Mercutio Instead
1
He always takes her to places like this; cufflinks and silk slips beneath dresses, cut glass and polished mahogany, all glittering behind her like the glamour of a 50's flick. They sit at a little table with one rose in a vase between them, her elbows on the tabletop and heels slipping out of her shoes.
They sit and read their menus (she's knows he will have Duck with Clementines and that she will probably have Blueberries Anglaise for pudding). She searches desperately for something custardy – even a custard tart – but finds nothing. There isn't even –
"What?" she spits incredulously, dropping the menu, "They don't do breaded fish here?"
Rory laughs at her solemnly, his eyes turning up, like the muddy-sweet hot-chocolate Aunt Sharon made on Sunday evenings.
"I doubt fish fingers are on the menu, to be honest with you: being haute cuisine and all that."
She mumbles, "Oh."
She hopes that he understands she doesn't need this, any of it: she'd much rather be lying in yellowed grass and drinking warm Pepsi with him, grass stains on the seat of her jeans; or maybe sitting with bare feet in the dark watching Wallace and Gromit.
"What about custard?"
"We could have just popped round my Nana's, y'know, if you want bloody custard tarts and fish fingers." He rolls his eyes, a little smile on his face.
"I don't care where we are," she shrugs, and for a moment he goes still.
Then he says, "Really?"
"I suppose it's a kid-thing," she chuckles, "just can't get enough custard and fish fingers."
She gets caught on a memory – on happiness so good it's bitter vinegar. Her eyes wander a little, to the window, the moonlight on the car bonnets. Rory says something like, "I was the same, couldn't eat anything without cranberry sauce 'till I was eleven."
She's a ginger Scottish Kiss-O-Gram in a posh French restaurant. Amy only thinks then – as Rory says, "the duck sounds alright," – that it's funny: funny that a nurse on a bad wage dreams of being a Doctor.
Funny that she dreams the same thing. She sips water.
'The Doctor' is all she has ever known.
2
"I don't play with dolls anymore."
The Doctor opens her mouth to speak but Amelia cuts across her. She holds out the doll; odd, rolling marble eyes and golden sausage-curls.
"I don't like them. It's silly."
The Doctor blinks at her, dark, gerbil's eyes wandering her face. She leans close, so close that Amelia can read the mechanisms of bone and muscle moving her jaw and tongue as she speaks. "Why is that, Amelia?"
Amelia stares at her for a moment and then, as the Doctor won't take it from her, she puts the doll down on the blue plastic table. She looks around the room, warm and vinegar-smelling, the window with the canary curtains, the itchy brown rug, the cream walls. A fat, salty lump grows in her throat.
Aunt Sharon told her they were 'going to see The Doctor'.
But –
3
She spends all morning squirming in her little patent red shoes and oh so happy, so happy, grinning into her orange juice at breakfast. He's waiting for her. They will turn on corner and he will be there in his funny torn shirt – in his pirate shirt – with his time machine and a bowl of custard and his blue fixer-thing. And Aunt Sharon?
Well, she would see, wouldn't she?
4
When he didn't come back for her that say she spent hours sitting in the garden, blubbering snot and saliva into her small pink hands, muttering as breath hissed between her teeth, 'people always say that, people always say that, people always –'
Aunt Sharon keeps coming and calling to her, grabbing and yanking her arms and hands, whirling lipstick on a snaggletooth and brown hair flying, "Amy, come on now. Amy, come on. This is bloody stupid! What's the matter with you? Amy!" and then leaves with a funny little spitting noise – 'taph!'
At six o'clock she went inside, the skin of her shoulders flaking like dried fruit skin from sunburn, disgusting snotty teary salty residue on her cheeks and hands. She washed her face and put on her pyjamas.
In the kitchen, Aunt Sharon asked her, "What do want for tea then, pud?"
Amelia said, "Fish fingers."
"Amelia -"
"Custard, as well. Yeah. Custard."
5
– it isn't her Doctor.
She is a Doctor of medicine and note-making and tablets and questions. 'It'll be alright, sweetie,' Aunt Sharon says, 'you two just have a chat. She'll make you better.'
6
"Look, all of this is silly," Amy says, and stands up, "just because you play with me it doesn't mean I'm going to tell you things. I don't want to talk to you. I'm nine now. I'm not stupid. I don't play anymore."
"Alright. How about, then, Amelia, if we -?"
"I've told you everything, you - stupid - idiot! There's nothing else I can say to you. He could be there now. He will be there one day."
She thinks her life is one great tragedy, the Ugly Duckling, Cinderella crying in the cellar with no glass slippers, Hansel and Gretel's muscles roasting with apple sauce and potatoes.
7
And after Aunt Sharon's sloppy, bitter apology for her 'outburst' – for biting her – she leaves. There are two other Doctors and she draws blood from both, when they get over questions about school friends and drawings, when they finally ask her about her Doctor.
Most days she does wonders if she's going bonkers. After all, it was so many years ago now, and it could have all been a dream.
But the thought of him never existing, not being real, never dipping fish fingers into custard and holding her hand?
She just can't think that way.
8
She's just treading on floorboards and laughing as they creak, crawling on scabbed knees through years – the gingerbread man digested.
9
When she's fourteen:
On the back of her school books, love hearts and scribbles and one long, scrawling word in blue biro: Doctor Doctor Doctor Doctor
For tea every Friday: fish fingers, custard for pudding.
In her dreams: touching the stars and biting alien fruit and fighting intergalactic wars and science-fiction.
10
She's fourteen and she's not sopping over Robbie Williams or Westlife. It's The Doctor.
Sometimes she actually thinks what the fuck?
11
Her last Doctor coaxes words out of her. He asks her what she's doing when she uses a butter knife to cut a slit into an apple skin. She tells him, through odd little jittery breaths, about her Mum.
Amy makes a decision – waking up with chilly-bumps on her skin after a dream of landing in a green ocean on Mars – that she'll tell her Doctor (the fourth one, Doctor Dowerhaint with his shiny bald head) about her Doctor.
"You won't believe" she says quietly, cords standing out in her throat, "you won't. No-one does, but I promise you that it's true. It is. Please believe me, yeah?"
"I'm here to listen," he says kindly.
"Look, he just – he just didn't come back – he just forgot to come back to me – he – he just – just – he just didn't come b-back -"
Her voice finally dissolves into horrible wet choking noises, and then throws her hands over her face, crying a little, a lot, crying like the little girl in the garden. She shuffles, shivering, teeth sliding her lower lip.
"I'm sorry," she manages, and then brushes herself down, "but I'm not mad."
The Doctor isn't so sure. He gives her medicine.
The following week she bites him; mostly to continue tradition.
12
She keeps telling herself, scrawling shaky love-hearts across her Romeo and Juliet essay, that one day she will prove them all wrong. He could still come back.
She thinks, smiling and sucking her biro, that Juliet is a silly girl. She'd rather have Mercutio instead.
13
At sixteen she realises her Doctor won't come back, and so decides she will have a White Wedding and some ginger kids, and she will forget The Doctor. All five of them.
She just can't choose what she dreams.
14
She has her first kiss at seventeen smelling of fried fat and sweat and expensive perfume. Rory smiles at her, and she's all warm.
"You taste of bubblegum," she grins at him, and he laughs, "it's funny."
"Better than garlic, I suppose." He shakes his head, "Your mad, Amy Pond."
Her face pales.
15
And now silence is separated by a whimsy smile or the chink of silver.
As she digs her spoon into her Blueberry Anglaise she watches the rich hue of the lights move like liquid in Rory's hair. She keeps thinking back to that Romeo and Juliet essay now, her average mark and average handwriting, and she wonders if love like that will ever happen again, if it still exists.
She wonders what part she'd play in a Shakespearian tragedy. She likes to think she's Juliet.
Rory says, "We can get some custards on the way home, if you like. Posh puddings have never really been you sort of thing, I suppose, have they?"
For a moment she's pulled back, from memories flashing like alien flesh in her head, playing back like a broken tape.
And then she wonders then who Rory would be. Rory is Romeo. And then she worries for herself, worries for spitting on a classic.
She knows she'd pick Mercutio instead.
"Yeah. I'm dying to get these heels off." She says blankly. He shuffles.
She wonders who Mercutio is.
16
Time goes on and she's still crawling on scabbed knees. Gingerbread girl, Gretel, Cinderella, Ugly Duckling, Juliet.
17
He comes back. When he returns for her she's a swan, she's dancing in glass slippers. It all changes later.
She goes with him and feels bad about it.
Later.
18
The Doctor (no, she's not imagining it) doesn't take her to restaurants and the theatre and he doesn't waste any money or any time. She wishes Rory was that way – she's doesn't want a fancy meal and the West End. She just wants togetherness. She wants to feel like a kid again, kissing outside of a greasy cafe.
When she's with the Doctor she's alive the way she had been at seven years old, fresh and new, clean, with an open mind and her heart on her sleeve.
19
It's only when she's walking, dazed, across the violet sand of Bellaphores, walking beneath five suns and fourteen-and-a-half moons, that she realises. She's watching the Doctor just ahead of her, walking in long, eager strides, swinging his tweed jacket in one hand. The atmosphere is hot and clean – lime. She walks.
"Watch out, by the way." He calls to her, turns and walks backwards now, "Y'know, for the snakes."
She freezes. "What snakes?"
"Y'know. The snakes I told you about."
"You didn't tell me about any snakes." She insists. His brow puckers and he pauses.
"I definitely told you about the snakes." He says, tilting his head.
"You didn't."
"Didn't I?"
"No."
"Oh," he says, shaking his head, "well, tread carefully, because this whole place in full of them!"
"Snakes?"
He begins walking back to her, hands in his pockets.
"Sand snakes," he says when he's a few steps away, "Poison spitting, purple, pentagonal heads – three heads." He reaches her side and stares into her, smiling slightly.
"What if I tread on one?"
He leans forward and then snaps his teeth at her with a sharp click, upper lip pulling back. When she gulps he grins. "Let's say we'll – er – take things in our stride."
She crunches violet sand between her toes, and he grabs her by the wrists, pulling her with him, "I'll carry you if I have to. Come along, Pond. Not to worry."
She doesn't, really. She wishes they could see her now, she wishes she could be there to spit their eyes, laugh at their faces.
He takes her to see the Bellaphorians celebrate something – they dance and flick black-forked tongue into the air, laughing, eating strange meat. It's beautiful – they sing like a thousand sopranos and madmen laughing, the purple sand is stark against their waxy skin. She asks, "What are they celebrating, then?"
"Well, it's -" the Doctor says, "- this is the Bellaphorian equivalent of Easter, I suppose. The day their Gods rose again."
She knows that he knows stories but won't tell her them, she wonders why. She's Amelia Pond like a fairytale and she's running across violet sand, running from Romeo, from reality, from evil stepmothers and witches.
She's writing her own script now. Besides; Shakespeare is long gone.
20
When they leave she asks him if they could go back, to history, to Shakespeare. He taps her nose, why she has no idea, and says, "I didn't think you were the theatre sort."
fin.