The Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 2

Nineteen-year-old Rose Tyler peered through the window of Flat 48, Bucknall House.

The piercing sound of the screaming child was deafening. Inside, the child’s mother held her daughter intently, as the child lashed out with her arms and legs.

The mother’s crying was almost inaudible. “Shh, Rose,” Jacqueline Andrea Suzette Tyler pleaded. “Please, for God’s sake, just stop crying…”

Outside, nineteen-year-old Rose Tyler began to weep. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and she closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mum,” she whispered.

Beside her, the Doctor placed a firm hand on her shoulder in a gesture of support.“Don’t beat yourself up,” he urged. “That little girl just wants her daddy.”

Rose began to cry harder, and the Doctor began to worry about them being seen, as well as for his companion’s well being. “Come on,” he said gently, but with firmness that let Rose know that it wasn’t a good idea to argue. In any case, she wasn’t in the mood to argue. She now knew that it had been a mistake to come here.

She allowed the Doctor to lead her away from the window, and they headed back to the TARDIS.
* * * *

Twenty-year-old Rose Tyler opened her eyes and fought back the tears. Why was she here again? What cruel twist of fate had led her here again? She sat for a few moments, against the wall with her head resting on her knees. She eventually forced herself to her feet and walked along the balcony. She watched as, below, her earlier self and the Doctor entered the battered old police box that she had come to call home, and the TARDIS disappeared. It had been painful to see him again, and Rose found herself having to summon every ounce of strength in her being to keep from breaking down.

For a few moments, she watched the empty space where the TARDIS had dematerialised, expecting it to reappear, and for her Doctor to return for her. The seconds ticked by, and still the box did not appear. Rose was startled from her reverie by someone banging loudly on a door behind her.

She jumped, and turned sharply to see a stern-looking man apparently in his late fifties hammering his fists against the front door of No. 48. Her front door.

A very haggard-looking Jackie Tyler answered. Rose gulped as she stared at the woman — she was a lot younger but it was undoubtedly her mother.

Before the poor woman could open her mouth to speak, the man said gruffly, “Do you know what bloody time it is!?”

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” Jackie managed to say, “I just can’t get her to stop crying.” Her tone of voice spoke of desperation and despair, of a woman who had tried everything.

Arthur…

Rose suddenly realised who the man was. Old Arthur Utterson had been the Tylers’ next-door-neighbour until he had died of a heart attack in 1991, when Rose was four. She vaguely remembered him, and had heard her mother speak of what a miserly old bastard he had been. “I know it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead and all that,” Jackie used to say, “but he was a mean-spirited old man.”

Now, Rose was beginning to understand what her mother had meant.

“Well, some of us are trying to get some sleep!” he railed loudly, completely missing the irony.

“Don’t shout at me,” Jackie said with as much force as she could muster through her tears, her voice cracking.

“Well, if you can’t get that kid to shut up, I’ll — ”

“You’ll what?”

Jackie and Arthur both turned to regard the blonde young woman who had spoken. Rose had opened her mouth out of an instinctive protectiveness toward her mother. He didn’t answer, and Rose suspected that he’d opened his mouth without actually thinking through what he was going to say.

“Well?” Rose pressed.

“I’ll… phone the police. This is noise pollution, this. You’re disturbing the peace!”

Rose couldn’t believe it. “What, and do you think they’re gonna arrest a two-year-old for crying?”

Arthur Utterson looked sternly at her, as if about to ask ‘who the hell do you think you are?!’ Instead he turned to Jackie. “Friend of yours, is she? Or I bet she’s your bloody sister?” He noticed a passing resemblance between the two women.

“I don’t know her. Look, Arthur, please just leave me alone, I’ll make her stop soon, I promise.”

Rose was surprised that Jackie was taking crap from this man, but she decided to back up her mother. “You heard her.”

Utterson made a disparaging noise, and with a look that seemed to say, ‘I just can’t be bothered', he turned and went back into his flat.

“Arsewipe,” Rose grunted, and turned to Jackie.

“Thanks,” her mother said with genuine gratitude.

“No worries,” said Rose, as her younger self continued to cause a fuss inside.

“I have to go and sort her out,” Jackie said wearily. “Thanks again.”

As Jackie started to close the door, Rose spoke quickly. “Let me help.” She regretted it instantly, but the words had passed her lips before she had thought.

Jackie regarded her sceptically for just a moment. “You any good with kids?”

“Um, yeah, I know a thing or two,” she said with a wry smile.

Jackie hesitated for just a moment. “Well, if you think you can get her to shut up then be my guest.” She stepped aside to allow Rose to enter the flat. As Rose walked through the door, Jackie said, “Sorry, I’m a mess. This whole place is a mess…”

“Don’t worry, it’s fine,” Rose said softly. “You should see my place.”

“What’s your name?”

The question caught Rose off-guard. “Uh, R-Rachel,” she said, coming up with another ‘R’ name off the top of her head.

“Rachel,” Jackie repeated. “Well, I’m Jackie.” Jackie cocked her head to one side. “You look a bit familiar, have we met before?”

“No. I don’t think so,” Rose answered. In the revised timeline created when her dad had sacrificed his life, she and her mother had no longer met at the Hoskins’ wedding. Although Rose remembered the event — something to do with travelling in the TARDIS — Jackie now had no memory of it.

“Well,” Jackie said, forcing a smile, “nice to meet you, Rachel. I’ll introduce you to Rose.”

Rose took a deep breath. She was beginning to think that it might have been a bad idea to intervene with Mr. Utterson on her mother’s behalf. It now occurred to her that she seriously risked damaging the timeline if her mother were ever to learn who she was. Rose thought back to her father’s reaction to her when they had met in 1987. He had felt an instant sense of familiarity with her, and had trusted her to the point of even giving her his car keys in order that she may park his car. Clearly Jackie now felt a similar sensation. The Jackie Tyler that Rose knew would never have invited any old stranger into her home to see to her child, no matter how decent and honest that person may have seemed. Rose knew that she had always been the most important thing in her mother’s life, and that her mother would never consciously put her in danger.

The flat was exactly as Rose remembered it from her visit to 1987, and her early childhood. She considered that redecorating the place would undoubtedly have been the last thing on Jackie’s mind as she struggled as a young mother trying to raise a child on her own. A seriously restless and unhappy child, Rose thought, if the sound of her younger self’s cries were anything to go by.

Jackie moved to open the door to Rose’s bedroom. “She’s in here,” she said, somewhat needlessly given that the child’s crying was loud enough to be heard next door, let alone in the hallway. The door opened to reveal two-and-a-half-year-old Rose Marion Tyler standing in her cot and crying for attention. The girl was scraping her rattle along the bars, as if indicating a desperate need to escape her prison. The image struck Rose as funny, and she couldn’t help but smile as she instinctively moved to scoop up the young girl in her arms.

Jackie didn’t seem to object, and the younger Rose’s crying immediately ceased as her older self held her tightly. The sensation was the most bizarrely ineffable feeling that Rose had ever experienced.

“Wow,” Jackie whispered incredulously, and it occurred to Rose that thankfully, as she had picked up the child without thinking, the Doctor’s little gizmo had worked for she was now physically interacting with her younger self with no apparent repercussions.

“You are good with kids!”

“Looks like it.”

Jackie seemed to force a smile. “She likes you.”

“Ah, you just have to have the knack.”

As soon as the words had passed Rose’s lips, she regretted them. It had been her intention to pass off the younger Rose’s reaction to her as anything other than supernatural, and she now hoped that Jackie wouldn’t take offence at what could be perceived as a dig at her parenting skills.

As if on cue, Jackie’s brave face crumpled, and she burst into tears. Damn it, thought Rose, and she immediately felt terrible.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I didn’t mean…”

Before she could finish, Jackie clasped a hand to her mouth and ran out of the room.

Rose silently admonished herself, and spent a couple of minutes gently rocking her younger self to sleep before placing the girl down in her cot.

She crept out of her room — little Rose’s room — as quietly as she could, and made her way into the living room, where Jackie sat sobbing on the sofa.

Rose sat down next to her.

“I’ve tried so hard,” Jackie said between sobs. “Nothing I do makes that girl happy. The health visitor warned me she’d be difficult — ‘terrible twos’, she said, but I don’t know if I can take much more!”

Rose picked up a box of Kleenex tissues from the coffee table and handed it to Jackie, then placed her arm around her shoulder and thought of something that the Doctor had said on their last visit to this time. “Maybe she just needs her daddy?”

“And how am I supposed to give her that?” Jackie said, forcefully. “Anyway, how do you know he’s not around?”

Rose cursed herself again. “I don’t know, I just… assumed…” she replied, not very convincingly. “Where is he?”

“Dead.”

The starkness of Jackie’s answer surprised Rose. Her voice was cold, and that one word carried more pain than if Jackie had recounted the whole story of her dad’s demise. Rose knew all too well what had happened to her father, but hearing her mother express it like that chilled her to the bone.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, her voice barely a whisper.

Jackie sat for a moment before replying with a simple, “Yeah.” She blew her nose loudly.

Rose glanced at a copy of Today newspaper on the arm of the sofa. The date read Saturday 2nd December 1989. It had been just over two years since her dad had died. Jackie was 22, barely older than she herself was now. Rose looked at her mother, and it saddened her to see the despair on the young woman’s face. Her eyes were swollen from crying.

She looked so tired and so… old.

Composing herself, Jackie reached down and picked up a packet of cigarettes from the floor. Taking one, she fished under the coffee table and found a lighter.

Rose's knew that her mum had given up in the early nineties , but it was still strange to see her smoking now. "Those things'll kill you," Rose said quietly.

Jackie rolled her eyes as she exhaled. “Oh, don't you start and all, I get enough of that from my mum. So what were you doing out there at half-one in the morning?” she asked.

Rose had to think quickly. “Oh, just… visiting friends.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s that, then?”

“Oh, um… Mina Costello,” she answered, using her best friend Shareen’s mother’s name. “I was just on my way to get a taxi home and I heard you talking to Mr. Utterson.”

“You know him then?”

Rose was digging herself in deeper. “Oh… only by reputation. Mina told me about him.” She was thankful that Jackie and Mina barely knew each other at this point and so Jackie likely wouldn’t mention her to the woman.

She seemed to accept her explanation as well. “Where do you live?”

“Cardiff.”

“Cardiff?”

It had been the first place that had entered her mind. “Yeah… I’ve been visiting family and friends back here. When I said I was on my way home, I meant… back to my mum and dad’s.”

“And where do they live?”

“Islington.”

“Ooh, there’s posh! Well, if you like you can stay here tonight. If you don’t mind the sofa.”

It crossed Rose’s mind that the Doctor could return for her at any moment, but something made her accept her mother’s offer. “Yeah, thanks. If you don’t mind.”

“Nah, least I can do. I'm not having you go back out there, it's freezing, and I think it's starting to rain. Besides, old man next door’ll be happy — if Rose starts crying again you can jump in and shut her up.”

Rose smiled.

“Let me make up the couch for you,” Jackie offered. She stubbed out her cigarette on an ashtray on the table, then wiped her eyes as she rose from the sofa.

“Thanks,” said Rose.

Jackie disappeared into the hallway. Rose sat for a minute, weighing up the situation. How had she gotten into this?

Doctor… she silently cursed.

Jackie reappeared with a spare duvet and a pillow. “Just the one pillow, I’m afraid. Couldn’t find any more. Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Rose reassured her. “I can make do.”

“Well, goodnight then,” Jackie said.

“’Night.”

They exchanged smiles, and Jackie retreated into the bathroom to brush her teeth again, and then crossed the hall to her bedroom.

Rose crept into the kitchen and took the Doctor’s calculator-device from her pocket. She decided to hide it at the back of the cupboard under the sink, knowing that Jackie rarely looked under there. She returned to the living room, kicked off her converse trainers and lay down on the sofa, pulling the duvet over her and trying to ignore the lingering unpleasant smell of smoke. She soon heard Jackie’s breathing grow heavy. Rose didn’t actually need to sleep, for she had only been awake for about six hours. That was one element of time travel that she loathed — the “jet lag”. She closed her eyes anyway, and after an uncomfortable couple of hours she nevertheless drifted off to sleep.
* * * *