You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  I’ve been wearing outfits from the movies for years. When I was with Christian, it was the only thing I had left of me. He didn’t have a clue. He wasn’t a film person and he wasn’t that observant anyway, unless it was something he felt was a slight to him, like a look on a face or the wrong kind of smile. I was observant. I could name food they ate in movies years afterwards. The outfits were even more memorable to me. It was my thing, when all my other things had been taken away by him, and I clung to my secret, as small as it was, as my way of keeping control. When I wore those off-the-shoulder Grace Kelly dresses or those latterly defiant Annie Hall waistcoat-and-tie outfits at the appalling date night dinners Christian and I used to have (four courses and a lecture in self-improvement, anyone?), I was still me. When I wore my glam Hepburn wide-legged trousers and white shirt (Katharine) to our weekly finance ‘meetings’, I was still me. When Julian and I left the house for that fortnight in the women’s refuge, and I wore a Hepburn black polo neck and capri pants, with flats (Audrey), I still had a little bit of me left.

  James looks awkwardly pleased to have his hunch confirmed. ‘I knew it!’ he says, like a small boy, and I worry for a minute he is going to make me do a fist bump, but he appears to think better of it.

  ‘You know a lot about films,’ I say. He knows Bonnie and Clyde and Notting Hill and Almost Famous, at least. He hasn’t seen The Graduate. Still, he must be quite a movie-lover. And an oddity, too, to both notice and remember the clothes.

  ‘Not really. I’ve just seen quite a few. I spend a lot of time on my own.’

  I thought as much. ‘You never said,’ I press, ‘about being a movie buff, when I told you Mac was a Film Studies lecturer, and when we went to his house and saw all those books.’

  ‘Lots of people watch movies.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s nothing out of the ordinary.’ No, I think, but he is, isn’t he?

  ‘What’s your favourite genre?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s quite specific.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘American war films from the seventies and eighties,’ he says, ‘Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter …’

  ‘Yes, quite specific,’ I acknowledge.

  ‘I know, but I will watch anything. I just like films.’

  ‘Well, me too,’ I say, ‘and as you say, there are loads of us. We’re not anything special, are we? Cheers!’ I add, unexpectedly, and we clumsily chink glasses and smile at each other and I can feel all those sets of green eyes on me.

  The lady at the microphone in the corner of the bar starts singing, some old Ella Fitzgerald song, I believe. Dad used to have a few of her albums and would play them on his old-fashioned seventies record player. They are sad, melancholy songs, often popular at funerals, he always told me. He didn’t want one at his funeral, though; said he didn’t want anyone in the crematorium to feel depressed: when the time came, he wanted to go through the curtains of doom to John Cougar Mellencamp. So he did, exactly two weeks after he died. We saw him off to ‘Jack and Diane’. Life goes on, as Mellencamp and many others would say, although sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.

  ‘Are you single?’ I ask James. It is sheer curiosity, but I immediately feel incredibly stupid. What a thing to ask! I am now definitely one of those hair-tossing, head-flicking girls with the green eyes. ‘Oh God,’ I hurriedly add, ‘I’m not asking asking, I’m just curious. You seem to be on your own. No significant other …?’ Oh dear, what a stupid phrase and why exactly am I using it?

  ‘Yes, I’m single,’ says James, tapping the thick base of his beer bottle repeatedly against one palm. ‘I have been for a year. I was with a girl for fifteen years, we lived together – I wanted to marry her. She kept saying “I’m not ready, I’m not ready”, then she left me and was engaged and married within six months, to a DJ! I mean, fuck off!’ he says good-naturedly. ‘A bloody DJ?’

  The ‘fuck off’ makes me laugh. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘Me too; I mean, I’ve been single for five years. I didn’t have anyone run off with a DJ, though. I was married. Abusive relationship.’ I shrug. ‘They happen.’

  ‘Sadly they do,’ says James. ‘Physical …?’ he asks hesitantly.

  ‘No. Verbal, emotional, financial. The unholy trinity.’

  James nods. ‘Are you OK now?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’ Am I? I still don’t know. ‘And I have my son, of course. He isn’t the abuser’s,’ (the abuser … I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to realize what he was), ‘he’s from a previous relationship. I don’t have to see my ex-husband again.’

  James nods. ‘That’s good. And Mac? Just an affair or was it love?’ Very to the point, I think.

  ‘I loved him once,’ I said. ‘And he loved me.’

  ‘I thought so,’ says James. ‘I can feel there was something really special between you. Even if it was just “plastics”.’

  I laugh, even though his comment doesn’t really make sense, then sip the tingling remains of my ice-cold drink. I haven’t examined exactly why it is I’m visiting Mac every night. What I feel for him. If it’s plain nostalgia or something more; if it’s a hankering for a happier, more exciting time because of all I’ve endured with Christian. Do I still love Mac? I don’t think so, though I feel a steady need to be near him. Do I need him to remind me of who I once was and all that I could be? Probably. But I know I’ll be visiting him again tomorrow night, and the next.

  ‘Would you like another drink?’ James asks.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  THEN

  Chapter 11: The Graduate

  The second autumn term rolled around at last, after an interminable August and September mostly spent hiding in my room at home with rounds of cheese and tomato toasted sandwiches done in the Breville sandwich toaster, a video of The Breakfast Club and the listless working through of the reading list for next term.

  Mac and I took up where we left off. There was always a worry when I returned after the university holidays, with no contact from him, that things would fizzle out, that I would turn up at his little flat on the first night back, after half a bottle of Lambrusco and a boogie at the Welcome Back disco to be told I was no longer wanted. That it was over. Especially after my last sulky, dramatic exit in the station car park. But when I pitched up in my cut-off jeans, embroidered plimsolls and a new Soup Dragons T-shirt, Mac opened the door to me with a grin, then immediately tried to take off my bra, so all was good.

  We resumed normal service: watching movies, sleeping with each other and remaining undetected by anyone, but there was now a slight obstacle to our affair, as second-year students had to live off campus … The other reason I was fearful Mac wouldn’t take me in on that first night – a waif and stray, an inebriated urchin clutching a plastic pint of cider and black – was I didn’t want to return to my new and splendidly hideous student digs.

  Becky and I had ballsed things up. There had been an accommodation ballot in the summer term, to allocate housing in the second year, which our names had been in, along with three other girls we wanted to share with. If you did well in the ballot, you got ‘top end’ of Leamington Spa – nice Georgian houses, central heating, carpets. If you didn’t, you got ‘bottom end’ – dodgy terraces, gas fires you had to throw lit matches at, mouldy carpets. We came out in the top three, or something, in the ballot. We had a Monday-morning appointment to be allocated our beautiful Georgian villa, but got pissed the night before, overslept and didn’t turn up for it. We were awarded a terraced house, Bottom End Leamington, which had bed bugs, mattresses with nails in, slug trails and a dangerous 1950s gas oven complete with one of those scary overhead grills that threatened to set your hair on fire every time you cooked bacon. The heating was woefully inadequate: we made do with those vile gas heaters (one in each horrible bedroom) and a three-bar electric fire in the damp living room that we all shifted up the sofa in turn to roast ourselves by.

  I vowed to spend as little time in this hellhole as possible and sleep as man
y nights as I could at Mac’s, if he would have me (well, of course he would have me … I knew this without doubt, after that first night back). It was risky, we knew. I would emerge, bleary-eyed, from his flat several mornings a week, hovering in the doorway until the coast looked fairly clear and then running like the wind to classes. If people saw me they never said anything to anyone. Becky knew, of course; the other three girls thought I had a boyfriend in the third year. On the nights I hoped I would be staying I stuffed a toothbrush and a clean pair of knickers into the pocket of my denim jacket … I was never the only person to turn up to laborious Brontë sisters lectures wearing the same clothes as the day before, anyway.

  Mac and I watched The Graduate one night in late October, on video, in his bedroom. We wheeled in the telly on the cabinet with castors so we could watch it in bed.

  ‘I love this movie,’ I said happily, as he snapped the video out of its box. I was propped up against three white pillows in a nightie with Little Miss Naughty on the front and had a packet of Hobnobs at the ready. ‘The soundtrack, the actors, the saturation of colour. All that sunlight.’ I slowly peeled the satisfying strip off the Hobnobs’ wrapper.

  ‘The “saturation of colour” …’ Mac smiled, leaning over to grab his notebook and pen from the bedside table. I was still pleasing him in every way.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The swimming pool, the lilo …’ I was excited about watching this with Mac. I was smiling as soon as the camera panned back from Ben sitting on the aeroplane and positively buzzing by the time Art Garfunkel started singing about his old friend, darkness, and Ben rode the airport travelator. I didn’t even eat a Hobnob until he emerged from the house in the scuba suit.

  We sang along to the soundtrack. We laughed at ‘Plastics’. When Anne Bancroft rolled her stocking up her leg Mac was inside me.

  ‘Such a good moment,’ said Mac.

  ‘This?’ I said, giving him a long, lazy wink.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he whispered, taking a slow intake of breath.

  ‘What were you like as a graduate?’ I asked him later. The film had finished and we were hoovering up slice after slice of paté on toast, with super-thin slices of cucumber on top. Still in bed. I wanted chocolate cake, like John and Yoko, but neither of us would make the effort to go to Sainsbury’s. ‘Horny?’ Mac laughed and popped a slice of cucumber in his mouth. ‘What about as an undergraduate? Did you get under an older lecturer?’

  ‘No. That’s a funny thing to ask!’

  ‘Is it? No Mrs Robinsons?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I just wondered if that’s how you got the idea to do the reverse.’

  ‘Cheeky!’ said Mac. ‘Though it’s flattering to be thought of as the male version of Mrs Robinson, I suppose. The woman is seriously sexy.’

  I wanted to ask him why he was having this affair with me, but at the same time I didn’t want him to think about it too much, to analyse it the way he did his movies. I’d end up as an intense, fucked-up character with a suspect past or something and he’d be a dark, shady brooder with issues that needed to be triumphantly overturned.

  ‘You could argue Anne Bancroft is the ultimate embarrassing mother,’ I said flippantly, ‘although of course you haven’t met mine. Why are you including The Graduate on your course?’ I added, pitching toast crumbs off my chest and leaning back against the pillows. ‘What does it say about women?’ I was feeling too full and languid to work it out myself, however much Mac liked my musings.

  Mac put his triangle of toast down on his plate and grabbed an edge of pillowcase to clean his glasses with. ‘At the time, this film was so controversial. A woman like Mrs Robinson – a woman in control, a woman who feels nothing but is desperate to feel something – was new to audiences. She was an absolute pioneer. And the fact she was an older woman – sexually powerful, still sexual at all, to be honest – just blew people’s minds.’ He put his glasses back on. ‘But ultimately, she is punished. She is conniving, manipulative. She loses her husband, her toyboy lover and the love and affection of her daughter. She is made to pay for her sexual verve, so you could argue that after all its shock and subversion, The Graduate is ultimately conservative.’

  I rested my thumb under my chin, wedging it into the concave space there; my forefinger resting against my nose. I hoped I looked cute and contemplative. ‘Could you also say that Elaine reaches independence and rebellion, but only with the aid of a man? That she is a confused character with no real mind of her own?’ I’d decided to offer an opinion, after all. I wanted Mac to see the best of what I had to offer. I wanted to dazzle him, always.

  ‘You could say that, yes,’ agreed Mac, nodding. I loved it when he looked at me like that, all impressed. ‘After all, she has to be rescued. And she doesn’t even go for that rescue until she sees the angry faces of her parents. She really has to be led.’

  ‘So, at first the movie seems to blaze a trail for feminism but chickens out and reverts to type at the end?’

  ‘Yes, it chickens out,’ laughed Mac. ‘I like that. I might call one of my lectures “The Graduate Chickens Out”. I reckon the students would absolutely lap it up.’

  I could just see Mac giving this lecture next year; pacing, waving his arms around, taking his glasses on and off to clean them with his shirt. I felt not only jealous of the students in that future lecture theatre, soaking him up, hanging off his every jewelled word, but alarmed with the fear I may not be in his bed next year. Would I still be with him in the third year? I had to be.

  ‘Elaine’s parents are terrible role models,’ I said, wondering if I, like Mrs Robinson, had been desperate to feel something when I arrived at Warwick. ‘As are Ben’s.’

  ‘And yours?’ Mac queried, with a smile.

  ‘What about yours?’ I asked. He wasn’t going to get anything more out of me about mine. I was happy; why spoil the mood?

  ‘Old, perfectly respectable and living in Devon.’

  ‘Sounds nice.’ Mac just shrugged. ‘Do you think Mrs Robinson loved Ben?’ I asked it only with the intention of changing the subject, but I realized as I said it I was suddenly fishing for something. A reason, a validation, a declaration … Why was Mac having this affair with me? Cheating on his wife? Telling lies by termly omissions? I loved him, I knew this every time I looked at him, but did he love me? There was no way I would ask him, so a roundabout movie allusion that Mac would probably miss entirely would have to do.

  ‘No,’ said Mac. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘OK,’ I replied, feeling a little sick inside. I knew she didn’t either. And I’d reached my own dead end. I would never ask Mac if he loved me, but I felt like he’d just told me he didn’t. Another subject change was required, to something I could always fall back on. ‘Would you like to lap me up?’

  ‘Pardon?’ That slow, slow smile dawned on his face, like sunlight on a country road.

  ‘You heard.’ I pulled back the white sheet and gestured with my head for him to jump back in. ‘Get in!’

  That weekend I had an almighty shock. The sort of shock that reverberates round you for weeks, the sort of shock you cannot believe actually happened. I was lounging on my bed in the Slug House late on Saturday afternoon, making notes on Northanger Abbey and trying not to nod off because I had been up all night performing sexual acrobatics with Mac, when there was a weird tap-tap-tapping at the door downstairs – a skittering tap, like it was being done with fingernails.

  Nobody else was home. Becky had gone out on a random shopping expedition with some lad from Ipswich who wanted to buy a fishing rod. The other girls were at a lengthy aerobics class.

  I opened the door to a pink vanity case, white plastic sandals despite the increasingly chilly weather, no tights and my mother.

  ‘Surprise!’ she trilled, to my absolute horror, and I stood there in the doorway, annoyed I probably wasn’t going to faint when the only thing that would save me from this horrendousness would be collapsing and being carted off to the nearest hospital. I
needed smelling salts, I needed one of those silver marathon blankets; I needed to be as far from this doorway as possible. But the scent of Poison and Embassy Lights was refusing to knock me out. My mother was here. Here. This was the worst thing to have ever happened to me.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here, Marilyn?’ It wasn’t my voice, it was the voice of a hysterical woman trying to remain calm; a far-away voice, squeaky and high.

  ‘I thought I’d come up for the weekend,’ she said simply, hauling her vanity case over the threshold and into the hall. ‘Pretend I’m a student. One of the gang.’ And she tittered her horrible laugh and her raspberry-pink talons scraped against the side of the case with a sound that would make a cat wince and I wanted to stab her with something, Psycho-style.

  She’d never given any indication she might just turn up! She’d been sneery about Warwick – yes, she’d shown off about it to her friends, but towards me there had been nothing but disdain. That I was getting above my station. That I was becoming a student, like it was the most bourgeois, embarrassing thing in the world. I felt invaded. Every fibre in my being was screaming against her being in this house. I didn’t want her poison here, infiltrating my new, escaped life. After all these years, now she chose to pay me some attention?

  She was in. She shut the front door behind her with a decided bang. She was dressed in skin-tight gingham pedal pushers, a mohair jumper and a tragic sort of cape. Her hair was massive, over-rollered. Her toenails were coral and thick-looking, curled over at the ends.

  ‘It’s a dump,’ she said, looking round her. ‘Absolute hellhole. Where’s your room?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  Up the worn carpet to my bedroom I went, the poison following me. Marilyn looked around at the movie and music posters, cast an ironically judgemental eye on my cluttered desk and my scraps of clothes and single socks littering the floor.

  ‘Where am I going to sleep?’

  What was she expecting? Twin beds with matching eiderdowns, like in all those Doris Day movies?