Allergic To Time (13 page)

I couldn’t help being amused by his second dose of Connie-bashing. I kind of wished she was there to hear it. Then I remembered she was technically doing us a favour and felt slightly guilty. But only slightly. Wiping the smile from my face, I tried my best to be reassuring. “I’m sure it will be fine Martin. We’re only going to be away for a day or two, right?”

Martin shook his head. “I don’t know. Especially without a car.” He shot me a look. “Your father lives seven kilometres west up the coast.”

“Yeah, no shit. I know where my father lives.”

“How are we going to get there without a car?”

I threw my hands up. “I don’t know! I also don’t care. I don’t
want
to get there, remember. This is all your crazy, stupid, bizarre idea.” In six years I had never spoken to Martin in that kind of tone, and he looked shocked.
 

“It might be my idea, but it is completely necessary,” he shot back.
 

“Don’t they have buses around here?” Robert butted in.
 

“Not really,” I replied. “There’s no bus line that goes up that way. Everyone around here drives.” You couldn’t even get a train to stop anywhere near Nelson Bay. If you needed to get there from Sydney using public transport then you had to catch a train to Newcastle and then take a coach the remainder of the way. The one-way trip took six hours and that was if you got lucky with traffic and transfers.

I began to wander down the footpath towards the centre of town.
 

“Where are you going?” Martin called out.
 

“For a walk! What else are we supposed to do?” Robert followed hot on my heels, but Martin refused to budge. I turned to look
 
at him over my shoulder. “Staying there isn’t going to do you any good.”

“I am going to get the car fixed.” He was fuming.
 

“Well, good luck with that,” I said, and kept walking. Robert caught up to me and began keeping pace beside me. He also waved goodbye to Martin as we walked merrily to the centre of town, away from Martin and out of his sight.

Chapter Fifteen.
 

I swallowed a mouthful of ice cream and laughed. I was actually having fun for the first time in days. “Oh!” I said suddenly, as an idea came to me. I hit Robert on the shoulder. “Do you know what we should do when we get back to Sydney? We should look up your relatives to see if any of them are still alive!” I gave him a wide-eyed grin.
 

He looked back at me horrified and sat his gelato cup back down on the table. “I don’t know Anna. That would be too...weird wouldn’t it? I mean, they’d all be ancient by now…”

“But they would have all been wondering what happened to you 40 years ago!” My mind raced at the possibilities. Now that we were away from Sydney, slowly but surely I was beginning to get excited at the prospect of interacting with a real life time traveller. If I used the opportunity correctly, maybe my thesis wouldn’t be destroyed after all. I now had access to the best research tool possible — someone who had actually travelled through time.

The first thing I would do would be to track down all of Robert’s family and friends. “Your disappearance will have been this great, unsolved mystery to them all these years,” I said to him, my excitement growing. “And now, 40 years later, you can turn up on their doorstep-“

“What?” he interrupted. “Looking like this? Like I did four decades ago? They would drop dead of fright, Anna, if they aren’t dead already.” He shook his head. “I can’t possible do that. I don’t want to. It would just freak everyone out, including me.”

I felt my face change from gleeful to disappointed. “Oh.” I dug a spoon into my chocolate ice cream. “But come on, don’t you think it would be...”

“NO.”

“Okay,” I said, dropping the subject. Though I couldn’t understand why Robert wasn’t jumping at the chance to see his family and friends, if he still had any left. If I ever travelled through time, it would be the first thing I did. Not that I particularly wanted to travel through time, what with the fact it caused you to stop breathing and everything.
 

Which reminded me to check —
 
“So, are you feeling alright? With your lungs and everything, I mean. You're breathing?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I’m feeling great actually.”

I studied his face. “That’s weird. You were so sick two days ago. It was like you were allergic to 2014!”

“I guess I adjusted.”

“I guess.” I cleaned the last bit of ice cream from my spoon and sat it back down. “Man,” I began, picking up Rob’s lingo. “I am really eating too much on this holiday already.”

“Holiday? Doesn’t seem like much of a holiday to me.” Some of Robert’s English accent slipped in as he spoke.
 

“Well, this whole thing is like a holiday to you,” I replied. “Doesn’t Nelson Bay look completely different to you than it did four decades ago?”

He looked around at the shops and restaurants on the tourist strip. “I guess.” He gave his shoulders a shrug. “Not that much has changed.”

“Right.” I gave him a suspicious glance.

He quickly jumped to change the subject. “So when was the last time you spoke to your father?”

I shot him a look like I would rather talk about anything
but
that. “I rarely speak to him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a criminal,” I said, bluntly.

Robert frowned. “What do you mean, a criminal?”

“I mean, that’s what he is, that’s what he does — that’s his job. His profession. He’s rich. Incredibly rich. But he made all that money off the misfortune of others. He basically runs the entire East Coast underground. There’s nothing he won’t do. Murder? That’s nothing to him.”

“Did he ever…” Rob trailed off and hesitated.

“What?” I asked.

“Get you involved with anything?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not accusing you of-“

I stood up. “I can’t believe you would ask me that.”

“Anna, I didn’t mean. I just wondered how involved you got-“

“Not at all.”
 

 
“Okay, fine,” he said. He stood up as well. “I’ll change the subject then. You know, Anna, I just wanted to say, that it really means a lot to me, that you believe me. That you believe my story.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Not everyone would. Not everyone does…” He trailed off, looking sad.

“Hey,” I said, touching his arm. “I’m here for you. And I do believe you.”

He smiled, but weakly. “Anna - I need to tell you-“
 

He was interrupted by the heavens violently opening on us as rain began bucketing down, causing the two of us to duck under the cover of the balcony we were sitting on, pulling our belongings to safety with us.
 

“Well, that was short-lived,” I said. “The weather has been so crappy lately. You’d think we were in Tasmania or something.”

“Is it always like this here?” Robert asked.

I shot him a strange look. “What, in the year 2014? The weather can’t have changed that much in 40 years, can it? I mean, I guess there’s been global warming...”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said, stumbling over his words slightly. He laughed it off. “I don’t know what I meant by that, it was a stupid question.”

“Right,” I said again, and we headed indoors toward shelter.
 

***

My phone began to buzz in my coat pocket. I pulled it out and checked the screen. “Incoming call, Connie H.” I rolled my eyes and put it back in my pocket. For all she knew, I was still horribly sick and didn’t want to be disturbed. Which was pretty rude of her. Whatever her problem was — she probably couldn’t get the overhead projectors to work or something - I was sure she’d be able to figure it out on her own.
 

Robert and I were strolling around town, safe from the rain under the protection of shop fronts, not doing anything except killing time. I was hoping that we would not bump into Martin for the rest of the day, which would delay the impending visit to my father a bit longer. Maybe we could delay it forever, I hoped. Being in Nelson Bay itself wasn’t bad — at least we were away from Sydney and RPA hospital, and the man in black — but I was sort of overjoyed that our car wasn’t working.
 

Another buzz from my coat pocket. This time the incoming call was listed as coming from “Dr. Anderson,” the contact detail I’d assigned to Martin two years earlier when, after becoming his PhD student, necessity had dictated that we exchange numbers. Back in those days I still called him Dr. Anderson, though I hadn’t referred to him that way since. I ignored the call. He probably wanted to give me the joyous news that he had found us a hire car, and I didn’t want to know. Ignorance was bliss.
 

Robert and I walked along in silence for a bit, before he suddenly blurted out, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Err,” I shook my head. “Not one particular guy, no.” I preferred to keep my options well and truly open. But to Robert I added, “Honestly, I am way too focused on my study.”

“I have never met a girl who loved studying so much.”

My mouth dropped open at this 70s-era gender bias.
 

“No seriously,” he went on. “In my time they don’t even have lady professors at universities.”

“Really?” I pulled a face. “That’s actually not true.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s not like I ever went to university. But I don’t think there were any women teaching there.”

“I’m sure there were,” I said, rolling my eyes. I skipped across the road in order to get to the other side as quickly as possible in the pouring rain. I was now glad that we hadn’t actually gone to the beach. Rob hurried after me. “And I’m not a professor, anyway! I’m still a student. I don’t think I’ll ever
not
be a student at this rate.”
 

“I’ve just never met a chick like you before,” he went on. Rain had caught his face and the charcoal on his left eye was streaking down his face slightly. “You’re so serious.”
 

I must have pulled a face. “In a good way,” he added quickly.
 

There was another buzz in my pocket. I groaned: whether it was Connie or Martin, I didn’t want to know about it. I pulled it out in frustration and quickly pressed the button on the top of the phone to switch it off. I smiled up at Robert. “We should go see a movie in the old Twin Cinema,” I said. “At least it’ll be dry in there.”

The Nelson Bay cinema complex was a drab building, falling apart in the main street of town. At that time of day there was only one choice of film: a children’s movie about a talking dog. I shrugged at Rob. “It’s better than walking around in the rain, right?”

He nodded. “Definitely. Plus we can get hotdogs.” Again with the food. Did they have bigger stomachs in the 70s or something? I handed Rob some cash to go get food — though I thought he would probably be disappointed when he found out the Nelson Bay cinema didn’t have any hotdogs — and I purchased the two tickets for us. They were almost a full $5 cheaper than they were in Sydney, although still a strain on my already limited funds.
 

“
Shit,”
I said, remembering. The rent. If I wasn’t back in Sydney the next day to pay Jennifer she was going to lose the plot. I could always ring her and deposit the money in her account — but that would still require me to actually have the money.
 

“They don’t sell hotdogs in this joint!” Robert said, joking me outside the theatre door. He shoved a lukewarm pie into my hand.
 

“Err, thanks.”

“Shall we go inside?”

“Love to,” I said. “I can’t wait to see this movie, it looks really great.”
 

He laughed. “Yeah, it sounds like a riot.”

***
 

There weren’t any advertisements or trailers screened before films at Nelson Bay Twin Cinema: they just launched right into the movie: a g-rated romp about a dog that helped a family solve mysteries, and taught them to love one another along the way.

“Oh my god, this is the worst thing I have ever seen,” I whispered, leaning over towards Robert about 30 minutes into the screening.

“I actually think it’s pretty good!” he said. I assumed he had to have been a least half-joking. Unless 1970s cinema had really set the bar that low, which I found hard to believe.
 

“Yeah, it’s a freaking masterpiece,” I replied sarcastically. A mother sitting with a small child two rows in front of us turned around and glared at me. I shut up without mouthing an apology to her and sat back in my seat. I felt Robert’s arm brush against mine.
 

He turned his attention away from the screen and looked at me, and I caught his eye for just a moment too long. His eyes were so black.
 

Robert didn’t move his arm away. He just kept staring at me.

Shit,
I thought,
he’s going to lean in for a kiss.

I broke the gaze and moved my head so that I was staring straight ahead at the cinema screen, sternly. It was unprofessional to even consider making out with a research subject. Robert sighed and tried to pretend nothing had happened.

***
 

As we were leaving the cinema an uneasy silence fell between us. Robert walked along the footpath with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the ground.
 
A kid on a skateboard flew past him, almost knocking him right over. “Shouldn’t he be in school?” Rob muttered, as he composed himself and regained his footing.

I thought back to my long gone days as a student at Nelson Bay High School and thanked the gods they were over, as I glanced up at the sky. A rainbow had formed — almost a double rainbow in fact —
 
framing the still grey clouds behind it. I remembered that it would technically be spring the following week, and the thought cheered me up somewhat. I skipped ahead to keep up with Robert, who was a much faster walker than I was. I threw him an apologetic smile as I caught up to him, hoping there would be no need to discuss what had happened — or almost happened — in the movie theatre. I felt guilty about the situation.