Time resumed, surprising him that it had slowed at all. The noise of the room was a roar. All eyes were on him, still high on a tension that for him had already slackened. Instead, he was overcome with a sense of vast, incomprehensible shame, so big and unwieldy he could barely comprehend the dimensions of it. The enormity of it set him close to tears.
He turned back to Ollie, his face bleached white and shining with sweat. Gil grabbed him in a rough and startled bear hug, before he blundered through the crowd and out of the door.
###
Vicki was standing by the curb, her telephone to her ear. The brief roar of the pub's interior made her glance around as Gil opened the door, but when she saw him there, she turned away again.
'Did your friend turn up?' Gil said. 'The one you were waiting for?'
Vicki pocketed her phone. 'Not really a friend. But yes. In that respect, they never disappoint.'
She turned back to him, and set her hand on his chest.
'Here's something I don't understand,' she said. 'Everyone's so concerned about the fact you all changed. The media, the government, all of you most especially. But no one asks why you changed back. You were given all that power, all that strength. And it was gone again before any of you could use it.' She leaned in close. 'Maybe, after all that, you were found wanting.'
A taxi pulled up at the kerb and Vicki kissed Gil gently on the cheek. When she turned away from him again, he was acutely aware of how cold the night had become.
'The guy we employed,' she said as she opened the taxi door. 'He came out of quarantine and fought his way back up the ladder. Went on courses, like I said.'
Gil stared at her blankly.
'The guy we hired is LPS,' she said.
'Bullshit.'
'No. He's nothing like Lance. Nothing like you. He's at home this evening. Got kids. One of them's LPS too. Apparently, he was really cute when he changed. Like a puppy.'
She ducked through the door and spoke to the driver.
Gil didn't hear what she said. Again there was a roaring in his ears that eclipsed everything else. The clouds were gathering again, the storm approaching. It was anger, he knew, but it wasn't aimed at her. It was directionless, arbitrary and if he could have changed there and then, he knew he would have. Oblivion. Violence. He would have welcomed it all. He closed his eyes and, clenching his fists, he strained every muscle he knew how to control as though he could have forced the monster out into the open, simply so he could have an excuse not to be there anymore, so he could absolve himself of anything it did. He willed himself to change, begged himself until he felt the tendons stretched and screaming in his neck, his teeth crack, his fingernails gouging his palms.
Five years ago, when he'd woken in the office, he'd found himself alone. His clothes were torn, his shoes had burst and he felt drunk and unsteady as he struggled to his feet. He'd barely thought about how strange his situation was; he felt so weary, so tired, he just wanted to go home. He saw others around the office, woozy and ragged, they moved like revenants, but they couldn't bring themselves to acknowledge each other.
He'd found his coat and stumbled outside to find an empty world which had changed irrevocably in the hours that had passed without him. He still wasn't sure how he found his way home, he only remembered it took longer than it ever had before and that everyone he passed backed away from him and gave him room. He'd heard sirens and later he wondered if they were because someone had reported seeing a van in the canal. Some sad and lonely workman, face serene and preserved behind glass.
When Gil opened his eyes, the taxi was still there outside The Volunteer. The door was still open and he stared at it for long enough to imagine it might have been an invitation after all. Long enough for him to wonder if he'd misjudged her opinion of him. Maybe she wanted him to come with her. For them to go home, to start something, anything, everything.
But he didn't move. The promise of the open door was such a delicate thing, he was loathe to risk breaking it with his own clumsy advance. Instead he watched as a hand reached out and pulled it shut with a snap. He watched, listless as the taxi moved away from the kerb.
He stayed until the bright, angry tail lights had receded into the dark like the eyes of something primal retreating into the night, then he pulled his hood up to counter the thin drizzle which had started to thicken the air.
There was one cigarette left in the pack. He teased it straight between his fingers and tried to light it, but the lighter failed to strike so he cast it unused into the gutter. The dull thud of an early hangover was making room for itself behind his eyes as he turned his back on the noise and music of The Volunteer and started, alone and heavy footed, on the long walk home.
Songs Like They Used To Play
In 1921, when he was nine years old, Tom Kavanagh walked into his sister Mary's bedroom at number 12 Westmorland Terrace and saw her kissing Peter Satchel from four doors down. Mary was six years older than her brother, but acted as though she was older still and whatever it was that was going on between her and Peter, it was an anachronism, because at the time, Peter was living in 1994.
Tom remembered how Mary had scowled at him, a stern and silent rebuke that Peter was too preoccupied to notice. He didn't even see the way she fluttered her hand at her little brother, shooing him out of the room with curt admonishment.
It was a memory, and although it wasn't recorded, there was every likelihood it really happened. As he'd got older, Tom found it harder and harder to tell. Some years earlier he had reached the conclusion that his memories fell into three categories: there were the things that happened, there were the things that had been recorded, and there were the things he invented to fill in the gaps.
On the crowded train up to York, he saw a young couple together in the vestibule space between the carriages and he admired the way everything else disappeared for them as they held each other close enough to only breathe in what the other had exhaled. It was 2012, and they were a good few years older than Mary had been in 1921, but the girl's hair was a similar strawberry-blonde and there was a similar sense that the boy knew less about what he was doing than he pretended. Enough, then, for the memory to come back, shoving its way into focus from the jumble of contextless imagery that had haunted Tom for the best part of his life. The memory was a bookmark his brain cross-referenced, and Mary was there again, her expression dark, her hands fluttering, her fury silent, but clear. Not for the first time, Tom questioned the memory's veracity. Had she and Peter really held each other like the couple on the train? Or had it been something smaller, something more innocent? Was it only a peck on the cheek, the recollection of which had become corrupted, which time had extrapolated into something more involved?
He caught himself staring too long at the couple on the train, and while they remained blind to his scrutiny, he looked away in embarrassment, turning his attention to the landscape rolling past the window. It was a late summer morning and in the passing fields, crops were being harvested. He watched fascinated as the bright modern machinery went about tasks that had otherwise remained unchanged for generations. A past augmented by the present rather than replaced by it.
With a clatter, the train plunged into a tunnel and his view was replaced by the dancing reflection of the rest of the carriage. The dimensions wrapped around vertiginously and in the glass, a young woman seated across the aisle caught his eye and looked away again blushing. He saw her lean forward and say something to the friend sitting opposite her and then both dissolved into fits of giggles, stealing glances at him, ripe with amusement.
The train rattled out of the tunnel and the countryside reasserted itself. Spots of rain struck the window and smeared into parallel diagonals. The rhythm settled back into the hypnotic click-clack, click-clack of the tracks and Tom closed his eyes, wishing the sound alone could lull him to the oblivion of sleep.
*
The house on Burton Stone Lane looked like it had been built in a less complicated time. It was locat
ed near the top end of a terrace of small Victorian houses, with a bay window by the front door and two smaller windows peeping out from the floor above. The cream-coloured rendering was cracked and the paint on the window frames was peeling. Across the road there was a pub with boarded up windows, and the whole street had a sense it had been left on pause.
Tom stood in the barren front yard and waited for his knock to be heard.
Beside him, a panel of the bay window was propped open a fraction, allowing the faint smell of tobacco and weed to drift across the front patio, the dampness of the afternoon's rainfall sharpening the odour into something barbed and unpleasant. The room's interior was masked by a plain grey-yellow net curtain, but Tom thought he could make out the shadow of someone sitting just inside.
He knocked on the door again and this time saw the figure turn and the curtains twitch as a hand reached up to part them for a moment. Before Tom could introduce himself, the shape had lurched to its feet and disappeared.
Tom took a step back, glancing behind him to make sure his escape route was clear.
It wasn't a licensed bed and breakfast. He'd found a website on the internet that let people rent out rooms in their homes peer-to-peer. It had the benefit of being a little bit cheaper and a little bit more anonymous, giving him the option to pay by cash and even indulge in a false name.
He'd trawled the site looking for accommodation in York and the house on Burton Stone Lane had surfaced when he'd sorted the results by price and proximity to the town centre. York was smaller than he was expecting, it had taken him only fifteen minutes to reach the address from the station, but the street still felt quiet and suburban.
There had been no movement since he'd seen the figure move away from the window, and he had the unpleasant sense that whoever it was, they had only moved out of sight and were now watching him from across the room. When he raised his hand to knock again, there were footsteps in the hall and the door opened, revealing a big man who had let himself go in his late middle age. The man was casually dressed, his jogging pants and T-shirt might have been used as pyjamas. His face and neck were evenly furred with white bristles, but he smiled down at Tom in the manner of someone both surprised and pleased to be disturbed.
'You must be Thomas,' he said, his accent soft and transatlantic. American Yorkshire, if there was any such thing.
Tom tried to remember which alias he had used. He often retained his first name for simplicity's sake, but his surname would vary: sometimes his mother's maiden name, sometimes something flippantly generic like Smith or Jones. Occasionally he even used Bobby's name, but that would have been asking for trouble here.
'You must be Max,' Tom said.
The man nodded with enthusiasm.
'Max MacConnell.' He stuck out a meaty hand, fingers splayed wide.
Tom took it, conscious that his own hand felt bony and delicate in comparison.
'A pleasure,' Max said, pumping his hand, his grin just a little too wide to be mistaken for sincere. He snatched his arm back and stood aside. 'Come in, come in,' he said. 'This is the house.'
The corridor was narrow and Tom's host was not slim, so what began as a polite gesture took on the connotations of an unsettling one as Tom was forced to squeeze both himself and his luggage past his host's ample belly.
The downstairs corridor was short and sparse. It showed signs of having been recently modified, with a thin layer of paint that didn't quite cover the seams in the newly built stud walls. To the left, there was one door standing closed and at the end, there was a second door built into an angled partition wall, which sloped across the space to meet the foot of the staircase, the banister rail of which had been meticulously boxed in.
'The rooms are upstairs,' Max said. 'Please. The very top floor, first door on your right.'
He pointed over Tom's shoulder, and again he just felt a little too close for Tom to feel comfortable.
The stairs switch-backed to a slim upstairs landing, with two doors off to the right, and a third at the end. The first door was open and when Tom hesitated outside it, Max edged past him to step inside, making his way to the window and opening the curtains wide.
'Bed. Wardrobe. Window.' He ticked off the room's inventory with a wagging finger. 'Bedside light and so on. The bathroom is at the end of the landing. We have another room next door but it's a bit noisy out the front. This is much nicer. You could say it's the executive suite.'
Tom blinked.
Max pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and, holding them by the fluffy keyring, handed them out for Tom to take.
'Small one's for the front door, big one's for the room. Just leave them on the bedside counter before you go tomorrow. Click the door behind you and we're all done.'
'Monday,' Tom said, taking the keys. 'I'm booked in for two nights.'
'Oh? Right you are.' He frowned. 'Are you here to study?'
'No,' he said. 'I'm just here to visit a friend.' He stumbled over the sentence; it felt as though there was something defeatist about it in retrospect.
'I could have sworn.' Max shook his head. 'Don't ever get old.' He fished in his other pocket for his wallet, and extracted a business card. 'That's my number if you lose the keys, and the WiFi password if you want that. We have the internet.'
He sounded quite proud of that, as though the internet was a wild animal he'd trapped and nurtured himself.
Tom reached out to take the card but Max seemed reluctant to let it go and they stood there awkwardly as though they were engaged in a genteel game of tug of war.
'Sorry,' Max said, letting go and stuffing his hands back in his pockets. He flushed and his smile flickered on and off. 'I'll leave you to it.' He retreated to the door.
Tom glanced at the back of the card. An unintelligible string of letters and numbers marked in ballpoint pen. He slid it into his wallet and looked up to see that Max was squinting at him from the doorway.
'Do I know you?' Max said. 'I didn't recognise your name, but I have to say you look awful familiar.'
Tom shook his head a fraction.
'I don't think so,' he said. 'No.'
Max's head cocked to the side. 'You not been on television or something? Maybe when you were younger?'
Tom laughed, perhaps too loud.
'I think I'd have remembered,' he said. He wondered if he sounded too desperate to be plausible.
Max pursed his lips and retreated onto the landing. His smile was sincere again, more so than it had been before. He looked as though the conversation saddened him for some reason.
'I understand,' he said. 'I absolutely understand.'
*
Tom had first been recognised in public sometime before the War. The 1930s had been and gone, but to the general public, it was a decade that had mostly been perceived as background noise. Once the family had settled back into the modern world, Mary allowed their parents to bribe her to take Tom off their hands for the day.
The Picture House cinema was in a part of town Tom was unfamiliar with and its ostentatious art deco façade struck him as being gloriously at odds with the neat suburban semis on either side.
It was the first time Tom had ever been to the cinema. His mother had always been just a little too busy, and never had any interest in films to pass on to her children, so she had never thought to take them. In later years, Tom would conclude that his father had few unscripted opinions of his own during that particular period of his marriage. He would only reiterate what his wife had already decreed, and so the idea of taking Tom or his sister to the movies would never have crossed his mind either.
Mary had been to the cinema before. Given their parents' attitudes, it had struck her as being a low-level act of rebellion; a chink in their carefully maintained reality, through which she could escape from time to time. Her first experience hadn't been in a cinema, but in the town hall where a live band had been brought in to accompany a screening of Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, projected at a skewed angle on the whitewashed
back wall. She told Tom it had felt like a special sort of time travel, a window that had opened wide, letting her see through it to another world.
Tom's first experience was not magical in the same way. On the screen in the Picture House, a cowboy and a spaceman were sizing each other up in a boy's bedroom. The film acknowledged that neither character existed, but underlined the importance that their friendship was real. This seemed like a confusing moral to Tom.
It was a mid-afternoon screening and the cinema was almost empty. Mary lasted twenty minutes into the film before she leaned across to her brother and hissed an instruction to stay where he was. He nodded obediently and watched as she disappeared down the aisle and through the fire exit.
Tom had begun to feel frightened. It occurred to him that the film was like being trapped in someone else's memory, remodelled and polished into something bright and palatable. In it, things that would have been small in real life appeared too large on the screen and the sense of scale was disorienting enough that the cinema's auditorium, already enormous to him, felt even greater in its emptiness, certainly bigger than anywhere he'd ever lived himself. His sense of perspective skewed vertiginously and when he forced his attention from the bright colours on the screen, all he could see were rows and rows of empty chairs, lined up to obediently watch a film he couldn't concentrate on himself. When he squinted into the darkness, he saw there were little metal plates screwed to the chairs on the row in front of him. 'Susan Weaver,' 'Sebastian Boore,' 'Julian Peake.' A different name on each seat.
Why should the chairs need people's names?
'Be good,' Mary had told him before she'd left, 'and don't move.'
Logic abandoned him. He was being lectured on trust and friendship by a toy-box full of walking, talking automata after all. Was this what happened to children who weren't good? Were they turned into chairs at their local cinemas? Forced to watch endless, whimsical, brightly-coloured morality tales, collecting the leftover soda-stains and popcorn dust of the good little children who filled the matinee performances…
You Will Grow Into Them Page 15