In Bed With Lord Byron

had given me a sharp slap around the face, slamming me back down to earth. Why couldn’t life be like the movies for once? I thought indignantly. Why couldn’t it end in
fulfilment and a sensual, low-lit bedroom scene and then happy ever after? Why did it always have to be full of cross-purposes and anticlimaxes and plot threads left dangling, never to be tied
up?
    I got up, shoving away my chair, and went to the window, gazing out at the London skyline, a necklace of amber lights hanging in the indigo sky. An aeroplane sparkled a gold trail through the
dark. I felt envy burn in my heart as I imagined people with lives a hundred times more glamorous and exciting than mine travelling to exotic places I might never see before I died. Or maybe I was
just being overly romantic again; maybe they were on a package holiday to the Costa del Sol and would end up in a cheap hotel, getting drunk and sunburnt, before returning to the same old jobs,
marriages and mid-life crises.
    I
was definitely having a crisis. I just wanted some excitement, some adventure, some danger, something. I’d spent much of the last decade feeling as though there was something
special around the corner – a wonderful man, a career opportunity, a spiritual epiphany – but the corner seemed to be forever out of reach.
    I realised just how much I missed Anthony. I wanted to call him up and tell him all of this. I wanted him to hold me tight and tell me everything would be all right. But it wouldn’t be all
right. Even if I asked him to come back, would he say yes? I had lacerated his heart today, and those wounds were going to take a long time to heal; perhaps we couldn’t even hope to be
friends.
    ‘Hey!’ I turned suddenly to see Lyra devouring the dessert, whiskers splattered with cream. I picked her up and cuddled her against my chest, sighing.
    Maybe I just needed to stop waiting for fate to solve my problems and make the change myself. Maybe I should move abroad, start afresh. Maybe I should . . . maybe maybe maybe. I felt my head was
going to explode with confusion. I thought longingly of my bed, of the comforting blankness of sleep.
    I looked round guiltily at the mess in my flat, telling myself I’d clear up in the morning. Matters weren’t helped by that ridiculously large and stupid time machine box in the
corner. I gave it an angry kick as I walked out.
    vii) Fiddling with the time machine
    I finally fell asleep around one a.m. and by two I had woken again, my temples pounding. I tried to play the bed game, but after a half-hour toss-up between Will Self, Orlando
Bloom and Anthony, Lord Byron somehow won – which demonstrates just how scrambled my brains were. I thought of some more lines from Plath’s ‘Insomniac’:
Now the pills are
worn-out and silly, like classical gods / Their poppy-sleepy colours do him no good
, though frankly I would have killed for a few pills. Finally I decided to get up and read.
    And so at three a.m. I ended up in the living room, curled up on the sofa in my dressing gown, yawning my way miserably through Byron’s
Childe Harold.
I couldn’t take a word
in – everything kept irritating me: the tick of the clock, the London traffic outside, the stupid bloody time machine box taking up half the living room. I decided grumpily that I’d
definitely sell it on eBay first thing tomorrow.
    And then I remembered how soothing I had found it putting the machine together. How I had managed to shut the world out. The thought struck me:
If I try and put the damn thing together again,
that is one sure way to get to sleep
. . .
    It ought to have been easier the second time, but my head was woolly with tiredness and grief; nor was I aided by Lyra who persisted in trying to sit on the parts. After an hour of hard graft,
though, the machine was ready. But nor did I feel tired any more: my mind was alert with a bright, fizzing curiosity. Anthony and Nigel and my unemployed state seemed pleasantly distant.
    I got into the machine and typed in a date from the nineteenth century – I’d always fancied giving that era a whirl and hanging out with Byron. Then I typed in the place: London.
Then I pressed the green button. Nothing happened. I sighed and gave the machine a sharp, frustrated kick.
    Suddenly, the whole contraption seemed to come alive, throbbing as though it was an expensive racing car revving up to do a lap around the track, its sides shaking as though it might
spontaneously combust at