Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [2]
‘I only wish I could remember the name,’ he explained. ‘I’m the only person on Earth who even remembers. Except. . . except I don’t. You understand, don’t you?’
Rachel made an attempt to look positive. But whenever he’d tried to explain this before, there had been just too much of it to get her head round. She thought he was sincere, that was the thing, but she didn’t understand him.
‘I believe you, Marnal,’ she whispered. It was his pen name. Since the breakdown, he had insisted on being called that, although no one ever did.
4
He sighed, returned his head to the pillow. Screwed his eyes closed, wring-ing out a tear. Drew in a breath.
‘Now I don’t have the time. Lord, I wish I could remember the name.’
His head slipped back a little, his face relaxed.
Rachel watched him carefully for a minute, then held the back of her hand close to his nostrils, like she’d been taught. She placed a finger on the side of his neck and waited a whole minute. One of the relatives, a man in his thirties, looked at her, not daring to ask the question.
She nodded. ‘He’s gone.’
One by one, the relatives filed out. Most at least glanced back at him; one of his daughters made a show of kissing his cheek, inspiring his other daughter to do the same.
Then they had gone. Rachel imagined them all downstairs, perhaps taking a room each and sorting the contents into plunder and litter.
She turned back to Marnal. He looked even smaller and older than before.
Peaceful, though. It felt like she should pray for him or something. Instead, she went over to the window and closed it. The garden was so colourful this time of year. A little overgrown, but with splashes of yellows, reds and purples among the dark green. Great trees. A couple of the younger children had already found their way outside, and were climbing them like nothing had happened.
‘Life goes on,’ she said.
Rachel turned back to the old man. His skin had some colour to it. She hadn’t expected that, but then she hadn’t known what to expect. None of her patients had ever died on her before, not right in front of her eyes. She’d been told that dead bodies could do strange things.
There was something. . . the old man’s skin was glowing. Ever so faintly, at least at first, but too brightly to be any trick of the light. She didn’t think that was normal. It was like an overexposed photo now, his eyebrows and the exact lines of his nose and mouth bleached out.
She stared at the old man’s face, and when it stopped glowing it was a young man’s face.
Brown eyes snapped open.
‘Gallifrey,’ the young man said.
5
Notions of heroism have always been problematic, but now heroes appear quaint relics of an age when a white man could save the day just by walking into a room and imposing his moral values on the ‘bad guy’.
Following the attacks of September 11th 2001, 13 we all know the problems of the world aren’t so easily defined, let alone solved. Heroism is not relevant to the current international paradigm, and seems out of context in domestic political situations. It is no coincidence that the
‘heroes’ of modern narratives, while often good family men and patri-ots, 14 are often troubled, flawed characters with fragmented, traumatic pasts, 15 endlessly condemned to nightmares and flashbacks of some loved one they couldn’t save. 16 A post-modern hero, 17,18,19 then, is on a journey of self-examination and self-validation. He is darker than the world around him, condemned to enact a revenge fantasy that will merely restore the world to imperfect, pluralist normality for an indifferent general population, 20 rather than to spread his virtues to inspire a ‘better society’. Rather than ‘Holding Out for a Hero’21 it is easy to conclude that most modern observers would actually find all the forms and attributes of traditional heroism old-fashioned and actively undesirable.
Extract from a book of essays by a
prominent popular historian, 2003
Chapter One
New and Missing Adventures
The walls were meant to be soundproof.
Mondova had spent a great deal of time and