Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [93]
The Chinese boy who didn’t have a name was awake now, sitting in Chris’s lap and staring out of the window. Something about the boy disturbed Chris.
It wasn’t just that the boy was quiet – and so far the boy hadn’t spoken a single word – it was more than that. Chris couldn’t remember a single expression crossing the boy’s face since he’d first met him. It was as if the boy didn’t have a personality at all. The lights were on but there was nobody home. Chris ran his fingers through the boy’s fine black hair. The boy sniffed a little in response.
The cabby was chattering on, but Chris was too tired from the journey back to London to pay any attention. He stared out of the window, taking a rare opportunity in his travels with the Doctor to watch the passing of an ordinary day in a different century. It had started to drizzle and the pedestrians in the city were now walking hurriedly through Soho. The streets they walked on were drab and grey. The cities of Chris’s day were neon bright, garish and loud; every available space taken up with advertising messages and images, the walkways which stretched between the mile high towers alive with the chatter of a thousand races.
Across the street a dreary tailors advertised ELITE STOCKING REPAIRS. 1/6
PER STOCKING. That was another thing, Chris mused, here everyone wore the same sort of clothes. Variations on a suit. Casual wear didn’t appear to have been invented yet. The only people who wore jeans were the workmen drinking tea from flasks as they put up office blocks over the last remaining bomb sites. Everyone else on the streets looked as if they were on their way to a job interview. The air of formality in the city was stifling. And beneath the veneer of bland respectability, you could never really know what people were like, or what was really going on in their lives.
Patsy appeared at the window of the taxi, looking concerned. ‘There’s no one at the Tropics. Not even Saeed and Andrew, and I’ve never known them rise before late afternoon. Strange.’
Chris shrugged. ‘So what now? Do we wait?’
‘No,’ Patsy said, coolly appraising the situation. ‘Mother feared that the Tropics was under surveillance – it would be safer if we stayed out of Soho.
We’ll go back to my place.’
‘Your place?’ Chris exclaimed. Of course Patsy would have a home here. It was just that – why was that so hard to imagine?
‘Hammersmith, please, driver,’ Patsy said, as she climbed in next to Chris.
She looked at him and smiled. ‘What?’ she asked, after a moment.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
158
Patsy’s home turned out to be a large house on the river, a little way down from Hammersmith Bridge. Patsy put the nameless boy to bed in one of the many bedrooms and then led Chris into a darkened sitting room. The room reminded Chris of a funeral parlour – stuffy and formal. It was hard to imagine anyone living in the room.
‘Nice,’ Chris commented out of politeness, although he was feeling uncomfortable. Cut flowers were everywhere in the room, on every surface. There were so many that several bouquets were still wrapped in paper and had been left neatly stacked on the floor. All the blossoms were dry and wilting.
Chris narrowly avoided stepping on a wreath. He remembered Patsy saying that she was a widow, but that her husband had died five years ago. He wondered who the wreath was for. ‘Did somebody die?’
‘What? Oh, those.’ Patsy paused and turned back to the hearth where she was preparing to build a fire. ‘Oh, they’re just from admirers, you know, my fans.’
‘Your fans send you wreaths?’
‘Oh you know what fans are like.’
‘Evidently not.’
He picked up the wreath, a small card was attached. With deepest sympathy on your recent loss. ‘Patsy, what’s this?’
Patsy crossed the room and lifted the wreath out of his hands. ‘Leave it, Chris,’ she said curtly, ‘those things give me the creeps.’ She threw the flowers on to an ornate sidetable which was already brimming with bouquets.
‘OK, OK, I’m sorry,