You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  I wrestle that kiss on the cheek from Julian, wave him off from the front door and decide to check my emails before I head off to the hospital.

  Yes! There’s an email from Perrie Turque. Below it is one from Becky and, again guilty I didn’t send her one first, I read it quickly.

  Hi Ardie! Was such a cool night on Monday! Felt dreadful yesterday … Prospective love interest was a complete loser, though. I didn’t even bother asking him in for coffee. Happy you came – we must do it again soon. Becky xx

  So uncomplicated, I think, so forgiving. How wonderful she can see past the terrible role I had to play; she certainly does it better than me. I reply, finally feeling I can take a step towards her. I can do this; I can deserve my friend again. I just have to open up. Push past my guilt, which is hurting us both, be more friendly, say ‘yes’ to more things. We’ll get there. We can repair what we had …

  Yes, loved it too, sorry about prospective love interest! Yes please, we must do it again! xx

  I feel happy as I send it. Hopeful. Then I click, with an excited intake of breath, on to Perrie’s email.

  Hi there Arden! (Cool name, by the way!!!)

  From the off she’s feisty, over the top. I can just see her, typing away under that fringe. I’m surprised she’s not writing the whole thing in shouty capitals.

  Yes I went out with Lloyd for a while – a bit of a toyboy for me, ha ha! I met him when he was running a bar in Thailand – Koh Samui. [Oh, not London then, as Stewart Whittaker had said – so was that before or after?] He was still Bartley-Thomas then. I found out Mac was his dad – I had him at Sheffield Uni. [I hope she hadn’t …] Lloyd said they weren’t speaking, and didn’t want his dad to know where he was. After Lloyd and I broke up I contacted Mac – I was curious about him, you know – once such a brilliant lecturer, I don’t know if you know? [Oh, she thinks I’m a neighbour or something, a concerned friend …] I got in touch with him when he was lecturing at UEA [definitely before the London Film School, then] and we’ve corresponded some since then. He invited me to a barbecue at his house a few years ago. [By letter? Mac never wrote letters. I don’t like the thought of this Perrie writing to him, going to his barbecue where he was all quiet and not like Mac at all.] So, anyway, no I don’t know where the elusive Lloyd currently is but I hear on the travel grapevine he was going to become a scuba dive instructor though I have no idea where – knowing Lloyd it could be any country in the world! Would you like me to dig around for you? I’m happy to. Would be fabulous to finally bring them together if Mac is on his deathbed or whatever.

  Perrie xx

  On his deathbed or whatever? I decide this Perrie is quite precocious. I’m also jealous she may have had a fling with Mac, after me, at Sheffield – despite the fringe. I have an irrational and probably destructive urge to ask James to let me into Mac’s house again so I can hunt around it for her letters. But, still, she has offered to help me, and yes, I would like Perrie to dig around.

  I type a sweet reply.

  Yes please, if you could, that would be great and very much appreciated. Do you happen to know why the two of them weren’t speaking?

  I am surprised by an email pinging back straight away. I wonder where Perrie is. On a dramatic beach somewhere, her toes in the surf? Halfway up a palm tree? Typing up copy in an internet café with free mango lassis and an electric fan in the corner, blowing a local diplomat’s papers around?

  I’m not overly surprised by her reply.

  Mac’s affairs.

  Mac is brighter this evening. He has that glint in his eye again. The old Mac sparkle, the sparkle that could make me melt into a glistening puddle of double cream just by looking at him. I wonder for the first time if it’s me that has brought it back. By being here. By sparking memories of his most golden days. But perhaps I’m giving myself far too much credit.

  I’m relieved to see him looking better, but I can’t stop thinking about what Perrie said. Affairs … This would mean plural, more than me, definitely – possibly Perrie, possibly dozens of others – enough for Mac’s son to not want to speak to him again. Is she right? I know she is – isn’t Perrie just the sort of woman to be absolutely crystal-clear sure of herself, like the tropical waters she’s currently bathing her big toe in? Mac has a glint. Mac has had affairs with dozens of women, passing himself lazily between them like a shining baton for God knows how long.

  I know she’s right. I may once have been arrogant enough to believe that after the immense, intense, cinematic nature of our romance Mac would be sated; there would be no one else like me; he would resume a conventional life of husbandry and fatherhood with poor Helen, with only his sinful memories to give him a warm glow on cold winter evenings. But not now. Things are different now. Then the universe revolved around me. I couldn’t see beyond my own entity. I was the archetypal legend in my own (cheese salad baguette, with loads of mayonnaise) lunchtime. Now the universe does as it pleases and is nothing to do with me. I can believe Mac continued to have affairs.

  Mac smiles a slow-formed smile at me as I come and take my seat. It’s a different one today and I don’t feel quite comfortable on it. This chair is bright orange and the back is too straight; my usual one is brown and it bends with me happily when I lean on it. I look around for my chair. I’m sure there’s a woman with a large bottom plonked on it on the other side of the ward, where Dominic was, but as she looks quite formidable and is waving a bunch of grapes around like a weapon, I decide it would be churlish of me to go over and ask for it back.

  ‘Hello, Mac,’ I say, resisting the urge to add, ‘you old bastard’. There is no mention of Helen in Perrie’s email. From all the evidence, and the lack of it, I get the feeling she moved out of the picture a long time ago, and who would blame her if she had divorced Mac? If she had left him after one too many betrayals? When exactly did Lloyd do the same? I wonder. I may feel remorse now about the affair, about Helen, but it seems Mac has not been afflicted by any such conscience. He carried on and on … I wonder if Mac played around when Lloyd was a baby, a small child, a teenager … if he was still enjoying dalliances right up until the car crash. If so, why is he alone? Why am I the only former lover and nostalgic idiot to visit him?

  Instead I say, ‘It’s good to see you back on the ward. I hope you’re feeling better.’ I look at him and I worry that our affair is included in Perrie’s curt two-worder – Mac’s affairs – whether I should cancel finding Lloyd, somehow, if he knows about his father and the girl at Warwick. But it’s not about me; it’s about Mac. He’s the one lying in hospital, without his son, unable to speak. I try and fail to be angry with him. I have been cheated on and shouldered the sear of its pain; I know how that goes. I have committed treachery myself and carried the shadow of it on my back for years. But I realize that if Mac had a thousand affairs, before or after me, it wouldn’t affect how I feel about him. It can’t. I can only see him in isolation. I do only remember him in relation to me; that he matters only in the context of that spinning cosmos which bathed me in light for that brief, golden time when I had youth and power and the world at my DMed feet. This man taught me how to love. This man gave me some of the best moments of my life. And I’m afraid, for me, it is only our moments that matter (sorry, Helen, and I truly am sorry). I can’t change what happened to us. I can’t turn down the brightness of everything we meant to each other. The past is a landscape that cannot be altered, however much we’d like to get our hands on it.

  I take off my coat, smooth my cream pin-striped skirt over my knees. Fran soft-shuffles over. She’s got a pen behind her ear, like a builder; I’m pretty sure that’s breaking some kind of Health and Safety regulation.

  ‘He ate his dinner,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Fish pie followed by apple crumble.’

  Fran is lovely but, like sitting in the wrong chair, I feel uncomfortable with this infantilizing of Mac. I don’t care that Mac has finished his apple crumble and I suddenly feel quite angry, for a totally different reason. I ju
st want him back. I want him to come back to me – properly – even if it’s just for ten minutes. To sit up, smile, wrap his arms around me and talk to me. I want to hear a complete sentence, the raw beauty of that northern accent involved in a proper, rhythmic, tennis-match back-and-forth conversation with my flat, Essex-tinged one. I want him to tell me what he remembers about us. All of it. I’m shamefully going old-school Arden and want to talk about me.

  Fran walks on. I take Mac’s hand. The Chase is on, above us; Bradley Walsh laughs at something one of the contestants says until he cries. I don’t let go of Mac’s hand. We are me and him, just as we once were, no one else allowed in the picture. I wish I had taken a screen shot of that photo of us in his house so I could keep it on my phone and look at it every day.

  ‘Hi, Arden.’ It’s James. He’s in a navy suit, a cornflower-blue polka-dot tie. I wonder what his flash of socks will be today. He looks handsome, unsure of himself. I’m pleased to see him but I realize I still haven’t made a decision about the lift up to Walsall on Saturday.

  ‘Hi, James.’

  James has brought biscuits and coconut milk, film magazines Empire and Sight & Sound, and some cherries in a large brown paper bag. He unrolls the top of the bag and shows them to Mac who nods approvingly, but I don’t think he’ll be able to eat them.

  James is kind, I think. Maybe it would be nice to have someone to witter on to, after I’ve seen my mother, so I can banish her from my brain. Light-hearted conversation with someone who doesn’t talk all that much, so I can chitter and chatter on until she is gone. On the train, she always swills around my head for ages, like cold coffee. Perhaps I should take James up on his offer. I never used to be so fearful; Mac and The List are reminding me exactly how fearless I used to be. Perhaps the old-school Arden – the best part of her, at least – should make a guest appearance in the present day, a small cameo. I could at least pretend I am as unworried as she was, as nonchalant and confident about everything, if only for a little while. It’s only a trip in a car, what’s the big deal?

  Mac has turned a little paler, suddenly. He gives a slow exhalation of breath then closes his eyes. Within seconds his chest is rising and falling and he is fast asleep. I lean across the bed. James is sitting the other side, in his usual position.

  ‘I’d like to take you up on your offer, James,’ I say. ‘For the lift up to Walsall on Saturday. I can give you petrol money.’

  ‘Great,’ says James, looking pleased. ‘And, well, we can work something out. Shall I pick you up outside the hospital that morning, say, ten?’

  ‘OK.’ Now I’ve said it, I don’t want to do it, but it’s too late. I’m committed.

  ‘If you get hungry we can stop somewhere on the way.’

  ‘Sure.’ I wasn’t planning on food stops. I’m even more sorry I’ve said ‘yes’ now – all of a sudden it’s turning into a road trip. But he’s being so kind.

  ‘And bring any CDs you like. Even if it’s something dreadful like Adele we can sing along.’

  James doesn’t strike me as the sing-along type so I’m already amused at the prospect of that happening. I remember Glen Campbell in Mac’s red MG. How much I hated it, but how if I hear ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ now it makes me cry.

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  James reaches into the bag of cherries and pops one in his mouth. There is nowhere to put the stones, except back in the same paper bag. I decline to take one; I would get into all kinds of mess.

  ‘Go on,’ says James, ‘have one. I’m sure Fran has a petri dish or something we can put the stones in.’

  I take a cherry while James leaps up to bother Fran for a dish, purple socks peeping. I eat round the stone. It is delicious. James returns, laughing, with something and we sit in silence for a few moments, eating more cherries and lobbing the stones into a kidney-shaped dish, as Mac sleeps. A rubber shoe squeaks on the polished floor; Bradley Walsh asks if any of the viewers think they’re clever enough to have a go; the tea trolley careers round the corner. A knife or fork clatters to the floor; there is insistent coughing, spreading down one side of the ward like a Mexican wave.

  Eventually Mac opens his eyes. I am holding the open bag of cherries, the dish of stones is on Mac’s bedside table; James is childishly dangling a cherry above his mouth, unaware he is being observed. I will Mac to speak. His favourite line from the next movie on The List – The Witches of Eastwick – is a little too rude for the sterile confines of the hospital ward but his second favourite is so brilliantly apt at this moment. He must feel it like I do.

  I urge Mac to say it, by some kind of brain osmosis, mine to his, but, although he is staring at the bag of cherries, he says nothing, so I do it for him. Well, our version of the line. I want to try out nonchalant, confident and fearless for size, put them on like my old denim jacket. I want to make Mac laugh – even if that’s currently impossible – like he made me laugh so many, many times.

  ‘Have another devil’s spawn,’ I say brightly to a bemused James, holding the bag of cherries out to him, and the corners of Mac’s dry lips slowly curl into the hint of a wolfish smile.

  THEN

  Chapter 15: The Witches of Eastwick

  Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick was probably the most brilliant and sexiest thing I had ever seen. I mean, I’d loved him in The Shining (‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ indeed) and I’d loved him in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the fishing trip!), but as Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick he was simply sublime. Mooching around with that devilishly impish grin; seducing Cher and Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, individually, then all at once; stretching and writhing on his bed in a silky dressing gown and a silly little ponytail, purring that he liked something very naughty indeed ‘after lunch’ … Outrageous, sexy, cheeky, wicked and arrogant … Oh, I was Jack’s for the duration of that film, every second. And his eyebrows should have got an Oscar, even if he didn’t.

  Mac and I watched The Witches of Eastwick in the screening room one afternoon at the height of summer. We were six weeks into the summer term, with four weeks to go until the end of the second year.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Mac asked as the credits rolled.

  ‘That cherries are definitely the devil’s spawn and I’m never eating them again as long as I live.’

  Mac laughed. I had tried to hide under his arm during the cherry-vomiting scenes. I may have done a bit of screeching. ‘Ah, my second favourite line in the film is the one about the cherries,’ he said. ‘Good old Jack.’

  ‘What’s your favourite line?’ I asked. ‘No, you don’t need to tell me. It’s the one about the pussy, isn’t it?’

  Mac clutched a hand to his chest. ‘Arden! This from a lady! Now, come on, tell me your thoughts on the film.’

  ‘Well …’ I considered; I was getting really great at this, I thought. ‘On the face it, this is a movie about female empowerment, the triumphant and potent release of their latent sexuality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mac, stroking his chin like a mickey-taking learned professor.

  ‘But …’ I took a dramatic pause, languidly stretched my tanned, smooth left leg up and over his knee and ran my hand slowly up my calf. I had his full attention.

  ‘But?’

  ‘It takes a man to release it.’

  ‘Oh, interesting.’ Mac’s hand followed mine up my leg, but overtook it and headed towards my thigh. I was wearing cute denim dungaree shorts, a white Kate Bush T-shirt underneath.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, warming to my theme, as Mac’s hand warmed my skin, under denim. ‘It’s under his touch that they’re released, isn’t it?’

  ‘True,’ said Mac. His eyebrow was up, not as high as Jack’s, but still pretty impressive; he was looking at me intently. The buckles of my dungarees were almost voluntarily coming undone. ‘But they conjured him up.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. I was finding it hard to focus on my train of thought; Mac’s
fingers were burrowing under the edge of my knickers; my breathing was becoming heavy. ‘But he completely steals the show!’ I argued, not without some difficulty. ‘It’s all about him! None of them are a match for Daryl Van Horny! And the whole thing is pure male fantasy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Or is it a satire of it?’ asked Mac, keeping his fingers where they were and leaning in to kiss me with those soft lips.

  Now he had got me. When he had finished kissing me, which was quite a while later, I gathered my hair back from my face and said, ‘It should be very interesting for your students, anyway. Lots for them to get their teeth into.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mac. ‘“Female empowerment or women kept in their traditional place? Discuss.” A good essay title, no?’

  I laughed, a little weakly. I had my own essay on the New Woman in nineteenth-century literature – due in next Tuesday – burning a hole in my terrible bedroom carpet in Leamington Spa. ‘A very entertaining romp of a movie, though,’ I said; ‘Hollywood at its best.’

  ‘You know I have one student who’s a complete chump,’ said Mac, standing up and dusting imaginary crumbs off his trousers. ‘All he says in seminars, in a long-drawn-out voice is “well, I really liked it”, although he doesn’t really ever say why. Over-earnest, but actually says nothing. There’s always one of those. I’ve got another one who’s always late and keeps falling asleep in lectures. He actually snores.’

  ‘What would it be like if I was on the course?’ I asked, leaning back in my seat and giving Mac a fine view of my chest, straining under those buckles. ‘Really? If I was in your lectures, or sitting opposite you in one of your seminars?’