Doctor Who: Rags (3 page)

They don’t care, she told herself, as she backed away up the alley. They don’t care, because nobody has ever cared for them.

Nu Mama, Nu Papa. Nu Mama, Nu Papa. NU MAMA, NU

PAPA...

They don’t belong, because they have no status. They have no worth, so they should not be. They should not be!

She was mouthing the words in the dark, in her bedroom. The church over by Plymouth Hoe was striking two in the morning, and her cheeks were wet with tears.

17

There wasn’t much to see except the moor and the prison, but Nick felt like staring anyway. There wasn’t much else for him to do. Behind him, the muted babble of lunch-time drinkers inside the Devil’s Elbow lulled his senses. Sleep dragged at him. As the sun pressed down on his eyelids he wondered idly how long Sin would take with the drinks.

‘Lazy dole-scroungin’ scum!’

Nick’s eyes flew open, maybe expecting to see some excitement.

It was only Jimmy, wearing his ever-present American Civil War Confederate cap. The wild-eyed, leather-jacketed scourge of Princetown settled down comfortably on the bench next to his friend.

‘Said the kettle to the pot,’ Nick murmured sleepily.

‘Uh?’

‘Nothing, just an obscure cliche. Don’t know what it means exactly. Don’t make me think about it for any longer than I have to.’

‘Then don’t use it. It’s annoying.’

Nick accepted a cigarette off Jimmy and gazed over at the dour Victorian prison half a mile up the high street of the little town.

‘And to think we stay here by choice,’ he said ruminatively.

‘You telling me you don’t like it here?’ Jimmy quipped humourlessly. It was a very old and worn joke. ‘Where’s Psycho Sin?’

Nick jerked his thumb behind him, indicating the pub. As if on cue she appeared in the doorway, a small, pretty Chinese girl in her early twenties, her eyes maybe a little wary, her sensuous lips pursed and stubborn. Her eyes looked even more wary when she saw Jimmy perched next to Nick. She plonked two pints down on the wooden table and sat opposite the two men.

Jimmy looked up in mock dismay. ‘You didn’t buy me one.’

‘There’s a man in there who stands behind a bar waiting to 19

serve people. Why don’t you make his day?’ Sin Yen wasn’t in the mood for Jimmy.

‘The Beast? He doesn’t like me.’

‘He’s not alone then.’

Jimmy did his best Johnny Rotten sneer and sauntered off reluctantly into the pub.

‘What’s that bonehead doing here?’ Sin asked as soon as he was gone. Her skin was translucent in the sunlight. It really was a beautiful day, Nick thought as he pulled on his cigarette. And Sin had never looked more beautiful, with her shoulder-length black hair and mahogany eyes. Yet this dismayed him oddly, as if maybe that beauty was there just to torment him. Suddenly he knew they wouldn’t be together much longer. He shrugged away the fear the thought brought with it and concentrated on being his usual laid-back self.

‘Hmm? Oh, just biding his time. Just like the rest of us. Killing the days.’

‘Can’t you get shot of him? You know he gets on my nerves.’

‘We’ve got to stick together, Sin. It’s an uncaring world out there and we need all the friends we can get.’

‘He’s a waster.’ She sipped her pint moodily.

‘Ain’t we all? The only difference between us and Jimmy is he wastes his time on drugs and we waste our time brooding about being wasters. At least he’s happy.’

‘I just wish he’d be happy somewhere else.’ It came again, with no warning: gonna lose her. It was like a shotgun blast cutting his soul in half, and yet there was no foundation for the thought. He turned his face towards the sun, closing his eyes; maybe the brightness would chase it away, like the shadow it was.

Jimmy reappeared, brandishing a pint of Old Peculiar.

‘The Beast served you then?’ Nick asked unnecessarily.

Jimmy grinned happily. This was all he expected of life: to sit in the sun with some mates and a decent pint. Nick envied him. He swigged at his beer. It might be an old Princetown joke but he really did feel like one of the prisoners. He was going nowhere: a 20

reject in a society that only respected money. Where opportunity never knocked, only the bailiffs. Lighten up you old bastard, he scolded himself.

‘Hey, lighten up you old bastard,’ Jimmy scolded him. Nick realised he was looking even more po-faced than usual, and gave his friend two fingers and a reluctant grin.

Sin suddenly sat forward, squinting across the moor. ‘What’s that?’

They followed her gaze, screwing up their eyes against the blaze of the sun. To the north, the rugged folds of the moor, stretched to the horizon studded with rocks and tors. Half a mile from the edge of the town sunlight glinted on metal. A truck.A cattle truck, bouncing carelessly over the uneven grass.

‘They’ll screw up their suspension,’ muttered Jimmy. Nick was more curious as to what the truck was doing driving cross-country towards Princetown. Wasn’t the road good enough? Soon they could hear the growl of a diesel engine and see the thick mud caked on the corrugated flanks of the vehicle. It pulled up a hundred yards short of the low stone wall that guarded the community of Princetown from the wilderness of the moor. The growl died and for a moment nothing happened.

The windows of the cab were dark, grimy with mud. Nick, Sin and Jimmy waited.

Dartmoor prison. Thirty-two acres of grim Victorian repression crystallised in stone. A more forbidding and depressing collection of buildings it would have been difficult to imagine. The main prison block squatted on the moor like a satanic mill worked by men of shame. Hewn from the dour indigenous rock, the barracks embodied the desolation that surrounded it.

For the men who lived there, unable even to see the hundreds of miles of freedom represented by the moor because of the intentionally high positioning of the cell windows, Dartmoor prison was a hulk of human despair. The bricks, the walls, the courtyards - all were as grey as their thoughts, their dreams. The 21

only respite from the bleak monotony that was their lives was the weekly visit to the work-farm outside the sprawling complex, when some of the men would get a snatch, however brief, of life beyond the walls of repression.

For Pemo Grimes that time was now, and he intended to make the most of it. Trudging over the moor with ten fellow cons, he decided he wasn’t going to overdo things today. It was far too warm to be overly energetic in his digging and planting, despite it only being early May. Sunlight cast a golden mantle over the moors. It lifted Grimes’s heart to see the usually dismal setting smiling for once. It inspired optimism, an emotion habitually alien to the long-term con. It made the remaining seven years of his sentence seem not quite as unbearable as they had the night before as he lay on his bunk, listening to the rain and the porcine snoring of his cell-mate. Shit, even the screws looked almost human today. There were three of them escorting the party that morning. There should have been more but staffing difficulties were bedevilling the prison. Nothing new there. Who the hell in their right mind would want to work in a place like this? Being a screw here, you really did share the sentence with the cons, something Grimes always derived a gritty satisfaction from. He could almost feel sorry for the bastards. They chose this. It didn’t say much for them. You had to have real personality problems to end up being a screw. What was the difference between a con and a screw? A few bars, and a uniform.

The work party had left the circular complex some distance behind now. Grimes turned to savour the view of Princetown. He could just make out the Devil’s Elbow and promised himself again that the day they let him out of the gates for good, he’d walk slowly - not rush, but walk slowly - to the pub, relishing every step. Once inside, he’d drink till he fell over; pick himself up, and do the same again. All the time staring out of the window at the prison, and telling himself he’d never go back. Still, that was for another day.

As he turned away from the view of the pub, Grimes’s attention 22

was distracted by a flurry of activity over to the north of the town, just beyond the grey wall that marked its boundary.

Three figures were bustling around a large, rusting cattle truck parked on a slight rise of ground. Sunlight reflected off something metallic; straining his eyes, Grimes made out a squat amplifier.

Guitars and amps were being lugged out of the back of the truck and dumped on the grass, wires and cables were unravelled carefully. He would have put it down to some sort of spring fête it it hadn’t been for the shabby and disreputable appearance of the three men.

He frowned. It was the first time he’d ever seen a band rehearse on the bloody moor. Several other cons were staring at the distant spectacle as well, and raucous laughter arose as one of them cracked a joke about the scruffy roadies and the filth coating the cattle truck.

Grimes noticed Eddie Price staring intently at the truck. Eddie was a lifer without the slightest trace of a sense of humour, and as he was in charge of the wheelbarrow full of gardening implements Officer Evans nudged him to continue walking. Price didn’t respond.

‘Get your big hulk moving, Price,’ the prison officer barked, shoving him a little more firmly.

Price continued to stare at the distant truck, mesmerised. His lumpen features were quivering as if some great emotion were tearing through him. His eyes were stark. Grimes could see the lifer’s soul bare and wild in those eyes. A killer’s soul. He turned away, a cold pool collecting in the small of his back.

Across the moor, the roadies were almost ready.

Rod was waiting by the wall along with a crowd of curious onlookers; a mixture of locals and tourists, all gathering to watch the band.

Jimmy, Nick and Sin joined their friend as the band climbed from the back of the truck and strolled casually to pick up their instruments.

23

‘Bloody hell,’ Jimmy said. Rod said nothing. His usually glazed eyes were curiously alert now, although with his scruffy beard, long unkempt hair and torn dinner jacket he looked as dilapidated as ever. Nick stood next to him, his attention fixed solely on the band.

He’d never seen anything like this.

Someone was joking. They had to be. The four musicians were a pick ‘n’ mix mess. A motley nightmare of clashing clothing and clashing periods. They were festooned with bright tatters like seventeenth-century mummers, and their hair was dyed and spiked with punk malevolence. The singer’s hair was grass-green, his trousers rags of paper stitched over hose. A torn leather jacket and wraparound shades completed the confused picture. The guitarist wore a top hat with its circular crown hanging down like a hinged lid - a cartoon tramp with minstrel trousers, leather waistcoat and spiked codpiece. The drummer was a skinhead adorned with coloured rags, tattoos and a bullet belt. The bass player was a skeletal ogre with a motley tunic, big boots and a Sid Vicious haircut.

‘What’s this, The Morris Pistols?’ Sin said in an attempt to lighten the inexplicable unease Nick was sure she must be feeling. He was sure because he was feeling it himself, and he didn’t quite know why. The sun was hot, and he was sweating inside his leather jacket. But he felt cold.

‘I know the roadies,’ Jimmy said as the three denim-and leather-clad men leant back against the truck to watch, their work over for now.

‘Sick bastards,’ Rod muttered. ‘From Tavistock.’ he added, as if there was a natural connection. ‘Seen ‘em in the Bull there. Tend to keep to themselves.’ Rod knew all the seedy haunts. He’d spent his adolescence discovering them and had realised, too late, that they had discovered him and made him their own. It was no longer any good trying to escape them now. Slow, creeping alcoholism had him in its horny grasp.

‘They’re sick all right,’ Jimmy agreed as the band tuned up, 24

shivers of electric sound skidding across the moors. ‘Been linked with most of the bad shit that goes on around here.Evil stuff, you 1, now?Devil worship, child murder. You name it, the Old Bill’s tried to pin it on ‘em.’

‘So where did these nutters come from?’ Sin wanted to know, nodding at the musicians. Nobody answered. Nobody knew. The crowd were muttering, the way crowds do. Local Princetonians, people from neighbouring villages, strangers. But as yet, not a sign of the village bobby.

Just then, the band began to play.

There’s a good pub in Princetown: the Doctor assured Jo as Bessie swept them along the moorland road. ‘They serve a wonderful breakfast as I remember.’

‘At two o’clock in the afternoon?’ Jo grinned at him, her hair whipping across her pixie-like features.

‘Yes, well, I had to do a bit of engineering before we could set off, if you remember.’ The Doctor nodded at the device attached to the dashboard of the motorcar, a smaller version of the sensor probes that had so suddenly been activated the night before and which had since become dormant. ‘And I’m sure they’ll still be serving breakfast at the Devil’s Elbow. The landlord’s a bit of a character, mind you.’