Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (17 page)

His eye was swollen and bruised. The cut on his back ached. Chris perched on the edge of one of the carriage benches, pulled his shirt off, and tried unsuccessfully to look over his shoulder to assess the damage.

‘Here let me,’ Patsy pushed him roughly around until she had a clear view of his back. Her hands were like ice on his skin: goose-bumps rose on his arms.

‘I don’t think it’s serious, just badly grazed. How’s your eye?’

‘Sore.’

‘They don’t pull their punches.’

‘They?’ He started to turn around, but Patsy stopped him.

‘I’m not finished here. It isn’t easy cleaning a wound with only spit and a hanky.’

Chris winced. ‘Nice. Well I suppose your saliva is mostly alcohol.’

She slapped him on the back. ‘Booze! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?’

Chris glanced over his shoulder. Patsy had pulled out a quarter bottle of whisky from the inside pocket of her suit jacket. There was an inch of brass-coloured liquid in the bottom of the bottle. She poured a little on to her handkerchief and was about to tuck the bottle away, when she obviously changed her mind and stole a quick nip.

‘You drinking that stuff this early?’

93

‘Listen, Christopher, when you drink as much as I do, you have to start early.’

She set the bottle down on the floor and pressed the handkerchief against the wound. Hard.

‘Oww! That burns.’

She grinned sadistically and tucked the hanky away in her jacket. ‘Good.

All done.’

He lay back on the bench, aware that Patsy was studying him carefully. He noticed her eyes drop to appraise his bare chest. He managed to stop himself flexing his muscles. But only just.

She ran a finger down the middle of his torso, through the six-pack of hardened stomach muscles and then paused at the top of his belt. ‘Impressive. You must spend your whole life doing sit-ups,’ she said.

Her eyes didn’t leave his, but he felt her fingers rest heavily and deliberately on his belt buckle.

Chris shivered. It felt somehow sacrilegious, although he didn’t know why.

Maybe it was just too soon after Roz’s death. ‘I can’t –’ he started. ‘Don’t.

Please.’

Patsy removed her hand quickly, as if something had bitten it. ‘I said I liked it, I didn’t say I wanted to kiss it,’ she snapped at him and lit a cigarette.

Silence. Chris pulled on his shirt. The cold and wet material slapped uncomfortably against his skin.

Patsy tended to the sleepers. She made an unlikely nurse. It had been hard work dragging them on the broken gurney to Healey’s tiny railway station.

For most of the journey, their cargo had been silent and motionless, like mannequins. Occasionally, the Chinese boy would stir and whimper in pain. Patsy would pause to whisper words of reassurance to him.

The first train back to London had not been until six in the morning, so they had set up camp in the waiting room on the station platform. The light in the waiting room wasn’t working and they had sat silently in the dark for hours listening to the soft breathing of the sleepers. A thousand questions about them had formed in Chris’s mind, but he’d been too exhausted to try to articulate them.

He took the last swig of whisky from the bottle and jammed it down the side of the seat. He wasn’t too tired to ask the questions now.

‘I was expecting them to appear out of nowhere. Dropped out of a spaceship or something. Materializing in a patch of coloured light at the very least. Not be dragged across a muddy field on a hospital trolley.’

‘You’ll find we’re full of surprises,’ Patsy said, curtly.

‘But running on empty as far as answers are concerned.’

Patsy frowned at him. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’

94

Chris thought about this for a moment. ‘Everything. That faceless creature.

What is it?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what it is. That’s the truth!’ she added angrily, when she saw him looking at her. ‘They’re a kind of guard. There are several of them at the hospital.’

Chris couldn’t think of another way of saying this. ‘They’re alien. They don’t belong to this world.’

‘I know.’

‘Do they come from Petruska?’

‘What? No, of course not. Does that thing look like me?’ she shouted, and then suddenly became more reasonable. ‘I don’t think that we’re the first aliens brought to the hospital.’

She turned the light in the carriage out. The first traces of dawn were creeping across the English countryside, turning the blinds on the carriage windows a delicate blue. Chris was surprised when Patsy lay down next to him on the bench. She kept her back to him, but pushed herself against him.

His immediate reaction was to put his arm around her. When she spoke he felt her voice reverberate gently through his body.

‘We came here looking for refuge. Liberation.’ She spat the word out, as if it hurt to have it in her mouth. ‘But your people found us. Found out about us and our abilities. And then we were slaves again.’

Chris wanted to say that the humans of this century weren’t
his
people, but held back, not wanting to interrupt her. ‘What did they want to use you for.’

Patsy sighed. ‘They discovered our therapeutic value. Our empathic abilities allow us to enter into emotional relationships with people who are otherwise unreachable. Those who are “not available for contact” through ordinary psy-chotherapeutic interventions.’

That explained the asylum. ‘You mean people with psychotic disorders, don’t you?’

Patsy nodded. ‘Pop was an orderly at the hospital. He’s been helping us escape from the asylum for some time now. It’s ironic; on our planet we were the toys of the neurotic rich, then we “escaped” to Earth only to become the companions of the mentally ill.’

‘Out of the frying pan. . . ’ Chris started and then stopped himself. It occurred to him that this must be the second journey Patsy had made from Healey to London. He looked down at the sleepers. ‘How many more of your people are left in the hospital?’

‘I’m not sure. The Major would know. He and Mother have been responsible for bringing them to London, helping them make new lives. I don’t see how we can help those left behind now Pop is dead.’

95

Chris hugged her tightly. ‘I know someone who will be able to help,’ he whispered.

Patsy hadn’t heard him. She was searching the floor of the carriage with her hand.

‘Where’s my drink?’ she said anxiously.

‘I finished it. For your own good.’

Melanie Wotton had been the cleaner at Healey station ever since she had left school. She arrived at the station at six-thirty every morning to wash down the platform, water the plants, and disinfect the toilets.

She knew most of the drivers and ticket collectors on the early trains, sharing a smile and a few words with them in the few minutes while the train was standing on the platform.

After finishing cleaning the platform for the morning, she was about to pour the soapy water in her bucket on to the track, when she caught sight of the figure lying sprawled between the rails of the Westbound line.

It was one of the ticket collectors. A young shy lad, who always had his nose in a book. He hadn’t been at the job long. Just a stop-gap, he always said, before he went to university. Adam. That was his name. He wouldn’t be going to university now.

His sightless eyes stared back at her. His uniform had been removed and fresh blood bled on to his string vest from two ragged wounds on his neck.

Melanie let her bucket and mop drop. She was still standing in silence, shaking and breathing in desperate gasps, when the station staff found her five minutes later. As they walked her slowly back into the station house, dirty soap suds from the spilt bucket spread across the clean station platform like a miniature flood.

As the first Westbound train of the day continued on its journey to London, it rattled past a level crossing where a London taxi waited patiently to continue on its way towards Healey. And in the guard’s van of the train, a uniformed figure stood silently in the shadows.

96

Interlude

Gilliam’s Story

On the third day, Gilliam woke to great commotion. She pulled on her work clothes and climbed out of her thermo-tent to find a couple of dozen people milling around Petruska’s chamber, bringing in equipment and setting up living quarters. The arrangements reminded her of her own college days: despite the different cultures it was still recognizable as an archeological dig.

A rounded, bearded man appeared to be directing the proceedings, scolding younger members of his team – for getting in his way – and generally fussing.

When he caught sight of Gilliam, he bustled over as fast as his short legs would carry him.

‘Highness,’ he began and bowed low. ‘An honour to finally meet you. I’d heard of your interest in the discipline, but if I’d known it was so –’ he gestured around the ancient chamber ‘– active, I would have had the university approach you myself.’

Gilliam cut him off with a sharp flick of her hand. ‘The king sent you here, didn’t he?’

The short professor was sweating in the morning heat, but that wasn’t why he looked so uncomfortable. ‘I received a request from the royal barge last night to give your Highness whatever assistance necessary for you to complete your work. I was working out in the K’tum Pi desert, an investigation into the palace ostraca of the Ker’ana Ton Warriors. Most of it is soldiers’ love poetry –

very erotic stuff. You may have read my work on the subject?’

Gilliam shook her head; she was beginning to feel like a little girl who hadn’t finished her homework assignment.

The professor wiped his sweaty, red face with his handkerchief and then stuffed it back in the pocket of his robe. ‘To tell you the truth, this early period isn’t an interest of mine. With so much written on the first family it’s hard to find a new angle – to really make one’s mark.’

He turned to look at her again and smiled approvingly. ‘Which makes your work all the more special, Highness. I took the liberty of reading through your field notes, when I arrived. Very promising. You do seem to have stumbled across something of real interest and importance though. Treasonable declarations from the first queen of Kr’on Tep hidden in her love songs. You 97

may have uncovered a proto-feminist covert communication network. Who knows what messages may be hidden in the other songs of the period? Quite astonishing.’ He tapped his chin thoughtfully, considering something. ‘Proto-feminist covert communication network,’ he said, quoting himself. ‘I like the sound of that.’

He paused, as if struck by a new thought, and looked a little guiltily at his queen. ‘The university will want to recognize your vital contribution to this discovery, of course. An honorary doctorate perhaps? Perhaps even patron of a college?’

‘Professor.’ Gilliam cut through his stream of words.

He stopped talking and blinked at her. ‘Yes, Highness?’

‘Get out.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You have two minutes to get yourself and your colleagues out of here. And if you personally say another word I shall treat it as an act of treason. Is that clear?’

The professor opened his mouth, and then closed it again. He nodded.

‘Good. I see that we understand each other.’

She watched him gather up his research team, who looked completely bemused at having to leave before they had even finished unpacking. But in one and three quarter minutes, Gilliam was alone in Petruska’s chamber.

Very promising, indeed! The patronizing git. She burst out laughing, and then remembered the king’s part in all of this and her laughter quickly died.

He’d arranged for the professor and his researchers to come just to speed up her work, no doubt thinking that when the translation was complete there would be nothing to prevent her from taking her place by his side on the
Jewelled Sword
. Nothing to stop royal life returning to normal.

Gilliam picked up her notepad and flicked through her field notes. Exciting as the work was, it wasn’t Petruska’s ancient story that was keeping her away from her husband. If she was honest with herself, she had to admit that she hadn’t run away to do archeology – she’d run away from him. And when the work was over, she wasn’t going to have anything to hide behind. She was going to have to make a decision.

But not yet, she told herself. Not today.

For the rest of the day she buried herself in the translation. Petruska’s song was spread across all five of the walls of her chamber. By the end of the day, Gilliam had finished translating the symbols on four of the walls. All but the last two choruses of the first queen’s love song for her husband.

Much of the journal was concerned with a device which Petruska was building with the help of her sole companion and bodyguard, a young man called Tol’gar, whom she had taken into her confidence. The device was represented 98

by two symbols: a bird in flight, and a circle or possibly a sphere. Petruska variously referred to the device in her journal as ‘gateway’ and ‘opening door’.

A secret means of escape perhaps? A way of fleeing Moriah’s tyranny?

Gilliam hoped so. She was beginning to feel close to the first queen of Kr’on Tep, despite the centuries that separated their lives. She could empathize with Petruska’s confinement of course. In her years as Queen of Kr’on Tep, Gilliam had all too keenly felt the imprisonment Petruska described in her journal.

But their lives weren’t the same; to suggest they were only undermined the first queen’s experience. Petruska had been a real prisoner, forbidden any contact with the outside world, locked in this luxurious gaol that was her palace. However trapped Gilliam felt, she could leave. Unlike Petruska, she had a choice.

No, that wasn’t quite right. Petruska had also had a choice. To choose to disobey, to fight, to try to escape her abusive husband. And she had chosen wisely; using her scientific knowledge to create a device, a machine to deliver her from the mysterious man-god, Moriah.

Gilliam couldn’t help hoping that the academic histories had got it wrong.