This was definitely Tegan's favourite room in the whole of the TARDIS, she had decided.
It wasn't because of the green flock wallpaper, dappled with paisley flora, or the gas lights that sprouted from everywhere with their low cosseting warm glow, or the rich red furnishings and voluminous curtains (in a room in the middle of the TARDIS!), the plush velvet chaise-longue, the deep-backed leather armchairs, or even the great Victorian cast iron fireplace where a coal-fire burned miraculously day after day and never seemed to exhaust itself or be refuelled.
No, what made this room Tegan's favourite room was it's drinks cabinet.
She had seen a few drinks cabinets in her time. As a trainee Air Hostess she had visited a few bars in her travels, and as an Aussie abroad she had peered behind the bar in more than one occasional drinking hole. She had seen a drinks cabinet made from an up-turned row boat (Molly's Bar, Canberra), and one made as if for a doll's house using a whole collection of miniatures (A Brewery Museum in Darwin). She had seen a full scale pub bar installed in the living room of a Brisbane suburban home (Uncle Des'). But nothing she had yet seen compared in any measure to the drinks cabinet in this room.
It occupied an entire wall, for one thing, a cascade of glass shelves loaded with a rainbow of glass bottles plastered with a confetti of exotically printed labels and stacked with every alcoholic drink she had ever heard of, including two whole shelves of Single Malt Whiskeys, a lot of alcoholic drinks which she had never seen before and a even more that, she assumed, she normally never would have come across if it hadn't been for the extraordinary change in her travelling itinerary that had taken place over the past few months. Standing close to it was like shoving your head into the centre of a crystal chandelier.
"Do you buy a bottle everywhere you go?" she had asked the Doctor, trying to disguise her excitement somewhat, as they stood in front of it one evening. They had stopped during a brief detour from an expedition into the interior to look for his spare hat. The Doctor regarded the kaleidoscope of colour and reflection as though he had never really noticed it before.
"Not any more," he'd answered carelessly, "I used to. But then I used to drink a little more back then, as well."
Her first problem, obviously, had been which bottle to try first. She had considered embarking on a methodical sweep from the top down along each shelf, but this would have meant tackling a curious cluster of purple-coloured bottles straight away and she didn't feel quite up to a full blown, head-long dive into the unknown without a little initial exploratory research. Some alcoholic drinks were poisonous, weren't they, after all? You could get brain damage from drinking Absinthe, she remembered someone telling her once.
Obviously, some sort of system was required and variety, she decided, was the key.
Tackling all of the vodkas, for instance – a bleak, clinical-looking stretch of shelving about half way down – did not appeal. Vodkas were, anyway, for mixing, as far as she was concerned, otherwise you might as well save yourself a few quid and down a glass of paint stripper. And doing all of the whiskeys seemed like something you ought to build up to – after a palette had been acquired, or at least not until you were drunk enough to no longer care all that much about taste anyway. Doing alternate colours – the colours of the rainbow! she'd suddenly thought with an inappropriately childish glee – seemed a good plan until she realised she'd spend a disproportionate amount of time on the blue end of the spectrum, none of which took her fancy.
And trying all of the most strange-looking bottles first had been a momentary flash of inspiration, until one containing a faint pinkish liquid smelling of honey also turned out to contain the bloated bleached-out body of a tiny lizard, pickled and floating at the bottom of the glass, its tiny serrated teeth glistening in its open mouth.
Ultimately, then, she took to an entirely random process of selection, her only concession to systemisation being to ensure that each subsequent bottle should be at least two rows and ten bottles away from her previous selection. A brilliant piece of rationalisation that, she judged, would ensure she tried everything at least once in the fullness of time. Everything apart from the pickled ghekos.
Her strategy had not met with immediate success. A succession of medicinal-tasting liquids that seemed more suited to being rubbed on in liniment than being downed out of a shot glass, had almost put a stop to the entire experiment before it had really begun. But the happy discovery of something like a cross between Brandy and a glassful of fruit pastilles, with an odd but not wholly unpleasant after-taste of menthol had put her back on track again, enthusiasm for the enterprise properly restored.
An hour a night, she had decided, to prove to herself that she wasn't an alcoholic. One hour, and then you stop. Pouring, obviously. If the glass was still full at the end of the hour then, obviously, it was only prudent to do so, she would keep drinking from the glass until it was empty.
The biggest glass that Tegan could find was one from a peculiar room not far from this one, strangely clinical in its neatness, like a hospital store room with packing cases filled with straw and all types of kitchen utensils and crockery stashed away as if in some dim and distant past the Doctor had regularly held vast soirées and dined hundreds of guests in some long-lost banqueting hall. It was like a goldfish bowl on a stem.
Leaving the room, carrying the glass up before her like some sacred ritual object, she had bumped into Nyssa.
"Where are you taking that?"
"Nowhere. Over here, that's all."
Nyssa watched her go with a suspicious gaze, then went to examine the room full of kitchenware, wondering perhaps whether there was anything in there of any use in her laboratory. Sneakily, Tegan waited until she was gone before nipping through the doorway and closing the door behind her.
She sat, feet tucked under her, in the biggest of the leather arm chairs opposite the roaring fire, hunched over a glass of delicately green, slightly liquorice-smelling liquid like a mystic studying a crystal ball. A book lay on the arm beside her, discovered in the Library amongst all the weighty tomes. It had been printed in 1834 and so was, as far as she was concerned, a historical document and, therefore, pretty much, Literature. It was titled 'Sweetmeats, Trifles and Just Desserts: Being the Trutheful and Candid Testimony of an Innocent Scullery Maid in the Kitchen's of Lord XXXX's Private Towne Residence.' (the asterixes were original) and a cursory glance of it had been enough to assure her that there was nothing in it about how to keep your griddle clean...
And beside that, made specifically to order by the inscrutable machine in the TARDIS' kitchen, sat a box of Belgian chocolates with all kinds of delicious fillings and absolutely no praline centres whatsoever.
It was, she considered, like a haven. This one small place, so odd in a place so thoroughly odd, where she could escape to and escape into yet another world...