So Vile a Sin (41 page)

It’s unbearable. He is – was – is the most alive person I’ve ever met.

Later. Chris and I spent the afternoon cleaning out Roz’s room aboard the TARDIS. Chris did the guns, I did the frocks.

There was a surprising amount of stuff in there; I’d expected something more Spartan, more along the lines of Ace’s room. A soldier’s room.

There was the usual odd collection of furniture you find in TARDIS rooms, an expensive Shaker chair and a locked writing desk. It took me almost ten minutes to pick the lock, feeling guilty all the time. There was nothing in there but a couple of old issues of
Badge and Bust
.

The guns were in a huge metal cabinet, also locked. There were a lot of them, from a standard Adjudicator-issue blaster to a flintlock rifle to something big and chunky and very twentieth century. Chris probably knew their names; I had no idea.

He took each gun out, carefully, checking it over. ‘We could just move the cabinet,’ I suggested.

309

‘No,’ said Chris. He sat down on her bed, a creaky old brass affair, and unzipped the bag he’d brought. ‘We should take this room apart.’

Roz kept her clothes in a big wooden cupboard against the wall. I knew she had quite a few outfits, though nothing like the number I’d accumulated in my travels aboard the TARDIS… but I was surprised by the number of slacks and jeans and shirts. And boots, half a dozen pairs, carefully cleaned. And dresses. I couldn’t ever remember seeing Roz in a dress, except for the wedding on Yemaya… She must have worn them a few times.

Why couldn’t I remember?

‘I wonder if it would be OK if I looked after these,’ I said.

‘Go ahead,’ said Chris. He was carefully disassembling the guns, putting them into the little boxes stacked on one of the cabinet’s shelves. ‘It’s not like the Doctor’s going to wear them.’

Right at the back there was a white dress, carefully hung inside a plastic sheath. Like a cocktail dress. Matching white gloves and a film-noir hat, complete with veil, were attached on the outside of the bag.

‘Chris,’ I said, ‘look at this.’

It took a moment to get the dress out of the cupboard, cradling it as I unhooked the coat hanger. I laid it down on the bed next to him. He hastily shifted the oily rags he was using to clean the guns.

Chris looked at it. ‘When’s it from?’ he said.

‘The forties,’ I said. ‘The nineteen forties.’ I was rummaging in the bottom of the cupboard, among the boots. ‘Look at these.’

White high-heels.

He looked at the dress some more.

‘It’s a wedding dress, isn’t it?’

I sat down with my back to the cupboard. ‘You didn’t know about this, did you?’

Chris just shook his head. ‘I wonder when
she
knew about it,’

he said. ‘When she decided. She never talked about George. I thought she just left him behind.’

I don’t think we ever leave them behind, diary.

Why didn’t she ever say anything to us?

310

I’m sitting here writing, up alone in my room. The Doctor’s probably still lying on his bed, where we left him. Chris is watching sims downstairs and Jason’s doing the washing up.

Why didn’t she ever tell us? Maybe she hadn’t made up her mind whether to go back to 1941, to take George Reed up on his offer of marriage, a home, a life of relative comfort and normality. Maybe the dress was just in case. But she could have said something.

Look what she’s done to the Doctor and Chris. Did she even think about them, before running up that hill? Bear with me, I’m aware this makes no sense, diary, bear with me. What about George? What about all of us? If she could see Chris slumped in front of the 3D and the Doctor half catatonic on the guest bed and me sitting here with tears in my eyes, trying to write, would she regret her decision?

What the hell was she thinking?

Yellow stick-on note:
I’m glad I got that out of my system. I still want to know, though, Roz. What were you thinking?

Kadiatu got here on Saturday.

How she found out we were here, I don’t know. Maybe Chris sent her a message, I’ll have to ask. Maybe the People found something about Roz’s death while they were paging through human history.

She descended from the sky in a bloody great fighter jet. It looked a bit old-fashioned – I reckoned I’d have to look it up in
Jane’s Ostentatious Aerial Combat Vehicles
.

Jason and I were in the kitchen at the time. I was washing up, peering at the Doctor, safely snoozing in his wheelchair out on the back lawn. I’d just made an especially witty comment about the Doctor becoming part of the shrubbery when the sky started to rumble, cutting across my punchline.

‘There aren’t any clouds,’ pointed out my observant husband, drying a dish.

‘That’ll be a flying saucer landing,’ I said. I headed for the back door.

‘The Institute is going to love this,’ said Jason.

311

Chris almost flattened me, careening down the stairs. He was wearing jeans and nothing else. I threw myself against the wall.

Fortunately, he stopped before he could make a large cartoon hole in the flyscreen.

We could see the ship, now, a heavy thing lowering itself on to the tennis court behind the house. I hoped it was advanced enough to have AG lifters, preferably ones which would stop its landing struts from wrecking the playing surface.

‘Triangulum Swift 400 series,’ said Chris.

‘You just made that up.’

He shook his head, yellow hair in disarray. ‘Twenty-first century.’

The flat, black triangle juddered to a halt on the tennis court.

The air around it was shimmering with heat.

Kadiatu got out of the plane. She was twenty feet above ground, but she didn’t bother with a ladder or any such frippery, she just jumped, dreadlocks trailing. She had on a white jacket, white slacks, white vest. She wore a violently red flower in her buttonhole.

She landed neatly on the ground, ran her eyes over the house, saw the Doctor, and started stomping towards him.

Dear diary, to imagine Kadiatu stomping, you have to imagine a panther who’s just been given a parking ticket. A genetically engineered, enhanced killer panther with split-second reflexes and a particularly large thorn in each paw.

‘Shit,’ said Chris. He pulled the door open and ran, getting himself between Kadiatu and the Doctor.

She looked at him, and he turned around and ran back to the house.

I let him in, peering past him through the flyscreen. ‘I think I’ll just let them have a little talk.’

Jason had come out of the kitchen. ‘What’s up?’

‘Keep an eye on them,’ I told him, already halfway up the stairs.

‘What do we do if something happens?’ he wanted to know.

‘Um… keep well clear,’ I said, lamely.

It was stuffy in the attic room. I opened a window, and pulled my chair over, back to the wall. Sitting down, I could peer up and 312

over my shoulder to see the Doctor and Kadiatu. I could hear them clearly.

Most of the neighbours could probably hear Kadiatu clearly.

‘Wake up, you old bastard!’ she yelled.

I sneaked a peek. She was shaking him, not gently. I heard Chris swear, downstairs, wondering whether it would be a fatal idea to try to stop her.

I saw the Doctor grab her arm. She stopped shaking him.

‘Wake up,’ she said again. ‘I’m not ready to be the Ka Faraq Gatri yet. Wake up.’

‘I am awake,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Won’t you kindly put me down.’

She dropped him into the wheelchair. ‘How did you find me?’

he asked.

She dropped into a crouch beside the wheelchair. ‘How long are you planning on sitting there?’

The Doctor’s hands smoothed the blanket on his knees. ‘It’s a very pleasant morning,’ he said, after a while.

‘There’s no one to take revenge on, is there?’ said Kadiatu. I wondered if Chris and Jason could hear her as well as I could.

‘Nobody you can blame her death on.’

‘She chose –’

‘That’s right. She jumped down into history and history ate her whole. Are you going to take revenge on history? Go back and change something so the whole future unravels? No.’

‘They found Walid,’ said the Doctor. He lifted his head, as though looking at her for the first time. ‘He was just a shell, all that was left after the gestalt was destroyed. They turned off the life-support after two days.’

‘So there’s no one left to hurt,’ said Kadiatu. ‘No one except you.’

‘I’m the wrong one,’ said the Doctor.

‘What?’

‘I’m the wrong one,’ he repeated. ‘I shouldn’t be here at all.’

‘You couldn’t have died in her place, so don’t be stupid,’ said Kadiatu.

‘It should have been one of the other ones,’ he said. I could just hear him. ‘One of the other Doctors in the Nexus. The one who 313

was quick enough to snatch Adric from the freighter. The one who arrived thirty seconds before Oscar Botcherby was stabbed to death, instead of thirty seconds afterwards. The one who saved Jan as well as everyone else.’

His head had fallen forward again. ‘Don’t you see?’ he said.

‘I’m the wrong one.’

I realized I was in floods. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and prayed that Kadiatu wouldn’t give up.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had our own little Nexus,’ she said. ‘And we could pick and choose the way the story ended.

Wouldn’t that be nice.’

‘But that isn’t –’

‘That isn’t how the story ends.’

‘I try,’ he said. ‘I try to make sure the story goes the way it should. That’s the whole
point
.’

‘But you’re not always the one who writes the final chapter, are you? You would have written it differently. Not the way Roz wrote it.’

The Doctor made a little sound. I wasn’t sure what it was.

‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ said Kadiatu, more gently. ‘That someone
knows
.’

The Doctor sat up in the wheelchair. I thought I saw him stroke her hair, like a father, but I couldn’t be sure.

‘Roz wrote the last chapter,’ said Kadiatu. ‘What about the epilogue, where the Doctor is so overcome with grief and self-pity that he never does anything, ever again?’

‘That isn’t how the story ends,’ said the Doctor.

‘So,’ said Kadiatu, ‘how does the story end?’

Extract ends

It had been a few months since Thandiwe had let her robots sleep in her bed. She was seven now, and old enough to have the bed to herself while the robots sat on the end.

Her bots were back on the shuttle, out of reach. There weren’t any toys at all. There wasn’t even a terminal. It was just a hut, with a bed in it.

314

Thandiwe lay down on the bed, picking at a thread on the blanket, bored. She could hear grown-ups talking and moving around outside, in the distance. Talking about Aunty Roz.

It had been a year since Aunty Roz had died. She would have spent that time wandering around, saying goodbye to all the people she knew when she was alive. A lot of them were here today, in the big house or the huts. The Doctor was back, and Chris, and lots of their friends that the Doctor had collected and brought here in his blue spaceship.

The Doctor had talked to her, earlier today, while she sat on his knee and tried to play with his yo-yo. He wanted to know how much she remembered of things. What she thought about Aunty Roz.

‘I’m her clone,’ Thandiwe had said proudly.

‘And what does that mean?’ he’d asked.

‘That means I’m a copy of her. Mama says that even though Aunty Roz is an ancestor now, I’ve got her genes.’

‘What do you think about that?’

Thandiwe thought about it. ‘I wish I’d got to talk to her more before she went away to the war,’ she said.

Everyone had been there that afternoon for the feast. Thandiwe had not been too clear on what was going on, and why everyone was making such a fuss of her. She had thought it was pretty funny when they slaughtered the bull, and Beni had walked out of the kraal, looking an interesting shade of green. That night Beni had eaten a bowl of salad and asked her what she thought of being a medium. She didn’t know, and decided to ask Mr Fact about it when she got home.

Mr Fact and Mama had explained some of the funeral to her.

Aunty Roz had been wandering for a year, they said, visiting everyone she knew and saying goodbye to them, and going to all of her favourite places. Now it was time to say goodbye properly.

Thandiwe had begun to fall asleep. Something nagged at her, pulling her back into wakefulness. There was someone else in the hut. She opened her eyes, holding completely still. She couldn’t see anyone.

There was only one person it could be.

The Monster Under the Bed.

315

Thandiwe pulled herself just to the edge of the bed, listening hard. Was that its breathing she could hear? Was it hers? She held her breath until she thought she was going to pop like a balloon, but she still wasn’t sure.

All she had to do to vaporize the Monster was to switch on the light – it always worked when Mama did it – but that would involve getting off the bed and crossing ten feet of dirt floor to the switch. She wasn’t sure how far the Monster Under the Bed could reach, and she didn’t wish to learn.

It wasn’t fair that the Monster had followed her all the way from Io to Earth. Or maybe this was a different Monster. Maybe every bed had one.

There was a flask of milk on the end of the bed. Mama had told Thandiwe not to drink it – it was for someone else. She sounded like she expected Thandiwe to know what she meant. Maybe she meant the Monster. Would a drink of warm milk put it to sleep?

Maybe she could smash its head with the flask. She reached for it.

She heard a noise.

Thandiwe froze in position. There
was
someone else in the hut

– she could hear them moving around. In fact, she could hear them struggling with something, rolling out from under the bed and on to the floor. Struggling, and winning, pinning their opponent down on the dirt and sticking a finger in its face.

Right,
they told the Monster,
you’re busted.