Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [54]
‘Are you OK?’ Dinah asked.
Miranda frowned as she retrieved her bag. ‘Yeah.’
‘Worried about getting old?’
‘Sixteen,’ Miranda said. ‘It’s ancient, isn’t it?’
‘Old enough to smoke, old enough to –’
‘Shush,’ Miranda said, blushing all over. ‘It’s too old to be in the under-sixteens swimming team.’
‘And so you’ve ended up in the under-seventeens... strange that. I can’t wait to be sixteen.’
‘So I heard,’ someone called from across the changing room.
The changing room was little more than benches and hooks, and it was always far too cold. Even though spring was well under way outside, in here it was still winter. The girls had got the knack of dressing quickly and silently. Dinah’s technique was typical – she yanked off her swimming costume, dabbed herself with a towel, then seemed to be in a race to get dressed.
Miranda was a little less efficient, trying to protect her modesty with her towel, and also making more of an effort to get dry.
‘Hurry up,’ Dinah moaned, buttoning up a white shirt over a black bra. ‘We’ll miss half of lunchtime. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.’
‘You get my watch when you go to get yours,’ Miranda suggested, self-consciously.
Dinah sighed. ‘Yes, your majesty.’ She stomped off to the valuables drawer on the other side of the room.
* * *
Human civilisation did not extend as far as this.
The roads were cracked, the windows of the crumbling high-rise accommodation blocks were broken, covered with metal grilles or, in the majority of cases, both. Every wall bore obscenities or tribal territorial claims disguised as support for the national ball game.
As the Deputy walked across the wasteland (that was the locals’ own name for it), he passed a burned-out car. He didn’t recognise the marque, but could tell that it was an old vehicle. Locals stealing from locals, rather than crossing into the more prosperous suburbs, only a few miles away. Sensible criminals, then, ones who knew that a local crime wouldn’t even be investigated, but an attack on the rich would lead to persecution and imprisonment.
The employers who had once flourished here had retreated, leaving behind burned-out and boarded-up shops. The people who eked out a living on this estate did so by exploiting ‘the system’, state-welfare payments. The Deputy couldn’t help but think that the system was exploiting them – removing all forms of income, police coverage and public transport, failing to maintain communal property and facilities. Closing every factory, car plant, shipyard, coal mine, steelworks and textile mill for a hundred miles around, and offering nothing in its place.
In the centre of the wasteland was the Tower. There had been three here once, full of young families, full of life and hope. But there was no hope here now, and the Tower’s companions had been demolished late last year. The Tower had been spared, so the local legend went, because the local authority had run out of money. It was deserted now, officially at least.
A couple of youths were circling around him, at a distance, trying to work out whether the contents of his carrier bag were worth stealing. The young preyed on the old, lurking in broken lifts and stairwells, behind collapsed walls and demolition sites. The youths’ calculations weren’t based on the risk of capture, simply whether it would be any less boring than what they were doing already. They made no effort to hide their presence – indeed, they had a music player nearby, hurling out repetitive thumping sounds and screeching, incoherent vocals.
The Deputy was an oddity to them – not a victim, like most of the people here. An old man, but not one who was wasting away on a tiny pension and an indifferent medical-care regime. They could see he was a strong man; their hunters’ senses were probably attuned enough to tell them he’d spent time in prison and served with the military.
They edged towards him.
‘Geezer!’ one of them shouted.
The Deputy stopped and turned, and they laughed at him for doing that.
He said nothing as they came over. If they’d seen him as a threat,