Paul Magrs's Blog, page 6
August 30, 2020
Season 13 - Chapter 5
Season 13 – Chapter 5
Doc!!
You always claimed these things are supposed to be difficult to fly! Hate to tell you, but Ravio is doing pretty well. She didn’t dither and panic and rush around the console pressing every button she could find. She just flicked a switch. She said it was labelled the ‘Fast Return Switch.’
‘Uh… are you sure about this..?’ I asked her, wondering what kind of place we might be flicking back to.
She shrugged. She’s very cool and calm, is Ravio. ‘You want to find your Doctor, don’t you?’
‘Well, yes…’
‘And I reckon you’ve had quite enough of lock-down in Sheffield, haven’t you..?’
‘Gawd, yeah.’ But then a thought hits me. ‘But what about Ryan? He’s standing waiting outside your house. What’s he gonna do when it dematerialises?’
‘It already has,’ Ravio tells me. ‘We’re in flight.’
I already knew it, really. My heart was hammering away in my chest because I could feel that this TARDIS was in flight. We had left the Earth and we had left 2020. And I was so glad, Doc. You’ve got no idea how glad.
*
Ravio went off to change into something more suitable for space adventures. She came back looking like something off of Mad Max, with her hair tied up in a bandana. I decided I’d stay just as I was. Gallifrey could take me or leave me, just as I was.
That’s another thing. It was a quick journey. It really was a Fast Return Switch. Are you sure you’re piloting your own ship properly, Doc? This one really didn’t mess about…
I didn’t even feel queasy as the floor gave a little lurch and Ravio said we were coming in to land.
She put on the little portable telly to show us what was outside. It looked like fellas in red tights and helmets, holding guns.
‘Who are they, then?’ Ravio mused.
I couldn’t make head nor tail of the instrument panels, of course. But that place out there didn’t look like the ruined remains of the city we’d seen on our last visit. I had a sudden inspiration: ‘I think we’re in a different time altogether…’
‘I think you’re right,’ Ravio said. ‘Shall we go out and say hello..?’
*
Turns out your folk aren’t all that keen on visitors from other planets, Doc.
We were grabbed by those coppers in the bright red tights and flung straight into a cell. A few fellas in long flowing robes came to have a look at us. They peered into our eyes and scanned us with their machines. Tried to pin down our species and frowned at the mention of our world. And they were really perturbed that we’d been in possession of a TARDIS (which still looked like a Wimpy home, as it happened.)
Ravio sat in the corner of our cell looking fed up.
I actually felt quite excited. Getting banged up in a cell was nothing new to me. I tried to tell her – it’s always happening to us. ‘This is how trips with the Doctor always begin, more or less. Someone always ends up locked up.’
She shook her head and sighed. ‘Do you ever think, Graham, that your precious Doctor was doing it all wrong..? That space adventures aren’t actually supposed to be like that..?’
She might have had a point.
But we didn’t have much time to think about it. One of the older guys who was in charge of this Time Lord city-in-the-past came to fetch us.
‘What is it with this place?’ I asked Ravio, as we got ushered out into the corridor. ‘It’s full of old guys floating about in evening gowns?’
One of the guards hit me with his laser gun. The hawk-nosed old geezer who’d come for us acted like he hadn’t heard a word.
*
Well, it’s a bit later now and we’ve met the Madame President and we’ve been up in a fancy High Council Chamber, where everything is a kind of cross between Flash Gordon and 1970s Habitat. Quite impressed, really. The whole ceiling was like a viewing screen showing the night skies above the Capitol, and all the ships and rockets they were sending up to defend the planet.
Oh, yeah. Because there’s something going off. Something dramatic and crazy. Of course there is. That Fast Bloomin’ Control Switch has zipped us straight into a time on Gallifrey when the place was facing its worst nightmare.
That’s how Madame President put it, anyway.
‘I don’t know why you Earth people are here at this time,’ President Flavia thundered, up on her podium. She was in a golden evening gown. Dripping with jewellery. This massive headdress on that looked like it was giving her a migraine. ‘But I believe in synchronicity and providence. I believe you are here for a reason. Is by any chance that foolish Doctor involved?’
Just as she said this a robot dog shot out of nowhere and started sniffing at us both. ‘Affirmative,’ he piped up, in a snooty little voice, before I could even say a word.
‘We came to help the Doctor,’ I tried to explain. I felt a bit out of my depth, looking up at all these people. They looked like the House of Lords, all disdainful and trimmed with ermine and that, looking down on me. Trying to explain Sheffield. Trying to explain what had gone on with the Cybermen and the Master.
‘Gallifrey faces a different threat today,’ President Flavia frowned. I don’t think she’d really been following a word I’d said. ‘Behold..!’
Then she waved a glittering sleeve at the screen above us.
And it showed us a picture of the scabbiest, shabbiest, most terrible-looking spaceship I’d ever seen. A proper kronky old rust bucket. I almost laughed. ‘What’s that supposed to be?’
‘Trans-temporal space pirates,’ the President said, looking worried.
I was surprised then, because next to me, Ravio had reacted to the image of the old ship with shock. She jolted. She cried out. ‘It’s the ‘Charity Begins at Home..’!’ she gasped.
‘What’s that, then?’
‘There were legends… during the Cyber Wars… about the pirate crew of that ship,’ Ravio said. ‘They were wicked. They were ruthless. They were refugees from a hundred thousand different times and places, bonded together in mutual distrust and loathing… and they were set on exacting revenge upon a universe that had spurned and ridiculed them..!’
We watched the image of that terrible old spaceship loom larger and larger over the Capitol’s dome. All the little rockets and stuff they’d sent up were dwarfed by it. They looked pathetic. Futile before its horrible mass.
‘Oh, great,’ I said. ‘Desperate pirates. And revenge!’
‘They want revenge upon everyone and everything,’ the Lady President shook her head. ‘One day their ghastly trailblazing was bound to lead them straight to our door… And now that day has come..!’
One of the fellas in the gowns came hurrying over with a kind of scroll, which he pressed into the President’s hand.
‘It’s from the Captain of that dreadful ship,’ President Flavia announced. ‘She wants to talk with us. If we don’t let down the transduction barriers she warns that she’ll simply destroy them.’
‘Can she do that?’ asked one of the worried-looking old guys in the evening gowns.
‘Of course she can’t,’ said the president haughtily. She commanded her lackeys: ‘Tell this person that we won’t be lowering the transduction barriers for anyone. Let alone common criminals like her!’
All the old guys seemed cheered up by this, and they all started bustling about excitedly. Alarms were going off and people were giving out all kinds of instructions. Me and Ravio just stood there, forgotten in the middle of it all.
We watched as President Flavia tore that delicate scroll into a hundred pieces and looked really furious. ‘Gallifrey won’t be dictated to by the likes of her! Tell the villainous Captain Melanie Bush that we are prepared to defend ourselves… to the death..!’
August 29, 2020
Season 13 - Chapter 4
Season 13 – Chapter 4
‘Listen, lady,’ I say to her. ‘I think you’ve got some flippin’ explaining to do.’
I sound so vehement! That’s exactly the word for it. I’m not used to sounding like that. It’s not really me at all. Well, sometimes it is. Sometimes a spot of vehemence is just the thing. A bit breathy, a bit annoyed. Letting the other person know you won’t stand for any nonsense. Oh yes, I’ve been known to be a bit vehement when the moment calls for it.
Like now. During Association hour in the anti-gravity yard. I’ve got old Bianca in a corner in the shade where no one can really notice. What’s a bit funny is the old anti-gravity aspect, which means that I’ve no sooner got her cornered than we’re both sliding up the coarse stone wall and every move we make to bring ourselves back down has us turning in cartwheels in the other direction.
‘Oops.’ I try to spin us back the other way. ‘Sorry.’
We’re spinning out into open space now and people are noticing, and pointing at us.
Bianca swears crossly at me and tells me I’m a fool. ‘Let go of me!’ she yells, but I cling on tighter and we go loop-de-loop. No longer are we hidden in a discreet corner of the prison yard. No longer are we having a quietly serious heart-to-heart. Now people are pointing and laughing because we’re having a tussle in mid-air with our hair standing on end, twirling in slow motion for everyone to see.
‘You’re making a show of us!’ Bianca yells. ‘This is just what you were like in the old days!’
Now, that’s what I wanted to talk to her about. That’s what I was feeling all vehement about. All these hints that Bianca’s been dropping. About how she knew me at school. About how we knew each other as kids.
Well, to be honest, Fam, I’ve had quite enough lately of people saying they know more about my past than I do. I mean, it’s ridiculous! Folk coming out of the flippin’ woodwork. Dropping sly little hints.
They’ve got me lying awake on my bunk in the artificial night and I’m wondering: just how much of my own story do I remember?
The women in the courtyard below are growing smaller and smaller. They’re jumping up and down, laughing and excited, sending up little puffs of moondust. And Bianca and I are tumbling, clutching hold of each other and I have a sudden stab of fear. Surely there’s a protective shield above our heads? Surely we’ll eventually bounce off the invisible ceiling and float softly back down..? But maybe there isn’t.
Maybe we’ll just go on floating away through nothingness in the most gradual and most hopeless prison break there’s ever been..?
Escape into Nothingness.
Ha! Typical!
‘You idiot,’ Bianca snarls at me. I’m still gripping her hand and she’s trying to shake me free. Her orange-painted fingernails are digging into my palm.
‘You have to tell me the truth,’ I gasp. ‘Are you really from Gallifrey? Did you really sit next to me at school?’
‘What do you think I’ve been telling you?’ She tosses her headful of soft pink curls. ‘Do you think I make up this stuff for the good of my health..?’
‘But who are you, though?’ I shout, trying to summon up enough of the required vehemence again. Then I gasp. ‘Oh flip, you’re not another one of me, are you? They’ve been coming out all over the place everywhere this past year! All these me’s I never even knew I was! You’re not, are you, Bianca? Oh, tell me you’re not!’
This creases Bianca up. She roars with laughter as she shakes off my pathetic grasp and turns cartwheels through the thinning air. ‘You! You! As if I’d be you! Never in a million years, lady! Hahahaha!’
*
Oh, but it’s true. I’ve never met so many people all claiming to be me as I have this year.
It’s been a rum do.
I mean, it’s one thing to have something like a special adventure, you know the kind of thing. When the fate of the universe hangs in the balance and all that jazz, Radio Times cover and blah-de-blah, Anniversary Special. Like, a very special occasion when only the combined talents of more than one Doctor can save the world, etc etc. We’ve seen all that.
Like a funeral, when you see family members you’ve avoided for years. Jostling along and trying to make the best of feeling awkward with all that proximity. Inappropriate drunkenness and everyone in their best clothes, glaring at each other. Is that so-and-so? Is that his new pal..? Digging up the past as you bury the hatchet. That’s my experience of Multi-Doctor episodes.
Flippin’ Blinovitch and his time limitation effect. No flippin’ use.
Anyway, this year… well, Fam. It’s been different.
There was, for example, Ruth.
*
Later, after that embarrassing scene in the anti-gravity exercise yard, I’m having a cup of tea with Dusty in her cell and explaining all about Ruth.
As best I can.
Something about Dusty tempts me into honesty.
‘I knew there was something different about her. Something special. Something that was hidden… even from herself.’
Sagely Dusty nods and sips her tea. ‘And you went to the coast with her? For a weekend?’
I shrug. ‘The details have gone a bit hazy. It were months ago now, and so many peculiar things have happened since. And you know, each time I go back to Gallifrey, something bizarre happens to my memory. I’ve never figured that out.’
Dusty snorts with soft laughter. ‘Home can really screw you up. It’s why I rarely look back. I’ve always kept moving. I try to keep travelling…’
‘Well,’ I carry on. ‘Ruth had lost her fella, and I’d lost my Fam, somehow. I forget how. This was in Bristol, I think. 2020. Terrible year. Horrible year. I don’t know what I was even thinking, being there in that year, but there I was. And Ruth had this idea about going back to the house that her mum and dad had left her in their wills, right on the seafront. A lighthouse. That’s what it was. She said – you know what? We have to go to the lighthouse.’
‘Like Virginia Woolf,’ Dusty smiles.
I frown. ‘That’s a whole other story.’
‘I don’t doubt it. And what happened at the lighthouse..?’
‘We had a few lovely days. Fire blazing. Red wine and chocolate. She told me about her husband and her work. I told her about travelling in time and space. She looked at me a bit blank at first. And then she had a funny do.’
‘A funny do..?’
‘At first she looked less friendly. Her eyes were strange. Like, focused on something just over my shoulder while we were talking. Like something was materialising just behind me… Which isn’t unheard of, of course. So I started feeling a bit paranoid…’
Dusty smiles. ‘You were expecting a nice, romantic time…’
I shrug. ‘Dunno what I was expecting. Hasn’t been much time and space in my life for romance since… since…’ I drift off then, trying to remember. ‘Anyway, Ruth had the Judoon hot on her trail. For some reason they were after her. Space rhinos. Hunting a nice, friendly woman from Bristol. A tour guide. We had no idea why. Until… gradually… after a weekend with me at the seaside… her memories started to come back…’
Dusty’s black-lined eyes widen. ‘Oh, yes..?’
I nod. ‘I think it came as a shock to both of us. Maybe more to her. We’d been for a walk along the beach. There was no one around. I was thinking, it’d be nice to have a dog, if you lived here. Taking them for long yomps along the beach…’ I stretch out my legs on the bunk in Dusty’s room. Not much space in here and suddenly I’m longing for that beach where I walked with Ruth.
‘Was it like a flash of lightning?’ Dusty asks. ‘Her moment of realisation? A real epiphany?’
‘Apparently,’ I say. ‘And she raced off back indoors to change all her clothes. She came out ages later in quite a different outfit. A whole different attitude. Well, I’d left her to it. I thought she needed some time by herself. But when she came back out, she was in a frock coat, a waistcoat, a cravat and glasses with blue lenses. She was wearing the kind of boots that you need to wear when you’re set on having serious adventures, you know? Seven-league boots for striding through the galaxy…’
‘Oh,’ says Dusty. ‘So she wasn’t just a tour guide from Bristol?’
‘If I’m learning one thing in this incarnation,’ I sigh. ‘It’s that with women… there are always complications. There’s always extra layers. There’s stuff you’d never even dream of.’
‘Hahaha,’ laughs Dusty. ‘You’ve no idea, The Doctor. You’ve got no idea. Just you wait..!’
*
August 28, 2020
Season Thirteen - Part Three
Season Thirteen – Part Three
The Doctor and Dusty started taking their morning’s exercise hour together. They went round and round the prison yard, deep in conversation.
Bianca’s nose was pushed out of joint a bit, but she didn’t say anything. She was used to people having their favourites. And those two had really hit it off, she thought. Let them get on with it.
‘I’m not going to call you ‘Doctor’, just like everyone else does,’ Dusty laughed.
‘What are you gonna call me?’
Dusty glanced at her sideways. ‘I’m going to give you your full title and call you ‘The Doctor’ all the time.’
‘What..?’ the Doctor started laughing.
‘I think it’ll sound very distinguished. ‘What is it, The Doctor?’, ‘Quickly, run away, The Doctor!’ And ‘What planet have we landed on, The Doctor?’’
‘I think it sounds daft,’ said the Doctor. ‘Anyway, who says I even want to sound distinguished? That kind of thing has never really bothered me.’
‘Oh, but it should,’ Dusty said, sounding serious. ‘If even half of the things you’ve told me are true, then you should be proud of yourself. You’ve lived an amazing life.’
‘Maybe,’ the Doctor sighed, feeling a bit ambivalent about it all.
‘Here,’ said Dusty shiftily, fiddling with her beehive and hiding herself from the guards. ‘Have a ciggy.’ From deep within her golden locks she produced a packet of cigarettes. When the Doctor waved them away she added, ‘They’re candy ones.’
‘Oh!’ The Doctor grinned at her. ‘You keep everything inside that hairdo of yours.’
‘It’s bigger on the inside than the out..!’
This made the Doctor feel glum. Just hearing that favourite phrase of hers. ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never see my TARDIS again. Never get out of here. Never get back to my normal life.’
‘Hm,’ said Dusty, chewing on her sweet cigarette. ‘You know, that’s always a possibility, and we must all be prepared for those kinds of disappointments.’
‘Very philosophical of you.’
Dusty shrugged and gave a strange little skip. The ashes beneath their feet puffed up in slow clouds. ‘That’s exactly what I am. All of my song titles were very philosophical, don’t you think? ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.’
‘Me neither,’ the Doctor sighed.
Bianca came shuffling over to interrupt them. Clearly she thought the pair were starting to get far too cosy. ‘So what about it? Are you in?’ she grinned at the Doctor.
‘Is this about this band of yours again?’ the Doctor asked, feeling mithered.
‘It is!’ grinned Bianca. ‘Dusty’s the singer. I’m on trombone…’
‘Trombone..?’ the Doctor started laughing.
‘And we’ve got a lovely electric piano thing for you to play. I just know you can do it.’
‘Oh, I can play anything,’ the Doctor said, immodestly.
‘Go on then, The Doctor,’ Dusty goaded her.
‘All right,’ she smiled.
‘That’s great,’ said Bianca. ‘But why are you calling her that?’
‘It’s just our little thing,’ Dusty said, winking.
*
Hiya Fam,
Well, I’ve got a new best friend, which is something I wasn’t expecting. I’m not sure what Dusty’s in prison for, but I’m sure it can’t be anything bad.
She’s such a gentle soul. But there’s something challenging about her. She really takes the mickey out of me, sometimes when I don’t even realise!
We talk for hours. Well, during the hours that we’re allowed to mingle in this place. The rest of the time we have to stay in our cells and flippin’ well contemplate our sins.
I don’t even know where to start on mine.
I spend my time writing to you lot. My Fam. And all my previous Fams, too. At least this period of being locked up is letting me catch up with my correspondence…
When it’s lights out I lie down and all the noise of all the other women rises up through the endless levels of this prison satellite. Sometimes it’s almost frightening. Hearing all that pent-up rage and frustration and fear and grief. Everyone here has her own story. Very few of them are happy ones.
The guards go banging on bars with their nightsticks. Yelling at everyone to calm down. It’s really not very nice, Fam. I found myself blubbing a few times. Overcome by it all.
I know, that’s not like me at all.
Last night I was having a good old wail about everything. My sobs indistinguishable from all the others’ hullaballoo. But when it started to die down… I could hear, faintly, a very sweet, smoky voice. Somewhere deep inside the metal complex of Season 13. It was Dusty. Singing to herself. Singing all by herself. Getting louder and louder. Belting it out in her splendid isolation. And I knew she was doing it just to cheer me up.
Because earlier today I was confiding in her. I said, ‘I don’t even know how many lives I’ve lived before, Dusty. I don’t even know how many women I’ve previously been.’
She gave a sad little laugh and said, ‘But isn’t that true of all of us, The Doctor..? Aren’t we all the sum total of all our previous selves? All the many women we’ve been before..?’
‘Yes, but…’ I began, and then I stopped. She was looking at me with those huge black-painted eyes. I thought, yes, she’s right.
I guess, in a way, she’s right…
*
Doc!!!
Ravio wasn’t amused when I tried to make a joke about her name sounding like ‘ravioli’ and then telling her about how many spaghetti hoops we’ve been eating. But I think it was probably a cultural thing. She’s from the far future, isn’t she, and gawd knows what they had to eat there.
It was strange and a bit nice, really, to walk into her house and find it was a TARDIS inside. I mean, I knew it was already. I should have expected it. But it still struck me as nice and strange. That smell. That humming. I think I’d started to think I’d made everything up and imagined it all. But there it was. Blue and white with circles all up the walls and Ravio looking quite at home in the middle of it all.
All that blue and white made me think I was in a kind of space supermarket. I much prefer our… I mean your more familiar TARDIS, with the crystals and everything.
‘Graham, the Doctor’s dead. She went back and sacrificed herself to save everyone. You know that’s true.’
Well! Ravio wasn’t taking any prisoners, was she? She was straight down to brass tacks.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I was firm. ‘We’ve been through this a dozen times before. There were four of us travelling together and almost every episode we were all thinking one of us had karked it. It was hardly ever true.’
The woman from the future shook her head. ‘You people. Talking about episodes and adventures. Treating it all like one big game. Do you realise how silly and irresponsible you sound?’
I frowned. ‘Do we? Do I?’
Ravio nodded. ‘Look. I’m from the end of the world. The last great Cyber war. I know how to face facts.’
I didn’t like to point out to her that what she calls the end of the world and time isn’t anything of the sort. You told us, Doc, didn’t you?
The human race survives. The world survives. It survives the Cyber wars.
It survives this bloody pandemic, too.
And we ourselves have been far in the future, long after Ravio’s time.
So I actually know a bit more about it than she does. Her being all gloomy and sultry and butch there, standing in her TARDIS front room.
But I don’t weigh in and start telling her all about the future. I don’t think she’d appreciate it. I think she’d make mincemeat out of me.
‘Where are the boys?’ I’ve forgotten the names of her two younger friends from the future. I’m hopeless with names. Especially futuristic, made-up ones.
‘Still sleeping,’ she says. ‘What’s to get up for? What’s there to do? Without the Cybermen to fight and our very existence to defend, they’re both a bit fed up, to be honest. Life on Earth is a bit soft and easy and dull, they say.’
‘Here, it’s not always like this,’ I tell her. ‘2020 is a bit unusual…’
‘So I gather,’ she smiles. ‘I’ve been reading this ship’s Information Files.’
‘Oh, yeah? You want to watch out… messing out with the controls. The Doctor used to go spare if she caught us touching anything in her TARDIS…’
‘She’s not here now, Graham. She never will be. You have to get used to that.’
‘I know, I know…’
‘And I think we ought to learn everything we can about this… this amazing machine that she’s brought us here in.’
‘Yeah, well… just you watch out for blowing yourself sky high, Ravio.’
‘You’d care, would you?’
‘Of course I would!’
‘Hm. Good to know.’
It was a bit awkward, the silence then. We looked at each other. Her in her towel and her dressing gown.
Then she said, ‘Graham… I’ve found the Fast Return Switch.’
*
August 27, 2020
Season Thirteen - Part 2
Of course, she wasn’t as bright and cheery as she pretended in her messages to her Fam. She put that on, determinedly, mostly in order to cheer herself up. There was no telling whether her friends on Earth would ever hear her messages anyway. They probably wouldn’t. Would they? Maybe they would. Or probably not.
Her hopeful, fleeting words would just go on echoing uselessly down the corridors of her own flippin’ mind.
Oh, dear, Doctor! You’re being proper mopey tonight! Come on! Get with it! Everyone’s gonna think you’re a right stick in the mud.
She dressed in a fresh pair of coveralls and combed her hair straight. Tonight there was a gathering in the Great Hall. It was a weekly thing that the governor allowed them. Free Association, he called it. It was the Doctor’s first chance to see everyone in Season Thirteen all together.
Well, someone had definitely gone to some effort. The Great Hall looked almost festive. There was bunting up, as if they were having a party. There was a bowl of fruit punch, which smelled disturbingly like the disinfectant that they used on everything here. Music was playing. A tune she remembered, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Milling around in the Great Hall were women prisoners of every description, all wearing the same drab outfit as the Doctor. Tall women, short women, hairy women. Women with feathers and scales. Antennae, crystal facets, robotic limbs and tentacles. The sheer, messy profusion of different types of life gave the Doctor’s spirits a little lift. She went round nodding and smiling and hoping that someone would look like they might want a chat.
They were armed guards in every corner of the room, of course. They glared through their visors and their laser pistols were cocked at the ready. What were they expecting? A riot? The Doctor shook her head. Everyone seemed too sapped of energy and spirit to even contemplate such a thing. She frowned. Yes, that was quite right. All the prisoners seemed depleted, didn’t they? Subdued. She sniffed her noxious-coloured punch carefully.
‘I do remember you,’ came a droll voice at her elbow and she turned to see the elderly woman who had befriended her yesterday during exercise hour. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I remember you from somewhere?’ The woman had a face like wrinkled fruit and her soft pink hair had been teased into a mass of curls. She was standing on her tiptoes to shout into the Doctor’s face and still only came up to her elbow.
‘Oh! Hello, there,’ the Doctor grinned. ‘I was just writing to my friends about you. Telling them I’d only met one person friendly enough to talk to, in this whole place.’
‘They don’t like strangers here very much,’ the old woman said. ‘I’m Bianca, by the way. What are you in for?’
The Doctor leaned forward confidingly. ‘It’s all a terrible mistake. I was dumped here by the Judoon. But I haven’t done anything! I’ve not had a trial or anything.’
Bianca shrugged. ‘You’ll find that’s the same for most of us. We get shoved here to keep us out of the way. There’s no justice in this galaxy.’
‘Huh,’ the Doctor frowned.
‘Here, let me introduce you to some of the girls,’ Bianca offered.
And that was how the Doctor came to meet Dusty Springfield.
*
Hiya Fam,
Well. Maybe this will only mean something to Graham, because he’s the oldest and he’s more likely to remember her name? I’m not sure? But you could google her anyway, and look up clips on youtube, I suppose.
Anyway, my big news is that I’m now best friends with Dusty Springfield!
I know! Get me!
Graham, I know you’ll think I’ve gone doo-lally from being locked up, but it’s true! She’s really here. It’s definitely her. We’ve talked for hours and everything and I’m completely convinced. It’s really her. Big blonde beehive. All that black mascara, the lot. I could tell just by her speaking voice. Sort of breathy and dusky and sweet. I stood beside her at that party and you could have knocked me over with a feather.
‘You’re Dusty Springfield!’ I gasped. ‘And… you’re in space!’
She laughed at me, like I was acting like a daft fan. But she was pleased, I could tell. I suppose she doesn’t get recognised all that much, away from Planet Earth. But the question is, what’s she doing here? And what she done that’s meant she’s ended up on this prison asteroid?
That’s what Bianca told me we’re on. A hollowed out asteroid. She says there’s no way off this hunk of dirt. She’s tried escaping often enough. There’s a whole spaceport of impounded vehicles and ships somewhere at the bottom, or the top, of the asteroid. But there’s no way to get to it. We’ll just have to see about that, I reckon!
I told her – I goes, I like a challenge, me! I’ve been in worse pickles than this one! You just watch, lady!
‘How long do you think I’ve been in here?’ Bianca asks me. ‘Nine hundred years!’
‘You must have done terrible things,’ I gasp.
‘I did nothing,’ she protests. ‘Like I say, there’s no justice.’
‘I bet Dusty didn’t do anything, either,’ I say.
‘That’s the thing about prison,’ Bianca smiles. ‘You always bump into someone you recognise. Like me with you.’
I squinch my nose apologetically. ‘Thing is, with all my years of travel and adventures and stuff, it’s all a bit of a blur. I hardly ever recognise faces. I’m sorry, that’s just how it is. I might have met you before, Bianca, but who’s to say. I’ve been just about everywhere!’
Bianca sniffs sadly and I feel a bit bad then. I feel like I’ve been showing off. No one likes a bragger. And that’s just what I sound like, don’t I?
Anyway, the music blares out louder then. Someone’s kickstarted the karaoke. Dusty’s protesting feebly but they’re laughing and shoving her – all the alien ladies – and next thing, she’s up on top of one of the tables. She’s giving us ‘I Only Want to Be With You.’
We’re all singing along and clapping.
For a minute or two it’s like we all forget where we are.
Towards the end of the song Bianca nudges me with her bony elbow. ‘I’ll give you a clue.’
‘You what?’
‘Where I remember you from.’
‘Go on, then.’ The applause for Dusty is huge. All the women are shouting ‘More! More!’
‘We sat beside each other once upon a time,’ Bianca said. ‘At metal desks you couldn’t even write on. We both sat right at the back of the class so we could talk and no one would notice. You were fetched home at the end of each day by someone you said was your best friend. He was a huge robotic badger.’
In all the joyful noise and tumult of that room I turned to stare down at the short, wrinkled woman. Dusty was giving into the crowd’s demands and doing them a second number. If my mind had been fully on her performance I’d have realised she wasn’t far enough along her own time line to be able to sing that particular song yet. But my eyes were fixed on the bright, mischievous eyes of Bianca. ‘What did you say? Say it again!’
‘Of course… I wasn’t called Bianca in those days...’
*
Doc!
It’s me again. Little update, even though I know the chances of you getting this are basically zero. Maybe you will. Stranger things have happened, haven’t they? Specially to us!
I’m getting out and about. At last! Wearing a little mask. I went out with Ryan to do the weekly shop and made sure we got something other than tinned spaghetti hoops.
We nipped round to see the others. The ones from that post-apocalyptic dystopian future. You know the ones. We rescued them from the Cybermen. They were the last human beings left alive and we brought them back with us. Now they’re living on the Primrose estate in a stolen TARDIS disguised as a Wimpy home.
Anyway. Me and Rylan went knocking on their door to see how they were getting on. We stood socially distanced, halfway down the garden path, of course. Ravio came to the door. She was the nice-looking older lady. I thought she had a bit of a soft spot for me, you know. In as much as you can tell when you’re running for your life on a giant ship full of Cybermen. But you know. I thought she took a shine. Not that I’m bothered. Not so soon after Grace, of course. And lockdown is a terrible time to even contemplate romance.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Ravio said. She was stood there in a dressing gown and her hair wrapped in a towel.
‘It’s me as well,’ Ryan said, and she glanced at him.
‘What do you want?’
‘Well, I just wanted to check that you’re getting on all right,’ I explained. ‘New planet and all. And… er… it’s not always like this, you know. This is unusual for all of us. The pandemic and that.’
She shrugged. Rubbed at her hair. ‘To be honest, I don’t mind. After the future we came from, all this is still pretty nice. Even in the circumstances.’
And then it hit me. She was standing in the doorway of a Wimpy home. A semi-detatched, three-bedroom Wimpy home in the middle of the Primrose estate. Except that’s not what it really was, was it?
‘Erm… the Doc hasn’t tried to get in touch, has she?’ I asked, hopefully. ‘I mean, TARDIS to TARDIS, like?’
It had suddenly struck me that this was the best way to try and get to you. These little notes of mine… there must be a way to get them to you, somehow? Using Ravio’s TARDIS?
‘Her? There’s not been a squeak out of her,’ Ravio said.
‘Can we come in?’ I asked. ‘We’ll keep our masks on.’
‘You can be in my Bubble,’ she smiled at me ruefully. Then she glared at Ryan. ‘But you’ll have to wait out there.’
*
August 26, 2020
In Season Thirteen
In Season Thirteen
1
Hiya Fam!
Well..! You’ll never guess..! Never in a million years!
It’s a good job I dropped you all back on Earth. It was just in time! Seriously! If you all knew what was happening to me you would all be wishing yourselves back in Sheffield.
I’m in prison!
Prison!!
I know, right?
There I was, reeling from all the to-do’s and carry on’s that we’d all been having recently. I’d barely had time to catch me flippin’ breath, let alone deal with all the mad repercussions of the stuff I’d learned in our most recent adventure when… BAM! Here come the space police. Flippin’ rhinos bursting into the TARDIS. (I know they’re not supposed to be able to do that. It’s been a few incursions we’ve had in recent times. Dunno what’s going on there. I’d have a look into the ship’s defences if I wasn’t currently ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FLIPPIN’ UNIVERSE.)
Because that’s where I am. My cell has got a little tiny window and I’ve studied the stars very carefully. I’m absolutely MILES away.
But never mind! I’m sure there’s a good reason! I’m sure they want my help with something. Something important and really complicated. Or otherwise it’s just a colossal misunderstanding or something. Bound to be.
I thought I’d write to you all anyway. Tell you what’s going on. Not sure how I’ll send it though. I’ll find a way eventually, I suppose.
From what I’ve picked up they call this space prison ‘Season 13.’ Unlucky for some, eh?!
*
Well. It’s a bit later. I’ve had me tea.
Today was a bit different. They let me out of my cell!
Wouldn’t say much. Just shouted at me to get out and quick march down the corridor to the dining room. Not many friendly faces in there. Pretty grim, really. All these women queuing up for not very nice-looking soup. Ah, well. At least I got to stretch me legs and see a few other faces. Even if they weren’t very hospitable-looking ones!
As you know, Fam, I like to put the best spin on things. I like to see the best in everything. I’m sure all this will turn out just fine. Everything always turns out for the best, doesn’t it?
Of course it does!
*
I’ve had a few funny dreams. I haven’t slept much really, since I’ve been here, but when I have I’ve had very giddy, sick-making dreams. I keep seeing HIS face. Laughing at me. Like a maniac. Well, that’s what he is, of course, so there’s no surprises there. But he’s really laughing a lot and being quite nasty and personal actually.
I’d actually thought we’d sorted out all our old issues, but this past year he’s been really awful. Really bullying, actually. This latest thing of his, it was the worst thing ever, I think. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d actually managed to kill off all the Time Lords this time (or so he says) and converted all their dead bodies into Cybermen (I know, right?) but then he got really personal and nasty with me. With me in particular.
I’m a bit hazy on the details because I’d had a bit of a bang on the head, and I was kind of stood there clinging to the wall in what used to be the Panopticon of the Capitol, back in the old days. He kept talking for ages. Well, for ages and ages, actually. He’s a bloke once more, so he really likes the sound of his own voice.
And guess what? He was coming out with all this stuff about how I’m older than I even thought I was! He kept going on and on about it. He was like, you think all this about yourself and you assume all that about yourself. You think you know who you are and all that kind of thing. But you don’t! You know nothing! There’s all these dark secrets and stuff that no one ever told you about!
And I was like, yeah, yeah, you don’t know anything either, matey. Really, I just wanted to go to sleep because it had been a run of really tiring stories, actually. I’d barely had a chance to have a proper sit down. But he’s like, no, no, no! You have to understand! I’m going to explain it all to you! Just you watch this screen and there’ll be some clips and stuff coming up to explain it all!
Well, I thought – ugh. I hate a montage. I hate being tied up and having flippin’ clips shown to me. I’m like, what do I want to look backwards for? I’m all about the future, me! I’ve already done all the past!
But he was like, You’re gonna love this! Just wait and see!
*
So, this is what I’ve been dreaming about, in the hours that I can dream, here in my space prison on the other side of the galaxy. How I’m older than I ever dreamed about. How I’m this and that and the other. How I’m not even who I thought I was in the first place.
Well, whoop-de-doo.
I’ve tried getting in touch with some of those earlier selves. The ones I remember and the ones I don’t. Kind of like sending out a psychic lasso. Maybe they’ll come. Maybe they’ll care.
I’ll sign off here for now.
Things are perking up here, actually. There’s a nice woman I got chatting to when they let us out in the yard for exercise hour. She’s what they call an old lag. She’s going to show me the ropes. Says she’s in a blues band and they need a keyboardist. I told her – I’m hoping I won’t be here all that long! I’m hoping to start my travels in time and space again soon!
Oh, she says. Time and space, eh? Another one, eh? And then she laughed. ‘We’ve got another of your sort in here.’
*
Doc!
You’ll never get this, so why am I even bothering?
But thanks a bunch. Thanks a lot.
Of all the times and places to drop us off!
Not just us – not just me and Yasmin and Ryan. The others. Those poor buggers from the far future you rescued. You dumped them in Sheffield, too.
You dumped them and us in Sheffield.
In March 2020.
March 2020.
Didn’t it ring any bells?
What were you thinking of, Doc?
I’ve not left the house for five months. Lucky I’ve got Ryan going out for all the necessaries He’s not much cop with a shopping list. But you’ve got to see the irony. We used to go everywhere, didn’t we? The universe was our oyster! Now I have a walk round and round the back garden and I feel like I’m having a trip out. Really, Doc, I’m clawing the walls here.
It’s been bloody awful. We’re living on spaghetti hoops.
I’ve gotta ask you…
Where the hell did you get to..?
And when are you coming back..?
*
Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley
Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley
Seduced by the new covers and the smart choices for Penguin’s new Science Fiction Classics range, I plumped for Robert Sheckley first. Over the years loads of people have told me that I would love him. And I found ‘Dimension of Miracles’ brief and brilliant. Our hero Tom Carmody accidentally leaves Earth for Galactic Central when he thinks he’s won a space lottery. He has to find his own way home, negotiating with space officials, demi-gods and his own shape-shifting sweepstakes prize over the correct era, location and alternate dimension. My favourite chapter is either the one with the very polite dinosaur or the one spent inside the passive-aggressive living city who complains about his visitor’s dietary and smoking habits. It’s a snappy, sarcastic and profoundly silly book and it could have been written yesterday.
August 25, 2020
Rereading 'Tolstoy and the Purple Chair'
My at-home-holiday continues with a reread of this absolute favourite - 'Tolstoy and the Purple Chair' by Nina Sankovitch. It's a memoir about love, loss and healing, in which a woman grieving her sister sets out to read and write about a book every single day for a whole year. We learn an awful lot about life, love, family, war and pain - and also get a massive amount of very eclectic book recommendations on the way. We also get to feel like a part of this warmly happy family for a year, too. It's a generous and complex book that gives the reader a little more with each rereading.
It's the seventh of my rereads and revisits in a row - and after this one I'm ready to start on my pile of brand-new holiday books...!
August 24, 2020
Rereading Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
I'm beginning my holiday-at-home with a reread of this lovely novel. These are my no-holiday, no-Pride, no-mooching-around-in-Paris, my end-of-August reading-nothing-but-books-I'll-love-for-days-on-end days. And this book, which I first read six years ago, is a wonderful start. It's the closest I've ever read to my own first year at college, I think. So many things are familiar - Cath's writing fanfiction in her room while everyone's out getting drunk (I spent those nights rereading 'Dracula' in an ancient pan paperback!), and that whole-hearted absorption in characters she loves - and that business of her tricky family and her various, gradual attachments to boys. The evocation of a snowy campus, too - and the sheer, muddle-headed, slightly woozy excitement of showing your first stories to other people.
Like many of the novels that have become my favourites - and the ones to return to - this had nostalgia written all over it, even the first time I read it.
Also, this copy came from the Burnage Little Free Library last week, and it's so nice to have an actual real copy. When I read this in 2014 it was an ebook. Though I loved it then, it's not the same experience. Reading ebooks is like looking through a window at the story.
August 19, 2020
Fancy Believing in the Goblin King... again!
‘Fancy Believing in the Goblin King’
by Paul Magrs
My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love.
When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay.
Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure.
It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening.
‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention.
‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already.
He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him.
He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence.
It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?
I asked him what happened on his adventure.
‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.
‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.
‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?
‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’
‘And so I did.
‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.
‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.
‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.
‘’Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said.
‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.
‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.
‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’
I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter.
What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye?
‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’
My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale.
‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’
But I do. I really believe in it.
And it’s the best story I’ve heard all year.
*
Afterword - two years later.
Paul Magrs, October 2019.
August 16, 2020
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll
Another Little Book Review
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll
Next in my series of rereads – a dark fantasy novel that I first read in 1993 and have revisited multiple times over the years. I think it’s drawn me back because it captures that feeling of book-fandom so well – that longing a reader has to return to the characters and settings of books they love. This is the Wicker Man-like story of a biographer drawn to a small town to learn horrifying secrets about the writer he reveres. I loved all the quirky aspects – the talking bull terriers and the bibliomystery clues. BUT on this reread it struck me that ALL the characters are utterly reprehensible. What an awful bunch! And the ending – as ever – drove me mad. Maybe some books you loved in your twenties are ones you just grow out of..?
