The First Person And Other Stories Part 6

The cinema had been converted into a new cinema from an old cinema. Its downstairs was now a pub which claimed to sell the cheapest beer in Britain; there were often people throwing up outside this pub. Above it was the new cinema, three screens tucked into the skeleton of the upper half of the old cinema, which meant that the new cinema always smelt of fried food and sometimes the noise from the pub would shimmer through the soundtrack of whatever film you were watching. That night we had seen a film with Ralph Fiennes in it, something vaguely Russian. Eugene Onegin maybe. Was Liv Tyler in it? There were balalaikas on the soundtrack, or maybe I'm mixing that up with Dr Zhivago. I lie in bed now and try to remember. I can't really recall anything that happened in it, other than that there were love letters and a lot of fur and snow.

Come on, you'd said. I'll show you.

n.o.body even noticed what we were doing. The doors were heavy, sheets of red painted metal. You leaned on the bar to open one side, then knelt down, took your newspaper out of your bag, chose one of its thinnest sections, folded it in two and shoved it under the near-closed door. This jammed it open just a crack not quite open, not quite closed.

There beyond the fire door the plushness of the cinema simply stopped. The stairs were concrete. They smelt of disinfectant. The bulbs in the staircase ceiling were bare. We went down two flights of stairs and came to a door. It was locked. It looked like it hadn't been used for a very long time. There was another door just along from it. It had no outside handle. I pushed against it. It wouldn't give.

You told me how you'd been given a tour of the cinema when it first opened by a friend of yours who was the manager of the cinema bar. This, he'd told you, was where he'd come with one of the young girl ushers, looking for three crates of bottled fruit juice which had been delivered via a back door, at least that's what he'd told her her, as the fire exit door had swung closed on its own weight behind them and they went down the stairs and backed each other up against the walls. They'd had s.e.x a few times. Then they'd found that mobile phone signals didn't work in there and they'd begun to panic. They'd run back upstairs and banged on the locked doors. They'd shouted, but they couldn't hear anything in there from the cinema, and even the noise from the noisiest pub in town wasn't coming through those thick bare brick walls.

They were there for a day and a half, you told me as we stood looking up at the bare steps, until a cleaning lady looking for somewhere for a sly smoke opened the fire door and found them both sitting there in separate corners with their arms round themselves, freezing cold on the concrete. It was winter, you explained.

That's when I had started to panic too, that the Arts and Books section you'd folded a couple of minutes ago wouldn't be substantial enough to hold the door against its own weight and that when we got back up the stairs it would have shut itself of its own accord, leaving us behind metal several inches thick with no way to open it, which is exactly when you'd pushed me back against the breeze-blocks and kissed me gently, then harder, on the mouth. I think of it now and something inside me acts like a film cliche, as if my insides are a hollow guitar, and just the disembodied thought of the movement of your hands can do anything it likes, once, then again, then again, to the strings of it.

h.e.l.lo? you say. What?

You sound a bit groggy.

It's me, I say.

It's half past three in the morning, you say.

I was just wondering how you are, I say.

You can't do this, you say. It isn't fair. It's unreasonable. We agreed not to behave like this. We promised.

I just need to ask you this thing, I say.

Christ, you say. I was asleep. I've got to get up in three hours.

I couldn't sleep, I say.

Bombs? Terrorists? London in flames? End of the world? Rough day at work? you say.

Well, you know that fire exit at the new cinema, I say.

The what? you say.

The fire exit that's not an exit, I say.

Not a what? you say.

What I was wondering, I say, is whether or not, if you were trapped in there, well, not you, I mean one, someone, anyone, if someone was trapped in there and the door had shut and everybody'd gone home, do you think there'd still be any lights on in there?

Eh, you say.

Do you think there's a general lighting panel in that cinema where all the lights, including the ones in the back corridors and stairs, get switched off last thing? I say. I mean, what if someone was trapped in there and n.o.body knew she or he was there? I mean, would he or she be standing waiting for someone to come and look for him or her, and then suddenly the lights would just flick off and that'd be it, dark in there till someone somewhere came in the next day and switched all the lights in the building on again?

Yes, but what kind of a fire exit has no way out? you say.

Or do you think the lights are always on in there, I say, like emergency lighting, regardless of the cinema being open or closed?

It sounds illegal to me, you say. Where is this?

Don't you remember? I say.

The thing is, you don't. You don't remember anything about it, or about showing me it, or about you folding your magazine to keep the door open. You don't remember us calling it the fire excite on the way home. You don't remember anything.

Go back to bed, you say. Phone me in the morning. Phone me on my lunchbreak. Go to sleep now. It's the middle of the night. I'll call you tomorrow. Good night.

So I do as you say. I go back to bed. But then because you told me to do it and I did it, I get annoyed at myself and throw the duvet off me. It falls on to the floor.

I sit on the floor wrapped in the duvet in the dark.

I ask myself why I didn't go down and help the woman, or at least check that she didn't need help. I ask myself why I didn't just mention it to an usher on my way out. Why did I do that, why did I just walk out of the cinema like that, without a word, even though I knew someone might be having a rough time?

My phone buzzes in my hand. The screen says it's you.

Did I wake you? you say.

Yes, I lie. I was really deeply asleep. You did.

Sorry, you say.

Fair enough, I say. That makes us equal now.

I remembered something I wanted to tell you, you say.

About the cinema and the exit? I say.

No, about me walking home from town yesterday, you say.

You tell me how you were just walking along the road towards your new place and something hit you on the head, bounced off you and hit the road in front of you. You looked down at it on the pavement. It was a tiny McDonalds milk carton, rocking from side to side. A bus had just pa.s.sed you. On its top deck was a bunch of adolescent girls. They were giving you the finger out of its back window. Then you watched them pa.s.s another pedestrian, a woman walking ahead of you. The girls threw a handful of the same small milk cartons out of the top window at her. Some of them hit her. She saw the girls in the bus giving her the finger. She stopped in the street. She bent down and picked up one of the tiny milk cartons and she threw it back at the bus.

This makes me laugh. You're laughing too; we're both laughing into each other's ears in different rooms, in different houses, in different parts of the city, at four a.m. in the morning.

It's getting light outside. The birds are waking up. I think about what it would be like to be in the dark and maybe not know what time it is. I tell you about the woman, how she went through the fire doors, and about her stuff left on the seat and under it.

There's no way out of there, I say. I'm amazed you don't remember. There was just a locked door, and another locked door next to it.

Well, there's nothing you can do about it now, you say. Someone will have found her, you say. They've probably sorted it now, you say. Regulations will have made them make it a proper exit by now, you say. She'll have walked through the wall like that man you once told me about, you say.

Like what man? I say.

The man who fell down between the wall and the soundproofing, you say. In the cinema, in your home town, when you were small. You told me that story. It was definitely you who told me. Remember?

No, I say.

Remember, you say. I'd had a really horrible day at work. I wanted to leave, but I couldn't, because of the loans. I felt terrible, remember?

I remember you feeling terrible a lot, I say.

Don't be horrible, you say. I was feeling really bad and you put me to bed and you curled up behind me very close, I was under the covers and you were on top of them, and you told me the story. You said your father had come home from work one day and told it at the dinner table and you'd never forgotten it. You said this man had come into the job centre and told him the story over the counter. And after you told me it I fell asleep, and in the morning I went to work and that was the day I handed in my notice.

I remember you handing in your notice, I say, but I don't remember any story about any, what was it, soundproofing?

I'll tell you again, you say. And then, with any luck, you'll go back to bed and you'll fall asleep. And so will I.

Yes, but I can't now, I say. Now that you've told me to it'll make me stay awake all the harder.

We both laugh again. It fills me with hope and sadness both at the same time.

And in the morning, you say, if you're still worried, you can call the cinema and ask them if anyone claimed the sweater and the bag, and if they say they've still got them in Lost Property you can tell them about the woman.

Then you tell me the following story. After you do we hang up and I go back to bed. I rearrange the duvet round me. I put myself inside it. I tell myself as I fall asleep that when I wake up I'm going to call that cinema and threaten to report them if they haven't made that fire exit a real exit with a proper, easy, simple, push-bar-down way out.

A man is working in a cinema. It's the 1960s and all the local cinemas are under pressure to adapt to changes. It's widescreen or nothing. It's soundproofing and quadrophonic sound or bingo hall.

The man is helping to construct an internal wall parallel to the main wall of the building. The new wall is for soundproofing. It's made of plasterboard. Because the cinema is a large one, one with a balcony, the new wall is more than seventy feet high and the man is working at the very top of it, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it together. In a few more panels' time it will touch the ceiling.

He leans over the top ridge of it. The wall bends. He loses his footing on the scaffolding and he falls down between the two walls.

Because the walls are only a metre apart he hits and braces himself against one or the other as he falls, which lessens the momentum. He hits the ground with only a few scuffs and bruises and, he finds out later, a broken wrist. He's not sure whether he broke it in the fall or in the act of making his exit, because as he stands up and dusts himself down, miraculously almost unscathed, he realizes he is trapped between the two walls.

He stands there, sandwiched between them in the dark, for less than a minute. Then he turns to the new wall and kicks it. It doesn't give. He kicks it again. He kicks and punches and throws himself against it until he makes a hole in the plasterboard. Then he rips his way out. He never knew he was so strong. His workmates, who've been running around in front of the internal wall like scared cats, clap him on the back.

But the firm who are converting the cinema sacks him for 'timewasting' and 'ruining cinema property'. He picks up his papers in his less sore hand and leaves the building. He goes to the doctor that afternoon, has himself signed off and has his wrist seen to.

Six weeks later he goes to the job centre to see what there might be for him in the way of similar work.

The second person

You're something else. You really are.

This is the kind of thing you'd do. Say you were standing outside a music shop. You'd go into that shop and just buy an accordion. You'd buy one that cost hundreds of pounds, one of the really big ones. It would be huge. It would be a pretty substantial thing just to lift or to carry across a room, never mind actually play.

You would buy this accordion precisely because you can't play the accordion.

You'd go into the shop. You'd go straight to the place they keep the accordions. You'd stand and look at them through the gla.s.s of the case. When the a.s.sistant, who'd have noticed you as soon as you came in partly because you look (you always look) like a person of purpose and partly because you happen to be, yes, very eye-catching came straight over to serve you, you'd point at the one you wanted. The shop probably wouldn't have that many makes of accordion, maybe just five or six. You'd point at the one whose name you liked the sound of best. You'd like the sound of a name like Stephanelli more than you'd like the sound of a name like Hohner. It would also be the one you liked the look of best, with its frame (if that's what they're called) made of light brown wood, a good workaday colour; the other accordion makes in the case would look too lacquered for you, too varnished, less ready for the world.

When the a.s.sistant asked you if you'd like to try the Stephanelli before you purchased it, you'd simply hand her your bank card. You'd take the heavy accordion home. You'd sit here on the couch and heave it out of its box and on to your knees. You'd press the b.u.t.ton or unhook the leather strap or whatever keeps its pleats shut. You'd let it fall heavily open like a huge single wing. You'd let it fill itself with air like a huge single lung.

But then that thought of the accordion being a bit like a single wing or a single lung would make you uneasy. So this is what you'd do. You'd go back to that shop. And although you can't really afford it, although you can't even play one accordion, never mind more than one, and although playing two accordions at once is actually humanly impossible, you would catch the eye of the same a.s.sistant and point into the gla.s.s case again, at the accordion next to the s.p.a.ce left by the one you've just bought.

That one too, please, you'd say.

That's what you're like.

No it isn't, you say.

I feel you get annoyed beside me.

That's nothing like me, you say.

You move beside me on the couch. You move your arm, which has been tucked there between us, against my side, like a rea.s.surance. You pretend you're doing this because you need to reach for your coffee cup.

I didn't mean it in a horrible way, I say. I meant it in a nice way.

But you're sitting forward now, not looking at me, looking away.

What amazes me about you, you say, still looking away, is that after all these years, all the years of dialogue between us, you think you've got the right to just decide, like you're G.o.d, who I am and who I'm not and what I'm like and what I'm not and what I'd do and what I wouldn't. Well, you don't. Just because you've got, you know, a new life and a new love and a whole new day and dawn and dusk and everything new and shiny like in some glorious pop song, it doesn't make me a fiction you can play with or some well-known old used-up song you can choose not to listen to or choose to keep on repeat in your ears whenever you like just so you can feel better about yourself.

I don't need to feel better about myself, I say. And I'm not playing with anything. I'm not keeping anything on repeat.

But as I say it I notice there's something out of place on what was our window ledge. There's what looks like a piece of wood there I've never seen before. It's new, like the new mirror in the bathroom, the clothes in the kitchen by the washing machine that aren't really your style, the slight trace in the air of what was our house of the scent of something or someone else.

You've got a new life too, I say. You know you have. Don't. Don't make this horrible.

I'm not making anything anything, you say. It's you.

You don't put your arm back where it was. So I move too. I make it look like I'm moving to be more comfortable, to lean on the far arm of the couch. I look at the place on the couch arm where there's the old coffee cup ring. It's been there for years, we made it not long after we bought this couch. Hoovering it didn't remove it. Working at it with a brush and some kind of cleaning stuff only made the area of plush round it less plush, making it even more obvious. I can't remember which one of us is responsible for it, which one of us put the cup down that made that mark in the first place. I'm pretty sure it wasn't me, but I can't remember for definite. I trace the ring with my finger, then I trace the square of worn plush round it like a frame.

G.o.d, you're saying next to me now. This is what you're like. This is what you're like.

You say it in a voice like it's supposed to be my voice, though in reality it's nothing like my voice.

This is what you're like, I say. I say it in the mimic voice you've just used. I say. I say it in the mimic voice you've just used.

You've really changed, you say.