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Hi Sis!

I’m hoping you got my last letter. If you didn’t, then hey! It’s me, Rupert. I didn’t get all blown up, I actually survived. Isn’t it great? OK, I’ll leave you a line to get over the shock.

How’s Phil anyway? Sorry if I remembered his name wrong, it was a pretty long time ago. Did the two of you get married? I thought you made a nice couple, I know I argued with Phil a bit at the time but I can see now that he’s a great bloke really.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to tell you the truth about where I’ve been. Instead I’m going to tell you some made-up nonsense that happens to fit the facts. There are lots of little stories that branch all round it and maybe if you get back in touch I’ll fill you in on those, but I’m going to miss them out for now and tell you the main one. It all started one night when I was working as a cleaner at Mystero Electrics.

I was cleaning because I was good at football. I still am. Some people say they’re good, but I know I really was. I played striker for the school, got loads of glory, but the Sunday team kept me out on the wing which suited me much better. It isn’t cheap keeping up with all the latest bits of kits, following Barnet to their big matches, or playing for the school or the Sunday team. OK, following and playing football wasn’t too expensive, but going to the pub with the team afterwards was taking up more than pocket money. So Tuesday and Wednesday nights were football nights, Thursday and Monday were working as a cleaner and Friday was for the pub.

This one Monday, I remember I knocked over this glass vase in reception with my duster. I’d been off-put by some noise I thought was coming from the air-con, an extra gurgling or rumbling. Plus my glasses were never too well prescribed back then, I often found that things were out of focus.

It was a dull job. We cleaned the factory and office when the staff had gone home, so it was always dark and quiet, only the three of us on duty, plus Joe the security guard, who we found was running some enormous DVD-copying black market. He was a weird bloke.

Then I hear someone running down the corridor towards me. I started kicking shards of glass out of the way, thinking I was going to get in trouble.

A guy with dark hair and a fancy jacket came into reception starts feeling around the lift doors. He said, “Are these the only lifts to the roof?” So I told him, those lifts don’t even go to the roof, he probably wanted the service lift at the other end of the corridor. I asked him about the vase too, but he said that a whole lot more things were going to get smashed.

Anyway, his name was the Doctor. It turned out that there was this Rujungan alien blood cult operating out of Mystero Electronics that did these ritual sacrifices on the roof. The Doctor helped me stop the Rujungans from activating the hypnotic circuits they’d hidden in hundreds of photocopiers around the country, which would have mass-copied the doctrine of the cult into thousands of people. All their followers were hypnotised.

Unfortunately, their response to being defeated was mass explosive suicide, hence the factory being blown up. It put an end to Joe’s DVD empire too.

I’d taken this sheet of black paper with really weird writing on it from one of the Rujungan’s copiers as keepsake, but soon after saying goodbye to the Doctor I realised that he must have pinched it off me. So I followed him.

I’m not going to write much about his time-space ship, because that’s too weird for you. So, I’ll say that it’s small when it lands, but big when it flies. It’s wonderful and it can go anywhere. Sometimes the Doctor leaves the doors unlocked like he did on this night. He was a bit cross with me for barging in, but by about our third or fourth trip we were best friends. Or at least, he stopped grumbling about me being in the way.

 

You’d like the Doctor, I think. You’d probably say he was a good replacement father figure. I don’t suppose we ever heard from Dad again did we? Or if there was ever any clue about why he left that night? I remember you telling me about finding other male role models when I was seven, that they should be the right sort, not too drunk or criminal.

I reckon the Doctor was the right sort. He was never drunk and he was only a criminal when there was a very good reason, such as when we found out that the President of the Reldar Federation was working with the Goom, these giant slugs that were looking to take over and eat everyone. We were up against the President’s private army, so the Doctor and these rebels were helping me to sabotage loads of technical equipment. Great fun and quite educational, too.

There were loads of times were I saw that he was a good man, but the one that sticks out for me the most is where we were up against these crystalline creatures called Meldrigans that were hiding out in prehistoric times on Earth. The humans, that’s us by the way, we’d wiped them out in the 32nd Century and so they’d come back in time to engineer some virus so that humanity never existed. We were about to be executed for the crime of trying to stop them, which to be fair we had been doing. We were there under the blazing late-Cretaceous sun waiting to be given up as food for something really big that I don’t think they ever found any bones of in our time. As the Meldrigan guard started to untie this thing with the teeth, the Doctor starts making this speech. He tells them about the causality of the Universe and how the smallest act can have repercussions. That he could save them, find them a new place to live and that they didn’t have to carry out their act of vengeance. He’d already proved to them that it wouldn’t save their people; there were other races out there who would have wiped them out long before if humanity hadn’t stopped them. Then he told them about humans and how they had things that were worthwhile such as scientific advances, culture, love and families.

It was the first time I’d thought of you and Mum since starting to travel with the Doctor. As he was singing some nursery rhyme to send the big lizard to sleep, I was thinking that you must be worrying about me. Or that from where we were, you would be worrying about me in about a hundred million years time. Then I got confused and missed how the Doctor got us out of that one. In the end he did convince the Meldrigans to move to a new planet and start again, rather than retro-erasing our existence. I had wanted to use their sonic weapons to wipe them out, but the Doctor stopped me. At the time I was furious, but of course he was right.

After a few months travelling with the Doctor, I’d settled down and was having a great time. Apart from when we went to Newport in the rain, that was awful. But we visited the Plasticine caves of Mymazor, where there’s this intelligent jelly in the rocks that makes the whole cave wall moves in waves. You can make little plasticine characters and they’ll swim through Someone should tell Nick Park. There was the beautiful Silent City and our amazing journey back in time to meet Petrarch; he was no end of laughs! Hated his poems though. The Doctor smiled at me all the time and there was never any talk of going home. Though sometimes I sat in my room in the TARDIS and I felt so sad. The Doctor never seemed to notice. We made friends wherever we went, but we always said goodbye to them when we left and I was getting lonely. The Doctor was so much fun, he had so much energy, but he wasn’t human. That’s why I was so pleased when Heather joined our team, but I almost had to drag her on board though!

We were back on Earth, round about 2020 trying to stop this sort of energy creature from turning the sun into a black hole. I’m a bit fuzzy as to why it wanted to do that, but then I did spend the whole day being ‘possessed’, or so I’m told. What I do remember is that Heather stopped me from killing the Doctor. She was so, so beautiful and her raven black hair was sculpted up in this amazing way, like I’m sure she must have used some future-world hairspray or something.

Heather wasn’t merely good looking though, she was smart and brave. She had found out about the Kreezltus all by herself and decided that she was going to try and stop it. It wasn’t her fault that she nearly became the conduit for the destruction of our solar system, I thought and she deserved a better chance, so I told her she could join us and see the future she nearly destroyed.

From the moment she stepped into the TARDIS I had it all planned out. The Doctor would take us away on amazing adventures and after a little while of me working my charm, Heather and me would be girlfriend and boyfriend, having seen such wonderful things together. After a year or two, we’d be so much in love that we’d have to leave and get married on some paradise planet. The Doctor would make the wedding by the skin of his teeth, of course and we’d have to fight the ultimate evil of the Universe as we proclaimed our vows.

Things were going well to begin with. Heather was initially very wary of the Doctor and myself, but after getting captured and escaping again on a number of planets she started to enjoy herself. It was her who realised that the Conqufressic Genarobolds hadn’t hidden the school children in the room that we were looking in, but that they had hidden the room we were looking in inside one of the school children. That’s lateral thinking. She said she saw a half-digested Twizzle outside the window.

As you know, sister, I do like to have a lie-in occasionally. I discovered that psychic attack really tires me out, so there was one occasion in particular where I needed to sleep. We had left the planet Ranto and the TARDIS was still in flight when I went to my room. I must have slept for about twenty hours.

When I woke up I made my way to the console room. That’s the main room of the TARDIS, it’s big and looks like a church. I felt quite justified wearing a Noel Coward dressing gown and slippers. Although not his actual dressing gown and slippers. We met him, but I didn’t steal any part of his wardrobe.

Heather and the Doctor weren’t around. The TARDIS had landed. Clearly, they’d not woken me up, but had gone out on an adventure without me. I flicked on the scanner, which was about the only control I could operate on the console. It was amazing out there, a bright purple jungle with old fashioned, wooden sailing ships floating over the tree tops. Silver fairy creatures were darting between the trees, leaving orange, fire-like trails that slowly faded away.

I was about to run outside, when I thought about the Doctor and Heather. I imagined the two of them seeing the same sight on landing and being too excited to wake me. I imagined the Doctor’s broad grin and Heather looking deep into his eyes before they held hands and rushed to the doors.

They didn’t need me. I turned off the scanner and went back to my room.

I started thinking about leaving. They still made a show of including me, but these adventures were for Heather to share with the Doctor. Every day I saw it more and more, that the two of them were so connected. I’d outstayed my welcome, I was the spare wheel, turning their flashy motorbike lifestyle into a mundane Robin Reliant.

It was impossible for me to grab any moments alone with Heather. It was as though we were being kept apart. We’d leave the TARDIS and get split up, with Heather and the Doctor having all the fun and me finding a load of weird aliens chasing me. Or I’d be knocked unconscious, or get drugged and there was even one occasion where I just collapsed in the TARDIS and missed a whole four weeks. Perhaps if I was able to stop losing my glasses. It was so unfair. I needed one chance with her, but all my chances were getting blown. Blown away by enormous hairy squids carrying plasma cannons.

Then we came to Australia, two years after I’d first left with the Doctor. I knew that as soon as we got close enough to home I was going to run out on him. I’d written the note weeks before and kept it with me in my pocket. I wanted him to know… lots of things, really.

We’d helped this family, the Hamiltons out with a Gigantivore that had unburied itself in the swamps near their house and was threatening to devour the neighbourhood. It had swallowed the Doctor whole, so Heather had rescued him through a complex plan involving ropes, levers and pillow stuffing. Meanwhile, I was being looked after by the Hamiltons, their young girl bringing me glasses of lemonade. I had got myself attacked by one of it’s claws and was recovering from the poison. The Doctor saved my life again.

So the Doctor had sent out a signal to this collector and he comes down with his zoo-ship and transports the beast up just as Heather rescues the Doctor from it’s stomach. I was going to miss them.

As we were walking up the hill back to the TARDIS, I pretended to the Doctor and Heather that I had left something behind and ran back to pick it up. But I ran straight past the Hamiltons, I ran on and on down the muddy road towards the town.

I had hoped that my note would explain everything. It said that although I had enjoyed the journey immensely, it was time to grow up. I felt I was stuck at age 17 and I had lost track of time. Although the Doctor was a good friend, he wasn’t substantial enough, our relationship was based on saving the Universe. I needed something I could relate to.

My note was there to tell him that I was sorry, he had shown me so much and that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. My note was there to say goodbye. My note was still in my pocket as I arrived in the little town.

So now I’m working in a bar. I’m renting a small apartment and studying for an International Baccalaureate in chemistry. That was my best subject at school, I suppose. I thought about saving enough money up to return home to England, but… but… how could you understand? How could I impose myself on you like that, to run off for years, let you think I’m dead and then expect to be welcomed back. I know that you can’t just flit about the place with one other person now, you need roots and friendships and stability. It’s okay for a while, but you have to take control and settle down at some point.

I’ve written you one heck of a long letter and hardly scratched the surface of my time with the Doctor. There’s so much more to say, but I’m not even going to show you this much. This letter isn’t going to get read, it’ll get deleted and wiped off the hard drive before I print it out. It’s not going anywhere near E-mail, that’s for sure. I’ll write some boring stuff about my mates over here and my girlfriend Mary in another letter. Maybe I’ll send you that someday.

Thanks for bringing me up. I owe you more than this.

I love you.

Rupert.

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