrestling with an Ordnance Survey map, which flapped wildly around him, like a panic-stricken swan. For some inexplicable reason, his hat appeared to be entirely wind-resistant.

‘Next left, second right, then a sort of squiggly bit, left around a church, right around a village and then straight up a crease in the page. Can’t miss it.’

‘Right you are!’ Miss Jupp sang gaily, and swung a left at the next junction, sending up a spray of small stones as she did so.

‘Slow down. Please,’ Harris wailed.

Tilda turned to the Doctor and shook her head. ‘Lilly Law doesn’t half go on, doesn’t she? I don’t know how you put up with her, Doctor, I really don’t.’

Harris was busy clinging on to the interior fittings and missed the Doctor’s reply. Lilly Law! Every single sentence the woman uttered seemed designed to provoke him. He sank back, as much as one could sink into the tiny back bench of the sports car.

He’d thrown away a perfectly good career in the Force for this. Why hadn’t he just gone home and enjoyed his suspension? He could be having his lunch now. Reading the
Herald
while Olive chattered on about the neighbours and the latest outrage at the church social.

Tilda cut the engine as they approached their destination. They coasted silently down towards the gates of the Institute. The Victorian building was just visible through the trees. It looked innocent and slightly grand in the cloudy midday sun. Tilda pulled the car off the road as they neared the entrance to the grounds, breaking sharply and almost sending Harris flying into the front of the small car.

‘Here we are,’ she announced and gave him a disapproving look. ‘All in one piece.’

Harris watched her step out of the car, clamber on to the bonnet and from there lift herself up on to the wall of the grounds of the Institute. Effortlessly, the Doctor scampered up after her. Harris sighed and followed, struggling to pull himself on to the top of the wall.

This was trespassing, he told himself. Harris rather suspected that the day’s record of offences wasn’t going to end there. When he’d finally straddled the 161

wall, he paused and took in the unkempt grounds and the large Gothic house in the distance. Catching his breath, he thought, I’m getting old.

‘I never thought I’d be back here,’ Harris heard Tilda Jupp say, her voice a cocktail of bitterness and fear. ‘I’ve prayed every night that I would never step foot in this place again.’

162

Interlude

Gilliam Comes Home

Gilliam dropped suddenly, as if a trapdoor had opened beneath her feet. She fell into infinity. Spiralling through a swirling, kaleidoscopic nowhere. She opened her mouth to speak but instead of words her thoughts were ripped out of her mind, forming a series of images from her past, each image linked to the next making a paperchain of memories through the core of the shimmering vortex.

The story of her life, stretched out like a coloured streamer across the wall of an office party.

–
eighteen clumsy and shy I went to Europe and
I’ll show you uncle there’s these two guys who are travelling and one’s quite cute although I’m not going to tell you that
in the water something snags my ankle and strange British youth
who’s got one eye on my
Jesus it’s bigger on the
invector gauge
sarcasm is not your strong point
only enough for one
makes me a very egotistical young lady
Mondas
Telos
I can never remember which
I think one of them is still wandering in the corridors of the
well nobody likes transmutification do they
stealing brain fluid and planning to take over the Universe
what again
? argue mostly
you
left me behind
you left me behind
you left me behind
you left me behind
you
163

11

All I Have To Do Is Dream

‘Something’s coming,’ the Doctor whispered, and ushered them back around the corner of the building. ‘Hide!’

Harris hadn’t heard anything, but such was the authority in the Doctor’s voice that he took shelter behind a parked ambulance next to the little man and Tilda Jupp. They waited in silence for what felt like an age. Harris was reminded of playing hide and seek as a boy and began to feel a little embarrassed that he was crouching in a car park. He convinced himself that the Doctor had been mistaken, and was about to step out from their hiding place, when he heard the sound of laboured breathing.

Someone was coming. Getting down on his hands and knees, Harris saw a man’s legs and feet on the other side of the ambulance. The shoes were sturdy and practical, the trousers neatly pressed and black. A uniform? Perhaps an ambulance driver or a hospital orderly? What was Harris going to say if the man found him crouching there with his two odd companions?

Harris climbed to his feet, he couldn’t resist taking a look at the man. He moved to the cab of the ambulance and peered through the passenger window.

He’d been right. The man in the orderly’s uniform was framed in the driver’s side window. He had his back to Harris and was carrying a length of chromed metal in one hand – it looked like a. . . fork. Two sharp prongs, and made out of the same reflective metal that surgical instruments were fashioned from.

The rasping breathing was louder now. It didn’t sound like a man, more like. . . like a large, dangerous animal. The orderly turned his head forty-five degrees and Harris let out a little gasp.

The Doctor pulled him down roughly and slapped a hand around his mouth, the little man’s bright blue eyes glaring with mute fury at Harris. ‘Ssh.’

No face. The orderly hadn’t had a face at all. Just smooth pale flesh, like uncooked dough. Harris shivered and felt bile rise in the back of his throat.

He prised the Doctor’s hand from his mouth and crouched there by the wheels of the ambulance, cradling his head in his hands and trying to breathe silently.

No face. It was unthinkable. Horrible. How could such a thing be possible?

After what might have been a few seconds – or perhaps an hour – the Doctor tugged at Harris’s coat sleeve.

165

‘I think it’s safe to move on now.’

Harris let himself be led away.

Jack’s nose itched. Every few minutes he had to press his face up against the wall of the padded cell and rub it against the plastic walls. Plastic walls which smelt of urine and disinfectant. The only light in the room came from the gap under the cell door; a strip of sickly yellow that leaked in from the corridor outside. Jack could just make out the outline of Mikey’s head next to him.