Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [23]
The book was important, Benny was sure of that, but the writing while in roman script was impossible to decipher. Not a language that she knew. 'I was carrying this?' she asked Zamina.
'It was in your pocket.'
Zamina was using a wooden spoon to shovel brown stuff from a white cardboard container into a cast-iron wok. The container had a stylized picture of a cow printed on the sides. The brown stuff sizzled as it hit hot metal.
The other girl, the thin-faced one, leaned against the kitchen door. Roberta, her name was. 'We figured you were a maintenance engineer,' she said, 'but you're not, are you?'
'No, I'm a traveller,' said Benny.
Zamina pulled out a green glass bottle from the top cabinet and uncorked it. Benny caught a whiff of strong spice, garlic and coriander. 'She thought you were a catfood monster,' said Zamina as she stirred in the sauce.
'Got any money?' said Roberta.
Benny could smell it, behind the grease stink of the frying meat, behind the spice and cheap perfume. It was a patina of grime laid down over years on the surfaces of the apartment and the pinched faces of these young girls, giving their eyes a brittle brightness. A hard smell, atomized out of the walls and floors, the smell of despair and broken dreams. Benny knew it well from cheap hostels and ratty billets on hundreds of worlds, from relocation camps and shanty towns. Poor man's funk, flop sweat, the smell of poverty.
Zamina pulled another cardboard container from the cabinet. This one had an onion printed on it. Cheap food - both girls had pinprick sores at the comer of their mouths, borderline malnutrition, vitamin deficiency. Poverty was a slow way to die.
'No,' said Benny, 'but I've got skills.'
Roberta grinned. 'Know anything about moneypens?'
Circle Line
The Doctor was lighter than he looked, lighter than he should have been given his strength. Even so Kadiatu was glad when she could dump him in a seat on the next Circle Line train out of Athinai. The Doctor lolled back in the seat, opened his mouth as if to speak and then shut it again. At least he'd stopped singing.
A concession stand whirred down the central aisle selling cups of hot Turkish. 'Another damn fine cup of coffee!' was painted along its side. Kadiatu bought one with the temporary moneypen Francine had given her. It was black and sweet and helped clear her head. She looked over at the Doctor. His arms and ankles were crossed, the red-handled umbrella tucked protectively under one elbow, his hat slipped down to cover his eyes. He looked content, like a man getting his first proper rest for years. He was not what Kadiatu had expected at all.
When she was young Kadiatu had lived with her mother and father on the outskirts of Makeni in a big mud-brick bungalow. Her parents had kept some altered goats and chickens in the compound to supplement their service pensions. Most of the time father would sit out on the verandah, thinking and watching the world go by. People would pass by on their way to the river, sometimes they'd stop for a gossip or to trade. Sometimes other people would come, walking up the dusty track from the station, men and women with lined faces and haunted eyes. Often they would stay up all night talking to father - conversations full of pain and longing. One day Francine came, landing her VTOL right in the middle of the road, bringing the children running out of school.
In the rainy season when the rain rattled off the corrugated iron roof Kadiatu would sit with her father and listen to his stories. Many of them were about the first grandfather