As their son, he came to the conclusion that he was just another audience for their performances. Like the show itself, they had started as professional and diligent historians, but success had made them a cabaret. It was the first time in his life that he would feel like he was a prop in someone else's carefully constructed fiction. It would not be the last.
Near the end of the series, he received another letter from Mary, this time with a postmark from Seville.
'Dear Tommy,' she wrote. 'They're showing Family Time here in Spain. They're a series or two behind and we've all been dubbed so I sound like I have a little girl's voice, and you sound like a fifty-year-old man. I don't know if anyone recognises me. I can't even tell if anyone takes it seriously. Why would they care, over here? Seeing it from this side, it feels so English and trivial.
'Occasionally, I'll see an English newspaper and there's so much about it in there that anyone would think it was real. The world outside doesn't care anymore. It's not about what you say, it's about what they hear. I don't think anyone wants the real any more. The fantasy of the happy family persevering over the years, the illusion of staying strong together. That's all they're interested in and it's all nonsense.
'It's funny to think how much I miss it sometimes.
'But then I wonder what I think I'm missing. Because everything has changed since I've been away, just as I've changed. Sometimes I wonder if you miss me and I hate myself that I sound so arrogant to want something like that. Sometimes I wonder if, given that I've been away so long, I'm still the person you miss at all.'
*
Bobby almost spat out his coffee.
'He was naked?' he said.
'As a baby.'
'What was he doing? Jacking off to the televisions?'
'They were monitors, and no, he was just standing there.'
Bobby sat back and shook his head.
'That's insane. You still stayed the night there?' Bobby said.
'Well I doubt I'd have been welcome at yours,' Tom said. 'I put a chair under the door and barely slept, but yes, I stayed all night. Kept expecting to hear music drifting through. Expecting to wake up and see Max at the end of the bed with a microphone, but no, it was almost completely silent.'
They were back in the same café on Stonegate. Same table, same drinks arranged on it. Bobby was even wearing the same blazer he'd worn the day before and for a distracting moment Tom wondered if it was still the same day after all.
'I would have spent the night on the street rather than stay there,' Bobby said. 'What sort of music was it, anyway?'
Tom shrugged.
'I don't know,' he said. 'It didn't really even start properly. There was a record playing and it sounded… I don't know? Some sort of smooth jazz I suppose. The last thing I can imagine with a cult behind it.'
Bobby blanched and shook his head at the horror of it all.
'Two words which should never, ever go together,' he said, 'are smooth and jazz. I'm amazed you got out alive.'
Tom was about to say he almost didn't. It would have been a lie, of course. As he'd passed the lounge door on the way out that morning, it had looked so ordinary in the plain light of day that he wasn't sure how much of the evening he should attribute to drink and exhaustion. But now he was enjoying himself and he realised he was dangerously close to elaborating the story with details that almost certainly didn't happen. Another invented memory. Another story for the book. He was saved from making a fool of himself by the gentle sound of someone clearing their throat behind him.
He turned around to see the waitress, the same one who appeared to have recognised him the day before. She was young and pretty, high cheekbones and a dark bob of hair, cut through with a streak of pink. When he looked at her and smiled as best as he was capable, her cheeks flushed to match her hair and her eyes darted away in embarrassment.
'I'm so sorry,' she said. 'It's just that I thought I recognised you yesterday but I wasn't sure and my friends said I should ask, and…'
She gestured over her shoulder to where two other waitresses were waiting for her by the counter. When he caught them watching, they spun away and doubled over, their laughter strangulated.
'Are you Tommy?' she said. 'Little Tommy from Family Time?'
Tom smiled. He could feel Bobby brewing impatiently opposite him, desperate to interject something, to take control.
'I was,' Tom said. 'I am.'
She ducked a little, a gleeful motion like her knees had just given away.
'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, I used to love that program when I was little. We used to watch it together, all of us. Every week. Don't tell anyone, but I so wanted to grow up to be like Mary.'
'Thank you,' said Tom. 'I'm glad it meant something to you.'
Her eyes rolled, confidence blooming.
'Meant something?' she said. 'It was so special. That program was my childhood, really it was.'
Tom's smile was genuine, but inside he quavered. He was used to the hyperbole of those with something they needed, although it didn't usually blossom so quickly.
'Thank you,' he said again. 'What's your name?'
'Kerry.' She flustered for her notepad and pen. 'Can I… can I get your autograph? Please?'
Just an autograph. He could deal with that. But then Bobby spoke up, his eagerness irrepressible.
'Why don't I take a picture?' he said. 'You got a phone? I can take a picture of the two of you, how does that sound?'
'Bobby.' Tommy took the notepad and scrawled a simple note, pushing it back to Kerry with a little too much force.
'Oh my god. That would be amazing,' Kerry said to Bobby, the analogue appeal of the autograph already forgotten. She fiddled in her pocket for her phone, unlocked it and passed it across the table.
The episode that followed was the sort Tom would have worked hard to avoid had he the choice. Attention begets attention; stand in a street and stare into the middle distance and strangers will join you as though there really is something to see. Bobby was noisy, he played the dumb photographer, forcing Tom to stand and smile and look as though he was enjoying himself. He wrestled with the technology and clownishly let it fail him. He gathered the other waitresses over, they introduced themselves as Sharon and Chloe. Chloe had never even heard of Family Time, but Sharon had sat through a few episodes once and proclaimed it both 'cute' and 'kind of old'.
Tom felt them cluster around him like limpets. He felt the eyes of the café centre on him. They looked to see what the commotion was, then their gaze lingered while they judged it for its worth. Some ignored him, others, he saw working their phones, a few discreet photos from the other side of the café, while others were busy working at typing something on their touch screens. Tom felt himself rising to panic. The situation bred a paranoia that he was the subject of a thousand texts, emails and status updates—
And then it was over. Only minutes had passed and Tom hadn't snapped, he hadn't screamed, he hadn't succumbed to the need to fight his way free, but he did feel exposed and humiliated. He could barely speak, but no one really noticed because Bobby was doing all the talking and of course that just made things worse.
He was using that deceptive, gentle tone again, the one he always had used when he was giving instructions. Tom shook his head, clearing the spell of it.
'We should go somewhere else,' he said once they were alone again.
'Nonsense,' Bobby said. 'It would look rude now.' He grinned. 'You never used to be so embarrassed by the attention. I remember you hammering on the bar at Saviours, shouting, "Don't you know who I am?"'
There were parts of Tom's life between the show's cancellation and the present that he couldn't account for, but he knew he would never do something like that and he said so.
'Well, you were pretty drunk.' Bobby smiled at him fondly. 'You were quite the lost little boy when I found you. Unanchored, all adrift.'
Tom shook his head again, a denial this time.
'And you were always scouting around
for a new project,' he said. 'Someone to fix. Someone to control. If we're going to bring up memories, I remember you holding court in Grenadine's, boasting about how you fucked the kid from Family Time. It was like I wasn't even there.'
'You were a good investment,' Bobby said. 'Even now, that line never gets old. You have no idea how often you've got me laid.'
'Jesus, Bobby.'
'Oh, relax. I'm just teasing you.' Bobby sat back in his chair. 'You always were far too sensitive. You're all grown up, Tommy. You're not a little kid crying through a pretend air raid anymore.'
Tom stared at the table. His coffee cup empty, pushed aside. A slick of undissolved sugar crystals smearing its sides.
'You always knew how to get to me,' he said.
'You always let me.'
They lapsed into silence. Eventually, Bobby said, 'Should I even ask about that interview?' and Tom laughed.
'I cancelled,' he said. 'After last night, I just… you were right. It was bullshit. I came here because I wanted to see you.'
Again silence fell, just as heavy, but warmer by a fraction. Again Bobby broke it. This time by taking out his wallet from his jacket pocket and summoning Kerry to bring the bill. She beamed and smiled and did as she was told. Everyone always did what Bobby told them to.
'So we're going to go out,' Bobby said when she was gone. His tone was precise and confident, as though he were trying to win over a class. 'We're going to get a little drunk. Not too much, but a little. And then…'
He trailed off, grinning.
'And then?' Tom said.
Bobby removed a business card from his wallet and set it on the table between them. Immortal Memories, it read, and there was Max MacConnell looking as though he was about to burst into song.
Bobby tapped the card with his fingertip.
'And then we're going to take in a show,' he said.
*
In the real world, the year 2000 arrived and for the briefest moment, the television-viewing public looked forward and not back. Family Time was cancelled eight weeks into its proposed twenty-four week run illustrating the 1980s. Already the right-wing press were fired up, anticipating how the series would lay into Thatcher's stance during the Falklands War, or deliver some unspecified socialist propaganda while recreating the miner's strike or even the poll tax riots. It never got that far; the viewing figures diminished week-on-week until the series was ultimately replaced by a run of repeats of a popular American sitcom.
By the time Family Time was cancelled, Tom was the same age Mary had been when it first started. Perhaps if the series had continued, he would have done the things she had done. Maybe they would have hired a new little kid for him to take care of. He could have been the older kid, the respected one. He was pretty sure none of that ever happened.
In the intervening years, Tom imagined he was living in subsequent series that would never be aired. The time-travel conceit had long been abandoned and so the subjects were now much more down to earth, the audience just loved things that were down to earth. Here's Little Tommy trying to fit in at the new school. Here's Little Tommy failing his exams. Here's Little Tommy being photographed by the press tonguing a guy called Jim outside a pub in Shoreditch. These scenes don't form a narrative on their own. The one does not by default lead to the next, but this is television, so we can edit in post to make it look like they do.
The audience roars with laughter, the music swells. When we're done, there won't be a dry eye in the house.
During a charity fundraising telethon the year after the show was cancelled, the cast of Family Time were reunited once more to star in a sketch purporting to be a clip from the unmade 1990s series. In the sketch, the family sat together on a sofa, doing nothing but watching episodes of Family Time on the television. The following day, the Telegraph's television critic remarked that it was the most historically accurate and relevant the show had ever been.
'A few days ago,' Mary wrote in her final letter, 'I met Peter again. Do you remember Peter? Peter Satchel. He lived down the way from us in 1994. He didn't recognise me at first. I can't blame him for that, I've done as much as I can to make myself someone new, but despite that, I don't think I've changed as much as I thought.
'He's married now. Has a few kids, and I realised his wife was somewhere in the bar with him, and maybe he did recognise me after all. So it wasn't that he didn't know me. It was that he did, but he was embarrassed to admit it, because of course all his wife saw of me was what they showed of me on the TV. Remember that? Mary the bully. Mary the slut. Mary the bad sister. I saw the look of panic on his face. As though his wife might see him talking to this awful woman who had grown up from the baddest of seeds, the girl in the too-short skirts with loose morals, whom the newspapers wrote acres of gossip about back in the day, and still would if they could be bothered to find her.
'And so he backed away from me, and I let him, because the funny thing was, I understood. Because although I had seen him look at me with fear, I hadn't seen so much else which surrounded that fear. I didn't know him. So how could I judge him without knowing everything?
'Let me see if I can think of an example, and given that Peter is involved, let's make it about him. Do you remember that time when you were small and you walked into my room and found me with Peter? You came in, you saw us there and you left again, the door slamming behind you. You saw the cut that day. That tiny moment of me embarrassed, and Pete being clumsy. That's how stories work, they tell you enough to make you care in the right way and for the most part they don't bother you with everything else because it's unnecessary.
'But you never saw the whole take, you never the raw footage, the rehearsals, the improvisation sessions. Even you didn't really ever see me as I was. You didn't see Peter and me doing homework together, you didn't see us laughing when we got something wrong, you didn't see him being stupid, you didn't see us being kids.
'And that's it, isn't it? It's no one's fault that we can't be attentive all the hours of the day. Your memories of someone are never enough to know them entirely and so, in the end, the things we miss were never real at all.
'Isn't it strange to think as we go about our lives, how much context is lost in the final edit.'
*
By the time they reached the house on Barton Stone Lane, Tom was almost convinced that he had imagined the whole thing. He could see Bobby looking up and down the street, his expression aloof and critical but he remained silent, reserving his scorn for when they were inside.
Never bring a witness to the site of a miracle.
Tom unfastened the lock and stepped inside, Bobby followed and they stood together in the narrow hallway.
'This is it?' Bobby said.
Tom nodded.
'Dump,' Bobby said.
Tom put a finger to his lips and although Bobby fell silent, his expression remained arch.
The house stood poised. There was no sound. The two men were silent for a good few minutes before Bobby gestured to the staircase.
'Your room up there?' he said.
Tom nodded and Bobby pushed ahead to the foot of the stairs.
'Well I could probably squeeze in a pity-fuck, but I'm working tomorrow so I can't stay long.'
'Bobby.'
'Oh for heaven's sake, Tom—' He broke off, distracted by something.
'Alright,' Tom said, embarrassed. 'I'm sorry, just drop it.'
Bobby's hand came up to silence him.
'You hear that?' He pushed his way back past Tom again, and stopped by the door in the hallway, ducking his head to listen closer. Then, without knocking, he pushed the door open before Tom could say anything.
Only then did Tom hear the music. It was the same as it had been the previous night, the same loose, lazy riff that sounded to Tom like the sort of thing that might be piped into a supermarket.
'Son of a bitch,' Bobby said and he disappeared through the doorway.
Tom waited a moment longer before following. A distance had g
rown in him since his experiences the previous night. Alone, he had tried to rationalise it, with Bobby he had tried to make light of it. Now, with every indication that it had happened as he remembered, he finally recalled how afraid he had been when he fled.
The front room looked much the same as it had the previous night and its bland uncanniness felt more unsettling now that it was familiar to him. Dreams were not built to be remembered, let alone reconstructed in every detail.
The red-velvet curtain was still settling where Bobby had passed through, a sigh of heavy fabric that set the candles chuckling on their wicks.
'Bobby,' Tom said.
He pushed through to find the corridor was empty, but he could still hear the music and accompanying it, he could hear the snap of Bobby's footsteps, delineating their own rhythm into the distance.
'Bobby.' Tom spoke louder this time.
He hurried onwards, but the corridor swerved ahead keeping Bobby just out of sight beyond the turn. Only his footsteps served to indicate he was there at all as Tom jogged after him.
Did the corridor feel longer than it had before? Had it sloped downhill like this the last time?
When the end came in sight, the second red-velvet curtain shifted with another trace of movement indicating someone had just passed through.
Tom stopped before it, overcome with the same sense he'd felt once before: a nauseous, overwhelming weight that gathered deep inside of him, a vertiginous horror that to step through the curtains would be like blindly stepping off a precipice. Alarmed, he turned away, his hand snatching at the wall to steady himself. Its cool solidity was both reassuring and anything but. When he had regained some control of his breathing, he glanced up to where he had previously seen the antechamber door. The outline of its shape was masked by the lines of the wood panelling, but even closed, Tom had a distinct feeling that someone was watching him.
He straightened and exhaled, dressing himself in a desperate confidence that didn't fit before he pushed his way through the curtain and into the nightclub.
The stage was still empty, the barmaid still looked morose, but there were more people in the club than there had been the night before. A new couple on the table near the front, another man leaned against the bar, two women sat together at the far side of the room. Bobby was seated alone.
You Will Grow Into Them Page 19
