Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [95]
The Doctor was in the passenger seat wrestling with an Ordnance Survey map, which flapped wildly around him, like a panic-stricken swan. For some inexplicable reason, his hat appeared to be entirely wind-resistant.
‘Next left, second right, then a sort of squiggly bit, left around a church, right around a village and then straight up a crease in the page. Can’t miss it.’
‘Right you are!’ Miss Jupp sang gaily, and swung a left at the next junction, sending up a spray of small stones as she did so.
‘Slow down. Please,’ Harris wailed.
Tilda turned to the Doctor and shook her head. ‘Lilly Law doesn’t half go on, doesn’t she? I don’t know how you put up with her, Doctor, I really don’t.’
Harris was busy clinging on to the interior fittings and missed the Doctor’s reply. Lilly Law! Every single sentence the woman uttered seemed designed to provoke him. He sank back, as much as one could sink into the tiny back bench of the sports car.
He’d thrown away a perfectly good career in the Force for this. Why hadn’t he just gone home and enjoyed his suspension? He could be having his lunch now. Reading the Herald while Olive chattered on about the neighbours and the latest outrage at the church social.
Tilda cut the engine as they approached their destination. They coasted silently down towards the gates of the Institute. The Victorian building was just visible through the trees. It looked innocent and slightly grand in the cloudy midday sun. Tilda pulled the car off the road as they neared the entrance to the grounds, breaking sharply and almost sending Harris flying into the front of the small car.
‘Here we are,’ she announced and gave him a disapproving look. ‘All in one piece.’
Harris watched her step out of the car, clamber on to the bonnet and from there lift herself up on to the wall of the grounds of the Institute. Effortlessly, the Doctor scampered up after her. Harris sighed and followed, struggling to pull himself on to the top of the wall.
This was trespassing, he told himself. Harris rather suspected that the day’s record of offences wasn’t going to end there. When he’d finally straddled the 161
wall, he paused and took in the unkempt grounds and the large Gothic house in the distance. Catching his breath, he thought, I’m getting old.
‘I never thought I’d be back here,’ Harris heard Tilda Jupp say, her voice a cocktail of bitterness and fear. ‘I’ve prayed every night that I would never step foot in this place again.’
162
Interlude
Gilliam Comes Home
Gilliam dropped suddenly, as if a trapdoor had opened beneath her feet. She fell into infinity. Spiralling through a swirling, kaleidoscopic nowhere. She opened her mouth to speak but instead of words her thoughts were ripped out of her mind, forming a series of images from her past, each image linked to the next making a paperchain of memories through the core of the shimmering vortex.
The story of her life, stretched out like a coloured streamer across the wall of an office party.
– eighteen clumsy and shy I went to Europe and I’ll show you uncle there’s these two guys who are travelling and one’s quite cute although I’m not going to tell you that in the water something snags my ankle and strange British youth who’s got one eye on my Jesus it’s bigger on the invector gauge sarcasm is not your strong point only enough for one makes me a very egotistical young lady Mondas Telos I can never remember which I think one of them is still wandering in the corridors of the well nobody likes transmutification do they stealing brain fluid and planning to take over the Universe what again? argue mostly you left me behind you left me behind you left me behind you left me behind you 163
11
All I Have To Do Is Dream
‘Something’s coming,’ the Doctor whispered, and ushered them back around the corner of the building. ‘Hide!’
Harris hadn’t heard anything, but such was the authority in the Doctor’s voice that he took shelter behind a parked ambulance next to the little man and Tilda Jupp. They waited in