You Will Grow Into Them

by Malcolm Devlin

  Toben put a hand on Gil's shoulder.

  'Gil,' he said. 'If you stay scared of horses, you'll never get back in the saddle.'

  'What?'

  'Something my mum used to say,' Toben said. 'Actually, no, I'm fucking with you again. I just made it up. Sort of thing she would say though.'

  'Right,' said Gil.

  'I've missed you, man,' said Toben. 'You have the best “what the fuck are you on about” expressions and my life has been poorer without them.'

  *

  'You never used to be sort to turn down a cocktail,' Toben said, slopping a pint of IPA across the table.

  'I'm planning a long one, this evening,' Gil said. 'I figure it's best to drink sensible when you're sober if you're going to drink stupid when you're drunk.'

  'You and my mum would get on,' Toben said. He raised his mojito and they clinked glasses.

  Gil's glass had been chilled so the beer was too cold; he could barely taste it, but something satisfying connected. Self-conscious, he wiped the foam from his moustache with the back of his hand and glanced across the floor.

  Even for a Thursday evening, The Old Bank was dense with lawyers, brokers, marketing executives, whatever the hell they were. The air was thick with day-old deodorant masked with too much aftershave, but there was piss and spilt beer in the mix too, a reminder that while the pretensions of the clientele may have been lofty, The Bank's purpose was the same as any other pub in the town. Gil hadn't been there since he'd worked at Muirhouse and he was keenly aware he looked out of place. He caught some of the younger men staring at him with unmasked hostility, but when he met their looks with an unwavering dead-eyed gaze of his own, they turned away again and this made him feel oddly pleased with himself.

  'I saw Jefferson, this morning,' Gil said. 'I called after him, but he didn't recognise me.'

  Toben cocked his head.

  'Well he's head of finance these days,' he said. 'He doesn't recognise anyone unless they've got the Queen's head on them.'

  Gil whistled.

  'They made him head of something?' he said.

  'Big shake up since you left,' Toben said. 'You wouldn't recognise the place. Let's see. Ahmed, remember him? Ahmed Farah? He's doing okay. The man's a machine and they'd be a fool to keep ignoring him, but you know the shit I've had to put up with from the old men up top? Same deal. Oh, but Kima just got promoted. She's an account manager now, so that's a thing at least.'

  He stirred his cocktail. The mint leaves swirled.

  'And Stephanie?' Gil said.

  'Stephanie's still there,' Toben said. 'Made an impression with her handling of the Dewley account. Got her some high-profile fans. She's going places.'

  Gil wasn't going to say anything. Then he said, 'How is she?'

  Toben smiled awkwardly.

  'She's good,' he said.

  They drank in silence for a moment. The Old Bank was a grand looking establishment, its brightly painted, vaulted ceiling was supported by ostentatious pillars and the room was separated into private alcoves by wrought iron dividers. The bar was a circular counter in the middle, and above it, flat screen televisions showed the highlights from some lower-league game, to which no one was paying attention.

  'So what about you?' Toben said.

  'I'm no longer in marketing,' Gil said.

  'I figured. Are you looking anywhere?'

  Gil nodded. 'Had an interview last week.'

  'And?'

  'The job part was great,' Gil said. 'The “are you now or have you ever been” bit, not so much.'

  Toben stared at him, wide-eyed.

  'Seriously?' he said. 'They turned you down because of that?'

  'Not the first time, either. Had dozens of interviews over the years. They all end the same way.'

  'Can they do that?'

  'Maybe I'd exceed their insurance premium. Change again, go crazy, you know.'

  'Shit, I had no idea.'

  Gil shrugged.

  'Why did you think I got fired from Muirhouse?' he said.

  'Aw, I don't know,' Toben said. 'They said the government had you all locked up somewhere. Like you'd got together and robbed a bank or something.'

  'They called it a “quarantine facility”, but it may as well have been a jail. They had to set these things up in a hurry, you know? It was one of those detention centres they set up for immigrants. A pop-up prison. Up in Kingston.'

  Gil spread his hands.

  'I mean this was when they thought we might change again straight away, so I guess there were good reasons behind it. Next time, we might not all stay asleep, that was the fear. So it was in the public interest that we were put somewhere safe. So they lock us all up, scan us for serotonin, excess testosterone, the warrior gene, all that crap. No correlation. Makes no sense, drives them up the wall. Six months or so go by and nothing happens and we're a waste of tax payer's money instead. Tabloids found something else to moan about and we were just a bunch of confused people living in dorms, getting fat.'

  'You don't look fat.'

  'Thanks, man. I appreciate that.'

  Again, they measured the silence with drink and Gil was conscious he was drinking too fast.

  'You working tomorrow?' Toben said.

  Gil shook his head. He made curly finger quotes with his hands. 'Holiday,' he said. 'I got an official letter advising me to lock my doors and stay inside, preferably alone.'

  'Think it'll happen again?'

  Gil shook his head. 'It's all a PR exercise. Some merry dance to placate the idiots who wanted to know why they didn't do more last time round.'

  Toben turned his glass around idly.

  'But that's the thing,' he said. 'The anniversary isn't really about you. No offence, but you don't realise how frightening it was back then.'

  'I had other things on my mind,' Gil said. That wasn't strictly true. From his perspective, the event had passed as a heavy, dreamless void. He may as well have been struck on the back of a head with a shovel.

  'In the office, you fell close to where I was sitting,' Toben said. 'I had a front row seat. First I thought you were having a seizure, then there were other people shouting for a first-aider to come over. But they were calling from other parts of the office. Because it was happening there too. Crazy.'

  He smiled as though the memory was now too preposterous to take seriously.

  'And it was like everyone realised how strange it was at the same time. It was like we all collectively saw the bigger picture, and it was frightening.'

  Gil stared into his pint. 'And then we changed,' he said. He'd heard this story before.

  'Damnedest thing,' Toben said.

  Gil swallowed the remains of his pint and stood up.

  'And three hours later, we all turned back,' he said. 'Another one?' He gestured with his empty glass.

  Toben reached for his wallet. 'Let me,' he said.

  'Fuck off,' Gil said. 'I got paid today.'

  He took the few steps down to the main floor of the bar and steered his way through the crowd. He felt drunker than he had any right to be. He was conscious he hadn't eaten anything since the pack of sandwiches he'd polished off at noon.

  There was a bit of a crush at the bar, but one of the benefits of being the scruffy one in the crowd of suits – one with steel toecaps at that – was that he didn't care if he was mussed or spilled or trodden on. He picked his way forward with a bullish confidence, turning like a dancer to avoid the drinks being carried the other way.

  He didn't have to wait long to get served.

  'Pint of IPA,' he said. 'And one of the cocktails. Small one. With leaves in it?'

  'Mojito?'

  'Yeah, let's have one of them.'

  The barmaid smiled, a delicate little expression, and poured the beer first. He started on it, and while she set about mixing the cocktail he looked about him. Everyone seemed so young and in a strange way, they reminded him of the apprentices on the site. Fired up, boisterous and painfully keen. They were al
l learning their trade, securing their place in the world with their first, increasingly confident steps. They each assumed themselves locked on a path to a particular future and couldn't imagine how circumstance could drive them off course. Gil sighed. They didn't know it yet, but they were all in training to become as old and cynical as he was.

  Someone jostled him from behind and he turned to see a young man in an expensive looking suit. Nearly interchangeable from his peers, this one was pale and lanky with a floppy blonde fringe, and was making an effort to wedge his way forward to the bar. The youth's eyes were already slightly unfocused, and for some reason this only darkened Gil's humour further. He looked a little like Ollie, the same high cheekbones and pitted eyes, the same curl of the lip.

  Glowering, Gil could feel something stubborn and combative brewing deep within him and he welcomed it, tensing up to make himself a solid, immovable obstacle. He could almost hear the whine of annoyance from behind him.

  The barmaid set the cocktail on the bar. The round cost more than twice what he'd expected, so when he turned back with his drinks, his mood had blackened further.

  The young suit tried to strong-arm him out the way.

  'When you're done,' he said, 'there's a blockage in the gent's that needs fixing.' His voice was as reedy and imperious as his appearance, but there was a trace of an accent there too, betraying a background Gil hadn't expected.

  Gil stared him down and when he spoke, his voice came out with enough resonance to quieten the room.

  'I'm too sober to start a fight kid, so back off.'

  'Fight?' The kid spluttered. 'I was just making a joke. Why would you do that?'

  'Because you're a cunt,' Gil said, 'and a broken nose might give you some character.'

  He didn't wait for a response beyond a startled look he couldn't ever imagine seeing on Ollie. Instead he barged past and the kid lurched out of his path with a gratifying whimper, stumbling into someone else and causing a minor chain reaction of chaotic alarm like a herd of wildebeest sensing the presence of a lion. There were still raised voices by the time Gil was back at the table.

  'What kept you?' Toben said. He craned his head around the metal fence to see what the commotion was.

  Gil grunted, setting the drinks on the table.

  'You might want to down that,' he said. 'I'm not sure we're still welcome.'

  Toben stared at him, then spluttered with laughter.

  'Still got that touch,' he said.

  *

  The Volunteer was a different sort of pub with a very different sort of clientele. Gil had tried to convince Toben to come with him but Toben had demurred. They'd parted ways at the top of Ship Street and there'd been an awkward handshake followed by an even more awkward straight-man-hug that only served to embarrass them both. Toben set off down the street and Gil saw him brush his coat down as he went.

  As Gil had expected on the evening before the anniversary, the pub was heaving, thickly overheated and ripe with the smell of beer and bodies. Gil pushed his way into the warmth of the mob, plotting a course to the bar. The crowd swelled and eddied around him, his presence accepted then ignored.

  They weren't all werewolves here, but a lot of them would be. The others were friends or hangers on, or those who simply wished they'd turned themselves. Some had witnessed people change and that tiny fragment of magic was intoxicating enough. Now they followed the were-crowd, greedy to see more. Finally, there were those who just wanted to fuck a werewolf, either in human form or otherwise, they weren't really fussy. This group were easy to spot: they were the ones in the three-wolf-moon T-shirts, the 'BITE ME!' pin badges, the felt and taffeta tails hanging out the back of their shorts and skirts. Gil had seen it all before. The Volunteer took all sorts.

  As he waited his turn at the bar, Gil let himself be distracted by the TV in the corner. The news was on with more talk about the anniversary, more footage of monstrous bodies lying unconscious in public places, more vox-pops from the day which already had the appearance of something vintage and irrelevant. Then there were the crazies: the elderly woman who'd tried to convince the police her husband had been killed by a werewolf; one who had apparently stabbed him eight times in the neck with a letter opener; and the guy in Covent Garden whose rant had gone viral on Facebook.

  'The rapture has already happened!' he said, eyes wide, arms flapping, 'No one deserved to be taken to grace! We've all been left behind and the demons are already here!'

  By his calendar, the world should have ended by now. Gil wondered if he was disappointed it hadn't.

  'Gil.' The barman was waiting in front of him. Big guy, bald and bearded, Sepultura T-shirt stretched tight across his belly.

  'Alright, Warren,' Gil said. 'I'll have a pint of that one there, and maybe a shot of Grouse to keep it warm.'

  Warren barely reacted.

  'Starting sensible, Gil?'

  'Done that. Aiming for insensible now.'

  Warren's grin was broad enough to split his beard in two.

  There was a loud jeer, and Gil turned back in time to see Chrissy Linderman's doughy mugshot on the television. The program cut to the footage she'd taken five years earlier with her headband-mounted video camera. A fiercely opinionated gun-rights activist, Linderman had been shopping with her sister in a mall outside Atlanta, when the event had occurred. She'd filmed herself taking out six werewolves as they slept. Double-tapping each in the skull with the AR-15 assault rifle she kept in her Chrysler Aspen. One of her victims had been Justin Gethen, who had been celebrating his sixth birthday with a trip to the toyshop in the mall with his family. Her supporters remained unrepentant.

  They interviewed the protestors crowded outside the courthouse.

  'I seen all them videos from Africa or someplace where all the monsters are being killed,' said one, 'but no one does a damn thing about them. It's only 'cause she's white, isn't it? It isn't fair.'

  'If they'd woken up,' said another, 'Chrissy would be considered a hero. She is a hero.'

  In the pub, the jeers turned to shouts of outrage, raised fists blocked the view and Gil turned away.

  'Nothing else on, Warren?'

  'Nothing else.'

  He planted the drinks on the bar and Gil checked his wallet.

  'Can I get a tab?'

  'Not if you're going to be insensible.'

  'I won't be that insensible.'

  Warren shook his head and took Gil's bankcard.

  The Volunteer was a large place, but every inch of it seemed occupied. Gil recognised a few people, most from his previous visits, but there were some he hadn't seen since quarantine. He nodded in curt acknowledgement, a little alarmed how they all looked so similar these days, but he wasn't in the mood to talk to them. In a strange and almost childish way, they felt like the 'bad crowd' his mother used to worry about him falling in with at school.

  He found a table occupied only by dead glasses. It was small and sticky-surfaced, wedged under the staircase, but it gave him a good enough view of the outlay of the pub. He sat himself down and downed his Scotch, swallowing a finger or two of beer to soften its burn.

  The game at the nearest pool table was being interrupted by raised voices, so Gil dwelled pointedly on his phone and considered dialling his mother's number again. He didn't really have anything new to say to her. He could tell her about the job rejection but it would only start a lecture and he wasn't in the mood for that. He scrolled through the numbers idly and was almost surprised to find Stephanie's was still there.

  Stephanie would have hated it here. Too noisy, too unrefined.

  That wasn't fair. It frustrated him that he could only view his past relationships in the context of how they had failed. There had been better times between them, they'd had fun together over the four years they'd been a couple, and it had never really mattered where they'd been. They'd met in a pub worse than this one, and that mad early rush of romance had a searing brightness, if no real depth or connection. Maybe they were still too you
ng back then? By the time the event came round, they no longer smiled at each other in quite the same way, so maybe it was just the excuse they needed.

  He remembered her look of distaste when she came to visit him in quarantine. He'd been there for nearly two months by the time they'd opened the facility to visitors, and Gil's presence there seemed to embarrass her. It didn't help that the conditions were so strictly controlled in those early months, and the glass between them exacerbated the prison feel.

  Stephanie had sat opposite him. She'd brought a bottle of antiseptic gel and constantly dabbed it on her hands, rubbing and kneading them. She'd barely looked at Gil; her eyes darted around the glass instead, looking for neglected breaches where some infection might find a way through.

  He remembered she mostly talked to him about work and he remembered how that had annoyed him. He didn't remember what he'd said to her, but he didn't think he deserved the email she'd sent him four days later:

  We regret to inform you, etc, etc.

  'This seat taken?'

  There was something familiar about the voice that made him look up. He almost didn't recognise her to begin with; the rock-chick look was so far removed from the neat tweed trouser suit she'd worn during the interview a week ago.

  'Vicki,' he said, 'is that right?'

  'That's right,' she said. She gestured at the stool tucked half-way beneath the table. 'This seat—?'

  '–is free, sure. All yours.'

  She surprised him by pulling it out a few inches and sitting down to join him at the table, setting her fizzing high-ball next to his flattening pint. Gil glanced around the room as though he could figure out where she'd come from.

  'You here with friends?' It was a bit of a struggle to keep his tone civil.

  'I'm meeting someone.' She smiled, not like the small, curt smiles she'd used so sparingly during the interview; those had been professional, on/off expressions she'd deployed like punctuation. This was something warmer, conveying sentences rather than silences and for a moment, Gil felt it was an opening, a way in.

  'I have to admit,' he said, 'I'm kind of surprised to see you in a place like this.'

  'Last time we met,' she said, 'I was interviewing you, not the other way around. So you don't have to be surprised by anything really. We may as well have just met.'