Allergic To Time (22 page)

I cleared my throat. “Yes, of course I remember. It was the most horrible thing.” I mean it, as well. “We all really liked her. Us students, I meant. And we all felt so bad for you.”

He nodded again. “I know, I could feel the pity every time I walked into a classroom.” His voice was slightly bitter.

“It wasn’t pity necessarily...”

“Do you know, out of all the students I taught — all 300 or so — you were the only one who actually came up to me and said anything?” Martin turned to look me in the eye.
 

I remembered back to the first week of class in my second year as an undergrad, the semester after Kate had died, when things had been so tense and awful in class. I had gone to see Martin one day after class, in his office, to tell him I was sorry for his loss. It had seemed like the right — the decent — thing to do.
 

“Really? I was the only one? I don’t believe that. I mean, surely…”

“Nope.” He looked back down at his hands. “Just you.”

“Well, I think no one really knew what to say,” I said, thinking back to the situation. “I’m sure the other guys wanted to say something, they just didn’t know how to go about it.”
Martin raised his eyes but kept fiddling with his hands. “No, I think you were the only one who actually cared enough to say something.”

I fell silent for a moment. I had no idea that I was the only one out of all Martin’s students to say something to him at the time. I thought most of my classmates would have offered their condolences. And what did it say about me then, about my feelings towards him, that I had been the only one to do such a thing?
 

“Anyway,” Martin went on, shaking his head briefly, as if to shake off the memory of what were discussing. “You know, after that I kind of lost passion for my job.”

I had to raise my eyebrows at that. “Really?” I asked. “Because it seemed to me like that was the time you actually got serious about it. You were a really amazing lecturer after that.”

He turned to me and returned my surprised look. “And what was I before that?”

“Well, you were a fun teacher, I suppose. But not a particularly good one.”

He sighed. “It’s funny how things must have looked. Because it was before — in my so-called ‘fun’ era, as you call it — that I was taking it seriously. My heart was never in it again afterwards.”

“Well, what was it in?” I asked.

“Time travel.”

I sat up straight on the bed, feeling as though I had made an important discovery. “Because you wanted to go back in time to save Kate’s life!” I exclaimed. “Well. How very H.G. Wells of you.”

Martin pulled a face. “No.” He shook his head at me. “Not because I wanted to ‘save her life’. I never would have thought that would have been possible.”
 

“Oh.” He had kind of dashed my theory. “Why then?”
 

He took a long hard look at the floor, like he was trying to set things straight in his mind. “I stumbled across a case. An alleged time travel case.” He let out a long sigh. Somehow along the way we had ended up right next to each other again, and now not only were our legs touching, but our arms kept brushing against each others as well. “I’m not sure if ‘stumbled across’ is the right word. I kind of purposely may have searched for the information. But I never in a million years would have expected to find what I found...”

“What did you find?” I asked, almost in a whisper. I had the feeling this was more than just another case. After all, this was the one that had started everything, had set him off in his secret line of work as a time travel detective.
 

“I started reading up on this case: of a family, the parents, and a young girl, three years old. Still a baby, really. That’s why it was so sad: she was in the hospital, unable to breath, her lungs couldn’t hold out, they were too little and undeveloped to cope with such a massive change in atmosphere. See, this family had travelled, approximately, 60 years through time.” He shook his head. “It was this that first started to convince me that maybe they were telling the truth, maybe time travel is possible. I mean, you certainly wouldn’t fake your baby daughter being that ill. And it seemed sick to lie about it, to use your kid for publicity like that, if it was just a hoax.”

He stood very still for a moment. If I didn’t know better I would have thought he was shaking slightly. He took a deep breath and continued. “So, I researched the entire case. I became a bit obsessed with it really, I am sorry to say.”

“Why are you sorry to say?” I asked slowly.

He didn’t answer me directly, he just kept going with the story. “It was my first official — if you can call it that — case. I became convinced, despite all my better judgement, despite my years of learning and teaching in the science department, that these people were telling the truth. I tried to track the parents down. I found the father, but...” he trailed off.

“But what about the little girl?” I asked, impatiently. “Is she okay? Is she still in the hospital?”

Martin shook his head. “No.” He then shook it even more vigorously. “No, no. This was not a recent case. It happened decades ago. 22 years ago, actually.”

I froze, my heart in my throat. “Martin,” I said, slowly, forcefully. “What was her name?”

“Anna Black.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight.
 

I felt as though I might vomit.

I recoiled away from him, not quite trusting myself to stand up from the bed, but not wanting our bodies to be in contact any longer. The first thing that came to my mind, my first overwhelming question, was how the hell he found the information in the first place, though why that was the most salient point in my head I wasn’t sure. “So you’re, like,
obsessed,
with me?” I asked in horror.

“What?” He looked at me with confusion.

“Why was I the first case you came across?” I had magically found the strength to stand, and I managed to back several feet away from the bed, as I was now entirely untrusting of the man who was sitting on it.

He sighed, and looked down. “That was the part I meant I was sorry for.” He looked uncomfortable and reluctant to continue on. He scratched the back of his head. “It was a really weird time for me Anna. I mean, my fiancé had just passed away...”

“So you decided to stalk your students?” I was aghast.
 

“I wasn’t...” he began, and then thought about it. “Well, I suppose I sort of was. Are you telling me you’ve never stalked any of
your
students?”

I thought back to many a bored evening marking assignments where I would look up whichever student’s essay I was currently marking to see if they were on Facebook and Twitter. I may or may not have spent over an hour going through Naomi Stone’s Facebook photos. I wasn’t proud of it, but it was just something I had done while procrastinating. Plus, I wanted to know my students a little better, so I could figure out who was actually worth my time and who was rubbish. But, I mean, that was different to what Martin had done. Wasn’t it?
 

I shrugged, not wanting to admit that I had also engaged in a bit of student-stalking in my time.
 

“I didn’t mean to,” Martin continued, hurrying to explain himself. “You’d just been in my office offering your condolences, and up until that point I didn’t really know who you were.”

“Thanks,” I said, raising my eyebrows. I was slightly embarrassed that I’d gone out of my way on that day in question to go and offer Martin Anderson my condolences, and he hadn’t even known who I was.

“Well, there were hundreds of people in your first year course, Anna. I recognised you, but I didn’t know your name until you introduced yourself.”

“So you just typed it into Google as soon as I left and had a good look.”

“Something like that.” He paused. “Do you remember the conversation we had that day? All of it I mean?”

I thought back to how I had knocked uneasily on his office door that day, unsure of exactly what to say but feeling as though I ought to say something. I had just been planning on entering his office under the guise of needing assistance on an assignment and then dropping a casual, “I’m so sorry about your dead fiancé” into the end of the conversation. But once he had invited me to come in and I was just standing there in the middle of his office floor with him staring at me from his desk where he was marking papers, I had just blurted out, “I’m really really sorry. Honestly. It is the worst thing.” I thought it was simple, and succinct, and true. But at the same time it was a slightly uncomfortable moment, as to be honest I barely knew the man and he clearly hadn’t known me at all.
 

On that day he had just stared at me for an uncomfortable minute, and I’d been scared I might actually cry. The emotion of it all had gotten the better of me.
 

Eventually he’d just nodded and said, “Thank you.”

I had then stood there for a moment, shifting my weight from foot to foot, wondering what else I could say. Should I just turn and leave? I could no longer even remember what the made-up ‘problem with my assignment’, that I had been going to pretend I was having, even was. So, all of a sudden, just to break the silence I had blurted out: “I think there should be a unit in the physics department that is solely dedicated to time travel.”

Martin had just looked up from the paper he’d been marking and given me the strangest look.
 

“Erm,” he’d begun, taking his reading glasses off and placing them on his desk. “I don’t think there would be enough demand for that. The university would never agree to the funding.”

“Oh.” I had taken a seat on his couch without being invited. “That’s a shame: it’s my main area of interest.” At that stage I was still a very naive undergrad student, with only a year of uni under my belt. I was brash enough to think that I could just walk into my lecturer’s office and offer course advice. “And I think a lot of other students would really love it.”

Martin had studied me for a moment with a serious expression. “And why are you so interested in time travel?”
 

I had probably shrugged and offered some kind of reason, but I couldn’t recall what I had said after that point. I just remember I had rambled on and on about how I thought the science department could be rearranged to accommodate this whole new major area of study I had thought up. I’d assumed Martin was humouring me at the time, probably, or that he felt rude about kicking me out of his office considering I’d come in to offer him my sympathies.
 

***

Back in the hotel, I brought myself back to the present moment. “Yeah,” I admitted. “I remember that I suggested that the university should run a new subject dedicated entirely to time travel...” I was a bit embarrassed over the memory.
 

“I was in such a strange place at the time,” Martin continued, “that your suggestion actually started to seem to me like it was a good idea. Even though, up till that point, all throughout my academic career I’d held the position that time travel was impossible. You know my own PhD was supposed to prove that time travel was impossible.” He let out a long heavy sigh.

“Yes I do know that!” I exclaimed. “I figured that’s why you always shut my ideas down.” But now, all of a sudden, that didn’t seem to me to be such a certain fact.
 

Nothing seemed certain anymore. I took a deep breathe and forced myself to think about the other information that Martin had told me, the information that made me
really
uncomfortable. That girl, that three year old girl, hooked up to a life support machine...unable to breathe. All alone in a hospital bed. Hot tears began falling from my eyes, skipping down over my nose and dropping on the floor with unbelievable ease. Because I knew now that I remembered it, and I knew it was true.
 

“How could he?...” I managed to say, in between my tears. I shook my head and almost broke down into full blown sobs. Martin stood up off the bed and came over, hugging me. I returned the embrace for a few seconds, but then I pushed him away. It wasn’t just my father who had lied to me.
 

“So this is how you knew him...” I muttered, looking at the floor.
 

“I was just trying to find out...I was trying...”

“I know, I know,” I said quietly. I completed the sentence for him so he could stop sounding like a broken record: “to protect me.” I shook my head, still staring at the floor. “But why? Honestly, why did you care so much?”

“I didn’t at first,” Martin replied, backing away from me as well, returning to the window where the sun was starting to dip lower in the sky, creating a dazzling view down below over the harbour. Rays of sun were blaring in through the window and I wanted to pull the blind down. I found them to be obnoxiously annoying in that moment. I was homesick for the dark winter skies I had experienced only the week before.
 

He leant up against the window and stared out. “There was something about the way you talked about it. Time travel that is. After you left my office I started to search through old science journals, partly because I was miserable and had nothing better to occupy myself with, and partly because you’d put the idea so strongly in my head. You’d spoken about the subject so passionately.”
 

He stopped. “And I don’t believe in coincidences.”

I didn’t either.
 

“When I came across your name, Anna Black, in that article about the family with the baby, my heart almost stopped. I couldn’t believe it: the coincidence I mean. I actually shut the screen down. I was frightened, almost.” His tone had gotten lower and graver. “I almost thought I was actually going crazy. I had barely slept in months by that stage...” he trailed off and looked down. I felt guilty that I was forcing him to dwell on the topic of his dead fiancé for so long.
 

“I didn’t go back to it for days, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t even look at you in the lecture theatre.” He turned and glanced at me. “You probably didn’t even notice.”