Out of Time

Prologue, Herne Bay, September 2009

 Not long after I started writing my Doctor Who stories way back in 2008, I knew David Tennant’s much loved and universally popular Doctor would be leaving and it would be a few months before we all discovered who would take his place. And as much as I loved Tennant in the role when I first saw Matt Smith in his Doctor Who confidential interview I just knew he was the one who could do it and it was love at first sight. Impossibly young and ancient at the same time, boundless enthusiasm along with endless compassion, full of childish mischief though maybe more darkness than all the other incarnations put together, Matt Smith just got the role and as far as I see it, he’s the best version of the Doctor that has ever graced the TV. So it would have been awfully remiss of me not to have written an adventure for Smith’s magnificent Doctor.

  I had way too much fun writing “Out of Time” and I couldn’t wait for Anna to meet a new incarnation of the Doctor because like so many of his companions before the Doctor never got round to telling Anna about his miraculous ability to regenerate, so that was a lot of fun and also moving to write. And after the dramatic events of the Greater Good, Anna needed some closure and also the Doctor back in her life again, though it took me awhile to decide whether Anna should have a happy ending. Hmm…Happy endings, it doesn’t quite work out like that in real life does it? That’s why I like to put them in my stories, so if you want to find out what happens to Anna and discover why Adam Tallis is back in her life then read on. As well as being influenced by the Doctor’s travelling companions, Amy and Rory, for Anna’s love story I was heavily influenced by an 80s cult TV classic from the BBC called The Flipside of Dominick Hide, where incidentally the main character reminds me a great deal of Matt’s gloriously alien, unselfconscious portrayal of the Doctor. So now I’ve put the final part of my eight part story arc on Wattpad and I would have loved to have written more of Matt’s Doctor but then I finally decided it was time to stop procrastinating (again) and write my own fiction in the form of my novels, though for one of my characters somehow a version of Mr Smith’s Doctor snuck in there as well! I wanted to get my story on here before Matt’s Doctor departs, Mr Smith you were amazing. Though maybe one day I will return to your Doctor and my Whovian fiction, so for now it’s goodbye but it’s never goodbye forever.

Prologue

Herne Bay, September 2009

 To casual observers soaking up the last of the summer sun it would appear that the agitated woman pacing the beach was suffering from some form of OCD as she repeatedly glanced down at her wristwatch; it was Saturday afternoon and it had just gone two o’clock… Though to the would be poets and dreamers among us it would be a different picture, they saw a beautiful yet frail looking young woman with shining bobbed hair smiling sadly to herself as she gazed out across the sea as though she was trying to conjure a lost memory into existence… Anna Bailey’s memory was a little hazy, she couldn’t be certain of the exact time but the one thing that she could guarantee at this precise moment was that the Doctor, her parents and friends, including an old boyfriend should all be trapped in the museum by now, under attack from the Shadow Armies, fighting for their lives and defending planet Earth. And you might wonder why Anna Bailey wasn’t there alongside the others but she was…Only it was her younger self. This Anna Bailey standing on the beach was in fact eighteen months older and that adventure was in her past. For those were the days when Anna Bailey travelled with the Doctor. And now this present day Anna could only wait on the side lines as though she had done something wrong and couldn’t take part when in reality she was unable to intervene and interfere with her personal history. And for those of you who have followed Anna’s adventures from the beginning you would know that in the end, all ends well. Planet Earth is saved and the second city survives unscathed, in complete ignorance of their invaders. But even still as the sun slipped behind the clouds, Anna automatically shivered as she remembered the time dimensional storms… “You see the thing with time is, it’s not fixed. Anything can happen. The tiniest thing could change everything. What if something goes wrong?…” Anna shook her head full of self-reproach, she knew she had to sit it out in the sleepy seaside town and stay away; crossing your own time line was an absolute “no no”. The Doctor would not be amused. Though in that moment Anna would gladly endure the last of the Time Lord’s wrath because she missed her old friend so much.  Anna wanted to see the Doctor again, the man who had set her world alight, given her so much joy and had shown her all of time and space. The Doctor made you a better person. Anna Bailey wanted to be that fearless and adventurous person again, to have one last adventure; she couldn’t even remember saying goodbye… “But so much happened and it wasn’t the same not after…” Her thoughts were interrupted by a seagull as it screeched overhead. It reminded Anna of the beach in Brighton, lying alongside the Doctor in the sand after plummeting at the speed of light through the Time Vortex in an escape time capsule from the stricken TARDIS, sometimes she thought she could hear its engines on the wind…Every time she turned a corner Anna expected to see that blue box. It was as though Anna had left a part of herself behind with the Doctor. Her mother had noticed that her daughter would simply drift away for long stretches as she sighed anxiously. “It’s like you’re still out there with him.” Though it wasn’t just the Doctor Anna was thinking of. Adjusting to the everyday world and coming to terms with life without the Doctor was hard enough but there was another man who haunted Anna’s dreams. Though Caroline Bailey had no idea about that particular chapter of her daughter’s life as Anna’s thoughts constantly returned to the Eden like planet of AVA and her final moments she had spent on it with Adam Tallis, the man from the future who she had fallen in love with…Though fate and the laws of time were against them as Adam also turned out to be her direct descendant, meaning they could never be together. It was in these solitary moments such as today that Anna Bailey was in danger of withdrawing further from her own life as her thoughts returned incessantly to Adam, wondering what he was doing in his own time stream. Sometimes she imagined that he had moved on in his life and met someone else on the new world. Travelling through time breaks down barriers, lulls you into a false sense of reality, Anna pictured herself walking into a room and simply finding him there. Anna knew if she could build her own time machine, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself…Though in all fairness there wasn’t much danger of this occurring. Anna sighed deeply and felt a sharp pain in her chest as though her heart was irrevocably broken. “I wonder if it’s possible to die of a broken heart…” Anna shook her head, she knew she was being melodramatic and wallowing in self-pity, it was only a touch of indigestion. It had been eighteen months since she and Adam had parted. And Anna knew she had to pull herself together because at the end of the day she had her own life to live.