Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [87]
Tegan decided to try to keep the captain awake by talking to him, just like she’d once seen Hawkeye do in an episode of M*A*S*H. So she began telling him some spasmodically amusing stories from her childhood.
She was just reaching the climax of a side-splitter about one of her cousins when Paynter stopped her.
‘Tegan,’ he rasped, and they staggered to yet another standstill.
‘Yeah?’ Tegan replied brightly.
‘Do me a favour. Shut your bleeding cake-hole!’
That didn’t go down very well. ‘Charming,’ she said, in a blasé Australian way that tried (unsuccessfully) to hide her distress. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot, sport, I’m only trying to help.’
167
‘I know,’ muttered Paynter. ‘I’m sorry me old mucker, it’s just you’re doing a better job of putting me to kip for good than the bootboys back at the shack.’
Not surprisingly, this upset Tegan even more than him telling her to shut up. ‘I wasn’t looking to cobber up with you,’ she said defensively. ‘I only want to keep you alive.’
Paynter looked back at the shack in the distance. They had covered less than a mile in more than an hour. The garage still hadn’t come into view, and twilight was approaching fast. At one point he and Tegan had been faintly aware of the distant drone of a helicopter, but they were some miles from where they were supposed to be and the chances of UNIT hanging around a pickup point for any length of time was, for security reasons alone as Paynter knew, very remote.
‘Tegan. That’s an unusual name,’ he noted.
‘It’s Cornish. It means “lovely little thing”,’ she replied with a red-faced flush of the cheeks that could have been exertion but was almost certainly embarrassment. ‘Parents do rotten things naming their kids. You should be allowed to name yourself when you’re like ten or something. Before that, you could just have a number . . . ’
Paynter considered this. ‘You’re weird.’ he said at last. ‘Oi mush,’ he yelled, as Tegan went silent again. ‘How did you think I handled myself back there?’
Tegan looked at Paynter and saw behind the grinning wide-boy façade someone who, like herself, had just faced death. ‘You were superb,’ she said truthfully.
‘Taking out the sidekick was easy, but that Perico, he reckons he’s a bit tasty.’
Paynter stopped and corrected himself. ‘ Was a bit tasty, I should say. That’ll have done my street cred no harm whatsoever!’
A sudden wind billowed some sand up into their faces and they both coughed and spluttered and laughed at the ridiculousness of their situation.
Chasing rainbows in the middle of a wilderness.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Tegan ventured after they had crawled another few yards closer to safety. ‘Something important.’
‘Sure,’ said Paynter. ‘Fire away.’
Tegan slackened her grip on his shoulder and turned to face him. ‘You don’t really think I’ve got a big bum, do you?’
It was at least ten seconds before Paynter found the courage to laugh. After all, it was supposed to be a serious question. ‘Sorry love,’ he said at last, ‘but it’s flaming enormous!’
Tegan released him and turned away, staring back towards the shack, now a mere speck on the horizon. ‘Thank you,’ she said, in a voice spray-painted with hurt.
168
‘I’m sorry,’ said Paynter, putting a bloodied and dirty arm around her. ‘I was only joking.’
‘It’s all right,’ Tegan replied after an agonising silence. ‘I’m just a bit sensitive about my weight. I used to be pretty fat, see, when I was a kid. And other kids can be really hurtful about that kind of thing. I suppose it’s a bit of a sore point. I’m sorry I brought it up.’
Now it was time for Geoff Paynter to do something heroic and manly. He knew that. And he accepted his responsibility, as he would do if ordered to massacre a peasant village. He turned her around to face him, wiped the beginnings of a tear away from her eye and kissed her, full on the lips. ‘You’re a