Doctor Who_ The City of the Dead - Lloyd Rose [104]
He generally left his coat hanging on a wooden peg beside the door. It never rained unless he had been thinking a bit of rain would be refreshing.
And the wind that rushed along the cliff at the top of the falls wasn't biting.
But one evening, not long after the boysenberry ripple offensive, he became curious about his pockets. Would their usual contents be the same here?
Of course, answering that question was difficult, since he had never managed to figure out exactly what, and how much of it, his pockets contained. Many had been the interrogation during which his questioner, after emptying his coat for half an hour or so, had simply given up. The Doctor himself was sometimes surprised during these sessions by what he'd been carrying around. There was always a yo-yo, and a bag of sweets
-sometimes jelly babies, sometimes barley sugars, once, unexpectedly, some chocolate-covered marzipan - and his sonic screwdriver, unless he'd left it somewhere, and generally a jeweller's eyepiece or a magnifying glass, and a torch of some sort, and of course string. One interrogator had got hold of the end of a piece of string and pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled The Doctor had spent the time awaiting the next phase of his questioning rolling it all up again into a neat ball.
But then there were the things he'd swear he'd never seen before. Some spare interoceter parts, for example. What had he been doing with those'?
A half-knitted mitten. He knew that wasn't his. He did not knit! A single welly. What use was that? Once a complete set of silverware had emerged, piece by piece, reminding him of a routine in an old Marx Brothers movie.
And a few times a steaming teapot had turned up. The trouble was, it was never the same teapot. Why was he lugging about these different versions of a simple household object? The tea they brewed tasted virtually identical.
The Doctor took his coat and sat cross-legged on the bed with it draped across his knees. Built into the wall, the bed had wooden doors that could be pulled to, making a little sleeping cabinet with its own window to the outside. When the Doctor had first woken in this, it had been securely shut up and he had a panicky moment of claustrophobia before working out where he was. Now he slept with the shutters and doors pushed fully open.
Just outside the window sat a stone trough in which night-blooming jasmine bloomed all day. The Doctor didn't think this was actually possible.
He delved into a pocket. Though he could go without food indefinitely, something to eat would be welcome. To his delight, he found half a packet of digestive biscuits topped with chocolate. Couldn't have asked for anything better. He felt around some more but didn't encounter anything that could be a teapot. Never mind. He munched contentedly on the biscuits. This was going to make it hard to resist the bowl of milk. He would just have to be strong.
Chewing, he began emptying his pockets: yo-yo, screwdriver, jeweller's lens, a library card for the Compendium of Learning in rRyxsel, a marble, another marble, several more marbles, a beaten-up paperback of The Code of the Woosters, an unidentified lozenge (possibly a cough drop), a Banasarrian cube, a slip of paper from a fortune cookie informing him Things Will Be Butter (and so they will, he thought, but probably not the very best butter), a box of safety matches, a Swiss army knife with the corkscrew missing, three mismatched buttons, a city map of Consestitine torn at the folds, a floppy disk labelled Yet More, a cherry-coloured lollipop wrapped in cellophane, which he put to the side for later consumption - At this point he looked up and saw a woman slouched sideways in the rocking chair, a leg thrown over one of its arms. Her hair was damp, water droplets gleamed on her pearl-hued body, and her eyes, narrowed at him assessingly were slate blue. She was casually tossing a red-gold pomegranate back and forth between her hands.
'Ah,