Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication (13 page)

‘True.’

‘Now it is resting on the floor of the TARDY itself. In the outside world it occupies a space no larger than a dinner-plate; but
inside
it takes up
acres
of space. Acres and hectares! Hectacres, probably.’

‘And?’

‘So the floor beneath us is the TARDY floor, except that it is magnified by a factor of - well, I can’t calculate the factor. Certainly it’s a
lot
. The floor I remember from the TARDY is perfectly flat and white. But when we look down the floor is bobbly.’

‘Bobbly,’ she said.

‘Blobbly. As if paved with miniature cobbles. Trillions of them - I’m guessing those are the
actual molecules
of whatever substance the floor of the TARDY is composed. Being inside this helmet is like being inside a gigantic microscope.’

‘I don’t see how this helps us,’ Lexanco said. Her brow was deliciously furrowed with noncomprehension. I wanted to kiss her forehead. In fact, to save time, I might as well admit that I wanted to kiss pretty much the whole of her, regardless of how long this process might take, and excepting only her big toes. I’ve always had something of a phobia about big toes. The rest of a woman’s toes I’m fine with; they’re even sweet, in a certain way of looking at things, all lined up in a row on the foot like that. But there’s something a bit revolting about the big toe - knobbled and protuberant with that toenail like a chip of faded bakelite. Urgh! But I’m getting distracted.

‘Don’t you see?’ I urged her. ‘Every tiny imperfection or indentation in the floor will be
enormously magnified
inside the helmet. If we work our way around the rim of the helmet I feel sure we will find a gap eventually - something that might be only the tiniest of dint or scrape in the surface of the TARDY floor, but which will
inside here
be a trench large enough for us to climb out of.’

‘You should not end your sentences with prepositions,’ she observed.

‘But
apart
from that, what do you think?’

‘An excellent plan,’ she said.

‘There’s no time to lose!’ I cried, enormously excited. ‘Let us start here and work our way clockwise around the rim. This helmet cannot be resting perfectly flat upon the floor - no floor is absolutely and perfectly flat, not on a molecular level! As soon as we find a gap we can escape.’

‘It is a very good idea,’ she said.

I did not add what I was truly thinking - that then, in the outside world, when her gratitude to me as her saviour temporarily overwhelmed her quite natural physical revulsion, I would be able to seize the chance for a cuddle. Perhaps two cuddles. Perhaps - and why not? - a whole series of cuddles. And what, I found myself wondering excitedly, is the collective noun for cuddles? A huddle of cuddles, perhaps? A gaggle of cuddles? Or, if the principle of naming collective nouns applies across the board (I mean that principle which chooses a word primarily by its randomness with respect to the thing being grouped: an unkindness of ravens, a metaphysics of chairs, an obliqueness of proctologists, that sort of thing), then perhaps a bacon-slicer of cuddles, or a venn-diagram of cuddles. Although, come to think of it, that last one isn’t so random.

Anyway: the point is that I anticipated some form of affectionate reward for helping the beautiful woman - the girl of my dreams - to escape. My fantasising knew no bounds. Except, of course, the bounds of decency such as was consonant with the tenets of teatime family entertainment.

We set off at once, Lexanco leading the way and me following, keeping the wall of the helmet on our left. For the first ten minutes or so there was nothing: the base of the helmet sealed perfectly against the white, stippled surface of the floor. I began to wonder about the soundness of my reasoning: perhaps, I thought to myself, the TARDY floor was constructed from some space-age advanced material that kept itself perfectly flat. This thought was a distinct worry to me.

‘What did you do on your homeworld of Tapov?’ I asked, by way of making conversation.

‘We danced,’ Lexanco said, simply. ‘Everything, our religion, culture and economy, is entirely based about the continual performance of the sacred dance. Tap dancing, from which our world gets its name, is one key component; but there are many other forms of the sacred dance. It has been my one consolation, in the many years of darkness, that I have been able to keep my body in shape and my thighs and buttocks trim by dancing the sacred dance.’

‘Trim,’ I said, nodding. ‘Thighs. Hmm.’

‘The point of the dance is to capture the sacred oneness of the cosmic principle of movement - stars and planets dance in their orbits, the very atoms out of which we are composed dance with quantum finesse and intricacy. By acting out the ritual with our own bodies, we connect with this core harmony of reality,’

‘Buttocks,’ I said. ‘Yes. Trim. Hmm. Thighs.’

‘I was apprenticed to a minor dance troop in my home town,’ she reminisced. ‘Every morning I practised the dance moves, moving arms and legs in carefully choreographed motions.’

‘Trim,’ I said.

To be honest my mind wasn’t really
on
what she was saying.

‘Wait!’ she cried! I was snapped from my reverie. ‘Look!’

‘Where?’

‘Oh Prose, you were right! Do you see?’

She was pointing at the base of the wall. There, in the fabric of the ground, was an indentation. It was shallow, no more than ten inches deep, but it was surely deep
enough
for the possibility of escape. Some scratch in the TARDY floor out there,
in here
grown to the size in which an adult might - just - wriggle free.

We both got down on all fours to peer more closely at this dent. ‘Do you think it reaches all the way through to the outside?’ I asked.

‘There’s only one way to find out,’ she replied. ‘To squeeze through. Shall I go first?’

‘Be my breast,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘
Guest
,’ I said, rather too loudly. ‘Be my guest.
Be
my, be-be-be—I said
guest
, definitely.’

She gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I shall go through first, and you can follow.’

‘Yes.’

She lay on her front and wriggled into the shallow indentation. Her head went under the base of the wall, but then she stopped. For some moments she lay there squirming and jiggling. It took me a moment to realise that she was calling to me. My mind was on something else. I can’t, um, remember what exactly.

‘Prose!’ came her muffled voice, for perhaps the fourth time.

‘Eh? What? Eh?’ I said, startled. ‘What! I
am
listening, honestly I am.’

‘For the last time pull me
out
. . . I can’t get through.’

I took her ankles in my hands and heaved her back. She emerged gasping. ‘I can see the light,’ she told me. ‘The dent goes all the way under the helmet - all the way to the outside!’

‘Fantastic!’

‘Alas I cannot fit. My chest area is too ample to permit me to squeeze through. But you, Prose, are a man, completely lacking the more built-up or developed tissue around your ribcage. I feel sure you could get through.’

‘Yes! I shall go at once!’

‘And when you get to the outside of the helmet, you must promise to lift it up - carefully, straight up. Do you understand?’

‘To free you. Of course.’

‘I’ll walk towards the centre of the helmet now,’ she said. ‘So that I am as central as possible when you lift the helmet. I don’t want you to snag me as you pick the thing up!’

‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised.

‘Then we are but minutes away from freedom,’ she cried, delightedly. ‘For both of us!’

‘No more delay,’ I promised. I dropped straight down to my belly and wriggled like a tadpole. My head went under the wall, and my shoulders and chest followed, my arms by my side. I propelled myself by pushing with my feet, and by a generally wormy process of wriggling, inching forward. There was indeed light at the end of this shallow tunnel, as Lexanco had said: in fact the tunnel deepened as I passed into it, becoming broader and wider. Soon I was able to crawl. I passed underneath several dozen metres of helmet-wall above, the tunnel deepening all the time. Before long I was able to stand upright, and as soon as I could I was running for the light - a widening smile-shaped space of brightness directly ahead.

I leapt—

—and landed, tumbling and rolling, inside the control room of the TARDY itself. I was free!

I came to rest against the far wall of the machine, with its curious pattern of inset circular alcoves, like gigantic exploded bubblewrap. ‘Lexanco!’ I cried. ‘I’m free!’

I got to my feet, and there was the Dr. He was standing on the other side of the helmet in one of the doors.

‘Where the bloody gecko did
you
come from?’ he exclaimed. He had a look best described as ‘startled’.

‘Doctor! I was trapped inside the helmet!’

‘What helmet?’ said the Dr crossly. He had, evidently, just woken up from his nap. When I say
woken up
, I mean, was
in the middle of the slow and crotchety process of waking up
. He glowered blearily at me. ‘What are you
talking
about?’

Meeting Lexanco had impressed itself so deeply upon me - love fountaining from my heart and filling my chest - that I couldn’t think, for a moment, how I had gotten inside the helmet in the first place. ‘Linn,’ I said, and it came back to me. ‘Linn and I decided to go outside and complete the mission whilst you were asleep.’

‘But the air would be poison to you,’ the Dr snapped, rubbing his left eye. ‘I
told
you that.’

‘We found two helmets inside the console there,’ I explained. ‘Breathing apparatus. We were going to put them on and . . .’

‘What are you
talking
about?’ the Dr demanded, grouchily. ‘
What
helmets?’

He took a step forward.

Oh! That fatal, sleepy stride! How I wish he had stayed put - how I wish now he had carried on napping in whichever TARDY antechamber he had gone to. Or, at the very least, if only he had put his foot forward with less forcefulness; if he had tiptoed, or shuffled, rather than flinging his whole leg, like a championship Strider competing for the Striding Cup.

‘Doctor! No!’ I cried. Or do I only
imagine
that I cried out in this Bond-like fashion, in the nightmares that have haunted me since that day? Was I not, rather, struck dumb with the horror of what was happening right in front of me? Is this my subconscious prompting me to do something, to try and prevent the inevitable? Those nightmares! They plague me still!

The Dr’s foot connected with the helmet, still lying on the floor in the middle of the control room. Inadvertently the Dr booted it. It flew, with the force of a well struck football, in a fast, straight line; skimming a little way above the floor. It struck the far wall, and bounced back, turning in the air; ricocheting off the central panel, and then rolling to a halt. It turned, and turned, and then clonked upright, rattling briefly on its rim before settling back on the floor.

‘My toe!’ cursed the Dr. ‘Who left that damn thing there in the
middle
of the floor?’

But I was frozen to the spot in shock. ‘No!’ I gasped. ‘No!’ I rushed to the helmet and gingerly, very gingerly, I lifted it up. There was nothing - a nothing that for the briefest flickering instant fed my hopes (of course, it was absurd - but hope, as love, can subsist upon absurdity). But then, with the very slightest sensation of weight shifting inside the thing, she came tumbling out. She fell, collapsing through the open bottom of the helmet to slump onto the floor of the TARDY - full sized at last—but—dead, as dead as could be.

I howled.

‘Will you keep it
down
?’ hissed the Dr. ‘Not only have I got a bit of a headache,
but—
now—I’ve
hurt
my
toe
.’

 
How many times have I replayed, in my mind, Lexanco’s last seconds of life? The beautiful Lexanco, the first woman I ever truly loved? Did she suffer? Did she even have time to register what was happening?

I imagine her walking dutifully towards the centre of the helmet, as we had agreed, looking forward to the moment when I would lift the device off her. But that never happened. Instead she must have seen the far wall of the helmet suddenly hurtling towards her. If the Dr, in the outside world, inadvertently kicked the helmet with enough force to propel it at, say, twenty miles an hour at the far wall, then
on the inside
it must have moved with a speed of
several thousand
miles an hour. Perhaps that solid wall of so many tonnes of metal, dashing towards her at the speed of a hyperbullet, had struck her before she had the chance to register what was happening. Perhaps she died in a blissful ignorance. I can only hope so.

 
Still stunned, terrified that a like accident might happen to Linn, I tremblingly lifted the second helmet, to reveal her standing, looking cross, and saying ‘you took your time . . .’ But once I saw that she was safe I could no longer hold myself up. I collapsed on the floor of the TARDY sobbing like a shower attachment. I mean, in case that this simile does not paint a clear picture in your mind, a shower attachment through which water is flowing. Luke-warm water, of course. Body-temperature water, in fact. I know people talk of ‘crying hot tears’, but that has never convinced me. It’s not as if human tear ducts have the capacity to add heat to the saline fluid that passes along them. So: the point of the simile is to stress how many and forceful were my tears. Hence, shower attachment.

Anyway, I cried.