He glanced down at his lap, arrested with the inexplicable fantasy that his legs had taken on the same, bland upholstery as the neighbouring seats. He imagined his arms stiffening at his sides and the spike of pain as a neat little name plate was screwed into his spine—
He was screaming by the time he slammed through the double doors back into the foyer. The young woman who worked the concession stand stared at him in wide-eyed horror. When she glanced up at the door to see what film he'd come out of, her expression shifted to one of bewilderment instead.
She led him to the office and comforted him and fed him some custard creams and a glass of Ribena. And as they waited for Mary to come back, she told him that she knew who he was. She'd seen him in the 1930s, she said, it had been on the television, and she tuned in every week to see him because she thought he was so brave. As she spoke, Tom saw how she turned the ring on her finger, first one way then the other, a gesture so familiar, she was no longer aware she did it any more.
'It seemed,' she said to him, 'like a much simpler time, back then.'
*
Tom had arranged to meet Bobby in one of the café bars somewhere on Stonegate. In his last email Bobby had explained the street was touristy and tacky, but then went on imply it was as much as Tom deserved – he was a tourist after all.
It took less time than Tom was expecting to get to the town centre, and figuring he was early anyway, he let himself get lost in the knot of narrow medieval streets tangled around the Minster.
It was proving to be a pleasant afternoon. The morning's rain had passed, leaving the cobbles brightly glazed and there was a gratifying sharpness to the air. It was warm enough to slip his coat off and tuck it under his arm as he walked, and he tipped his head up to catch the shafts of sun cutting through the pale blue gaps between the timber-frame buildings. He lingered at the window of one of the chocolate shops and made a mental note to come back and buy something before he left.
If he left.
He sighed and on cue, a cloud passed overhead and the street felt altogether cooler and less welcome.
Betty's Cafe Tea Rooms on Stonegate had all the appearances of a tea shop that hadn't changed since the Edwardian era. It might have been true, but it was still part of a chain, which punctured some of its hard-won authenticity. The neat premises with the bulging glass windows were full of dainty tables and chairs, cake stands and bone china. Behind the counter, the staff wore pinstripe shirts, long brown aprons, and uniform expressions of tolerant boredom.
Bobby had already arrived. He was seated near the back of the café, leaning back in his chair, his newspaper open wide in front of him.
It had been six years since they'd last met, and even then, things hadn't ended properly between them. There had been that awkward meal together at Tom's flat the day Bobby had taken the train north. Bobby had kept checking his watch even though they had hours to spare. They'd walked to the station together and the whole thing hadn't felt real enough for Tom to see it clearly. In his mind, people didn't move to York to live, they moved to York for a weekend. To see the cathedral and the Viking Centre. It was a theme park, not a home.
He had a picture of the town patched together from clips he'd seen on television when he was small, and it made the news seem both more real and less at the same time. When he said goodbye to Bobby on the platform of King's Cross, an internal defence mechanism was already in control.
It wasn't a finished scene, it was a take. If it went wrong, they could just do it again until they got it right.
'Well, this is civil,' Bobby had said, and Tom wilfully overlooked the tone with which he'd said it.
'Isn't it?' he'd said, and even when they'd kissed, it had felt less definitive than a full stop.
The fallout had dragged on. There'd been a few weeks' grace period where Tom let himself believe he was missed, and then, with 200-odd miles separating them, Tom limped towards the conclusion that Bobby had already tried to make obvious. By email, by telephone, by late night Skype sessions, the stitches that had held them together stretched and loosened; the things unsaid coalesced and threatened to suffocate them both until finally, mercifully, realisation dawned.
Sometime later, Tom would come to consider his life as a series of very personal historical eras. There was the time after the show that he'd rather forget; there was the time when he was with Bobby which was vivid, frustrating, beautiful and stupid; and there was the time after Bobby, which had been mostly normal, mostly routine, mostly numb.
Bobby, he decided, had saved him from the pre-Bobby life, but left him ill-equipped for the post-Bobby one, and sometimes he considered fucking things up again, just so he would have an excuse for someone to step in and rescue him. But the Bobby sitting waiting for him in the café did not look like the sort to jump in after someone who was drowning. He looked like someone who would raise his paper and appear distracted as though he hadn't noticed him at all.
They hadn't seen each other in person since King's Cross, and so the Bobby who sat in the café came as something of a surprise. He'd always had height and confidence, but the years apart seemed to have given him licence to grow in both.
They were still friends online, by whatever definition that meant. It was a benefit of contemporary social media that they could remain in contact without having to actually communicate. It was a breach in their respective realities, a window to spy through, a platform to show off from. Tom had seen photographs of Bobby as the years had passed, fragmentary dispatches from his new life, smiling with strangers in unfamiliar landscapes. He would search them for evidence that Bobby's beauty had begun to fade, that his taste in men had succumbed to compromise, but while the Bobby sitting in the café was not quite the same Bobby he remembered, he had grown up as he had grown older. He had more poise, more polish; a smartly-chosen wardrobe on the same well-kept frame. The past six years had done Tom fewer favours. Barely thirty in real years, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw someone older. His hair had thinned and retreated, the blondness undercut with the threat of encroaching grey. He hung back a moment, feeling unkempt and unworthy. For some reason, he felt as though he had grown into something unaccountably seedy.
Bobby glanced up as Tom approached, he folded his newspaper and set it on the table, and while Tom recognised his smile and reciprocated with a tentative one of his own, he didn't believe in it any more.
*
The Second World War ran for four months because the hidden camera cop show was cancelled at short notice. The viewing figures for the 1930s had been more than respectable, and the 1940s had been commissioned almost immediately, but the new series was originally only scheduled to run for eight weeks and eventually be replaced by a new run of CopCam by early August.
CopCam was also in its third year by then. Focusing on the day-to-day activities of a police station in Islington, it was intended as an unapologetic propaganda piece for the Metropolitan Police Force. It was a bland corrective to recent news stories, intended to demonstrate how much of the police's work was dull, ordinary and pointedly uncontroversial.
Unfortunately, no one told Officer Kevin Blunt. With the camera crew granting him a bullish confidence, the thirty-six-year-old officer subjected an armed robbery suspect to a beating severe enough to break three ribs and cause permanent brain damage. The incident was caught on the cameras mounted in the interrogation room, which had always existed but which Blunt – having become used to the more obvious crew that had been following him around – forgot were there at all. The scene lasted for nearly twenty-four minutes without interruption. Such was the price of good television.
With the exception of edited footage shown on the national news, the scene was never officially aired, but the broadcaster reacted in the way television companies tend to do when caught in wrong sort of controversy. They cancelled the show with some fanfare then oversteered in a desperate attempt to appear unimpeachable.
Family Time was safe. Its first two series had attracted
respectable audiences and decent press but more crucially, it was conceived as something educational, fulfilling a vital, if under-explored, aspect of the channel's remit. It was also a reality show, but its gimmick was more parochial, featuring a modern nuclear family living in a carefully contrived past, and went to great pains to detail a different decade each year. A house was dressed and furnished appropriately to resemble a time capsule and the family would move in, wear the period clothes, eat the period food and live their lives under the pretence they had travelled back in time. It had been done before, of course, but the scale of Family Time's artifice was unprecedented.
The Kavanaghs were not the only family to apply for the first series; they won the role because both parents were historians of a sort. Penny Kavanagh had written three books about England's domestic history, and lectured on the subject at Kingston University. James Kavanagh on the other hand had written his thesis on the history of British public transport, and ran an online bulletin board calling out anachronisms in Hollywood movies.
The original plan had been to feature a different family each decade, but it soon transpired that the Kavanaghs possessed a certain quality that made the show watchable, even addictive. While Penny commentated on the events that shaped the period, and James observed the rise of popular culture first-hand with an infectious enthusiasm, most audiences found themselves fascinated by the children. Mary had a patient, world-weary air, quite at odds with her fifteen years, while Tom was young enough to simply accept his situation at face value. Of all the family members, he was the one who most convincingly seemed to have slipped back in time.
With the cancellation of CopCam, the production crew rallied to produce outlines and resources to cover a double-length run at short notice. Thankfully, the 1940s were rich in incident and, as one of the executives observed, 'Deep down, everyone loves a good war. '
The 1940s series of Family Time was broadcast in the summer of 1996 and by its third week, it was averaging six million viewers. Midway through the run, an episode was broadcast live from the Anderson shelter that Tom had helped his father build in the back garden. The cramped, claustrophobic half-hour was rocked by a relentless simulated air raid. The doors were locked, the whole set vibrated, and a building across the road, purchased and prepared by the production company with only minor controversy, was demolished for effect.
It was gripping television, convincing enough as a spectacle to make a small number of people disproportionately angry. It was edited so well that arguments about the veracity and worth of the episode were fought bloodily in the following week's newspaper columns. The phone lines were jammed with messages of concern for the eleven-year-old boy who looked like he was enduring the real thing.
That was the recorded version. A concerned public appalled at the plight of Little Tommy, wide-eyed and silent, held tight in Mary's arms while she told him all the fairy tales she could remember by heart.
'Once upon a time, there was a boy who wanted to know where the shivers came from,' she said, and Tom had stared into the corner of the room, a little boy with a thousand yard stare, the stark green filter of the night vision cameras making his eyes bright, milky stars in the gloom.
It was a powerful scene, but Tom had other memories that may be less real. In one, the image breaks like old film reel, and the director comes in and squats down in front of him.
'We're going to try that one again,' he said. 'How scared can you look?'
Tom showed how he could look even more scared, he'd been practising over breakfast. His mouth gaped a little, and he raised his hand and sucked his thumb, something he hadn't been permitted to do for years but which came to him there and then, an inspired moment of improvisation. The director loved it. What was his name? Jack or John or Jules? The directors always insisted Tom called them by their first name but he never did remember them.
'Perfect,' the director said. 'Do that.'
And so they did it again. And again.
Was the shelter really in the garden or was it in a studio? Was it set up on pneumatics, shaking and rocking them in time with recorded sound of explosives? Technical staff in camouflage shorts and baseball caps winding cables in loops around their arms. Was the building across the road demolished in the same evening? Didn't Tom see them doing that as well? Standing next to the special effects supervisor and his little box of buttons, a pair of ear protectors wedged tight over his head, pinching the skin around his ears? When the building detonated and debris spewed across the street, why does his memory remember the unfiltered boom of it? Why does he remember it from a different perspective to the one in the recording?
This is something he had learned over time. Separate incidents don't form a narrative on their own. The one does not by default lead to the next, but this was television, so they could edit everything in post to make it look like they did.
*
The waitress at Betty's Tea Rooms recognised Tom when she delivered their coffees. She didn't say anything, but there was a splinter of confusion in the look she gave him, a sinking recognition, coupled with a panic that she couldn't quite remember where she had seen him before. Tom had been subjected to that look before, and as the years had passed since Family Time's cancellation in 2000, the component of panic had grown as the component of recognition had dwindled.
'Another fan?' Bobby said after she had gone. When Tom looked uncomfortable, he laughed. 'She doesn't look old enough to even remember the show.'
'There are box sets,' Tom said. 'They keep reissuing it.'
Bobby whistled.
'Immortality, thy name is the box set binge.'
He raised his coffee cup in a solemn toast.
'I know my place,' Tom said.
'It must have dated terribly by now.'
'I think that was sort of the point.'
'You still look like him,' Bobby said after a while.
'I am him,' Tom said.
'No, I mean, you can still tell it's you.' Bobby set his cup on the table and leaned forward on folded arms. 'Some people age differently. You look like a little kid who got stretched.'
'And you've aged well too.'
'Don't knock it. I still get ID'd at bars.'
'Then you go to the wrong bars.'
Bobby grinned. It was a loaded expression and one Tom remembered well.
Tom had once decided that Bobby was the sort of person who dealt with his own vulnerability by diagnosing it in others. He'd once boasted to Tom how he had a gift for identifying a broken soul from a thousand paces. The first time they'd met, he said, Tom struck him as a man whose fractures spidered away from him like the roots of an enormous tree.
People often said things like that to Tom. He was fifteen when the show had concluded, and he found himself well known but with no discernible skills.
His mother convinced herself that a real life would be the best thing for him, particularly given what had happened to Mary (bless her soul wherever she was). Tom went back to school where he failed all his exams, except history, which he scraped through with an E. The papers enjoyed that, of course, and for a brief, perverse moment, Tom was pleased just to find himself with an audience.
Tom imagined his life as a transplant operation. The fictional world he'd lived in was being cut out of him and a weighty reality was being wired into the hole it had left behind. But transplants were dangerous, and Tom found himself living at one remove, convinced his body would rebel at any arbitrary moment, rejecting the reality he had been forced to accept.
When he turned eighteen, he fled his mother's house. He couldn't talk to her anymore. Everything she said felt like it was scripted, every look she gave him seemed to be followed by one for the benefit of an audience that was no longer watching them. When he moved out, he waited until she was gone for the day, because he knew she would cry and he knew he would imagine some sad library music to accompany her, and he wouldn't be able to deal with either.
Most people who met him told him they wanted to sa
ve him, and for a time he was happy for the attention. If they helped in some way, then so much the better, but it was never something he sought out with a purpose. And so from one to another, he drifted, spiralled, fell.
That's what he thought happened. Very little was recorded, very little he remembered himself.
When he met Bobby, and Bobby said he saw the cracks in him, Tom had a sense he saw the parts between them too. He saw the reality he had been given, leaking out into the world. Bobby's company not only granted Tom happiness, it gave him the luxury of letting the contentment grow stale.
'What brings you to York, Thomas,' Bobby said.
'I told you in the email.'
'Yes,' Bobby said. 'An interview. Bullshit, but whatever.'
'And I wanted to see you,' Tom said. 'It's been six years.'
Bobby whistled and picked up his cup again. There was only foam left; he drew circles in it with his coffee stirrer.
'Six years?' he said. 'So what, you're thirty now?'
Tom nodded. 'Same age as you were when you left.'
'You think queers migrate north when we turn thirty? Please.'
'Fuck off, Bobby.'
'You fuck off, I live here.'
Bobby set his coffee cup back on the table and crossed his arms.
'Listen,' he said. 'I was just surprised to hear from you. More so that you were finally coming up to visit. Six years ago I asked you to come up here with me and only now you show up.'
Tom looked down at the table.
'I know,' he said. 'I'm sorry.'
He could feel Bobby studying him.
'What did you think was going to happen here?' Bobby said. His tone wasn't unkind, but it was firm, no-nonsense in that way that Tom had come to miss, even though it had infuriated him when they'd been together.
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