Doctor Who: Rags (10 page)

From the corner of his eye he saw Jo gazing out at the fog and the night. Exhibiting a patience normally alien to him, Jimmy was singing along to the music as they crawled after the rusting Bedford truck in front, doing barely twenty miles an hour.

‘So where do you think we’ll end up?’

Nick turned to face Jo, who had asked the question that was, of course, on all their minds but which, strangely, no one had voiced aloud until now.

He took his time answering, looking at her well-cut and obviously expensive clothes and wondering what she would look like with a punk haircut. She had the air of someone who had been away for a while, someone who was normally in tune with the times and liked to be as trendy as possible but had recently been whisked off somewhere that fashions didn’t or couldn’t reach. She was strange all right: a bit of an enigma with her eccentric uncle or whatever he was - and again, no one had even asked her about him, as if their curiosity had been switched off like a tap. There was something in her young, yet experienced eyes, in her innocent yet haunted expression, that hinted at a lifestyle that went far beyond ‘alternative’. He must talk to her properly, and find out more about her.

He took so long answering, that Sin got there first.

‘The edge,’ she said without even turning.

Jo frowned, and Nick felt a coldness that could have emanated from Sin.

‘The edge of what?’ Jo asked before he could.

‘The edge of everything.’

‘Don’t be so bloody melodramatic!’ Nick snapped. He wanted to shake Sin. Hold her tight until he could feel her warmth again instead of this creeping cold.

She ignored him, merely blew smoke from her sensuous lips.

Forget her lips, you fool. She’s leaving you. You’ve lost her, and 71

now there’s nothing. Just a hole.A big, empty hole.Dead to you.Dead.

Jo cut through his misery: ‘I think we should all keep our eyes open.’

That made Sin swivel round to give the blonde girl a hostile stare. ‘I don’t need anyone to think for me.’

‘But doesn’t it strike you that this whole tour is a bit sinister?

Several deaths already and the band don’t seem bothered at all.

In fact who are the band? Does anyone even know their name?’

‘Do they need a name?’ Sin was definitely on the defensive and Nick wondered just why she should be taking this so personally.

Maybe it was to do with Jo. A mad hope darted through him that it might be jealousy. Could she be worried that Jo might be trying to take him away from her? But looking at Sin’s impassive features, the hope curdled. Her thoughts were far beyond him.

She was in a world he couldn’t reach, and she had been ever since the day of the Princetown gig. The day before that she had lain in his bed and told him how much she cared for him. The day of the gig - while the cattle truck was bouncing its way across the moor towards them even - she had changed. She had just...

switched off.

And it felt like there was nothing he could do.

‘The band with no name.’ This came from Rod, who had been listening to the conversation in his usual thoughtful way, sad and withdrawn, a loner even when amongst friends. He took a swig from his bottle of Jack Daniels, and fixed them with a calm stare.

‘They’re the band that doesn’t need a name,’ he continued, ‘but I bet everyone in this convoy knows why they’re here.’

Nick frowned. He felt like maybe he was missing out on something here, because Sin was smiling in conspiratorial approval of Rod’s words.

‘Well I for one would like someone to tell me,’ Jo said, and Nick warmed to her, feeling a kinship for all of five seconds until Sin turned those beautiful, depthless eyes on him and froze it out of 72

him. He snatched the joint from her hands and her tight smile became a sneer.

‘Do you love me?’ she said and laughed. It was the cruellest laugh he had ever heard.

Rod went back to his Jack Daniels and Jo returned her gaze to the dark fog outside.

So there they all were: Nick, Sin, Rod, Jimmy and The Dead Boys.

Ain’t it fun...

And maybe Nick had a hint of what Rod had been driving at; but, if he did, it only made him feel colder than ever. Rod was implying the band had come to make a stand for people like them: rejects, misfits, dreamers who had forgotten how to dream; people from the dog-end of society. With the help of the band they were going to fight back. After all, that was what Nick himself had felt on the two nights the band had played to its ragamuffin audience. Yes, maybe he could see what had enthused Jimmy and Sin and all the rest of them, all the ragged heroes driving to nowhere in the foggy night. Maybe he could see that. Or maybe he just felt scared, and maybe he just felt cold.

And StivBators sang.

And Jimmy drove.

Ain’t it fun... When you know that you’re gonna die young.

73

Two signals.

That complicated things, of course. But maybe it made a little sense too. One pulse emanating from the cattle truck, intensifying whenever the band played - whenever carnage was unleashed -

and otherwise practically dormant, only detectable under the amplification of the TARDIS’s booster circuits rigged up on the cluttered lab desk.

And the other signal? That was the mystery. And pointed the way to the answer too. All he need do was identify where that other signal - so much weaker than the first, like a faint heartbeat slowly waking - was coming from.

It was an aural shadow of the first pulse. It shouldn’t be such a huge task for the Doctor to isolate it.

Simple. Then why, despite all the technology his lab had to offer, was it taking such an interminably long time to do that one simple thing?

The Doctor straightened up from his desk. His thoughts kept straying from the task in hand, from the taunting elusiveness of the signal source, to the subject that worried him even more. He strolled to the window overlooking the canal, stroking the underside of his nose pensively.

Jo.

The fool on the hill.

Jimmy sat with his back against the Glastonbury tor and looked out on the world spread below him. Fool? He was a sodding king up here, surveying his kingdom. That kingdom was a flat green carpet cut by straight dikes and winding lanes. I can see for sodding miles and miles and... In a field at the foot of the hill the encampment was a disordered junkyard of almost certainly illegal vehicles. Jimmy marvelled at how large the convoy had become since the Oblong Box. Cars, buses, campers and motorcycles had

75

just tagged on to the end of the metal snake as it slithered through England’s green and pleasant land as if it were growing a new but decidedly tatty tail.

To the south, Glastonbury was a sprawl of elegant masonry laden with windows reflecting a golden sky, dominated by the skeletal abbey, a haven for romantics. There’d be no one from the convoy visiting that relic, Jimmy thought. Hippies were dead, and their Meccas were crumbling. The travellers were on to something new and dangerous and exciting... He dabbed his tongue into the little plastic bag and rubbed the white powder across his teeth.

Jimmy was nobody’s fool. He knew it was down to him that they were here, on the tour to end all tours; the magical mystery tour to heaven, or maybe just to hell. Whichever, did he care?

Princetown was a hell, and he’d got out of there. At least he’d have a laugh looking for the next one. At least he’d go out kicking against the pricks.

Yeah, they’d all wanted out of Princetown for ages, but it took something like the band to make them get up off their arses and do it. They’d all silently and unanimously agreed that this was something better than they had going for them in Princetown, which was nothing. But Jimmy had been the deciding factor; he had the camper, and it was down to him.

They’d thank him for it one day.

He took another dab of speed and snorted as his roving gaze fell on the two police-cars parked at the foot of the steep hill. They’d trailed the convoy all the way from Dartmoor. What did they think was gonna happen anyway? Maybe the end of society as they knew it?

Why not? Might be a laugh.

He hated pigs. Hated ‘em. But if anyone had ever thought to ask him why, he would have been stumped for an honest answer.

It was just the way he felt. They got in his way. Stopped him doing what he wanted. Was that good enough? It would have to do, ladies and gentlemen.

Jimmy sat on the hill in the brilliant afternoon sunlight and 76

waited for the speed to kick in.

Sin watched the band climb the hill. They were wearing their shades and carrying their instruments. Different instruments, she realised, as they threaded their way through the travellers thronging the crest of the hill. The guitarist and bass player each clutched an acoustic guitar. The drummer jingled a tambourine as he strode towards the stone tower, the childish instrument incongruous in such brutal hands. The singer carried nothing and ignored anyone who tried to talk to him. Once somebody was foolish enough to pluck at the multicoloured but grubby tatters of paper that adorned his frame. The singer dealt with this intrusion into his privacy by kicking the offender squarely in the face. No one else tried to slow his progress.

Sin glanced at Jo sitting a little to the left of Nick, on the brow of the hill. What did she want with them? She was from a different world, Sin could sense that. There was something very odd about the girl, and it troubled her. Jo had got quite friendly with Nick. That didn’t bother Sin at all, and she wondered why.

Perhaps because she didn’t care any more.

Didn’t care about anything.

Was that true?

The band moved inside the ancient tower. Anyone already inside promptly moved out.

Sin had a good view of the tor, sitting as she was barely ten yards away. She picked a daisy and crushed it in her fist as the band began to play.

This was a different kind of gig. Gone was all the manic energy and electric violence that had characterised the earlier performances. Sin sat up straight. The singer was crooning, leaning in the entrance of the tower with a sneer on his gaunt face, his voice amplified by the natural acoustics of the hollow monument. His companions stood beside him, strumming lazily, contemptuously. The cheeky jingle of the tambourine was a piss-take.

77

The music was quieter, obviously, but still trembling with a skeletal attitude. The melodies were stripped raw and bleeding; chilly bones of sound in the radiant daylight. Sin felt dirty fingers slip into her soul, caress it untenderly. Perverse passions awoke in her, passions for things unhallowed, a desire to embrace the unknown and the shunned. And she found that she did care after all.

She lay back amongst the daisies, let the music wash over her.

She felt it carry her away on a breeze of ecstasy that swept her over the edge of the hill, floating in a dream, her body throbbing with sexuality. She stretched, every tendon and nerve languorous and teased by delight. Her veins ran with pleasure. Her body arched on the grass, daisies pricking her cheek as she turned her head to one side, moaning. Her tongue moistened her lips and her fingers played through her gorgeous dark hair, then crept down her body.

Night at the camp, and the fires played against the silhouette of the hill. Jo huddled beside Jimmy listening to his constant stream of bravado and nonsense and wondered, not for the first time, if the Doctor had not taken the easier option by heading off in Bessie, probably back to the comforts of UNIT HQ, and leaving her here with these good-for-nothings.

That was uncharitable. They weren’t good-for-nothings. They just hadn’t learnt how to fit in. She could understand how that felt. By God she could. But this whole set-up freaked her in a way she could not explain. Perhaps numerous gory deaths had something to do with it, she mused ruefully. But then, she was used to death, thanks to her unconventional companion. No, this special foreboding of hers ran deeper. Hadn’t the Doctor told her to keep away from the band and to be extra careful? But what was she supposed to look out for?

Jimmy was obviously wired on some drug or other; he wouldn’t keep still for a moment. One of the tin rifles that crossed on his cap was bent outwards, rather comically. It was a pointless detail 78

that she would remember long afterwards, and for no good reason

- or perhaps because it was one of the last things to occupy her mind before the mummer appeared and stole all her rational thoughts away.

She didn’t see where he came from; he was just there, strutting amongst the travellers hunched round their various camp fires, lute in hand. She watched him chatting animatedly to some punks nearby, but couldn’t hear a word of what was said. She noticed that the attention of the entire encampment was riveted on the bizarre figure. Just like in the the Devil’s Elbow, all other conversations ceased. And suddenly it was their turn.