The Unlikely Time Traveller by Janis Mackay Read Free Book Online Page A

kept to the part of the path with a picture of people walking on it. And I wondered how people in the future could heal themselves. Or heal each other. Was it the I-band? Or could they somehow make each other better?
    “Impressive,” Ness suddenly said.
    “Yeah, seriously,” I agreed, thinking of the miracle I had just seen.
    But Ness was talking about old-fashioned me: “You were feeling for his life pulse?”
    I nodded. It wasn’t exactly rocket science. “It was nothing,” I muttered.
    “Like the uncommon foodstuff in your pocket?” he said, and winked. “Nuts don’t grow in Scotland. To import them costs muckle.” He raised his eyebrows then nodded, as though he had just figured something out about me. “You are rich. That does explain!”
    I shook my head. Was this the moment to come clean about where I was really from? But then Ness ducked behind a palm tree and beckoned for me to follow. Between the tall glass buildings were lanes and next minute me and my new pal from 2115 were sauntering down one.
    We came out of the lane, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, we had reached the High Street. There was bustle,people moving about and lots of chatter. And some trailer things, like silver pods, that could be modern market stalls. And a huge bike parking lot. Some of the old stone buildings were still there, up against new tinted-glass ones. Still no cars. Where were they? Surely they couldn’t all have disappeared, could they? Had the future run out of petrol, like Agnes imagined it would? All the engine noises had gone, and the smell of exhaust. There was a whiff of horse poo in the air, but apart from that everything felt clean and smart.
    All except one plastic bag floating in the breeze. That wiped the smile off my face. It looked so out of place in this clean, unlittered world. I recognised the words on it, swaying in the air in front of me – Helping you spend less . Robbie must have been here! He had probably polished off a whole bag of snacks by this point. Knowing Robbie, he’d have a few more to keep him going. The bag puffed out and swung towards me. It was like he was leaving signs.
    Ness saw it too. “What is this, Saul?”
    The wind dropped and the stupid bag floated down. I snatched it and shoved it in my pocket, along with the wrappers and everything else, feeling embarrassed about the litter. “Robbie is leaving stuff about the place; I’d better follow his trail.” I forced a smile. “Might be fun,” I said.
    “Fun? What is ‘fun’?”
    I remembered the word he had used and explained, “Like a celebration.”
    Ness grinned. “Then, rich boy,” he said, “let us follow the trail to the celebration.”

13
    I didn’t like the rich boy thing, but maybe compared with him I was. My dad had a car. I had a bike. I had a phone; my mum had a laptop. I had an Xbox. As far as I could see, Ness worked with horses, and in the field, and had none of those things. But maybe in the future rich and poor looked different and you couldn’t tell from the stuff people owned.
    We set off along the High Street, past the glass-fronted tall buildings and the silver pods with fruit and veg for sale. I tried not to gape like I had just landed from Mars. It felt like I was in a film set. The bank had gone. The butchers and bakers had gone. Trees grew in the middle of the main road. The Post Office, amazingly, was still there, still looking exactly the same. Ness saw me gazing at it. “You think he may have gone into the Post Office Museum?”
    So it wasn’t a normal Post Office any more. I doubted museums would be top of Robbie’s list of Things To Do in the Future, but I nodded. I wanted to have a look.
    This museum wasn’t anything like the National Museum in Edinburgh. There were no whale bones, stuffed giraffes or Egyptian mummies. “Welcome to the past,” a man said, saluting me at the door. He had on a red T-shirt with yellow lettering: Royal Mail . He lookeda bit like our postman in 2015. He even