Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [60]
'This is getting out of hand,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu looked over at Blondie who was struggling out of his helmet. His hair was slicked down with sweat. He threw the helmet on to the ground and turned to look back at Kadiatu.
'Where's my moneypen, you rat?' she asked him.
Blondie looked at her wide-eyed.
A strange barking noise issued from Old Sam's massive armoured head.
He was laughing at them.
'My place this time, I think,' said the Doctor.
Central Line
A rumour had started that they were going to Mars. It ran down the train in a chain of furtive whispers from refugee to refugee. People were staying quiet as possible, even the children. The KGB guards posted at the end of each carriage were shirt-sleeved and pretty relaxed looking, but no one was taking any chances.
'Mars,' said the woman sitting next to Zamina. One side of her face was a network of broken capillaries, testament to some serious alcohol abuse. 'Where's that?'
'Down the line,' Zamina told her.
'I heard they got an atmosphere there now,' said a man opposite.
'Do you think they'll put us outside?' said the woman. 'I haven't been outside since I was a girl.'
The man had the same broken hopeless face as the woman, as the whole trainload of refugees. Zamina realised that no obvious gangbangers or streetwalkers had got on the train. The younger people were all kids or babies, clinging on to their parents. These were the structurals, the faceless unemployed that shuffled down to the welfare shops to pick up their weekly ration of cheap protein and even cheaper carbohydrate. Always in little packs of three and four because they were scared of getting ripped off.
Losers, Roberta called them, people too stupid even to be active parasites. Living on the leftovers of the leftovers after the street people like her had finished with them. Getting down on their knees in the hole in the wall churches and begging God for a better life which they didn't deserve. Stupid enough to raise children that would only have to make the same zero sum choices as their parents.
She tried to drag her mind away from Roberta, leave her memory the same way they abandoned her body in the orphanage, but the memories kept surfacing like small silver bubbles. Roberta climbing into the bed between Zamina and Zak, growling that she should get some action from the boy too. They were friends weren't they? Share and share alike.
She used to do dumb things like the time when they both painted their nipples red with lipstick and caught the train to Riyadh during Ramadan. Spent an hour flashing their tits at the Saudi matrons on their way to prayers. Outraged eyes above the black purdah veils. It got them arrested but a policeman let them go on the usual terms. On the way out Roberta stole his sunglasses right out of his shin pocket.
Roberta always said that life was a hereditary disease, sexually transmitted and invariably fatal. Now she was lying on her back with a corpse marker pinned to her face, a second mouth between her breasts. Lips red without lipstick. Zamina was running with Benny now. Caught up in a hustle that had nothing to do with sex, drugs or money. Somewhere she'd stumbled across the line into a world full of monsters and strange little men with sad eyes.
'We're going to Mars,' she told Benny.
Benny didn't look up from the tatty notebook that she constantly read. 'I certainly hope so,' she said. I had enough trouble getting us on this train.'
London Bridge
They sat on a wooden bench under a canopy of wrought iron and frosted glass. Cold radiated from the stone platform. At the far end of the station brilliant sunshine made the parallel tracks of metal shine. The Doctor said that trains ran on those tracks but Blondie was yet to be convinced.
Kadiatu was asleep in his lap; at least she wasn't asking about the moneypen any more. Her right hand rested on his leg by her face, the knuckles were black and swollen. 'Try not to get her angry,' Old Sam had told him when they separated at Kings Cross.
The train pulled into the station with great bursts of steam.