Doctor Who: Paradise Towers (3 page)

‘Why’s that?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Just is.’

‘Not got very enquiring minds, have you?’ the Doctor remarked sarcastically. He hated it when people failed to show curiosity about what was happening around them. Particularly when, like now, he himself was trying to piece together what was going on.

‘Quiet, Doctor.’ Mel spoke to try and stop the Doctor’s sarcasm annoying the Red Kangs but the actual result was to divert their attention from the Doctor to her.

‘You a Kang?’ The leading girl eyed her suspiciously.

Mel shook her head. ‘No, I’m not a Kang. I’m Mel. And I don’t know who the Kangs are.’

‘We’re Kangs,’ the girl returned. ‘Red Kangs.’

‘Who are, of course, the best,’ The Doctor said hastily, in order to prevent another performance of the Red Kang Chant.

There was not a male face in sight. A thought occurred to the Doctor. ‘Maybe they’ll ask you to join up, Mel,’ he whispered mischievously.

‘I hope not,’ Mel replied miserably.

‘Bin Liner.’ The first Kang who had spoken suddenly cut across their whispers but the words made no immediate sense to either the Doctor or Mel. ‘Bin Liner,’ she repeated firmly. A response was expected but exactly what response was not clear.

Then the penny dropped. She was telling them her name. And after she had done so for the third time, she indicated to the other Red Kangs that they should unpin their two prisoners.

Mel hoped this was a good sign not a prelude to something worse.

‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ The Doctor, freed at last from his undignified pose against the wall, was determined to take the initiative. He raised his hat and putting on one of his most ingratiating smiles, pointed at himself. ‘I am the Doctor.’

The other leading Kang stepped forward. ‘Fire Escape,’ she announced.

‘Good names.’ This rather banal remark seemed to please the Kangs and the Doctor, growing in confidence, offered his hand to be shaken. But no hand reached out to grasp it. Indeed, the Red Kangs seemed to regard his gesture with great suspicion and even raised their crossbows threateningly again. The Doctor stood there nonplussed.

‘I only want to be friendly,’ he protested to the still blank faces. ‘To say hello,’ he added, gesturing frantically to indicate his good intentions.

At some point during the Doctor’s performance, to his relief, some of the Kangs obviously realised what he was talking about.

‘He wants to how you do,’ Fire Escape explained to the slower ones. ‘Do we?’

There was a moment’s hesitation before the other Kangs gave approval. And then Fire Escape started one of the oddest forms of everyday greeting Mel had ever witnessed. It reminded her of a very slow, rather menacing version of the game of pat-a-cake she used to play at school. She was very thankful that it was the Doctor who would have to respond and not her. Fire Escape was deadly serious during the whole ritual and yet the memory of her childhood games made Mel want to giggle.

The Doctor, however, coped splendidly. He managed to return the greeting exactly, movement for movement, and even added a few flourishes of his own with his hat which seemed to go down rather well with the Kangs. Before very long he had made the full formal acquaintance of not just Bin Liner and Fire Escape but most of the other Kangs as well. Fortunately, it was not necessary, it appeared, to have to go through the whole greeting ceremony with everybody or else the proceedings would have taken a very long time indeed.

‘But what about Mel here?’ the Doctor enquired when the formalities were over. ‘None of the Kangs have said how you do to her.’

There was a pause. Fire Escape shook her head. ‘You we like, Doctor,’ she announced. ‘What you wear is high fabshion and icehot for an old one.’

‘Thank you very much,’ the Doctor replied, not absolutely sure of the exact meaning of these words but getting the general drift. ‘But clothes don’t maketh the man, you know.’

‘No,’ agreed Bin Liner. ‘But all Kangs have colours. Blue.

Yellow. Red. What is Mel’s colour?’ she turned suspiciously towards Mel, who felt all eyes trained on her now.

‘I don’t have a colour,’ she retorted, stung by the fact that the Kangs had been deliberately ignoring her up till now. ‘And I certainly don’t want to be a Kang.’

‘We don’t want you to be a Kang,’ Fire Escape snapped back fiercely. ‘Not a Red Kang.’ It was a cue for the Red Kangs to start their chant again and, much to the Doctor and Mel’s dismay, start it they did. The Doctor had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the din. Finally it subsided as quickly as it had begun.

‘Look,’ the Doctor began when quiet was restored. ‘I think now we’ve been introduced, some explanations are in order. We are visitors to Paradise Towers. Only just arrived. You can’t expect Mel to understand what you’re talking about.’

‘No visitors.’ Bin Liner’s remark came out so swiftly and so fiercely that the Doctor didn’t at first catch its import.

‘Pardon?’

‘No visitors,’ Bin Liner repeated. Again, she seemed to regard the captives as fools for not understanding her. ‘No ball games. No flyposts. No visitors.’ They were the sort of words Mel was used to seeing on noticeboards back home but Bin Liner was repeating them now with a deadly seriousness.

‘You mean visitors aren’t allowed?’ the Doctor enquired patiently. He hoped that he and Mel were not just about to be punished for infringing some obscure by-law of Paradise Towers.

Bin Liner shook her head. ‘No visitors ever.’

‘Not since time start,’ added Fire Escape.

All was becoming clearer. The Kangs had quite simply never seen any visitors. Mel didn’t like to think too closely about what might have happened to any tourists who had been tempted by by seeing the video brochure before her to sample the delights of Paradise Towers. She suspected they had not had the most satisfactory of holidays.

The Doctor meanwhile was thinking more about the present. ‘There’s always a first time, you know,’ he insisted. ‘Not everyone you come across is going to be a Kang.’

‘No,’ Fire Escape agreed. ‘There are old ones. And Caretakers. And –’

‘Ware tongue!’ Bin Liner interrupted fiercely. Fire Escape bit her lip and lapsed into silence.

‘And?’ The Doctor’s eyes were agleam with curiosity. There was nothing more likely to get him interested than discovering something that somebody didn’t want him to know. But this time there was no way of finding out what Fire Escape had been about to say. Bin Liner’s warning had been enough. The Doctor had to turn his attention to what the Kangs were prepared to tell him. He asked therefore about the Caretakers they had mentioned.

‘They wipe away our wallscrawl,’ Bin Liner explained.

‘Chase us down carrydoors. Catch us if they can.’

‘I see,’ the Doctor nodded. ‘But all the young ones are Kangs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Young girls I should say, of course,’ the Doctor corrected himself. ‘There aren’t any boys around, are there?’

‘Boys?’ Fire Escape’s face was blank. The other Kangs’ faces too. ‘What are boys?’ Her face wrinkled in puzzlement. The concept was clearly new to her. ‘There are old ones, and the Caretakers, and the Kangs and the –’ But this time she stopped herself and the Doctor was still none the wiser. He was beginning to suspect there was a strong possibility he would never be. Indeed, he was also beginning to think there was something to be said for Mel’s notion of looking for some other planet with a swimming pool. The crossbows were not reassuring. It was time to make an exit. Mel, he noticed, was already trying to edge herself nearer to the TARDIS.

It was worth a try anyway. The Doctor smiled brightly and edged with her. ‘Well, I must say, it’s been nice meeting you but I think it’s time we ought to be on our way. Don’t you think so, Mel?’

‘Yes, Doctor, not a moment to lose,’ she agreed heartily. The TARDIS was only some thirty paces away but those thirty paces lay past a whole crowd of Kangs. Mel and the Doctor prepared themselves to run for it. But the Kangs were far too quick. They sensed what their captives were going to do before they even began to do it and blocked their paths. I suppose, the Doctor thought sardonically, when you live in a nightmare like Paradise Towers, you have to learn to act quickly.

‘We heard you talk of the pool,’ Bin Liner announced, coming right up to the Doctor. Acute hearing too, he noted to himself.

‘The great Pool in the Sky.’ Fire Escape spoke the words with a great deal of reverence and not a little fear. It was the first indication Mel and the Doctor had that the swimming pool they had so lightly selected might have a much deeper significance for the inhabitants of Paradise Towers. It was useless, however, to try and argue that their overheard conversation had been perfectly harmless. They had said enough to convince the Kangs that they were not to be let go.

‘You’re coming to our Hide-In.’ Bin Liner announced. She gave a gesture of command. Experienced hands grasped them and, before they knew what had happened, the Doctor and Mel had their hands tied neatly and firmly behind their backs. Being bundled up in this way was marginally preferable to being impaled by metal arrows but still didn’t make them feel at ease.

‘I see the art of knot-tying hasn’t died out here anyway,’ the Doctor muttered ruefully. ‘I wonder if the Blue Kangs behave like this?’

‘I thought they liked you,’ Mel returned in some puzzlement.

‘They liked my clothes,’ the Doctor corrected, remembering the Kangs had dubbed them ‘high fabshion’, whatever that meant. ‘It’s clearly not enough on its own.’

‘Are they tied and true?’ Bin Liner had been watching the execution of her orders with an expert eye. The Red Kangs nodded. Fire Escape, meanwhile, was otherwise occupied. The Doctor’s ever-inquisitive eye tried to study what she was up to but it wasn’t easy with the scrum of Kangs around him. She appeared to be using some sort of telephone. But a phone concealed artfully in a battered old mechanical drinks dispenser.

Presumably this was to hide its existence from the Kang’s enemies, which appeared to be legion.

Whatever she was hearing on the phone had Fire Escape worried. She summoned Bin Liner over. ‘Red Kang Eye-Spy says we can’t go through the usual carrydoor. Blue Kangs out and lurking.’

Bin Liner was thoughtful. ‘And the Yellows?’

Fire Escape listened again. Her face became grave as she turned to her companion. ‘No Yellows. All unalive.’

‘All.’ Bin Liner echoed her in an awed voice.

‘All.’ Fire Escape put down the receiver in silence. This was news they had obviously not expected to hear from their lookout and it had taken them by surprise. Suddenly the two girls looked very young and rather frightened.

‘Excuse me –’ the Doctor called out as politely as he could.

‘What?’ Fire Escape was again the proud, warlike, ever-vigilant Red Kang, who feared nobody.

‘Are you saying a whole tribe of Kangs has been wiped out –

er – made unalive – just like that?’ The Doctor could not keep the shock out of his voice. Fire Escape nodded her head in agreement. ‘But why?’ the Doctor pressed. ‘You didn’t kill them did you?’

The suggestion shocked Fire Escape into speech. ‘To make unalive is not part of the Kang game.’ She paused and then added with a firmness that was totally convincing. ‘No ball games. No flyposts. No wipeouts.’

‘Then who does it?’ the Doctor urged. ‘The Blue Kangs?

The Caretakers? Who?’

‘It takes place.’ Fire Escape would not discuss the subject further. The Doctor sensed much that was unspoken which would only be discussed when he was out of earshot. For the moment, the Red Kang leaders found relief from their worries in frenzied activity. It was time for the band to leave the Square.

‘We’ve been out in the open spaces too long.’ Bin Liner was keeping a wary lookout now and the Doctor realised how open to attack they all would be in the Square if any of their foes did appear. The Kangs confused him. They were such an odd mixture of toughness and vulnerability.

‘We must go. Ware Blue Kangs.’ Fire Escape surveyed the party with its two prisoners, hands well tied, at its centre, all ready now for departure. She raised her hand and made a sign, a sort of blessing or good-luck gesture for the whole group.

‘Build High for Happiness.’

‘Build High for Happiness.’ The other Kangs repeated the gesture and then they were off. Bundled unceremoniously along, up rickety steps and through dingy, ill-smelling corridors, Mel and the Doctor caught only glimpses of what Paradise Towers had become. But it confirmed everything they had feared from that first sight at the door of the TARDIS. The once clean, confidently planned and well-equipped planet was a nightmare of decay and destruction.

‘Sorry about the pool, Mel.’ They were all crossing a narrow walkway now, high above a litter-strewn square all too like the one they had recently left.

‘That’s all right, Doctor.’ Mel thought it was rather generous of the Doctor to apologise since she was the one who had insisted on coming here in the first place. The leading Kangs were nearly across the walkway now. Ahead was a dark archway. Beyond that it was impossible to see.

‘Caretakers! Run!’

Suddenly the whole line of Kangs dissolved and scattered.

Just in time those at the front had given the warning. A group of heavily built men in uniforms rushed out of the gloom behind the archway.

‘All right, you Wallscrawlers, let’s be having you!’

It was lucky for the Kangs that they were young and fit and these men were older and paunchier or they would all have certainly been caught. As it was, the Kangs had to scramble nimbly down stairs or through broken windows to evade them.

Mel instinctively followed the other girls. Her tied hands impeded her progress but somehow she found her way back down the stairs and then managed to lose her pursuers in the mass of corridors that led off the square. Kangs were all about her but for the moment none of them had the time or the will to question her or prevent her escape.

She had been sure the Doctor was right behind her when she was running down the steps. He was after all remarkably light on his feet for a Time Lord. It was only when she stopped to draw a breath and turned to congratulate the Doctor on their successful escape that she discovered, with a sudden sickening shock, the Doctor was no longer with her. She was well and truly alone in Paradise Towers.