‘Sort of, yeah.’ He had a massive grin on his face.
‘You’re full of it.’
‘I’ve missed this.’
‘Missed what?’
‘Little human beings trotting along at my side and asking daft questions. Those were the days!’
And now Rose stopped. Making a stand. ‘Hey. I’m not your secretary. And I’m not your pet. Have you got that?’
To her surprise, he stopped and looked at her with genuine alarm. ‘Oh no, no, no,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. Those people, asking questions. I loved them. Oh my God, I loved them all.’ It was the strangest thing, he looked as though he could cry. Then he turned and walked away.
And still, she followed. ‘Okay. So. This plastic. If you’re not the police, who else knows about it?’
‘No one. Just me.’
‘You’re on your own?
‘It’s better that way.’
‘Shouldn’t you tell someone?’
‘Like who? Who else is there? I mean, you lot, what good are you? All you do is eat chips and go to bed and watch telly, while all the time there’s a war going on, right underneath your nose.’
‘But … a war with who?’
‘Long story.’
‘What, too long for me? Do I look like I can’t cope?’
He smiled at that. ‘No, you look like you can cope with anything.’
That’s more like it, she thought, he gets me now. ‘Well then who is it? What kind of war? I mean, why use shop-window dummies? Does that mean someone’s trying to take over Britain’s shops?’
He laughed out loud, and said, ‘No, it’s not a price war,’ and she laughed too. Then in a second, his smile was gone as he said, ‘They want to overthrow the human race and destroy you all. D’you believe me?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re still listening.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I must be mad,’ and they both found themselves coming to a halt, the battle between them exhausted. They looked at each other properly, two survivors of extraordinary events.
‘Really though, Doctor,’ she said quietly. ‘Who are you?’
He rubbed his head. Heaved a tired sigh. Looked left and right, perhaps checking that no one else could hear. They were alone; the edge of the estate was a flat, open wasteland leading to the motorway, far-off in the distance, with an empty car park to the left. Not quite empty. Someone had left a tall, chunky, dark-blue box on the tarmac, some sort of old wooden hut, inlaid with windows. But Rose only considered it for a second before the Doctor lifted himself to his full height and looked into her eyes.
Rose saw red weals around his neck, where the plastic hand had dug deep. She saw cuts from the broken glass, little flecks of blood on his jaw, a deeper slice across his cheekbone. And she wondered if he let himself show any pain to anyone, as he said, ‘D’you know what we were saying? About the Earth revolving?’ He gave an exhausted smile. ‘It’s like when you were a kid. The first time they tell you the world’s turning and you can’t quite believe it cos everything looks like it’s standing still.’ And now she felt as though the Doctor could see through her every pretence and compromise, to stare right through to her soul. ‘I can feel it,’ he said. ‘The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it. We’re falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go …’
He broke the moment. Stepped back. Rose gasped, as though gravity could have snapped in that second, to fling them off the world and into the dark. But no, she was still here, on her plain old estate, standing at the edge of an empty car park with this terrifying man.
‘That’s who I am,’ said the Doctor. ‘Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home.’
He walked away.
Rose turned, wanting to run, some primal survival instinct telling her to get away from him as fast as she could. She walked across the scrubland, not looking back. The Enoch Tower was waiting for her in the distance. Home and safety and Mum.
But then she heard a noise. The strangest of noises, like nothing she had ever heard before. A grinding, heaving, aching sound, like some sort of ancient engine lurching into life. A wind sprang up, papers and leaves blowing in a vortex around her.
The noise began to fade and she turned around to look at the Doctor, to see if he’d heard it or caused it. But he was gone. Impossibly gone. She’d walked away for only 20 seconds or so, there was no way he could have crossed the wide-open space.
But the Doctor had vanished. And so had the big blue box.
6
Life at No.90
‘Hey, it’s my woman! Kit off!’ Mickey stood in the doorway of his flat, No.90 Powell Tower, and gave Rose the biggest smile, then the biggest hug. ‘It’s still on the news,’ he said. ‘Henrik’s and everything. You’re lucky to be alive. I keep thinking, if you’d been ten minutes later …’
‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t,’ said Rose. She kissed him, then kissed him some more, then made her way through to the kitchen. ‘Hello, you lot.’
Mickey’s little gang sat in the kitchen: Mook Jayasundera, a shy, tiny lad with big staring eyes; Patrice Okereke, the gangling, grinning joker of the pack; and Sally Salter, born Stephen Salter, sharp, spiky-haired and cautious but always, Rose thought, smiling at some private joke. They all whooped and stood and hugged her and asked about last night while Mickey made them coffee.
Rose loved this little gang. They called themselves a band, rehearsing their R&B once a week, after hours, in the garage where Mickey worked, but they had few musical ambitions beyond earning £60 in the Lamb & Flag once a month; really, they were together for the laughs. And laugh they did, this untidy little kitchen often full of booze and music. Rose thought the company he kept was one of the best things about Mickey. His crew weren’t just mates, they were all escaping something; the flat had only one bedroom but the living room settee was usually taken up by whichever member of the band had fallen out with someone the night before. Mook was the youngest of six brothers and came to No.90 so he could gradually, cautiously, definitely be gay. Patrice held down three jobs, saving for the day he could leave home and escape his mother’s sullen boyfriend. Sally had never gone back to her parents since starting to transition, calling her old home Stephen’s house, keeping a toothbrush and clothes at five different flats scattered across the estate. And Mickey was the centre of their lives. He’d been on the housing list at 16, and at 18 he’d been granted that holy grail, a flat of his own. The first thing he did, when given the keys to No.90, was to prop that door open and make others welcome.
Rose watched him now, taking forever to make the coffee. Mickey was a lean, chippy strip of a lad, with that winning smile, bristling with energy all day long. Even now, he kept darting to and fro—a little dance with Patrice, drumming out a new riff with teaspoons on Mook’s head, showing Sally the Daily Mirror’s front-page photo of Henrik’s in which, he swore, if you got a magnifying glass, you could see Rose in the rubble, there, right there, that little yellow blob—and she thought, I’m lucky. Mickey Smith is a good man.
Patrice took last night’s curry out of the fridge and they all helped themselves. Rose considered this a radical improvement on Mickey’s home cooking, his favourite dish being Butter Pepper Rice: rice with butter and pepper. Now, they all ate and joshed and hooted, the normally quiet Mook inventing a physical impersonation of Henrik’s exploding that had them all howling. Rose knew they were making an extra effort to cheer her up. And she thought, Yes, this is where I should be, this is my normal life, and it’s fine. Something strange had entered her world with the Doctor, but now he was gone. And she was home.
She wondered if No.90 would truly be home, one day. Rose Smith. Tyler-Smith. Maybe. Her life had been connected to Mickey’s long before they had started going out with each other. Her mother had been friends with Mickey’s
mum, Odessa, since the ’80s. Along with their mates Sarah, Suzie and Bev, they’d call themselves the Wednesday Girls, meeting up for wine and chips every Wednesday night. Mickey was three years older than Rose, and family lore maintained that he’d visited Baby Rose in hospital on the day she was born. ‘He imprinted himself,’ Jackie always said. ‘Like a chick.’ Rose would point out that she’d been a baby, so technically she was the chick. ‘Trust me,’ Jackie would say, ‘Mickey’s the chick.’
Now, in the kitchen of No.90, Mickey was improvising a song about the fate of Henrik’s, rhyming ‘explosion’ with ‘emotion’, Sally adding harmonies. Rose smiled, thinking of everything he’d been through, this daft, larking-about boyfriend of hers.
Odessa Smith had relied on the Wednesday Girls for one night of laughter in the week. Other nights were darker. ‘She could never really cope,’ said Jackie. ‘With money. With men. With anything really, poor soul.’ One day, when Mickey was five years old, Odessa had gone to her bedroom and quietly taken herself out of the world.
Mickey was left with his father, Jackson Moseley Smith, an engineer and part-time pub-singer who was horrified to find himself a single dad. He worked longer and longer hours, further and further away from home, until he found a job on the cruise ships moored at Tower Bridge Upper. He was employed as Second Engineer, though everyone knew he had ambitions to move up through the decks to sing on the stages above. A two-month contract was followed by a six-month contract, and then another, until Jackson Smith sailed away and never returned. ‘Be fair,’ Jackie always said, ‘he ran away with a broken heart.’ Whether he ever sang on those stages, no one knew.
Rose watched Mickey now, making toast—‘Curry on toast, best meal in the world!’—and she remembered the saviour of little Mickey’s life. Jackson’s mother, Rita-Anne. Mickey’s Gran had been blind for 20 years and if blindness intensifies the other senses, then hers had made her angrier, shrewder and a better aim with a punch. She was a firebrand, a meddler, a troublemaker, and absolutely magnificent. If she were here now, thought Rose, she’d clout the side of his head. ‘Shame on you! Wasting good food!’ She had taken Mickey to live away from the Powell Estate, moving him to her redbrick terrace on Waterton Street. But she kept him at his old school, and took Mickey back to the estate to see the Tylers and his friends at weekends, as well as opening the door of Waterton Street to anyone and everyone.
The open door, thought Rose. That’s where he got it from. And she smiled as Mickey and Sally invented a filthy rhyme and hugged each other with laughter.
Rita-Anne’s birthday present for Mickey’s sixteenth was to put him on the council’s housing list, with the Powell Estate as first preference. ‘I’ll never leave you, Gran,’ he said, but when No.90 became available, she told him that he was a pain and a nuisance and she wanted him out. Mickey hugged her, everyone hugged her, as they packed Mickey’s things into a van and drove him away from Waterton Street to his new life. Two months later, Rita-Anne tripped on the stair carpet and broke her neck. Three hundred people came to her funeral. The street was sealed off for a party which danced and wept till 5 a.m., Mickey Smith carried on the crowd’s shoulders like a king.
What a life, thought Rose.
But as she watched Mickey tuning his bass guitar, Sally writing down the new lyrics, Patrice and Mook sorting the washing into clean and dirty (no one was ever quite sure which pile was which), Rose felt a sense of quiet dismay. Because she was jealous of Mickey. She envied him his losses and tragedies. She’d never dare admit it, but my God, she’d think, he’s lived.
What had ever happened in her life? Apart from a lost year with Jimmy Stone and a few failed exams, she’d lived in the same flat with her mother since the day she was born. She could spin a tragedy out of her poor old dad, but she’d only been six months old when he died, and life since then had been a straight, unaltering line. The most exciting option in her future was the prospect of moving from No.143 to No.90 and then staying there for years and years to produce lots of little Smiths, until blonde became grey and the day came when no one danced at her funeral. Her life was fixed and dull and inevitable.
Until last night.
Until the Doctor.
My God, she thought, the Doctor. She’d spent all these years waiting for something to happen, then someone different and strange and powerful had entered her life and what had she done? She’d let him go!
‘Mickey,’ said Rose, ‘can I use your computer?’
She typed the word Doctor into the search engine.
1,080,000,000 results.
Rose took a sip of tea, typed in:
Doctor Henrik’s explosion
848,000 results.
Doctor bomb dangerous man
2,240,000 results.
Doctor leather jacket
1,900,000 results.
Doctor London March 5
3,450,000 results
I am looking for a mysterious doctor
1,970,000 results.
Rose huffed. Took another sip of tea. Looked around Mickey’s bedroom, planning a good tidy. From the kitchen she could hear laughter, Sally strumming the guitar as the debate went on; they’d decided that the name of their band, No Hot Ashes, was rubbish. They had a booking for tonight, £100 for 30 minutes in the Brook at Camden, and had taken it as their chance to ‘relaunch the brand’, as Patrice put it, to much hooting. Now they were throwing around new names. Mickey and the Mooks. Family Hold Back. The Byzantine Exploration. Best Day Ever. Carbon Footprint. The Dazzlers. Glitch. Bum. If.
One more go, thought Rose, and she typed in:
Doctor blue box
1,600,000 results
It looked like another list of medical sites, but then a link, six down, caught her eye, with its machine-gunning question marks:
Have you seen the Doctor????????
She clicked. And there he was.
The Doctor.
A photograph of him, running. Same leather jacket. Panic on his face, he was holding out his arms and seemed to be yelling. Behind him … was that the Taj Mahal? With some big blurred birds in the sky.
And then a gallery of more photos, all grabbed, from a distance or on the run, alongside some CCTV stills. They showed all sorts of people – mainly a curly-haired man in a long scarf – but there were dozens of shots of the Doctor, in all sorts of different places. My God, he travelled! Paris. Berlin. Rio. The Great Wall of China. An endless beach, somewhere. Was that tundra? And did he never take off that jacket? She noticed, in three photographs, that the same chunky wooden box was standing in the background. Did he take it with him? Was it self-assembly? Like a workman’s hut?
As she looked, Rose’s head was thick with the thud of her heart, her right knee jiggling with tension, like when she sat exams. The urge to click the screen off and run home to her mother and get a job in a butcher’s and forget this ever happened.
Has he affected me that much?
She read the text underneath. The site was run by a man called Clive Finch, an estate agent from Stoke Newington, married to Caroline, two kids, Michael and Ben. ‘I’m giving you this information so you can see I’m a normal bloke, not a crackpot. But if you’ve come this far, then I suspect you’ve seen him. The Doctor. And if you’ve seen him, then I wonder, was it at a time of great peril? Was there danger? Disaster? Even death? Because these are his harbingers and helpmeets. If you have seen the Doctor, your life has been touched by something extraordinary. And doubtless you’re wondering: who is he? Well, faithful reader, I am here to tell you: I HAVE THE ANSWER!!’
Rose smiled. This man sounded a bit nuts, but kind of funny too. She took a good gulp of tea as, behind her, the argument in the kitchen raged on, Mook’s favourite name for the band now Hope of the Hopeless, with Patrice complaining, ‘We’d sound like evangelicals!’
She read on, Clive explaining that he’d been collecting evidence concerning the Doctor for years. ‘If you can help, photos or anecdotes or top-secret documents, please get
in touch,’ followed by his email address and telephone number.
Rose hesitated, wary of contacting a stranger. She turned her mobile phone over in her hand. She’d switched it off since the Doctor’s disappearance because Jackie was bombarding her with texts about coffee tables. She put the phone down, deciding on a little snooping first.
She found an About Me link on his website, clicked on it, and found photos of Clive, a middle-aged man, untidy black hair, beaming away. The sort of man who looks like the office joker. And below that, photos of him with his wife Caroline and their two boys. A snapshot of them all at Thorpe Park just two weeks ago. Fair enough, thought Rose, but anyone can steal photos. Then she clicked on the link to the estate agent’s, finding a list of staff bios with, yes, a photograph of Clive Finch. The same man.
If he’s a murderer, thought Rose, he’s not hiding himself very well.
She fired off a quick email, saying that she’d seen the Doctor, and could he help? She’d barely picked up her mug for another sip of tea when ping!
Clive Finch replied.
Twenty minutes later, Rose popped her head into the kitchen. ‘Mickey, I need a lift.’
‘I’m here!’ said Mickey, and leapt to his feet without even asking where they were going, which made the other members of the band howl with laughter. Mickey loved their mockery, grinning as he grabbed his keys. He kissed the top of Mook’s head, ‘Don’t miss me too much!’
‘We’re meeting for a sound check at six o’clock,’ called out Patrice, as Mickey went into the hall to find his leather jacket, Rose already waiting by the front door.
‘I’ll be there,’ said Mickey.
Rose turned to go and yelled, ‘See you later!’
‘Hey Rosie,’ called out Sally, ‘we were thinking of names for the band, something like Bad Karma, or maybe Bad Future, or Bad Timing, what d’you think?’
‘Bad Echo?’ said Mook.
‘Bad Dogs?’ said Patrice.
‘Bad Wolf?’ said Sally, but Rose had gone.
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