Allergic To Time (27 page)

“Thank God you’re okay,” I said, still holding him in an embrace. “I was really worried something had happened to you.”

He pulled away and gave me a quizzical look. “You mean you’re still talking to me?” he asked, switching his glance between Martin and I.

I backed away slightly, dropping my arms back to my sides. “Well, I don’t know... I mean, Martin has been saying a lot of crazy things about you. But I don’t...” I shook my head, staring into his black rimmed eyes. “But I don’t believe them. I still...I still believe in you.”

A look of guilt flashed across his face. And for a second I was pretty sure that I had chosen the wrong side, yet again.
 

“Rob...” I said, backing away even further. “Please, please tell me that you travelled here from the 70s.”

“Oh, I travelled here from the 70s all right,” he said, a slightly more hopeful expression crossing his face. “Just not recently.”

Chapter Thirty-Four.
 

“What the hell do you mean not recently?” I asked, backing away even further. I hit a chair behind me and almost tumbled over. I cursed my commitment to wearing heels at any and all times as I fought to keep balance.
 

He glanced toward Martin. “How long ago was it Doc? About...three years ago?”
 

Martin seemed incredibly reluctant to answer that question. He looked at me first, before nodding, resigned. “I was just about to break this to Anna.”

“Break what to me?”
 

Robert grinned. He looked like he was about to break into a laugh. “I suppose he was going to break it to you that he’s been stowing me away in secret for three years.”

I looked around and realised people were watching this strange scene. Well, they were probably watching the strange looking six foot tall glam rocker more than anything. I grabbed Rob by the arm and pulled him towards the table where Martin was still sitting and got him to sit down.
 

I lowered my voice so as to not attract anymore attention to us. “What the hell do you mean, stowing you away for three years?” I whispered, angrily. “You’ve been here for
three years?
” I was incredulous.
 

Rob kept his head bent and his voice low. “Around about that long.”

I looked at Martin for further elaboration. He was still looking guilty. I supposed of all the things he had lied to me about, this was the lie he felt the worst about. Then again, when I thought about it: if this was true, then it really was
the
lie, the one that all the others were based upon. “Do you remember I took a semester’s sabbatical in England three years ago?” he asked me. I thought back to the semester just before my Honours’ year started, the only time during my undergrad degree that I had not been able to take a Martin Anderson class because he had been on exchange, teaching a course at the University of Leeds in the UK.

“Yes,” I said, spinning my head around to look at Robert.
 

“Well, that’s where we meet,” Rob said slowly. “That’s when I “arrived” I suppose.”

“So you’re not even from Sydney?” I asked, in shock. Quite a few things were suddenly making sense. Why he didn’t want to look up any of his family in Sydney, why he hadn’t been familiar with the weather...the
 
British accent that kept slipping out.
 

He shook his head. “English born and bred, unfortunately. Anyway, when I travelled through time, it was just lucky for me that Doctor Time Travel over here was in the area. I was terrified, I didn’t know what the hell had happened. I couldn’t
breathe
for christ’s sake! I woke up in hospital, and I didn’t know anything or anyone.”

Martin was staring down at the table, clearly afraid to make eye contact with me. I turned back to Robert. “So Martin saved you, sort of?”

“Sort of is right.” He threw a glance at Martin. “He didn’t really seem to believe me at first. He still doesn’t.” He raised an eyebrow. “But yeah, he sorted everything out for me, found me a place to live. Even though he never really seemed to completely believe my story.”

“So you
did
track down your family then?” I asked him, hoping that he had.
 

“Yeah,” he replied, a look of sadness crossing his face. He stopped talking and looked down at the table.

“And?”
 

“Well, my parents were long dead, of course...”

“What about your fiancé?”

He sighed. He lifted up his head to look at me. I had completely turned around in my chair to face him. A new feeling of hope had come over me: hope that maybe I could trust my instincts after all, that I
had
been right about Robert Smith. Even if he had been lying to me, I was desperate to find a kernel of truth in amongst it all.
 

“She was still alive. I...I tracked her down and just turned up out of the blue at the flat where she was living...” He trailed off, and I thought I saw tears fill his eyes as he turned away. “It was...awful, really. I mean, she was in her 60s for crying out loud...”

“Did she recognise you? Did she remember you?” I was desperate to know.

Rob shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t...she answered the door and I...I ran away.” He looked disgusted at the memory. “I couldn’t face it. It was awful, like I said, really horrible. I didn’t want to know.” He looked across the table at Martin. “I honestly don’t know why any of us want to do it: track down people we knew, I mean. I never wanted to even attempt it again.”

“So...is that why you moved here, to Australia, then?” I was still unsure about what had happened between these two: or what this strange allegiance was between Martin and Robert. Rob had said that Martin had
stowed him away
for three years.
 

Rob sighed and shifted in his seat a bit. “Not really...” He scratched his head. “Maybe, partly. But it was mostly because the Good Doctor talked me into it. He thought we could work together, fool people, back in Australia. He had this idea that we could trick your father...” He took one final look at me, before fixing his stare on Martin across the table, who still remained suspiciously quiet.
 

Martin nodded and took over the explanation. “We thought — well, I thought really — that Robert would be the perfect candidate. He knew all the symptoms he needed to fake, so he could be believable. He was still refusing to dress in era-appropriate clothing, so that would help with his story. And he really didn’t have anything else going for him in his life...”

“Hey,” Rob interjected, offended.

“Well it’s true,” Martin shot back at him. “Anyway, it seemed like the perfect plan. I would bring Robert back to Australia and we would fake a time travel scene.” He paused and looked up at me. “It was a well intentioned plan, really. I wanted to make your father think that his time machine worked properly, so that he would stop using it as a murder weapon. I thought that if he sent someone – Robert – ‘through time’ and he came out the other end in one piece, then he would give up his experiments. And I would be done with him. By that stage I had so much experience dealing with time travel victims I thought it wouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“And?” I prodded, remembering that this was all supposed to have taken place more than three years ago. “What happened?”
 

“Well, the Doctor’s great scheme didn’t exactly go to plan,” Rob said wryly.

Martin looked embarrassed. He glanced up toward the ceiling. “It turned out I was good at solving time travel mysteries but not great at conducting them myself.” He hesitated before going on. “I drove Robert up to Nelson Bay, to your father’s house. When we got there I made up a story about Robert being a ‘volunteer’ for the experiment. I had to make up a fake ID and story for him of course, so that your father didn’t catch on. The story was that Robert had been born in 1983, in Sydney, that he was a broke musician, and that I’d found him on Gumtree.com, volunteering for ‘medical experiments’.”

I couldn’t quite read Robert’s expression by this stage, but it seems to be one of resentment as he followed along with Martin’s story.
 

“And did my father believe any of that?” I asked, looking between the two of them for an answer.

“Yeah,” Martin replied, nodding. “That was actually how he found most of his ‘victims’ at that stage.”

“Oh my god,” I replied, horrified at the thought of him carrying out these experiments on poor broke people who were desperate for money.
 

Martin took a deep breath and continued on. “Anyway, the plan was that I would ‘distract’ your father, while he was carrying out the procedure, and Robert would escape and we’d just pretend he had ‘travelled through time’. Then, I’d hide him for a couple of months or whatever before ‘finding’ him perfectly healthy, proving to your father that time travel could be fun, simple and painless.”

“So what happened?” I asked frantically.
 

Martin cleared his throat. “Well, my attempts at ‘distraction’ failed disastrously. In fact, your father didn’t even use the time machine I’d been familiar with, the one I had seen there on a previous trip. Instead, he grabbed Robert and tied him up, dragging him away to some secret part of the house that I didn’t even know existed.” The lair, then.

Martin sat back in his seat, shooting Robert an apologetic look. “I was horrified, of course. Beside myself actually. Your father told me to wait in the house while he went and did the deed. I just waited up in the main part of the house, devastated, blaming myself for having Robert murdered.”

“Meanwhile,” Rob cut in. “I was being shoved into a cage downstairs! I tell you what, I was pretty furious at the Doctor.”
 

“Oh my god...” I murmured. I turned to Rob. “But you’re okay. What the hell happened to you down there?”

“Well,” Rob said, playing with his cigarette lighter in his hands. “Nothing. There was some buzzing and whirring, and I kind of recognised the sounds and sensation from the time I had
actually
travelled through time. So I was like, oh man, not again. You know?”

I nodded. “I suppose so. But?”

Rob grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “Didn’t work man. I was like, immune to it or something.” He looked at Martin for corroboration, and he nodded.
 

Martin continued on. “The two of them returned upstairs about twenty minutes later,” Martin said. “I was so relieved: I thought the time machine hadn’t worked or something. But your father was furious at me. He was threatening to kill Robert on the spot, so we had to get out of there ASAP. We drove back to Sydney as fast as possible. The whole drive back we were just trying to figure out what had happened.”

“I was furious, of course!” Robert exclaimed. “I mean, this guy almost had me killed.” He pointed at Martin.
 

“Not on purpose!” Martin shook his head. “Anyway, I wasn’t thrilled myself. Now I was stuck with this bloody guy.”
“So you kept him in your house for three years?” I asked, bemused.

Martin groaned. “More or less. Not for the entire time. He was back and forth between here and England a lot.” He shot a look at Robert. “And for a brief time he did manage to find a job and his own place, but that was a short-lived foray. I mean, for a while our new plan was to figure out a way to make this new information work to our advantage. Surely a guy who was
immune
to time travel was worth something.”

I shook my head. My mind was racing with all of this information, struggling to take it all in. “So...then...what the hell happened at the hospital two weeks — or three months — ago? Because Robert was definitely lying in a hospital bed, unable to breath.”

Rob looked extremely guilty. I turned to Martin, who was glaring at him angrily.
 

“Well?” I asked, turning to Robert.
 

“I
may
have purposely given myself an asthma attack and faked a trip through time?” he stated, like it was a question, looking up at me for forgiveness.

“Oh my god...” I began.

“I was sick of being hidden away! I figured that if I faked a time travel trip I would at least get some bloody attention. I could come out of the closet, so to speak.”

“Did you know about this?” I asked, turning to Martin. “On the day we went to RPA, I mean?”
 

“Not at first,” he replied, shortly and sharply. “When I saw who it was, lying there, I couldn’t believe it. I was just going to walk out and leave him there. But...” He stopped and suddenly looked behind him. “John Raymond was there. As far as he was concerned it was a real case.” He paused and dropped his voice even lower. “I thought that maybe we could at least try to put the original plan in action, use Robert for what he had originally been intended for.”

Rob looked offended. “Oi!”

Martin ignored this and continued on. “After all, Raymond didn’t know about the incident in Nelson Bay three years earlier. So I thought we may as well capitalise and play along a bit. Although…” he said, shooting a look at Robert. “I was unwilling to fully commit. For various reasons. And I had to remain cynical anyway, at least in front of Raymond.”

He sat back and sighed. Before he continued, Martin quickly glanced over his shoulder again and then leant in slightly towards me. “I didn’t want you involved at all, Anna. I didn’t want you to come along at all that day, and when I saw Robert in that bed, I was even angrier that you were there. But, at least...” he sighed. “At least with you there, I didn’t think your father would give orders for anyone to be killed. That’s why I left to go back to the university. I thought the two of you would be okay. I never would have thought he would…try kill his own daughter for crying out loud.”

I scoffed. “But he did.” I turned away and shook my head. “He’s never cared about my life being in danger. You knew he sent me through time when I was a baby-”

“That was his first trip,” Martin interrupted. “That trip was never supposed to end in murder.”

“Yeah well,” I said bitterly. “He had no qualms trying to hurt me the next time.”