LONGING
"I have lost something. If only I could remember what it was."
That was the first line in Donna Noble's diary entry, and it looked like being the last one.
She was sitting in a café in central London, drinking coffee and trying to come to terms with a life that should have been happy…. So why wasn't it?
She had a job and she had a husband. Her relationship with her mum had improved, though she was sure it would never be ideal, and her dear old granddad, Wilfred, was still around. Everything was going so well. So why this sense of something missing?
She had tried to figure out when it started, and she was pretty sure it had started around two years ago, when the new planets had appeared in the sky. Astronomers said that the Earth had been dragged in its entirety to a new location in space, and some people claimed to have seen aliens (strange metallic creatures called Daleks), which were supposedly responsible for this event. And that was one of the strange things: when Donna had seen a blurry, out-of-focus newspaper photograph of one of these so-called Daleks, it had sent a shiver up her spine out of all proportion to what she was seeing…. as if she knew what the thing was, and what it was capable of, if only she could remember.
But then the new planets had disappeared, and the Daleks too; the earth was supposedly back in its old location, and everyone was trying to pretend it had never happened. However, some time during these events, Donna had collapsed, and woken up with no memory of the new planets in the sky or of anything unusual happening.
Her mum and granddad had assured her that she had fallen and hit her head, blacked out, and lost only a couple of hours' worth of memory. But she was sure it was more than that.
For one thing she had spoken to some of her old friends who said she had disappeared completely for several weeks before the incident of the new planets in the sky. Where had she gone? What had she been doing? She couldn't remember.
Also sometimes she saw her mother and her grandfather looking at her – when they thought she couldn't see them – with a terrible sadness on their faces. Pity, in fact. Why? They knew something, she was sure.
And there was someone else who knew something about it, she was sure: the youngish man with spiky brown hair who had come to her wedding. She had seen her mother and grandfather talking to him just as she had come out of the church. Later, when she asked her grandfather about him, Wilfred had replied that it was the verger, but she knew that wasn't true; for one thing, the verger of St Swithin's church was about ninety years old!
Also, when she put her mind to it, she was pretty sure the man had been at the house on the day she had her "memory loss" – she had heard someone talking to her mother and grandfather, and then seen him leaving. But who was he?
And furthermore…. She hoped she wasn't getting paranoid, but she was sure other people were involved as well. She had sat in this same cafe just last week, and seen a young black couple looking at her. They whispered to each other and she was sure they were talking about her. The girl in particular, an attractive girl with dreadlocks, had looked strangely familiar; she thought the man had called her "Martha" as they were leaving.
Was she just going crazy? Was she ready for the nuthatch? Or was there some mystery to her life that she had just… forgotten? She just didn't know any more.
What made it worse was that, beyond the worry about her own sanity and the puzzlement over her lost memories there was an intense longing… a wish for something more. Almost as if, at some time in the past, she had lived a life much more exciting and fulfilling than the one she had now… if only she could get back to it. But how could that be?
Donna sighed and put her diary back into her handbag. She stood and prepared to leave the café.
What was worse, she thought wryly: to have a mundane, boring life and be satisfied with it, or to be tortured by the thought of something more?
Well, it was back to work for a few hours, then off home. She was trying to improve her cooking skills, and was going to attempt chicken cacciatore tonight. Chicken cacciatore with a man who loved her…. Well, that was a lot better than nothing, she thought. Perhaps her life wasn't so bad after all.
She left the café with something like a spring in her step.
From across the street, the Doctor – newly regenerated and wearing a face Donna would not have recognized – watched her leave and wiped away a tear from his eye.