Doctor Who: Rags (13 page)

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from hustling the fiscal streets to pose at marbled tables and pontificate with ruthless peers.

There were also the poor imitations of course: the ambitious shadows, emulating their heroes with sycophantic precision.

Junior execs who would most likely not progress much beyond that level; bank clerks and sales reps rubbing shoulders with the big boys, their suits cheaper, but oh so immaculately pressed.

These low-ranking wannabes were the ticks in the exquisitely tailored hides of their idols; struggling to conceal Bristol accents as they ordered their Double Diamonds, borrowing catch phrases they’d overheard about the state of the market - and which market it was, perhaps they didn’t even know.

The women posing around the plush but incredibly soulless wine bar knew the score; gold-digging secretaries or struggling lower-paid execs in low tops with big smiles. Lured away from preoccupations about blue-collar boyfriends by the flash of cash.

Fifty-pound notes were so much more pleasing on the eye than the scrumpled quid Dave or Terry offered over the bar down the local.

Above the gleaming brass bar, crystal chandeliers glowed tastefully. The setting sun played on them, streaming through the great arched windows. More arches, exquisitely marbled, opened on to the recessed lavatories while white, fluted pillars ran the length of the long room. Above the complacent, chattering throng, Renaissance characters frowned down reproachfully on this modern decadence from gilded frames. The fiercely manufactured elegance was neoclassical, and the fact that the building had once been a Lloyds Bank simply added to the irony.

The singer wielded his microphone stand like a spear, prodding it out into the audience for them to roar the chorus into the mouthpiece.

‘SCUM!! WE’RE THE SCUM, SCUM OF THE EARTH!!’

Then he snatched it back, belched out more obscenities masquerading as lyrics, his face contorted with ogre rage.

The guitarist hunched over, hacking rhythms from his 94

instrument. The bassist was spitting blood into the crowd, his mouth growling wide, wider than any mouth should go. And the drummer was joining in the barbaric fun, nutting his cymbals with his scarred club of a head. He finished this display with a stream of shining green vomit that splattered his snare drums.

‘How do they do that?’ Jo shouted into Sin’s ear as they stood at the very front of the twisting, leaping crowd, buffeted this way and that. She had to hold on to the Chinese girl for safety. Sin didn’t answer - but she remembered the foul stink of the liquid spraying down on to her, and she smiled a secret smile and began dancing, pulling Jo around with her.

A foul odour came off the band like heat. Rotten compost cabbage animal spew smell. Jo’s nostrils flinched from it, but she knew she was grinning regardless. The little Chinese girl’s enthusiasm was infectious, and Jo felt a violent joy that was all her own rip through her. She was a wild child dancing a discord dance as the Earth churned beneath her careless feet. And why should they care? Why should the Doctor dash frantically through the universe putting right things that would probably sort themselves out anyway, if he only left them alone.

Always rushing around, meddling.

When he could be dancedance-dancing.

Who gave a toss about anything?

All the signposts pointed to the same place didn’t they, in the end? All roads led to Home.

Better to sit in your armchair and do nothing. Do nothing or dance the discord dance...

The guitarist charged abruptly to one side, his boot lashing out.

He kicked a leaning gravestone flat on its back, then spun, all in one lithe movement, machine gunning horrendous riffs into the loving audience. The singer posed, legs apart, mike detached from its stand and pumping at groin level; threw his head back and then let fly a torrent, a spew of white squirming objects from his mouth.

Maggots.

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They cascaded into the crowd, festooning spiked hair and hippie beards alike... and several hundred voices screamed with insane fervour.

The bassist was atop a tomb, swinging his bass dangerously.

Then he was airborne, came crashing down on a gravestone, falling with it, rising, pummelling his bass continuously, shades still clamped across his eyes.

Jo realised Sin had stopped dancing. She could see the white grubs squirming in the luxuriant blackness of the Chinese girl’s gorgeous hair, could feel them in her own and didn’t care; she watched as Sin was suddenly seized by the singer, and a strange sexual horror swept her as she realised what was going to happen

- horror and dark, dark glee.

The singer was pressing that noisome mouth, from which so many maggots had spilled, against Sin’s, was snogging her violently, wantonly. Then he shoved her away, and was that something white and squirming falling from the Chinese girl’s lips? Sin was smiling, reeling as if drunk, and the music took them all.

The Amos Vale alkies were in the city centre now. They couldn’t remember what had made them come this far. They didn’t know why they had collected the sexton’s tools from the cemetery shed near the gates. And for once, their oblivion was nothing to do with alcohol, although, of course, they had consumed vast amounts of that.

Nose, Hedges, Moggy, Lionel and Cliff; differing ages, differing backgrounds.United by their dilapidation. They had staggered all the way from Totterdown, over the railway bridge, under the flyover, clutching bottles in one hand and rakes, hoes and shovels in the other. They didn’t argue for once; didn’t talk at all. They merely swayed and tottered on their meaningful way.

Oh yes, tonight they had method in their madness. But it was not their own.

* * *

Richard Thwaite, a commodity broker in his late twenties, was the first to guess that the stocks were about to plunge disastrously to an all-time low for him and his buddies. What convinced him of this was seeing the two don’t-mess-with-me-I’m-hard bouncers, who had supported the doorway outside like two burly, tuxedoed pillars, come tumbling in through the swing doors spraying blood.

Bad shit, he mouthed to himself, not comprehending exactly how bad the shit was going to get this evening. One of the bouncers had the head of a rake embedded in his neck. Then the doors opened further, and Richard saw what was on the other end of the tool.

A bum. Dribbling, filthy suit, purple face: the lot. A bum, in this exclusive haven.

That made him get off his seat. He had always loathed bums.

They were people who had lost control, who had turned their backs on their own humanity and dignity. Losers and failures.

And Richard despised losers most of all. Losers were the creatures you stepped over in subways, carefully avoiding the outstretched grimy claws begging for money. They were the refuse that the council always forgot to sweep off the streets.

The large-breasted young thing beside him was also getting up, almost in slow motion - certainly too slowly to avoid the wino who came lurching across the marbled floor at her like a wound-up toy, waving a shovel and gibbering nonsense. Richard didn’t have time to stop the swing of the shovel, even if he had the inclination. Which he certainly hadn’t - he was too busy saving his own finely soaped skin.

He watched anyway as the blade of the shovel connected with his companion’s lovely face, albeit from the apparent safety of the other side of the large round table. But he didn’t count on the bearded derelict who came through the glass doors at a run, his run turning into a leap as he spotted a victim - as he spotted Richard.

What almost offended Richard the most about his predicament 97

was the smell. His last thoughts were not of his wife waiting patiently at home, watching the clock and wondering at exactly what point in their brief marriage her perfect husband had begun going wrong. They were concentrated on the indignity of being butchered by a crazy wino with a scythe who stank like a sewer thing. And then the prices hit absolute rock bottom for Richard.

Screams echoed around the vaulted wine bar. The Amos Vale alkies waded into their adversaries, slashing with broken wine bottles, mutilating with hoes, ripping at smooth, well-fed faces with filthy fingers. Moggy pounced on a sleek brunette with a low-cut dress, dropping his meths in his excitement. The girl shrieked with revulsion and the terror inherent in the idea of two social opposites so inelegantly united, then her breasts were bared and Moggy was burying his coarse features in the forbidden fruit.

Some of the suits made a break for the door. But Lionel had retreated there to take up his new occupation as wine-bar bouncer. Only this bastard didn’t let anybody out he didn’t like.

And his scythe agreed with his philosophy.

‘If your name ain’t down...’ he croaked, ‘You ain’t getting out!’

The scythe swung and dug, swung and dug.

Cliff, Hedges and Nose were doing fine too.

The Money Tree at number twenty-nine Corn Street had once been executive heaven. In the space of fifteen minutes it had been transformed into executive hell.

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Once more a blood message had been left. This time scrawled by the winos all over the decorous walls of the exclusive wine bar.

Charmagne Peters read it along with her journalist peers; the police had finally allowed them access. She turned to study the looks on the faces of the other hacks. A lot of hard-bitten stoicism, some poorly hidden glee, and just a little revulsion - not a lot, but some. To them it was an opportunity for a great story.

To her, it was something different.

Although what that was, she could never have said.

Personal. Yes, this was in some way personal, and she resented all the other journalists for being there.

She recognised a few of them from Princetown and the Oblong Box, some from the nationals, others from local rags. But none of them had been on the story right from the start - the first reporter on the scene at Princetown had been herself, so maybe that was why she felt so defensive.

It was more than a story.

She remembered her dream. (Keep running, cos it’s nightmare time.) It was recurring almost twice a week now. And it had been five years since she’d been to Romania as a student and seen the sewer children. They had not advanced on her like in the dream; she had not been on her own in a deserted side alley. Yet nevertheless the children of Sighisoara had haunted her ever since, and the image of them begging from the tourists and more affluent members of their own society at café tables, driven away by angry - indignant - proprietors, was what had inspired her to become an investigative journalist in the first place: she wanted to correct these wrongs. And that wasn’t just naive self-righteousness, it was something she felt deeply. (just like she could feel this tour burrowing deep inside her, like it was part of her) But she’d certainly never dreamt of them since her visit - not until the night before the Princetown gig.

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And now this.

This blood graffiti.

This, this reached a deep secret spot as well. Not for her the superficial satisfaction at the chance for career advancement that was evident in the reactions of the journalists milling like cockroaches around the scene of the crime, cameras blitzing.

This was something else.

REND THE RICH, the blood graffiti told her, dribbles spiralling down from each letter to congeal on the marble floor.

UNWASHED AND UNFORGIVING...

The Brigadier allowed the police access to the encampment reluctantly. While he was at odds with the Doctor on one score, namely that the tour should be given free rein at all - he was all for disbanding it immediately - he agreed with him that harassing the bloody hippies would only cause further trouble. And what would the police be able to discover anyway? The actual perpetrators of the crime at the wine bar had been taken away, blatantly meths - and blood-sozzled. So what were they hoping to prove here? That the band had subliminally brainwashed some local alcoholics to butcher a bunch of stockbrokers? What did the civil boys think they had on their hands here, a punk-age Charlie Manson and his family?

The Brigadier frowned. The analogy was a little too close for comfort. But it seemed to fit: some crazy cult working their evil influence on impressionable minds. Why had it taken him so long to come to that rather obvious conclusion? His perceptions seemed to be a little dimmed lately. The band were a death cult.

Maybe he ought to pass that little nugget of inspiration to the Doctor. If the Time Lord ever managed to tear himself away from his tinkering, that was...

Another thought struck the Brigadier, a natural successor to the first one, and he gazed long and hard at the cattle truck and the detectives interviewing the roadies outside it.

If the band were the family, just who the hell was playing Charlie?

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The police were walking away from the truck now, and the Brigadier could see the open sneers on the faces of the roadies.