Part 37 (1/2)

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, cus.h.i.+ons 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 .