You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin

Author:Malcolm Devlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unsung Stories
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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