Doctor Who_ Time and Relative - Kim Newman [42]
There's Gillian and John and Zack and Malcolm. There was John's Dad giving up his life for a girl he probably wouldn't have liked if he'd thought about it. There was Dolly, feeling responsible for a little boy because he wandered into a café on her shift. There was Malcolm offering up his most treasured possession for a cause he didn't understand. And there's 'Love Me Do', Albert Finney with an air-rifle, The Magic Flute, Lyon's Maid ice cream, St Pancras Station, Hancock's Half- Hour.
But there's F.M. and Mr Carker and the Haighs. And that's not counting Nazis and atomic missiles and Double Geography.
I could have gone the other way.
If Gillian hadn't talked to me on my first day at Coal Hill School, I might have been with Grandfather, standing back and letting the Cold
Knights retake the planet and good riddance to bad rubbish.
Wednesday, April 4th, 1963
I met John at the Lyon's Comer House – not the Wimpy Bar –and we had tea and cake. Very grown-up.
The Cold may be banished to Pluto, but things were broken during its attempt to regain mastery of the planet that will never be fixed. In the end, it was a matter of throwing a few switches on Grandfather's machine and the Cold Knights melted away, but I still don't feel as if we won anything. John's father and Mr Okehurst and many others are still dead, and people like Mr Carker and the Haighs are still alive, still insisting that they were doing the right thing.
Deep down, John would rather Grandfather had killed the Cold, as it killed his father and so many others. Its emigration to Pluto might have been a neat solution, avoiding genocide, but it didn't satisfy his human need for ... justice? Revenge? Not admirable, I know. But I feel its appeal.
Grandfather was tinkering with a machine, seeing a problem and finding a solution. I wasn't. I saw people hurt and killed for no reason except that they were in the way. Grandfather says loftily that the Cold had no grudge, no capacity for cruelty. It was ridding its home of humans in the way a person might clean algae out of a fishtank or take medicine to purge a germ colony. But that's not how it felt in the School playground, out on the streets, in the Wimpy Bar, at the railway station. The cold Knights seemed to enjoy their mission: setting traps, springing surprises, making a game of it.
If I'm pleased that Grandfather didn't kill the Cold, it's because I wouldn't want him to live with the guilt I know he'd feel at the extermination of an intelligent life-form. I certainly don't want to go to Pluto to visit, to see how 'the Cold fellow' is getting on in its new home.
The big thing is that I don't have a secret any more.
My friends know I'm not from this planet.
The only one who treats me as he always did is Malcolm, and I didn't really have a secret from him. I don't look after him on Saturday afternoons any more. His Auntie Junie has come to live with them, and so my weekend job has disappeared – I miss it, and not just for the five shillings. I still see Malcolm around the High Street quite often, with his Mum or Auntie Junie. He always has a big smile and a bigger hug for me. He has a new gonk now, Spaceman Gonk, but Cowboy Gonk is still his favourite, even with the woolstitch scar over its eye. His Mum disapproves when he 'makes up' stories about me, but it doesn't upset me. His wild tales might be true, for all I know – maybe he's wound up with the memories sponged out of my mind. But I have to be careful with him.
Older children, even as old as Zack, know to keep quiet about us. But the little ones are different. They don't know not to tell grown-ups. Now he's gone against the meddling rule, Grandfather is a little bit paranoid about grown-ups finding out we're not human. He says the Truant Officer will have agents on our case, alert for the slimmest rumour. He is especially wary of the teachers at Coal Hill, because he has this strange idea that educators are the sharpest, most dangerous intellects on the planet. I mentioned that he has never been to a parents' evening,