You Will Grow Into Them

by Malcolm Devlin

  Tom sighed.

  'I thought we could have a drink. A chat,' he said. 'You could show me the sights, maybe take in a show. Then you'd see me to the station, and then I'd go home again.'

  'Not forgetting the interview?'

  'Not forgetting the interview.'

  The café was starting to empty out, and the noise of the place – a friendly, boorish clattering of raised voices and crockery – had subsided as the tables had emptied. The waiting staff now had the time to engage in conversations of their own and Tom thought he caught the woman who had served him glance across at him as she talked.

  'I thought you didn't do media interviews,' Bobby said.

  Tom shook his head.

  'It's some student thing,' he said. 'A psychology project, I think. Seemed like a good cause.'

  Bobby raised his eyebrows.

  'Are they paying you?'

  'Something token, I think. A contribution towards transport costs, that sort of thing.'

  Bobby snorted. 'So I was right,' he said, 'the interview is bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I'm flattered you should come so far on my account, but I wish you weren't so lousy about pretending otherwise.'

  Tom could have retorted then. He could have said something about how he'd missed how narcissistic Bobby could be. How, if anything, he had come up to York and seen him again just because he wanted to reassure himself that their breakup had been a good thing after all.

  But he didn't say that; he didn't want to cause a fuss. He didn't want Bobby to resent him and, deep down, it was still a cover story and one he didn't quite believe himself.

  'So what about you,' he said instead. 'What are you doing? Still teaching?'

  'I'm not being interviewed,' Bobby said. 'If we're going to do “the talk”, I think I want something stronger than coffee. There's a bar around the corner, I'll get the first round in if you cover the tab here. They're more or less London prices, so you should be used to them.'

  Tom fished out his wallet.

  'Nice to see you haven't changed,' he said. When he slipped out his bank card, another fell out and landed on the table between them.

  Bobby picked it up and looked at it, turning it over in his hands. 'Oh, Thomas,' he said. 'I had no idea this was your sort of thing.'

  Tom frowned and reached for the card. Bobby held it out of reach.

  'It's the WiFi password,' Tom said. 'The guy at the bed and breakfast I'm staying at gave it to me.'

  Bobby was reading from the other side of the card with a smirk.

  'Immortal Memories,' he read out loud. 'Classic songs from the Forties, Fifties and Sixties.' He grinned and passed the card back to Tom. 'Your vintage, I believe.'

  Tom hadn't even looked at the back of the card. It was a glossy, but cheaply printed business card with over-decorated typography and one picture. It took a precious moment for Tom to recognise Max, and he realised he hadn't even registered his last name. Maximillian MacConnell, of all things, his landlord. The Max in the photograph was younger and slimmer than the one Tom had met. His jaw shaved close and clean, his sculpted hair glinting with Brylcreem. He looked dapper in his pristine tuxedo and if his matinee idol grin was anything to go by, he was more than aware of it.

  *

  During the 1950s, the episode that everyone remembered was the one in which Tom suffered from night terrors and told the nation his dreams.

  The popularity of the previous series had seen Family Time recommissioned for another four month run, this time supported by considerable public interest, and the full weight of the broadcaster's publicity machine. There were features and profiles and interviews with the press. There was plenty of secrecy and speculation about what was planned for the family as they prepared to live their lives through a post-war Britain of ration books and bomb sites.

  The set constructed for the series was astonishing. A warehouse district in South London had already been razed and he production crew set to work recreating a Blitz-scarred London suburb, with nearly six square miles of post-war terraced housing, a school and the skeleton of a church. During the live shows, the public were invited to dress up and serve as background extras, a proposition so popular that security was increased. To Tom, the set took on the aspect of a bizarre prison. One where people from the future were happy to queue for hours in the rain for a chance to get in, while he peered through the fences at the modern world beyond, and wondered if he might find the opportunity to escape.

  One night Tom woke screaming and when no one answered his call – for reasons he wouldn't understand until some years later – he picked his way downstairs in the dark and found the friendly blinking light of the night vision camera mounted in the corner of the lounge. Standing underneath it, the twelve-year-old Tom addressed his audience directly as though they were the more attentive of his parents, the one who might offer him comfort or advice.

  The show wasn't broadcast live that week, and when the producers found the footage during their morning trawl, it led to a debate about the anachronistic content of the dream, rather than the ethics of broadcasting such a strange and improvised monologue from a young boy in a clear state of distress.

  In the end, the edited sequence took up the best part of episode eight. Later, when he saw the program as it was broadcast, Tom claimed he didn't remember telling his story, let alone the dream itself. Dreams aren't meant to be remembered, after all. They slip through the cracks of consciousness when more immediate experience elbows in to take their place.

  Tom told the audience how in his dream, he found himself at an amusement park (he'd never been to an amusement park), and at the end of a lane of brightly-coloured fairground rides, he found himself standing outside the ghost train. It was a big ghost train, with a giant, painted façade showing a spindly black castle surrounded by a storm cloud of vampire bats, and lurking in the shadow of a dark forest full of ravenous eyes.

  There was someone with him, his friends were with him (Tom didn't have any friends), and they all paid their money and took their seats. The ride started like you might expect a ghost train to begin: a slow and rickety rollercoaster through gaudy plywood sets, draped with cobwebs and thick with plastic spiders and bugs and broken pieces of bone, hanging on strings, sirens howling and shrieking around every corner.

  But the longer it ran, the stranger it became. The sets felt more convincing, the lighting more naturalistic. The actors employed to jump out from darkened alcoves and surprise the riders no longer wore greasepaint, it was real scarred flesh stretched taut over real jagged bones.

  As the background noises of the fairground began to recede, other noises took their place: a rumble of gears, a shriek of machinery, a roar of distant, violent industry.

  The car moved faster and Tom understood that whoever had been there with him at the beginning of the ride had disappeared. He now rode alone, the track swerving at steeper angles and more precipitous drops until it broke out of the makeshift building entirely and ploughed into a vast, cracked plain. It was dark and hot, but somewhere ahead there was the dull red glow of something that looked as though it had been burning for a very long time.

  Tom described all of this to the camera in a tone so matter of fact it could have been mistaken for deadpan. He explained how he was overcome with a very specific sense of fear and so he wrestled with the locking bar that had been designed to keep him safely seated for the duration of the ride. There was a trick to it, he saw. If you squeezed the discreetly positioned levers at each end, the mechanism could be retracted.

  A blazing inferno filled the blackened horizon and Tom leapt from the carriage into the charcoal dust and let the car disappear into the flames unmanned.

  Dreams don't always end where you expect them. This one went further. He didn't remember it all, but what he did remember was running back through the fairground and finding his mother there. Or maybe that was a different dream? Maybe it was the same one. How many dreams do twelve-year-old boys have in a night? How many do they remember?<
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  Tom told the camera how he told his mother about the ghost train. She was calm and rational and believed everything he said. She told him to take her there so she could see it for herself, and so they went back together, hand-in-hand through the emptying fair.

  The ghost train looked so ordinary from the outside, but his mother looked down at him and he knew she still believed him. She bought two tickets and they boarded the waiting car together.

  'I can get us out before it's too late,' he told her as the locking back snapped into place, 'I know what to do.'

  When she smiled in response, he felt a flush of pride. He'd never felt so grown up.

  The ride worked in exactly the same way it had before. It started slow and normal and dull and then, by degrees, the artifice fell away until they were out in the dark plain, flying towards the distant inferno. His mother was sitting upright beside him; she looked attentive, analytical but also strangely unengaged.

  Tom again felt that mounting sense of dread, steadily amassing until it threatened to crush them both. Desperately, he worked the locking bar in the same way he had done before, opening it wide and releasing them from its grip.

  'We're free now,' he said, 'I've saved us. We can jump out and run back.'

  But his mother turned to him, her expression passive.

  'But I want to see what it does,' she said. 'I want to see what happens.'

  And even though the bar had been lifted, she would not move. She looked forward, arms crossed, her expression analytical.

  Tom told the camera how he had sat there beside her, impotent and desperately afraid, as the fires loomed closer and closer. He could have saved himself, he said, but how could he leave her there to burn alone?

  His dream exorcised, the twelve-year-old boy turned away from the camera and went back to bed.

  *

  At half-one in the morning, Tom walked back to the bed and breakfast, alone but buoyant in mood. Initially, Bobby's behaviour had been as spiky as Tom had feared, but he'd mellowed as the evening progressed and they had left on better terms than Tom could have hoped, even going so far as to arrange to meet again the following afternoon.

  The facts of the past five years had been pencilled in with minimal fuss. Bobby was in a relationship and it had been going strong for almost two years now. He said he was happy but he refused to go into further details.

  His job was going well too. Yes, he still taught English and was better at it now than Tom would have foreseen, had he given it any thought. Bobby had boasted about how his GCSE class looked as though they would exceed expectations and his A-Level class would go some way to raising the regional average.

  But news of both Bobby's relationship and career were delivered in such a brusque shorthand that Tom allowed himself to wonder how secure he was in either.

  Tom's own relationship with Bobby had lasted just over two years, a short period when considered empirically, but Tom's perception of time had never operated in a conventional way. Instead, he considered their time together being roughly the same duration as two series of Family Time, by which measure, their relationship had lasted the best part of twenty highly compressed television years, repeated and syndicated. By comparison, the nearly-two years Bobby had spent with his new someone-else was short-lived and potentially breakable.

  Time changed again once they'd separated. One year was one year as it was for everyone else. Perhaps that was one of the things Bobby had taught him, one of the things he would claim he rescued him from. It was true that the years he'd spent post-Bobby had a degree of stability the pre-Bobby years had lacked. Bobby's departure from London left him with a group of friends who bonded with their shared loss of Bobby's charisma, and Tom, standing on his own two feet by then, found he could move amongst them with more confidence than he had done before.

  The previous Christmas, he'd visited his mother for the first time since he'd left home. They'd circled each other delicately and even when she nearly spoiled everything by suggesting how the meeting felt like a reunion episode, he bit his tongue and let the comment pass. Undaunted, they remained in touch over the intervening few months.

  Was that why he had come up to York? He had achieved one success in reconstructing his past, perhaps he could achieve another?

  As he turned onto Burton Stone Lane, Tom cautioned himself against hope. In all likelihood, nothing would come of it, but if he could ease even a handful of his concerns about the past then it would have been a journey worth taking. There was nothing to suggest that a future with Bobby was completely out of the question. It just wasn't something to count on. It wasn't something to expect.

  He knew from bitter experience that hope could be toxic in the wrong circumstances. Just because he and Bobby had parted that evening with a smile, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, it was a shallow foundation on which to build an imaginary life together.

  But still he had a grin on his face when he set his key in the lock; still he had a skip in his step as he crossed the threshold. He was so preoccupied, in fact, that he had reached the foot of the stairs before he heard the music at all.

  At first, it sounded like a distant radio. A band of some sort, something vintage, heavy on the brass. The melody was that of a louche swing, something that should have been from the jazz age but which had been tamed and softened into something bland and safe like lift music.

  A thread of amber light outlined the nearest of the two doors in the hallway, and he was certain the music came from behind it.

  Immortal Memories, the card had read. He recalled the amusement he and Bobby had shared over the business card, that ridiculous photograph of Max.

  The music sounded a little too insistent and a little too loud. It sounded like an invitation.

  The evening's drink had granted Tom a confidence he didn't otherwise feel he deserved and it was perhaps this that made him first tap on the door, and then push it open.

  He'd been expecting a suburban sitting room, and a dishevelled one at that. The sort of room where Max might lounge by the window smoking a joint while he waited for his guests to arrive.

  The room the door actually opened into was rather more austere. The walls were trimmed with half-height dark wooden panelling and the wallpaper which covered the upper parts was a rich and swirling green. It was mostly empty except for a series of small occasional tables arranged with clusters of fat candles nestled in thickened pools of melted wax. In the far wall, a square archway was masked by a thick red velvet curtain. There was no one in the room, there was not even any sign of the bay window that Tom had seen from the outside, but the music still played, distant and half-heard. It sounded as though it was coming from behind somewhere far away on the other side of the curtain.

  The fact the room was empty galvanised him to transgress further. He stepped across the uncovered wooden floorboards, and brushed his hands over the curtain pleats until he found a thin current of cool air that guided him to an opening.

  Behind, there was a corridor. A long, wide passageway, panelled and papered on both sides in the same dark wood and green wallpaper as the entrance hall. It was lit by discreet fittings that looked like gaslights and it disappeared into the distance, curving gently to the right.

  Tom was sober enough to appreciate its disorientating eccentricity. The house was part of a terraced street, and so the corridor must cut through the neighbouring houses for a purpose he couldn't imagine. He hadn't walked any further up the road, but he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Were all the houses on the street decoys? What of all their neat front gardens, their parked cars, their pot plants in the windows? He had a sudden sense that the entire street was part of the same elaborate and inexplicable deception; a paranoia that he was being set up for something cruel. Was Bobby part of it as well? How could any of this be real?

  From the end of the corridor, the music persisted, clearer now it was unmuffled by the curtains. Tom glanced back, checking the corners of the room for evidence of concealed video
cameras. On impulse, he performed a rather florid bow, a drunk and brazen fuck you to whoever might have been watching. Then he set off down the corridor to find out where the music was coming from.

  *

  During the 1960s, the family divided its time between houses in Carnaby Street and Liverpool, because someone high-up in the production team had heard from a contact-of-a-contact that Paul McCartney was a fan of the show and had expressed interest in getting involved in some capacity. This proved to be apocryphal, but the producers secured the rights to film in the Beatles Experience anyway, and booked a sound-alike, look-alike band to use in wide-shots.

  The primary gimmick of the first half of the series was the gigs Mary attended each week. She and a Cavern-full of extras, whom the costume department had spent considerable time and effort working on, were filmed in a carefully dressed night-club set, dancing all night to recordings of bands from the era. The new material was then spliced with existing concert footage featuring the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers and The Searchers. Cilla Black was one of the only acts to play herself.

  One night, Mary confided to Tom that the recorded music hadn't worked for some technical reason, so someone stuck on a contemporary CD instead, and everyone danced to that instead.

  'They'll add the right music in post and no one will notice,' she said. 'Maybe that's what we can take away from all of this. It doesn't matter what people hear, we all dance the same anyway.'

  Mary was 19 that year, and the producers declared that having been lurking in the sidelines over the past few years, growing increasingly cynical about the entire enterprise, the sixties series was all hers. This meant she was the one who got to go out and do everything: nightclubs, shops, festivals and so on. It also meant the wardrobe department went to town using her as a mannequin to show off the breadth of the decade's fashions. There were rumours that in the dubious spirit of historical veracity, the producers were feeding her alcohol and drugs and setting up vast flower-power parties for her to attend. Tom didn't know how much of this was true. Nothing salacious made it to the final edit, but the tabloids were vicious regardless. Confident that something untoward had happened, they demanded the channel hand over the deleted material. By this point, of course, they'd already decided Mary was trouble: all those sarcastic asides to the camera as though she wasn't taking things seriously enough for the high standards they selectively upheld; all those raised eyebrows; all those sour expressions; all that disrespect. For the first few months of the show's Sixties run, Mary appeared on the cover of The Sun eighteen times, The Star, fifteen and The Mail and The Express ten a piece. Mostly the stories recycled the fictional narratives of the television show, treating them as factual gossip, carefully weighted to scandalise their readers.