Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [93]
And they’d drunk – although only he had got drunk – and he’d smoked – which hadn’t appealed at all – and they’d gone up to her room and spent the night celebrating. She’d laughed when he’d asked if it was her first time, and she’d surprised him, and then they’d made sure they were safe, then they hadn’t needed to speak any more.
She found her Batman T-shirt in her bag and put it on, before opening up the shutters and stepping out on to the balcony.
So hot and so light! So colourful!
Below, in the courtyard, the crowds were swarming. There were so many people here. People to carry your bags, people to open the doors, people to serve your drinks, people to bring you the drinks. That was the division between East and West, she decided – here the cheapest part of any process was the cost of labour. Here perfectly ordinary houses had half a dozen servants, or staff, or whatever you wanted to call them.
Miranda hadn’t yet discovered the history of the hotel, but it had plainly been a palace once, and no doubt its staff had been even more numerous than the army currently working here. It was a vast building, with blue minarets and a vast golden dome. It didn’t seem to belong on the same planet as the filthy, congested, thrown-together streets that surrounded it.
There were vultures circling overhead. When she’d first arrived in the country, that had seemed ominous. When she realised they nested in the eaves of the hotel, as doves would have done in England, it had seemed absurd, Pythonesque. A month on, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
So why had the crowds stopped to stare up at them?
For a moment, Miranda thought they were looking at her. A few years ago, she’d have been absurdly self-conscious in just a T-shirt, but now she quite enjoyed the idea of standing on a balcony while a crowd below hung on her every move.
Then she looked up, back over her shoulder.
A silver disc, hanging above the hotel like a couple of extra storeys.
It was the size of a house. For a moment, it didn’t strike Miranda as odd: there were things she’d seen in India that were far more alien.
Then she realised what it was, that it didn’t belong and that it had come for her.
But by then she couldn’t move. She was surrounded by a blue haze, and the world around her evaporated.
* * *
Her eyes were the same.
Her face was a latex mask. Her skin looked as if it had been bathed in something corrosive, something that had scored lines into it while also loosening it from her skull and making it melt a little. Her hair was white, now, and wispy, contrasting with the dark Terylene of her nightdress.
She looked into his eyes, and didn’t say anything. It wasn’t difficult to know what she was thinking: that he barely looked a day older than the last time she’d seen him, that he’d looked the same since they’d first met. Now she was in an old people’s home, her life nearly spent.
‘Betty,’ the Doctor said.
She smiled, the effort almost visibly draining her. She seemed to draw strength from the beautiful roses in their vases and the flickering light of the television screen playing on her face.
‘Have you found her?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘I thought she was in Berlin. I went there, but no one had seen her. I’ve just come from there.’
‘I didn’t see you on the telly. They had a newsflash during the break on Coronation Street. Show me the photo again.’
The Doctor took the photo of Miranda he kept in his coat pocket, apologised that it was a couple of years out of date. She would be nineteen now.
‘I love her,’ the Doctor said.
‘Of course you do, she’s your daughter. She’s very pretty,’ Betty said. ‘I can see the resemblance.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Everyone said that. We weren’t related – I adopted her.’
‘You never could do things the easy way, could you?’ She chuckled, admiring the photo. The Doctor looked at the picture frames lined up on