Allergic To Time (21 page)

Martin’s head snapped around, away from the window. He clearly hadn’t expected my reaction and storm out. “Anna,” he called. “Wait!” He stood up and hurried after me, onto the street. “Where are you going? I have so much to tell you. Fanny has all of this information that you really need to hear...”

I wasn’t in the mood to hear anything else he had to say. “Yeah, well, if you decide to stop being such a jerk for five minutes, Robert and I are staying at the Novotel in Darling Harbour.” I turned away and walked as quickly as I could, doubting that Martin was even capable of going that long without being a jerk, so I was not optimistic about seeing him again.

Chapter Twenty-Six.

I got back to the hotel as quickly as I could, assuming that was the same place Robert would go to once he realised we’d been separated at the University. I arrived back just after 10:30 and went straight back up to our room on the 14
th
floor.
 

“Rob?” I asked, removing my swipe card from the door and turning the lights on. The room was empty though. I glanced around and saw that the beds were made, and I was thankful room service had already been. I realised I was exhausted, so I kicked my heels off and crawled across the top of my luxurious king sized mattress. I figured I would at least get some sleep while I was waiting for Robert to reappear.
 

I must have slept for over five hours, because when I was jolted awake by a frantic knocking at the door I glanced at the digital alarm clock beside the bed.
 

3:30.

I jumped out of bed and headed for the door, checking my reflection in the mirror as I passed. I looked a bit puffy, but okay.
 

Robert must have lost his swipe card,
I thought, as I went to pull the door open. I wondered what he had been doing all that time, alone in a Sydney he barely knew, without any money in his pockets and no one he knew still alive. Or at least no one he knew who he was willing to look up, to see if they were still alive or not.
 

I pulled the door open, ready to embrace Robert in a hug, and admonish him like an angry mother whose child had wandered off in a shopping centre. But standing in front of me was Martin and Fanny. I raised my eyebrows.

Martin looked sheepish. “Okay,” he began. “I have decided to stop being a jerk for five minutes if you will hear me out?” He looked up at me apologetically, and beside him Fanny shot me a smile.
 

I stood back and pulled the door open wide, allowing them to come in.
 

“Wow,” Fanny said, admiring the decor. “This is a splendid home.”

“Hotel room,” I said. “I don’t actually live here or anything. Well, I guess I kind of do for now, but…”
“How can you afford this?” Martin asked.
 

“None of your business,” I said.
 

“Fine,” he replied, and then forced a smile, clearly remembering that he had promised not to be an arsehole, at least for a few minutes. “Where’s Robert?”

“Um,” I began, realising that I was going to have to admit I had lost him, and feeling slightly guilty about it. “I’m not exactly sure. We kind of got separated at the University this morning...”
“You were at the University?” Martin asked, looking slightly horrified. “I’m not sure that was a good idea.”

I stopped. I still hadn’t told Martin the REAL terrible news: that the man in black had taken his job, and was probably planning on killing us all and then dancing on our graves as he took charge of the physics department. “Well I did stumble across some rather unsettling
 
information while I was there...”

“Hang on, so, you haven’t seen Robert all day?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure he’s okay. He can look after himself.”
Martin didn’t seem so convinced, but I wasn’t sure what the big deal was: Rob had been fine all by himself while I’d been unconscious in hospital for a week in Newcastle. I glanced at Martin and raised my eyebrows. And as for
him,
well, he had been more than okay.
 
He’d been frolicking around Sydney with other time travellers by the sounds of it.
 

Fanny sat herself down on a chair over by the window, and looked out over Darling Harbour with glee. “What a beautiful view!” She clasped her hands together.
 
I turned back to Martin.

“So how come you were okay?”

He stopped pacing the length of the room to stop and look at me. “What do you mean, okay?”

“I was in the hospital for over a week, barely able to breath,” I said. “The usual time travel symptoms.” I looked over at Fanny, who stood up and nodded. She leant against the window paling, her eyes glazing over as she seemed to be recalling a memory.
 

“Oh yes, I remember,” she said, her voice far away. “I woke up in a hospital room — in the strangest, most futuristic city I could imagine.” She giggled a little bit, and added, “It turned out to be Perth. But I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I had died, or was hallucinating.”
 

She looked down at her feet. “Everything was so different. I was so scared. But I was also lucky, and grateful that someone had found me and brought me to the hospital, after I had collapsed.” She looked up towards Martin. “From what I gather not everyone is so fortunate.”

I shot him a suspicious look. “Or, some people are extremely fortunate and don’t have any allergic reaction to the time change at all.”

“Anna what are you talking about? I DID collapse. I was in the hospital for several days. The normal time one could expect for such a relatively short journey through time.” He stopped and looked at me. “I don’t know why you took it so badly,” he added.
 

“Well, you took off pretty quickly,” I muttered.
 

He sighed. “I had to come back to Sydney, didn’t I! When I realised we had missed the entire semester, my god. I almost had a heart attack. I rushed back here to try to explain to everyone what had happened...” he trailed off.

“And?” I asked.

He seemed reluctant to continue. “Well, I soon discovered that there were some...theories for our disappearance together.” He refused to meet my eyes, walking over towards the window like he had suddenly been compelled to admire the view. He was quiet for a few moments before he concluded with, “And of course I soon realised that I had no plausible explanation for what exactly
had
happened to us. I could hardly walk in and tell the physics department the truth.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It’s not like we really have anything to lose at this point.” I threw my hands up.
 

Martin turned around briefly to look at me. “We still have our lives.”
 

“Yeah, about that,” I began. “Are you aware of who has taken over your job?”

He nodded, his back still to me.
 

“You are?” I exclaimed. “So why aren’t you doing anything about it?”
 

Fanny stood up. “Oh,” she said. “We are doing something about it, believe me.”

I was confused. Fanny knew about the John Raymond? And how on Earth could she possibly do anything to help us in this situation?

She turned to Martin and grinned. Martin returned the smile and I felt a brief spike of something in my stomach. I didn’t like the way the two of them were looking at each other.
 

“You see, Anna,” Fanny began, smoothing down the crease on her dress. “There’s more than one way to travel through time. And my trip was no accident. My husband, God bless his soul, invented the time machine that I arrived here in It was a safe method of time travel. I could breath perfectly when I arrived.” She smiled at me, before she turned to shoot Martin another meaningful look.
 

“So?...” I asked, not really understanding.

“SO,”
 
she replied, her eyes lighting up mischievously. “I still have it.”

Martin turned to me, triumphantly. “And we are going to use it to send that bastard somewhere far, far away.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven.
 

My thoughts turned immediately towards my poor PhD thesis. All I could think was,
Well that is YEARS of research I may as well have just flushed down the toilet
. I had spent the better part of my adult life with my head down, and my nose to the grindstone, coming up with a working theory of
time travel,
and it had already been invented over a hundred years before I was even born? Great. Just great.
 

I was so mad at Martin. I walked straight over to
 
where he was standing beside the window, raised my hand up, and then as forcefully as I could, brought it back down, slapping him across the face as hard as I could.
 

“Oww!” he cried out, putting his own hand up to the place where he’d been struck.
 

Fanny backed away from us, horrified.
 

“Jesus Christ Anna!” Martin yelled out. “What the hell was that for?”

“What the hell do you think it was for?”

“I don’t know! You’ve lost the plot?”

I walked back over to the bar fridge on the other side of the hotel room. I yanked the door open to see what was inside. Cans of Jack and Coke. Perfect. I needed alcohol, and I needed caffeine, so this would kill two birds with one stone. I pulled a can out and snapped back the pull tab to open it. It made a satisfying hissing sound as I brought it up to my mouth to take a gulp.
 

I swung back around to look at Martin and Fanny, who were both watching me with caution. “The slap was for six years of lying to me,” I said. I took another swig from the can. “And you deserved a lot worse than that.”

Martin sighed and looked up at the ceiling, his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t exactly ‘lie’ to you.”

“Oh?” I was getting more and more worked up, the longer I thought about the implications of Fanny’s time machine. Every single meeting we’d had over the past two years, where I had come into his office like a dutiful little student, and shown him the progress of my thesis: “Towards A Working Theory of Time Travel”. And how, every time, — every single freaking time — he had sat there, pretending to make thoughtful comments, always giving me some variation of the same freaking statement: time travel was not physically possible. That I was wasting my time. And his. And the university’s. When all along, all this time, he not only knew that it
was possible,
but he had failed to share with me the fact that he had access to a freaking “working model of time travel”.

“How exactly was telling me for all these years that time travel was a physical impossibility
not
a lie?” I asked him.
 

“Well, it’s not...” he started, taking his hands out of his pockets to run them through his hair, getting flustered. “It’s not a lie if you’re trying to protect the person.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah yeah, you were just trying to protect me. More like trying to protect yourself.”

He threw his arms up. “How exactly was I trying to protect myself, Anna?”
 

“Your precious reputation,” I said, taking another swig from my can and then setting it back down on the bench. It was starting to make me feel a bit ill. “You knew that if you ever publicly supported any of my ideas that you would become a laughing stock at the university. The same reason why you published all of those articles under the Nick Cooper pen name. It is
so
freaking hypocritical.” I spat the last words out and sat back down on my bed, leaning my elbows on my knees and leaning over with my head down. Trying to ease the dizziness I suddenly felt, brought on both by my sudden state of anger and the nauseating concoction in the can I had just been drinking from.
 

I saw Martin’s feet heading towards the bed. He reached the edge next to where I was and sat down beside me.
 

I felt almost too upset to say anything further, but I managed to get one last thing out. “You just didn’t want to risk losing your job.”
 

“Anna,” he murmured, and I could feel his leg pressed against mine, we were sitting so close together on the bed. “I haven’t cared about ‘my job’ — or at least the one you’re talking about, in a long time.”

I looked up, the sudden movement making my dizziness worse. “What are you talking about?
All
you care about is that job. The physics building is your entire life.”

He shook his head. “Not since Kate...” his voice got even quieter, and he didn’t quite finish the sentence.
 

Fanny cleared her throat in the corner. She stood up straight and adjusted the bag strap on her shoulder, announcing she was going to leave. “I’ll see you two tomorrow,” she said, heading toward the door, the glint in her eye returning. “For the showdown.”

Martin went to stand up, but she waved a hand to gesture for him to stay seated. She waved goodbye to me and headed for the door, shutting it gently behind her.

“Is she going to be okay by herself?” I asked, concerned. “In, you know, the modern world?” I remembered
 
about Robert with a flash of worry.
 

“Oh, she’s been here for five years now,” Martin replied. “Well, by ‘here’ I suppose I mean, modern times. It was 2009 when she landed, so I guess it wasn’t technically ‘here’, but, you know what I mean...” he trailed off, looking into my eyes.

The atmosphere was all of a sudden very tense, so I broke the eye contact and shifted slightly away from him on the bed, so that our legs were no longer quite touching.
 

“Do you remember when she died?” Martin asked quietly.
 

“Kate?”

He nodded.
 

I was unprepared for this conversation. It was one I never thought I would be having with my thesis supervisor. Then again I also didn’t think we would ever be travelling through time together, so maybe I had to let go of all the things I always
thought
we’d be doing together and think instead about the things we might do...