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The Absolute started trying to reconcile the different versions. It made no sense. He tried more and more taps, sought more and more perspectives of the same event. The four sat outside the café were Trotskyists, plotting to act against the Communist Party. They were anarchists, the type that had destroyed people’s ways of life and made them hide in workers’ outfits and speak their language of ‘comrade’. They were barely even noticed.

This was no good at all.

* * *

‘That was a complete waste of time,’ Fitz commented as they started back down the hill.

The Doctor waggled a piece of painted card that had been hastily wrapped in paper. ‘Not completely. His lover gave me a good preparatory sketch for the painting.’

‘To add to the huge stack of artwork piled up in the library waiting to be hung one day,’ Anji remarked. She’d seen the stack herself: a collection that would fetch a fortune at Sotherby’s, all propped up against the shelves of paperbacks or spread out over one of the long polished reading tables, haphazardly covered with acid-free paper. Nearly all were unfinished work, sketches or drafts, partial glimpses of finished masterpieces. Still worth a packet to the right collectors, though.

‘Ah, but most of those are fakes.’

The Doctor was leading them, single file, through the crowds in Square Clignancourt, pushing past the artists and entertainers, holding his Picasso sketch in front of him tenderly. They had to raise their voices to be heard over the variety of buskers and café groups.

‘Fakes? All of them?’ Anji saw the fortune dissolving. There went her plan to take a few with her to sell as a parting gift and/or compensation from the Doctor.

‘Mostly,’ Fitz said from behind her. ‘The TARDIS rebuilt herself from the smallest atom upwards, including all her contents. Everything in there when she was restored is fake, even the first folio in the library or this old paperback...’

Anji bumped into the Doctor and had to step back hastily as he whirled round. Her heel barked into Fitz’s shin and he had to put out an arm to stop them both falling.

‘The book is part of the TARDIS library?’ the Doctor asked, ignoring the people muttering as they barged past the suddenly stationary trio.

‘Well, yeah,’ Fitz looked suddenly defensive, ‘where else would I get a book to read in there?’

At the Doctor’s gesturing, Fitz pulled the book back out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. Anji found the sketch thrust into her hands as the Doctor took the paperback and it took her a moment to find a way to hold it without it being bumped by the passers-by or getting in her face. The Doctor was flicking through the battered novel, as if testing that the pages were real. He took out the postcard bookmark and looked at both sides of it. Fitz was watching with a frown as his place was lost. ‘What...?’

The Doctor waggled the book at them. ‘This, this is part of the TARDIS!’

‘We got that already, Doctor.’ Anji beat Fitz to it.

‘Don’t you see? It’s not affected by the context!’

Anji and Fitz glanced at each other. Anji tried to suggest with her eyes that they lead the Doctor to one side, get him to calm down. Fitz just looked at her, puzzled. She tried to work out what the Doctor meant: clearly asking him wasn’t going to work as he had that enthusiastic – almost manic – look on his face.

‘The context of the painting is the gallery,’ she ventured. The Doctor shook his head at her, grinning.

‘No, think bigger.’

‘Paris?’

‘Bigger. The context is the entire western culture right now. Just like you,’ he gestured at Fitz, ‘first saw it on the walls of families who had lost someone in Spain and that influenced how you saw the image.’

Now she saw it, she thought. The inside of the TARDIS was rarely affected by its surroundings, whether ‘in flight’ or sat on an alien planet or in the basement of a bordello. It was constant, steady. Timeless, culturally neutral. It took them outside those subtle influences.

‘How we perceive the painting is being affected by the culture,’ she told Fitz.

He frowned. ‘Is that it?’

‘Is that