‘He fancies me,’ she’d say, about everyone, and then she’d try to do something about it. It didn’t matter that she had a husband who adored her and would take her back each and every time she cheated, and a child who used to adore her, until the child realized how fruitless that was – Marilyn always wanted more. Sometimes there was a calm period of three or four months, maybe six (I came to think of it as her ‘resting’), when she came back to us and she and Dad were all lovey-dovey, and things were fine. But then she would scour for men and succumb again.
‘I’ve put it all out on the landing!’ I called down. I knew, as usual, she would later try to appease me for her rudeness, her disinterest. She’d appear in my bedroom doorway with a box of Milk Tray and a disarming smile – she had a stash of both hidden away, ready to be pulled out, like a rabbit from a hat, when she needed to get round me. She would make me open the chocolates and watch me choose my favourite one, something that used to make me feel nice but didn’t now; she’d ask me to save her a hazelnut whirl for when she got back from her shift at the leisure centre.
She’d worked there for three years – another in a series of jobs. In the little reception area next to the turnstiles. Stage front, she called it, as though she worked at the theatre. It was her stage, though. She got up from her office chair a lot – pencil skirts, sheer blouses over that pointy bra, stockings with those seams up the back; always slightly on the wonk. A steady stream (a pool, if you like) of men to flirt with went clanking through those turnstiles: dads, sporty young men, lifeguards. Dad and I knew when she’d been up to no good. She’d slink home with her jaunty MM curls a little mussed up and stinking of chlorine, despite a good layer of Charlie over the top, sniffily declaring a pool party or a late session she’d had to stay on duty for. This was code for shagging a poor lifeguard senseless in one of the filthy private cubicles in the changing room. We weren’t stupid. We knew she was as dirty as one of the changing-room drains matted with dark, wet hair and a rubbery week-old verruca plaster.
‘Arden!’ she shouted up at me, her voice shrill. ‘Don’t touch my cerise baby doll, it’s very delicate!’
It was somewhere at the bottom of the pile on the landing, its pompom hem crushed under a red suede court shoe. I hated her saying my name. Why would she call me a name which suggested she wanted me to be exactly like her? A Marilyn clone? I didn’t want to be her or be like her. By now I was repulsed at the thought of even being in her womb.
Right up to my departure for Warwick there was Marilyn drama. We just couldn’t escape it. Dad was a mild-mannered, loving and genial man who always turned an eye so blind to Marilyn’s misdemeanours he needed a guide dog, and took her back every single time. He loved her; that was always his excuse. He couldn’t imagine life without her. You had to admire the man for his staying power. I did. I loved him for sticking with her as it meant he stuck with me. I’m sure it was one of the reasons he did. But, until I left home, I had no choice but to be privy to all the drama and the constant ups and downs. His everlasting hope she would stop being such a cow; her everlasting refusal to be worthy of such a steadfastly loyal man.
Three days before I made my blissful escape to Warwick, for that first autumn term, I came in through the back door after the pub to the sound of high-pitched weeping. Marilyn was in a terrible state at the kitchen table (Happy Days are here again?) and wailing like an air-raid siren. It seemed a boy had nearly drowned at the pool during one of her shifts.
‘Where was the lifeguard?’ Dad asked, with as much world-weary inquisition as my poor father could muster. He was at the table eating an early portion of fish and chips out of the paper, his hair flat to his head, his faded New York Yankees sweatshirt looking too hot and tight for him. He had massive biceps just ripe for hitting someone with, but he never did. He had been a hippy in the sixties, had travelled to San Francisco during the summer of love. He was a lover not a fighter, but this of course made him a loser, too, my lovely Dad. He had lost in the game of love with Marilyn, big time, and over and over again.
‘He was there, of course he was,’ she said, sniffing, but she wouldn’t look at us. She never did when she’d been caught out.
Dad and I looked at each other instead and Dad took another slug from an ever-to-hand glass of beer. It didn’t take an over-active imagination to fathom what had really gone on, did it? She’d been shagging the lifeguard out the back somewhere and someone’s poor kid had nearly died.
‘Oh, Marilyn,’ I said, and she lit up a fag, blowing smoke all over Dad’s chips.
But an hour later, once she’d made a furtive call to her colleague, Debbie, from our dual-decorated hall (striped wallpaper and floral sponge-effect, separated by dado rail) and had ascertained she wasn’t going to get into trouble, she was dishing up Findus crispy pancakes and frozen peas to me without a care in the world.
It was a miserable Christmas. Awful. Christmas Day being an absolute low point. Marilyn was drunk and, with no flirting outlet for it, was trapped with Dad, me, a dried-out turkey and Morecambe and Wise. She became snappy and morose. She refused to wear the cracker hat as she said it made her look unattractive; she stropped over the Brussels; she laddered her stockings and swore like a sailor. Dad got on the cider just to make it bearable; drink to me was all about fun so I abstained. They were both snoring by the time a safari-suited Roger Moore whizzed through the swamps on an air boat, chasing baddies, in the Christmas-afternoon movie; Marilyn’s fluffy mule slippers hanging off the end of her stockinged feet and Dad stuffed endearingly into his worn velour armchair.
I couldn’t wait to get away. I couldn’t wait to go back to Warwick and my freedom. When the film ended, I sneaked out of the room and called Becky – we had exchanged numbers on the last day of term. She sounded happy; I could hear Top of the Pops on in the background, her cousins were over and it all sounded terribly festive. I was jealous as hell.
I slept with Mac the first Tuesday of the spring term. I know it was a Tuesday because we always had a morning lecture on a Tuesday, followed by a lunchtime seminar. I caught him in the corridor outside the Humanities Lecture Theatre with a book in his hand, whistling the theme from The Guns of Navarone. He looked boyish, cheeky, delicious, and I was utterly in lust. I wanted to rake my hand through his floppy hair and kiss him until he begged me to stop.
‘Here’s that book on film theory you wanted to borrow,’ he said, as I went and stood chirpily in front of him, giving him my best smile.
‘Did I?’
‘Yes.’ He thrust it into my hands. It was called Sculpting in Time. ‘I hope you get a lot from it.’
‘I’m sure I will.’
‘There’s a very good chapter on “yearning for the ideal”.’
‘Splendid.’
This exchange of words between us was entirely and immediately sexual and it completely thrilled me. I was grinning; there was delight in Mac’s dancing eyes; my heart was thumping in my knickers, which childishly declared ‘Tuesday’ on the front, accompanied by a cartoon bear.
‘What are you doing now?’ he asked, while the thumping and the grinning continued.
‘Going back to my room. Staring at my Einstein poster. Rifling through my Letts notes on The Canterbury Tales. Lying on my bed and dreaming of Fellini.’
Mac laughed. ‘Do you want to come for a coffee with me? Maybe a muffin?’ The word ‘muffin’ had never sounded so sexually charged before. I liked it. ‘Harvey’s should be quiet at this time.’
‘OK,’ I said, and I knew exactly where it would lead and, God, I hoped it would.
We walked to the café, me daring anyone and everyone to notice us together. I felt like I was walking on air. Air that had a massive power surge crackling through it, like those clouds in Flash Gordon. Mac ordered coffee and toasted English muffins, with butter, although I was too excited to eat mine. I toyed with a tea, two sugars. I looked around the sparsely populated café – students eating all-day bacon and egg baguettes, nursing strong coffees for
their enduring hangovers – hoping people were wondering what we were doing together, considering I wasn’t one of Mac’s students. I was challenging someone to give us ‘a look’. There was zero chance we appeared entirely innocent. I felt as far from innocent as I ever had.
Forty-five minutes later we were in his double bed in the bedroom of his flat and we had already had sex twice. A half-finished bottle of wine was on Mac’s bedside table, along with two torn condom wrappers, his glasses – still slightly steamed – and my watch.
‘So,’ said Mac. He was lying prone, his head on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling and catching his breath. His chest was pale above the white sheet. There was just the right amount of hair there for me to circle into cute whorls of tumbleweed with my finger.
‘So,’ I said. I was on my side, my legs flanked against his; my chin nestled in his sweet and sour armpit.
‘You’re sure you’re OK?’ he said, sticking one foot out from under the covers. ‘With the whole lecturer/student thing? It’s not against university rules but it is frowned upon.’
‘I’m used to being frowned upon,’ I said into his armpit. ‘It’s fine by me.’ My bra was on the floor, my Tuesday knickers were screwed up at the end of Mac’s bed and I had come three times. It was academic to be talking about rules and regulations at this stage, quite frankly.
‘You’re absolutely sure? I’m certain we won’t get caught.’
‘I’m absolutely sure. Are you saying you want to carry on with this?’ I held my breath, praying he would say ‘yes’.
‘Yes, I do. Do you?’
‘Oh, definitely. I’ve got one question for you, though.’
‘Go for it.’
‘How many students have you slept with before me?’ This was what I really wanted to know: did I have predecessors or – worse – a rival, here on campus.
‘None,’ said Mac.
‘None?’
‘None. Have there been rumours?’
‘Loads,’ I said, ‘but if you say I’m the first, then I’m the first.’
‘You’re the first.’
‘OK.’ So I had been recruited, but as the first, not as the next. I was really happy.
‘And you? There’s no one else at Warwick you’re seeing?’
‘No.’
Actually, I had a boyfriend at home I hadn’t quite got around to dumping yet. He wasn’t up to much, Steven from Home. But I had been determined to lose my virginity and he was sometimes a good laugh and he had a decent car. We’d sit and snog in it after he dropped me home from the pub, him putting on a Whitney Houston CD, for mood. When it got too boring and unsensual, I’d go in. I’d hate it if Marilyn was still up as she’d be all giggly and ask if I’d been ‘necking’, which was excruciating. She’d be sitting at the kitchen table in her flimsy silk dressing gown, a ‘fag on’ and an open Arthur Miller in front of her so she could pretend she was a semi-intellectual, like the real Marilyn.
We only had sex a couple of times, Steven from Home and I. It was pretty awful; I felt sorry for all the missionaries who had ever lived. I did it with him again, just the once, in the Christmas holidays, when the boredom of being at home with Dad and Marilyn got too much. I needed to get around to writing him a letter to end it.
‘Would you like to watch another film with me?’ asked Mac, playing with my hair.
‘Which one?’
‘The Birds?’
‘Hitchcock? Yeah, sure. Haven’t you got a lecture or something to go to, though?’ It was gone three in the afternoon.
‘No, all done for the day. You?’
‘Nada,’ I said, raising my chin – any essay I should be getting on with could wait. ‘I’m free as one of dem birds.’
‘You’re funny,’ he said. I knew this. I had cultivated my wit to see me through life: a drawbridge against Marilyn’s bitter complaints; a swinging saloon bar against school’s hard edges: pretty robust, but not always effective. ‘Have you ever watched it?’ Mac took the fag end of a packet of Polos from the side, peeled back the foil with his neat fingernail and offered me one before popping the last mint in his mouth. I was glad Mac wasn’t one for a post-coital cigarette. I hated smoking, because of Marilyn. I hated yellow ceilings and shell ashtrays and the kind of breath, combined with coffee, which could make a girl heave before school in the morning.
‘Yeah, a couple of times. It’s scary.’
‘What other Hitchcock films have you seen?’ He played with the Polo mint, speared on the tip of his tongue. I was mesmerized.
‘Rear Window, North by Northwest – the one with the cornfield, that’s the one, isn’t it? Dial M for Murder. I love that one. I think that’s possibly my favourite.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Mac, looking surprised. ‘It’s not his most popular. Critics call it “Lower Case Hitchcock”.’
‘Really? Well, I’m an interesting person.’
‘Indeed you are.’ Mac looked rather pleased about that. ‘What do you make of Hitchcock’s portrayal of women?’
‘A bit dodgy,’ I said. ‘He treats them as sex objects whilst pretending he reveres them as strong women. All those icy blondes … He was a bit of a sex pest, wasn’t he?’
‘No one’s really said so, in so many words …’ said Mac. ‘I know he put Tippi Hedren through a fairly sadistic ordeal for that attic scene of The Birds, though. She had her eye clawed at, got pecked at by real birds. She described it as the worst week of her life. Hey, I hope you don’t think of me as a sex pest.’ He was grinning; he knew there was no way I did.
‘You’re not a sex pest if it’s mutual,’ I said and I pressed my body closer to his and trailed my finger down the central groove of his chest.
‘Very true.’ He smiled lazily. He shifted his body so he was facing me. ‘Can I ravish you one more time and then we’ll go? We’ll really have to sneak in this time, like fugitives. We don’t have the cover of darkness to skulk around in at this time in the afternoon.’
I liked his use of the word ‘skulk’. I was most certainly up for a spot of it. After the ravishing we got dressed and left Mac’s flat, separately. We crossed the courtyards and the open spaces of campus, the wind tunnels between square-bricked buildings, at a steady distance from one another. I entered the Humanities Building a minute after Mac, looking left and right like a spy. I had the urge to turn up the collar of my denim jacket. This was fun.
I decided it would be even more fun to kiss Mac on the threshold of the screening room before he had even unlocked the door (he had got somewhat delayed; a student had stopped him to briefly pick his illustrious brain), which was deliciously dangerous, as three other students had only just slipped from view round the corner. We kissed for ten more minutes on a squishy chair, the door locked, before he opened the faded cornflower-blue box he’d brought with him, where the reels of The Birds lay. These reels were older, a duller metal, the name on the middle of them faint and in scrawled handwriting. He took the top reel out and I held it in my hands. I ran my fingers over the metal, grooved my nail over the stack of brown film.
Mac looked at me as though I were a curiosity. ‘You’re really hard to resist; you know that, don’t you?’ he said.
‘You don’t have to resist me,’ I replied. ‘You can have me any time you like.’ And he took the reel from me and placed it carefully back in the box. Then he hoisted me up on the Formica table and pushed my satin fifties skirt up to my knees. We did it silently; the last thing we wanted was a red-faced research assistant knocking on the door.
‘Let’s watch the master at work,’ Mac finally said, as he did up the buckle of his belt and I yanked up my red woolly tights.
‘I thought I just had.’
He laughed, bounded up the steps to the projection booth in one stride and began loading up the reels. I waited on one of the squishy chairs, pulling up another to make a sofa again, next to the wall.
The movie flip-flapped into life. Mac trotted back to me and plonked himself nearest to the wa
ll as the countdown rattled down and the movie began; dark flitting birds skittering and battering across the screen as the credits rolled; the words splintered and disintegrating, as though pecked at; the only soundtrack the foreboding flap of wings and desolate, scrappy cawing and cheeping. I felt the opposite of foreboding and desolate. I was full of excitement, my body charged; my mind was swimming with great moments to come. As Tippi walked elegantly through Union Square in San Francisco and into the pet shop and Hitchcock did one of his famous cameos, coming out with two dogs on a lead, Mac took my hand and smoothed each of my fingers in turn with his forefinger and thumb.
Tippi Hedren was so beautiful as socialite Melanie Daniels. Her face, the elegant chignon her hair was rolled into, her green sleeveless dress with matching jacket. I was fascinated by everything, seeing this film anew with Mac – I was determined to notice everything. Stoic Mitch whose face didn’t move much, the shrill women of the weird town on the coast. All those ominous faces. Never-ending, treacherous skies. Even the children were freaky-looking, before anything had even happened. Last time I’d seen it, I’d been wedged between Marilyn and Dad on our grubby mustard chesterfield, the central overhead light on, Marilyn noisily sucking on Fisherman’s Friends in my left ear. Mac and I were in the dark. The soundtrack was as loud as we dared have it, despite the soundproofed room. It made it all wonderfully scary.
I tried to pre-empt what Mac might ask me afterwards. What was the significance of the lovebirds that Mitch fails to buy in the pet shop but which Melanie takes to his door, in order to woo him? What was with all the cage imagery? The significance of Tippi’s green suit? I wanted to impress and excite him; I wanted to both challenge and contribute to his magnificent knowledge.
‘She definitely brought them with her, didn’t she?’ I whispered, as Tippi crossed Bodega Bay in the tiny motor boat, with the lovebirds in the cage, to Mitch’s house by the lake. ‘Melanie Daniels. She brought the evil of the birds to Bodega Bay. She’s being punished for being a woman who goes for what she wants.’
You, Me and The Movies Page 7