A few years ago I had a dream. I was in a nightclub. It was crowded, dimly lit – the usual sort of thing – a choking atmosphere of sweat, cigarette smoke and heavy bass that makes your chest ache with every thump. Maybe there were people there I knew. Maybe I was on my own in a heaving sea of strangers. I don’t remember that bit. All I remember was that I wanted to leave.
As I stood amongst them all, bored and confused, something made me look up. There between the shifting mass of faces I suddenly saw, looking right back at me, him.
The Doctor.
It wasn’t my Doctor; not the one I’d grown up with, nor a face familiar in a dream only to become a stranger again when you wake. This was the, until very recently, current Doctor; The Tenth Doctor. But it was him all the same. The Doctor, champion of my childhood and all the wild stories, unrefined memories and feelings associated with being a child, staring back at me with an intensity both frightening and yet somehow sad.
I tried to make my way towards him, but the crowd was too tightly packed. Squeezing between sweaty bodies and contorting myself into every free space I found, I crept a little closer. As I approached the spot where I had seen him I glanced up. But he was gone.
Frantically I looked around me. Strangers’ faces blurred past, nondescript and uniform. Everyone was in silhouette, grey or black and white. By chance my gaze fell upon a far wall and my head turned just in time to see a man with brown hair in a light brown coat slip through a doorway before the door closed behind him.
I pushed on through the crowd, desperate to get to him before he disappeared for good. I remember panicking as I fought my way through the thick mud of people, totally indifferent to me as I pushed and struggled through them, that I wasn’t going to reach him; that he was going to disappear. That I had to find him. Somehow I broke through the throng, tripping as I fell against the door, and toppled out into a cold and dusklit evening as it slammed shut behind me.
I was in an alleyway. From beyond the door throbbed the sound of the nightclub. Ahead of me the alley stretched on into darkness. There was no one there. My heart sank as I turned to make my way pointlessly back into the cave of people, the distant bass and noise throbbing through me like a sickly alien heartbeat.
And there in front of me, leaning nonchalantly against the police box that dominated the width of the narrow alley, was the Doctor.
I stared at him open-mouthed, suddenly entirely unsure what to say. He looked back at me with that same look of intense, alarming sadness. Neither of us spoke.
“Take me with you,” I said suddenly. I sounded like I was seven years old. At first he didn’t say anything, his brow wrinkling only slightly.
“I can’t,” he then sighed.
“Please.”
“I can’t,” he repeated. Again we stared at each other in the dim streetlight.
“Okay,” I relented. “Just…” – as he smiled ruefully – “Just don’t forget me.” His smile broke into a broad, genuine grin.
“I could never forget you!” he beamed.
I smiled weakly. It was cold. With nowhere else to go I made my way back into the autistic hug of strangers. The door closed behind me.
I woke up.
***
Years later I am on a bus, late for work as usual.
Fed up with staring down at another inexplicable Regent’s Street traffic jam, I follow the woman seated in front of me from the top deck of the Number 6 and off into the street, resigned to walk the rest of the way to Holborn – just a mini act of rebellion for a Thursday. It’s cold and I pull my Camden-relic navy officer’s coat about me as I cross Shaftesbury Avenue, through Piccadilly Circus and on to Leicester Square.
A sickly yellow on red totem of corporate trash catches my eye, and suddenly I realise that there is nothing I want more at this precise moment than the capitalist taste of a McDonald’s Egg and Bacon McMuffin™. I walk in under the neon plastic arches, share a joke at my incompetence with loose change at this hour of the morning with the young woman at the till, and am soon marching on across Leicester Square, munching on my Egg and Bacon McMuffin™ and wishing my hair didn’t have to resemble Hyacinth Bucket‘s when the wind blew.
‘Not a bad city after all,’ I muse as I eat my junk food and walk through an impossibly, blissfully deserted Leicester Square at 9:41am. I even consider leaving the house that little bit earlier in future so I can take this walk more often. It’s that odd sort of morning where you take an interest in everyone around you as they pass by, rather than keep your head down and push on through the crowds just to get where you’re going. I notice one man in particular as he approaches me – nicely tanned like he’s just returned from holiday, and idly wonder where he could be headed. He looks weirdly familiar somehow, and I feel as if I should know him. It happens all the time in London – a huge city where you can bump into people you know in the most unlikely or stupendously obvious of places. The closer I get, the more certain I become that I do know him.
I stop, mid-chew.
It’s David Tennant.
It’s the Tenth Doctor.
He glances at me and just as quickly looks away. Instantly, (even as my brain tries to understand why David Tennant is in Leicester Square, in front of me and not on a television screen in my flat) I feel invasive, and realise he must encounter this sort of reaction all the time.
Suddenly I am aware my mouth is open, and decide that he’s probably more confused as to why a man in an ill-fitting retro navy overcoat with hair like Hyacinth Bucket is showing him the half-chewed contents of his mouth for no apparent reason. Surely he doesn’t encounter that all the time.
His pace quickens. Something in me that realises that this moment is imminently about to become one of those memories known to people called Ben Leto as “a regret”, and my feet and mouth launch a devastating coup against my brain, still entirely unable to grasp the basic concept of chewing. Everything that follows I remember perfectly, but as if I watched it as someone else:
Ben remembers how to swallow, steps carefully forward and somehow manages to say “I’m sorry, but… David…?” David Tennant smiles a broad grin and stops his acceleration away from the mad apparition of Patricia Routledge with stubble, turning instead to face it. Ben extends his hand.
“I just want to say… thank you. Thank you so much,” Ben says, somehow.
David grasps his hand and shakes it warmly. His smile grows. “No,” he replies, with no trace of his natural accent. It’s The Doctor’s voice. “Thank you.”
Ben smiles in return and begins to walk slowly backwards. David Tennant nods his broad smile and resumes his march towards Piccadilly Circus. Suddenly he turns around, walking backwards as he watches Ben similarly backing away.
“Wow,” Ben says.
David Tennant laughs. Both of them turn back to their original paths and continue their different journies.
Half an hour later, I arrive at work, alternating between wide-eyed, open-mouthed and staring into space and giggling like a dizzy seven year old boy, with next to no memory of how I got there. I’m not usually phased by celebrities, even when they’re personal heroes (though some certainly are phased by me).
But I didn’t meet David Tennant.
The seven year old in my head who dreams and makes up silly stories keeps insisting I met the Doctor.
“Of course,” I replied, handing it to her.
