"You're very lonely, aren't you?"
from Love and War by Paul Cornell
Dear Professor Elizabeth Shaw, M.D., Ph.D...
Suite 170 sat in the far corner of the unassuming, two-storey commercial building on High Street in Ealing Broadway; the October sunlight streamed through the dusty curtain windows and fell in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the cool evening air. Outside, she could hear the engines and air breaks and other vehicular ephemera sloughing through London's arteries.
Over the course of the afternoon the sunlight had moved leisurely across the chamber, stacked to its ceiling with cardboard boxes and scientific instruments. Scorch-marks marred the walls, discernible as broad black smears across the blistered cinderbrick. Shelves bowed noticeably beneath the weight of literature; what didn't fit between the makeshift bookends reposed in tottering piles on the floor. Four great wooden workbenches were arranged haphazardly towards the centre of the room. On one rose an elaborate construction of test-tubes, Bunsen burners, retorts, tubes and glass jars, the colourful, bubbling concoctions they once contained having long since crusted to the consistency of rust or evaporated entirely away. Every piece of equipment seemed to belong to a different age than its fellows, scattered about without any immediately discernible design or order: a maze of particle accelerators and what had once been christened a dimensional revisualiser sitting kitty-corner to common or garden o-scopes and microscopes. The mess had a certain charm, she supposed, but it had always seemed too conscientiously untidy for ready use... less like scientific artefacts and more like props, a front to lure the wayward or the curious while affecting just enough disorder to discourage any serious investigation.
It felt contrived.
Which was why, as Liz Shaw paced the suite 170 laboratory in UNIT's London headquarters, she was mindful of tossing the various letters and circulars and postcards with trite clichés scrawled on the back into the round wastepaper basket, lest the litter find itself squirreled away for bench liners. Or worse, pegged in a place of prominence on the cork-board, smack bang in the middle of her painstakingly transcribed transesterification formulae. She'd be damned if she was going to be privy to the chaos, much less add to it.
All the while, Liz avoided looking at the torn envelope and creased letterhead on the nearest table.
I am delighted to inform you that the Selection Committee for the Faculty of Mathematics...
She focused instead on tidying the dirty mugs crowding its surface, emptying the small pedal bin, and combing through the stacks of paperwork, untouched by anyone or anything save the coffee rings. It told of chronic carelessness and incurable distraction... not least of which her own.
Has reviewed your excellent history of service in the research, administrative and pedagogical duties associated with your position and has shortlisted you as a candidate for...
Liz had analyzed the few short words describing the appointment to a ludicrous degree, agonizing over the contents of the letter from her old scholarly stomping grounds for most of the afternoon. Three hours in and her tired excitement had a feverishness about it, exacerbated by the aching of her body from the ceaseless pacing and the perpetual strain of being cooped up inside UNIT's overcrowded base, waiting for her work colleague to show his face so she could break the good slash bad news to him with as much delicacy and tact as she could muster.
Which, Liz supposed ruefully, wouldn't be very much at all.
It wasn't as though the Doctor was bound to notice the effort, in any case...
She took another turn about the perimeter of the room, playing the possibilities out in her mind until she managed to wear a groove in her thoughts, so deep that she feared she might soon struggle to peer over its edges. The lab was a riot of oranges and yellows in the late day sun that fired the floating dust in the air to sluggish, glittering halations; Liz passed close to a cracked window and was assailed with the scents of autumn: damp foliage, thick borders of roses and dahlias, flowering grasses and beds of fresh mulch that made the air pleasantly pungent.
Pulse decidedly quickened, Liz set aside her tidying up and touched the piece of paper with her fingertip.
This appointment and any subsequent appointments are subject to confirmation by the Board of Trustees and are governed by the policies and procedures of the University. Further information regarding the rules and regulations of the final selection...
Academics, each in their own way, envisaged themselves as singular cogs in the scholarly apparatus, a kind of temporary placeholder in the eternal succession of professors. Akin to a medieval kingship, thought Liz: although monarchs and scholars alike commanded great respect in the secular world, their temporal incumbency seemed relatively inconsequential compared to the apparatuses they represented...
The thought of refusing to operate as a cog for a military machine only to be bolted down in the gears of an academic one appealed little to Liz, but of the two apparatuses, she knew immediately which she preferred. Only one was capable of expunging the death and pain and killing she had come to know over recent months...
As well as the despair of eternal inadequacy.
The realisation of how patently obvious her decision ought to be lay perilously close to a cognisance of her own selfishness, the bitterness near acuity and the uncertainty near resolution. That Liz had been handed a means of escape, all but wrapped in a bow and ribbon, granted cruel, cold amusement first, then stinging self-pity and pain, the patterns moving in a spiral... its distance increasing from an epicentre only to return again, one circle removed.
I'm leaving, Doctor. You're suffocating me. You're making me feel inadequate. You're tearing my career to ribbons. You're making me, and my world, seem so shallow and small. You you youyouyou...
Blame. Anger. Resentment.
She could picture it now: his tall, long-limbed frame skittering away from her like a spooked colt at such naked statements of bitterness, redoubling the barriers he liked to erect if ever their spikier emotions brushed too near to each other.
Nevertheless, there was a kind of relief in admitting the painful truth to herself.
It was time for her to go... long past time.
The letter was the kick in the arse she needed.
No need to wait for the Doctor to show his face at all.
Mustering her resolve, Liz left the lab and made a beeline for a room in the adjacent wing.