Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [74]
‘Yes. It’s like the woman, Tameka.’
‘Ah,’ Jock murmured, and looked into his glass. ‘You’ve become intimate.’
‘I like her. We’ve had sex a couple of times. But something’s really changed now. Not big things, just subtleties of language. She looks at me as if she expects something of me. Almost like
. . . like an answer to something. The boy’s the same.’ Scott chuckled a little hollowly as he remembered the other night. ‘No, actually he’s worse. Emile can’t even acknowledge what he wants – even to himself. He’s caught up in this elaborate fiction about himself. It’s ridiculous.’
Jock put his glass down. ‘But?’
Scott caught the older man’s eye and smiled, shyly. ‘Yes, you’re right. There is a but, and I don’t feel so good about this. But to feel so wanted, so desired, to be everything a person needs –
even if they are hopelessly deluded – is . . . seductive. Exciting. Makes me feel . . . I don’t know.’
‘Special? Unique?’
‘Yes! Yes, exactly that! It’s an illusion, but the illusion is powerful, intoxicating.’ Scott suddenly felt that he had said a little more than he had meant to. Maybe it was the wine. He felt a bit embarrassed, a bit guilty for being so caught up in such arrogant notions. ‘I’m egoizing madly, I know,’ he said quickly, aware that he was just passing judgement on himself before Jock did.
However, Jock only shrugged. ‘It’s what you feel.’
‘But if you set up expectations like that, how can people do anything but fail each other?’ Scott shook his head, aware that he was a bit drunk now. ‘They really are crazy, aren’t they?’
Jock rested a hand on Scott’s shoulder. ‘Crazy and seductive.’
‘My head feels like it’s spinning. I’m lost in all this.’
‘How could you not be?’ Jock said, and smiled kindly. ‘There’s no logic to their behaviour. And so there’s no map to these feelings you are exploring.’ Jock finished his wine and set it down beside him with a little sigh. ‘No map and a compass wouldn’t help at all.’
They sat in silence, listening to Errol’s rasping breathing. Eventually Jock fell asleep in his chair.
Scott clambered to his feet and shook the cramp out of his legs. He wandered through the rooms, humming an old song that Leon had taught him. Emile and Tameka’s filthy uniforms were lying on the floor where they had been thrown. He stood a little unsteadily on the balcony and listened to the insects buzzing in the shrubs below him. He stared out at the stars and tried to imagine them full of profiteers and planets and companies and corruption, but they just looked like tiny dots of light in the orange shadows.
His foot nudged something which clinked. He looked down and saw that Bernice had left her glass on the balcony from the previous night. The strange little sculpture she had shown him was sitting beside it. He picked up the little figurine and examined it for a moment.
Bloody profiteers and their bloody things! On a drunken whim he tossed it out into the night and heard it land in the scrub with a satisfying thump.
Bernice followed Iranda out of the large office on to the balcony. The noise of the music rushed up to greet her out of the well of the courtyard. Over in one corner she could see a spotlight being tested against a small curtained stage. She couldn’t see Tameka or Emile, which was simultaneously worrying and typical. The red-haired woman had taken the arm of her partner and was about to descend. Sensing her options running out, Bernice called her back.
Iranda looked impatient. ‘What now?’
Bernice bit her lip. She deliberately hadn’t mentioned the artefact Jason had entrusted to her.
He had wanted her to keep it safe. It was still the most likely reason why he had been kidnapped.
But she had come up against a blank wall. ‘Before Jason disappeared, he left something with me.’
Iranda looked at Bernice with new interest. ‘Go on.’
Bernice watched the interest in the woman’s face drain away as she described the figurine. It obviously wasn’t what she had been hoping or expecting to hear.
‘Goodbye, Bernice,’ she said firmly and descended