Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [4]
She wasn’t sure where in the world her parents were right now Could she keep on travelling, by herself, until she was ready to go back to college? Were the Doctor’s credit cards real or were they fakes? How long would they last? Where was he? Was he OK? Would she ever see him again?
She dozed off around midnight, held tight between clean sheets, exhausted by worry.
Peri has slept well in palace beds and badly in prison cells, and sometimes the other way around. She is a little vague about exactly where she has been with the Doctor. But it’s obvious they’ve travelled the globe many times over, usually off the beaten path, more likely to stay in a hut than the Hilton.
The hardest place she ever slept was on a flat plain of ice in a screaming fifty-mile-an-hour blizzard. She and the Doctor were squeezed into a tube-shaped tent, hoping desperately that the wind didn’t rip the fabric; the smallest hole and the whole thing would’ve torn apart like a punctured kite. What kept Peri awake was not the fear, not the rock-hard ice underneath her, but the jet-engine roar of the wind. The blizzard lasted forty-four pitch-black hours. Crawling out of the half-buried tent, their faces covered by breathing apparatus, was like being born again.
Peri’s parents had taught her that you ask for what you want, and you make sure that you get it. In five-star hotels or fleapit boarding houses, they checked their rooms before booking in, making sure the locks and the plumbing were OK
and that the linen was clean.
Peri had learnt for herself that you couldn’t always get what you want. You might imagine that after surviving the tent in the snow, Peri would never care how soft her mattress was or whether there were clean towels. But instead, it taught her that getting your own way was a precious privilege never to be wasted. She would ask for what she wanted, and she would make sure she got it.
She’d expected something to happen during the night.
Maybe the Doctor would track her down and show up at the hotel – she knew he could find her if he wanted to. Or maybe an intruder in her hotel room, come to kidnap her. But when she woke up, there was just the whirr of the air conditioning and pale, snowy light from behind the layers of curtain.
She made herself eat a full hotel breakfast. She had, always loved filling in the little forms as a kid, ticking the boxes for toast and juice and eggs. She didn’t have much appetite, but experience had taught her that sometimes it could be a long time between meals.
She decided to go look for the Doctor herself.
Peri took a cab to a hairdresser and had her dark bob bleached blonde. She bought a new outfit, black jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and a good black coat. A pair of sunglasses completed her disguise.
The first place to check would be last night’s restaurant –
the last place she had seen him. She played video games for an hour: Space Invaders, Tempest, Berserk. Real aliens and robots, she thought, would take more to kill than a tap of the fire button.
At last the waiter from last night showed up. He was easy to spot, with his cue-ball head and his sunglasses: the kids stared at him nervously as he took their orders.
Peri ambushed him as he headed for the kitchen. ‘Excuse me, she said. ‘I’m looking for my friend, the Doctor. You spoke to him last night, remember?’
The guy looked at her for a moment. They were both wearing shades, reflecting one another’s faces. ‘Big guy?’ she said, holding her hand over her head to give an idea of the Doctor’s height. ’Fair curly hair?’ She hoped they weren’t having a language problem; her high school Spanish had been a disaster. But that wasn’t the problem. He was ignoring her.
He actually turned away and was about to walk in the kitchen door when she put herself in his way.
‘Excuse me,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m asking you a question here. Now you can either answer me, or you can get the manager,