Dr. Who - BBC New Series 48

by Borrowed Time # Naomi A Alderman

  day was! She felt amazing, like she could do anything.

  So she hired a car and drove to Leadworth.

  Her parents were thrilled to see her, of course. She never got enough of that, never ever. Real Mum, and real Dad. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember them -

  she remembered every moment of her upbringing, every school play, every Christmas Eve, every scraped knee and seaside holiday. But she also remembered, somehow overlaid on top of that, what it had been like not to have them there at all. What it had been like to grow up so lonely, only knowing that there ought to be stars and there were no stars, and that a raggedy man in a box would come back for her one day.

  So there was nothing better, not really, than spending a night at Mum and Dad’s house. Especially a free day, one she’d just borrowed. They were surprised to see her, of course, because wasn’t she supposed to be on holiday or something? But she told them there’d been a change of plan. Just for a day. Her mum made her favourite roast beef and her dad showed her his plans for the extension to the garage, and she made them show her all the photos of her childhood again, every single one, just so she could reassure herself it was all where she’d left it.

  And she fell asleep under the same old duvet she’d had when she was a kid, with the old Roman soldier models under the bed in their same old box. And when she woke up, the sun was streaming in the window and it was almost midday. Her parents wouldn’t like that. Not that they’d be angry exactly, just that her dad would rattle his newspaper and say, ‘Up late again, are

  we, Amelia? Are you getting enough sleep, girl? That Rory keeping you awake too late? Do you want me to have a quiet word?’ and the embarrassment would be so cringingly awful that she might experience a single moment of not-bliss in her trip home.

  She turned the watch dial back. It was 8 a.m. again. A perfectly respectable time to get up. Plus that gorgeous feeling of the hours peeling away. Her mum was in the garden, hanging up the washing. Downstairs she could hear her dad tinkering with that faulty connection on the washing machine. Hmmm, actually. Amy turned the watch back another couple of hours. The nice tingly feeling washed over her again. She went downstairs and by the time her mum got up, it was she who’d done the washing, hung it up, made breakfast (all right, it was only toast and soft-boiled eggs, but she’d had to wind time back a few times just to stop them burning and hard-boiling, and had had to make a quick dash to the petrol station to buy more eggs), and picked some flowers from the garden for the living room table. She’d even found her dad’s spanner and tightened up the loose connection at the back of the washing machine.

  She could tell by the looks on her parents’ faces that they were impressed. And surprised. Mainly surprised.

  She drove back down to London, smiling all the way.

  As she drove, she kept touching the watch. It was so easy to turn back time. Imagine, she thought, if she did it now while she was driving, the sun would stay just where it was. And it’d feel so nice. She reached over and almost turned the dial when she suddenly wondered what’d happen if, travelling back in time, she hit another

  car on the motorway. Probably not the best idea. She wondered if they’d mentioned anything about dangers like that in the terms and conditions she hadn’t read and pulled over to have a look, but she couldn’t make them come up again. Oh well.

  Back in London, she planned to go straight to the Bank and rejoin the Doctor. What had it been he wanted to talk to her about again? She couldn’t quite remember any more. She suddenly realised why Sameera had had that notebook with details of what she was wearing every day in her drawer. It was so easy to forget exactly the continuity of your days when you could travel back in time as often as you liked.

  And suddenly it struck her. Wearing. She’d left the business suit she’d found in the TARDIS back in Leadworth, had come back in her own comfy skirt, boots and bright red jumper. She couldn’t go into a bank like this! Only one thing for it.

  She hit every shop on Oxford Street just as they opened, five hours earlier. She’d never managed to go shopping this early before - without the crush of people, it was just so easy. She turned the watch back to 9 a.m. after every shop, and kept on and on being the first customer. Before she knew it, she had armfuls of bags and was feeling exhausted. Strange - exhausted and it was only 10 a.m.? Ahhhh, she worked it out. She’d turned time back so much she’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours.

  Well, couldn’t go and see the Doctor while she was dropping on her feet. Just one more turn. A good long one this time, with that wonderful sensation, and it was last night again. She walked to the nearest, poshest hotel

  - an brass signs and polished wood fittings - and using the credit card she and Rory had agreed was just for emergencies, just this once, she checked herself in for the night.

  ‘OK Amy,’ she said to herself when she woke up in the big, soft, plump-pillowed, feather-mattressed bed. ‘OK, get a grip. Time to go back to the Doctor.’

  The watch was still on her wrist. She’d tried to take it off the night before but hadn’t been able to manage the clasp somehow.

  Her mind rebelled. She couldn’t stop thinking of the possibilities. She could use the watch to get something for the Doctor, maybe? What would he like? Or maybe she could go to Lexington Bank a few days ago and leave something for him. That’d be hilarious, just the kind of time-joke he’d like. Or maybe…

  She stopped herself. She stared hard at the watch.

  This was all a bit too easy, wasn’t it? She hadn’t seen Rory in days, it felt like, and she missed him. Where had all that time gone? She wondered how much time she’d borrowed. It had all blurred together. She took a piece of hotel stationery and a pencil from the bedside table and wrote it all down, as much as she could remember anyway. The hairdresser, the nails, lunch with Rory, Leadworth, Oxford Street, last night… It came to about four days, she thought. Maybe. Ninety-six hours. Five minutes of interest per hour: 480 minutes of interest in total. Enough.

  She was still late getting to see the Doctor. She walked from the hotel and misjudged how long it would take.

  As she arrived at the Bank, it was 1.20 p.m., and he’d already called her mobile phone. She hadn’t answered.

  She thought about turning the watch back so she could arrive dead on time but she felt a bit sick when she thought of where the last four days had gone. It had been so easy. It shouldn’t be that easy to spend four days, surely?

  ‘Pond!’ shouted the Doctor as she walked out of the lift, ‘You’re late. And you haven’t tried any of this magnificent cake yet, and you haven’t…’

  He ground to a halt.

  He stared at her.

  She knew she didn’t look any different. Apart from the haircut and the very slightly different suit but she didn’t think he’d notice that.

  The Doctor brought his face very close to hers, then looked around her, behind her, then caught her wrist and pushed up her sleeve so he could see the watch.

  She didn’t know why, but she felt ashamed.

  ‘Oh, Pond,’ he said, ‘what have you done?’

  Chapter

  8

  ‘This is bad,’ the Doctor said. ‘It’s very, very bad. I don’t see how it could possibly be any worse. How do you get this thing off?’

  They were standing in the now-empty conference room. The Doctor was wrestling with the clasps on the inside of her wrist. They looked as if they’d be easy to undo, just several interlocking buckles. But for some reason, his hands slid off every time he tried to open them.

  ‘Protected!’ he shouted. ‘Woven into your personal time stream, the only way to remove it will be to destroy the central hub where the time is being stored, but where’s the hub, where’s the hub?’

  ‘Doctor,’ Amy said. ‘Doctor, why are you panicking?’

  ‘Panicking? I’m not panicking! I’m just very calmly, very rationally, being quite insistent, that we have to get this thing off you.’

  ‘But why?’r />
  ‘Do you know what this is? No, of course you don’t why would you, you just let anyone at all put any kind of temporal engineering device on your wrist I suppose.

  You probably do it all the time. This is a Time Harvester device. It’s a parasite. Or, it’s a very small element of a parasitic organism. Leave it on there much longer and it’ll start sucking the time right out of you and you really wouldn’t want that to happen, believe me.’

  He was pacing agitatedly, waving his hands in the air and rubbing his forehead.

  ‘Think, Doctor, think,’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘But Doctor, it’s OK,’ Amy said. ‘It hasn’t taken any time away from me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘In fact, it’s sort of the other way round. It lets me borrow time, Doctor, as much as I want But’ she added hurriedly, I’ve only borrowed about four days. The interest is only about eight hours! It’s nothing!’

  The Doctor stopped pacing.

  He turned towards her.

  ‘Say that again,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve only borrowed four days,’ she said.

  ‘The other bit.’ His face was very grim.

  T h e interest is only…’ she slowed down, ‘about eight hours?’

  ‘Did you say interest?’

  Amy suddenly felt like crying, and she didn’t know why.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and her voice was very small.

  The Doctor rested his forehead on hers, just for a moment He spoke very quietly.

  ‘Oh, Amy,’ he said. It’s very bad, and I don’t know how to make it better.’

  He pulled at her wrist again, pressed a button or two on the watch, poked at a little indentation on the face she’d never noticed before. A display came up, projected out of the watch into the air in glowing orange letters.

  It read: ‘BORROWED TIME TOTAL: 4 DAYS, 3

  HOURS.’

  ‘See,’ said Amy, wriggling her wrist to try to get out of his grasp, ‘that’s what I said. Four days. Five minutes interest on the hour, eight hours total. It’s fine! I’ll pay it back now if you just let me press the…’

  She reached for the button that Symington and Blenkinsop had shown her. The ‘pay back the time you’ve borrowed’ button. They’d warned her it might make her feel a bit tired, all that time coming off her lifespan in one go, but better that than having the Doctor fussing over her any more.

  ‘No!’ shouted the Doctor and wrenched her wrist around so she couldn’t reach it.

  ‘Ow, you’re hurting me!’

  ‘Not as much as it’ll hurt if you try to pay that time back. Look, just look at the interest.’

  The display changed.

  ‘INTEREST TERMS: FIVE MINUTES PER HOUR, PER HOUR.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Amy.

  ‘No, you said five minutes per hour.’

  ‘That’s what it says.’

  ‘No!’ the Doctor wheeled round and grabbed a magic marker from the table. ‘It says five minutes per hour, per hour, totally different thing. If you promise not to touch that watch I’ll explain, do you promise not to touch it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right’ Look.’

  He started to draw on the glass wall overlooking the atrium.

  ‘Five minutes per hour, right? So you’ve borrowed ninety-nine hours, call it a hundred, make the sums easier, five times one hundred is?’

  ‘Five hundred,’ said Amy, somewhat sullenly.

  ‘That means you’d owe 500 minutes’ interest yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, because it’s not five minutes per hour, it’s five minutes per hour, every hour.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Amy started to have a sinking feeling. The feeling that she’d done something really stupid.

  ‘Doctor, you mean it’s been adding five for every hour I’ve borrowed, every hour since I borrowed it?’

  ‘Yes. But I know what you’re thinking, Amy.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘You’re thinking, “Five minutes per hour every hour, that’s five times a hundred times a hundred.’ He wrote the sum up on the glass wall. ‘Which is?’

  He was starting to remind her annoyingly of her old maths teacher.

  ‘Erm, 50,000? I owe 50,000 minutes?!’

  ‘OK Amy, if only, if only you only owed 50,000

  minutes - that’d only be thirty-five days, you could pay that back now and not really notice, might feel a bit sleepy, cup of coffee you’d be fine. Amy. They charge interest on the interest.’

  ‘But it can’t be that much more can it Doctor?’

  ‘Can’t be that much more? Can’t be that much more? Don’t they teach you anything in school? This is compound interest, interest on the interest.’

  He stared at her. She looked back blankly.

  ‘Compound interest, Pond. This is the concept that built banks and empires. This is what means people don’t pay off their credit cards. This is the concept that keeps poor people poor and rich people rich on your benighted, glorious planet. It’s… look. See this cake?’

  He pointed at the enormous cake in the centre of the table which now read ‘ppy rthday reg’. The people at the meeting had made a brave attempt to eat it all, but had barely got through a tenth of it.

  Amy nodded. ‘Yes, I see the cake. I understand cake.’

  ‘Right.’ The Doctor cut a slice of cake. The chocolate icing was thick on the top. ‘Look at the cake, focus on the cake. The cake, this yellow part, is the hour of time you’ve borrowed. And the icing is the interest. Get it?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘OK, so that’s after one hour. Now let’s borrow another hour.’

  He cut another slice of cake.

  ‘This is your new borrowing. Cake. Plus the interest.

  Icing. Plus you owe an extra slice of icing because you’ve got two slices of cake, right? Every hour, you have to pay one slice of icing for every slice of cake you’ve borrowed. Two hours, two slices of icing.’

  He made a gentle incision on top of the cake and cut off an extra triangular piece of soft chocolate icing, leaving the cake partly bald.

  ‘Doctor, you’re ruining that cake!’

  ‘We’ll get another one. Ten. They’re delicious.

  Anyway, look.’

  He put the icing, wobbling, chocolately, on top of the second piece of cake.

  ‘Now that’s what you owe. Now let’s borrow another hour.’

  He cut another slice of cake with icing.

  ‘Now the interest.’

  He cut two more pieces of rich brown icing and piled them on top of the second piece of cake.

  ‘Careful, Doctor,’ said Amy, ‘that cake’s almost more icing than cake now!’

  The Doctor grabbed Amy’s shoulders and stared hard into her eyes.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is precisely the point. Let’s borrow another hour.’

  He cut another piece, and cut three more pieces of icing. He piled up all the extra icing together, with the icing he’d already cut.

  ‘There’s a whole extra piece of cake just made of icing,’ said Amy.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘So now, if you borrow another piece of cake, how many slices of icing will we have to take?’

  The Doctor cut another piece.

  Amy counted the slices of cake. ‘There are five pieces of cake. Five slices of icing.’

  ‘But look at the slice entirely made out of icing.’

  ‘Oh. Right. If that counts as a piece, it’s six.’

  ‘So we have to cut an extra slice of icing. Lucky it’s a big cake.’

  ‘But six slices of icing is practically a whole extra piece. That means that now, every time I borrow another slice, I end up getting a whole extra slice just made of icing.’ She was feeling queasy.

  The Doctor nodded slowly.

  ‘You’ve almost used up the icing on that cake,’ said Amy. It was true, the cake was almost completely bald.

&
nbsp; ‘The interest goes up much faster than your actual borrowings. Once an hour, a slice of icing for every hour you’ve borrowed.’

  ‘That’s a lot of icing.’

  ‘That’s how compound interest works. Eventually, the icing you have to pay on the icing is thousands of times more than the cake.’

  Amy stared at the soft sweet brown mass of icing.

  She’d never disliked icing before, but she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to eat it again now.

  ‘So how much time do I owe? With the compound interest?’

  He worked it out for her.

  She stared at the number for a long time.

  She thought she might faint, or be sick - as if she’d eaten a roomful of icing.

  ‘You must have made a mistake, Doctor.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘But I only borrowed four days, Doctor.’

  She kept on staring at the number written on the wall.

  She owed Symington and Blenkinsop ten years.

  ‘Ten. Years.’

  ‘And even if you don’t borrow any more, it’s going up by about a year an hour now.’

  She didn’t scream. She just started clawing and

  pawing at the watch. She realised she was shaking.

  ‘Get it off me,’ she said, ‘get it off, get it off, take it off my—’

  She picked up a bottle opener from the drinks cabinet, trying to lever the corkscrew under the watch to prise it off. She was bleeding, but she didn’t care. She just wanted the thing off her wrist.

  ‘Amy, Amy,’ the Doctor was trying to stop her, to get the corkscrew out of her hands before she gouged more of herself with it.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ said Mr Symington, from very close behind her.

  And then she screamed. Shuddered. Turned. There they were. Suddenly there, from absolutely nowhere.

  ‘We certainly hope there isn’t a problem,’ said Mr Blenkinsop.

  ‘We certainly hope you weren’t trying to remove our extremely expensive chronological asset-management device,’ said Mr Symington.

  ‘Because as we’re sure you know from your perusal of our terms and conditions…’

  ‘Your extensive perusal of them, as we advised you to do…’