(Catbert confesses: I stole the characters from Thames/Pearson, I'm sure I've trodden on a few BBC toes, and I ripped the idea off wholesale
from various postings on the forum. Thanks everyone, I'm planning never to use my own brain again.)
He was always there - in the background, on the sidelines. A bit player with no major role in the grand scheme of things. And
that was the way he liked it. To work quietly alongside the others, observing them, learning about them - that was what he
needed. Fitting in took a lot of hard work, but he was finally starting to understand the humans.
He had lost track of how long he had spent here on Earth. Seven years? Ten? It didn't matter - to someone his age such small
time-spans were inconsequential, and there was no time limit on his mission. He had been sent to Earth on a fact-finding
mission (although the term seemed to have a completely different meaning here. On Gallifrey, a fact-finding mission was a
mission to find facts. Here, it seemed to involve a bunch of civic leaders spending their town's council tax revenue on a two
week trip to find out how Bahamians dealt with their wheelie-bin collections).
Petty crime was on the increase at home, and the Council had decided the Chancellery Guards were no longer up to the job of
dealing with it. Some one, he couldn't remember who, had mentioned a system in operation on Earth. The streets, he'd said,
were patrolled by uniformed officers who provided a visual deterrent and investigated crime. They could even be contacted in
emergencies with blue phone boxes designed especially for that task. "Very handy", he'd added, but never explained why.
So he'd been despatched to Earth to investigate, reporting back at regular intervals but allowed to remain as long as he felt was
necessary. His TARDIS arrived in the station with the minimum of fuss. The new type 50, it had top of the range chameleon
circuitry and the latest in landing technology. There had barely been a ripple around the door of the stationery cupboard as the
sophisticated time-machine settled into place. At first it had been a minor annoyance to him, pencils and binders cluttering up
his console room, but he was used to it now. And he'd really got to like it here - England, London, Sun Hill - it felt like home.
He had to admit, though, that he'd made a few mistakes. On several occasions now he had forgotten to close the inner door of
the console room. He'd been quite startled one day to find Debbie Keane wandering through the seemingly endless inner
corridors, although not as startled as she was - she'd only popped in for a new pencil, and certainly hadn't expected to find
herself in a cupboard which was apparently many times larger than the building which housed it. He explained the situation to
Debbie, and, when she demanded proof, took her on a quick spin around the beauty spots of the Universe. Unfortunately,
Debbie hadn't wanted to come back. This had made things slightly tricky, but the Council allowed him special dispensation to
alter the time-line. He did the work well; no-one at the station noticed she had gone, because she had never even been there.
And she hadn't been the first. The excuses he'd had to think up for some of the others were harder than anything else he'd had
to do here on Earth. Only once had he allowed on officer to think up his own cover story, and that had been so far fetched he
wasn't going to take the risk again. After all, who could seriously believe Nick Slater was going off to work undercover?
They'd been lucky to get away with that one.
And now Liz wanted to go. He couldn't blame her. She was intelligent, ambitious and stifled. If she didn't get out soon, he was
sure she'd throttle Boulton. Again, he couldn't blame her, even he'd had that impulse on occasion. The trouble was he was
running out of plausible excuses. Become thoroughly hacked off with the job and move back home? No, he did that with
Steve. Sudden transfer? Suzi. He couldn't risk changing the timeline again, not after that ugly incident with Jamilla.
He gradually became aware Deakin was shouting at someone. Repeatedly. It took a moment for him to realise Deakin was
addressing him, because he was using the wrong name. The one thing that really irked him about his 'colleagues' was that they
could never get his name right. Before he set off on his mission, he'd carefully researched a nice, plain, inconspicuous Earth
name, but from Day One, they'd always got it wrong.
"NOW!" Deakin was shouting again. He sighed and put away his notebook, Liz's excuse would just have to wait. Ugh, Deakin
had used that name again. Oh well, as problems went, it was a minor one.
Besides, there were worse things they could call him than Trev.
If you liked it, feel free to let me know! Catbert
