Chapter Text
Then, she began to breathe and live,
and every moment took her to a place where goodbyes were hard to come by.
she was in love, but not in love with someone or something, she was in love with her life.
and for the first time, in a long time,
everything was inspiring.
- R. M. Drake.
Prologue
Lizzie sat on a chair that was probably a bit too big for a six-year-old, since her feet couldn’t touch the ground and were left dangling in the air. She was watching the sunlight streaming in through the window, fascinated with how it made the buckles on her shoes glimmer and shine. Jenny had told her to put on these shoes on because they were her best pair, and they made her look ‘smart.’ This was the same Jenny that called her Elizabeth, so Lizzie thought she was a bit posh and didn’t like puppies or ice cream or fun.
Lizzie watched her shoes because she didn’t want to look out the window – all the other children were playing outside, in the afternoon summer sun, and she wanted nothing more than to join in, but she wasn’t allowed. She thought it was probably Jenny’s way of being nasty to her, because it didn’t make any sense – she hadn’t done anything wrong. Even though this wasn’t her real home, Lizzie still liked the other children, but she didn’t always join in. Sometimes they just didn’t want her.
The office was dusty, and Lizzie watched as the particles of dust floated and fell through the air. She reached out to touch them, but they flew just out of reach whenever she tried. Eventually, she gave up and slumped backwards in the chair, bored, and waiting for Jenny to come back and tell her why she had to sit here alone.
The door opened, and Jenny walked in. She looked down upon Lizzie, as if Lizzie were an alien. She had not come alone.
“Elizabeth – this is Maggie. She wants to talk with you.”
Lizzie had learned that there wouldn’t be any point in replying. Whatever Jenny wanted would happen anyway, so she waited, in silence.
The woman who pulled up a chair opposite her was older than Jenny. Lizzie liked her patterned cardigan. Unlike Jenny, this lady didn’t talk to her as if she were stupid.
“Hello Lizzie,” Maggie smiled at her. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” Lizzie replied, still slightly unsettled by how friendly this woman called Maggie was being. “How are you?”
The only reason she responded that way was because that’s what adults told her to say.
“I’m very well, thank you. Have you been enjoying the sunny weather?”
“It’s alright,” Lizzie said. “I can go and play outside then. But I like the rain too.”
“Do you?”
“Without rain – things wouldn’t grow.”
The woman-called-Maggie hesitated for a second. “Yes – well done. Now – what sort of things do you like doing, Lizzie?”
“Erm… I like television and I like music, and also like to read lots of books. Also, I like dogs, but only small ones. The big ones are scary. I like cats more than dogs. They’re nicer and we get along better.”
“Now then, Lizzie. My name is Maggie – and, I can’t be sure, but someone tells me that you’re a bit sad.”
THE EIGHTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES
SERIES 5 - EPISODE 1
HALF THE WORLD AWAY
WRITTEN BY Peter Darwin
“Hello?”
Lizzie was jolted awake from her daydream.
“Oh – er – I am so sorry, Mrs Smith.”
She stood up quickly, because she wasn’t particularly up for losing her job.
“Away with the fairies again, Elizabeth?”
To be fair, to kill hours of boredom, yes, she had been away with the fairies. Her boss (not Mrs Smith) tended to leave her to it, while he went off and did whatever it was the people like him did. It meant that Lizzie saw the inside of the café more than anything else, due to the fact that, barring the girl who came in for a Saturday job, she was the café’s sole fulltime employee.
“Something like that. What can I get for you, Mrs Smith?”
“My usual, please.”
She knew exactly what that “usual” was, due to the fact she served it to Mrs. Smith every Wednesday morning at about half ten-ish, give or take the cooperation of Mrs Smith’s springer spaniels. Her tea would require just a ‘dribble’ of milk, and a slice of carrot cake to go with it.
Since Mrs Smith also pulled a blinder of a question with each visit to the café, Lizzie awaited, with bated breath, for said question to arise.
“So, Elizabeth.”
Here we go.
“What are you going to do with your life?”
And there it was. Mrs Smith knew it irritated her, and yet she always posed the same question every single time. Lizzie resented her enquiries for a number of reasons:
1. It was as if Mrs Smith were deliberately trying to make her feel guilty about something she couldn’t do anything about, and…
2. … if Mrs Smith actually cared about “Elizabeth’s” situation, she might understand that perhaps the vote Mrs Smith took part in every 5 years at the polls was not helping “Elizabeth” at all. And, furthermore…
3. Mrs Smith was renowned for being particularly harsh on anyone from the estate, where she knew Lizzie lived.
“I don’t know yet, Mrs Smith,” she replied as she poured Mrs Smith’s tea into the mug, and then added in the ‘dribble of milk’. Lizzie had decided, as her boss had suggested, to at least attempt small talk, since her customer service skills were ‘significantly lacking’. The idea was repulsive to Lizzie but she soldiered on. Luckily, she knew the way to Mrs. Smith’s heart: “How are your dogs?”
After spending so long watching this particular middle class wife of a doctor, who instead of drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, seemed to drink from the fountain of eternal 60-something, Lizzie had realised that Mrs Smith rather liked dogs. Lizzie was more of a cat person herself.
Not unexpectedly Mrs Smith responded with great enthusiasm! “Well, I had to take Jasper to the vets. He required some inoculations. And Peter is as feisty as ever. He’s so tricky to take for a walk, goes straight for the pheasants! But it’s always worth it! I do love him.”
“There we go,” Lizzie passed over the mug, doing her best not-real-smile. “Call me over if you need anything.”
Lizzie partly said this last bit just to wind her up, knowing full well that Mrs Smith would desire nothing more than to call her over and complain about something petty, while expressing her profound concern about Lizzie allowing her standards to slip.
“I will,” nodded Mrs. Smith, a grim look on her face, as she withdrew to the corner by the window where she could see her dogs. Lizzie pitied anyone who might attempt to sit in Mrs Smith’s corner seat. It had become her territory, her place, and no one else would dare even attempt to annex it from her, no matter how unwittingly.
Lizzie had grown accustomed to the habits and behaviours of each of her café regulars. She knew their orders – what they ate, what they drank, whether they took milk or sugar– and whether they would come in pairs, or alone. In fact, for a lowly waitress who merely poured the tea and coffee, and cut and served the cake, Lizzie was privy to more knowledge than perhaps she should be. People gave away a lot more during everyday conversation than they realized. Not that any of it was of particular concern to her – but still….
It was a nice little tea room. Lizzie would even have gone so far as to say that if she didn’t spend so many waking hours in here, she would love it. It was a cosy little shop, its walls hung with framed paintings of pretty country scenes, of the harvest, and of shooting parties, in either watercolour or oil. An eclectic assortment of ornaments decorated its oak shelves as well as the mantelpiece of an unused fireplace. The shop’s entire trade came from customers shopping in the little market town.
Lizzie realized rather quickly after she started working here that she spent so much of her time just doing nothing. She was often left alone with her teacakes; left alone to find some way of occupying herself.
Sometimes she loved that part of it.
Sometimes she just wanted to get out
***
5 o’clock eventually came.
She then set the alarm, installed a few years back, stepped out into the evening air, and locked the door behind her. It was summer, and the weather was warm and sleepy, like the town itself. Dunsworth was not the sort of place for anyone looking for thrills and exhilaration. There was a bus stop, just down the street, where you could catch a bus that went right up to the edge of the estate. It was a bus she could take, but rarely did because she enjoyed the walk; it wasn’t far.
Dunsworth was dotted with small cafés, and boutiques, and general gift shops for anyone who came to enjoy the typical middle England life, with an old castle looking down from on the top of the hill. Dunsworth had been twinned with a town in Germany and another in Italy. Recently, it had won the “Britain in Bloom” competition three years in a row, and another five wins before that. There were a number of retired couples who lived there, and some young families whose dad was likely a banker in the city or whose mum babysat for the lord of the manor. They all lived quietly, and contentedly.
It was quiet. Except – not always. Because there was…the estate.
Lizzie’s former home, once situated on the outskirts of Dunsworth, was no longer on the outskirts of Dunsworth. Seven years ago, the council had made the decision to build a council estate there instead.
The council would’ve gotten a friendlier reaction had they decided to kick a nest of very angry wasps.
There was an immediate uproar from the legions of pensioners. Lizzie, at the time, was still in school, still hating school, and remembered it well. There were protests….well, not really protests, more like a few disgruntled elderly ladies who stood outside the library, holding hand- painted protest signs. There was rioting… well, again, not really rioting, more a matter of angry planning in the café. There were petitions and there were letters to the council. The council retorted with a perfectly understandable response: They needed housing. There wasn’t enough of it.
It was at this point that Lizzie first began to dislike the residents of Dunsworth and had not-so-fervently celebrated when she finally left to study history at Durham. The care home where she had grown up was delighted for her; her teachers were delighted.
Student life, it transpired, was not for her. The endless partying was nauseating.
However, it seemed you can do whatever you want at university and there’s usually no positive outcome when you graduate. Ever. No jobs. At all. Especially for people with history degrees. It was because of this non-positive outcome, that Lizzie had come back to stay in the town she’d grown up in and, after getting the job in the café, had found asylum in one of the properties on the estate. It was only meant to be a temporary measure until something better came up.
But nothing better had come up.
She would stand at the edge of the valley – there was a sort of observational area, fenced off, where one could sit on a bench, and look out into the distance. The view was beautiful, and it was possible to sit there and watch the sunset, over fields and distant cottages and great tall oak trees.
Even when there seemed like there would never be a chance to escape her present existence, she could come here and dream for ten minutes, before she had to return to her reality.
She stopped this particular evening, and sat for five minutes, letting the rest of the world pass her by. She could do that– just sit, and drink in the view before her each evening after work. The sunsets were always magical. Now June had passed, and the nights would start to draw in a little earlier, meaning she could look forward to that magic more and more, especially after long and pointless days at work.
On this evening, only five minutes passed and Lizzie left the bench earlier than usual. She wanted to pay someone a visit.
***
Lizzie still had a key to the house where she had grown up, because now as a “responsible” adult, she was always the one on cat feeding duty and plant watering duty whenever Maggie went away, which was rare, but occasionally she’d go and stay with her children.
The hallway was cramped – all the houses on the estate were small, and the flats were even smaller. A staircase led upstairs, and after one of Maggie’s hearty meals, one would have to breathe in deeply to get past the chest of drawers on the way through the hallway and into the kitchen.
Lizzie hung up her coat, and walked through into the kitchen, where Maggie stood fiddling with the oven.
“Oh, hello!” Maggie called over. “Just putting the tea on. Do you want some, or will you be off?” Maggie murmured. “Honestly, this oven is five years old and I still can’t figure out how to – oh. There we go.”
“Now. Sit down,” she said to Lizzie, while bustling about the kitchen. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
“No, I’ll do it,” Lizzie offered, walking past her.
“Elizabeth, sit down. You spend enough time making tea, let me do it. I hate thinking of you in that godawful café all day.”
Lizzie was okay with Maggie calling her Elizabeth because she would do it in a friendly way whenever jokily telling her off; it was kind of heart-warming and made Lizzie smile.
“You’re going to go insane,” Maggie told her, as she bustled around the kitchen with the tea bags.
“It won’t be long before I lose it.”
“You’ll find something better. You deserve to, at least.”
“I did three years in university and I’ve got like –,” she sighed. “I’m tens of thousands of pounds in debt. Nobody needs people who’ve just graduated and have ‘no experience’.”
“But you’re intelligent! Even if you have no experience, as you say, there’d be people wanting to snap you up. I just can’t believe the current state of things. I swear it’s nigh on impossible to get work nowadays. When I was young…”
As Lizzie listened, she was feeling a tangled mix of emotions, most of them guilt-related, or just general panic and anxiety about how she was wasting her life. She longed to be out, travelling the world, walking across mountains, and deserts, and swimming near coral reefs, and doing whatever it was that well-travelled people did, like the things her Facebook friends did. But she was stuck, as if the universe were conspiring to stop her from doing any of that stuff, while at the same time it seemed to be reaping her of every penny she had. And, she acknowledged, she was increasingly anxious about all this anxiety and was spending some Sunday mornings (the café wasn’t open on Sundays – an overly religious community and all that) lying in bed and not doing anything useful at all.
“It’s that flat as well,” Maggie continued. “It’s tiny, and it’s in such a rough part of the estate. You know, I’d have you stay here, but the system won’t have it. Honestly, I can understand why you’re so anti-THEM. But ‘improper’ they said! Improper. You’ve been out of the system for years, and Mikey moved out last month. I haven’t been alone here for 40 years, and I think I’m going to go doolally if I start now. You are all that keeps me from losing my marbles.”
Maggie stopped, and sat down opposite her. Lizzie looked up from the table and into the old woman’s eyes. Maggie had seen so much and Lizzie always felt as if she were being a burden.
“But I’d rather lose my marbles than hold you back. You’re special. I always said so to that care worker. You’re the most intelligent child I’ve ever worked with. No, not just intelligent. Understanding. So, I want you to go out, and live a bit.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just – I can’t. Things are –”
“I know. Money. It’s annoying, isn’t it? That, and, of course, you’re so nervous.”
She always loved Maggie for being so straight to the point.
“I’ve been there,” Maggie took a sip of her tea. “When my mother dropped me off in my own flat for the first time, she helped me unpack everything, and then suddenly said ‘Bye then’ and was off. And I sat there alone on my sofa, this old thing we’d been keeping in the attic for years. For a few seconds, I was fine, just like being left on my own of an afternoon. Then, it hit me. She wasn’t coming back. Suddenly, it was very quiet and very cold. And I was alone. Oh – Lizzie, I know your worries almost as well as I know my own. I’ve been privy to them since you were a little girl. You were such a sad little thing, and I look at you now, and sometimes I think you’re not any different. I know how you’re feeling. But there is something you need to remember: you’re never alone. Not really. If everyone vanished from the Earth – there’ll always be someone here, for you and with you.”
Maggie had been Lizzie’s support worker since she was 6 years old. Nowadays, it wasn’t anything formal, but Lizzie still stopped by every so often for a cup of tea and a chat. Maggie was an incredible woman, and the closest thing Lizzie had to a mother. She treated the children she worked with as if they were her own, and all of them treated her like a mum.
***
It was getting dark as Lizzie arrived back home.
There were two women, probably high or drunk or something, and they stood at the end of the road, catcalling and giggling, waving vigorously at her as she walked past. She smiled at them before turning the key into the rusty lock, pressing against the door with her foot (it would often stick, and require an extra bit of force) and making her way inside.
Her flat was indeed tiny, as Maggie continued to point out. But it was home, at least. Her front door opened up against stacks of books – there wasn’t enough space for them all on her bookshelves, so she had piled some of them up against the hallway wall, a bit too near the door, apparently. There was a bedroom off to the right, and the living room/kitchen diner just ahead.
It was tidy, but looked lived-in as well. Lizzie was partial to the term ‘cluttered’. As already implied, the bookshelves were full, with some smaller novellas stacked lengthways on top of the other books. And on the top of the same unit were some old shoeboxes gathering dust, containing remnants of her childhood and of her school days.
The floor space was relatively uncluttered and clean, with a coffee table and a sofa, both of which she’d picked up from a charity shop. The kitchenette was accompanied by a little table and two chairs, none of which matched. But Lizzie liked it – she appreciated the individuality of it all.
On the wall above her table was a pin board, where she kept a few photos and postcards, and notelets to herself to remind her to take the bins out and such. There was a window opposite her sofa, looking out onto the street below. As she entered her flat and before she flopped down on the sofa and closed her eyes, Lizzie drew the tartan curtains, and switched on the fairy lights that ran from the window, above the TV, and around into the kitchen diner.
Time passed, with her just sitting there, wasting it, before she opened her eyes and looked up to see a battered novel on the coffee table, waiting for her. She loved books. As a child, she’d been such an avid reader, and often had her nose buried in a book. It was comforting, having the struggles of someone else to escape into, and it was heartening how those struggles could help her understand her own.
But as she’d grown up, it had become harder to read as much as she used to. Lizzie promised herself, as some kind of New Year’s Resolution (which, if she did say so herself, she was rather good at sticking to), that she would read 20 pages every day, partly so she didn’t feel so rubbish about not having the same bond with stories as she used to. The looming, overstuffed bookshelves were a reminder of the days when that bond was strong and when she had made time for books, before the days she came home, ate alone, washed up, and sat in the dark, empty flat, just dreaming of that time when books were her life.
This evening, she’d grabbed some chips on her way back home, and had eaten most of them as she walked. It had left her at a loose end, now, as she sat on her sofa, absent-mindedly watching the light fitting (the bulb had no shade), just waiting for something to happen. So, Lizzie took herself off to bed. Maybe sleeping would make her feel better.
Of course, it didn’t help that Lizzie was an insomniac – and a bad one at that. Some nights she could go off to bed, and sleep just fine. Other nights, she just couldn’t lie still, or get rid of thoughts she didn’t want, and allow herself to be carried off into a world of the not-real and of the seemingly-real, of disjointed, random bits of life, strung together in the form of dreams, almost like little clips of movies uploaded to YouTube – the story, there, but not the whole story.
But in one way, insomnia worked for Lizzie, though, because sometimes the nights were the only time she could find a way to feel better. The calmness and tranquillity of the small hours, at just gone three, when nobody was awake.
Nobody at all.
This was one of those nights, where no matter how much she tried, sleep just refused to come, and she just wanted to go out and wander the Earth as everyone else slept. When these nights came, Lizzie would take herself over to the lone window of the flat, that looked down onto the street below. She was lucky to have one of the flats with an actual window – this was the only flat that had one.
On these nights, Lizzie would pull back the curtain, and sit on the windowsill, looking out at the night- shrouded street outside, and marvelling at how the stars looked down on her from above. She’d shut the curtains behind her, enclosing herself in this little bubble on the edge of reality. It was like she was in a capsule, watching the universe drift by, at the same time the nights would tick by.
It was so comforting to lock herself away like that, a set of curtains blocking out the real world, with a starry world ahead. She’d always found it comforting. Lizzie had memories, of doing this even as a child. When all the others were in bed, and she was the last one awake, she would sit on her windowsill and look out over the garden in the night.
Blissful moments of solitude.
Tonight, as she watched, the night was calm, and the weather was still. As summer approached, the nights would grow warmer – but there would be storms as well. But tonight, there was no cloud layer, and she could enjoy the never-ending cycle of stars, burning and re-burning in the dome-like impossible navy blue of the night sky above her head. Lizzie sat back, resting her head against the wall and hugging her knees hunched up in front of her, and watched. The temperature by her window was colder than that of the rest of the flat – it made the hairs on her neck and arms stand up, and it chilled her. But it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was almost cathartic.
Lizzie was thinking how impossible it would be to count how many nights she’d spent like this, by the window. She had lost count, herself. That’s why Lizzie was reasonably certain that, despite the constant change unfolding in the sky, the estate grounds below her window would not be too different whenever she chose to look down. She knew there was another block of flats over the road, exactly the same as hers, with three storeys, one in the middle with a large window. And she knew that if she were to continue down the road to either the left or the right, there would be some houses, paintwork crumbling off them, and litter tossed into their gardens.
So, because of her experienced understanding of the geography of the grounds outside her home, Lizzie Darwin was certain that she had never seen a large blue box on the street corner, just opposite her window.
It was a police box, the sort from 1950s London. It was built from the most beautiful, blue-painted wood, and had a glowing light on its roof, illuminating the various signs on the rest of the box, as well as the area surrounding it, with its warm, yellow, glow. It looked fundamentally normal in terms of its construction, just like a funny little cabinet. And yet she had a strange, nagging feeling, one that people in her favourite books usually felt (and that Lizzie had ridiculed as a child), that whatever the box was, it wasn’t simply someone’s idea of a joke, left out on the street corner as a lark. There was something different about it.
Her mind already had gone straight onto some weird and out-there possibilities before she even dared to consider what was probably the more realistic explanation. After all, in the real world, there was no such thing as a magical blue police box. But Lizzie also knew that nobody would go to so much trouble on just a whim. Why would you even bother building such a thing for ‘a bit of a laugh?’ she quoted herself back to herself, as she often did when she thought she was being stupid.
For a reason she could not define, Lizzie just knew that somewhere there was such thing as a magical blue police box.
She threw on some jeans and a t-shirt, grabbed her coat, and sailed out of the flat.