Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [14]
She was struck again by the unreality of the situation. Here were these two, having a domestic in front of her. She glanced around at the rest of the pub clientele. The mood was losing its initial tenseness. Boozy banter was replacing the stone-wall antipathy she’d met upon entering the Devil’s Elbow. People had even stopped discussing the incident - and then it struck her.
Stopped? They’d never started! Apart from Nick, she hadn’t heard a single other person mention the band or the murders. She glanced at Nick again, and maybe recognised the same confusion in his eyes.
Just then the mummer walked in and everyone... Everyone went silent.
‘What the hell... ‘ said Jimmy, moving up alongside Sin and Nick at the bar,’... is that?’ Then even he apparently forgot how to speak.
Rod was also staring at the bizarre figure. Of course he was, the whole damn pub was staring. The mummer didn’t even seem to notice the effect he had made on the pub crowd. Jimmy wasn’t sure if it was the clothes (and, after all, they weren’t any odder than those worn by the band) or the face, or something about the weird aura of the character that demanded everyone’s attention.
The face was certainly powerful enough. The nose was hooked, the jaw long like a wolf’s. A profusion of dandelion-coloured hair sprouted from under the tilted minstrel’s cap. The mouth was too large for the face, voluptuous and cruel, like a hedonistic shark’s.
Jimmy gazed into the man’s eyes.
Rod took in the tatterdemalion clothes, bright rags stitched together over shards of leather. The gloves, old leather again, the fingers gnawed away by the elements. The boots, split and caked with the dried mud of centuries. The mummer looked like he’d just strolled down a summer lane that stretched back to the 38
seventeenth century, maybe casually deadheading daisies along the way, nonchalantly playing his lute.
He was playing his lute now. Rod looked up, into the man’s eyes.
And he knew the pint of beer clutched in his fist just wasn’t strong enough.
He was playing a merry air, and his eyes were fixed on Sin. He saw past the pout, he saw past the paranoia. He saw the child within, reading Moomin books beside a muttering stream as evening stained the sky. She looked up at him with a welcoming smile, and stretched out a ten-year-old hand. The stream changed tune, and was only the mummer-minstrel’s lute, a quiet trickle of olde melody that was yet as loud as a waterfall in the silent pub. The jukebox had shut up too, almost as soon as the mummer entered, but Sin barely registered that. Her hand was still reaching out for the figure with the childhood-restoring eyes, and now he had stopped playing, was reaching inside his tatters and pulling something out to give to her.
Charmagne saw the pretty Chinese reach for the paper the mummer held out, and the spell she was under broke. She reached past the girl like a jealous child snatching a sweet from a favourite uncle and held the square of paper tight, as if her life depended on it. Maybe her career did depend on it, a voice told her - the inner voice of compulsion, which had carried her this far on a whim and would carry her so much further because of this day, because of this character. She knew this, and read the flyer.
The Chinese girl snapped out of her bewilderment and snatched the paper back. By then Charmagne had read it, memorised it, no longer needed it. She looked up at the mummer and he was smiling at her with eyes that were the colour of treacle.
‘Welcome to the Beginning,’ he said to Charmagne, in a voice that danced like the notes trickling again from his lute. ‘And welcome to the End.’
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Then he turned, and she was shut off from him, left with the memory of his words and the endless space of those eyes.
Jo looked over Sin’s shoulder and read the flyer. The Chinese girl read it aloud for the benefit of Nick, Jimmy and Rod. The mummer was busy distributing more flyers around the