Doctor Who_ Father Time Part 7

'Yes,' the Doctor admitted.

'Why?'

'I...' He stopped, then shook his head.

'Go on,' she prompted him.

'I get like this, from time to time,' the Doctor told her. 'I've lost... It's all right. I'll be all right.'

'You're lonely?' she guessed. 'Who have you lost?'

He didn't reply.

'There's no one else you can talk to, is there? I know we hardly know each other but '

'You are the closest thing I have to a friend,' the Doctor said.

Mrs Castle sucked in a little more cigarette smoke than she'd bargained for. 'Really?'

'Really.'

'You're young, you're confident. I don't understand the problem.'

The words came slowly, as though the Doctor was having difficulty letting them out after so long. 'I'm... older than I look. And I don't understand the problem either. I just know that I'm... different. That I've lost a great many things and people and memories that were special to me.'

'Memories? There's nothing wrong with your memory: just look at the way you remembered everyone's name at the chess club.'

'I have a photographic memory,' the Doctor told her. 'Perfect pitch. A grasp of symbolic logic that put Alan Turing himself to shame. I can quote every line of Shakespeare, hum any song I've ever heard, speed-read... but my memories start with me waking in a railway carriage. There's nothing before that. Nothing except a sense that... that I was from a large family, that I travelled, and had friends everywhere I went, and that my life used to have a purpose, I used to make a difference.'

'Wow,' said Mrs Castle. 'Could the police help?'

'No. There are thousands of people reported missing every year. I'm not one of them.'

'What were you wearing? You could speak English?'

'I have thought about it. Too much, if anything. It's like trying to guess what the jigsaw is from only one piece. Have you ever had the sense you've been here before? That you remember remember the words that you're just hearing. A sense that everything is utterly familiar?' the words that you're just hearing. A sense that everything is utterly familiar?'

'Deja vu. Yeah. Everyone gets that.'

'I don't. I never have. Nothing ever seems quite right. There's never anything that feels ordinary, Debbie.'

It was the first time anyone had called her that since she had been a child. And the name felt utterly familiar. It felt like she'd remembered her own name, after years of bafflement and defeat. And she looked at the Doctor, sitting on a pub bench, in his black coat and silk s.h.i.+rt, and suddenly he wasn't ordinary. He was... more than ordinary. More than human, but less than human at the same time.

He looked lonely.

Mrs Castle bent in and kissed him on the forehead, then leaned back, looked at his face.

He smiled down at her, calmer than he'd been.

'Thank you,' she told him.

The Doctor opened his mouth, and her husband's voice came out of it.

'Who's this?' Barry asked.

A heavy-set man in a tracksuit and parka was standing behind the Doctor, staring at them. He hadn't shaved, and his wiry, thinning hair hadn't been brushed.

He'd spoken before the Doctor could. And he hadn't seen her kiss him. It was an innocent kiss, not the sort of kiss that a wife gives a husband or a girlfriend gives a boyfriend, but she knew that Barry wouldn't have seen it that way.

'h.e.l.lo, Barry,' Mrs Castle said. 'Doctor, this is my husband.'

'The bloke that fixed the Cortina?' Mr Castle asked.

'That's right.'

'You did a good job,' Mr Castle conceded grudgingly.

'Thank you.'

'Come inside. You play snooker?'

'Er...'

Mrs Castle and the Doctor followed him back in.

Mr Castle pointed over to the table. 'I'll set up.'

The Doctor's smile flickered.

'It's his way of saying thank you. But let him win,' Mrs Castle suggested. 'He likes to win. Thinks it's important.'

'Right,' the Doctor said, his mind elsewhere. He was watching the other snooker table.

'Looks easy enough,' he decided.

'You've never played before?'

'No. Have you?'

'Barry's got a table at home. He made me learn. I think he did it just so he could win all the time. Do you know the rules?'

'You hit the b.a.l.l.s with that '

' cue,' she supplied.

'Cue. The object is to get the b.a.l.l.s into the holes. Right. Sounds tricky.'

'It is. I keep potting the white by mistake.'

'Right. So the white ball has to stay on the table.'

The Doctor downed his mineral water in one and walked over to the table.

Barry had finished setting up. He ushered the Doctor over and handed him his cue.

The Doctor weighed it carefully, then paced around the table.

'Do you want to make it interesting?' Barry said.

The Doctor frowned. 'Is that actually possible?' he asked.

'Put a pound on it?' Barry suggested, holding up a pound note.

'Barry,' Mrs Castle objected, 'this isn't fair. The Doctor's never played before.'

'He can fix cars, can't he? He plays chess? Snooker's not going to be a challenge.'

'Yes, yes. All right.' The Doctor dug into his pockets and pulled out a pound in change. Barry put his pound note down on the cus.h.i.+on, and the Doctor piled his coins on top of it.

'You wanna break?' Barry asked. 'Go first,' he clarified, when the Doctor looked confused.

The Doctor nodded. Barry smirked.

The Doctor tapped the end of the cue with his finger.

'It's more complicated than it looks,' the Doctor confessed. 'On the face of it, this is a simple Newtonian system, but there are quite a few complicating factors. The felt isn't even, the b.a.l.l.s have slight manufacturing defects, the tip of the cue isn't quite right.'

'You can chalk it if you want.' Barry handed the Doctor the cube of blue chalk.

The Doctor examined the chalk, then used it to smooth the tip a little.

'Hurry up, Doctor,' Barry said. 'It's not like chess where you spend ten hours on every move.'

The Doctor bent over, perched the cue on his left hand, and tapped the cue ball with it.

It rocketed forwards, breaking the reds, scattering them, sending them bouncing off every cus.h.i.+on.

'Whoa! Too hard,' Barry bellowed.

The first red ball fell into the pocket, followed by the yellow, another red and the black. The other red b.a.l.l.s were ricocheting from cus.h.i.+on to cus.h.i.+on, catching the other b.a.l.l.s as they went. Two more reds, the green, the pink and a few more reds rattled into the pockets. The initial momentum was dying down the blue, brown and the rest of the reds merely rolled languidly into their pockets.

The last ball on the table, the white, tottered over the pocket nearest Barry. After a moment or two it fell in.

The Doctor's face fell. 'Ah well,' he said quietly, 'looks like you win.'

Barry took a moment to recover. 'Yeah. Yeah. You have to pocket them in order. Yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, then black.'

The Doctor looked back at the table. 'Really? I didn't know that. I was talking about the white ball. I'm not meant to pot it, am I? I tried not to, but...'

'Yeah,' Barry agreed eagerly. Barry wrapped the Doctor's coins up in his pound note and scooped the money up from the table. 'You're OK, right? Bit of practice and you'll be good. But you can't pot the white, yeah?'

'I see.' The Doctor handed the cue back to him. 'Ah well, I'll leave the game to the experts.'

'Well done, Doctor,' Mrs Castle said.

'Don't congratulate him,' Barry said. 'I won, love.'

Mrs Castle kissed her husband on the cheek, but she looked at the Doctor as she did it.

'Time to get going,' Barry said firmly.

'Bit early for you, isn't it?' Mrs Castle argued.

'I want an early night,' he told her. And with that, he dragged her away, but he looked at the Doctor as he did it.

Less than half an hour later, the Doctor was walking across the car park of the county hospital. The tarmac hadn't been gritted, but the Doctor didn't slip.

It was quite late in the evening, now, and the car park was almost empty.

Almost. In one corner, nestling under a large elm tree, there was a black Volkswagen Beetle.

The Doctor looked over his shoulder at it. The headlights were on, and they looked like eyes, watching him from the shadows. He wasn't cold, but he shuddered anyway, and was glad to go through the sliding doors into the warmth and safety of the hospital.

As the Doctor arrived at Arnold Knight's room, a redheaded nurse was just leaving. The Doctor smiled at her, glad she wasn't asking him any awkward questions.

Arnold Knight was lying in bed. One of his legs was in traction, suspended at a forty-fivedegree angle. He was in a room to himself, one that was full of get-well cards.

The Doctor introduced himself, and cleared up the confusion when Arnold a.s.sumed he meant that he was some sort of medical specialist.

'I've brought you some sweets,' the Doctor told him.

Arnold looked in the little paper bag the Doctor handed him. 'Jelly babies,' he said approvingly, and started tucking in.

The Doctor pointed at Arnold's leg. 'What are the doctors saying?'

'That I had a lucky escape,' Arnold told him.

The Doctor was checking the notes clipped to the end of the bed. 'Fibula broken in two places. Clean breaks, no sign of infection.'

'It could have been worse.'

The Doctor nodded, then asked, 'What were you running from, Arnold?'

'I told the police.'