Doctor Who: Rags (7 page)

‘And two?’ She folded her arms over her breasts, and she was smiling too.

‘Aren’t you supposed to contradict me before we get to two?’

‘And two,’ she repeated, still smiling.

‘Two’s obvious; d’youwanna come back to my place?’

That got a laugh from some of the drinkers, who until this point had been pretending not to listen to the conversation.

Cassandra sighed. ‘I’ve got something for you. You might find it interesting.’ She held out a square of yellow paper. A flyer. He let her wait there with it in her hand while he took his time finishing his pint, and then he plucked it off her.

‘What’s this shit?’ He studied it, and then he felt the blood fill his face, felt a fist clench inside his gut. The flyer said: SIMON KING PROUDLY PRESENTS;

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH,

48

A MORALITY PLAY OVER TWO THOUSAND YEARS OLD

CIRBURY VILLAGE HALL 19TH & 20TH JUNE

Kane scrumpled the flyer into a ball and tossed it into his empty glass on the bar counter. His grin had gone. He turned and left the pub without a final line.

Cassandra came out into the street after him and caught hold of his elbow. Sunlight made him squint. He tried to shake her off.

‘If you I ain’tgonna bed me, do me a favour and get lost,’ he snapped.

‘You can’t hate him for ever, Kane,’ she said, tightening her grip. He turned and lunged at her before she could move. He pinned her up against the outside wall of the Falcon and had thrust his tongue between her lips before she could do anything more than utter a muffled squeal. Then, just as suddenly, he shoved her from him and strode off up the street. She came after him again.

He kept walking, up the long incline of the high street. ‘Want some more?’ he said without turning.

‘You’re a pig, Kane.’

‘So they tell me. I’m no good, good for nothing, fit for nowt, a bum, loser, long-haired hippie. You can’t come up with any insults I ain’t heard from this town a hundred times.’

‘What about a coward?’ She had to hurry to keep pace with him.

‘Yeah, why not? I’m not John Wayne, you know. Calling me a coward’s not gonna make me turn round, squint and say "The hell I am!” I don’t give a damn. But just for the record, what am I supposed to be scared of? Not that I’m really interested.’ He sneered at a middle-aged housewife doing her afternoon shopping who was watching him with a frown, her head tied up in a silk cravat like a wrinkled, disapproving package.

‘You’re scared of my brother. Of the fact that he’s achieved something and you haven’t, and never will.’

Kane snorted. ‘Any tosser with a silver spoon wedged up their hole can achieve. You try underachieving, like me. That takes real hard work.’

‘So I take it you won’t be going to see his play then?’

49

Kane stopped outside Merretts greengrocer’s, plucked an apple from the display box outside, took a big bite and replaced it. He carried on walking. ‘Is he gonna be in it, or is he going to be producing it?’ He sneered the word. He sneered a lot of words these days. His whole life had become a sneer, and that was fine by him. That was his guard against the world, against the bastards who were out to prove he was nothing.

‘He’s starring in it.’

‘Then I’ll definitely be going. Me and a couple of tins of rice pudding.Opened of course, with a spoon for flicking.’

‘It’s a special occasion for him, Kane. Don’t spoil it.’

‘That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’ Kane stopped again and faced her, deliberately blocking the path of Sergeant Sallis, the village bobby, who had to step around him on the narrow pavement shaking his head with contempt.

‘Yes, that’s what this is all about. I wanted to ask you, as a favour to me, not to do anything nasty.’

Kane laughed harshly. ‘Nasty! Hell, your brother knows all about nasty. I could tell you some things would make your eyebrows stand on end.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘Anyway, why’s he doing this play here, in this one-hog place, if he’s such a big-shot producer at the BBC?’

‘It’s going to be filmed for television when he performs it at the Edinburgh Festival. This is a dry run in front of the people he knows best. A sort of thank you to his roots.’ Cassandra bit her lip. He could tell even she knew how crap that sounded. He resisted the urge to pull her apart. Or almost.

‘He’s coming back to remind us how great he is,’ he spat finally.

‘And to let us know how privileged we are to have known him.

That’s why he’s coming back.’

She frowned, her eyes angry now.

‘Are you going to cause any trouble? Yes or no?’

‘Are you going to sleep with me? Yes or no?’ When she didn’t answer he laughed. And belched.

‘Don’t worry, Cassandra. Of course I’m going to cause trouble.

50

I’m going to make this homecoming very special indeed: He blew her a kiss and disappeared inside the Co-op to get some more fags.

51

The last hunt of the season had ended in failure. The horns were silent now, their jubilant cries scorned. With dusk spilling across the Dartmoor landscape and the twilight mourning of a blackbird tickling in their ears, the three riders decided to split off from the rest of the hunt in search of some much-needed cheer.

He had almost had the fox at one point; the hounds streaming after the streak of russet cunning, the cream of Devonian aristocracy pounding along behind. Through a knot of larch trees they had galloped, thorns and brambles tearing skin and blood-red livery, and then out into the open again; and there was the pack, milling confusedly at the edge of a brook where an old stone bridge crouched protectively over the laughing water. They had scanned the moorland - tors, heather, sheep. Of the fox, nothing could be seen.

Edward Mortimer had pushed his animal forward on to the road and over the weed-pierced bridge, towards a mulberry-coloured VW Beetle parked carelessly on the other side. Penelope followed obediently, admiring the straight sweep of her lover’s back, cocksure in red. She would have followed him to hell and back, twice over, but then Penelope Fitzgerald was not the sharpest tool in the box; Edward had been cheating on her with her best friend Edith for the last six months, and had no intention of stopping. It was his sport, like shredding foxes.

As they approached the car, a gaunt-faced man wound down the window, his skull earring and menacing eyes not promising much of a welcome.

‘Fox?’ was all he said.

Edward nodded. The man, in his thirties, had pointed across the moor to a tor shaped like a witch’s profile on the horizon.

Edward had looked at the others, clearly not trusting the stranger. But what choice did they have? The hounds weren’t helping any.

So they had taken the trail, and of course it had been false.

After

53

an hour of fruitless searching, with tempers fraying by the minute, the hunt had dispersed leaving Edward, Penelope and Henry Patton-Wilde to ride alone in search of comfort.

The Oblong Box would provide it, only a mile away across the moor.

Nick, Sin, Jimmy and Rod were among a growing crowd of restless, curious spectators watching the roadies preparing the equipment in a grassy hollow in front of the Oblong Box.

Towering speakers, two guitars, mike stand and a gleaming drum kit contrasted oddly with the bleak sweep of the moor.

The nearest village was a good two miles south, invisible in the gathering dusk, trees hiding any lights that might be blooming.

Despite the seclusion of the pub, which looked defiant and entrenched as if from years of shrugging into itself against the loneliness of the spot, a sizeable audience had already gathered.

Nick estimated about 150, maybe double the number who had witnessed the Princetown gig. And still nobody knew the name of the band, or the purpose of their tour. No money had changed hands, no tickets were on sale.

Most of the crowd were young, and dishevelled. But there was also a healthy contingent of older, shabbier characters shuffling and scowling amongst the younger breed. Nick found it hard to believe they had come to watch a band. Their interests seemed to lie in other directions. Perhaps they hoped for an encore of the violence the first gig had brought.

He sincerely hoped they would be disappointed.

Some of

the

crowd

were

obviously

having

difficulty

understanding what they were doing there themselves; their frames twitched and shuddered with obvious cold turkey, their faces were sucked dry of vitality. Others sported countenances so ugly with misanthropic hate that Nick began to wonder if the riot at Dartmoor prison had not been more successful than had been reported. He took shameful satisfaction in the presence of a token police force positioned around the pub.

54

On the fringe of the crowd he could see the eccentric form of the white-headed man with his pretty companion, Jo. What had brought them back for more? He knew they had been staying at The Devil’s Elbow, but had not seen them since meeting them in the pub. They were an odd couple too, that was for sure. It was like the band attracted nature’s strange.

‘I’m surprised old Fossil Farris allowed this shenanigan outside his pub,’ Jimmy said, complacently sparking up a joint.

‘What, with the crock o’ gold he’ll get from all the ale sold tonight? He knows a good thing when he smells it,’ Rod said, eyeing the joint eagerly.

‘Well, he obviously didn’t smell this lot first, did he? He might have changed his mind.’ The dried blood on Jimmy’s grey Confederate cap reminded Nick of the Princetown gig and unease slipped into him, like a ghost. The blood had been there for over a year, from the time Jimmy was evicted from a Tavistock pub by a bouncer who objected to his dubious state of drunkenness.

Jimmy had promptly come straight back in, through the feature window, a spectacular entry riding a cloudburst of shattered glass. He’d cut his fingers on his way in, and the blood had somehow found its way on to the cap. The bouncers had chased him back out of the pub again, aided by some locals enraged at having their peaceful evening so violently shattered along with the picture window.

Blood.Dried blood. Nick hoped it wasn’t a sign.

‘One, two,’ barked the head roadie into the microphone. ‘One, one...’ He coughed into the metallic throat and then shuffled away from the natural stage towards the cattle truck parked further down the incline.

Edward reined in his horse as they came over the rise. ‘What the bloody hell...?’

They hadn’t expected this: people crowded around the usually quiet pub - and he used the word ‘people’ rather loosely. Oiks from hell, more like. He didn’t like the look of them at all.

Mutants.

55

Those disgusting punk types, and worse, much much worse.

Lord, it was a veritable freak show.

‘I think we should ride on by, Edward,’ Henry piped up from behind. Edward could hear the fear in his companion’s weak voice.

‘What, and let the oiks scare us away from a good whisky? I think not.’ He straightened demonstratively in his saddle and kicked off towards the pub, leaving his two anxious companions to trail behind.

The closer he got, the less sure of his convictions he became.

This really was a scary-looking bunch. He pulled up just short of the dirty crowd that spilled out like a stain over the moor around the pub, conscious of the jeering looks he was attracting. His horse skittered nervously. He was aware of Penelope and Henry directly behind him, and really didn’t want to look indecisive now.

‘Edward, I don’t like this...’ Penelope trilled. Just then one of the oiks slung a bottle in their direction. It struck Olivier, Penelope’s stallion, and the horse reared, flinging its owner from the saddle. She landed on the hard turf with a whump! and Edward flinched at the sound. He dismounted rapidly and moved to her aid.

She was nursing her back. Bloody woman. Why hadn’t he brought Edith along instead; she was better in the saddle in both respects.

‘Are you all right, darling?’ he forced himself to ask. A loud cheer had erupted from the crowd at her fall, and he felt anger blending with his frustration.

He made a brusque examination of his fiancee while Henry sat rather helplessly on his horse. ‘You’ll live,’ Edward told her shortly, and helped her to her feet. ‘It looks like you’ve stunned your spine, that’s all.’ Anger blared through him. ‘Dammit woman, can’t you be more careful?’

He sensed her imminent tears and cursed even more, this time silently. ‘Come on, we’ll have to get you inside and telephone an ambulance.’

56

Henry stared at Edward as if his friend had lost leave of his senses. ‘In there?’

Penelope began to cry then, just as Edward had known she would. Bloody, bloody woman! Instead of answering Henry, he threw Olivier’s reins to his friend, and began leading his own horse towards the pub. What a nightmare the day had turned into.