You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  ‘What’s the Hays Code?’ We were passing the entrance to the tiny path, edged by prickly bushes, that led off to Sainsbury’s, the trees overhead looming and pleasurably menacing. I felt we were in our own film noir, although Mac had told me Casablanca wasn’t a film noir but had noir-ish elements. I was learning a lot.

  ‘Hollywood was forced to clean up its act in 1934, before that it was a little racier, immoral, even a little feminist. Marlene Dietrich and her tailored suits, confounding expectations of femininity – all that. You know who she is, right?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ I loved the way Mac said her name in that sexy northern accent.

  ‘It imposed a code on itself. No sex, violence, no crimes that could be imitable. It’s why Mae West became a star – all that innuendo, to circumvent the restrictions. Everything was highly sanctioned, sterile. I’m putting Bonnie and Clyde on my Women in Hollywood course – I’ll show it to you at some point, Arden. By then – in the later sixties – the Hays Code was on its way out, and that particular firecracker exploded away the final remains of it, right off the screen.’

  ‘Boo to the Hays Code,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Mac, taking my hand and putting it in his trouser pocket. That was as good as it was going to get, and the moon had gone behind a cloud again, so we could get away with it. ‘Interesting times, though.’

  It was a Tuesday, about half seven. We had watched Casablanca early. The coast had been pretty clear; all the students had gone back to halls or were getting ready to rave it up at the Edwin Starr gig in the students’ union. I wouldn’t be going. I had snuggled up to Mac in the screening room and felt all romantic and cosy as we settled down to watch one of the most famous movies ever.

  ‘What do you think of black-and-white films?’ Mac had asked me as the opening credits started to roll, showing us the globe, the war in Europe, Casablanca, its market streets.

  ‘Love them.’

  ‘Me too. You can say so much with an absence of colour. Did you know the human eye can detect between one and ten million different colours? Black-and-white distracts from all that … busyness. It enhances things. Loneliness becomes that more lonely, romance becomes that more romantic.’

  ‘Black-and-white reveals people’s souls,’ I said, almost casually – I had read it somewhere – but I was searching Mac’s face for a reaction and was thrilled when he served me a gratifying grin and an impressed eyebrow hitch. I was spurred on. ‘Although there are some brilliant films that go from black-and-white to colour and vice versa. The Wizard of Oz, A Matter of Life and Death, Raging Bull …’ I thought for a moment. ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’

  ‘Bloody hell, you’re good, Ms Hall,’ said Mac, looking thoughtfully at me as the camera swept through the streets of Casablanca. ‘You’re really good.’

  ‘Tell me about it, Mac,’ I replied, in my best Olivia Newton-John.

  The movie had been as epic as I remembered. I’d seen it once before, with Dad, on a rainy Sunday afternoon. He’d fallen asleep halfway through and I’d enjoyed the rest on my own, with a bumper bag of mini Mars Bars. It was sweeping. Sad. I loved Rick’s Bar – I wanted to go there, especially with Mac. We could order spider crab and drink Moroccan martinis … Tonight I had to settle for dinner at The Moody Cow, over in Kenilworth, if we ever made it. I’d booked a table for half eight, but if we didn’t get back to Mac’s flat soon we’d be horribly late. He’d been a bugger to persuade off campus in the first place.

  ‘What did you think of Ilsa?’ Mac asked, as he changed his desert boots for a pair of shoes, in his bedroom. I was already in my 501s and my best top. ‘As a character. Did you like her?’

  ‘I’d like to go out,’ I said. ‘Hurry up!’

  ‘Come on, Film Studies interloper,’ he persisted, sitting down on the bed with only one shoe on, stalling, ‘imagine you’re writing an essay on Casablanca. What did you make of Ilsa, apart from the whole goes-back-to-her-husband thing?’

  ‘OK. Well, she was always slightly out of focus,’ I said.

  ‘Intentional. So she can be ethereal, nostalgic, other-wordly. What else?’

  ‘Stop it and put your bloody shoe on!’ I said. Normally, I would adore all this film talk; now I just wanted to get Mac away from his flat. I wanted to go out somewhere with him, like we were real. ‘I feel like Rita in bloody Educating Rita!’ Not for the first time.

  ‘I’m just being Frank,’ quipped Mac.

  ‘Michael Caine did it much better … All right, Ilsa’s an idiot! And I will talk about the whole goes-back-to-her-husband thing.’ Writing an essay on Casablanca would be so much more fun than the essays I had to write, I thought. ‘I don’t believe she should have done the right thing for the war effort! I think she should have followed her heart and gone off with sexy Rick. Go for what you want! Like Tippi in The Birds.’

  ‘Is that what you do? Go for what you want?’

  ‘Do you even have to ask?’ I had my hands on my hips, all sassy, and I knew Mac loved it.

  ‘You could also argue it’s for her safety.’

  ‘I don’t like safety.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  I flung my arms in the air. ‘She’s a damsel in distress; I don’t like those. She reacts to things, she doesn’t do anything!’

  ‘She points a gun at Rick.’ His second shoe was finally on.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’ I was full of bluster and swagger and overconfidence. Mac looked highly amused. ‘She’s too young for Rick, anyway.’

  ‘Er, hello!’ said Mac, in an American accent, holding out his arms in mock-stupefaction. ‘Tell me about your mum and dad,’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘What the hell are you asking that for? Are you Philip Larkin? A therapist?’

  ‘I want to know things about you. Who you are. Who you were. Like Rick asks Ilsa in that flashback.’

  ‘When he wants the skinny?’

  Mac laughed. ‘The skinny? One of Humphrey Bogart’s most famous lines in Casablanca, in one of the best scenes, when he asks the enigmatic Ilsa for her history, and you’re reducing it to him asking her for the skinny?’

  ‘It’s more concise,’ I laughed back. ‘Give me the skinny, Ilsa!’

  ‘Another one for my notes,’ he teased. ‘Right. Let’s have your skinny. Mum and Dad. Come on.’

  ‘There’s not much to say,’ I said. ‘They’re just my mother and my dad. Now can we please get going to the pub? Please.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mac, grabbing his blazer, ‘I can see I’m not going to get anything out of you right now. We’ll go to the pub.’

  The Moody Cow’s dining room was far too pricey for students so we were safe there, as far as detection went, but it was surprisingly packed.

  ‘Oh shit, it’s Valentine’s night!’ I said. How had we forgotten? The tables were all wedged in together, like rows of desks at school. Every table but one had a doe-eyed or already-bored couple stuffed either side of it and there was a hopeful red rose in a wine bottle in the middle of each table.

  ‘Where’s cupid, stupid?’ said Mac.

  ‘I’m with stupid,’ I retorted, like one of those T-shirts. Steven from Home had taken me for a meal the February before, on Valentine’s Night, to a little Italian in the next village. It had felt ridiculous, like we were going through a set of pointless motions. I didn’t feel enough of anything for him to be one of those couples gazing into their heart-shaped soup and struggling for conversation.

  Despite his quip, Mac hesitated, on the threshold – a dark wooden wonky beam underfoot and a low door frame he had to stoop to get under – like he didn’t want to walk in any further. I bet if I’d suggested we go straight back to campus he would have leapt at it. Campus Man.

  ‘Let’s get a drink at the bar first,’ I said, taking his hand and dragging him there.

  He ordered a beer and I ordered a Kir Royale, which Marilyn was always going on about as some kind of fantasy drink. I was glad I had worn my best silky top over my jeans and had boots with lit
tle heels on them, not that I needed any extra elevation; I was on an absolute high, being out with Mac.

  ‘Interesting, what you didn’t say about your mum and dad,’ said Mac, as we waited for our drinks. ‘Nobody is just anything. You need to give me something.’

  Did I? I sighed. ‘OK, potted skinny. My mother is awful and has fidelity issues. My dad is lovely but puts up with them too easily,’ I said.

  ‘“Fidelity issues”?’

  ‘That’s me putting a gloss on it. The truth is she appears to be addicted to a series of grubby encounters with disposable men. Next?’ Our sandwiched-in table was ready. We were shown to it by a waiter and our drinks were brought to us by another. My Kir Royale had a plump drunken strawberry floating in it.

  ‘Why does your dad put up with it?’

  ‘Because my dad is my dad. He drinks too much and loves her too much. It’s fine. Now come on, let’s get into the Valentine’s Day spirit. Let’s link our arms through each other’s like they do at weddings and make a toast.’

  ‘What would you like to toast to?’ asked Mac, linking his arm through mine and raising his glass.

  ‘Entirely up to you,’ I replied nonchalantly, but my heart was beating fast when he looked me in the eye, making the room dissolve away to nothing, and said, ‘To us; always to us.’ Then we tried to drink from our glasses and it all turned instantly comical. Like a couple of inept contortionists, I spilt some of my Kir Royale and Mac almost elbowed the man at the next table in the face.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, deadpan northern, and I thought it was the cutest thing I’d ever heard. ‘What are you grinning at?’ he asked.

  ‘You,’ I replied. We sipped at our drinks and scanned the Valentine’s-themed menu. I quite fancied the Love Boat mushrooms and the Romeo and Juliet steak, whatever that was.

  ‘Helen doesn’t believe in Valentine’s Day,’ said Mac, looking around the room.

  ‘Who’s Helen?’ I asked absent-mindedly. I was reading all about the desserts while simultaneously trying to work out if the couple by the door were having a row or not.

  ‘My wife,’ said Mac, sounding surprised, and I wondered whether he was surprised because he thought he’d already mentioned her somewhere along the line, or surprised with how casually he’d just come out with her name.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. His wife. It sounded strange: alien, wrong. Why was he bringing her up when we were having a nice evening out together? I had forgotten all about her. Well, I had barely spent any time thinking about her at all – only fleetingly, of course. Now I knew her name I was in danger of having all sorts of thoughts I didn’t want, like how many times did he phone her, what did they do in the holidays? How many times a year did they have sex? Mac looked a little flustered. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, cool as anything. ‘I know you’re married.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mac. ‘I shouldn’t have brought her up.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said again, and, not wanting him to think I was in any way pissed off about him mentioning her, I added, ‘What does she say about Valentine’s Day?’

  Oh, I was cooler than cool. I was good.

  ‘Not much.’ He grinned. ‘That it’s consumerist fallacy at its worst. That it’s the beginning of the end of modern civilization, or something.’ He looked a little proud, which I hated.

  ‘Well, good for Helen,’ I said, going to polish off my drink. I spilt some more on the table. Clumsy clots. I mopped it with my sleeve and laughed a high, bright laugh.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mac again.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ I replied. ‘I mean, really, don’t mention it!’

  He looked contrite, guilty even; I liked this even less so I laughed again and called the waiter over to order more drinks.

  Despite this shaky beginning, where a lesser girl would have thrown the remains of her Kir Royale right over Mac’s head (but I was determined not to be a lesser girl, ever), this was probably the most romantic night of my life. I decided to throw myself head first into the evening instead and banish Helen, the invisible hippy rival. We saw off the other couples in the dining room, too. There must have been at least three that came and went from the tiny table next to us. None of them looked as happy as us. No one laughed as much. No one drank as much, or had as much fun. I bet none of them had a shoeless foot in their crotch for half of the evening.

  Mac had never looked so handsome; I had a 100-watt bulb lit up right inside me. I was aglow, I was on fire; I was indestructible … Compared to us, everyone else just looked dimmed, somehow, and downright miserable. This night, this moment, was everything.

  We ordered loads of food – potato skins and scallops and steak and fat chips dripping in sauce. We let sauce slide down our chins and we didn’t care. We ate off each other’s forks; we dipped fingers in each other’s cream. I trailed my finger round the rim of my glass, then brought it slowly to my lips like I’d practised with mugs of milk, as a teenager, for when I came to restaurants as a grown-up, with sexy men.

  Our waiter flirted with me, which I loved. ‘He fancies me,’ I said, then wished I hadn’t as this was Marilyn’s line.

  ‘Not half as much as I do,’ Mac replied. He studied my face, drunk it in. He looked at me as though I was the most captivating person he’d ever met. He fed me petits fours from a dessert spoon. He even bought me a rose from one of those ridiculous sellers that came wandering in.

  ‘What’s your favourite movie genre?’ I suddenly asked him, the rose behind my ear. ‘You haven’t told me. Or are you not allowed to have one? Do you have to be impartial and love all genres equally?’

  ‘Westerns,’ said Mac. He put the rose between his teeth and did a growl.

  ‘Westerns? Ugh. They’re my worst.’

  ‘Love ’em,’ said Mac. ‘The Searchers, High Noon, The Magnificent Seven. I’m going to get myself out to those prairies one of these years, see it all for myself.’

  ‘Really? Do you own a pair of cowboy boots?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy,’ I said, showing off again. ‘I bet you really fancy yourself as some sort of stud in those boots.’

  ‘One of my favourite films,’ said Mac, ‘and if you play your cards right, I’ll put them on when we get home,’ he added, with a wink.

  I giggled and everything inside me turned somersaults. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  We were so ramped up for some huge explosive sexual encounter when we got back to Mac’s flat, but it didn’t happen. Which was a shame, because I’d just gone on the pill. I’d sat in the campus medical centre just over a week ago at the ungodly hour of nine o’clock, yawning my head off and praying I wouldn’t see a student I knew, which of course I did. Two, in fact, who both made the cardinal faux pas of asking what I was there for. I had coughed tragically and said I had the flu and they had moved away from me.

  Mac and I had eaten way too much to make use of my new contraceptive powers. My stomach, under my silky top, was all popped out like a cute egg. We were burpy and full and giggly and we wrapped ourselves in each other’s arms, like koalas, and went to sleep on Mac’s bed. I never did see the cowboy boots that night.

  Mac woke at 2 a.m. and so did I. He put Kate Bush on his stereo. Before I arrived I was not at all studenty in my music tastes. I was a pop girl, an occasional soul girl. I wore neon, I liked mild hip hop and songs that were in the charts; the intro to Wham’s ‘Club Tropicana’ was the best thing I’d ever heard. Mac changed all that; he introduced me to The Smiths, The Cure, Kate Bush, The The – my ears were opened.

  ‘“The Man With The Child In His Eyes”, that’s you,’ I said, as Kate sang.

  ‘What are you trying to say? I’m the boy who will never grow up?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Mac looked strangely sad. And I must have suddenly felt completely masochistic because I said, ‘Tell me about your wife.’ God knows what I needed to know. I had already formed my opinion of her personality: fiercely intelligent, confid
ent, deeply unsexy, a bit dull, blah, blah, and, most importantly, nothing like me. Perhaps it was my inflated self-confidence that made me brazen enough to ask about her. I mean, you couldn’t get more brazen or more confident than being in her husband’s bed. Or maybe I just wanted some of Mac’s skinny, too, however self-destructive that was.

  ‘She’s very clever.’ Check. ‘Very sure of herself.’ Check. I drew my leg from under the sheet and rubbed it up and down Mac’s. He smiled lazily at me. ‘Interesting.’

  Oh, she was supposed to be dull. She’d sounded dull – all that Valentine’s Day stuff. This threw me a bit. Still, she couldn’t be a lecturer if she couldn’t get people interested in what she had to say, so I let that one go. I was safe. I could listen to him talking about his wife with a feeling of glowy smugness. I was younger than her, better all round. She was old and I was new.

  ‘She is amazing, sometimes. Kind, affectionate.’ Uh oh. He’d be looking all wistful in a minute. ‘She also sometimes makes me feel smaller than I have ever felt.’

  Ah, now, this was interesting. She was sometimes a cow, good. ‘You don’t have any children?’ I asked. The less to tether him to her the better, I thought, and I was pretty sure he didn’t.

  ‘We’ve tried for many years, but Helen has had several miscarriages.’

  I was sketchy on these. I didn’t know anyone who had had one. Although Marilyn said there was a boy, before me, who hadn’t made it; she never elaborated on why but perhaps it was another reason she found it so hard to tolerate me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but it came out as though it had a question mark on the end, which sounded a bit dodgy. I wasn’t that hot on empathy; in fact, I was hopeless at it. I had a certain skill in not being able to come up with a single, appropriate thing to say when people brought up their sadness or troubles.