Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [65]
She wiped the moisture off her mouth and smelled her fingers. After a day in the city her fingers always stank. Here in the real world, deep in the wet green it was different. Justine liked the smell of her hands. She didn’t like the way they looked though. The crude tattoo Isabelle had done for her at school with a Bic pen. Ugly and blue on the back of her hand. She had long ago acquired proper tattoos.
Her first contact with the movement, the real movement instead of the kids playing games, had come through a tattoo artist who had a damp studio above an indoor market in Hastings. There among the biker posters on the peeling wallpaper, with the smell of vegetarian food from downstairs and the pounding of music through the floorboards. He had showed Justine how he traced the tattoo designs off paper from magazines and the covers of old 33 rpm records. And he’d shown her other things.
Standing in the woods with the rain falling around her Justine thought of Alec and the way she’d felt about him at first. She’d been surprised at his pale skin. Unmarked. No tattoos on his own arms. He’d lacked the commitment. Just as she discovered that he’d lacked the commitment to the movement.
She remembered the way he’d looked at first, face close to hers as he put the tattoo on her shoulder with an old electric needle. Then closer still, in bed together. And the way he’d looked at the end, eyes open as he sat on the floor with his shirt off, back against the black iron radiator. After he was dead the radiator had slowly burned deep into his back, sending a smell of cooking meat drifting down to the vegetarian café. Justine sometimes had dreams about that. Sometimes she cried over Alec.
It was quiet in the woods now. The rain had stopped. It would fall again at seven o’clock. There would be another hour of light after that and when the light faded Justine would give up her watch for today. She rolled a cigarette and smoked it. She sat under the canopy of trees, waiting for someone to return to the house in the valley. Waiting for them and waiting for the automatic rain.
* * *
12
At Heathrow Ace hung back while the Doctor bartered for a taxi outside the Arrivals building. The Doctor had a knack with taxis. Within five minutes they were riding out of the airport on the back of the motorcycles, diving down a long concrete tunnel and angling low to the ground as they swept on to the curving orbital roads. Armoured cars lined the escape lanes and khaki‐uniformed squaddies stood smoking and talking on the grass verges beside them.
As soon as the taxi‐bikes were past the airport perimeter, they hit the traffic. A solid column of locked metal, cars extending back along the approaching roads as far as you could see. Some of the lines of traffic were moving. Most weren’t. Gipsy‐looking roadsiders moved up and down the stalled columns selling food, newspapers, themselves. Ragged children tagged along with some of the roadsiders. A whole subculture that had grown with the traffic problem, their numbers rising in symmetry with the falling average speed of cars in urban centres.
Ace had her arms wrapped around her taxi driver, a Sikh in a red and white leather jacket with heavy shoulder pads. In front of her she could see the Doctor sitting on the back of the other motorcycle. For some reason his hat hadn’t blown off.
The bikes reduced speed as they entered the traffic pattern, slowing, dodging, threading through the motionless lines of vehicles. The fumes were thick around them now. They accelerated again, hitting a stretch where there was clearance for the bikes. Ace’s driver offered her a mask, holding it over his shoulder, dangling by its strap. Ace shouted that she was all right. They’d be out of the worst of it soon, and she liked to feel the slipstream on her face. The cars on either side of them blurred as the speed of the motorcycle picked up. Ace looked at the endless stalled traffic. Passenger