Doctor Who_ Winner Takes All - Jacqueline Rayner [1]
Rose sighed. ‘Don’t be silly, Mum. I’ll pop back for a visit soon. Make sure the family silver gets a good polish ready.’
‘Family silver!’ Rose could hear Jackie’s voice go up a notch. ‘It might please you to joke, my girl, but I’ll have you know that I’ve just won the lottery.’
‘You what?’ Rose said. ‘That’s incredible! I don’t believe it! How much?’
There was a sound, somewhere outside Jackie’s end of the phone call. A shout, or a cry, or something. ‘Listen love, I’ve got to go now. Lovely to hear from you. Gotta go.’
There was a click, and the phone was silent. Rose looked down at it in surprise. Then, shaking her head, she slipped the phone back in her pocket.
‘Talk for England, you said,’ the Doctor commented, strolling over to the central controls. ‘Can’t get her off the phone.’
‘My mum’s won the lottery!’ Rose started pacing around the control room, her eyes shining. ‘How brilliant is that? We’ll be able to get a great big house –’
The Doctor raised an eyebrow, gesturing at the enormous room in which they stood.
‘– go on holiday – the Caribbean or somewhere – or Florida!’
The Doctor stared at her. ‘I can take you anywhere in time and space!’
She wasn’t listening. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Disneyland.’
‘Yeah, brilliant, grown men dressed up as mice and kids being sick on roller coasters. I can take you to planets where there are real talking mice. And ducks!’
She shrugged. ‘But you haven’t, though, have you? And you wouldn’t take my mum, anyway.’
He grinned. ‘Well, maybe not. Don’t wanna scare the mice.’ He carried on before Rose could respond. ‘She all happy then, is she? Too busy spending to talk to you?’
Rose grimaced. ‘Yeah, that was weird.’ She paused for a second, and then gave him what she hoped was a winning smile. ‘Don’t s’pose we could pop home for a bit, could we? Just to check on her.’
‘D’you think something’s up?’ he asked.
‘No, not really. But she did say something about not being there when I get back,’ Rose said. ‘Don’t want to turn up one day and find she’s gone off to some country mansion and chucked out all my stuff.’
‘A couple of old posters and a teddy bear? Yeah, that’d be a tragedy.’
Rose gave him a mock glare. ‘I’m nineteen years old, I think I have grown out of teddy bears, and I do have a few more possessions than that. Some of which have sentimental value, I’ll have you know. So could we go home please? Just for a flying visit, I promise.’
‘Yeah, all right.’ He nodded, and started setting a course. ‘I don’t know, humans, always come with so much baggage…’
‘Yeah, it’s a crime, isn’t it?’ she agreed. And then, after a moment. ‘You don’t really think she’d chuck out Mr Tedopoulos, do you?’
The Doctor just grinned.
* * *
ONE
The TARDIS landed in a courtyard on the Powell Estate. Rose popped her head out of the doorway, saw the Chinese takeaway in front of her, the library and youth club over to one side, and realised that the time machine had come back to its favourite spot; it’d landed here before.
She stepped out of the spaceship. On the outside it looked like a tall blue box, an old‐fashioned police box – big enough in its way, big enough to fit in five or six people, if they were prepared to be quite friendly, but not big enough to fit in an enormous control room and all the other bits that formed the inside of the TARDIS. She’d come to accept it – funny how quickly you got used to even the most incredible things – but it was something else that her mind didn’t really like to dwell on, not the ins and outs and hows and whys of it all.
There to her right was Bucknall House, and there, if she squinted upwards, was number 48. Home. Or was it? She turned back to the blue box. Well, no one said you couldn’t have more than one home.
Rose had still got a key, but as the two of them climbed up the concrete steps towards the flat she wondered if she should really use it. Key out of her pocket, look at it, put it back in, take it out again, look at it… It wasn’t as if her mum was expecting her, and she didn’t want to