Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [19]
'Maybe we should get it a cake.'
'No,' said the Doctor, 'that wouldn't be a good idea.'
'Why not?'
'You'd never fit all the candles on.' The Doctor poured them both another drink. 'You'd think,' he said, 'that it would be old enough to look after itself
'I always thought it did.'
'You wish."
Kadiatu watched through her drink as the Doctor drained his glass. 'Why do you have two hearts?'
'Because I'm the anomaly, the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment, the cheese grater in the goldfish bowl.'
'I know what you are,' said Kadiatu.
The Doctor smiled at her and tilted his chair back until ii balanced on two legs. 'Do you', he said, 'really?'
'You're the butterfly wing.'
'I'm nothing of the sort,' said the Doctor rocking back and forth. 'I'm just an old man getting drunk.'
'You're not drunk,' said Kadiatu, 'you're not capable of anything as simple as getting drunk.'
'No?'
'You're just behaving in the manner of someone getting drunk.'
'In that case,' said the Doctor, 'why am I about to pass out?' The Doctor vanished from sight. There was a crash as the chair hit the tiled floor.
Kadiatu carefully stood up and looked over the table. The Doctor was lying on his back, still in the chair. His eyes were closed. He was singing softly to himself, his slurred voice curling upwards like cigarette smoke.
'Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you ...'
Nowhere
Although she knew it to be a lie, the memories Bernice had of her father were always tinged with the golden light of late evening. He smelt of the cologne her mother would synthesize in the kitchen, smiling to herself as she tapped out the puter code. A secret smile with one comer of her mouth higher than the other. The cologne would go into the engraved pewter bottle that had once belonged to her grandmother. When her father went away into space her mother would fold the bottle carefully into his clothes as she slipped them in his vacuum-resistant carryall.
When he left he let Bemie walk with him as far as the transmat. His big gentle hand holding hers as they walked through the sculpture park that fringed the married officers' quarters. She'd wanted him to take her to the play area with its twisted swing and cushion grass but he said he couldn't.
When he came back then, she'd demanded.
Yes, he said, when he came back.
He waved goodbye to Bernice from the transmat's staging platform. The last golden light of the evening lighting up his face, gleaming off his polished silver cap badge.
It was the last time she saw him.
Bernice ran home to her mother whose face had become suddenly grey and pinched.
Lay down your troubles.
The last dying light, changing the silver into gold.
Lay down your troubles, and let me fill you up with certainty.
'Yes,' said Benny, 'certainty.'
The Stop
Zamina bought herself a bag of kola nuts at Tbiisi Central before grabbing the Char'kov-Warazawa-London feeder train She chewed through two waiting for her Central Line connection at Kings Cross. The bitter nuts helped keep her awake and take the semen taste out of her mouth. She waited incognito amongst the commuter crowd, a shapeless tan folding-coat over her working clothes, day-dreaming that she too was travelling back to some arcology on the Plains of Elysium instead of outsystem to the Stop. Everyone groaned loudly when the hologram said 'Unavoidable Delay', all of them made suddenly equal by the vagaries of public transport.
She finished the nuts as the train pulled out of Oberon and spent the last leg of the journey carefully folding the brown paper bag into smaller and .smaller squares. Zamina always kept her bags, saving them until she had a kilo or so to flog down at big market. They were out of the commuter belt now and the carriage was half empty and filled with a grim silence. When the train slid into Lowell an old voicebox always said: 'This train terminates here.'
Terminate was the word. People seemed to pull themselves out on to the platform, reluctantly admitting that this was where they were well and truly terminating.