You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I have no idea what Mac did for the last three decades,’ I say. ‘So many pieces to fill in. There’s the London Film School, lecturing at UEA, possibly, but that’s about it. What about before that? And what about before that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says James. ‘I’ve only lived next door to him for four years, and even if it had been much longer I probably still wouldn’t know a lot. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ I stir my tea, pick at my sticky bun. ‘It’s just weird to have this void; that he can’t fill it by simply telling me about it. It makes me feel … discombobulated.’

  ‘That’s a big word.’ James smiles.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ I break off a piece of my bun. ‘Did you meet someone called Perrie Turque when you went to Mac’s barbecue that time?’

  ‘Perrie Turque? Yes, that was her! Mac’s former student. Not you.’ He smiles at me, releases a marshmallow from a mound of cream and pops it in his mouth. ‘Perrie. Feisty kind of woman. Pushy, I thought. I didn’t really speak to her. I was a bit scared of her, to be honest.’

  I laugh. ‘It does seem to be that sort of name, doesn’t it? Perrie Turque? Forceful, slightly sinister. Did she have a severe fringe?’

  ‘Yes, I believe she did. And a very stern cardigan.’ James’s eyes are lit up, teasing.

  I laugh again. ‘Did you know she was the ex-girlfriend of Mac’s son?’

  James looks surprised. ‘I didn’t know he had a son!’

  I nod. ‘He does.’

  ‘I’m surprised. He never mentioned anyone, ever. Though Mac and I didn’t talk that much, it has to be said. I was only at that barbecue in the first place by default, because I was in my garden pretending I knew what to do with a rose bush and I think he felt sorry for me. I could have been a rose bush for all Perrie Turque cared. I remember she started barking on about her journey from Crystal Palace or something and her voice was too loud so I made my excuses and escaped to the bottom of the garden.’ I smile; I can imagine James keeping clear at the bottom of Mac’s garden. ‘I was spared her life story, which I could imagine would be quite long. Where is his son now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘He’s not missing,’ I frown, ‘at least I hope not. A missing son would be unbearable, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You have a son,’ he acknowledges.

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘And I can’t think of Mac’s son being missing, it’s just that he’s not able to be located, at the moment. Listen, you said you also met a man there from the London Film School. Was he called Stewart Whittaker?’ I ask. ‘A big guy, with a beard, possibly? Looks a bit like a bear?’

  ‘A bear called Stewart …’ James smiles as he stirs his hot chocolate. ‘Yes, I think that was the chap from the London Film School. Why do you ask? Why all the interest in these attendees at a long-forgotten barbecue?’

  ‘I’ve been playing amateur detective,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to find Lloyd – Mac’s son.’

  ‘Oh, right. I see. Any luck?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.’ James shrugs.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe they’re estranged.’

  ‘I’ll find out,’ I say. ‘I’ll find out what the situation is. If Mac is in hospital his son will want to come to him, I believe.’

  ‘Not if they are estranged.’

  ‘You’re not helping!’

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘They’ll just have to become un-estranged,’ I conclude. I can’t imagine being without Julian. I can’t imagine him not coming to my bedside if I was in a car accident.

  ‘You sound determined.’

  ‘I am determined.’ And the fact surprises me. I haven’t felt like this in a while, that I have a purpose. I quite like it. Mac wrote so much of my life for me – those intricate, plot-heavy eighteen months of our affair – I realize I want to write a bit of his for him, something good, something wonderful. A plot twist (not a denouement, no!), and a plot twist created by me, lifted from the pages of my screenplay. I wonder if it’s the memory of the old Arden coming back that’s making me do it, too. The scrappy, annoying me. The girl who went after what she wanted, at any cost. I want this for Mac. I really do. I’m going to find Lloyd. ‘Can I ask you something else?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why do you keep coming to visit Mac if you hardly know him?’

  James is silent for a moment. He places his hot chocolate on the table and a thick ribbon of cream creeps down the side of the mug. ‘Because I know what loneliness feels like. To have no one bothering about you. Wondering how you are. Looking out for you. I know how it feels to be alone.’

  ‘Oh.’ I remember the ex-girlfriend and the fucking DJ. James’s eyes are grey and steadfast and I avoid staring into them by focusing on tapping my teaspoon on the edge of my saucer. ‘I’m sorry.’ It troubles me that Mac was lonely and I wonder how it could have happened to such a colossus of a man. I wonder why James is lonely, too. Doesn’t he have any friends, nice work colleagues? Where is his family? I know there is the mum down in Kent, but doesn’t he have anyone else?

  ‘It’s OK,’ says James and as I glance up he almost does a little start, recovers himself. His voice lightens and his eyes crinkle into a smile. ‘So, have you thought any more about letting me give you a lift to see your mum? You’re still going, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still going. And she’s not my “mum”,’ I say, trying not to sound indignant but failing. ‘Well, she is, but I don’t call her that. I call her “my mother”, or Marilyn.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ says James, looking at me with curiosity. Those grey eyes flicker. ‘Not the greatest relationship, then?’

  ‘No, not the greatest. I don’t like my mother,’ I add. ‘But that’s OK. Some people don’t.’

  ‘Well, no,’ he says. ‘That’s very true. So, would you like a lift? I wouldn’t mind the company, to be honest. Being a lonely old soul and all that shit …’

  I laugh, but my mind is racing. I like being on the train by myself, gazing out of the window. I don’t like being tied to someone else’s plans, their times. I like to eat messy junk food on the journey, from a carrier bag. Read a dog-eared book. I’m not sure I can sit in a car with James for two hours and make small talk although, actually, I now wonder if the talk would be that small. Now I know him a little better.

  ‘Well, think about it,’ he says finally, while my mind continues to race round its own endless track, with no safety car in sight. ‘The offer is still there.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  James slurps at his chocolate again. He gets a chocolatey moustache, which looks quite cute. I decide not to tell him it’s there. Not for a bit.

  ‘How do you know Mac has a son in the first place?’ he asks me.

  ‘Google,’ I say. I wasn’t going to tell him that Mac’s son is the reason we couldn’t stay together.

  The neighbour and I, the ex-lover, wait either side of Mac’s bed – somehow we found ourselves back at the ward again, two spare parts – and finally Mac is wheeled into the ward, on a different kind of bed, with high sides, and lifted carefully by two orderlies on to his own.

  He doesn’t look that good. He is pale; his lips are dry. His eyes are firmly shut. James and I stay with him for an hour; there’s an old film on one of the TV channels, Overboard with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn – one of Dad’s favourites, actually – and we gawp at it, periodically, until we start watching it properly. I catch James smiling occasionally. Now and again he breaks into a chuckle. Towards the end, we realize Mac has his eyes open and is watching it too, but he is not smiling. His dry lips are set into a cracked line.

  James has to go.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Arden,’ he says, ‘won’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you will,’ I say, and I like the thought of arranging to meet him here. I can’t imagine visiti
ng Mac without him now. We’re like some kind of tragic double act. ‘Bye, James.’

  He leaves the ward. I watch him holding the door for a family of five who have just been buzzed in, before he leaves. Fran glides over. She is in super-efficient, bustling mode, fussing with the sheets and blankets, patting back hair, gently chiding Mac for his absence.

  ‘Ah, you’re back with us, Mac. I’m glad to see it. You are naughty, giving us a little scare like that!’ Scare? She implied earlier it wasn’t a scare. She said it was a ‘procedure’, routine. ‘I expect to see you up and about tomorrow and eating all your dinner, Mac, my boy. I’m going to hold you to it.’ Oh, she really is giving him a good telling-off. Mac simply stares at her, unblinking. There’s no twinkle today; the ghost of his charisma gives no flicker, no hint of its former magnificence.

  Once Fran has soft-shoed away, I lean close to him and place my lips a fraction from his ear. I don’t know if he can hear me or not, but I know the next movie on The List and I want him to remember it, too. I also want him to know that to me he is not a bad boy but one of the very best. I lean over to whisper in his ear and I say, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

  THEN

  Chapter 13: Some Like It Hot

  The worst thing about my mother’s hideous visit in the autumn term (well, not the worst – that would be her cavorting near the front of the stage to Erasure’s ‘Respect’ whilst pretending to ride an invisible pony) was that when the Christmas holidays rolled round again – dreaded and inevitable – Marilyn had a new weapon.

  Christmas was the same old same old – indifference, disdain, dullness, damage, disillusion, despair and too much Drambuie – except this time Marilyn knew something about me I had fiercely wanted to keep to myself.

  Where I lived. What my life was like at Warwick.

  I hated that. She had infiltrated a part of me I never expected her to even get close to. She had rocked up to my escape – my refuge away from her – gleefully planted her flag and casually moon-walked away. Warwick and everything that came with it was supposed to be mine, but she had claimed a portion of it for herself, which made me absolutely rage inside. I couldn’t bear it that she could envisage me there, in that horrible house, in my horrible bedroom, in the brilliantly horrible bathroom with the one-bar electric heater precariously attached to the ceiling and operated by a single fraying cord. That she’d stayed there, gatecrashed a night out. The fact we had had a shared experience made me shudder, and she could now afflict me with a whole series of ‘remember when’s:

  ‘Remember when we queued at the bar and that lad said I looked like a movie star?’ He was taking the piss, but yeah.

  ‘Remember when I drank that pint down in one and then put the empty glass on my head?’ Er, yes, as it was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life!

  ‘Remember when I fell up those stairs?’ Yes, yes, yes, I do bloody remember! I will never, ever live it down!

  And of course every ‘remember when’ had her in the spotlight, with me playing a bit part in the shadows, just where she liked me. I was tempted to come up with some of my own: remember when I fell outside the butcher’s and hurt my knee and you took me in to ask the man for a plaster? Remember when you used to look really happy when I came out of school, especially that time I had made peppermint creams and saved all the smoothest ones for you? Remember when you loved me?

  I knew Marilyn was tempted to send her own round robin, boasting about her ‘wonderful’ weekend in October with her daughter at university. I could see her thinking about it, as she scowled and read the Bankses’ latest offering. She even lifted a biro and reached for an A4 notepad – usually reserved for scribbling incoherent shopping lists. But she laid down the pen after writing ‘painkillers’ and ‘cottage cheese with pineapple in’. She probably couldn’t be bothered, when it came to it. Too much effort. But still, it was round robin material, wasn’t it? Mother-and-daughter adventures in Academia Land. Ugh. The hideous fake camaraderie of it made me sick to my stomach.

  Dad didn’t say a lot about her little escapade. He was probably pleased she’d gone away for two days, so he could potter in his shed in peace, drinking his beer and wondering what the hell had happened to the woman he’d married. All he said to me that Christmas was he was glad I was home.

  The only very small, microscopic saving grace of it all was that I don’t think Marilyn had set eyes on Mac that autumn Sunday, so preoccupied had she been with her blister when he cruised past in his MG, but I also hated that she had kept me from him that weekend. As soon as I’d dumped her and her vanity case at the ticket office of Leamington station, I’d hitched back to campus and run straight to Mac’s flat, where of course he wasn’t in. Hungover and desperate for him, I’d skulked around and waited for him for over an hour and when he finally turned up, with a Sainsbury’s bag and a grin that re-ignited my soul, I’d uttered, ‘Thank God,’ and had almost wrestled him to the ground with relief.

  The first movie on The List we saw in the new spring term – so fresh, so full of possibility, and me so relieved to be far away from home – was Some Like It Hot. When Mac showed me the reels, in the screening room, having promised me a black-and-white comedy, I smiled, although it could have been a grimace.

  ‘Not keen?’ Mac asked.

  ‘My mother thinks she’s Marilyn Monroe,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ said Mac, an amused look on his face, his right eyebrow raised into his floppy fringe. ‘Well, that is interesting. Tell me, your mother wasn’t that woman standing at the hitching point with you late last term, was she? You know, the one with the white-hot barnet and the heels?’

  ‘Er … no,’ I tried to bluff.

  ‘Hmm. She looked a lot like you,’ said Mac. ‘Similar build, same face …’

  ‘All right, all right, that was my mother!’ I cried, not liking that I sounded so hysterical. ‘She ambushed me for the weekend. It was horrible.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mac. ‘I must admit you didn’t look pleased to be seen with her. Why does she think she’s Marilyn Monroe?’

  ‘She thinks she should be a movie star.’ I shrugged. ‘She thinks she’s someone special.’

  ‘Everyone’s someone special,’ said Mac, stepping towards me and teasing one of my curls between his thumb and forefinger. ‘But not everyone’s Marilyn Monroe.’

  ‘She’s a fantasist,’ I concluded. ‘Now are we going to watch the movie or not?’

  ‘A fantasist and someone with fidelity issues,’ said Mac, infuriating me by still not taking the first reel out of the box. ‘Not good for a daughter, I should imagine.’

  ‘No, not brilliant,’ I said.

  ‘So coming to Warwick was an escape for you?’

  ‘Well, I would quite like to get a degree,’ I said, ‘they can be quite useful in life …’

  ‘But you also wanted to escape from home.’

  ‘Yes, Freud, I also wanted to escape from home.’

  ‘Am I part of your escape? This affair? Us?’

  ‘Don’t try to psychoanalyse me, Mac! I’m not a character in one of your films! Are you trying to say I’m an empty husk of a girl, damaged by her home life and seeking to fill the hole – don’t say anything rude! – with an older, wiser mentor figure, as an act both of rebellion and of self-flagellation? If so, what’s your excuse? Why are you doing this? I just fancied you, that’s all. It happens.’

  ‘Whoa,’ said Mac. ‘It was only a question! And one that’s hit a bit of a nerve, I see.’ He sat down on one of the bristly sofa-chairs and rubbed a hand across his chin. ‘And why am I doing this?’ he added quietly, staring up into that husk of a soul of mine and filling in every cracked corner of it. ‘Because I can’t not. Come here.’

  And he put his arms out to me and pulled me on to his lap and I was determined not to let his closeness feel restorative, salvationary, everything I needed, but it did. I wondered if he loved me but I still didn’t dare ask.

  ‘And now I’ll thread up the movie,’ h
e said. ‘If you can bear to watch Ms Monroe in action.’

  ‘I can bear it,’ I replied.

  I loved it, actually; adored it. I’d last watched Some Like It Hot when I was about twelve and couldn’t even countenance thinking about it since, so Marilyn-y had Marilyn become – in looks if not in sweetness – but I did enjoy it, watching it with Mac. We laughed a lot; I loved Marilyn’s character, Sugar, in this movie, how she played up to the camera, how she let it swallow her whole.

  ‘Themes.’ I clicked my fingers at Mac, when it had finished. ‘Go!’

  ‘Hmm. Let me see.’ He pretended to muse, stroking his chin. ‘Subversion of expectations of gender identity. The objectification of women. Misogyny. The male gaze …’

  ‘Laura Mulvey,’ I offered. I had read the book Mac had given me. Cover to cover. I had considered Mac’s Male Gaze towards me, wallowed in it, how he gazed at me, feasted upon me. His Gaze was everything. I still couldn’t see it as a negative – sorry, Ms Mulvey. Mac’s view of me brought me alive. And in Some Like It Hot, there was no image more male gaze-able than Marilyn Monroe waddling up the platform with her cases; even the train is not impervious to her charms as it lets off a shot of steam. Sublime, really. My Marilyn would see a moment like that as the pinnacle of her absolute life.

  ‘Quite,’ agreed Mac. ‘You know, the Hays Code did not like this movie. It was basically the middle finger to it. Gender bending, sexual innuendo … It was banned in Kansas, you know.’

  ‘We’re not in Kansas now, Toto,’ I trilled. ‘I love how Lemmon and Curtis [hark at me, Lemmon and Curtis …!] discuss how women are treated. What was it they said? Something like all you have to do is put on a frock and men become animals?’

  ‘Pretty much that. Great, isn’t it? That script. I’m sorry your mother thinks she’s Marilyn Monroe,’ he added, looking at me curiously. ‘Do you still need her in your life? Could you actually escape her?’