Allergic To Time (20 page)

My heels clomped on the pavement as I hurried to get to the Physics department. I cursed the fact that neither of us had mobile phones: Robert because they hadn’t been invented in 1974 and me because half of my belongings had disappeared when I had travelled through time three months.
How the heck did people ever survive without mobiles?
I thought, as I quickened my pace to a jog. I wished I had given him an exact location to meet me at, instead of the vague ‘out the front of the library’. Technically everything in the world was out the front of the library, depending on which angle you viewed it from.
 

I pushed my way in through the glass, wood-panelled doors that housed the entry to the physics building and I began to jog down the corridor towards the former office of Martin Anderson, which now apparently belonged to one John Raymond. “Rob?” I called out, though I wouldn’t have usually ran through department buildings screaming people’s names. I only did so because the place was deserted and I was beginning to panic. What if something had happened to him?

I knocked on the door of the office which now belonged to John Raymond. Just as a courtesy, in case the man himself had actually shown up while I had been researching Robert in the library. “Rob?” I called out. “Are you in there?”

“No,” a deep cool voice called back. “But, Anna, please: come in.”

Chapter Twenty-Four.
 

I stood still, frozen in time, unable to move. I knew that voice.
 

“Oh no.”
I said, backing away from the door.
 

John freaking Raymond was the
man in black
.
 

I turned on my heels and ran out of the building, almost knocking Naomi over on my way out the door. She was carrying a tray off coffees in both hands, which almost ended up on the floor. “Whoa, are you alright?” she asked, balancing the tray so that it didn’t spill.

“Um,” I said, catching my breath. “Yeah.” I looked around, flustered. “Sorry, I was just, in a hurry.”

She looked me up and down with something resembling pity. Oh great, pity from Naomi Stone, the school’s worst student. She used to be afraid of me for crying out loud! She patted me on the arm. “I guess it’s a bit scary for you being back here.” She gave me a little smile. “What with everyone talking about you and everything.”

“I thought you didn’t know about the gossip...” I began.

“Just what you told me earlier.”

“Right.” I smoothed down the creases on my black dress, trying to calm myself. I wished I hadn’t been running through the department halls like a lunatic. It had probably been caught on closed circuit TV. That would hardly do my case any good. I looked back towards where I had come from, John Raymond’s office. “The guy in Martin Anderson’s old office...” I began, hoping that Naomi would have some information about him. Like, where the hell he came from and, you know, when he might be expected to return to whichever land of evil he had come from.

“Doctor Raymond.” She perked up at the mention of his name and nodded down at her coffees. “These are for us.”

“Those are for you? What, you and him?”
She nodded. “Doctor Raymond is going to be my Honours’ supervisor next year.” She beamed up at me.

“How did you qualify for the Honours’ program...” I began. “Never mind. Who is he? When was he hired?”

Naomi looked uncomfortable. “After you and Doctor Anderson ran off...err, disappeared. And Connie...died.” She stared down at her coffees. “Sorry, I don’t really like to talk about it.”

“So he just took Martin’s job?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. Everything was sort of in chaos for the weeks following everything. I think they were desperate. But Dr Raymond is SO brilliant.” She was grinning again now. “I’m telling you, he is so smart, and, like, he really takes the time to get to know his students, and he gives us all so much attention...”

Oh boy, I thought, zoning out during the rest of Naomi’s gushing speech. I recognised the signs of a student with a crush on a teacher. Not from first hand experience, mind. From Connie, mostly, and other wide-eyed undergrads who clearly had a thing for Martin, staying back after class to talk to him, visiting him during after hours. Not me, obviously. My reasons for visiting him were always purely academic.
 

“Well that’s wonderful,” I replied, cutting in. “I’m glad you’ve found a teacher you love so much.”

She blushed. “Well, only because he’s such a good lecturer.”

I nodded, pretending I believed her. I was mostly just desperate to get out of the building, so that I could somehow find Martin, to let him know that not only was the man in black after his life, he was also after something far more serious: his job.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Without a phone to aid me, I had to track Martin down the old fashioned way. I figured that the most likely place to find him would be at his house: after all, he owned it, so even in his absence no one should have sold it or done anything to it. I stopped for a second and wondered who actually
would have
been in charge of taking care of Martin’s possessions while he was missing. I had no idea about who his family was, or if there even were any. I mean, there had been Kate, his fiancé, but...
 

So I decided I would walk the 20 minutes east, across campus and across the neighbouring suburb of Glebe to get to his house. Which wasn’t ideal, but I wanted to save some of my money to buy us all phones. How were we supposed to solve time travel mysteries without them?

I wondered, if after all of this settled down, whether the three of us would actually continue working together, solving time travel mysteries. After all, Martin already had more than enough experience at it. And then there was Robert – a time travelling veteran by that point. And me! And expert on time travel, having researched it full time for years, and now having actually done it. By this stage we were probably the leading world experts on the subject of time travel. Maybe we could help people: other people who had had their lives displaced — or even totally destroyed — by unwanted time travel. We could track them down, make sure they were okay.
 

But I was probably getting ahead of myself, I thought, as I began the hike across campus towards Parramatta Rd. First of all we had to solve the mystery of what had actually happened to all of us, and to Connie.

Before I left campus I took one final look around to make sure Robert wasn’t anywhere in sight. I sighed. He’d probably gotten distracted and wandered off and gotten lost. I figured at some stage he would make his way back to the hotel though, so I wasn’t too worried. I would meet up with him back at the Novotel later that night, once I had sorted out this business about Dr John Raymond stealing Martin’s job. Not to mention stealing his life.

***

I had made it about half a block up Glebe Point Rd – about ten minutes away from Martin’s house by that stage — when I suddenly stopped in my tracks out the front of a cafe called ‘Badde Manners’.
 

My mouth almost hit the pavement as I stood there in shock: there Martin was, sitting up in a booth, happily chatting away to someone without a care in the world. I wasn’t sure what I had expected to find, but it was something more like, him sulking away alone in his house, in a state of distress and despair over the ruined tatters of his life. I didn’t expect him to be merrily sipping a cappuccino in Badde Manners with a mysterious female companion.
 

I just stood there staring at the two of them. Right, this confirmed — as if it hadn’t already been confirmed — that whatever Robert had said about Martin being “in love” with me was a complete and utter falsehood. I mean, he had left me alone, barely breathing, in a hospital bed in Newcastle, to come back to Sydney to go on coffee dates with some blonde woman. Not that I was jealous, mind you, just indignant. He hadn’t even tried to track me down, to make sure I was okay! Sure, I didn’t know how he was supposed to have contacted me, but still: this was pretty heartless. He didn’t even seem to care about me as his student, let alone as anything else.

People were starting to glance up at me, clearly wondering what this angry brunette girl standing in the middle of the street staring into the cafe with her hands on her hips was actually doing. I straightened myself up and cleared my throat, then strode into the cafe and right up to the table where Martin and his date were sitting.
 

“Dr Anderson,” I announced, being formal. “How great to bump into you...”

“Anna!” he exclaimed, jumping up and almost spilling both his and his date’s coffees over in the process. “Oh my god.” He immediately wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me so tight that my already tenuous oxygen supply was in danger of being cut off.
 

After ten seconds or so he broke the embrace and backed away the merest amount, looking just slightly embarrassed and quickly looking around to see if anyone we knew was in the cafe. After all, the place was littered with students at all times of the day and night, and we were already the topic of hot gossip. But the look on his face said he didn’t care too much about that. He rested his left hand slightly on my arm. “Thank god you’re alright.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say at first. I had been so prepared to be angry at him. I was definitely expecting a less... Enthusiastic response from him. I guess I really had convinced myself that he didn’t care what had happened to me at all, despite what Robert had said...

I just nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said quietly. Then I reassessed that evaluation. “Well, I don’t know that ‘fine’ is the word for it, actually. My whole life has kind of been destroyed...”

Martin nodded, but he wasn’t taking any of this the way I thought he would. He seemed far too happy, considering the amount of trouble we were in. “I want you to meet someone,” he said, gesturing to the blonde woman who was sitting below us at the table. She looked up at me and smiled, waving at me.

I thought something about her was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it for the life of me. Maybe she was a former student of the University or something. After all, she couldn’t have been much older than late 20s. She was probably a former grad student of Martin’s, and I had probably ran into her in a department meeting at some point over the years. Maybe she had given a guest lecture at some point: Martin was always getting his PhD students to do that. He said it was so that we gained valuable teaching experience, but I was pretty sure he did it just so he could get the week off occasionally.
 

Just as I had convinced myself that was where I knew her from — funny how strong the power of suggestion could be – Martin introduced her. “Anna,” he said. “This is Fanny.”

She smiled at me and reached a hand out across the table. “It is so lovely to finally meet you,” she said, in a prim, proper voice, like she was from the North Shore.
 

Martin leant over to me and whispered, “Fanny is from the year 1876.”

My eyes grew wide.
 

“Well, allegedly,” he hurried to add.
 

“Hey!” Fanny exclaimed, in either mock or real offence, it was difficult to tell. Maybe it was both.
 

“Sorry,” Martin said to her. “It’s just, there’s no proof. I mean, I believe you, but I have to be scientific about it...”

“No proof!” I butted in on Fanny’s behalf. “Um, don’t you think that you and I are proof enough?”

Martin gave me a cool, easy stare. So, the warmness of a minute earlier had already disappeared then. “Anna,” he began, seemingly growing tired with me. “You and I travelling through time is simply only proof of that: that you and I travelled through time. It doesn’t prove that anyone
else
travelled through time.”

I rolled my eyes. Yeah, he was right, but did he have to be so... scientific, all the bloody time? Especially with poor Fanny sitting there, all wide-eyed and clearly — now that I took a good look at her — not from this time. Martin took a sip of his coffee and looked at me. “You know, for every case I’ve investigated that turned out to be true — or at least believable — there have been ten that were hoaxes.”

I had a sudden flashback to the day this all began, that afternoon in the dungeon ward at RPA, when we had met Robert. The way Martin had been so sure it was a hoax. Or, at least, that’s what he had kept repeating at the time. I always thought that was just for the benefit of the man in black —
 
because Martin didn’t want to help him out, but this new information made me think otherwise.
 

“In the hospital, when we met Robert...” I began. Martin seemed to visibly bristle at the mention of his name. “You thought that case was a hoax?”

Martin took a long hard look at Fanny, seeming to contemplate how much he should reveal in front of her.
 
“I’m still not 100% convinced it wasn’t a hoax.”

I sat up in horror, appalled that Martin could even say that, after everything we had all been through. “Are you serious?” I asked, barely able to conceal the anger in my voice. “How can you possibly think that Robert is lying, after everything we’ve been through?”

He shook his head. “Who here is the expert on time travel Anna?”

“I am,” I snapped.
 

“Actually, I probably am,” Fanny spoke up, raising her hand meekly. Martin ignored her and continued on.

“That day in the hospital I warned you that you didn’t know what you were getting yourself involved with, that you needed to stay out of : because you didn’t know anything. And you still don’t!”

By that stage my mouth was fully open, and there was nothing mock about my offence. “I cannot believe...”

“You’re just a student, Anna,” he snapped, and sat back in his seat, looking out the window over a shopping centre car park.
 

“Wow,” I said, standing up to leave. “I’ll leave you alone then. I’ll leave the two of you time travel experts alone, seeing as I am not needed in any of this.” I smoothed my dress down and started heading for the door.