Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [24]
What the hell. Even soaking, miserable and furious, Jessica was no quitter.
As the headlights of the Mercedes splashed her shadow against the concrete pillars, lurching, black and monstrous, she stuck out her thumb.
Now Jessica sneaked a glance at the driver sitting beside her. Lesbians, she thought. They’re on my mind tonight.
Maybe it’s just sexual insecurity, the broken engagement and all that. The Mercedes passed under a street-lamp and amber light filled the car for a moment. Jessica scrutinized the old woman behind the steering-wheel. Definitely an old bull-dyke, thought Jessica. That’s what I thought the first time I saw her hanging around the airport and that’s what all the other stewardesses think, too. Old bull-dyke in tweeds.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Mrs Woodcott, glancing away from her driving for a moment to smile at Jessica. She wasn’t wearing tweeds today. She was wearing some sort of hideous floral creation. It was hard to see now that the streetlight had passed.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Jessica hastily.
The light in the car was dead. ‘You’ll have to forgive the mysterious appearance,’ the old woman had said when Jessica climbed in. She had introduced herself as Mrs Woodcott as they pulled away.
Jessica knew her by sight but not, until then, by name.
One of the other stewardesses had told her that Mrs Woodcott was something to do with airport security. This was a reassuring thought, somewhat ameliorating the sinister-dyke vibe Jessica detected from her.
‘Thanks for picking me up,’ said Jessica.
‘You should never have been hitch-hiking,’ said Mrs Woodcott crossly. ‘Because of certain recent events, girls should be very careful about travelling on their own.’
‘What recent events?’
Mrs Woodcott glanced across at Jessica, her face hardly visible in the faint moonlight through the windscreen. Her eyes were unreadable. Her voice was absent, offhand, as though her mind was on other matters. ‘It’s like Kenya,’ she said. And she began to speak in her vague, distracted voice.
Jessica was hardly listening, peering out of the windscreen of the Mercedes as it sped along through the night. She was lost in thoughts of Roy. She stopped herself and made a conscious effort to forget Roy. No point worrying about that now. Just think about getting home and getting your feet dry. Cup of tea then a big brandy in a proper brandy glass to put that familiar silky fire in her stomach. Curl up on the big old comfortable sofa with her big old comfortable dog, and get slowly sozzled. Feel sorry for herself, listen to Dave Brubeck and hug Scooter, enduring his atrocious doggy breath as he panted ecstatically in her face.
Just get me home, thought Jessica. Luckily she was too exhausted to be frightened, because the old woman beside her seemed to be getting weirder and weirder.
‘They call this a state of emergency,’ Mrs Woodcott was saying. It was as if she was musing to herself. ‘Funny, because in many ways it reminds me of what they called the Emergency in Kenya. You’re not old enough to have heard about it. It took place in the 1950s. How time flies.’
Jessica let the old bat ramble on. She tuned out, absorbing herself in fears of the future. What was she going to do? Why had Roy left her? Would she be able to find someone else? Was she too old?
She drifted into thinking about the times she and Roy had spent together. She remembered one wet day in Greenwich. They spent a charcoal-grey winter afternoon happily poking around in funny old junk shops, looking for blue antique bottles. Then they bundled into a warm pub afterwards to sit by the fire and have a drink. There they opened their bags and unwrapped their discoveries, their treasures.
She remembered the prize of their collection. It was a Victorian medicine bottle in the shape of a skull with the admonitory word ‘poison’ carved in the blue glass forehead.
She had put flowers in it and set it on top of the shelves in the kitchen.
It had been one of the first to get smashed