Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [8]
‘It’d be too much to hope they don’t bite, wouldn’t it?’
‘Sorry,’ Calamee said. ‘Yes, it would. But you’ll get used to it.’
He raised his shoulders ruefully and glanced up, looking as though he were trying to focus on the midges. Comically, Nessus’s head made the same movements, and he reached out for one of the midges – before nearly losing his grip and tumbling from the stranger’s shoulder. She sighed and pushed the two of them down the alleyway, past the bemused and curious faces of a couple of Esperon kids who had stopped to stare at them.
‘Do visitors to your world always attract this much attention?’ the offworlder asked as they reached a junction and Calamee tried to work out which way to go.
‘Only when they look like you.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ the man said. He seemed harmless enough
– slightly bemused and dazed, Calamee thought, but then if she’d been a prisoner in the Crystal Palace, she might be feeling a bit bemused and dazed, too.
‘Makes a change, though,’ the man said. ‘I normally manage to blend in perfectly. Are we actually going somewhere. . . ? Sorry, I don’t think I caught your name. I’m the Doctor, by the way.’
13
With surprising speed, he reached out to grab Calamee’s hand and pumped it up and down madly for a moment before dropping it abruptly.
‘Calamee,’ she said. ‘And yes, we are going somewhere. I just haven’t decided where yet.’ She looked back down the narrow street they’d just visited: no sign of the Guard yet, but she found it hard to believe that they’d given up on him this quickly. They normally stayed inside the Palace, more ornamental than functional: the city police would no doubt have been notified about the Doctor’s escape by now, and they wouldn’t be quite so easy to shake off. What the hell was she doing? she thought. Helping a criminal to escape? Of course, now that she had Nessus back, there was no real reason to stay with this Doctor. Particularly since she didn’t know what the penalty was for aiding and abetting the escape of an offworlder (although she was pretty sure it wouldn’t just be a stiff telling-off and a ‘go to your room for a week’). But Calamee’s life was usually so terminally dull that it seemed such a shame to just say goodbye and meekly head back to normality. When would she ever get a chance to be this close to an offworlder again? Who knew what technologies and exotic things he had access to, what things he could show her? The leaden heat of the Esperon summer was settling in, the schools would be closing in a few days, and a month of tedium stretched ahead of her. Maybe this Doctor could put a little bit of zing into it. Even if it was only till he was caught again.
‘How did you get here?’ she asked. ‘Have you got a ship at the port?’
‘A ship at the port?’ The Doctor looked flustered. ‘I expect so.’
‘You expect so? Don’t you know? How did you get here?’
He sighed and Calamee saw his shoulders slump.
‘That’s the whole point,’ he said tiredly. ‘I can’t remember.’
Trix sat up sharply, her bottom slipping on the floor of the bath, feeling momentarily disorientated. At times like these, when the TARDIS wasn’t in flight and she was the only one aboard, it was easy to remember what it had been like before: when she’d lived like a mouse in the skirting board, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji knowing nothing of her existence aboard the ship. But Anji had been gone a while, and sometimes it seemed like nothing had changed. When he wasn’t finding a use for her, sending her off to the distant past or the far future on errands for him, or telling her that as soon as they arrived in the right place and time she’d have to go, the Doctor made a studied pretence of ignoring her. Fitz, on the other hand, seemed to have quite taken to her
– in an annoying, puppyish sort of way. He was OK, she supposed. And it was useful to have a friend aboard. If nothing else, she could rely on Fitz to prevent the Doctor from taking off and leaving her behind.
She cleaned the bubbles from her ears and wondered where her travelling companions had got to.
14
‘We’re