Chapter 57: 'Big Deep Breaths, Please, ...

… Johnny Depp. I’m not here to hurt anyone,’ said Rollo, lowering the point of his knife towards the floor, keeping his eyes fixed on Johnny’s. The music had stopped next door. ‘How could I do anything? Look around, there’s only one of me.’

‘Assassins don’t care what happens afterwards.’

‘If I wanted that, Johnny, then I’ve had plenty of chances.’

‘None of us knows anything about you, mate,’ said Johnny. ‘Pardon us for being careful. Pardon us for trying to protect her.’ I was pushing through the others towards them, and Johnny said, ‘Get back Mary Sue. No risks.’

‘I trust him,’ I said. You will think that some piece of me must surely have been thinking, ‘Please, oh please, let me be right about what I saw in Rollo’s eyes. Let me not have been bamboozled by them, because trustworthy eyes are hardly something I can take to the bank, so how can they possibly be something I will risk the world on?’ You will think that, but you will be wrong. I walked to Rollo, took his knife, then his hand, and then I pulled him over to a seat in the corner of the bar. Everyone was staring but I didn’t react to that. If Rollo was here, I reasoned, where he would know what kind of reaction he would get, it must be important. ‘What is it?’

He smiled, and squeezed my hand. His palms were dry, ever so slightly rough and completely comforting. Rollo looked like an ex-public school rugby player, with shiny brown shoes, neat jeans and crisp-collared short poking out from a blue and white round-neck sweater. This is not something I would usually find appealing, but it made Rollo look – it’s hard to put this in a way that doesn’t seem like faint praise, but you have to remember what a nightmare these two weeks had been in terms of trust and upheaval, and how this meant that certain things were unusually important to me – it made him look reliable. And then he said, ‘I’m here to say goodbye, Mary Sue.’

‘But…’

‘I’m sorry it has to be like this.’

‘But you said you were going to protect me.’

‘I will do everything I can, but we both know what’s happening tomorrow, and…’

‘How do you know? We only planned it today. Who are you?’

‘I’m someone you can trust,’ he said.

‘So,’ I said. ‘You think I won’t be coming back?’

‘I’m sure you will.’

‘But…’

‘We don’t have to go on about this conversation. I am not, well, I do not normally talk about these things, but I love you Mary Sue. I have to say it, in case I never get the chance again. I want you to remember that whatever happens, or however you come to think of me in the future, if, well. Just if. We will see each other again before the end, but the circumstances will be difficult, and when that happens, you have to know that I have always loved you as well as I could, after my fashion, and everything I have done in all this has been because you are incredibly important to me. Does that make sense to you?’

‘Not much.’

‘No, I suppose it wouldn’t.’ The music had started again, but there was still a critical mass of people watching us intently. The mood of the room was changed. ‘When that moment comes, very soon, when you see me, you may have some choices to make. At that point, you must remember that I love you, and would do anything for you, and if I tell you to do something, you have to do it, even if it seems, well, whatever it seems might be the result. Do you think you will be able to do that?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and I knew I would, and I didn’t know why. Again, I know, I know, if I were reading this, alarm bells would be going off in my head. Don’t think I don’t realise it now. Don’t think I didn’t realise it then, on some very deep level. Rollo smiled at me, stood up, kissed me gently on the cheek, said goodbye and walked away without looking back. Sir Conn hurried over to replace him, Johnny Depp and Freddie Flintoff at his shoulder, and asked if I was alright, and what Rollo had said, and whether anyone needed to go after and detain him. Sir Conn was holding a gin and tonic. I took it from him, drained it and said, ‘He was saying goodbye, Sir Conn. Let’s go home. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.’
***

Johnny Depp muttered something in the taxi home that came back to me later with particular vividness. He said, intending me to hear, I’m sure, ‘When that bastard broke in, and pulled the knife, where was David Tennant then? If he’s supposed to care about you so much?’

Chapter 56: They Can Because They Think They Can

At midnight, Kylie took her turn on the decks and the dancefloor began to fill. By the time she started her second set at two, everyone was doing the sort of dancing where they think they are dancing brilliantly, and they might as well be because they are all as drunk as each other and who is made happier by the thought that everyone looks an idiot? I’d stopped hugging my friends by this point. At the start of the evening I did it every five minutes, and they hugged me back, holding me four-drinks-tight because knew that something serious was happening, even if they didn’t know what it was. But now, none of us wanted to be thinking of that, and we were all dancing with celebrities, except Katharine who’d been snogging David-Mitchell-the-novelist since soon after we arrived. ‘I thought he was married,’ I said worriedly to England cricket hero Freddie Flintoff at one point. ‘I hope she doesn’t…’

‘Don’t worry, love. Most angel marriages are best-mate-style long-term partnerships. David-Mitchell-the-novelist’s wife is actually a lesbian at the moment, but when they got married, civil partnerships didn’t properly exist, and it was better for tax.’

‘That was a very full answer, Freddie.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want you to tell anyone this story later for some reason, and have people not understand that we angels are very moral, but that our situation with all the eternal regenerating means that sometimes, if you describe what we do, it sounds as if we are cheating on wives and partners and everything. That totally isn’t the case. Look, that’s David-Mitchell-the-novelist’s wife over there, dancing with brainy Mariella Frostrup.’

‘But brainy Mariella Frostrup surely isn’t…’

‘Hey, pet,’ said Freddie. ‘When you’ve been around forever, everyone’s a little bit everything.’

‘Okay,’ I said. A bit later, I was being twirled around the dancefloor by Sir Connaught Sampson-Samson, my surprisingly light-footed Head of Chambers. He was mouthing along to that Gilbert O’Sullivan song which keeps saying, ‘I’m a bad dog, baby,’ and I had a sudden, clear vision of how surreal all this was and, just like that, I had my first flash of proper terror about tomorrow, and Sir Conn saw it in my eyes and without saying another word, he whisked me off the back of the dancefloor and through a door which I had been assuming was a cupboard, but which was actually the entrance to a quiet little sub-bar called Pin Head Too.

‘Mary Sue,’ slurred Jeremy Clarkson lumbering into us clumsily. ‘Have you been told not to judge us? Have you? Have you been told that your puny earth morals do not bind us, because we are superbeings.’ Then he broke down giggling.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Freddie told me.’

‘Freddie Flintoff,’ said Jeremy Clarkson, ‘is the best bloke in the world. Best. Bloke. Inthe. World.’

‘He certainly…’

‘Don’t patronise me. You know all my being an arse stuff is just an act. This is my wife,’ he said, waving over a woman who was rolling her eyes. ‘You know that genuinely none of us would ever sleep with anyone except our wives if our wives didn’t allow it?’

‘Or vice versa,’ said Jeremy Clarkson’s wife.

‘You wouldn’t sleep with anyone else because I’ve got such a huge…’

‘Stop it, Jeremy!’

‘I can’t help it. I love being Jeremy Clarkson. He is the funnest person I’ve ever got to be! I was a mediaeval scribe once, not even one who got to do the pictures; and someone who counted weeds in an African lake; and an industrial spy in a pharmaceutical company in Germany, but during a boring bit of German history. I always play whatever part the Teacher needs, but God those ones were boring. I don’t think I’ve ever really got over the weed-counting. And do you know, the thing is now being Jeremy Clarkson is that I’ve genuinely got so I hate speed cameras! At the start, I couldn’t believe people were so touchy, because the cameras can only catch people who are breaking the law, etc., but now I really think there must be something bad going on with them if people agree with all my ranting so much.’ Then his drunk face went serious again. ‘But the key thing to remember is that none of us are love rats, not even David-Mitchell-the-novelist. He’s a great bloke, even though if you’re having a dinner party and need to invite a David Mitchell, I’d invite the other one, because he probably doesn’t spend the whole time crapping on about how he should be the main David Mitchell. But he’s not a love rat, ok?’

‘Why does everyone keep saying this,’ I asked. ‘It’s not as if I’m telling anyone else what you’re getting up to. It’s all so wild and fantastic that everyone would treat it as a joke, and if it’s legal issues we’re worrying about here, then surely that problem would already have been made as bad as it could be, since by now I’d have revealed about David Beckham being gay and a murderer.’

‘Oh,’ said Jeremy Clarkson. ‘Yeah. Totally.’ And then he looked at Sir Conn, and smiled like someone much, much older than he was supposed to be, and also much younger. He said, ‘You know what this is like tonight, don’t you?’ Sir Conn nodded. ‘You know what we need?’ Sir Conn nodded again, without saying anything, and Jeremy dived off to the bar. I thought he might be humouring Jeremy Clarkson, but then I saw that Sir Conn’s eyes were glistening, and so were Jeremy’s, as if they he were about to cry.

‘What is it, Sir Conn? What is this like?’

‘Near death, Mary Sue. When you’re near death, there’s no point in holding back, so you dance. But us, we regenerate. We dance, and some of us are brave, and that’s all very well, but when humans dance on the edge of their void, it really is a void. Jeremy and I once fought alongside some very brave men, and there were parties like this every night because… Well, humans are very inspiring, Mary Sue.’ Jeremy returned with two huge glasses of port. He handed one solemnly to Sir Conn, and the pair of them stood opposite each other, and the intensity with which the looked into each other’s eyes somehow created a bubble of quiet, and they straightened themselves tall, and they intoned together, ‘Aeberhardt, Blake, Boswell, Brinsdon, Burgoyne, Couston, Coward, Cox, Cunningham, Dolezal, Fulford, Haines, Howard-Williams, Jones, Lane, Lawson, MacGregor, Marek, Parrott, Pinkham, Plzak, Roden, Scott, Steere, Sutherland, Unwin, Vokes, Whelan. Nineteen Squadron, friends and brothers, fewest of the few, Possunt quia posse videntur.’ Then they slowly saluted, and they drank their huge glasses of port in great gulps with tears streaming down their faces, and tears were streaming down my face as well.

As my vision cleared, I saw Rollo Price at the door to the little sub-bar, looking at me. I barely had time to register his presence before he was knocked to the ground by Johnny Depp, and the two bounced back to their feet, knives held instinctively and suddenly in front of them.

Chapter 55: Eat, Drink and Be Merry, for Tomorrow...

‘Are you okay, Mary Sue?’ called Johnny Depp, and I could hear that he was now running through the trees. I was stunned into silence staring in his direction, because I didn’t know how he would react to Miss Smallbone, or how I would explain her presence. I needn’t have worried. It can only have been a couple of seconds seconds, but when I turned back to the wall, she was gone. Johnny burst into view, gun in his hand.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘There’s no one else.’

‘I thought I heard…’ He looked around and said angrily, ‘Why didn’t you reply? You know how important you are! You cannot wander off on your own, is that clear? You said you were going to the restroom.’

I’d almost forgotten my excuse for leaving the endless meeting. All the decisions were made in the first twenty minutes, and after that it was finicking over tiny details for hours and hours, mostly to do with what weapons we would take, and whether we should wear black or dark green. Although I would be a member of the party, I lack military experience on an extreme scale, and I couldn’t see what I was contributing. And also, Johnny Depp was in the room, looking at me, and I thought I might die tomorrow. (And also (II), part of the reason I was thinking of him like that was that it helped me put the twisted feelings I had for David Tennant out of my mind, and why I keep going on about these twisted feelings is beyond me, because I’m not twisted, and I would never do anything about them. Perhaps it’s the same reason that Miss Smallbone told me about Johnny Depp. Against the bright light of oblivion, it’s hard to resist baring your soul.) ‘Is the meeting over?’ I asked.

‘Er…’

‘Just some final details?’ I said. Johnny grinned. It would have been easier if he didn’t get my jokes.

‘Come on, Mary Sue. We’re almost done, I promise, and tomorrow we go to war, so…’

‘Yeah, yeah. We have to get a good night’s sleep.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, we might all be about to die! Tonight we party!’
***

Once, on a work trip to New York, I learned that the cool bars there are ones you have to know about to find, because they look as if they are the toilets of crappy Japanese restaurants or they are through a bead curtain behind the counter of second-hand bookshops. It never even crossed my mind that London was full of similar places, and maybe it isn’t, but there’s one at least. After wolfing down the delicious barbecue Kylie Minogue had been preparing all afternoon, and drinking a beaker each of a drink called Admiral’s Flip with which Freddie Flintoff seemed to be obsessed and I could see why, the mood was festive. We jumped into taxis, and headed to Kilburn. I couldn’t believe there was somewhere to go out that I’d never heard of this close to my home, but Freddie just laughed. He was clearly the leader of the gang. Even Johnny Depp and David Tennant, who were alpha as they come, deferred to him without a second thought in the matter of having a good time.

Because it was, well, because this might be the last time, and the end of everything, and all that jazz, I’d been allowed to call my mates. Jen and the others were waiting outside Cookies & Cream, looking bewildered. I started introducing them to the angels, many of whom they recognised, of course. It was surreal, presenting Jeremy Clarkson and saying things like, ‘Morgan, Jeremy, Jeremy, Morgan,’ or hearing the words over my shoulder, ‘Sorry, we haven’t met, my name’s Kylie.’

The best moment was when I said to Jen and Katharine, ‘Jen and Katharine, this is David-Mitchell-the-novelist,’ and Jen went, ‘What?’ and David-Mitchell-the-novelist said, ‘Yes, I know. I cannot believe the bloody BBC! Even when we gave them the list of angels with it very clearly in stated in brackets that there were TWO Davids Mitchell, they STILL put a picture of David-Mitchell-the-comedian on the screen when they said my name. It drives me up the absolute bloody wall. I mean, I was…’

‘I agree,’ butted in Katharine. ‘It’s ridiculous. I mean, you were famous long before him! I LOVED Gostwritten. And you’re much better looking than he is…’ Jen and I looked at each other and edged away.

Opposite C & C was a furniture shop I must have walked past a hundred times over the years, piled high with ramshackle sofas with bad gilding. The shop entrance was obviously closed, but next to it was an inconspicuous door, with three buzzers. Freddie held his right index finger in the air with great ceremony (I think he might have had two Admiral’s Flips), and pressed the middle one, which was labelled ‘Pin Head’. The bar was not as tiny as I expected, and the dance floor was also perfectly respectable, which boded well. For now, though, the music was at a level we could talk over, and there were eight barmen crowded along the counter, so there was hardly any waiting. ‘This is amazing!’ said Jen, next to me. ‘Daiquiris? I literally do not care how much they cost!’

‘Don’t worry about that, old thing,’ said Sir Connaught Sampson-Samson. ‘I’ve put a million pounds behind the bar.’

WEEKEND ELEVEN

Well, I estimate that next weekend will be the last break, and the story will be finished sometime in the week after that. I think I know how to get us to the denouement, and I have liked the end of this week, and the start of next week has got some really nice things in it, but I don't think I will have time to make them work as well as they might, since I have a busy day singing tomorrow. Still, there's that free extra hour stolen from summer, so never say die.

I know how to get us to the denouement - certain aspects of it are still up in the air. But, like I say, I have a WHOLE WEEK, so...

My top moment of this week was witnessing my two top readers (measured in the only available units: comments) meeting each other in a hot busy pub from which, to my certain knowledge, it is easy to have your computer stolen. My other top moment was the small collection of emails from more reticent top readers who didn't want to put their names in public or anything and were very nice about things. Big up them.

(I said at the start that it would be in the region of sixty chapters; it might be. It is a sign of my growing maturity that I will not force it to be sixty, if it needs to be sixty-one. I write to length and deadline. It is like a disease.)

Chapter 54: Don't Go Breaking My Heart

I sat down next to the Teacher. The soft grass still held some of the day’s heat, but the brick wall against my back was starting to cool. Only the top of my head was warmed by the sun, and the garden was painted by Seurat. After what seemed like a long while, Miss Smallbone said quietly, ‘Please don’t tell anyone.’

I looked at her in surprise, hurt that she thought I might betray her confidence, and her eyes were pleading. I was struck suddenly by how young she looked, and although I knew her youth was illusory, the illusion gave me a moment of perspective. ‘You don’t have any friends, do you?’

‘I’m…’ she began. Then she said, ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘How long have you loved, er, I don’t know what to call him.’

‘Call him Johnny. And I’ve loved him forever. Or as near as makes no difference.’

‘Does he know?’

‘Of course not,’ the Teacher said fiercely. ‘It wouldn’t, I mean, he’s in love with Vanessa. I’ve always known it.’

‘Always?’

‘Always. There have been… No. No, he has always loved her, and I have always known it.’
She hung her head, hands folded again in her lap. Sometimes, you know somebody doesn’t want to speak to you, but sometimes you know they are desperate to be forced. I said, ‘Really? Over thousands of generation, you’ve never tried, or said anything? Not at all?’ The flush rose up her neck, stronger this time, and I carried on, ‘Now is your chance to talk to a friend you can trust. You might not get another one.’ So she told me her story.
***

‘I have tried,’ said Miss Smallbone, in a voice that in a normal person would not have sounded emotional, but which I knew by now was the highest pitch of drama she would let herself express. ‘And I knew it was madness, I always knew. It’s just, oh!’ Instead of thudding her hands into the grass by her side, she held them still for a moment and then smoothed a non-existent crease from the front of her skirt. ‘It’s been so long! When I was very young, and we were still on our home planet, I fell in love with who you call Johnny Depp. But he loved Vanessa, who is wonderful. I wanted to kill myself then, and many times after, but it was only when got here that I…’

‘What?’

‘No. I didn’t kill myself because there was a war, and it would have been selfish to waste a life that our side could use somehow, and so I entered the military and found, I was surprised, that I possessed certain aptitudes. Perhaps my aptitude was not caring about death. Later, only a very few of us survived the destruction and exile, and fewer still who had been trained as I had been. I watched unseen at the beginning, wary of traitors, thinking it would be the easiest time for the enemy to infiltrate us. When I discovered that Johnny was another I was elated, but then I knew she had survived also, and I realised I could not bear the proximity of being known. The details of how I became the Teacher, and how I have maintained the illusion of continuity through the changing generations, need not concern us here. I thought it would pass, but it never did.’

‘You said you tried?’

‘Sixty million years is a long time, Miss Park. There were periods of less activity from the demons, and there were periods when I was weak. There are episodes of which I am ashamed.’

‘You don’t have to…’

‘I know.’ Miss Smallbone’s voice was small and clear, nothing so fragile or ringing as crystal, and certainly not dull. It was metal, sharp not jagged. ‘As you well know, Johnny is not continent when he and Vanessa are not of an age. For thousands of years I did nothing about this, although it was difficult.’

‘But?’

‘Tens of thousands of years, Miss Park. I am not proud of the things I did, but I understand myself. And I have paid for it, many times.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I, there were times when, more than that was necessary, I put Vanessa in the way of danger.’ She said it so calmly that it barely registered until I realised she was looking for my look of horror, and then I was horrified.

‘You…’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I knew she would regenerate, of course, but more than once, I split her from her one true love for my selfish purposes.’ Now I was close enough to the metal to hear its jagged edges. Nothing is ever smooth close up. Her neck was dark and her eyes shone. ‘I understand what you must think, and it was shameful, but… I can’t apologise to him, and so I’m apologising to you.’

‘What happened?’

‘I pretended to be… I can barely say this Miss Park,’ and now the metal was both jagged and brittle. ‘I know Johnny’s tastes. I waited until I looked like … what he would like, and then I, well. Then I was with him.’

‘What was it like?’

‘You know what it was like. I’d watched him often enough, seen the effect. It is not experience, your husband had as much experience, I don’t know what it is that he has. It made it worse, because I knew he didn’t care.’

‘Really?’

‘I knew he cared something for the person I was pretending to be, but I knew also what he was holding back, and that he would hate me if he knew what I truly was. I would have known if he ever forgot Vanessa, ever stopped waiting for her, and he never did or will.’

I stood up, and looked through the trees towards the house. ‘How often did you kill yourself?’ I asked.

She looked into my face, saw there was no point. ‘Many times. I am weak, Mary Sue, self-indulgent like a teenager, throwing myself off a cliff so it can be a few more years before the ache is strong again. Is that what you want me to say?’

‘No. It’s just…’

‘It’s true.’

‘And Johnny never knew?’ I asked. ‘I know he never knew WHO you were, but did he never even knew WHAT you were?’

‘I am very good at hiding the eternal part of myself, Miss Park. I have to be.’ I reached to hold her hand but she shook me off. A tear was in the corner of her eye. ‘Millions of years, Miss Park. Of course I TRIED. I tried everything. ‘She couldn’t stop herself, but she wouldn’t look at me. ‘There were other times, when Vanessa was waiting for him to be of an age, when I went to her, with her. I tried to learn what she did, what kept him so enthralled, and I tried to remember, and then later I tried the things she did, but of course I was not… And don’t think I didn’t know that this would never work. Of course I knew, but I had to try because it was either try or go mad. Though of course, it was madness anyway, and it harmed our cause. You cannot understand the humiliation that this was, or how humiliating it is to tell you.’

‘Why are you telling me?’

‘Like you said, there may not be another chance. And also, it pertains. I said you and Johnny would be a disaster because I know he likes it more with you than he liked it with me, and I was jealous. It was not because he is the Master.’ She was withdrawing, and her voice was smooth again. ‘I was jealous, that’s all. You see, Mary Sue, there really are very few stories, and mine is one of the most banal.’

‘No, Teacher …’

‘No, Mary Sue. Time does not dignify it, or excuse the things I’ve done. But I have paid. They have been together almost all this time, and the fractions I have stolen have only made things worse. I wish you will not sleep with him again, because he is not the one for you, but I know how hard he can be to resist.’

‘Mary Sue!’ shouted Johnny Depp from near the house. ‘Who are you talking to?’

Chapter 53: The Orchard: Gold

I wandered through the orchard in the golden dusk. Sun dappled through the leaves but it was too low to reach over the buildings and down as far as the grass, which was mown but not freshly or obsessively, the tree trunks ringed with deeper grasses and some white flowers which my mum would be embarrassed I can’t name. The angels’ replacement London headquarters were in a mansion in one of those Mayfair terraces where, because you only walk up and down the streets, you don’t realise some of the houses back onto significant pieces of land. The front of the house was grand enough, though it was thinly camouflaged by a row of buzzers that made it look like flats, but inside and out the back, it was amazing. The orchard had officially been planted in an attempt to defeat prying eyes in the overlooking houses and flats, but really it was because everyone likes fruit.

I’d slipped out of the interminable conference indoors on the pretext of needing the loo, and I stepped outside for a moment, and I suddenly felt a million miles from the chaos I had sparked. The French government was enraged, obviously, but the French people were ominously sullen. Britain was more or less convinced, which wasn’t surprising given that le Pen tried to obliterate London. Around the world, the angelic revelations had been met with either incredulity or outright disbelief. But any huge mental shift takes time, and at least we’d convinced the jury and David Tennant was free. David Tennant, who hugged me at the verdict, and who I hugged back tight, and who looked at me with his crooked smile and shook his head ruefully. David Tennant, who felt like the other half of me, because he was half of me. David Tennant, my father, who was inside the house volunteering for a suicide mission so he could protect me. And Johnny Depp was in there too, who was, well, who was who he was. Johnny was why I came outside, really. Every time he spoke or looked at me, I forced my face into a mask, but I don’t suppose it worked. My feelings about him were very mixed, and when I say that I don’t mean it: my feelings about him weren’t serious, in the final analysis, but they were powerful, clear and simple, and I felt them whenever I saw him, even though I knew it wasn’t right or couldn’t last, but my head would overcome my feelings. I knew this was important because the Teacher had said…

‘Hello, Mary Sue,’ said Miss Smallbone. She was sitting quietly against the rude red-brick wall at the back of the orchard, her legs straight in front of her in a long, light lilac skirt that reached almost to her sensible, anonymous trainers. Her round face was tilted sideways, and just caught the lowest edge of bright sun as she looked up at me.

‘Teacher,’ I said.

‘You did well, I think. Or at least, David is free. And now we can get to the end of this.’

‘You look tired.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It wasn’t a criticism, Teacher.’ I moved to stand beside her, leaning against the wall. It was hot late summer, and I wearing my small olive shorts and black vest. My friends say this makes me look like a commando, I say I wear it because it’s so comfortable, and we all know I actually where it because I’m half-Korean and slim, and it’s a really good look for me that also makes it look as if I’m not trying. The brick was warm and rough against the skin of my shoulders and arms, and I pressed my neck back into it, wanting the roughness against the bones of my spine, all the way to the skull. To get that, I had to tilt my chin into my chest, pushing till I had felt each vertebra touch against the brick. It took me some time, and then I sat down in front of Miss Smallbone. ‘Can we save my mother?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What about me? Will I survive?’

‘I don’t know. It took me too long to realise what the Master was planning. Forgive me. But all we can do is try.’ I nodded. ‘Tomorrow night, Mary Sue, as soon as the shadows fall. Are you sure you’re ready?’

‘Of course I’m not ready.’

‘Of course.’ She wasn’t chastened.

‘Why would it be so bad, me and Johnny Depp?’

‘I’ve told you it would be bad.’

‘Please, Teacher. If he isn’t the Master, and you swear he isn’t, then I can’t understand why it would be so dangerous? I know he doesn’t love me, but, I mean, I don’t love him either, it’s just… I mean, this is the end of the world! Surely there’s no harm in, I mean, I might die, and everything is basically a nightmare, and this was one thing which was amazing, even if, well, it’s just sex obviously, but…’ and I was looking at the Teacher’s face while I was saying this, and she was looking at her hands, and I understood. ‘You love Johnny Depp,’ I said.

She didn’t move, but the skin of her neck darkened.

Chapter 52: High Wire

At the very moment David Tennant revealed his magic sword to the courtroom, revealing to the demons that he and I were about to reveal the hidden truth that angels and demons walk amongst us, a crack team of undercover secret commando angels were breaking into the demons’ Paris headquarters, the address of which I’d found when I was scurrying furtively around their Master’s mansion trying not to be shot by R Kelly, David Beckham, et al. When it became clear to the Teacher that I was definitely going to reveal all in the courtroom, she had snapped into her usual brisk efficiency. ‘You will need proof, Miss Park. It will seem like madness. What proof do you propose to give?’

‘I expected you to be able to think of something.’

‘How rash of you.’

‘And yet I see you have an idea.’

‘Touche, Miss Park,’ and she gave a wintry smile. ‘The demons cleared out their London office in preparation for the bomb, but Paris will be occupied. To extract anything will be costly. Some will die, maybe many, but it is the last days, and I can see no other way.’

‘If…’

‘No, Miss Park. You are the Chosen One. This strategy of yours is naturally uncomfortable to me, after these millennia of secrecy, but it is what we have, for good or ill. You do your part, and I will do mine.’
***

Of the sixteen angels that broke into the Paris headquarters, only seven survived, but they escaped with plans, details, lists and more.

The world’s press had treated the previous day’s revelations as more or less a joke – an extraordinary claim in a soap opera celebrity trial that was distracting the world, ludicrously, from the sabre-rattling between military-law France and the rest of Europe. But then we started giving evidence on le Pen’s career, and the careers of other demons in the French armed forces. The prosecution said, ‘France is not on trial! This is irrelevant. All that is relevant is whether David Tennant killed Gavin Wishton.’

‘My client killed Gavin Wishton. I thought you had established that clearly?’

‘But…’

‘Your honour, as we established, Mr Tennant’s innocence rests on his claim that murder is a crime committed by humans. We must be allowed to prove to the court that no such crime was committed.’

‘This trial is a farce…’ began the judge.

‘Yes!’ said the prosecuting counsel. ‘The defence is…’

‘Hear me out! The evidence submitted for my consideration this morning should be seen and will be seen. I have been informed by the defence that the newspapers will be presented with it, but I have also been assured that this will not happen until it is seen in court. In light of this…’

‘We object most strongly! The jurisdiction of this court…’

‘You will not interrupt me again and remain in the room, counsel, is that clear?’ The prosecuting counsel sat mutinous. ‘This is my courtroom. Extraordinary times make certain demands, and while I am yet to be convinced, I am impressed by the defence’s restraint in not having forced my hand by feeding their tales to the press, and the defence’s clear desire to allow the jury to decide on the basis of evidence unmediated by public hysteria. I am perfectly sanguine about the possibility that what happens today may be overruled, but I will not stop the defence from presenting its case.’

The atmosphere was electric. The evidence we had gathered was absolutely convincing proof that le Pen was the product of a conspiracy which had also placed France under his military control. It also demonstrated that Vladimir Putin was part of the same conspiracy, which underpinned his shock decision to sign a non-aggression pact with France. But as the prosecution kept pointing out, it did NOT prove that the conspirators were timeless regenerating demons. ‘How can you stand here denying the humanity of David Tennant, who has been examined by a variety of medical experts over the course of his professional career, for insurance purposes, as we can demonstrate, and who has never once been told he cannot be insured because he is not human.’ My witnesses repeated what David had said about the sword. The science that allowed the angels and demons to blend with the world was sufficiently advanced that from our human perspective, it seemed like magic. The judge emphasised that the jury were only debating the merits of this case. If they thought David Tennant and Gavin Wishton were human, it must be murder. The jury nodded wisely.

We showed a video of the battle for Centrepoint, which claimed five lives, including brave Davina McCall. The jury were duly horrified. And then I called Boris Johnson to the stand. After all, our defence was all about theatre. ‘Are you an angel?’ I asked.

‘Of course I am, old thing. Always have been, always will be. Fight the good fight.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘Afraid not. We lost access to the science of our ancestors when we arrived on this planet. This is not about proof. This is about reasonable doubt.’

‘Objection! It’s not Mr Johnson’s job to tell…’

‘Objection sustained.’

‘Your honour,’ I said. ‘All I have is enormous volumes of circumstantial evidence. I am convinced the jury will believe it, and I will keep presenting it as long as you allow me. May I please ask Mr Johnson some questions which will allow us to explain more quickly?’

‘On the condition that he does not try to do my job for me.’

Boris was funny, eloquent and charming. He gave details of his life as Churchill, including where to find a graffito in one of the toilets at Blenheim that showed a scratched picture of a black dog widdling on Hitler. He also handed over a key to a safe-deposit box where, as Churchill, he had deposited a diary of every crucial decision in World War II which had been based on work done secretly by the angels. It was a story of heroic sacrifice which paralleled rather than diminished the heroism of the known story. ‘We should perhaps have revealed ourselves many years ago, but secrecy became a habit, and we feared prejudice. We are so few, and we are the last of our kind. We only reveal ourselves now because le Pen and his monsters want to start a new war, and the world must know what it faces.’

As we knew when we started, fine points of law were nothing to do with the jury’s eventual decision. When Boris revealed that no nuclear weapons would work any more because the angels had disarmed them for fear that they might end up under demon control, as indeed had now happened, there was almost a cheer. From that moment, we knew we had won.

Of course, victory was only the beginning.

Chapter 51: Trial By Jury

On the first day of the trial, witness after witness attested to seeing David Tennant cut off my husband’s head. I cross-examined none of them. There was a sense of anti-climax the first time, but since David Tennant had pleaded not guilty, the anti-climax quickly translated itself into tension as to what trickery we must have up our sleeve. The prosecution lawyers were clearly disconcerted. They started pontificating, ‘Of course, the defence will try to say your eyewitness testimony doesn’t matter,’ or, ‘Some clever expert will appear to explain how this was a group delusion, simply because we can’t find the weapon.’ Everyone had expected a duel, but they were getting a phony war. That first evening, various legal pundits on the telly blustered to imagine what rabbit we would pull out of what hat.

Rabbit-and-hat is appropriate, actually. On day two, the prosecution introduced a couple of stage magicians to explain how they could have given the impression of holding a sword and then, five minutes later, ta-da!, no sword. Thus, they hoped, any defence which rested on such trickery would be doomed.

I knew, as did the demons on the prosecution team, that David Tennant’s sword had disappeared because it was literally magic (or born of powers beyond our technology’s ability to comprehend, powers lost by the demons and angels aeons ago, and so the difference between these powers and magic, as far as present purposes were concerned, was semantic). You couldn’t tell the jury that, of course.
***

‘So, Mr Tennant,’ I asked, ‘the so-called sword. Would you say it was impossible for it to have disappeared?’

‘Objection!’ said the dutiful prosecution counsel. ‘We have clearly established several methods by which the sword could have appeared to disappear.’

‘My question, your honour, is as to whether the sword could ACTUALLY have disappeared. It is central to the defence case.’

‘Carry on, Miss Park,’ said the judge. Like all judges unless television is lying, he was a very dignified black man.

‘So, Mr Tennant, could that sword have literally disappeared?’

‘Yes.’

‘Objection!’

‘Dismissed. Carry on, Miss Park.’

‘How would that be possible, Mr Tennant? Would you explain to the court, please? It flies in the face of our understanding of science.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said David Tennant, ‘you must rethink some of your fundamental beliefs about science.’

‘Objection!’ said my opposite number, panic and disbelief mingling in his voice. He understood now. ‘This is completely outside the remit of the courtroom.’

‘Your honour,’ I said, ‘I must be allowed to defend my client.’

‘Well, Miss Park,’ said the judge gravely, ‘I don’t know where this going, but you may continue for now.’

I thanked him, and asked David Tennant what he meant. He delivered his answer straight to the jury. ‘I’m sorry to be doing this. It’s only because I have been forced to. The world is full of crackpots pretending that evolution didn’t happen, or that dried camel’s brain and honey will cure epilepsy. They are deluded, of course. There are other crackpots who see conspiracies everywhere. Most of these conspiracists are lunatics screaming into the void, hungry to blame shadowy forces for their own inadequacies, but some of them, a tiny few, have been right all along. Humans are not the only intelligent life on this planet. Another race of humanoids have existed alongside you for millennia. I am one of them. We once possessed science of extraordinary power, but we warred and were exiled from our own planet. We are not more powerful than you – one thing about our exile was that we resemble you in every measurable way – and our former power and knowledge survives only as fragment and prophecy.’ The room was stunned into silence by this obvious speech, which they all knew was insane. But it was thrilling to be listening to David Tennant say it in a courtroom, like being in a story, and they had all heard things very like it from David Tennant’s lips when he was playing the Doctor. The unreality of his speech combined with his fictional persona to give him, while his momentum was unbroken, a fragile credibility. It would fall apart as soon as he stopped, surely, except he now said, ‘One of the few artefacts that remains to us is this! ‘And suddenly he was holding the sword, three-feet long and glittering in the courtroom sun. The policeman behind him seized him round the waist and grabbed for his arm, very bravely I thought, but the sword was gone.

The room erupted. Courtroom artists were feverishly trying to sketch what they were sure they had seen, the prosecution was objecting to anything it could think of, and the judge fixed me with a steely glare. ‘I very much hope you can explain this trickery, Miss Park, because I do not like trickery in my courtroom.’

‘Mr Tennant,’ I said. ‘Was that a trick?’

David Tennant smiled. ‘According to Sherlock Holmes,’ he began, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, has to be true. That is fair enough, so far as it goes, but it is unimaginative. Very, very often in their history, humans have been wrong about what is or isn’t possible, so their initial assumptions can make them believe things which they know for a fact are incredibly improbable. In those cases, the probability of them being wrong about what is impossible is much higher than the probability of the thing they are trying to persuade themselves to believe is the only possibility. For instance, in this case, it is much more probable that I have an artefact so advanced as to seem like magic than that you have all had the same collective delusion about me holding a sword – the same collective delusion that took hold of all yesterday’s witnesses.’

‘Miss Park,’ interrupted the judge, ‘Is the root of your case going to be that your client is not human?’ I nodded. ‘In which case, I am going to order a recess until tomorrow to prepare myself for the implications. I will not have this room turned into a circus. Good afternoon.’

Chapter 50: Duty-bound

‘You have to tell me about Rollo Price,’ I repeated. David Tennant still said nothing. ‘I’ve asked over and again, and the Teacher, and every time, you tell me not to worry, and Miss Smallbone has told the others that there’s nothing to worry about, but the time is coming and Rollo is part of it, and I don’t know what part. I need to understand what he’s doing in my story.’

‘I can imagine that,’ said David. ‘If I were in your position, it’s something that I would really want to know.’ And then he stopped.

‘Nice try!’ I said. ‘The Teacher tried to turn me against him, and now she says I don’t have to worry about him, but she gives me no reason, and neither do you. It’s ridiculous. It’s like he’s this shadowy figure in the background, obviously important, but no one’s ever bothered to explain him properly.’

David Tennant picked up the Evening Standard I’d brought in with me, and folded it so the only thing showing was the main headline: BARMY BORIS SLAMS FRANCE-RUSSIA PACT. HOUSE PRICE CRASH AHEAD? He wasn’t looking at it, just fiddling. He smoothed the paper, and I watched his hands, wanting to hold them. I had some faint memory about prisoners not getting nail scissors because they might turn them into those knives made out of toothbrushes (I’ve never been clear on the details) but David was perfectly neat. Eventually, he tapped his right knuckles twice gently on the table and asked me, ‘What do you know about the Unattached?’ Nothing. ‘I thought so. After our people were cast upon this planet in the giant explosion that killed the dinosaurs, etc., we divided more or less down the middle, and we have fought ever since. The angels try to save the earth, the demons seek to destroy it. But there were some who refused to pick sides, and over the millennia, others have joined them. They are the Unattached. We do not know precisely who or how many they are, a few score perhaps. Some of them, concentrating on very long-term investments, are incredibly wealthy and powerful; some are more monastic; some have gone what you might call crazy – like missionaries left too long alone. The Teacher is certain that at least some of the Unattached collaborate to maintain the status quo. They are, therefore, loosely on the side of the angels. Rollo is a part of your story, very clearly. The Master has watched him because he has been around you too often for it to be a coincidence. Perhaps the simplest reading of the Rollo situation is that he is one of the Unattached who has assigned himself to you as a Guardian, or been assigned. If he were an assassin, you would be long dead.’

‘How could he have found out about me?’

‘The Unattached have great resources, as I said.’

‘Could he have told the Master? Is that how the Master found me?’

‘I doubt it. The Unattached have joined us several times, but they have never fought on the side of the demons. They are like Switzerland. They engage only to protect themselves, and if the fate of the world is in the balance, they would join those trying to save it. Almost certainly.’

‘You are telling me half truths.’

David grinned and said, ‘You’re beautiful when you’re angry, and you learn very fast, but know this, I have told you nothing untrue.’ And he leaned forward, folded my hands in his, and said, ‘I would do anything to protect you. Anything. I…’ He exhaled. ‘I look forward to the end. You understand that I must do what the Teacher thinks is best? She has always done the right thing. It is very hard to be a leader. She loves you very much, Mary Sue. And she loves this planet very much. It’s been her whole life.’
***

I knew he thought he was doing the right thing, but I had had enough. Without another word I strode from the interview room to where I knew Rollo would be standing like a woolly-suited sentinel. I grabbed him by the arm and said, ‘Enough, Rollo. I’ve been told not to have this conversation, and I think you have too, but we’re going to have it. Come with me.’

Half an hour later, in a greasy spoon round the corner from the station, Rollo looked at me with his disconcerting eyes and said, ‘Ok. What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Tricky. May I start by saying that I’m here to protect you? That’s my job. I’m…’

‘No, Rollo. That’s all the Teacher ever says, and David Tennant, and then it’s just guff about Unattacheds, complications and prophecies no one understands. You need to tell me something that I can get to grips with, because at the moment, I don’t trust you, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to trust anyone. You are the key to this whole story in some mysterious way, and I need to know how.’

‘The Teacher told you I was an Unattached?’ he asked.

‘Don’t!’ I said. ‘Don’t repeat what they say. I want to know the truth.’

‘No you don’t. What you want is to look into my eyes, and to know for certain that you can trust me.’

‘No, I don’t. I want to…’

‘This is me, Mary Sue. No one knows you better than I do. Look into my eyes.’ He said it with such, I don’t know exactly, but depth might be part of how to explain it, that I instantly locked my eyes on his, and I looked through him almost, and I knew I would trust him with my life, absolutely, without any question.

I worry that I’ve made him sound creepy, like some circus mesmerist, but I can’t help that because I have never been very good at describing. Believe me when I say that I had, from that moment on, no doubt that Rollo would do anything to protect me. I said, ‘I trust you,’ and he squeezed my hand, and it was not like when David Tennant squeezed it. I didn’t feel any confusion – I just knew he was the best friend I’d ever have. I know I’ve said this badly. I really do know it. You’ll be thinking, ‘How could she possibly trust him after THIS. He has said literally NOTHING that I would regard as trustworthy!’ All I can say is that you didn’t look in his eyes, so you don’t understand. Those were eyes that loved me, absolutely, without exception, without consideration of time or pain. I bet no one has ever looked at you like that.

WEEKEND TEN

People, my people,

1. It was obvious, when I thought about it, but I only worked out about making BP into Mary Sue's mum at the start of last week, during the feverish period of writing about giant fish which means I am now doing a chapter today so that I will be two days ahead at the start of next week, which is still a nerve-wrackingly small amount.
2. I want to say it is nerve-wracking because it leaves me no time for quality control, but actually I have not really got any time for quality control anyway. MSIL only works (in terms of not ruining my life in areas like rent) if I severely limit the amount of time I spend on it to 'the amount of time it takes to check the chapter I am publishing for spelling mistakes + the amount of time it takes to write 1000 words'. And even then, I had really hoped to be all but done by next week, which is the first time in ages I will be able to sit down to write something someone might one day buy (If you can imagine such a thing) and I suspect I will be resenting still doing this. Partly, I think, because both the projects I expected it to have run neatly alongside over the past two months fluttered around in the near distance before disappearing into the ether, which has made it feel like a less efficient use of time than I envisaged it being.
3. But don't for a second think this means I regret writing MSIL. It has been / is still being excellent mental floss, and you (I mean 'I') never write anything without getting better at it. MSIL has been a wasteful use of time and energy, I suppose, in terms of what we economists call opportunity cost (if that is what we economists call it - my knowledge of econo-jargon is based on having read half a textbook towards the end of 1991), but maybe it has also been what we in the world where everyone uses the same expressions as my mother, 'a time of gathering.' I think and hope so.
4. I have not got the details of the ending worked out, but I have a rough idea. There are still some things that could go either way.

Stay strong.

Chapter 49: Obvious, When You Think About It

My mother was clearly captive but she looked unharmed. Her eyes flicked between the camera and whatever card or screen she was supposed to be reading from. ‘We were wrong, all of us,’ she intoned mechanically. ‘We have pretended to be meat. We have denied our true nature. We must free ourselves from the cold shackles of this prison planet. We,’ and here she coughed and stumbled, looking sharp at the camera, and shook her head saying, ‘This is all true, they’re not forcing me, I understand now, we must ascend, I don’t know what…’ At this a jolt ran through her, and her face twisted in pain. She gathered herself, turned angrily to her left and said with what looked like the last of her strength. ‘Can’t you see I understand? I agree with…’ Another jolt, and her voice when she spoke again was on the verge of tears. She went back to reading the script. ‘You must join us, Mary Sue. I love you, and it is our destiny to be together. Ask your precious Teacher. Forget your past, and think of your destiny. Nothing compares to destiny.’

The recording came to a halt. My hand was over my mouth. The stone that started dropping through my insides when I saw her face was still plummeting. Maybe being the Chosen One gave me infinitely deep metaphorical innards. I’d have preferred laservision. Or a brain. As soon as I knew David Tennant was my reincarnating father, I should have realised that my mother was… ‘But wait,’ I said to the Teacher. ‘You said she died giving birth to me, and then reincarnated! That I was the last of her strength. That doesn’t work because…’

‘She died again in a car crash, aged five. We are not immune from casual tragedy.’

I rewound the disc and froze the picture, trying to find anything of myself in her face. I knew there would be nothing – I’d already been told how I’d grown to resemble the couple who brought me up – but I desperately wanted to catch some flash of familiarity. I stared and stared. Eventually, the Teacher said gently, ‘There is nothing, Mary Sue. That’s not how it works.’

‘So,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what this means. What do we have to do now?’

‘She told us she is really your mother. She told us she is not some surgical creation.’

‘How?’

‘She said, “We must ascend”. It was the agreed signal, should this ever happen to her, or to David. It means she will do everything she can to stall them.’

‘What did she mean about the prophecy?’

Miss Smallbone bent forward, plump little hands holding each other. Her knuckles didn’t whiten the way a normal person’s would have done. ‘The prophecy is confused, and a dangerous guide. No, Mary Sue, don’t interrupt. I am going to tell you, but it is important you do not let what I say bear too heavily on you. From the prophecy, it is unclear whether or not you join the Master or kill him, that remains your choice, but it does say you join your mother, and it does say that your father sacrifices himself for you. They do not survive, and they go to a place from where they will not return. And also, they…’ She stopped.

‘You cannot…’

‘I know. It is just very difficult to explain. Our language has a much more complicated verb structure than English, as bad as Russian or something, and the conditional tense is particularly tortuous-slash-ambiguous. The Master will use an obscure section of the prophecy to confuse you: it says something along the lines of your mother being both your saviour and also the great betrayer. It is not clear who she betrays, or how, or even whether this is a good or bad thing. The phrase has so many meanings that it is fundamentally meaningless, which is why it is so dangerous. You must not trust anything the Master says about your mother. She was the purest and best of us, and I will not believe she is anything but that now. When she said, “We must ascend,” she meant we must do what we are doing. She will fight to the last, and she loves your father beyond the death she cannot avoid.’

‘When did you last speak to her?’

‘I know her, but she doesn’t know me. Only you know me, and David. And only David knows her. Her identity must be protected from the Master.’

‘And yet.’

‘And yet what?’

‘And yet there she is, Miss Smallbone. On the screen, captured. They found out who she was, and it’s obvious how they did it, if they knew about David Tennant.’ The Teacher said nothing. ‘Rose and the Doctor? Don’t you think that was a bit stupid? In retrospect? The way they looked at each other every week?’

‘They are both good actors, Mary Sue.’

‘And yet.’

‘Yes. And yet. I’m sorry.’
***

If you are a billionaire twenty-five year-old and your father marries someone old enough to be your little sister, no one expects you to think of this new step-mother as your mother. That was not exactly the problem I had thinking about my new relationship to Billie Piper, but it wasn’t exactly not what at least one of the problems was. But there was nothing to be done about that. I had a trial to prepare for, and even if The Teacher didn’t like my strategy, I couldn’t think of anything else. Sir Connaught Sampson-Samson thought it would be fun, but even he was scared. David Tennant looked proud when we discussed it. After learning that Billie was captured, his eyes locked themselves to the table for five minutes, during which he spoke in a dead monotone. After that, he was the most frightening, beautiful David Tennant, voice brittle with having to pretend. I loved every meeting with him despite it all, and our connection was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I thought, ‘So this is the connection you feel with your real father.’ I still loved the man who brought me up, but with David the bond was more utter and primal. I understood, a little, Electra and all those other tragic ones.

The trial got closer. But I still had something that needed clearing up. Once we went to court, things might happen too fast. ‘You have to tell me about Rollo Price,’ I asked him.

Chapter 48: Does She Not, To Put It In a Nutshell, Have Any Mates?

So much has happened so fast that I have forgotten to mention some things. It’s because they haven’t felt germane, exactly, but I want to say them now because they might make me seem less of a freak.

For instance, I have talked about my excellent relationship with my ‘real’ parents – the ones who brought me up – and I have mentioned having friends, and generally hinted that my life seemed quite normal ten days ago (or at least up until my wedding, which was a week before that). Since things went haywire, I have periodically mentioned that I wanted to get in touch with the people I knew, but have been stopped from doing so by the Teacher, Johnny Depp, et al. I was stopped because I was in the middle of crises, or my friends hadn’t been re-vetted, or various other good reasons, given that the people stopping me were operating under a war-footing. But of course, in these last ten days, at quieter moments, I have been allowed to speak to my family and friends. If I hadn’t, they would have assumed I was kidnapped and called the police, and made a fuss in the news, etc., and generally done what they could to counter the ludicrous pictures of me shopping with Victoria Beckham and snogging poor evil Matt Damon. I couldn’t tell my friends the details, but I said that there was something crazy going on which needed me to play a role, and that I would explain it all as soon as I could. Then, I said… Look. I’ll stop there. Suffice to say that I spoke to them, and at the end of the conversation they were reassured – not completely, but enough to let me be for the short time this whole nightmare was going to take. Talking to them made me feel better. My parents took it better than my friends and also worse. They took it better because they are much wiser than my friends, and more sensible, and they had also always known there was something curious about how I appeared in their lives, so deep down they were less surprised. But they took it worse for the same reason: it was something they had always feared.

What I am saying is that, in spite of the impression you might have got from this story, I was a normal sort of youngish person living in London. I went to work every day. I went skiing every Christmas. I had some great friends I saw most weekends, and some less good friends I met up with for drinks during the week. Because of all what has happened since my wedding, I’ve ended up telling all the most colourful bits of my history, as if it was all leading up to now. But that’s not how any of it seemed at the time. Take the archenemy period with Cathy Calloway: I used to think it was just a good way of telling an anecdote about my student days. Also, there is nothing the faintest bit unusual about the crush I had on my work-neighbour which I never did anything about. I dare say the night I spent with lovely Will, which was our secret, was unusual, but everyone who is thirty has done some things that sound colourful if you write them down – we all have baggage and mine is nothing to write home about. It’s not like I was a happily married soap-starlet’s lesbian mistress, and even if I were, it is totally possible to be one of those and have a very ordinary boring life, I happen to know, because, well, we’ll not go into that.

I don’t know why I’m saying this. It’s protesting too much, since my life has turned unusual to a world-changing degree. But put it this way: I bet it’s normal for normal people to go on and on about how normal they are when they are put in a situation where other people might think they are abnormal. I wasn’t a different person, in spite of what had happened. I wasn’t cleverer, braver or more beautiful. I had been forced to make certain decisions, and I was convinced that I was somehow important in spite of my intrinsic ordinariness, but I was the same person to look at, with the same worries and uncertainties. Thus, in need of comfort, the most comforting person I could think of was my mother. Thus, when told I couldn’t get in touch with her, and in such a way as to indicate that something terrible had happened, I flipped out. I can’t remember what I shouted at Miss Smallbone, but I do know that the next thing I knew she was standing with two fingers pressed to my elbow while I was frozen, every nerve and muscle locked helplessly. ‘No, Mary Sue,’ she said. ‘We cannot afford this. Your mother cannot afford it. Time is a luxury we do not have. So is rage. We must keep moving forward. I will release you now, and you will then be calm.’

She released me, and my body rebooted in sections. My tongue was clumsy as I stammered, ‘Is she safe? Where is she?’

‘The Master has her, and…’ Miss Smallbone’s face went white and her hand covered her little round mouth. ‘Oh Mary Sue, I am so sorry. Of course. I am not… I mean… You do not mean your…’ I was as terrified by Miss Smallbone’s stumbling as I had been by anything else she had said, and I started to realise how much I has subconsciously come to depend on her calm omniscience. ‘The mother who raised you is fine. She is untouched. I mean… The Master has your birth mother.’

Chapter 47: Back of the Class

‘No!’ said the Teacher. ‘There has to be another way.’

‘I can’t think of one.’

‘You have two weeks, Mary Sue.’

‘Have you thought of anything better?’

‘It’s not,’ Miss Smallbone began primly, and then she stopped. The silence built, and she looked at me, her moon face considering what I had just said. Then she shook her head. ‘There must be something else, but I don’t know what it is. It’s not my place.’

I was still suffused with the strange new clarity I’d found in the courtroom earlier, and so, to Miss Smallbone, the super-competent leader of the forces of good, I said, ‘That sounds like evasion, Teacher.’ Her eyes snapped to mine, pale blue, glittering. I’d never seen her in anything other than complete control, and it was frightening, but not very. She wasn’t angry with me. She was unused to any feeling of doubt, and she was trying to understand my plan, which would involve an upheaval of all she had known for so long. ‘The prophecy says that I find a way to cut my father out of a metaphorical coiled snake, as if with a sword. That sounds like I do it by changing the rules, doesn’t it? By not accepting the snake’s terms? Isn’t that what this plan does? Can you think of another way to get David Tennant off this murder charge?’

‘But…’ began Miss Smallbone. She wanted to say something, but she stopped. ‘You will find the way.’

‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘You will find the way, Mary Sue, but in this case, I want you to think very hard about alternatives.’

‘Stop treating me like a child. Since this started, all you’ve told me is little bits of the story.’

‘It’s for your own safety.’

‘I’ve had enough of it.’

‘I dare say,’ said Miss Smallbone.

I was enraged. I’d been kidnapped, drugged and flown around the world. I’d nearly been killed, I’d killed and I’d been told I would save the world, and still the Teacher didn’t trust me. My calm deserted me, and I said, ‘You can’t send someone into battle without telling them everything.’

‘Of course you can. That is exactly what you do. You send people into battle knowing only the things they need to know.’

‘Get out of my house,’ I said, but I didn’t mean it.

‘I’m sorry, but you know that I’m right. Sit down, and let me make you some tea.’
***

Never underestimate the power of cliché. Tea made me feel better, as it always has. When I first graduated from tea-at-teatime and the odd hot chocolate onto regular-hot-drinks-through-the-day as a sixteen year old (I wasn’t very precocious), the drink I graduated to was instant coffee, because that was what my mother drank. Then, when I got to university, it seemed as if everyone drank coffee, with tea as the periodic other-option, usually to be drunk at teatime. And yet, by the time a graduated three years later, everyone was drinking tea. I don’t know why this was, since the period coincided with the Starbucks revolution. Oh, of course, I suddenly think, maybe that is precisely it: maybe Starbucks gave everyone certain expectations of coffee, which meant that instant coffee was no longer acceptable, while tea made at home was almost always decent? With insights like this I could write lazy columns for the national press. Whatever, the tea I had with friends at the time I was graduating was no more mystical than the coffee I had with them when I arrived, but it is the drink we still have whenever we meet up, and so tea means comfort, and periods of stillness and relaxation with people who are demanding nothing.

What I am groping ever so clumsily towards is that doing something which you almost always do when you are in a certain mood – such as wearing flip-flops and a sundress when you are on holiday for instance – can bring on that mood. So that, even if you are working on a grim Sunday in your flat and you turn up the heating high and put on flip-flops and a sundress, you can trick your body into feeling that it must be having fun, because all the physical signals are there that you are on holiday. Or maybe my body is just particularly suggestible. Whatever, if I started always having tea in moments of stress with murderers or something, or with deceptive supposed-leaders sending me to my death without telling me that it’s all part of some big plan, then I suppose tea would have different associations, and it would lose its power to induce calm, but that was not the case here. Instead, the action of drinking tea in my kitchen was so strongly associated with certain things that it brought on the usual calm, which was a mood I don’t think I’d felt properly since watching the decapitation. Just like Miss Smallbone knew it would.

‘I am sorry there are still secrets, Mary Sue. I really am.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You are not my comforter. I’ll call my mother.’

Miss Smallbone’s white face went white. ‘I’m afraid you can’t do that,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

Chapter 46: I'd Almost Forgotten About Her

I shouldn’t have been surprised to see my archenemy at David Tennant’s arraignment. The process took twenty minutes because of all the media fuss. I’d spent all morning answering police questions, including some from a tall LAPD detective called Landseer who’d flown to England to question me about the Vanessa Paradis/Ewan McGregor shootings. For some reason, blind panic, probably, I located within me a hitherto never-suspected zen-like focus. I needed every bit of it when I walked out of the courtroom into the flashlights, which I expected, and into Cathy Calloway, who I did not.
Cathy was dressed as the mourning wife in a mafia movie – black pill-box hat and a little veil, black suit with short skirt, patent leather stilettos, white face, mouth a red slash, nails like talons. ‘You murdered the love of my life!’ she hissed.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘You killed him!’

‘That’s an extremely bold accusation to be making in public, Miss Calloway,’ I said.

‘You know what I mean, you dumpy bitch!’

‘I’m accused of nothing, and my client denies the charge.’

‘He killed Gavin, because you told him to.’

I raised my voice, ever so slightly, and said, ‘Gavin, the love of your life?’

‘Yes. Of course he was! You know…’

‘Gavin, my husband? My husband was the love of your life?’

‘Shut up! You know exactly what I am saying!’

She was saying was that the demon Gavin was her partner through the millennia, but of course she couldn’t say that to the press. I saw precisely what I had to say to wind her up. ‘You are saying you and my husband were the love of each other’s lives?’

‘Of course we were. Anyone could see it.’

‘I have to say, Miss Calloway, that if I were the police, I would look at the situation and think that this Gavin had clearly chosen one of these two women, and he’d done so in a very public way, with a ring, and given that one of the two women is now completely hysterical as a result, it seems that we should maybe be looking at how she reacted when she was scorned by this Gavin. Maybe she was so upset she wanted to kill him?’

‘You know that’s not true. You know why he married you!’

‘Yes, or I presume so. I presume he married me because he loved me. It can’t have been money, or status, since you have more of those things than I have. So it must have been because he loved me more than you. I’m sorry you can’t accept that.’

‘He chose me at the wedding!’

‘You seduced him when he was drunk, and we had a fight. Look, Cathy, none of this is decorous. I’m sure you didn’t kill him, and nor did I.’

‘David Tennant killed him, and you told him to!’

‘If you repeat what you just said, you will be in court for slander. Surely you shouldn’t be making an exhibition of all this. Cathy dear. It’s so vulgar.’ And I swept out. I’d never swept out of anywhere in my life before. I’d tried a few times, but I’d usually just knocked something over. Maybe being doomed really does make you cooler. Although, on the being doomed front, Cathy Calloway had given me the glimmering of an idea.
***

I told David Tennant my idea, and he liked it. I want to say, ‘I felt like a clever girl trying to impress her dad, and basking in the glow of his approval,’ but this was not what I felt like. I wanted to impress him, and was excited when he was impressed, but… Well. The thing about this is that I’ve never been a kinky person in any way. I’m not a kinky person, I don’t think.
***

Miss Smallbone was in my flat when I got home. How she got past the reporters was just one of the many mysteries. She must have been able to teleport, basically, though when I accused her of doing so, she denied it with a faint smile. ‘Do you have an idea, Mary Sue?’ I told her my idea, and her face fell.

WEEKEND NINE

Hi, hi, hi,

Late with weekend round-up. Lateness merely the result of nightmarish panic (blah, blah, blah), and a weekendly round-up not being part of the original commitment, and etc. Have only written a couple of things since getting back from NY because computer has gone West to join the phone, and, wait a second, you really don't need to hear about the many tedious ways in which I am sometimes forced to pay my rent.

Whatever. From tomorrow, I will be writing the day before I post, which is slightly nervewracking. It certainly doesn't leave me any leeway to get ill. It is what it is.

Chapter 45: Not Appropriate

‘Mary Sue,’ said David Tennant. ‘I thought you’d abandoned me!’

‘No, I’d never! I was… Oh, wait, you’re joking, right?’ Of course he was. He knew all about my death defying adventures. And that wasn’t all. Before we began working out how to extricate him from this murder charge, there was something incredibly important that I had to say. ‘I know who you are,’ I said. ‘The Teacher told me.’

‘Oh,’ he said, looking at the table. ‘I… Well.’ I can see why he hadn’t told me before. Knowing that David Tennant was an evil reincarnating demon who had fathered me and then turned good for the love of my angel mother, who had stayed lost for thousands of years when she learned who he was, definitely made things weird. But it was something we had to get through. He looked down at his hands with the face he wears on television when he is doing something that hurts him but is the right thing to do. And then he gave me the sparkling grin he does next, and said, ‘Well, yes. There it is! Been remiss at birthdays. Not much of a dad, am I?’

He didn’t feel like my dad. I had a dad, who had been my dad all my life. David Tennant felt like… Well, he felt like David Tennant. Except that now, when I looked at him, I finally understood what it was about his face that made him so mesmeric. His eyes were old. I can’t explain it, and maybe I just saw things because I knew them, but they seemed like eyes-like-fathomless-wells in bad romantic novels. He said, ‘You’ve cut it pretty fine, haven’t you. The arraignment is tomorrow. The Teacher must be doing his nut.’

‘I haven’t spoken to Miss…’

‘Mary Sue, Mary Sue, I cannot imagine what you are going to say, but before you say it: walls have ears.’ Of course. I’d been going to mention Miss Smallbone’s name. David Tennant and I were the only people who knew who she was. Miss S had called to tell me Sir Connaught Sampson-Samson was picking me up to bring me here, but by the time I let him into my house, she was off the phone, and I had no way to get back in touch with her.

In the car, I had asked Sir Conn, my head of chambers, why he couldn’t take over from me as David Tennant’s counsel. He said, ‘Won’t work, old fish, I’m all out of ideas. The prophecy says that your father will be beyond hope, coiled in a snake or some such metaphor, and you will cut through the metaphorical coiled snake with a sword. Specifically, says the prophecy, you will prove his innocence, which could hardly be more apposite, no? It will be like a miracle, because you will see something no one else sees, and do something no one else could have done. There is also something about him sacrificing himself for you and your mother, but that comes later. The language in the original is more ornate, but that’s the gist. Looking forward to it – seen a lot of hopeless cases, but this one beats the band. So, every faith in you, but we probably best get off to see Tennant, since time’s winged chariot.’ Like most of the angels, Sir Conn’s lip crinkled when he said David Tennant’s name. They couldn’t forgive him his millennia of evil. He looked back at the road, having not done so for the duration of the above speech, slammed on the brakes, and shouted, ‘GET OUT OF MY WAY, FOXTONS-MINI-TOERAG! Ha ha. Parp parp.’

Sergeant Rollo Price followed behind, in his own car, not a police one. I asked Sir Conn if Rollo was an angel or a demon, and why the Master had photographs of him in his LA mansion. Sir Conn said he knew nothing about Rollo, and I believed him. But Sir Conn also agreed that it was suspicious. ‘Speak to the Teacher about it,’ he said.

The case certainly seemed like a hopeless metaphorical coiled snake. Thirty lawyers had witnessed David Tennant decapitating my husband. Even if his weapon had mysteriously disappeared, it was the definition of an unwinnable case. I asked David what he thought, and whether he might consider insanity as a plea, and he said, ‘The prophecy says you’ll prove me innocent. You’re my girl,’ he said, something wrenching at his face again from inside, ‘No idea how you’ll do it, but I can’t see what can possibly go wrong.’

I asked more questions, but he was unhelpful. He said, ‘Doesn’t really matter yet, tomorrow’s the arraignment, I’m pleading “Not Guilty” whatever, and then you’ll have a couple of weeks. Plenty of time. What’s le Pen up to?’

‘He’s still saying it was an accident. Everyone believes him except Mayor Boris.’

‘I’ve always liked Boris.’

‘Yes. Who is my mother, David? Do you have any idea who…’

‘No. You will have to ask the Teacher.’ And right at that moment, I remembered that when he puts on his brave face on the telly, it always means that he’s lying to his companion because he thinks it’s for the best. Technically, it was irritating now it involved me, but it has always been my very favourite expression of his, the doomed sense of self-denial, the thing I love most about the Doctor. What I felt about him at that moment, as a ray of sun flashed across his face, was very inappropriate indeed. God help me, I thought, because it looked like no one else could.

Chapter 44: Masterful

Omigod. Johnny Depp’s eyes were heavy and glowing above my face, like two jewels I knew were cursed but which were so beautiful that my hand was drawn to them anyway. Omigod, omigod, omigod.

The Teacher told me not to have sex with Johnny Depp because it would be a disaster in ways I couldn’t imagine. And the Master was supposed to have some unstoppable way of making me forget myself and join his evil plans. And sex with Johnny Depp was so amazing that I was prepared to do it even though the Teacher, who was trying to save the world, told me not to. And no one knew who the Master was, because he was the cleverest of the demons, just like the Teacher, Miss Smallbone, was the cleverest of the angels. But if she was the cleverest of the angels, how could she risk this if she knew or even suspected that Johnny Depp was the Master? And if Johnny Depp was the Master, what did that make Rollo Price, who had turned up in Los Angeles when the Master was supposed to. What I can tell you is what all this made me: completely paranoid. Johnny said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘We shouldn’t do this,’ he said, and kissed me, and it felt as if every bone in my body went soft. The phone rang. ‘Leave it,’ he said. I left it. If he was the Master, then what harm did this do? I knew who he was, and so I was forewarned, and it was as if, basically, I was using him to gratify myself. I was completely using Johnny Depp. And then I would have this memory forever, and no one could take it away from me, and all of those things. And my bones were even softer, and it felt as if he was melting into me.

And then my answerphone kicked in, and the disguised voice of the Teacher said, ‘Stop it, Mary Sue! I can see what you’re doing. I told you not to, and I have very good reasons that I do not, at this moment, have time to explain, because I am trying to save the world. Suffice for the moment to say that your doorbell is going to ring at any moment, and you have work to do, and both of you need to get this hormonal nonsense out of your heads. Get off her, Johnny. I know you’re upset, and thinking about Vanessa, but she was a brave soldier, and you must be brave too.’

The phone clicked, and the doorbell rang. Johnny said, ‘I wasn’t think about Vanessa,’ and he kissed me again, very gently, and my arms tightened around him, but he smiled ruefully and pushed himself up to the full length of his arms. Then he winked, and hopped up, and pulled me after him. I went to the door, smoothing my hair. I was so discombobulated that I hadn’t properly considered who might be waiting – I took it on trust that it would be someone good, since the Teacher hadn’t given me any specific warnings – so when I opened it and there stood Rollo Price, it felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

‘Mary Sue?’ he said, stepping towards me, as I instinctively moved away. ‘Are you ok? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost?’ Press cameras clittered in the background. I forgot to mention the cameras earlier. Since I had been photographed with David Tennant, Matt Damon, Victoria Beckham and the Depps, and then sort-of-disappeared while I was at the centre of a series of international crime investigations involving top celebrities, I had become a sort of celebrity myself, and there were paparazzi camped outside my door when I got back, but Johnny Depp whisked me in past them as if it was all in a day’s work, which for him it was. But now they were taking pictures of me and Rollo, and behind Rollo was Sir Connaught Sampson-Samson, my head of chambers.

‘Fun, isn’t it?’ said Sir Conn. ‘But still, maybe better inside?’ Sir Conn was an angel, and I definitely trusted him. But Rollo? Sir Conn saw me looking at him sceptically, and he said, ‘It’s ok, Mary Sue. I’m here.’ So we went in.

Because I have never said anything else to anyone visiting my flat ever, I asked if they wanted tea, and they said yes, so we all stood in the not very large kitchen while the kettle boiled. Johnny hovered protectively, which I liked, which made me nearly as terrified, deep down in my soul, as the fact that Rollo looked as if he was about to leap on Johnny and pull his head off. Sir Conn acted as if he were oblivious to all this, but if there was one thing I had learned about Sir Connaught Sampson-Samson it was that he was oblivious to nothing, ever. A couple of times, I caught his eyes flashing from beneath their hooded lids, gauging the situation, calculating the points of particular stress. Eventually, I could hold off no more, and I said, ‘So, Rollo, plain clothes today. Are you on holiday? Have you been anywhere nice?’ A pause while he gauged what I knew and conjured up some inoffensive lie, but before he could tell it, I said, ‘What are you up to, Rollo?’

‘I might ask you the same question.’

‘I might answer it, if you arrest me. But you’re in my house now.’

‘I’ve been looking for you. You’re a witness in a murder investigation. I know you, so I was the obvious person to send to LA to ask you to come back.’

‘So you could pretend to be my friend?’ He looked blank, so I added, ‘I heard you tell your partner that that’s what you were doing.’

‘Is that why you’re angry? I told her that because it’s best not to let on to your fellow policemen that a witness is your mate. Saying that was what kept me on the case. So I could protect you.’

‘What happened in LA?’

‘Nothing. We heard you were in Harrison Ford’s mansion. We arrived…’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Me and Detective Landseer, LAPD. But as soon as we arrived, there was a massive fuss, and some shooting.’ Oh. That had been me, escaping. ‘I wanted to go in, but we were blocked off and told to wait. Landseer said we were leaving. A couple of bodyguards told us we had to stay. Then Landseer called for back-up, and then Harrison Ford arrived, heard what was happening, and told his bodyguards that they couldn’t afford any trouble, and that we would have to go. Harrison Ford looked at me as if he knew who I was. It was freaky. What have you got yourself mixed up in, Mary Sue?’ If he was lying, he was a brilliant actor. But then, if he was the Master, then he WOULD be a brilliant actor. I still didn’t know who to trust.

‘Entertaining as all this is,’ said Sir Conn, ‘your client is going before a judge tomorrow, and he really needs to see you.’ In all the furore, I had (almost) forgotten about David Tennant.

Chapter 43: Does She Not, To Put It in a Nutshell, Fuck?

Here are a collection of moments that I have not described in detail because I have had other things on my mind, but which I was mulling over during the two hours I spent on the sofa watching nuclear bomb news with Johnny Depp. They did not occur to me in this neat chronological order, but by the end of the two hours, that is how I had sifted them in my mind.
***

When Cathy Calloway revealed herself as my archenemy by shagging Rollo Price loudly in the room next to mine, and I sat drinking embarrassed tea with nice big Canadian Harley, I grew mortified and angry, but also frustrated. When Harley went to leave, I kissed him and asked him to stay. It was my first time, and Harley was not particularly gentle, but he was very sweet. I thought of making my own loud cries for Cathy and Rollo’s benefit, but even at the time I realised that would have been too ridiculously obvious for words. I was drunk and angry, and what I did, while maybe not particularly kind to Harley in the short-term, though I doubt he ever minded much, was a normal sort of thing to do, under the circumstances.
***

When I came upon my husband shagging Cathy Calloway, and she saw me and pretended to come, I knew she was faking it, because Gavin was not very good in bed. I had taught him enough about me that I didn’t have to take matters into my own hands, and it was often very nice, but it required him to be dutiful. He needed specific teaching. He had no instinct at all. There was not a way in hell he could have achieved success shagging someone standing up. Underneath my horror and betrayal, the knowledge that Cathy was faking it made things very slightly less awful. This is a completely normal reaction, on my part.
***

When I went back to work while Gavin took Cathy on my honeymoon, my gloomy neighbour who I’d always fancied came to see if I was alright. He brought a small latte with an extra shot, which was my regular, and an orange which he had cut up into cute little eighths. He sat in my clients’ chair, and a fantasy flashed into my head that he was about to say that he had also discovered his wife was unfaithful, and it was like fate, and was there any point waiting for a discreet amount of time to pass when this thing between us was so strong? This is absolutely not how I felt or what I wanted – I liked him and his wife, and what there was between us, if anything, was far in the past, but I had no viable dreams of a better personal life, and this one jumped into my mind fully-formed. This kind of thing happens to everyone all the time, and it’s perfectly normal.
***

When David Tennant came into my office a few hours after that, I had some very different instant fantasies. They were easily accessible and relocatable to my office, since they were part of the regular fantastical apparatus that anyone engaged to Gavin would need to have available to enhance that side of her life. It’s not that I haven’t had a normal amount in my life, with normal people, but I’ve always refused to regard it as the bedrock of a relationship or anything, since obviously no sex life will be great forever (people say), and if you built on that alone, you were building on sand, so you built on something solid (like I had with Gavin, ha ha ha). When I had sex with Gavin, which was fine, I thought of David Tennant, and other people I could never even possibly have sex with. I did NOT think of my gloomy neighbour. I didn’t think of Rollo, even. That would have been wishing for a different reality, whereas daydreaming about David Tennant had nothing to do with life. It was just for fun, and it didn’t feel unfaithful. When I had the momentary fantasies on seeing David Tennant in the flesh, they suddenly felt new. They didn’t feel unfaithful, exactly, because I didn’t have anyone to be unfaithful to, but they felt somehow sullied, like pornography or something. Embarrassing, actually, is what they felt. This was a man who was a figure of my joking fantasy life, and also my secret real fantasy life, but I could hardly tell him that, because it would objectify him, and he was a real person with real feelings, and… This was a ridiculous train of thought, obviously, but getting cold feet on encountering one’s fantasy: perfectly normal.
***

When I was standing with Rollo Price on the roof of the police station, I could not remove from myself how much and how desperately I had once wanted him. When he chose Cathy, I told myself and everyone who would listen that this proved how incompatible we were, which won’t have fooled anyone except me (I am very easy to fool). I even tried to pretend I was unmoved by Cathy going on and on about how amazing he was in bed. None of the men I ever slept with (eight, if you’re desperate to know) were amazing in bed. They were mostly perfectly ok – I mean, they had all read enough furtive copies of Cosmo, and ‘accidentally’ watched enough Sex and the City to know that orgasms are important and they would be judged harshly for not providing them – but I basically began to think that there was no such thing as ‘amazing in bed,’ and orgasms were all basically the same after all (even though I knew very well, deep down, that this was not so, so who was I trying to kid?). This kind of thought is perfectly normal when your sex life is in the doldrums.
***


When I found out David Tennant was my father, I was mortified. I could pretend that this was because I felt icky about having fantasised about my father, but it was really because he had entered my real life, and although you get cold feet when your fantasy enters your real life, you also reshape your fantasy to fit the new circumstances, and I couldn’t help myself from having wondered if, just possibly, I mean, here he was, asking me for help, and he was so gorgeous, and, etc. But if he was my father then that was that, and another fantasy bites the dust. This also feels like a normal and plausible reaction to this set of circumstances.
***

When I was having sex with Johnny Depp, therefore, and realising that there really IS such a thing as amazing sex, I was thinking to myself that, on the many occasions when I had given opinions about sex while I chatted with my friends, it must have been ludicrously obvious that I didn’t know what I had been talking about. This is why, a day and a continent later, when Johnny Depp rolled me off the sofa, it was a perfectly normal reaction that I pantingly ignored the fact that that the Teacher had told us in no uncertain terms that us having sex would be a disaster. Why was that? How could it be? I mean, Johnny was so masterful!

Chapter 42: Missile to Mayfair

Johnny Depp piloted his jet down to the private airstrip, which was near Luton airport and piggy-backed off its air traffic control resources somehow. Luton was where all the celebrities surprisingly keep their planes. There was even, Johnny told me, a top secret branch of Soho House in this dull Hertforshire town. CRACKLE, and the disguised voice of the Master burst out of the radio. ‘Johnny! We are tracking you! We know you are landing in London! You have only two minutes to turn away. The nuclear missile is already at the south coast. Everyone in London is going to die, and you won’t be safe in Luton, if that’s what you think!’

‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ said Johnny Depp.

‘This isn’t a movie! There’s no deus ex machina. There’s just a pulverising holocaust and a city full of corpses.’

‘One of them will be mine,’ I said, calmly.

‘Yes! Stop him, Mary Sue. Turn him round. He’s doing it because we killed Vanessa. He’s not being rational.’

‘You sound very upset,’ I said.

‘I’m…’

‘It’s interesting for me, psychologically, how upset you seem. I’m new to all this, you see. I’m coming to it fresh, and I have to say that comparing you with the Teacher, who I’ve just been speaking to, it’s like chalk and cheese.’

‘I don’t care about the Teacher. I just want you to… What do you mean? Is he cooler than me?’

‘He’s way cooler.’

‘You’re just trying to… Oh. Wait. You’ve been speaking to the Teacher! He’s told you to fly into the flames.’

‘I am literally like a moth.'

‘Don’t be absurd. The Teacher wants you dead because he’s scared of what you and I could do together. He knows that if you were on his side, the pair of you could kill me, but he’s frightened that you will join me, and we will open the Gates of Hell together. He’s a coward because he knows, in his heart, that he is a traitor to his kind. To OUR kind, Mary Sue. But if you really do want to beat me, then you have to save yourself. You’re the only one who can kill me, says the prophecy. If you don’t do it, I carry on wreaking havoc, time out of mind. I might not be able to open the Gates of Hell, but does that really matter when I can destroy London like I am about to do RIGHT NOW? I will destroy every major city in the world tomorrow if you do not turn away. Every major centre of population. I don’t care if I turn the world into a desert. I reincarnate and reincarnate, and so do we all, and, in the end, another of my demons will procreate with an angel, and there will be another Chosen One, and this suicide of yours, this fit of childish pique, will have been for nothing. You are destroying the world you know. Let that be on your conscience, Mary Sue.’

The wheels touched down, and Johnny Depp held my hand. I said, ‘When it’s your time, it’s your time.’
***

Two hours later, back in my flat, we were watching the news. Pictures, of Green Park showed where the missile had landed, and failed to explode, but still caused massive devastation. It killed eighty people sitting in the sun, and wounded hundreds more. At the bottom of the screen, a banner marched leftwards proclaiming that the French President le Pen said this was a terrible accident, the actions of a rogue submarine captain over-reacting to the approach of a British destroyer attempting to break the blockade of the Channel Islands. Le Pen’s speech, which we’d watched several times by now, threw much blame onto this British destroyer, which had entered what he described as ‘French Territorial Waters.’ World leaders had lined up to condemn French aggression in the Channel, and le Pen’s mealy-mouthed evasions, but they all accepted that the missile was a tragic accident. Of course they did. Who could possibly believe that even le Pen would nuke London, since he would immediately face global reprisals? Everyone said it was a miracle that the missile hadn’t exploded. President Bush described it as a gift from God, and normally everyone would have laughed at him, and maybe they would tomorrow, but it’s how everyone was feeling. Johnny Depp and I knew the truth, of course, but we weren’t telling anyone that for now.

The other politician who’d been playing on a constant loop was Boris Johnson. He knew about the Teacher. He knew that le Pen had been trying, on his Master’s orders, to neutralise the angels. Of course he didn’t say all this. What he said was, ‘I know it is almost impossible to believe, but this wasn’t a mistake. Most of the Froggies, pardon my French, are innocent, but le Pen is a horror, a lunatic, and everything he says about British aggression is guff. This submarine captain is at the peak of his profession. He’s been trained NOT to fire nuclear missiles without extreme provocation or very clear orders. He has clearly received the latter. Londoners are lucky that the French can’t build proper bombs, but we will never forget this, and we know it was no mistake. We do not know what France is doing, but she is doing something, and when it becomes clear what that is, we will be ready. We have stood in her way before, and we will stand in her way again. We will use luck, and we will use steel, and she may think we will fail, but we never have, and we never will.’ Boris was being slated for his bombastic tone, and for not understanding the only possible rational explanation for what had happened. World leaders censured him. Gordon Brown cautiously supported London and Londoners, but warned against over-reaction until all the facts were known.

And then Vladimir Putin spoke. He said that Boris Johnson was the unacceptable face of British Imperialism, and France was right to take back her Channel Islands, and that Russia stood four-square behind le Pen. But I didn’t pay as much attention as I perhaps should have because I was on the sofa with Johnny Depp, and I hadn’t forgotten what happened in the batcave. However wrong it was supposed to have been, it was the first time in a week I had forgot myself, and been at peace, albeit in very unpeaceful way. But there’s no way Johnny could have been feeling the same way, so it wouldn’t matter if I let my feet sort of accidentally touch his side. The instant after I touched him he had rolled me off the sofa and onto the floor, somehow catching me so there was no fall, and we were kissing, and I was wrapping around him, and neither of us were thinking about the Teacher, as far as I could tell.

Chapter 41: Misplaced Trust

‘You’re alive!’ said Johnny Depp.

‘So it would seem,’ said the Teacher.

‘But…’ I said.

‘You’re ALIVE!’ said Johnny Depp.

‘Yes. And annoyed, since my plan for discovering the Master’s identity was ruined when Mary Sue decided to go walkabout. Explain yourself, Mary Sue.’

‘I heard you’d been captured and tortured to death.’

‘That wasn’t me.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Grainne Sand.’

‘Grainne!’ said Johnny Depp.

‘Yes. A very brave angel prepared to go to her death if the demons realised they’d been infiltrated.’

‘A suicide mission!’ I said.

‘This is a war, Mary Sue.’ The Teacher almost sounded tired. ‘Sacrifices are necessary sometimes. Grainne was there to pay the final price, and allow us to escape, which she did, but her sacrifice was wasted.’

‘I’m so sorry. But maybe you should have told me the plan.’

‘Maybe so,’ said the Teacher.

‘It wasn’t completely wasted. I did escape.’

‘Yes,’ said the Teacher. ‘I was both surprised and impressed by that. How did you do it?’

‘Well,’ I said, flattered, ‘it was like this. I…’

‘Actually, there’s no time. The key thing is for you to now land in London.’ Johnny Depp asked the Teacher to repeat this, since London was about to be blown up by a nuclear missile. ‘Land in London, Johnny. Trust me.’

I had trusted Gavin, my recently murdered husband. I never REALLY loved him, but still I married him because he seemed to be good enough, and it was time. When I say that out loud, I want to stab myself in the hand with a knife for being so stupid, but there it is. Whatever. That’s all beside the point, because while I didn’t LOVE Gavin, I did trust him. I absolutely did. But he was a demon who had wormed his way into my affections (I did feel affection for him ((tinged with pity (listen to me! What was I doing?!))), and even in addition to that very fundamental deception about his whole nature and purpose, he had sex with someone else at our wedding reception. Ergo misplaced trust. Then, also, I trusted Rollo Price, my old friend from university who became a policeman and acted like a knight in shiny armour when I was being questioned after David Tennant killed Gavin to protect me. But then I heard Rollo say it was all his tactics to get me to confess, and then I found Rollo’s picture in the headquarters of the people trying to make me destroy the world, and Rollo turned up at these headquarters when the evil Master was supposed to. Ergo misplaced trust. Among other people I have trusted are Johnny Depp, who at various points said I should be killed and he’d do it himself; my parents, who never told me I was a foundling; my so-called best friend at school, Hetty Winglass, who thought I was boring; and there are bound to be others but I worry there is a danger of my sounding self-pitying if I carry on. But a pattern begins to emerge. I wanted desperately to trust the Teacher. She was the leader of the angels who were, I was almost certain, trying to protect me. But she was saying, through the voice-disguiser that made her sound like a man, that we had to land in London even though a nuclear bomb etc. And there had been a time very recently when she kept me drugged so I wouldn’t be able to mess up her plan to find out who the Master was (though that fell through, unless the Master was Rollo). So, while I trusted her to do what she though was the best thing for the world, I could tell she was a leader, and prepared to make the hard decisions, and one of those might be to sacrifice me, since if I was dead, the Master wouldn’t be able to open the Gates of Hell, which sounded like the all-time worst-case scenario.

‘Please repeat instructions,’ said Johnny Depp again.

‘I don’t have time for this, Johnny.’

‘But…’

‘Unless the physical missile hits your plane, you will be safe. The warhead will not explode.’

‘But…’

‘I’ll explain very quickly, so don’t interrupt: after the Cuban missile crisis, I decided that nuclear weapons were really dangerous.’

‘Ok.’

‘So I disarmed them.’

‘How did you do that? How come you…’

‘Did I not ask you not to interrupt? And do you not remember that I dropped out of circulation for ten years in the late sixties and early seventies?’

‘Yes.’

‘What I was doing, with a very small team of assistants, was going to all the world’s nuclear facilities, and injecting the weapon cores with a cocktail of ion pacifiers, rendering their reactive plasma inert.’

‘That’s incredible. But what about new weapons?’

‘We have an ongoing programme of factory-based inertification, combined with a load of scientists I have bribed to get the maths wrong so that basically all nuclear weapons are duff these days.’

‘That’s incredible.’

‘So you said. But what do you think I was doing all that time? Now I need you to land in London and get Mary Sue to David Tennant. He goes to trial the day after tomorrow, and he needs her. I don’t know what the strategy will be, but the End of Days is coming, and this whole mess is part of it, and I need her to be where she needs to be, and where we can have a team of angels looking after her. And, while I know you two enjoyed it, it would be better if you don’t have any more sex with each other.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Come on, Johnny. I’ve got cameras in that batcave.’

‘What harm could it do?’

‘You have no idea, Johnny. Trust me.’