Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow Part 53

'And what will you teach us with your manifold wisdom?' said Ferain. 'Whoever you are or were?'

The Doctor met the old man's eye. The wind stil ed.

'What do you want, Ferain? What do you want me to be? Shal I reveal my blazing power? Might that not fry you to a crisp? Shal I sweep away evil and chaos? Reorder the stars in their courses? Banish burnt toast forever?'

He paused.

'Well, I won't. I wouldn't if I could. Who do you think I am?' He thumbed his chest. 'I'm me. The Doctor. What I have been, someone might have imagined. What I will be, how can I tell? I'm not immortal. I shal go to this Skaro Skaro, collect the Master's remains and bring them back to President Romanadvoratrelundar.'

'With such backing,' said Ferain, 'how can she fail?'

The Doctor's eyes flashed. 'Be quiet, my lord. And remember your place!'

The birds had stopped singing.

Ferain was silent.

Romana cleared her throat. 'Please be careful.'

The Doctor eyed her sternly. 'The Daleks. The Master. Romana, who have you been talking to?'

221.

Innocet sniffed the books one after another. The musty smells of the pages and covers had their own stories to tell.

One faded volume contained a picture of a tubby creature floating under a dirigible surrounded by a cloud of beat.i.tude flies.

The words were unintelligible to her. A telepath translator could do the job instantly, but that would deny her years of painstaking work. Something to savour while the new House was nurtured and grown. She and her House. She hoped the Doctor would come to their wedding.

She looked round for the Doctor, but he and his companions were nowhere to be seen.

They stood in a line beside the TARDIS.

'Please,' the Doctor said, 'I didn't ask to be seen off.'

'Tough,' said Dorothee. 'You'd better have these.' She fished her last battered box of teabags out of her pocket. He took them and hugged her tight.

He looked fondly at Leela for a long time, peering into her eyes as if he recognized something there.

'This love thing,' he mused. 'Interesting. A father from Gallifrey and a mother of Earth stock. That's an unusual pedigree.'

She pushed back her hair and said awkwardly, 'I don't have anything for you, Doctor.'

'Just call him after me.'

She looked startled and then nodded.

'Who exactly is the terrible Zodin?' b.u.t.ted in Chris. 'Some sort of Galactic megalomaniac emperor?'

The Doctor's eyes went misty. 'Zodin was a celebrated sword-swallower at the Grand Festival of Zymymys Midamor. She had an amazing trick with a scimitar.'

Chris grabbed the Doctor, lifting him off his feet in a monstrous bear hug.

'Roz bet me that I'd never dare do this,' he said. Eventually he put the Doctor down again and picked up his hat for him.

'Give my love to Bernice,' said the Doctor, squeezing Chris's hand.

'And ask her if she wants to lecture at the Academy here,' said Romana.

She turned to the Doctor.

'I know. I'll be careful,' he said.

'I want you to have this.' She slipped a metallic object into his hand. 'It's my sonic screwdriver.'

He smiled. 'Thank you, Madam President. I shall see you soon. Back at the Capitol.'

He walked to the TARDIS, a small figure clutching his presents. He turned his key and went inside.

One by one they moved away.

'Will he come back?' said Leela.

222.

'Dorothee!' The Doctor's head re-emerged from the door. 'I just remembered. I haven't been Merlin yet!'

He vanished and the door closed.

'What?' chorused the others, as Dorothee began to laugh.

The light on the TARDIS flashed like a bright idea.

A flock of startled birds rose from the trees as the TARDIS grated out of existence.

Then they were alone on the sunny mountainside.

223.

AUTHOR'S NOTES

Prologue.You can find a quote in Shakespeare to fit most things, but the 'abysm of time' line from The Tempest seemed absolutely right here. The Tempest is also Shakespeare's last play and Prospero is another magical figure and arch-manipulator, not unlike the Doctor. Maybe he is a Doctor, 12th or 13th generation. Now there's a thought.

They do say that if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing for television...

The Other's garden is reminiscent of the rose garden in which we see the First Doctor, Hartnel in Three Doctors and Hurndall in Five Doctors. It also reappears as the Doctor's imaginary garden in Auld Mortality.

According to Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, the Gallifreyans of the Old Time were all linked by telepathy. There was a continuous commentary in their heads reflecting the communal mood and public opinion. A bit like a telepathic chatroom. By the Doctor's time, that ability has declined to a mere remnant of its past, but it still exists within families. The Doctor and Susan were supposed to have a degree of telepathic empathy. The Doctor's Cousin Innocet has strongly developed powers. And the living House is in telepathic sympathy with its Housekeeper. And, of course, the TARDIS has telepathic circuits.

Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel were especially proud of the Hand of Omega, because it was old, battered and believable. Not the star spangled stuff of most tv science fiction.

"Eighth Man Bound" first appeared in Lawrence Miles's Christmas on a Rational Planet. It's a game played by students on Gallifrey, in which they foresee their possible future lives. The rhyme in Chris's head seems to list the Doctor's lives so far. The Doctor couldn't see beyond his seventh generation, and it worries him...

The scene with Badger is a bit of an info-dump to set up the location and family. But it also harks back to those magical childhoods in cla.s.sic children's books. The start of a Big Adventure. It's very C.S. Lewis and Arthur Ransome. Al old houses and schoolrooms and sunlight. I thought it was the sort of childhood that the Doctor should have had. Even if he does look about twenty.

Badger is essential y the Doctor's first companion. When we needed a visual reference for the original book cover, I asked Mike Tucker to come up with a design. Mike, bless him, turned up on my doorstep with a complete plasticine maquette, rams horns, dangling eye and al . The Virgin cover design was a bit slimline compared to the original, but Daryl Joyce has gone back to the original for his wonderful ill.u.s.trations here. Badger's zigzag fur comes from one of the skins worn by an Outler in The Invasion of Time.

Chapter 1.The Paris branch of Marks & Spencers closed early in 2001, so I just got away with that one! WARNING!

FASCINATING FACT ALERT: But if you go to Woolworths in South Africa, you'l notice that it's a bit more up-market than Woolworths in Britain. The product range is all M&S. Strange but incontrovertible truth that alternative universes do exist... sort of.

If Dorothee was partying at the Cafe Momus on Christmas Eve in 19th century Paris, she might well find that the rowdy people at the next table who keep singing loudly are Mimi, Rudolfo and friends, the protagonists of La Boheme in Act 2 of Puccini's opera.

George Seurat, whom Dorothee, true to NA form, is planning a fling with, is the French pointilliste painter (1859-1891.) His paintings are made up of thousands of points of colour. In Stephen Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Park with George, which I love, Seurat's mistress is called Dot. Sorry, I couldn't real y resist.

Robert Holmes' Gallifrey is a cross between a comfortable gentlemen's club and the Vatican, and I've always seen that as my role model for the Capitol. It's so ancient it creaks. If society stopped, the on-going rituals would take centuries to wind down. There's a Byzantine proliferation of guilds, societies and strangely named officials, all stabbing each other in the back. Most of the workers have the factual y a.n.a.lytical minds of cataloguers, filled with a fascination for the detail of other people's events. They observe the Universe, annotating and revising their notes, while their leaders are locked in an endlessly shifting, complex and stately dance of power.

224.

Chapter 2.Almoner Crest Yeux is p.r.o.nounced Yooks.

Leela: what did she see in Andred? Why would she give up travelling with the Doctor? (We're talking about the character, not about Louise Jameson leaving.) The parts of Gallifrey she witnessed in Invasion of Time would hardly encourage her to stay. Maybe she recognised kindred spirits in the Outlers? Or mistook the grandeur and pomposity for some sort of mystical haven? Not very likely.

I suppose Andred is the only attractive and vaguely sparky person she comes across, but real y Leela's whole departure is a tagged on afterthought. Better to look at how a practiced warrior and woman of action would cope in such a potential y deadly dull place. So she's bored and the Doctor, the most important and influential person in her existence, has gone. What else do you expect her to do, other than dig up his past?

Romana returned to Gallifrey from E-s.p.a.ce in Terrance d.i.c.ks' Blood Harvest. By the time we get to Paul Cornell's Happy Endings, she has been elected as Lord High President. She's a lovely character to write, by turn authoritative and frivolous. Lalla Ward stamped all through her like Brighton rock.

Leela doesn't know the name for the striped pig-bear creature she encounters in the Gallifreyan forest, but it might be to Badger what brown bears are to our own domesticated teddies.

Chapter 3.In the original book, this used to be Chapter 4.

We've seen the TARDIS bathroom before, but somewhere, I like to think, there is also a gla.s.s roundel through which you can see all the Doctor's washing going round and round. One of the old Audio Visual plays, which featured Nick Briggs as the Doctor, ended with the Doctor in the bath and his plastic duck laughing at him in a chipmunky, Pinky and Perky, speeded up voice sort of way. I liked that a lot, so it's here too.

The two Aces - I wanted a sequence which would get Dorothee to come to terms with what she had become. If there had been another season on tv, Ace would only have had a couple more stories. As it was, her character stayed on into the book range and developed a long way further than anyone would have suspected. She grows up, becomes a bit of a maneater, leaves the Doctor, has a stint as a fighter in the Dalek Wars, comes back to the Doctor, and lands up living in 19th century Paris, able to commute through time using a time-travelling motorbike which belonged to Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (black female descendant of the Brigadier!) So Dorothee and Ace have a night in with a bottle - one of those nights in where you start playing Truth or Dare and talking about forbidden subjects which always lead to trouble.

In the tv days, Ace's surname was Gale, as suggested by her creator, Ian Briggs. Then in the books it got turned into McShane, or Gale-McShane, or Gale again. It's a b.l.o.o.d.y minefield out there. Maybe the kidnapped Parisian Dorothee is McShane and her carbine-wielding tormentor is Ace Gale...

A Marsh Dalek appears in The Dalek Book, published in time for Christmas 1964. I really liked the Marsh Daleks and used to draw lots of pictures of them instead of doing my maths homework - they were lot easier to draw than the normal Daleks. They were quite sleek, resembling a sort of tin can on stilts with few external features apart from an eye and a gun, and they patrolled wetland areas on the planet Gurnian where ordinary Daleks couldn't go and kept the two-headed Horrokon monsters in order. I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't just send a hoverbout patrol.

The Great Gates of the Past or Future, under which the future slides or the past emerges, depending on which side you're standing, first featured in Time's Crucible. Plot dynamics so far prevent me from revealing who the woman in brown and the old harpy with an eypatch actually are.

Chapter 4.So here we are at last in the House of Lungbarrow. Many people have compared the House to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, and I'd be the last person to deny any influence there. I love Peake's work very much, not just the t.i.tus Groan trilogy, but the charming and quirky Mr Pye and a lot of Peake's poems and his ill.u.s.trations.

225.

Both Houses are huge edifices that ramble for miles, as much characters in their stories as any of their inhabitants. Both Houses are prisons. But there are big differences too. Gormenghast is essentially a dead place, whose denizens perpetuate its endless rituals as if they might cease to exist if they stopped. But Lungbarrow is alive and an active partic.i.p.ant in events. It's possessive of its inhabitants. It suffers from family pride in extremis. It has a violent temper and wil sulk for centuries on end. To walk along its pa.s.sages is truly to walk on egg sh.e.l.ls.

In the early days of working on Lungbarrow - the script, I put a note on the latest draft I was sending to Andrew Cartmel: "The furniture is getting increasingly predatory." Followed by the direction "The Drudges are herding tables into the Great Hall." I doubt the scene later on where the Doctor "surfs" on a runaway table could ever have been realised properly in studio, but that was the start of the House's character evolution. And the book allowed me to give full range to that. There are certainly elements of Beauty And The Beast here - not just the Disney version, but the ravishing Cocteau film before it.

As to the family? Well, families get everywhere. Not just the inevitable Groans and their retainers, but equally Robert Graves' Claudian family poisoning and politicking their way through Roman history; the completely batty Starkadder family from Stella Gibbons' gloriously funny Cold Comfort Farm - forget the softened up tv version, read the original. Even The Archers. Al soaps are filled with slightly crazy families, but any family would go mad if they had to live in the circ.u.mstances inflicted on the Lungbarrovians. Worse than Albert Square. You don't have to be mad to live in a soap opera, but it helps! One of the points of the book is: how could any family cope if the Doctor was a close relative?

Most Lungbarrovians cope by playing games, but over the years, decades, centuries, the games have got progressively more bizarre and deadly. You're given thirteen lives to start with... But in Lungbarrow, what else is there to do except be beastly to each other?

Cousins so far: Cousin Arkhew, is a rather put upon little chap; the gul ible one who always gets the short straw when it comes to dirty jobs.

Cousin Owis is a bit of a sad Billy Bunter - not very nice, certainly quite dim. But extremely significant.

Cousin Glospin, the Doctor's arch-rival. In a surprising family trait, the "young" Glospin seems to bear more than a pa.s.sing Byronic resemblance to Paul McGann.

Cousin Innocet, the House's moral minority, still possesses a remnant of the old Gallifreyan telepathy. In the Old Time, women were taller than the men and Innocet is tall and proud like her forebears. It's likely that the very tall body that Romana tries on before regenerating into Lalla Ward, is another throwback to the tal seer women of the Old Time - well, it could be! Innocet's long, long hair may have roots (ha!) in Rapunzel or Maeterlinck's Melisande or the braided Bride in the Stravinsky/Nijinska bal et Les Noces, but its weighty symbolism is entirely different and nothing to do with the loss of innocence. One day, Innocet will be Lungbarrow's Housekeeper, until then she keeps her journal and builds houses out of circular playing cards.

Cousin Jobiska: Edward Lear's Pobble Who Had No Toes had an Aunt Jobisca who gave him to drink lavender water tinged with pink. When a close relative of mine was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's and had to go into h.e.l.lingly Hospital, a giant rambling NHS inst.i.tution in rural East Suss.e.x, there was a tiny and very sweet old lady on his ward, who constantly said "Take me home, dear. I want to go home." Bless her, I don't think she really remembered where home was. It seemed to change on a weekly basis, rather like Jobiska's age. h.e.l.lingly, with its gothic architecture and warren of corridors, was yet another inspiration for Lungbarrow. It was closed in the cutbacks, a lot of patients went back to the community (maybe some got into government) and the place is now something like luxury flats. The House of Lungbarrow would not have stood for that.

The G.o.d of Pain is one of the old Gal ifreyan G.o.ds, aka the Menti Celesti, who could also be Eternals (Enlightenment.) They turn up throughout the New Adventures, most notably Time (as the Doctor was her champion) and Death. I had to coordinate the writing of Lungbarrow with Kate Orman, whose Room With No Doors was the previous book in the series. I rang Kate in Sydney and she was in the middle of her birthday dinner.

After we'd both stopped going "Oh, my G.o.d!" at each other, she pointed me towards a painting, The Death of Arthur by J.G. Archer, which shows the dying King Arthur laid on a seash.o.r.e, tended by three queens before he's ferried off to Avalon. Kate saw the three women as the embodiment of the Gallifreyan G.o.ds - Red/black for Death, white for Pain and an unfixed shifting colour for Time. Bizarrely I knew the picture and had already used it in the novelisation of Battlefield. Things, like Gallifreyan clocks, run in complex interlocking circles.

226.

And talking of Gallifreyan clocks... The arrival of the TARDIS sends out ripples, toppling Innocet's house of cards and setting frozen time in the House moving again. And poor old Arkhew is trapped in the orrery-like clock as all the planets and orbits, representing s.p.a.ce and legend, start to activate around him. The Doctor, of course, insists he doesn't believe in omens.

Chapter 5.Lungbarrow's attic is like a fairy tale forest. The giant furniture recalls when we are little and can only just see over the top of the table at what Mum is doing for tea. I once saw an opera production in which a character regressed to childhood, dreaming she was ascending to Heaven. In answer to this, a white staircase at the side of the stage was suddenly replaced by a giant version of the same staircase. The character became a child again, climbing this mountainous slope one big step at a time. It was an unforgettable and radiant image. Lungbarrow's not so radiant, but you get the idea...

In the original version, it was Ace who went through the looking gla.s.s into the House's past. As a visual reference, I copied the Tenniel ill.u.s.tration of Alice climbing over the mantle into the gla.s.s and subst.i.tuted our Perivale heroine with her Ace jacket on.

When I worked at Woodlands at BBC White City, our open-plan office was right next to the reference library. One lunchtime I found an old copy of Spotlight from the 1930s with a portrait of a young and dapper comedy actor called Billy Hartnel . I'd suggested we use it as a basis for a framed picture which the Doctor would uncover and hurriedly hide again in fright.

The garden itself is another Gal ifreyan timepiece with the statue of Ra.s.silon as its centre.

The Drudges are the ultimate evolved form of Lungbarrow's furniture. Living wooden servants who tend to the day-to-day needs of the House. We had debates in the tv production office as to whether they should be male or female. Ben suggested (it's always Ben) that they should be one of each, but you'd never be quite sure which was which. At this point, Ace had dubbed them Grim and Grimmer. I'd always seen them as fearsome wooden Victorian governesses, but Daryl Joyce's ill.u.s.trations show them as quite beautiful objects. Which is, of course, quite correct. Why should furniture be ugly?

In this flashback, Cousin Glospin is a lot older than he was in Chapter 4. And he's a lot younger too. Gallifreyan families are a nightmare.

Chapter 6.This gathering is one of those hatched, matched, dispatched occasions, when you get to see al those distant aunties who you normally avoid and barely remember to exchange Christmas cards with. There's something of those Forsyte family gatherings in this too - everyone being frightful y superior, whilst still gossiping about the latest family scandal. Basically most of the Cousins know there's trouble in the offing and are there to enjoy the show.

There are various units of Gallifreyan currency throughout the NAs. Pandaks are named after one of the Presidents named Pandak, of whom Deadly a.s.sa.s.sin tells us there have been at least three. Not unlike the French Louis.

Chapter 7.I often have an actor in my head when I'm writing a part. Occasional y I've been lucky and actual y got the actor in question, but it just helps both me, and maybe the director, to nail down the type of character. In the late 1980s for Lungbarrow, I was thinking of the late Patricia Hayes, al wiry and with a fearsome energy, as Satthralope, Michael Maloney as the charming, but deeply nasty young version of Glospin (who has mysteriously turned into a McGann lookalike in the book) and I fantasised that Peter Cushing might be lured out of retirement to play Quences. These days, I'd kill for Leslie Phil ips. Innocet, I saw as Angela Down, who'd been so genuinely lovely as Princess Maria in the BBC's War and Peace. Today I'd go straight for the very wonderful Gina McKee. Alternatively, these days I'd be tempted to insist that all the Cousins were played by the League of Gentlemen, with Mark Gattis as a magnificent Auntie Val sort of Innocet.