“They’re beautiful,” Rose said, looking up from them to him in bewilderment. “I’m not sure why you don’t like them.”
He took a leap of faith. “They’re just too much like me at the moment.”
“Oh,” Rose said, biting her lip. She leafed through the photos, spreading them on the table in front of them. “I like them a lot. You should come to my place. It looks a lot like this. Although it’s in much better repair. It’s jus’... empty.”
“Aye,” he said, holding her gaze, willing her to understand that he felt just as empty and hollow as she did. She was a kindred soul; he had a feeling that she knew exactly what was going on inside him.
“They’re beautiful and haunting. They make me wonder what happened in the rooms,” Rose said, returning her attention to the photos. In most of the photos, the rooms had been reclaimed by nature, vines and weeds growing in them. Once, he had been incredibly lucky and found a room in which snow had collected on the debris littering the floor. There were rooms with peeling wallpaper, offering glimpses of past lives. Leaves and old newspapers had collected in the corners of rooms. He had caught a wall dappled by sunlight filtering in through the foliage as it fell on the flaking paint. Dust motes were dancing in the piercing beams of sunlight cutting through gaps and knotholes in boarded-up windows.
“There’s always windows, and always light,” Rose said, looking up. “I like that. It suits you.”
Dave chewed the inside of his cheek. It was something he hadn’t noticed until then, but Rose was right. There were always windows and the pattern of light painting bright rectangles on the floors and walls. “I suppose there are.”
“I love them. They’re gorgeous,” Rose said. “I’m no expert, of course, but I really like them.”
“I think,” Dave began, bracing his hand on his hip and drawing a deep breath, “I think I’d like to see you in them.”
Rose looked up in surprise. “Me?”
He exhaled. “I don’t... I found you that night in the street, with all those empty buildings around us, and... forgive me but I can’t quite shake the image of you there. You were out of place there.” And I am probably completely out of line, he added in the privacy of his thought to himself.
Rose was silent for a very long time. She went through the photos again, which by that time he felt the urge to protect. It wasn’t that he was afraid of her damaging them. She had understood what they were about, and he had voiced his artistic desires. He felt very naked.
“It’s just a mad idea. Forget about it,” he said, his voice tense. He reached for the photos, but Rose put her hands on his, stopping him gently but insistently.
“I haven’t said no, have I?”
“Rose, please. I shouldn’t have shown you these.”
“I’m glad you did,” she said. She curled her fingers around his hand. “I really am.”
He just stared at her.
“I’d be honoured to work with you,” she said.
“But...” he began. “You don’t even know what it is I’m after.”
“I don’t need to. I trust you,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for my outburst earlier.”
“It seemed to me you needed a good cry,” Dave said, unusually bold at discussing matters of the heart. He was very reluctant to discuss his inner life because whenever he had opened up to Michelle, she had started to explain his emotions away as if they were some minor complication. At the beginning he’d not allowed her to brush him off, but eventually he had learned that apparently he wasn’t entitled to discuss his feelings with her and he had given up. Over time he had learned to keep them to himself, and he’d turned to photography to vent his feelings.
“I did, yeah,” Rose said thoughtfully. She was playing with a loose lock of hair. Her gaze was still on the photos, as if she were making her mind up. “I like you, Dave. A lot. And... I think you need to know a couple of things about me before we take this... any further.”
A shiver ran down Dave’s spine. That sounded ominous and he wasn’t sure if he was up to her story, but he also wanted to understand her. And he definitely wanted to take this further. His heart was thumping in his chest. Rose was still interested in him. “Let’s sit down,” he said softly, gesturing at the sofas.
Rose sat down, fidgeting nervously. It was a side of her he hadn’t seen before. She always seemed so self-confident. He reached out to take her hand. The touch was electrifying, sending jolts of pleasure through him, accompanied by a flash of panic that he’d reject her.
His eyes went wide. That last feeling wasn’t his.
“I’m sorry!” Rose hurried to say, horrified. “Please, don’t be scared.”
It took him a few blinks to find the words for his thoughts. That flash of panic had been hers. “What... happened?” She tightened her grip around his hand as he wanted to let go of her in his bewilderment.
“I am a low-level telepath,” Rose said. “If I touch someone I can sometimes feel what they feel, and I can make them feel what I feel. It’s not supposed to happen, but I’m a little upset now and my control slipped. I’m sorry, Dave. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“A low-level telepath,” he repeated dumbly. He’d only ever read of them, or seen them in films.
Rose nodded, her face serious. It was hard to believe, but he had felt her panic. She wasn’t lying to him.
“So that night,” Dave asked, “when I found you in that street — you weren’t upset? I touched you but I didn’t... hear you.”
“Yes, I was, very. But... I can’t explain it. There are so many things I don’t know about it,” she said. “But I do know that you don't have to be afraid of it. I can control it.” There was something else she wanted to say, but she looked away. He took her hand in both of his and pressed a kiss to the back of her hand.
“It’s... How did you...? God, I’m making it sound like it’s a disease,” he chuckled nervously, trailing his fingers over the hills and valleys of her knuckles.
Rose relaxed and laughed. “It’s not, I can assure you. It was a gift,” she said, sobering.
“From the Doctor?” He had no idea where this idea had come from, but it seemed the only logical conclusion. Rose had said he’d put the universe at her feet and burned up a sun for her. He hadn’t paid much attention to these words at the time, but now that she’d revealed her gift to him, he couldn’t help thinking that the Doctor must be a very special man.
“Yeah,” she said.
He took a deep breath and stilled his fingers on her skin. She wasn’t very forthcoming, but at the same time he knew that what she was telling him wasn’t easy for her. It wasn’t easy to make sense of what she had told him.
“Do you trust me, Dave?” she asked.
He nodded slowly. “Aye.”
Rose took a deep breath before she began. “The Doctor isn’t human. He is from a planet called Gallifrey. He has a ship, the TARDIS, with which he can travel in space and time. I travelled with him for a while.”
Dave started when his senses were suddenly flooded by her emotions. It was not entirely uncomfortable, a warmth, like velvet fingers, travelling up his arms. But it was too much to take in. “Please, Rose, don’t... don’t make me feel it. It’s a little overwhelming.”
“Yeah, right. ‘m sorry.”
Dave covered her hand with his, looking down at their joined hands. The sensation was gone, and he felt both relieved but also a bit empty. Not a moment ago he’d found her presence in his mind unbearable, and now he was missing it? “So you’re telling me I look like an alien?” he asked, trying to infuse his voice with humour, but the truth was that he was confounded by what she was telling him. But then again, there had been the Cybermen a few years back, and they certainly hadn’t seemed man-made. A shiver ran down his spine.
“No, he looks human, but he’s different. He’s over nine-hundred years old and he as two hearts.”
He nodded.
“But as I said, the two of you are
completely different. You feel different,” Rose said. “You see, his body temperature is lower than ours, and he’s always tense with energy. You are warm and solid and calm.”
He smiled feebly. “That’s good to hear.”
She had travelled through space and time with an alien.
“What was it like? Travelling with him?” he asked when she went silent for a moment, her thoughts turning inwards.
“It was a mad rush most of the time. It was exhilarating, beautiful, terrifying, humbling... I could go on like this for a while,” she said.
“He isn’t dead, is he?” he asked. She’d been using the present tense when she’d described him.
“No.” She ducked her head and made to tug her hand from between his, but he tightened his hold on her. If he let her go now he’d lose her.
“What happened?” he asked gently.
“We were separated, and now there’s no way of going back to him. I was trying to when you found me. The... device I was using malfunctioned and... well, you know the rest.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Are you sure there’s no way back to him?” He was horrified for even asking her that but he needed to know if he even stood a chance against that swashbuckling alien. The Doctor had, literally, put the universe and time at her feet. How could he ever hope to compete with him? Suddenly he felt very stupid for showing her the Emptiness Folder.
Rose drew in a shuddering breath. She was fighting tears again, but eventually she looked at him. Her eyes were full. “I can’t go back to him. Ever again. He was right and I didn’t believe him. You know, he used to tell me, early on, to never say never ever. So I tried to get back to him when he told me there was no way this time. I didn’t believe him and I fought until the Dimension Cannon exploded.”
“Dimension Cannon?” he asked, frowning.
Rose held his gaze. “I... the Doctor and I, we are from a different universe. When we were separated, I was brought to this universe, and when the walls between them were sealed up, I was stuck. Forever. And he was on the other side.”
Dave let go of her hands. If her story had sounded fantastic until then, he wasn’t sure what to make of that bombshell she had just dropped. A different universe she’d said. A parallel universe? Did such things exist? Rose took his hand and squeezed it, and for a moment he just felt the warmth of her skin. It was reassuring and very human.
“He burned up a sun for me so we could say good-bye to each other,” Rose finished.
“Rose, I... I don’t know what to say.”
“Do you believe me?”
Strangely enough, he did. “I do, it’s just... so much to take in,” he said. “And I think I have a thousand questions.”
Rose smiled in relief, and it was the most heart-warming thing he had seen all evening. “I’ll be happy to answer all of them.” She paused, then laughed.
“What?” he asked, surprised by her reaction.
“I didn’t think it’d be so easy to tell you all this. That you... would be willing to listen. And believe me.”
He lowered his gaze to their hands and covered them with his free one. “It explains why I’d never heard of you until... So... what about Peter Tyler? Your name is Tyler, isn’t it?”
Rose laughed softly. “Yeah, it is. Pete isn’t my real Dad, however. He adopted me when Mum and me came to this universe.”
Dave stared. “Your Mum... didn’t she, back when the Cybermen...?”
“That was this universe’s Jackie Tyler. It’s a long story,” she said.
“I’d like to hear it, please,” he said softly.
He went to the fridge and got out two fresh bottles of beer, and after he’d passed her one, she made herself comfortable on the sofa. It was getting a bit cold, so he fetched a blanket for her. For a moment he toyed with the idea of moving this somewhere more cosy, but he was afraid of breaking the spell, of giving Rose too much time to think things over and decide that she didn’t want to tell him all these things after all.
After he had draped the blanket over her legs, he settled down and Rose began to tell him how she and her mother had come to this universe.
“The empty rooms,” he said after she had finished, “they are like the Rift Chamber, aren’t they?” He had peeled the label off his bottle and there was a pile of pellets on the wide armrest of the sofa.
Rose sighed. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“Don’t be. I’m very glad I could tell this story to someone who wasn’t part of it,” Rose said.
He smiled shyly.
“I still want to work with you,” Rose said. “If you’ll have me.”
Dave nodded, relief travelling pleasantly down his back and pooling warmly in his stomach. “I’d love that.” At the same time, however, he couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever be able to live up to the Doctor. The image he had gotten of the time-travelling alien was intimidating, but at the same time, Rose had managed to portray him as a very lonely man, who loved her dearly although he hadn’t known how to tell her. Also, the idea that the Doctor looked like him, just an ordinary bloke from Earth, was puzzling. Rose had assured him that he was nothing like the Doctor at all, and he wondered what she was doing here, sitting on his sofa, telling him all this. He realized that his similarity to the Doctor was the catalyst for her being able to open up to someone; to talk about her loss. But he couldn’t help wondering where that left him. He certainly didn’t want to compete with this god-like, two-hearted man from another planet. The Doctor had taken her to planets and to all kinds of historic events. He couldn’t possibly offer her any of that.
“Dave?” she said softly, reaching out to him, her fingertips brushing against his hand where it lay on the armrest. “Say something.”
“I think we should call it a day. I’ll have to get back home to relieve the babysitters,” he said.
“Babysitters?”
“My sister-in-law and her husband are over at mine,” he said. “They’ll be wanting to go home, I reckon.”
“I’m sorry, you should have said. I shouldn’t have monopolised you like this,” Rose said, embarrassed.
“I wouldn’t have let you if I didn’t want you to,” he said. “I feel rude for kicking you out like this.”
“No, it’s late anyway. Thank you for listening to me. And for the photos. They mean a lot to me.”
He smiled.
“You will call me about the empty room photo shoot, won’t you?”
His smile widened. “Aye.” They stood and he showed her to the door, carrying the folder with the photos from the charity event for her.
“Just let me know when you have an idea of what you’d like me to do.”
“Rose,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Thank you for listening to me,” she said. She rose to her toes and kissed his cheek. The gesture startled him, and again pleasure washed over him.
“Bye,” he squeaked, passing her the folder.
After she left, he slumped onto the sofa and ran his hands through his hair. Even after a while of staring into the rafters he had no idea what had hit him that evening. Eventually, he stood, grabbing his sketch book and pencil case from his desk, and picked up the Emptiness Folder. It was getting late and he needed to get home so Anna and Robin could enjoy the rest of the evening. He had told them he was at footie practice. After he put the children to bed he’d work on some sketches for the ideas he had. If he wanted this to work, he needed to be well-prepared. He wanted this to be perfect. He wanted perfection from their loss., even if his seemed nothing compared to what she had gone through.
Rose definitely was not of this world.
With that thought and a smile, he left the studio and rode his bike home.
Chapter 12
Rose had fanned out the photos of her on the floor in the lounge. She was sitting on the sofa gazing down on them. Dave had captured a side of her on her birthday that very few people bothered
to see, and he had been undeterred by it. If she were a cynic she’d say he had come too close, but she was grateful he had. She was even more grateful that he had given these photos to her. Just how she was going to thank him for his kindness she had no idea. Maybe the project she had agreed to work on with him was a start.
Bigger on the inside: Space, Time Travel, Alien Criminals (A Space Time Travel Mystery Book 1) Page 12
