VERDIGRIS PAUL MAGRS Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane London W12 0TT First published 2000 Copyright © Paul Magrs 2000 The moral right of the author has been asserted Original series broadcast on the BBC Format © BBC 1963 Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC ISBN 0 563 55592 0 Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright © BBC 2000 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton Contents 1 - A Secret, Cosmological Bonsai Thing 2 - The Dawn of a New Venture 3 - A Mysterious Carriage 4 - Children of the Revolution 5 - It’s Only Mind Control But I Like It 6 - Beside the Sea 7 - Spacejacked! 8 - You Live in a Perverted Future 9 - The House of Fiction 10 – Night 11 – Bargains 12 - Reading the Signals 13 - The Order of Things 14 - Space Pods and Cephalopods 15 - In the Forest! 16 - Iris Puts Out the Flames 17 - In the Newsagent’s 18 - My Bag 19 - An Attempted Escape 20 - The Tunnel 21 – Verdigris 22 - The Manager 23 - Iris Remembers 24 - Back to Work 25 – Space About the Author Acknowledgements/thanks: Joy Foster, Louise Foster, Mark Magrs, Charles Foster, Michael Fox, Nicola Cregan, Lynne Heritage, John Bleasdale, Mark Gatiss, Pete Courtie, Brigid Robinson, Paul Arvidson, Jon Rolph, Antonia Rolph, Steve Jackson, Laura Wood, Alicia Stubbersfield, Siri Hansen, Paul Cornell, Bill Penson, Mark Walton, Sara Maitland, Meg Davis, Amanda Reynolds, Richard Klein, Lucie Scott, Reuben Lane, Kenneth MacGowan, Georgina Hammick, Maureen Duffy, Vic Sage, Marina Mackay, Jayne Morgan, Alita Thorpe, Louise D' Arcens, Rupert Hodson, Lorna Sage, Steve Cole, Jac Rayner, Rachel Brown, Justin Richards, Pat Wheeler, Kate Orman, Jonathan Blum, Dave Owen, Gary Russell, Allan Barnes, Gary Gillat, Alan McKee, Lance Parkin, Richard Jones, Brad Schmidt, Phillip Hallard, Nick Smale, Mark Phippen, Helen Fayle, Anna Whymark, Chloe Whymark, Stephen Hornby, Neil Smith, Stewart Sheargold and Jeremy Hoad and all other companions on the bus past and future. Welcome to Earth, everybody. love, Paul September 1999 Chapter One A Secret, Cosmological Bonsai Thing Tom was in a huff with her. He lay about all morning on the settee in his dressing gown. She had given him the gown herself – burnt orange silk: an antique – and he loved it sure enough, but she believed it had given him airs. Only a month’s travelling together on the bus and they were fractious with each other already. He was flicking despondently and rather violently through glossy magazines and hadn’t said a word since first thing this morning. Iris drove remorselessly, hunched over the wheel in the cab of her double-decker bus. She wouldn’t let a sulky travelling companion get her down. Perhaps she ought to just dump him somewhere. She flexed her leather driving gloves and used the wing mirror to adjust her floppy green felt hat. Not looking too bad, Iris, she thought happily, pursing and smacking her lips. If she was honest with herself, her hair was looking rather wild today, lilac wisps straying from under her hat. At this point in her extremely long life, Iris Wildthyme bore the guise of what she firmly believed to be a woman in her prime. In human terms she looked like a woman perhaps a shade over sixty, but one who had kept herself fit enough to run around with companions a fraction of her age. She had an air of raffish, haphazard, gung-ho glamour and firmly believed that dashing at breakneck speed from one end of time and space to the other kept you perpetually sexy and young. Had Tom been in a better mood she’d have shouted down the rumbling, juddering gangway: ‘Look! Driving – no hands!’ After a glance at the boy’s petulant expression she decided not to bother. She put on her Tammy Wynette’s Greatest Hits tape instead. I’m missing good company and decent, polite conversation, she thought. I wonder where I can get it. All around the Number 22 to Putney Common the time space continuum swirled and coruscated in brilliant shades of scarlet and blue. It was the most fabulous sight Iris could imagine. On first witnessing this, the jaded nineteen-year-old Tom had simply sniffed and said, ‘Looks like a Milk Tray advert.’ Iris had been so cross. Over the weeks the tone she had adopted with him had become distinctly auntyish. ‘Young man,’ she had said firmly at one point, ‘I don’t think you understand what I am offering you here. A chance to see all of time and space. Visit anyone! Go anywhere!’ Tom had sighed. He was touching up the white on his heavy-duty trainers. ‘Terrific. Just make sure you get me home before Christmas. ‘He eyed her narrowly. ‘In the year 2000.’ He had first wandered aboard her bus during early November, his time. He had mistaken it for the real Number 22 to Putney Common. Tom had tripped aboard, somewhere between Old Compton Street and Piccadilly, after a particularly heavy night out. Iris had been as startled to see him as he’d been to step aboard and see her. Her bus had been parked and secreted well away from any of the standard routes, she’d thought. But there was Tom, expecting to be driven straight home to his one-room flat in Putney. He had looked around at the interior of Iris’s ship and laughed. He laughed at the chintzy soft furnishings, the Art Nouveau lamps, the brocaded curtains and the pseudo- futurismo of her driver’s cab. Iris had flown into a fit of pique, taking them off into the vortex, leaving central London in the numinous hinge between centuries far, far, blessedly behind and here she was with yet another young travelling companion. Hoorah! That first trip had landed them in deepest, darkest Calgoria and into a series of hair-raising adventures with the forest-dwelling Jirat and the pathologically metropolitan Trinarr. That whole escapade had done nothing to allay Tom’s considerable ire at being – as he saw it – kidnapped. Since then they had endured a run of what Iris called historical adventures, all of which had bored Tom, he claimed testily, except for the one that involved their meeting Cleopatra, who was fabulous. Tom was very hard to please. He had a habit of replacing Iris’s driving tapes with fairly hard-core dance music. Secretly, for all her complaints and advanced years (over nine hundred, she blithely informed him), she quite enjoyed dance music. ‘Anyway,’ she reminded him on a number of occasions, ‘as you very well know by now, this bus is a cunningly disguised time machine. I can get you back for Christmas at any time’ ‘Hm,’ he muttered. ‘In fact,’ she went on, jumping up and pulling her silver cardigan straight, ‘we could have Christmas right now, if you liked’ ‘Oh yeah?’ I know what you’re doing, he thought, drawing his feet up on the sofa and watching her sceptically. You’re trying to make me enthusiastic. You’re trying to get me to stay with you as you go gadding about through time and space. Really, he felt sorry for her. She mustn’t have many friends. ‘Where do you want to go?’ Iris was unfolding an alarmingly complicated series of control panels out of the dashboard and her chubby fingers, each adorned with what looked like priceless gemstones, were jabbing excitedly at the illuminated buttons. ‘Home,’ he said again. She wasn’t listening. ‘I know just the thing,’ she said, redoubling her efforts with the myriad switches and dials. ‘There’s someone who you haven’t met yet that you really ought. Someone terribly, terribly important to me who just adores everything about me. We’ll drop in on him!’ She turned to grin at Tom, still counting on her fingers as she did the necessary calculations to come up with coordinates. ‘I’ll find a convenient Christmas and we’ll land ourselves on his doorstep and he’ll be absolutely thrilled to see us’ ‘Who?’ asked Tom. He could see it wouldn’t be worth the effort to insist on being taken home. He’d already learned – the hard way – how difficult it was to deter Iris from a plan once she had her dander up and her mind set. ‘Who are we going to visit?’ He sighed and cast his magazines away but, secretly, he was intrigued. He slouched down the aisle of the bus, as she made the final few adjustments to the controls and firmly grasped the dematerialisation lever with both her eager hands. ‘Just you wait and see!’ she laughed and the bus’s engines went into noisy overdrive, every piece of furniture aboard trembling, every teacup and china ornament clattering on tables and shelves. ‘Hold on tight!’ she cried. ‘We’re coming in to land!’ Summer had come early this year. It was only May and the air shimmered with standing heat. As the small train shunted its leisurely way through the miles of flat yellow fields towards the remote station of Thisis, Jo Grant could hardly see a scrap of cloud in the dense blue of the sky. Well, she thought, I’ve brought all the wrong clothes for this trip. She peered up at the huge, battered case on the rack above her head. It was packed with sweaters and old jeans, all the heavy-duty gear she’d assumed she would be needing for a week out in the country. But if it stayed like this she would be sweltering.