I’ve slept in and Grandpa Byron’s waiting to take me to school when I come downstairs. Mum and Steve have already left for work, and Carly’s nowhere to be seen.

(I don’t think she totally buys the time travel stuff, now that I’ve made my big confession. No surprises there. She is intrigued, though, and that’s enough to buy her silence for now. But I’m going to have to produce some evidence pretty soon, or I’m toast. And she’s not at all happy about the twenty pounds she’s spent.)

Grandpa Byron looks at me, shakes his head and says, “Oh my flippin’ Lordy! What has happened to you?”

I suppose I can’t look that great. I have slept for about three hours, and badly at that. I’m shivering and pale, and I still haven’t got my school uniform on. Instead my dressing gown hangs loosely around me.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost! How do you feel? How’s your kyte?”

He means my stomach. It’s one of his old Geordie words, I think.

“Pretty rough, actually.” There’s an opportunity to miss school here, I can tell, so I make my voice croaky, just to be on the safe side, although in truth I feel really sick. Grandpa Byron pulls down my eyelids, and then my bottom lip. He smells my breath, and declares that I am “most certainly out of balance”. His remedy is what he calls a “hot posset”.

Soon the kitchen is filled with the smell of spices: cardamom and cinnamon are the only two I recognise, and he goes out again to fetch some others at the Bangladeshi shop. The resulting concoction – the ‘hot posset’ – is warm, milky and sweet, and when I sip it, I already feel a little better.

“There, you see! Balance is everything!” He pauses, and I see his eyes flick over to me. “I was telling this to your father just the other day.” Grandpa Byron has a sort of faraway look in his eyes when he says this, but then I see him glance at me again to check if I’m listening.

“To Dad? What do you mean?”

“I mean just what I say. Even though your father has passed on from this life, that does not mean that he is forgotten.”

“Of course not!”

“Well, then. Imagine using the power of your mind to transcend time, Al. Thanks to your namesake, Mr Einstein, the whole world knows that time is relative: it can be different depending on what you are doing.”

So he knows, then. Or knows something, at any rate. Stuff like this doesn’t come out of the blue.

I say nothing, which I figure is probably the safest thing to do while my mind is racing. I think of Dad’s letter when he quoted Einstein’s idea of putting your hand on a hot stove and it seeming like ages, and I sip more of the spicy medicine-milk.

“The scholars of the Sri Kalpana knew this many, many years ago, Al.”

Ah. The old Sri Kalpana. Grandpa Byron’s prized book that I haven’t quite got round to finishing. It’s on the kitchen table in front of me under a pile of other stuff, poking out. Still I say nothing.

“The mysteries of the universe are multitudinous, Al. And the answers lie within us, not without. Your father and now you, I think,” and here he pauses, narrowing his eyes a little, “you both seek to transcend these wonders in the physical realm, from which only misery can arise.”

I love the way Grandpa Byron talks, but sometimes it gets a little, well, dense. I’m walking through a dark forest of words, and looking for a clearing of sense. He sees that I’m getting confused.

“I know what you have been doing, Al. I am not stupid.”

Apparently everyone around me at the moment has this idea that I think they are stupid.

“I never said you were.” I’m getting a bit defensive, and Grandpa Byron can tell.

“Don’t try being smart with me, bonny lad. I am trying to help you. My book, which I see you have not read, aimed to assist you in this regard.”

I put on a pained expression. “I’m sorry. I have tried, it’s just …”

“Difficult to understand? You betcha. But not so difficult to understand as why you would risk everything on this ludicrous adventure of your father’s.”

I stare at Grandpa Byron, unsure of what to say. I can tell where this is heading, obviously, and I don’t like it. I can feel myself being cornered, hemmed in by his calmness and the pretty inescapable fact that he’s right: it is a ludicrous adventure, or at least very dangerous. I hate it when adults do this, and the only thing I can do is to get all self-righteous to try to steer the argument. I stare at him angrily.

“You read my letter, didn’t you? The one from Dad to me?”

Instead of answering me directly, he comes to the kitchen table and sits down opposite me.

“One of the hardest things in life, Al, is to accept the things that cause us pain, absorb them, and continue. And no, I did not read your letter. But I imagine it was to do with your father’s experiments in, for want of a better expression, time travel?”

“And what if it was?”

“Then you are at liberty to follow your heart. But that is not always the wisest option.”

“And what if I had the chance to stop Dad from dying, eh? Wouldn’t you want that?” I’m getting a bit upset now, and I have raised my voice, but Grandpa Byron remains unperturbed, which infuriates me further. He just wobbles his head, and says:

“Death, Al, is not the end. As it says in the Sri Kalpana, ‘Live life so completely that when death comes to you like a thief in the night, there will be nothing left for him to steal’.”

“And so I should just do nothing? I have this ability, and I should just do nothing? Can you hear yourself? You sit there, spouting this so-called wisdom like you’re, you’re … Yoda or something, and all the while Dad is still dead and you don’t want to do anything about it.” My cheeks are hot, and my throat is wobbling but I’m not crying. (That’ll come later.)

Still Grandpa Byron just blinks slowly and reaches across the table to pick up his precious book.

“But you cannot undo what has been done, Al. It may appear that you can, but you cannot. It may appear that you can change your world by going back in time and altering it, but you are merely creating another world and living in that instead. Escaping is not changing.”

“Well, I want to escape then.”

“Don’t do it, Al. It cannot make you happier.”

“How not? How not?” I can hardly speak, I’m so angry. “Don’t you even want to see Dad again?”

“But I can, Al, by—”

“By what? By meditating, is that it? You can dream about him? You can think about him? God Almighty, I can do that. Anyone can do that! But actually meet him? Wouldn’t you like to do that? Well, I have. Got that? I have. And I’m going to do it again.”

“Don’t do it, Al. Please, for God’s sake. Just. Stop. You’re playing with things that … that …”

“That what? I don’t understand? Like you understand everything, O holy wise Indian mystic? Give me a break. You and your Sri Kalpana, it’s just mumbo-jumbo for people who can’t handle reality. Take it. Take it away and go away yourself.”

Grandpa Byron says nothing more. In fact that’s the last thing I say to him. With an expression of deep hurt on his face, he picks up the old book and silently leaves the house.

I hear his moped coughing and spluttering down the street, but – in case you were wondering – this is not when I start crying. My mind is racing with what I have to do.