Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [16]
At the time I remember thinking that it probably hadn’t been a very good idea to have had sex with Jason. He was probably going to walk back out of my life, leaving the deep wounds from our marriage open to the elements again.
I was hit by a vague feeling of unease. Something about my students. I’d arranged to meet Tameka and Emile at the site at nine. I finally found my watch where I had discarded it in my drunken hurry to be naked last night.
10:37 a.m.
Damn. I hated being late for my students. Probably because it was such a frequent occurrence.
I leapt into the shower, shrieking as the hot water hit me, and I made a desperate grab for the cold tap. I was shampooing my hair when there was a knock at the hotel room door.
I have gone over what happened next a thousand times in my mind. I have fantasized a hundred alternative possibilities and outcomes. Most of them involved me being suitably heroic and all of them ended with Jason in my arms.
‘Husband,’ I bellowed, ‘get that, can’t you?’
I didn’t hear anything further and had assumed that he’d answered the door, when the knock came again. I popped my head out of the shower curtain and shouted, ‘I said – ’ And then Jason interrupted me.
‘I heard,’ he grunted back, sounding groggy with sleep.
I listened for a few moments before clambering back in to the shower. I heard the hotel room door open. There were voices and then a muffled thumping sound as the door was rudely slammed shut.
Ha! I thought at the time, assuming that Jason hadn’t been pleased to have been woken. I pitied the poor porter who’d knocked on the door.
I took what now feels like an agonizingly long time towel-drying myself and then strolled naked into the bedroom. Only then did I suspect that something might be wrong.
I ducked back into the bathroom when I saw that the door to the corridor was still wide open.
‘Jason!’ I hissed. ‘Close the bloody door!’ But Jason hadn’t returned to bed. The hotel room was empty.
Jason had gone.
Alarm bells were ringing in my head. I wrapped the towel into an impromptu minidress and glanced out into the long, shadowed hallway. The only natural light came from a small window at one end of the corridor. The small hotel was built out of the same grey stone as all the other buildings in this part of the town. The hallway looked dark and unfriendly. Suddenly it had become unknown territory. Jason wasn’t in sight. Why would he have left the door open if he had been called away? And why would he leave without telling me where he was going? His clothes were still scattered over the floor. It seemed unlikely that he would wander off naked or just in a dressing gown.
The elderly creature at reception was too flustered by my semi-nudity to make much sense. It took me a few desperate minutes to extract the information that Jason had left the hotel in the company of two humans.
‘They were different from you,’ the creature began uncertainly, when I demanded a description.
‘Do you mean they were men?’
The creature retracted its snout a little and grimaced. A gesture which, several field trips to Apollox 4 had taught me, meant that the Apolloxian was confused.
‘Men,’ I repeated. ‘The male of the human species. Often taller, broader, facial hair, no sense of fair play or monogamy.’
‘I was going to say that they were different from you in that they kept themselves covered with
. . . fabric.’
‘Well that narrows the field,’ I muttered. ‘Damn.’ I slapped the reception desk in frustration.
The noise shocked the little creature and it retreated hurriedly into the private quarters behind the desk.
I ran out on to the street, which was still busy with early-morning traffic. I heard the screech of tyres and I turned just in time to glimpse a dark ground car disappearing around a corner further down the narrow road. I was about to head out into the rain when I remembered that I was bare-foot and only wearing a towel. Reluctantly I turned on my heel and hurried back upstairs