Bafflement and Devotion
Whatever she says, she first met him on the desert world Hyspero, while he was in his Eighth incarnation, and they all got mixed up in the devilish shenanigans of the Scarlet Empress (1). Somehow he recognised her. She convinced him - this addlepated woman, tough as old boots - that they had known each other for centuries and had met many, many times before.
No. It was before that. In eighteenth century England, when he was Doctor number four. Tom Baker. She’d dragged him into Jane Austen’s world; tugged him deftly by the ends of his endless scarf. That was the first time. Definitively. (2)
But even then, he still recognised her. She looked just like Beryl Reid. She was rude and abrupt and insinuating. She knew far more about him than she was letting on.
And before that; he had memories of her coming to Earth to visit him, back when he was exiled and disgruntled lord of his own manor. She’d been involved in a ghastly plot to make him think he was losing his mind and faking the various alien invasions that were going on all over the joint in the nineteen seventies. (3)
Before that, too, when he was Patrick Troughton; with the Dalek Supreme in the diamond mines of Marlion. And her butch dyke traffic warden assistant Jenny had had a stomach complaint because she wasn’t used to time travel. (4)
She had pleaded for his life, that time. She did it out of love for him. She was devoted to him. She always had been, it turned out, and always would be.
But Iris always left the Doctor completely baffled.
‘I suppose what you have to remember about Paul is that he’s so relentlessly nostalgic. And all the things he’s nostalgic about, he has to go back - into the past, as it were - and collect them up again. He has a terrible fear that, as he goes on, everything behind him is vanishing. Maybe that’s why he writes books; to prove, at least to himself, that he was actually there.’
The blonde in the catsuit was painting her toenails. Her feet were up on the coffee table and a yellow cocktail cigarette smouldering in the ashtray.
‘It’s like,’ she chuckled, ‘when all his Terrance Dicks novelisations vanished overnight. Then he found all one-hundred and fifty of them on a market stall in Newton Aycliffe, being rained on and being resold at an exorbitant price. Well, he wasn’t going to buy them back. He knew them just about off by heart anyway. So what was he going to do?’
She paused to blow on her feet as the bus they were travelling in gave a small lurch. Her companion, a distinguished looking fella in a green velvet jacket looked uncomfortable.
‘He’d have to write them all again. With remembered patches and shreds and doing it like he wanted it to be.’
The man coughed awkwardly. ‘Nostalgia’s a dangerous business. Isn’t it better to push on ahead, leaving old lives behind, having new adventures?’
Iris gave him a hard stare. ‘Who says?’ She wrinkled her nose and shrugged. ‘There’s an awful lot to be said for rewriting and revisiting the past. Anyway, last time I saw him he was all excited about having found a copy of the Geoff Love orchestra doing the theme tune in l978 ... a kind of disco version in brass and woodwind. It had been one of his favourite records when he was eight. Still brought tears to his eyes.’
‘Just like I get over Brahms and Mahler.’
Iris looked at him wryly. ‘There you go. You’re so relentlessly high-culture, Doctor. A bit of a snob, really. You have to admit to enjoying trash sometimes, you know. For its own sake. Lighten up.’
He grimaced. ‘Trash?’ he said.
‘Low cultural artefacts.’ Iris reached over and patted his knee. ‘In a word, lovey: Us.’
I was asked to write something about the books I’ve written.
I suppose I believe any writer writes the books they really want to read. They write the books they think they remember reading when they were children. Now those books are gone and lost in a house move or an accident. Or they reconstitute themselves magically, distorted, like a dream.
When I was asked to write this, it was because (I was told) those books of mine evince devotion and bafflement, in equal measures, in their readers.
Good.
That’s exactly what I always got out of Doctor Who and, indeed, out of all of the books I ever loved.
The bus was steaming merrily along through the time-space vortex. Once her golden nails were dry, Iris popped back to the cab to take the wheel again. She was thinking about how she’d actually been at the recording of that Geoff Love orchestral version of the theme. Back when she’d worked for the Ministry, and someone High Up had suspicions that the lauded conductor was secreting subliminal messages into his elaborate reworkings of TV scifi themes. He’d been quite right, of course. (5)
Disguised as a distinguished cellist and Space l999 freak, Iris had been the one giving Love advice on his arrangements; that he should bolster the formidable brass section so as to make it sound like the menacing, ravening hordes of the Doctor’s enemies encroaching on him and his friends through their endless travels. Geoff Love had been delighted with her suggestions.
She hunted for the tape in her glove compartment.
The Doctor was by her side. ‘If I were more rational ... what would I suppose then, hm?’
‘Don’t know, ducky.’
‘I’ll tell you what. That you were an imposter of some kind. Someone dreamed up and injected retrospectively into my already-troubled time stream to further complicate my lives.’
‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘Who by? A faction of paradox-inducing psychopaths from the far future perhaps?’ (6)
‘Or maybe,’ he went on, his mouth tight, ‘you’re from some other dimension where I’m someone else entirely and all the times you claim to have met me, you really did ... and we did know each other throughout history...’ (7)
She had found the wrong Geoff Love tape. It was Shirley Bassey singing. No Doctor Who theme. It would have to do.
As ‘What Now, My Love?’ crackled from her antiquated speaker system, the Doctor had started to rant. ‘You just take advantage of me because my memory’s been so badly shaken in recent years ... I don’t know exactly where I’ve been ... how many lives I’ve really had, whether I’m a renegade (8), a president (9), exiled to Earth (10) or my homeworld (11), whether I had a mother (12) or whether I was processed out of some diabolical gene-splicing machine (13) or whether it’s all been some peculiar distraction or fantasy... (14)’
‘Never mind,’ she laughed. ‘What if I’m from a place where you don’t exist at all, hm? Have you thought about that?’ (15)
He looked down glumly at the yellowed paperback she had given him. ‘Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks.’ (16)
‘This contradicts the Terrance Dicks book very badly,’ (17) he tutted. ‘No wonder I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’
‘You could always ask the Daleks which is the right version!’ she laughed. Then she softened. ‘Look, learn to live with the contradictions. Learn to have a laugh.’
His face went dark. ‘I need to know which was the right way! It’s very important to me!’
She didn’t have the heart to tell him that the way she remembered it, it had been her on the planet Skaro back when it was a denuded, ashen wilderness and the petrified forests had been overrun by recalcitrant Aryans in savage blue eyeshadow. As far as she was concerned, she was the one who led the attack on the electrified city of the Daleks. And in her version, things had been much more terrifying, naturally. The Daleks had been experimenting with hallucinogens and weird sex; it was a real tale from the Sixties. Something out of Philip K Dick. (18)
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I could be the one saying to you, that you’re supplanting my life and memories. You’re turning all of my own, glamorous, sexy sorties in time and space into a kind of ... series of adventure stories for kids!’
He stiffened. ‘I’m doing nothing of the kind. And we have to sort this out. One of us had these adventures and only one.’
‘Doctor,’ she said patiently. ‘We’re talking about a series of stories that involve paradoxes, time travel, mind control, virtual selves, cloning, regression, reincarnation, talking vegetables, cybernetics, regeneration, prolepsis, analepsis, alternative dimensional instabilities, metatextuality, allegory, satire, fantasy, revisionism, cliches, plagiarism and hoodwinkery!’ (19)
‘So?’
‘So that’s my life as much as it’s yours! It’s all of our lives! Can’t we just enjoy it for what it is? Why do you need a time line for heaven’s sake? Why do you need a precise autobiography?’
‘It would just be nice, that’s all,’ he said huffily.
Even I get mixed up with the various incarnations of Iris Wildthyme. She’s not meant to have a stable time line. Who’d want one of those anyway? Just imagine living your life in exact chronological order! Ghastly.
None of us do. Not really.
There is a very old, imperious Iris. Rather like Edith Sitwell as she’s described in the novelist Denton Welch’s memoirs. A sagacious arachnid; a grande dame glittering in a carapace of ebon pearls. It was she who called all seven Irises to the Death Zone on Gallifrey. (20)
There’s the Iris who looks a lot like Shirley Bassey in her prime. Who posed as the revered chanteuse for a while and made a mint on the colonialist nostalgia circuit.
The Iris we know best: the one with frizzy, lilac hair and a silver cardigan and sensible boots. The one who, feeling her age and destined to die on Hyspero, most doggedly pursues her amour, the Doctor. (22)
And then: holstering her hot pink blaster in her thigh high boots and swishing back her immaculate locks of auburn hair, the most recent Iris. The one who looks like Jane Fonda in the late Sixties and who finds herself gravitating to that heady era; working occasionally for the Ministry of Incursions And Ontological Wonders (MIAOW). (23)
She knows - Oh, of course she knows - that she’s a very deliberate parody of Doctor Who.
That’s why she loves him so.
They didn’t speak for a while. He sloped off to the back of the bus and put the kettle on, thinking furiously. What disturbed him most was that the things Iris was saying were being borne out in the way his memory was working suddenly. It was as if his life was looping and tangling back on itself like a horrid vine thing.
After that terrible business at the dawn of time, when he’d been in his fifth incarnation, when the Master had for some reason taken to impersonating Fu Manchu and plucking Concordes out of the sky like butterflies in a net and hauling them back through time ... What had happened next? (24) Well, they’d left Tegan behind at Heathrow, hadn’t they? And he and Nyssa had gone on travelling together ... and it hadn’t been long till they’d bumped into Tegan again in Amsterdam over that dreadful affair with Omega trying to take over his body and ... (25)
But now, suddenly, he had extra memories of that Teganless time when only he and Nyssa had been alone in the TARDIS. Suddenly whole new adventures were popping into his head. Something about Antarctica and vicious dinosaurs made all of bone marauding about the place (26)... and then being in Venice as it seemed about to tumble and crumble into the Adriatic ... (27)
‘I’ve got extra memories!’ he explained, and the teapot crashed to the floor. ‘Someone’s been slipping in extra adventures for me!’
Iris shouted back down to him. ‘You should be glad! It’s a gift! It’s extra life! Someone somewhere is making you live further, interesting times!’
She grunted then, bringing the bus in to land. He came haring down the gangway to her.
‘I’m starting to remember allsorts of peculiar things,’ he gasped. ‘I feel like the Brigadier after his nervous breakdown. Everything comes flooding back...’ (28)
‘In a flashback sequence,’ nodded Iris sagely. ‘That’s what we call it in Trash Culture. Something that relies on the expert and specific knowledge of a loyal audience of fans, but something that doesn’t render the experience too abstruse to the casual viewer or reader.’
He gulped as the interstitial mists began to clear, somewhere beyond the smudgy windscreen. ‘I feel like a casual viewer of my own life. As if I’ve missed out vital episodes and the story arc doesn’t quite make sense to me...’ He put a hand to an elegantly fuddled brow.
‘And I’m a Fan, Doctor. Do you know what that means?’ She was shouting above the rasping, droning (29) noise as the bus began to rematerialise. ‘That means I know Everything. I can quote chunks of Everything to you. But not in the correct order ... because there’s no such thing.’
‘If these extra memories keep getting slotted into my life,’ he said, with dawning horror, ‘Then my life just gets longer and longer. I’m completely ... elasticised!’
She patted his hand.
‘It means I live forever!’ he said, aghast.
‘Barring accidents,’ she said, just before they were both flung to the floor. (30)
If you particularly enjoy reading and making lists, why not read the following? :
1. Doctor Who and The Scarlet Empress
2. Iris Wildthyme’s Old Flames
3. Doctor Who and Verdigris
4. Iris Wildthyme and the Fabulously Priceless Baubles of the Dalek Supreme
5. Iris Wildthyme and the Maestro of Doom
6. Doctor Who and Interference
7. Doctor Who and the Blue Angel
8. Doctor Who and the War Games
9. Doctor Who and the Invasion of Time
10. Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
11. Doctor Who and the Infinity Doctors
12. Doctor Who: The Novelisation of the Hit TV Movie
13. Doctor Who and Lungbarrow
14. Iris Wildthyme and the Mauve Autodidact
15. Iris Wildthyme’s Gilded Utensils
16. Doctor Who and the Dead Planet
17. Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child
18. Iris Wildthyme and the Extremely Lively Planet
19. The Sacred Ajai’ib of Hyspero
20. Iris Wildthyme’s Seven of Thirteen
21. Iris Wildthyme’s Goldfinger
22. Death to Iris Wildthyme
23. Iris Wildthyme’s Fabric of Time Itself (MIAOW)
24. Doctor Who’s Time Flight
25. Doctor Who and the Arc of Infinity
26. Doctor Who and the Land of the Dead
27. Doctor Who and the Stones of Venice
28. Doctor Who and Mawdryn Undead
29. Iris Wildthyme’s Wheezing, Groaning Enigma
30. And Ready To Embark On An Exciting New Adventure.[Originally published in Doctor Who Monthly, 2000]
