The Doctor was adamant that he wasn't brooding. But he deliberately didn't glance around the console room, keeping his eyes fixed downwards in pretended concentration as he flicked switches and tapped buttons to materialise the TARDIS. He didn't like looking around his ship – his home - and seeing nobody there. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to share with him the wonders of the universe. Nobody to show off to – that's what Martha would have said, and Donna, too, for that matter. Anyway, it was time for a refuel, and that meant a trip to Cardiff so that the TARDIS could soak up some of that rift energy that she kept telling him she liked so much. Actually there were other rifts they could go to, but Cardiff wasn't so bad these days. There was always Jack, and now he'd got used to the sheer wrongness of the man being a fixed point in time, he was quite good company. Perhaps it would be a good thing to catch up.
The wheezing, grinding noise of the TARDIS' materialisation process stilled, and the Doctor pulled on his long brown coat and steeled himself against what he knew would be a bracing Welsh breeze. The Plass was always windy. Just as he opened the door, all the hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood up, and he peered round the side of the TARDIS just in time to see something rather odd. Thinking that Jack could wait another few minutes for the big reunion, he found himself to be sufficiently intrigued to follow.
One hour earlier...
Alice Milton was adamant that she wasn't going to start being someone who sighed. In fact, she had always found other people sighing rather irritating. But she was starting to understand why they did it. Sitting at the little desk in her attic room she looked out over the Cardiff rooftops towards the Bay, and massaged her temples, and silently vowed not to start sighing.
Three months ago she had been looking forward to moving to a new job, new flat, new people, new challenges, and planning a wedding, and it had all fallen apart. Ed had broken the engagement off and moved back to New Zealand, and the funding for her community worker job in Manchester had fallen through. She had had to move out of Ed's flat at the same time as he did so that he could sell it, and she was absolutely not going to go back to living at her parents' house. She did still have some dignity after all, though it was being eroded by the day.
Sharing all these woes on facebook had at least got her a roof over her head – the attic room belonged to an old college friend, Jenny, who had, for reasons that Alice couldn't quite fathom, set up a florist shop between Cardiff city centre and the Bay, and had offered Alice a room in return for helping out with delivering flowers. It was marginally better than nothing, and Alice felt slightly guilty about not being more grateful, but it was hard to summon up much in the way of optimism. No home of her own, no proper job, and ever since she'd moved to Cardiff she'd been plagued by such awful headaches so that she was only barely earning her keep at all.
The GP had (quite reasonably) diagnosed their cause as 'stress', which had really wound Alice up. She didn't do stress. She grudgingly acknowledged that the last three months might have been a bit challenging, but stress was all about how you dealt with life, wasn't it? Or rather how you failed to deal with it. Having stress headaches was a sign of failure in Alice's book, and she didn't want to be sitting around popping ibuprofen when she could be out doing something (anything really) or even out looking for a proper job, so that she could pay Jenny some rent (or let's face it, get a place of her own, ideally several hundred miles from Cardiff).
The GP's advice to down tools the moment she felt one of the headaches coming on was a bit of a joke. The only times at the moment when Alice didn't feel there was a headache coming on was when it had already arrived and was in full swing. There had been a couple of times when it had got so bad that she'd momentarily lost her sense of which was up and had embarrassingly lurched, gasping and gulping in air, into the nearest wall. People probably thought she'd been drunk, Alice thought, bleakly.
So she had soldiered on, despite feeling terrible most of the time, just to be getting out and doing things. She closed her eyes and let her mind wander, thinking back a day to some flowers she'd delivered to a small terraced house on Bute Street, only about 10 minutes' walk from Jenny's place. The woman who'd answered the door had been in a terrible state – the door had been flung back with enthusiasm, but the woman's face had fallen when she'd seen Alice and the flowers – in fact, she'd started sobbing so suddenly and so uncontrollably, that Alice had ended up being drawn into the house and spending the best part of an hour making tea and listening to the woman's tale of her 20-year old daughter Megan's disappearance. The girl been gone a week, completely out of character, and Alice winced as she remembered Brenda saying that Megan and Alice looked rather alike – apparently she'd seen Alice through the frosted glass front door and for a moment had thought that her daughter had come home, only to have the hopes dashed when she answered the door.
Such was Alice's guilt at this piece of mistaken identity that she had ended up leaving Brenda her mobile number, in case she needed someone to talk to again. She didn't have any other family, and had seemed very grateful. Alice left, and almost straight away had to duck into an alleyway and throw up. The headache that had been bad before had risen to such intolerable intensity in Brenda's house that Alice could hardly believe that she'd managed to keep listening. Or maybe that was the key – get a reputation as a good listener by being in so much pain that you're unable to form a coherent sentence.
Back in the little attic bedroom, Alice's mobile rang, and she saw that it was Brenda calling. 'Brenda, is that you? Has there been any news?'
'Alice – no, there's nothing, but... could you come round? I just can't cope with being alone today. It's Megan's birthday...' Brenda's voice cracked.
'Give me ten minutes' replied Alice, quickly, glad of something positive that she could do.
Alice's headache remained unchanged even with the fresh air of the five minute walk to Brenda's house. Wasn't fresh air supposed to help? For early June it was mild but not warm – though to Alice the air felt close as if a thunderstorm was coming. Perhaps if it did she would finally get rid of the bloody headaches. Or maybe she was allergic to flowers, or to Brenda. Or to bloody Cardiff. Alice paused for a deep breath and rang the bell.