Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 37

Sam rubs my shoulder.'You miss her, don't you?'

I smile.

Something lights up on the console. At first I can't remember what that particular signal means. Then I do.

'What's up?' asks Sam.

Someone is sending us a message. Maybe a distress beacon. Maybe a warning. Something. In my life, this is exactly the way new episodes always begin. Gladly, I flick the switch.

Sam gives me an ironic grin.'Is this Sam and the Doctor on their way to their next exciting adventure?'

'Maybe,' I say, trying to shrug off my mood and remorse.

Some kind of message is definitely coming in. Something visual, apparently.

'Scanner,' I say, and elect for the wider view. I throw the switch that activates the overarching ceiling scanner. It opens gloriously and displays the vortex in its giddying intensity, yawning and widening over our heads. I love that.

The scanner flickers and jumbles and then - eventually - we get the visuals. Someone is transmitting us live pictures, from some souped-up video camera.

Sam squawks.'It's Iris's bus!'

And indeed it is. In wide screen. In full Technicolor. The lower deck of Iris's old charabanc. She is delivering us a home movie.

And there she is. She's in the vortex herself. For some reason she's in antigrav. She spins and revolves in mid-air, alongside a scattering of floating teacups and novels and journals, cushions and teaspoons and parchment maps.

The old woman is glowing and spinning in the viscid-looking air. Then her features blur. She is changing. Sloughing off her old self. She peels off her cardigan, kicks off her sensible shoes and they drift away from her. She flings off her hat.

Her thick, aged flesh drops away. Her grey wiry hair shakes out, fanning around her, and it turns, as if ripening, into honey blonde. We blink.

Iris is suddenly young, still revolving on the air. She is wearing a silver, partly transparent bikini. She's young and laughing.

'She's regenerating,' I tell Sam.

Sam is grinning. 'She said she would.' She bangs the console with a whoop. 'She's sent us a video of her regeneration like she would a wedding video. Fantastic!'

Sam and I stare at the changed Iris. Ma.s.sive and glorious she looms above our heads, and then she winks at us broadly. Renewed.

'She made it,' Sam says.

'Bless her hearts,' I reply, just as the picture breaks up and we are returned, once more, to the happily infinite vortex.

Afterword.Better than the Telly When he was six my brother decided he was going to start buying Christmas presents. He was counting up his pennies in a small, dark newsagent's called Stevens, down the precinct in the town where we grew up, Newton Aycliffe in County Durham. Stevens used to be great.

It's where we got Marvel Comics all through the seventies. It's a things-for-your-car-shop now. Mark had sixty pence in one fat little hand, and in the other, a slim white paperback, brand-new. Doctor Who and the Destiny of the Daleks by Terrance d.i.c.ks. He showed me it - the front-cover ill.u.s.tration was in pastel colours: Daleks emerging from gingerish swirling fog, Tom Baker pulling his face into an expression of mock consternation. Mark had come round the book stacks, looking for me, needing fifteen pence. I was four years older than he was. This was 1980.

'I need some money,' he said,'to buy you this for your Christmas.' He only showed me the book briefly, then hid it behind his back.

After that,Doctor Who was always mostly the books to us. That first one - succinct enough to read in two hours - set us off. The TV series became only so much raw material to be transformed. You could get only a few of the books we sought in earnest in Newton Aycliffe. We went to Durham, to Clarke's the newsagent, where in the cafe and bookshop upstairs they had a bookcase full of the whole series. Such a selection.Where did you start? We went with our mam and Charlie and, as a treat, they let us choose two each. This was important, because of the weekends we spent in Durham with our dad and he was into things like football, which we hated. Time with mam and Charlie was for the things we really wanted.

First off, the Tom Baker stories were the most important ones. And then the Dalek ones with any other Doctors in. We specialised early on our particular areas of research, with me branching out into stories aired and novelised before I was even born. These books could take you to times and stories only your parents remembered. Planet of , Invasion of ,Masque of , Genesis of . We read quite voraciously and uncovered the texts' various formulae: especially 'The X of Y', that most important of constructions. The qualifying of the threat of the unknown. As we went on we discovered the more oblique, more artistically succinct and opaque t.i.tles; The Tenth Planet , The Daemons , The Giant Robot .

Of course, reading the Target books made us both take up writing immediately. I sent my first roman-a-clef to Penguin when I was nine and they were rather nice about it.

The process of novelisation seemed to be a kind of alchemical reaction through which cheap TV material - shaky studio sets, lush, velvety capes and costumes, rubbery rubbishy monster hides - became the very stuff of seventies children's adventure fiction. I was already happilyau fait with cla.s.sic children's fiction and the weirder end of the Puffin list, in which fantasy, mythology and magic were already a given, and lush descriptiveness was taken for granted - writers such as Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, E. Nesbit and Rosemary Sutcliff. What the Doctor Who novelisations seemed to have aplenty were adverbs and adjectives, and a knack for fitting them exactly to characters. The transition from screen to text was soothed by the adept use of very precise qualifiers. The Fourth Doctor did things with a particular panache: his pockets were capacious, his TARDIS voluminous, when he grinned it was wildly, he muttered derisively, and when his scarf was described as long, of course, it was ridiculously or incredibly long. In every sentence there was a certain lexical item that would become a clue to character, and those clues were sprinkled in, repeated and brought in again and again.

Very neat, those skinny books. We started borrowing them from Aycliffe town library, as well as buying them in Durham or from W. H. Smith's in Darlington. With each slim volume what we looked forward to were the inevitable repet.i.tions - the consolations of habit.Young old faces, shocks of white or brown hair, ruffled shirts, multi-sided control consoles, battered blue police boxes. Those verbal tokens led us each time into a particular world.

At the end of the seventies, of course, that world was just about to end.

That raffish, tousled, insouciant irreverence of the Fourth Doctor was about to leave the show and what was more, almost all of his stories were novelised. Doctors had only a certain span in those days - there were no missing adventures yet. In 1981 Tom Baker slipped Holmes-like from the gantries of a latterday Reichenback falls and suddenly it was the 1980s in earnest. I started comprehensive school. Thatcher was in power with a horrid vengeance. My parents were listening to Blondie and the Clash. The Doctor was younger, the stories both more scientific and more like a soap opera. And then, as the eighties went on, they spoiled the series, it seemed to me, making it too garish and ugly and cra.s.s.

Oddly enough, the novelisations got better. Some editorial person commissioned the stories as yet unrediscovered and filled in the gaps.

The word novelised came into its own, the books a little better written.

'Novelised' came to seem to mean doing something completely: covering up, improving it. So we kept on reading them, until the stories ran out and then, by the time I went off to university to be, naturally, an English literature student, the TV show had finished too.

I still liked the way those early books moved along so skimpily, so fluidly.

I thought that would be useful in the proper, original longer novels I intended to write. I loved Hardy, Lawrence, the Brontes, but next to Terrance d.i.c.ks and Malcolm Hulke, couldn't the Greats seem a little stodgy at times? That's how I was thinking.

By university I knew I was going to be a writer. I'd already finished a first, rather surreal novel called, interestingly, Iris Wildthyme . Halfway through my first degree I wrote the first confessional novel that everyone has to write and subsequently junk, and I called it A Handful of l.u.s.t .

Then I went off, did an MA in creative writing and a PhD on contemporary literature and wrote the first two literary novels I would publish, Marked for Life , and Does it Show ?. Then I wrote the collection of stories, Playing Out . I was busy. I was writing literary fiction, by which I suppose we mean fiction with no holds barred, nothing sacred, no genre distinctions.

In the back of my mind I still wanted to write a Doctor Who book one day. Paying off a debt. Whatever. I moved to Edinburgh, wrote Could it be Magic ? and a second collection of stories. WroteFancy Man .

Someone I met in Edinburgh read my first novel and pointed out that, in it, I described someone's pockets as 'capacious'. They guessed immediately I'd spent my formative years reading Target books.

I thought again about writing a Doctor Who story; constructing a big surrealist romp for the Doctor. Since I'd done my finals, Virgin had been publishing original stories. At first, unfettered from the limitations of the TV series in t.i.tles such as Genesys , Exodus and Revelation , Doctor Who seemed to come alive again and these were, indeed, adventures broader and bigger than TV would ever manage. They were coming closer to being proper novels, yet full of the old colour and magic, character and camp of the original. After a while, though, I felt some of the novels seemed to lose the drift and the wit of the series, which had never been about science fiction for me, anyway. Doctor Who was closer, in a literary sense, to magic realism, with its deft collision of the everyday with surrealism. When Kafka's Gregor Samson wakes one morning transformed to a beetle in Metamorphosis , isn't he just living too close to a certain Welsh pit engulfed by the Green Death? When Salman Rushdie's devil and angel drop into London from the sky in The Satanic Verses, aren't they playing out part of the morality tale that threw together Pertwee and Delgado so often in the early seventies? When Spanish galleons appear untouched, impossibly, in the rainforest in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , might not they have been timescooped by someone toying with the very fabric of time and s.p.a.ce? And Angela Carter's whole carnival of characters who are vampires, wolves, fat ladies and clowns might have come from one of the Fourth Doctor's more baroquely Gothic tales. That whole literary genre of magic realism, which came so extravagantly into the mainstream in the eighties, seemed to be exactly where Doctor Who belonged.

So I was pleased when the BBC started doing their own thing with the Doctor again. He seemed restored to us. Especially with the Eighth Doctor and his rather engaging simplicity, his relish of being reborn, his wearing velvet again, and his flouncing off into new, uncluttered adventures. This time he knew only a little more than his audience. No more all-knowing prophet-like Doctor. I was always pleased when the Doctor was content to blunder into things, and let himself meet fabulous characters in that sweetly picaresque, eighteenth-century way of his. So then I was ready to make a present to myself of my ownDoctor Who story.

I took Iris Wildthyme from my first novel, where she isn't a Time Lord at all, but still the same character and one who goes round blithely and drunkenly telling everyone that she is centuries old. I injected Iris into the Doctor Who universe (Umberto Eco somewhere calls this process, rather pretentiously, Transworld Migration) and here, Iris came to life again, as a particularly unshakeable old flame of the Doctor of old. Bless her.

So I wroteThe Scarlet Empress , and here it is.

In this book, I'm indebted to a curious imbroglio of texts and authors. In no particular order...

The Arabian Nights themselves, of course, Laura Riding, Angela Carter, Robert Irwin (for his fabulousArabian Nights Companion ), Salman Rushdie, Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Josef Von Sternberg, Fellini's Satyricon , Ray Harryhausen, Allen Ginsberg, Italo Calvino, Jean Luis Borges, Jean Cocteau, Collette, Susan Sontag, Aubrey Beardsley, Casanova, Marina Warner... and so on and so on.

So, after all this time, here's my little foray into somebody else's fictional world. Someone else's, but one I was at home in before I found one for myself.

Paul Magrs Norwich March 1998.

Other DOCTOR WHO books include:

THE DEVIL GOBLINS FROM NEPTUNE by Keith Topping and Martin Day THE MURDER GAME by Steve Lyons THE ULTIMATE TREASURE by Christopher Bulis BUSINESS UNUSUAL by Gary Russell ILLEGAL ALIEN by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry THE ROUNDHEADS by Mark Gatiss THE FACE OF THE ENEMY by David A. Mclntee EYE OF HEAVEN by Jim Morttmore THE WITCH HUNTERS by Steve Lyons THE HOLLOW MEN by Keith Topping and Martin Day CATASTROPHEA by Terrance d.i.c.ks MISSION IMPRACTICAL by David A. Mclntee ZETA MAJOR by Simon Messingham DREAMS OF EMPIRE by Justin Richards LAST MAN RUNNING by Chris Boucher THE BOOK OF LISTS by Justin Richards and Andrew Martin A BOOK OF MONSTERS by David J Howe DOCTOR WHO t.i.tles on BBC Video include: THE WAR MACHINES starring William Hartnell TIMELASH starring Colin Baker THE E-s.p.a.cE TRILOGY BOXED SET starring Tom Baker BATTLEFIELD starring Sylvester McCoy THE MIND OF EVIL starring Jon Pertwee HORROR OF FANG ROCK starring Tom Baker Watch out for DOCTOR WHO: EARTH AND BEYOND on audio: Three exciting short stories read by Paul McGann - the Eighth Doctor!