Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [75]
What, exactly, was his problem? Couldn’t he see what was going on around them? They were all caught up in the most monumental moment of change this land would ever know - and he was running scared. They had the chance to put all wrongs 181
right, to level the playing field so that this country, and then maybe the world (and why not?), could be free of bigotry, prejudice, inequality, brutality, selfishness, greed. The mummer was going to show them how. Couldn’t Nick see that? Or was his reluctance and antipathy purely down to the fact that he no longer had Sin? selfish bastard. He deserved everything he had coming to him, then.
And what was that, exactly?
She ignored the quiet, rebellious question, and touched Sin’s hand. The Chinese girl smiled carefully at her, and continued rolling a spliff. Jimmy was singing tunelessly to himself, patting his knees arhythmically as if to confirm his complete lack of talent. But then that was all right - in the world that was coming his previous social unacceptability and status as number one pariah would be completely assuaged.
The mummer was coming. He was stepping between the stones, through the daisies, eyes shining darkly as he strummed his lute.
The merry air played across the meadow as stars spun through the dark skies above and a slight breeze ruffled the grass. A few hundred yards behind him, in Cirbury’s public car park, Jo could see the silhouette of the cattle truck surrounded by its entourage of dilapidated vehicles. The village nestling beside the car park and the field of stones seemed not unduly perturbed by this mass arrival of dubious characters - aside from sending a deputation of local policemen backed up by curious villagers to investigate the rare phenomenon. They now stood watching from the fringe of the encampment, as if all this were some bizarre Midsummer Eve fête they were looking forward to.
Jo gazed up at the moon riding towards fullness. It was half-past midnight on the day of the twentieth of June. Tomorrow would see the summer solstice, and anything could happen really, couldn’t it? She felt like saying so to Sin, but just then the mummer finally reached them and instead she fell silent and listened to his words. Even Jimmy stopped drumming impatiently on his knees and lay back on the grass to take it all in. Nick stayed
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slumped, head drooping, eyes clouded.
The mummer’s eyes were upon Jo, or so she thought; but they seemed so all-encapsulating she was sure the others were just as certain that they were the sole object of his attention. She could see herself small and waif-like in his dark shark eyes, and she was smiling into the depths.
Shark eyes? Yes, maybe; but they promised so much. They promised an end to that old tyrant, the Doctor - and it had been so long since she’d even bothered to think of him that she hardly needed to wish for an end to him now. The mummer would take care of it for her anyway. He was the tidier of loose ends, the leveller. Now she could live her life the way she wanted to, instead of being dragged from one horrendous conflict to another by a man who purported to be on the side of freedom, yet needed the narrow-minded might of the military and all its conservative, stifling authoritarianism to back him up.
Sod him!
Let him be blown away in the wind like... like the spore of a seeding daffodil. Oh yes, the mummer would tidy that loose end all right.
His long