Doctor Who: Rags (6 page)

She had to learn to stand on her own two feet - learn to stop always needing the bloody Doctor!

Was that her own voice in her head? It really hadn’t sounded like it, and oh God she might be going mad, and now he was leaving, yes he was leaving the pub and the jukebox was playing again and she had never felt so alone and miserable in all her life.

The Doctor had been watching the cattle truck for some time. The police had long gone, and even the reporters and news crew whom he had seen arriving a good hour or so before had apparently exhausted their avenues of interrogation and left after greedily snatching all the footage they could get. Patience was certainly not one of his virtues and, after walking up the road to take a curious look at the prison and then returning to his vigil at the wall, he began to wonder if his time wouldn’t be better spent with Jo in the pub. All the while the roadies sat in the cab smoking, and swigging from bottles of whisky. They seemed in no hurry to leave. When the dusk came down like a lid closing over he world, the Doctor felt it was finally time to move, and if he was surprised at the unnatural rapidity with which the night had arrived, he gave no sign of it.

He vaulted nimbly over the stone wall and on to the springy turf of the moor. Behind him, the pub was silent. And he gave no sign that he had noticed that either, so intent was he on watching the truck. The village was quiet too. Not even a passing car disturbed the spring evening. A sprinkling of stars was flung against the blackness and the moon’s blind eye peeped at him from above the humped metal back of the truck as he strode through the heather towards it. Wind brushed his hair, stroked his cheeks. It was cold. Colder than it should be for this time of year on the 41

moor. It was as though the cold was creeping from the blank, dirty sides of the truck.

The Doctor made his way to the back doors of the vehicle and paused, studying the rusty padlocks that secured them. The stink made him pull away as if he’d been slapped. It was shambles smell, blood and farmyard and rottenness combined. He steeled his sensitive nostrils and leant closer to the left-hand door, where he could make out a hole, bored by rust, that was just about the size of a man’s eye.

Then he was being lifted into the air like a stuffed teddy bear held aloft by a disgruntled child, and the double doors came a little too close as his face was pressed against the corrugated metal.

‘You wanna look inside?’ The voice was husky with threat and whisky. ‘Wanna look inside, Mr Ruffles?’

The Doctor considered struggling, but the grip holding him showcased the power of a bull elephant. ‘That was admittedly the intention,’ he quipped, twisting his head to get away from the dried filth on the doors and to try to catch a glimpse of his assailant. The hands pushed his face harder against the cold metal. The Doctor felt his generous-sized nose flatten, and indignation betrayed itself in his shout. ‘But I’ve since come to the conclusion that it wasn’t such a good idea!’

To his relief, the man - for it was obviously a man - laughed, and lowered the Time Lord to the grass. ‘Got that right, Mr Ruffles.’

The Doctor was free, and able to turn and face his companion.

He recognised him immediately. One of the roadies, and he guessed the head one, judging by the way this man had co-ordinated the clearing away of the band’s equipment. He was big all right. Big and shoulder-chip mean. His head was like an anvil, a solid wedge of bone with a shaven head and a great spade of beard. His arms, the width of beech trunks, were etched with old tattoos.

‘Was that really necessary?’ The Doctor straightened his finery with as much dignity as someone who has just been tossed around like a rag doll could muster.

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‘You got a biiig nose, Mr Ruffles. You poke it too close to my truck again, I’ll make sure you don’t damn find it again in a hurry. Whaddayer say to that?’

‘Only that I prefer to keep my nose where it is, thank you very much.’ The Doctor smiled wryly at the giant. ‘Well, if this little interview is over, I have some rather pressing business to attend to.’

‘I’m sure you do, Mr Ruffles.’ The giant placed a hand the size of a baseball glove on the Doctor’s cheek. ‘But if I find you here again...’ He patted the Doctor’s face twice, then stroked one finger suggestively down the Doctor’s nose. ‘You get me?’

‘Yes, well, I wish I could say it had been a pleasure, Mr er...’

‘Good night, Mr Ruffles.’ The giant waited until the Doctor had returned to the wall and vaulted over it. From the other side, the Time Lord waved cheekily at him. The roadie remained where he was, arms folded.

‘Doctor, where have -’ Jo’s face collapsed with relief when she saw the Doctor enter the pub. The mummer had walked out and, shortly after, the Doctor walked in. Nature abhors a vacuum, so they say, and why was she thinking such absurd things anyway?

The Doctor let her hug him, then held her at arm’s length.

‘What’s been going on?’ he asked, picking up a flyer from a beer-puddled table. The pub was noisy again, faces flushed and voices swollen with alcohol.

He read the flyer, then looked up at Jo. His eyes were grave.

She was about to ask him what was wrong when Jimmy came over, obviously well on his way to being drunk. ‘What’s John bleedin’ Gielgud doin’ in ‘ere?’

‘Down, Jimmy,’ Nick said and stared at the Doctor with a level, inquiring gaze. The Doctor returned it, then smiled benevolently at the four young people standing around Jo. He screwed the flyer up into a ball. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve made some friends, Jo. Very glad indeed.’

He turned and glanced back out of the open door of the pub.

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He could just make out the silhouette of the truck, like the dark back of a slumbering dinosaur, against the paler gloom of the moor.

‘Now then, where’s the landlord? I think it might be an idea if we had a room for the night, don’t you? Or maybe we should make that two nights?’ He beamed even more expansively and threw the ball of paper into an ashtray.

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The police were laughing at him. He’d wasted their money, time mid resources and they were bloody well laughing at him! Pole dragged furiously on his cigarette and spat on the roadway.

‘OK, you’ve had your fun,’ the sergeant was smirking into his megaphone, ‘now go home in a quiet and orderly fashion.’ The cordon of police officers buckled in the centre, allowing passageway for the fifty or so cold and bored protesters who, after having been hemmed into a disused cul-de-sac for the last two hours by skilful police manipulation, were only too glad to be allowed to disperse sheepishly and head for the nearest pubs and takeaways. A few half-heartedly stuck some fingers up at the police as they-passed or mouthed nearly inaudible profanities -

mostly on a porcine theme - just to show that they had won the day really.

Derek Pole couldn’t believe their passivity. One arrest for drunken and disorderly behaviour, and a few jeering anti-police songs. That was hardly the anarchy he was trying to instigate, was it? He climbed on to a low wall that ran alongside the cul-de-sac and waved his arms at the dispersing crowd.

‘This ain’t over yet! Don’t let them corral you like bloody sheep!

Remember, today the streets were ours, and not the council’s! We had a major victory and we can do more!’

A protester with green spiked hair and Machine Gun Etiquette painted on his leather jacket turned and stared at the protest organiser. ‘A cul-de-sac was ours, today, Derek. A cul-de-sac that no one ever uses. They herded us in here like schoolboys at assembly time, and you know it.’

Pole snarled at the protester. ‘Yeah, and you let ‘em! All of ya!

We could have sealed off the city centre. We could have stopped traffic for a whole bloody day if you had just listened to me; if you hadn’t all been so apathetic.’

‘Do yourself a favour and go home, Derek. We did our best.’ The punk turned his back and headed off with the rest of the 45

protesters. Derek stood on the wall like a failed general haranguing a deserting army, and saw that the police were climbing into their riot vans, having decided there was going to be no more disturbance here today. The final insult. They weren’t even waiting for him to leave!

Derek climbed down from the wall, conscious that his face was burning, and threw his cigarette stub after the departing Machine Gun Etiquette jacket. Bastards! Trying to muster as much dignity as he could, he strode towards the mouth of the cul-de-sac, past the few remaining police officers who were putting away emergency traffic cones and cracking jokes about the unconventional dress of the Streets Are Ours activists. He spotted a telephone box across the main road leading to New Street Station - the protesters’ intended target for isolation - and trotted over to it.

He thumbed in some coins and dialled. It was not a call he was looking forward to. Somebody was going to be decidedly unhappy with today’s lacklustre results. The protest had hardly brought one of the busiest zones of Birmingham city centre to a standstill as had been the desired intention. He was going to look like a right prat. And, unlike the police, somebody was not going to be in the mood for laughing.

‘Here’s to you all then,’ Kane said, raising his pint and toasting the lunch-time drinkers. ‘Here’s to every last miserable, spineless one of ya!’ He grinned wolfishly and glared round defiantly as he leant against the bar of the Falcon. His long dark hair framed an angular face coarsened by stubble and bad humour. He had their attention, all right, and he was ready to take on anyone who dared give him any lip back. Not cos he was particularly hard, but because he was particularly drunk. A few of the drinkers pretended to ignore him, but he heard Buster Egan, a meathead who - so the village gossip went - was knocking off a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, call him a ‘tosser’, and that just made him grin even more.

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‘You and me both, Buster, old chap,’ he called back. He gulped at his Old Peculiar and waited for the big man to come for him.

!minty Turrock held Buster back, muttering something in his ear.

I think you’ve had enough, Kane.’ Trevor the landlord was looming above him, head just shy of the rafters he was that tall.

‘Do you, Trevor?’ Kane put his beer down. He dragged a cigarette from its pack with his teeth, lit it and blew smoke at the publican. ‘Funny how two people can disagree so wildly over something,ain’t it? Cos I don’t think I’ve had nearly enough.’

‘Drink up and go home.’ Trevor looked as impassive as ever, but he was blinking a little too quickly, and Kane knew that was a sign the giant was becoming annoyed.

‘Let me tell you about the day I’ve had, Trevor, and then we’ll see if you still want me to go.’

‘Oh believe you me, Kane, I’ll want you to go even more.’

Kane wasn’t listening. ‘The bastard sacked me, Trevor. Sacked!

For what?’

‘Falling asleep on the job, from what I heard. Being a lazy, no-good git, from what I heard.’

Kane whirled round to face this new challenge. And his grin grew wider. Cassandra King had entered the bar from the lounge.

She might have been nearly thirty, but she still had a waist you could easily strangle, a chest you could lose yourself in and eyes wild, green and dancing. Her hair was teased into a semblance of punky disorder without being too prominently spiked. Cassandra was following fashion, not politics.

‘Well, hello,’ Kane drooled. ‘Condescended to come in the bar with all the scum, huh?’

‘I only see one piece of scum round here, Kane.’ But she said it with a smile that pushed him off the bar and brought him a step closer to her, close enough to lick her. So of course she stepped back to compensate, as if she was frightened he was going to do just that.

‘I only had a little kip, rich bitch,’ he threw at her. ‘Hardly a reason to sack a bloke.’ He had been assigned a road to dig, along 47

with Andy the Letch, his groundwork mate, and had got bored riding the jackhammer. So he’d snuck off into a newly constructed house to see if he could get some shuteye, which had seemed perfectly reasonable to him on account of the fact he had a bitch of a hangover and so should hardly be expected to do too much work. The ganger had disagreed with that philosophy and sacked him on the spot.

‘How old are you, Kane? Thirty?Thirty-one? You’re no longer a teenager. You don’t have to keep playing the rebel. No one cares any more. Isn’t it about time you started using your brain for once?’ She stared up at him with those dazzling green eyes. ‘You have got one, haven’t you?’

Kane scooped his half-empty pint off the bar counter just as Trevor made to snatch it away. ‘I ain’t allowed to use it, am I? I’ve been branded a waster ever since I was a kid...’ He belched for emphasis. ‘So I might as well stick to what I do best. Two questions for you, Cassandra: one, do you get off on playing all concerned when we both know you don’t give a damn...’ He paused and sucked his cigarette, still grinning like the wolf he always wanted to be.