Dr. Who - BBC New Series 28

by Beautiful Chaos # Gary Russell

‘Everything we’ve said…’ added Ben.

  ‘About you…’ Jayne again.

  ‘You… you heard… Oh God… kill me now…’ Ben put his sieve down and sat hard on the ground.

  Tonio tousled Ben’s dark hair and winked at him, before throwing a look to Jayne. ‘Sorry, you lose.’

  ‘Course I do,’ Jayne said. ‘When does life ever go Jayne Greene’s way?’

  The laptop bleeped and, leaving the students to sort out the tea and Tonio’s confession, Professor Rossi accessed his emails in response. Nothing from the Bursar, but there was one message:

  From: Madam Delphi

  To: Rossi@Tarminsteruni.ac.uk Subject: SAN MARTINO

  Professor Rossi

  My congratulations, you have rediscovered your heritage, and you are indeed in San Martino, just as you hoped. Click on this link to be taken to my site for more information about this delightful Italianate kingdom and its secrets.

  The Professor was about to call the students over, but thought it would be better to check that this wasn’t a hoax.

  (Although how did anyone know they were searching for

  San Martino? He hadn’t even told the students the name of the kingdom). So he clicked the hotlink.

  Instead of a new webpage, the screen was instantly filled with a pulsating ball of bright white light, highlighted with lilac edges and spirals.

  Instinctively he let his hand reach forward to touch the screen… to go into the screen, to go through the screen…

  as if his right hand was being consumed by the transfixing ball of energy.

  Then he withdrew his hand, and looked at it.

  Crackling around the fingertips were the vestiges of purple pulses of energy, like tiny flickers of raw electrical power. He turned his hand over, studying the little pulses until they seemed to vanish for good, absorbed into his skin. He rubbed his fingers together, and then looked back at the screen. It just displayed Sean’s eBay victory again.

  The Professor stood up and turned to face his students and held his arms out, hands flat. ‘We’ve done it,’ he breathed.

  Instantly distracted from their own petty concerns, the four young people walked over, Jayne and Sean taking an offered hand each, excitedly returning the gesture, if unsure what they were celebrating.

  After a second, they wordlessly released the Professor’s hands, and Rossi then grabbed Ben and Tonio’s hands. And they in turn took Sean and Jayne’s, the five now forming a circle.

  In unison, they all raised their linked hands into the air, purple electricity building and crackling around them.

  The others followed the direction of his gaze as the

  Professor looked up into the sky.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he said quietly.

  Dinner was subdued in the Noble household.

  Sylvia silently put food on plates. Donna silently passed the plates from the work surface to the dining table. Wilf silently poured water into tumblers – three matching ones from a petrol station, and a larger one with Donald Duck on it. The Doctor had that.

  The Doctor sat there, uncomfortable with domesticity at the best of times, utterly ill at ease right now.

  ‘Dubai?’ Sylvia said, suddenly sitting up.

  The Doctor shot a look at Donna – what was he supposed to say?

  ‘With the horses,’ Wilf helpfully prodded.

  ‘Horses?’ The Doctor was like a rabbit caught in headlights. ‘Horses. Yes, marvellous things.’

  ‘The Sheikh of Dubai put us up for a couple of weeks,’

  Donna interjected. ‘ Didn’t he?’

  Sylvia started eating. Something cheese-y and macaroni-y the Doctor had guessed, but he wasn’t quite sure. Something that looked like this had once tried to bite off his toes on the coast of Kal-Durunt in the Keripedes Cluster.

  He gently eased his fork into it.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s not as posh as what you get in Dubai, with horses and sheikhs,’ Sylvia said. ‘But I had no notice from either of you that you were coming.’

  ‘Oh, well, we couldn’t have Donna missing today,’ the Doctor said brightly. Too brightly. Wrong occasion for

  Tigger-Doctor, better to be Eeyore-Doctor tonight.

  ‘I thought the Emirates were run by emirs, not sheikhs,’

  Sylvia said, pouring herself more water. ‘But what do I know? I just sit here every day, waiting for people to turn up out of the blue, expecting to be fed.’

  The Doctor just threw a look at Donna that he thought said ‘help’ but Donna clearly took to mean ‘no, it’s OK, ignore me, oh and right now would be the time to pick a really good fight with your mum’.

  So Donna did.

  ‘What is your problem, Mum? Most people would kill to have family around them.’

  Wilf tried to intervene, but Donna was going off on one now.

  ‘I mean, Mooky goes away for two weeks, her parents throw a bloody party to celebrate her return. And all she’s done is go shopping in Glasgow. I get to see the gala-well, to see the world, things I never thought I’d get the chance to do, and all I get is moans.’

  Sylvia didn’t look up from her food. ‘Yeah, but they probably knew where Mooky was. All I know is when your granddad there bothers to say he had a postcard. And I’m never allowed to read them, oh no.’

  Donna was going to chastise Wilf for that when she remembered that said postcards were usually sent from another star system entirely.

  ‘OK, Mum, I’ll start sending you postcards too.

  Promise.’

  ‘Oh it’s not just that,’ Sylvia said. ‘It’s the whole life I have. Your dad’s gone, you’ve gone, and I’m stuck here as

  nursemaid for your granddad’s bit on the side.’

  Donna opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again.

  Then, as that comment sank in, her mouth opened again, but still no sound came out.

  ‘Bit on the side?’ the Doctor asked Wilf.

  Wilf glowered at Sylvia. ‘She’s a friend,’ he said. ‘I’m not gonna marry her.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ Sylvia said. ‘Mum would turn in her grave.’

  ‘Ahhh, so that’s what it’s all about,’ Wilf sighed. ‘You think Eileen wouldn’t approve. You think somehow me seeing a poor, sick old lady would make Eileen sad. Well, you’re wrong. She was your mother, but she was my wife.

  I knew her better than that.’

  The Doctor remembered why he didn’t ‘do’ families.

  ‘Lovely macaroni cheese, Mrs Noble,’ he said, stuffing his mouth. ‘Mmmmm…’

  ‘It’s mushroom raclette,’ she snapped.

  ‘Not macaroni?’

  ‘Mushroom.’

  ‘It’s… great… very cheesy. And…’

  ‘So, who is this lady, Gramps?’ Donna asked.

  Wilf smiled. ‘She’s a lady astronomer I know, from Greenwich. Helps out at the observatory there, has done for years. But about three years ago she was… well, she fell ill and had to stop working. We chatted on the phone a couple of times, met up, had dinner. You’d think I’d started dating a teenage married pregnant cousin the way Sylvia goes on about her.’

  The Doctor was looking at Sylvia Noble, however.

  Spotting what made her flush angrily when Wilf spoke. It had been the word ‘ill’.

  He looked back at the old paratrooper. ‘Why’d she give up at the Observatory then?’

  ‘Ask her yourself,’ Sylvia said. ‘She’ll be here any minute. Even on Geoff’s day, my daughter brings you round, and he brings her round.’

  And Sylvia was up and out of the kitchen.

  Donna sighed and went after her mum. Wilf made to follow, but the Doctor caught his arm.

  ‘I’m no expert, Wilfred, but I reckon best leave the ladies to it.’

  Wilf nodded.

  ‘And your friend?’

  ‘Netty. Henrietta Goodhart.’

  He smiled. ‘Most appropriate name I think she could have. But she was diagnosed with… She has Alzheimer’s, Doc
tor. And it’s not getting any better.’

  ‘It wouldn’t,’ the Doctor said quietly, just as the doorbell rang. ‘That her?’

  Wilf nodded and went to let her in.

  A moment later and the Doctor was grinning at a vision of eccentricity, charm and humour that only certain English women of a particular age and bearing could carry off.

  She was dressed from head to foot in brown – knee-length corduroy skirt, tan blouse, chocolate-coloured jacket – and carried a tan handbag. On her head was an amazing hat with at least half a dozen brown feathers of different shapes and sizes. Wilf was removing her long

  dark overcoat, and Netty offered her hand to the Doctor before Wilf had got the coat off her, meaning one sleeve, the handshaking sleeve, was still on.

  ‘Doctor, how marvellous to meet you. Hooray and huzzah, it’s a real pleasure.’

  ‘Mrs Goodhart.’

  ‘Miss, please. Better still, just Netty. Never been married and, despite what Wilfred’s daughter believes, have no intention to ever be married.’

  Wilf finally got the coat off her, and Netty slid neatly into a chair, grabbing a glass of water in an obviously well-rehearsed manoeuvre.

  ‘I never married,’ she went on. ‘Seemed such an alarming waste of time. I live in Greenwich you know, bit of a trek out here, but my local cab firm, they know me and my little ways, so it’s never a problem if I forget to have money. Or where I’m going.’

  The Doctor had taken to this gregarious lady instantly.

  ‘You can’t beat a reliable taxi firm, Netty,’ he said, managing to get a sentence in before she blithely carried on.

  ‘Are they rowing yet? It’s all they ever do. And it’s about me. I was so ashamed to start with, now I just treat it as a ritual, and in ten minutes Sylvia’s back to her normal charming self, full of tea and crackers.’

  The Doctor smiled. ‘Sylvia Noble? Charming? Words not often in the same sentence.’

  The look he got from Netty showed him how he’d misjudged the situation between the two women.

  ‘Oh, don’t disappoint me, Doctor. Not after all I’ve

  been told about you. That woman out there is a saint.

  She’s just lost her husband, she’s got a daughter you drag halfway to God knows where on a whim, and has to tolerate that marvellous Wilfred, who can be just as stubborn and cantankerous as her. More so in fact. I like her a lot. Besides which, and I know she complains, but that’s just her way of letting off steam, she’s bloody terrific with my… you know…’ Netty tapped the side of her head. ‘My condition. Bless her, last weekend she drove Wilf all the way to Charlton. Apparently I was found in someone’s back garden, trying to convince them I used to live there when I was six!’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Good gracious, no. I was brought up in Hampshire.’

  She dived into her handbag and brought out an A5-sized red notebook and showed it to him. ‘My life,’ she said simply. ‘So I can remember things.’

  The Doctor looked her straight in the eye and saw, briefly, a very scared but very proud old lady. And he liked her even more than before.

  ‘Without that book, without the likes of Sylvia Noble, I’m nothing. I’d left my bag in a shop on Greenwich High Street, so I’m in this garden, unable to know who I am, where I’m from. Sylvia found a receipt in my pocket, found the shop, got my bag back where I’d left it, sorted it all out with the police. She wants to put me in a home, you know. The brochures are in that drawer next to the cooker.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Wilf won’t hear of it. Says he’ll have me move in

  here first. Daft old fool, as if I’m going to go from one house I can barely cope with to another. But a lovely nursing home, where I’ll be looked after? How marvellous is that?’

  The kitchen door opened. Donna and Sylvia trooped in, and Donna immediately introduced herself.

  As Sylvia put the kettle on, the Doctor crossed and stood behind her. ‘Does Wilf know all you do for his friend?’

  ‘Does Donna know you’re poking your nose into her family’s business?’ Sylvia responded.

  ‘I’m not your enemy, Mrs Noble,’ the Doctor said.

  Sylvia turned and smiled at him. The most insincere smile possible. ‘For my daughter’s sake, Doctor, I tolerate you in this house. But that’s all. For my dad’s sake, I’ll do the best I can for Netty Goodhart. I don’t think I’m a selfish woman, Doctor. I’ve worked hard, I built a life, I never had much money, and I tried to give Donna a decent life. But then one day, I lost my husband. My rock. And since then I’ve tried to do what both of us did, but with a daughter who one minute won’t get a job, the next can afford to be in a different hemisphere, but can’t afford a stamp, and an old dad who seems to have decided it’s time to replace my mum once and for all.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re not worried he’s replacing you? I imagine he let your mum go a long time ago.’

  The silence that followed the slap around the face he received seemed to go on for a few hours, but was probably only a few seconds.

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that…’ the Doctor started. ‘I

  genuinely wondered—’

  Sylvia ignored him. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you take the Doctor up to the allotment, eh? Donna and I can catch up with Netty while you two have an hour or… a few hours up there, yes?’

  Wilf took the hint and was all but dragging the Doctor out of the kitchen as the women watched.

  The last thing the Doctor heard was ‘Tea, everyone’

  from Sylvia, before Wilf had thrust them both out into the night air.

  ‘Allotment. This way,’ the old man said.

  Babis Takis hoiked the largest bale of hay onto the back of the station wagon and stopped to rest. He wasn’t getting any younger, and this was really Nikos’s job.

  But Nikos wasn’t here, he was probably around the back of the farm, messing with that Spiros girl. Typical.

  There was work to be done – they had to get this consignment over to Faliraki, where so much building work was still going on. Hotels, apartments, shopping malls, everything the whole Dodecanese would benefit from because of the continued tourism it would bring.

  Babis yelled out Nikos’s name a couple of times as he hauled up more bales of hay. He glanced at his watch. It would take an hour or so to drive across the island to the Petaloudes, where they would collect Kris, before going on to Lindos and along the coast to Faliraki. They’d drop off the hay at the depot, then it was off to Erik’s Taverna for the night.

  Still no sign of Nikos.

  With a sigh, Babis walked away from the station wagon. ‘I am an old man, Nikos,’ he called out. ‘I fought in the war, you know, so people like you could be independent and have your luxuries. Just once, it’d be nice if you could pull your weight.’

  He had reached the rear of the farm, when he heard a noise from inside one of the stables – a short female gasp of surprise, almost fear. Certainly alarm.

  Babis was inside the stable in a second.

  Nikos was on the ground, holding his head in his hands, silent but clearly dazed.

  Standing over him, a shovel in her hands was a pretty young girl, who Babis recognised as Katarina Spiros.

  ‘You all right, girl?’ Babis asked, reaching for the shovel.

  Katarina swung around to face Nikos’s grandfather, and he realised how scared she looked. ‘What happened?’

  Babis asked.

  He was surprised when Katarina explained. ‘He took a call…’

  She was pointing at Nikos Takis, who was now beginning to stand up, abandoning the cell phone on the ground by his foot. He looked at his grandfather, causing Babis to take an involuntary step back.

  Babis Takis had fought in the latter days of the war as a youth, kicking the Nazis out of Crete and keeping Greece for the Greeks. He had faced the wrath and pain of his parents, who had so hated and eventually rejected him for falling in love, marrying and having chi
ldren with one of the hated Italians who had occupied the Greek Islands for

  seven hundred years before being sent packing after the war. He had done some time in prison for a barroom brawl in Diagoras, and he had once had to face the embittered son of a German he’d tied a live grenade to back in 1944.

  But nothing had ever scared him as much as the look his grandson gave him right now.

  Nikos wasn’t there any more. That carefree, funny, clever grandson he had nurtured after his father’s death was just not there.

  Babis didn’t know how he knew that. He didn’t know how it had happened. But he’d never been so sure of anything in his life.

  He was still sure of this when a flash of purple fire, hotter than the heart of a sun, extinguished his existence in less time than it took Katarina Spiros to draw breath to scream.

  A second later, a handful of ashes dropped to the ground where the young girl had stood.

  And Nikos Takis threw his arms towards the sky, purple electricity buzzing around his fingertips, as he threw back his head.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he yelled triumphantly.

  Donnie and Portia were on their honeymoon. It was Donnie’s first, Portia’s second, but both were enjoying themselves enormously.

  Donnie’s son had been his best man. His grandson had been pageboy. Portia’s granddaughter had been the flower-girl. They’d had two ceremonies, a full-on Jewish one and a simpler Christian one to reflect both their chosen faiths. Portia had always stayed in the Jewish faith,

  whereas Donnie’s family had pretty much abandoned it within weeks of arriving at Ellis Island a century and a bit earlier.

  They had overcome the odds – a cancer scare for Donnie, some severe frowning by Portia’s more traditional relatives and the death of their 8-year-old cat, Mr Smokey, a week before the ceremonies. After knowing each other for fifteen years, courting for the last six, they were finally together for ever.

  And here they were, in Donnie’s jeep, having bombed along the 8, passing through Danbury, before turning off the freeway and into the Connecticut countryside for their honeymoon.

  They had taken a nice colonial house outside Olivertown, thirteen miles from Danbury. The house belonged to one of Portia’s clients (she was a dog-walker, traipsing three times a day around Central Park with a variety of canines). The Carpenters were on FM radio, telling the world how they’d like to teach the world to sing, and the happy couple were singing along.