Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Bernice Summerfield [077] - Beige Planet Mars by Lance Parkin & Mark Clapham

Author:Lance Parkin & Mark Clapham
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1998-10-27T23:00:00+00:00

9

WHIZZ KIDS AND GRATUITOUS NUDITY

Benny was pleased she didn’t have to lie back on a big leather couch. Benny and her counsellor faced each other across a light, pot-plant-filled room, each sitting in a comfy swivel chair. The counsellor was a businesslike woman, who spoke in pleasant, but very mannered tones. She occasionally took notes, using archaic paper and pen.

‘So,’ said the counsellor briskly. ‘Tell me about these dreams.’

Benny shrugged. ‘Where do I begin?’

The counsellor smiled kindly. ‘Begin with whatever you feel most comfortable discussing.’

‘OK,’ said Benny. ‘A lot of the dreams are just plain surreal, outright madness. There’s the one where I’m in Tokyo, and a giant chicken goes on the rampage, ripping apart buildings and so on.’

The counsellor raised an immaculately stencilled eyebrow.

‘And?’

‘And then there’s the one with the bamboo tanks – you know, as in military tanks rather than fish tanks.’ Benny was getting into her subject now. ‘Then there’s the one with the bearded villain who turns me into Lego –’

The counsellor coughed pointedly. ‘What do you think these dreams signify?’

Benny shrugged again. ‘Dunno. What do any dreams really signify? Are they of any significance, important messages from the subconscious, perhaps? Or are they just the random flotsam bouncing around the inside of your average moderately disturbed psyche?’

The counsellor looked rather embarrassed and taken aback by the breadth and depth of this response. ‘Good questions, I’m sure. But let’s apply them. How would you interpret this one, for instance?’

Benny blinked. ‘Pardon?’

‘This dream. How would you interpret it? I mean, it’s obviously not real. Even if you could afford a counsellor, you’ve always been too stingy to spend good beer money on sorting your life out. So, what do you think?’

Benny paused, weighing up possible responses to this rather cheeky aspect of her own unconscious mind. ‘Well,’ she said tentatively. ‘Either I’m tiring of my own endless self-examination – diary writing, drunken self-pity, that sort of thing…’

The counsellor nodded vigorously. ‘Good answer, good answer. Or?’

‘Or… I really shouldn’t go to sleep with the telly on. Like cheese, it gives you bad dreams.’

‘Damn right,’ agreed the counsellor, before turning into a cockroach made of ice cream.

Benny’s alarm buzzed. As was the way with such things, Benny had already woken a minute or so beforehand.

Soaz woke up, and looked straight up into the fearsome eyes of a gun-toting Chelonian.

‘Shite!’ he exclaimed, suddenly wide awake. Then he rather ashamedly noticed that the Chelonian was, in fact, somewhat two dimensional. It was a one-and-a-half-metres-tall cardboard cut-out, some kind of window dressing, with the title ‘One Bad Mother’ emblazoned across its legs at knee level. Presumably the name of a holo or something.

Shaking the remains of last night’s kebab off the duvet, Soaz rolled out of bed and picked up the flat-pack reptile.

With difficulty, he manoeuvred it out of the narrow door and into the even narrower corridor. Seez’s bedroom door was wide open, thereby depriving Soaz of the pleasure of kicking it in.

He brought the standee crashing down on the duvet-shrouded bundle of subhumanity on the bed.

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