In Bed With Lord Byron

compensation if it all went horribly wrong.
    I sat down in the machine and blinked at the keyboard.
    ‘Well, type in a date, Lucy,’ Dr Merrick said, in a typically patronising tone. As though a time machine was a perfectly straightforward thing to use, like typing your PIN into a
cashpoint.
    ‘OK, I’ll pick ten minutes back from now,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘In which case I’ll step out of the machine and you won’t be here.’
    I typed in the date and the time. There was a green button which clearly indicated ‘GO’. I pressed it gingerly.
    Now, I have to admit that at this point I did feel rather nervous. I kept thinking about
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
my favourite novel as a child, and how the boy who is obsessed
with TV ends up getting transported into one and shrinking a million times smaller in size. What if, in the process of being transported backwards, all my particles and atoms and what-not ended up
getting muddled about and distorted? I’d end up needing plastic surgery. I closed my eyes, heart hammering, gripping the seat tightly.
    When I opened my eyes, nothing seemed to have changed. I stepped out of the machine. Dr Merrick was standing there with her arms folded, a smile on her lips.
    ‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘it didn’t work. There’s a surprise. Now, could you pack it up and put it out with the rubbish?’
    ‘But you can’t just throw it out,’ I cried. ‘I mean, you can’t . . .’
    ‘Nor can I have it cluttering up my office,’ she snapped, heading for her room. ‘If you want to keep it, Lucy, you can take it home. You have forty-eight hours to remove
it.’
    ‘OK – I’ll take it,’ I called after her back. Then I felt slightly foolish. My flat was rather small – just where would it
go
? Still, it could be a kind of
cool and kitsch thing to have. And if the worst came to the worst, I could sell it on eBay as a novelty. I might well need the money, now I had broken up with Anthony.
    My lovely flat, you see, belonged to Anthony. It had been his sweet suggestion after our thirty-fourth one-night stand. On my crappy PA salary I’d only been able to afford a flatshare in
Balham. Since arriving in England, Anthony had been making even more money buying properties on the side. One of them was a studio flat in Primrose Hill, and instead of renting it out to some young
city boy for £2,000 a month, he had let me have it for a measly £500. I was convinced that with the mortgage he was actually making a loss, but he insisted he was breaking even –
just.
    Now I would have to move out. It was bad enough having to suffer the pain of the break-up without having to worry about where I was going to live.
    The rest of the afternoon went relatively smoothly. I packed the machine back into the box, ready to be somehow transported to my flat. I shut Anthony out of my mind and heart
by throwing myself into work, typing out letter after letter until my fingers ached. In fact, it was ironic that on the day I worked the hardest I’ve ever worked for Dr Merrick, she decided
to sack me.
    vi) The Daily Telegraph guy
    After I was fired, I felt there was only one place to go. I went to Victoria Station and caught the train to Horsham, where I walked down Woodley Park Road, sniffling in the
drizzle. As I rounded the final corner of the cul-de-sac, I saw the same sight I used to experience on my way home from school, from the age of eleven to eighteen: the blue door, the wisteria
clinging to the peeling porch, the overgrown rose bush hanging over the grey stone wall. Home. I walked up the cracked path to the front door, and my frantic heart felt softened and swaddled with
the comfort of familiarity before I’d even rung the bell and my mum had hugged me and bustled me into the kitchen and sat me down at the scarred oak table and offered me a cup of PG Tips.
    She wasn’t too upset when I told her I’d been fired.
    ‘I was doing well – and then she found out about the fake quote,’ I confessed, blushing at my lies. ‘She wrote to Alain asking him out for dinner to thank him for the
quote, and he called back asking what on earth she was talking about, he’d never even
seen
the book. She said it was the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to her, and
she just snapped and said enough was enough and that she was also sick of me being late every morning.’
    ‘Well, Lucy,’ Mum tutted, ‘you always were hopeless about getting up. I remember