Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [71]
‘Grandfather?’
‘Grandfather?’
Someone was calling for him. Someone he hadn’t seen for such a long time.
169
‘Grandfather, is that you?’
No. Not her. It wasn’t time for him to meet her again. He’d left her. Abandoned her, hadn’t he? Running away from his responsibilities, just like he’d always done.
Run, rabbit, run.
Across the universe, along the yellow asteroid road.Always chasing the rainbow.And finding a pot of blood at the end of it.
‘Grandfather? Are you coming out to play?’
He could see her now she was walking across the insane trace of the reality-wound (because that was all it was that was all it was that -) and she was dragging behind her something like a big stuffed doll. No, not a stuffed doll.A stuffed man.Her husband.0f course. He died, didn’t he? Old and diseased in a hospital bed while she was still young. Nice fate: to watch the person you love (grow older and older, to see the sorrow and yearning in their eye: as they stare back realising that it was the truth after all - that you will stay young for ever. Or so it must have seemed to him.
And maybe there would be bitterness too. Resentment, at the trick of fate.
Never marry an alien.
Didn’t I tell you that one, Susan. Didn’t I?
She was still dragging the corpse after her, and yes, it was old and white-haired and wearing hospital pyjamas.
Go away. It wasn’t my fault. Love kills, didn’t you know? Even if you don’t actually die.
The curtains swished apart. The Epic of Gilgamesh was commencing. Simon was the first on the stage, and Kane stared a him. He hadn’t seen him for years, but the young man, slightly portly with chubby cheeks and weak chin, was still the boy who had tortured him on the school playing field. Just across the road in fact. Kane thought abstractly about the distance in yards an the distance in time, and it didn’t make much sense, but the perhaps it wasn’t supposed to. Life was all a matter of absurdities he found himself thinking about his grandfather’s corpse.
170
He’d broken into the morgue the night before the funeral to see if they’d tampered with the old bastard’s body. He’d only been ten, but he’d heard tales and he wanted to see if they put makeup and shit on him. Didn’t give a toss about him being dead of course. He’d found the coffin, unopened, against one wall. His grandfather was inside it, miserable-looking as he’d always been in life. Kane had thought they might have tried to pinch his cheeks into a macabre smile, but what he’d found had been funnier still: to lift the pillow on which his grandfather’s rotten old head was lying and give him a more dignified air, the funeral assistants had stuffed magazines behind it. Pornographic magazines.
Now that was bloody funny. The young Kane had thought so.
So did the old Kane. He began barking with loud laughter and his distracted, drunken, crazy thoughts meandered away from his childhood visions to the bastard who had evoked them, who was standing a mere ten yards away, tall and proud in flowing robes.
And suddenly they locked eyes.
Simon froze in midsentence. His eyes widened, his fey poise wilted. Then he recovered his composure and snapped back into his role. ‘I am the strongest here!’ he bellowed, deliberately staring at Kane, lifting up his pudgy arms and vaingloriously blind to any irony. The chorus kicked in with:
‘Is there none to challenge Gilgamesh?’
Kane lit another cigarette and noticed from the corner of his eye that someone was moving into one of the empty seats two down from him. He didn’t need to look round to know it was Cassandra, Simon’s sister, and that she was watching him worriedly.
‘I am the strongest here!’ bawled simon again, surveying the audience with petulant bravado.
And again, Kane barked with raucous laughter.
The chorus twittered on with their story, ignoring the dishevelled drunk in the front row. As wind instruments accompanied their melodramatic posturing, they spoke of a meteor falling from the heavens and bursting open to reveal an 171
antidote to the megalomaniac king: a leveller, the wild man Enkidu, who