Doctor Who_ Time and Relative - Kim Newman [13]
After last night, I don't think Gillian is my friend any more. She went home angry. I was being a complete child, speaking without thinking. What I did wrong actually mattered. Though she was giving Zack a hard time, cheeking him back, I could tell Gillian was testing him, throwing remarks to see how they bounced. I think she'd like to be a Ton-Up Girl when she leaves School. Not the sort that sits on a pillion or flutters a scarf to start a race, but the sort with a motorcycle of her own – or at least one of those nippy little Italian scooters – who keeps up with the Boys.
It took ages to take off that 'sad clown' make-up. Gillian was right about that: I did look stupid. What could I have been thinking?
I accept that there are things missing inside my head.
Memories are like newspapers and magazines. You can't keep them all, but you can cut out the articles and pictures to put in a scrapbook. Only it's not your choice. It's like someone else does the cutting and pasting. They put in things you'd rather leave for the dustmen and throw away things that would have been useful or your favourites.
When I read this, will I know the answers?
Or will I need this to remind me of the questions I've forgotten?
Thinking about Grandfather, I'm sometimes worried – terrified – that the fog-patches get bigger as we grow up.
Not for people in general, but for people like Grandfather and me. If we count as people.
There are times when Grandfather doesn't know me or himself. He arrives at the end of a sentence having forgotten how he began it, and then gets flustered. He tries to cover his lapses with bad temper, but I see how they hurt him. I can feel his frustration and pain.
Then again, there are times when Grandfather isn't a person.
Living in a Box, rarely stepping outside, looking at screens and dials. It's not what people are supposed to do. I don't think it's what Grandfather wants, but his fog-patches are larger than mine and are growing.
(Sometimes, I can feel inside Grandfather's head. It doesn't work with anyone else. The sad thing is that it's easiest when the least is there, when he's less like himself. Then I get frightened. There's a black void inside the white fog and that's dangerous. Fall into that and we might as well never have run away.)
At home, they have rules we can't live by.
Later –
According to the Sunday Express, which I nipped out to the newsagent's to buy from Malcolm's Mum, the Russians and the Americans blame each other for the worldwide adverse weather conditions. Apparently, it's unseasonably wretched even in the Southern hemisphere – there are snowstorms in Australia and icebergs near Polynesia. President Kennedy's scientific advisers are insisting on an international investigation into the Novosibirsk Project, but the Kremlin's scientists claim that American oil drilling in Alaska is as likely to be behind the disaster. Both sides have had to admit that they've bored deeper than they said they would. But it should be hotter inside the Earth, not icy. The Giles cartoon, the main reason for buying the Express, shows Granny on ice-skates leading a crocodile of scruffy children on a reckless careen around the iced-over Serpentine while Mum and Dad try to melt bottles of frozen stout over a fire made with deck-chairs.
I'm not sure if John isn't right about the cold being an attack. But there's something else too.
I'm worried that it's our fault.
I think the Box may have broken something.
It stands to reason that the space has to come from somewhere. The Box doesn't work properly. Could it be that it is turning heat into dimension? And it's out of control, increasingly drawing all the warmth out of the planet, adding more and more space to its insides?
We only use a few rooms. There may be as much to explore inside the Box as out.
Grandfather is always tinkering. Trying to