You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  ‘Who’s that boy with?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Should we say something?’ Mac wiped his brow; he looked unnerved.

  ‘What would we say?’

  ‘Well, ask him who’s he with?’

  ‘He must be with someone,’ I said. I looked around. I really didn’t know who. ‘He’s probably with that woman there.’ We both looked at the young woman with the headphones. She still stared straight ahead. The boy was smiling, tapping; he’d noticed the falling fiver now and had stuffed it back inside his pocket. ‘Anyway, we’re getting off now.’

  ‘I think we should say something to someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  The tube rattled into White City where we had to change; the brick walls, the advertising posters, the waiting people. The door swept open. ‘Mind the gap between the platform and the train,’ a voice said.

  Mac hesitated, looked distressed.

  ‘Come on then!’ I took his hand and pulled him off the train.

  As the door shut behind us, Mac said, ‘We should have asked him. We should have asked that boy who he was with. We should have asked that woman.’ He was running his fingers through his floppy hair, his eyes wild; he was frightening me.

  ‘Don’t worry about it!’ I cried. ‘There are probably loads of streetwise kids running around London, hopping on and off the tubes. Who cares?’

  ‘Maybe we should tell a guard?’ There was one behind us talking to an elderly lady; she was saying something in a plummy voice about the Palace Theatre.

  ‘And say what? Come on, Mac. You’re being silly.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re probably right,’ said Mac, but he looked anguished all the way to Hammersmith and I got cross with him, because he was ruining the last hours of our special trip that Stewart Whittaker had already put a dent in and it was all rather ridiculous.

  ‘Stop it now,’ I said, quite sternly. ‘Please.’ He dropped the anguished look, and by the time we walked to the NCP car park he was trying and failing to be charismatic and good-humoured again – but he didn’t fool me.

  The drive back to Warwick was pretty awful: the traffic horrendous, Mac’s mood indefinable. Yes, he spoke, he laughed, he sang along to the songs on Radio 1 (which I put on), but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He drew a barely disguised sigh of relief when we turned into campus and I could barely disguise my annoyance.

  ‘So, I’m going to go home.’ I shrugged, standing behind his car and hefting my carpet bag on to my shoulder under dappled sunlight. ‘Back to the slug-infested hovel.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mac. He was looking around him. What was wrong with him? Was he worried the Dean was going to jump out at us from a bush and snare us in a net? ‘I’ve got some work to catch up on anyway, so …’

  ‘Thank you for a lovely time,’ I said tersely, giving my best pout.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mac. He was glancing over to his building, ready to scurry inside. He’d said he loved me yesterday, I thought, as I walked away. Last night. How could things have gone so ever-so-slightly wrong since then? Because of a man on the street and a boy on the tube? I felt there had been an unravelling in London, like when a spool of film runs out from one of those clunking grey projectors – whipping to its end with an unsettling clatter. We were reduced, somehow. We were not quite what we had been.

  Mac was weird for a few days after that. When I was next at his flat I noticed a copy of the Evening Standard on his little side table next to the sofa, and he casually told me he’d placed a subscription for it, from London.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Keep me abreast of London news,’ he said, but I didn’t believe him. I suspected he was scouring that paper daily for news of that boy. Some tragic accident, a murder? God knows what Mac was looking for but it became a temporary kind of obsession for him.

  ‘You watch too many movies, Mac!’ I said, after I had seen the paper on his side table for the third time. He was on the sofa taking notes on Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy, while I lounged next to him with a cup of tea and attempted to read Middlemarch. Mac didn’t laugh. He popped his glasses on the top of his head and looked at me with clear, cool eyes.

  ‘No. But I have encountered real life,’ he said.

  ‘I know you’re looking for news of that boy. It’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Is it? Bad things happen to people all the time, Arden,’ he said, rubbing at his eyes. ‘To children. We should have said something. We could have done something.’

  ‘We didn’t need to do anything!’ I protested. ‘That boy was fine. He is fine!’

  ‘I lost my brother, when I was a kid.’ Mac put his glasses back on and stared at Cagney shoving a grapefruit into his girlfriend’s face at breakfast.

  ‘Lost? What do you mean? Lost in a supermarket or something?’

  ‘Not lost, lost. Died. Drowned.’

  My heart contracted for a millisecond. I put my book on my lap. I remembered Mac’s distaste for the lido, his nervy unease, his declaration he wouldn’t be getting in the water. ‘How awful. What happened?’

  Mac looked away. He fiddled with the corner of his shirt, rubbing at it between index finger and thumb. Then he looked back at me and started talking.

  ‘There was a group of us, when we were kids, my little brother and me and a load of other kids from school. We used to go to this pond not far from us, in the middle of some woods. Swim in it, particularly on hot summer days. It was always in the shade, it was always lovely and cool. We went there in the summer holidays one time when I was about fifteen. We were all larking around, as boys do. Diving to the bottom for a big stone we’d found, over and over again. There were too many of us. Too many boys.’ He paused. ‘Reggie didn’t come up, but we didn’t realize for ages that he hadn’t. He’d got tangled in the weeds. He was lying on the bottom of the pond. I guess no one noticed.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘It took all of us to pull him out and get him to the surface, but by then, of course, it was too late. He was only seven.’

  ‘Oh God, Mac,’ I said. ‘That’s so terrible.’

  ‘Yeah. It was bloody awful. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. That I didn’t notice. How could I have not noticed that my brother didn’t come up again?’ Mac looked wretched, broken. I had never seen that look on his face before.

  ‘Because you were a boy,’ I said softly, surprised at how caring I sounded. ‘Because you were playing with loads of your mates and you just didn’t notice.’

  He’d noticed that boy on the tube, though, hadn’t he? He’d noticed and hadn’t done anything. I got it now. The panic on his face, the agitation, the Evening Standard. I felt sick; this was an awful story. Poor Mac.

  ‘We never went back to that pond again,’ he said. ‘I think of it sometimes. Still there in the shade. It’ll probably be there for ever.’

  My heart contracted again. I recalled with horror my flippant anecdote about my mother and the boy who’d nearly drowned at the leisure centre. That was why Mac had wanted to flee the lido: my story, delivered against the splashy scenery of pool shouts, merry screams, tomfoolery and laughter. A story where I’d got the focus all wrong – it should have been on the poor boy who had nearly died, or at least his worried family, not my own acid indignation towards my mother. I also remembered The Water Babies and all the lost children Mac had been unable to rescue, and my heart ached for him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mac,’ I said, and I really meant it.

  ‘It’s just one of those things,’ he said. ‘Just one of those terrible, terrible things.’ And he got up and left the sofa to walk to the kitchen, where I heard him flick the kettle on.

  A few days later, it was over. I didn’t see another copy of the Evening Standard and Mac didn’t mention that boy on the tube or poor Reggie again. Still, I felt like something had shifted. We had gone into a patch of shade which hovered over us, biding its time. A little colour had drained from our affair, like from a seventies caravan curtain left flapping i
n a sunny plastic window too long. I was even scared I had fallen out of love with him, just a little, so when Mac mentioned the next movie on The List – A Star Is Born – I jumped at the chance of watching it with him so we could get ourselves back on track.

  Mac and I saw the Judy Garland and James Mason version of A Star Is Born – the Technicolor one, from 1954, where Judy dances for James in tights and a button-down shirt and announces herself in a moment of high drama at the end of the movie as Mrs Norman Maine. We watched it in the hot screening room, two weeks after Soho, with a large bag of M&M’s and noisy cans of Dr Pepper, but despite our attempt at all-American movie-going high spirits, there was a swirl of unacknowledged disquiet and unease around us.

  The film is super-charged with high-colour vibrancy and big-band numbers, but I found it sad and quite depressing. When Judy Garland sings her torch song, ‘The Man That Got Away’, I wondered how soon Mac might become mine. When Judy as Esther Blodgett goes to the studio lot in Hollywood, after James Mason – who sees something in her no one else can – sends her, and the backstage elements of artifice are revealed: lighting, gaudy make-up, wigs and being given an arbitrary, more glamorous new name, I felt deflated. The drinking, the despair, the hollowness of surface-sparkly Hollywood left me feeling strangely bereft and the melancholy of Judy’s voice went right through me, haunted me. I cried at the end as yes, it was a very sad ending, but also because of my own fear and sadness, which I’d nursed since London, that Mac and I were reaching the end of something.

  We didn’t even discuss the movie afterwards, as we warily walked back to Westwood under intermittent street lights. I couldn’t be bothered to give Mac my brilliant thoughts on the movie’s portrayal of women – how it was pre-feminist, with its self-denial and its keeper-of-the-flame Mrs Norman Maine business. I didn’t mention how I had never seen a movie more about the trials, the drive and terror of failure of one woman. How the sheer power of Esther Blodgett becoming Vicki Lester frightened me. Mac was walking in front of me, two paces, as though making sure he could easily extend them to five, or six, if someone came the other way.

  Everything felt vulnerable, fragile, impermanent and a little fake. With both his revelation about his brother and his fear of the discovery of our affair revealed to me, Mac was now fallible and not the giant I had imagined him to be. When your rescuer needs rescuing himself, the fairy tale gets shattered … I was supposed to be the brittle damaged one who needed stuff seeing in me. I couldn’t be any kind of salve to Mac. I just didn’t have it in me.

  ‘Would you say A Star Is Born is melodrama?’ Mac asked me, hands in pockets.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I thought it was but I wasn’t in the mood to talk.

  ‘A melodrama should bring out heightened emotions,’ he said, as we walked. ‘There’s another film I was debating having on The List, Imitation of Life. Do you know it?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, wishing I did, to impress and get some of us back. I wanted all of us back – the laughter, the carefree joy, but I was worried the fun and fearlessness of Mac and I had disappeared.

  ‘It’s a Douglas Sirk movie,’ says Mac. ‘His last, and what a way to go out! Lana Turner’s in it. She has a black maid whose daughter passes herself off as white. It’s highly emotional, a real weepie – you’ll weep buckets, I guarantee it. There’s a funeral scene that is just “wow”. We should watch it sometime.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. The end of term was fast approaching. I wondered exactly how much time we had left together, if we would last another year, and whether the best of us had already passed. God, I hated myself like this – morose, flattened. I decided there was another way to get back on track. As soon as we got through the door of his flat I took my top off and led Mac into his bedroom, where I seduced him as the languid branch at his window tap-tapped a lazy finger down the pane in the mid-summer dusk.

  NOW

  Chapter 20

  James and I are on the home stretch. There is about a mile of the journey left. We are stop-start at traffic lights, we are wedged between hissing and belching buses, we are assaulted by fumes and skimmed by weekend Boris bikes flashing by in the dark – but I lace my fingers and stretch my arms lazily out in front of me as I am quite content. I am cheered by carrot cake and the butterflies. I am far from Marilyn again.

  ‘Why do you keep going?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  James is fiddling with the radio, we’ve got bored of pop and inane, breathy DJ-chat; we’ve been thoroughly geeked out by a presentation on Radio 4 about quantum physics and the application of amplitudes, or something. I quite enjoyed that, actually – at least, I’d loved how consumed James was by it, how concentrated. He was nodding at things I didn’t even understand and it made me smile. James finally settles on something classical, a piece I know but cannot name.

  ‘Going to see your mother?’ he says. ‘You say you don’t like her. You looked miserable before you went in, even more miserable when you came out. You needed the help of the butterflies to get over it.’

  ‘True,’ I say, with a laugh. A bus draws up alongside us, about an inch from the car. Inside, so brightly lit I feel like a voyeur, passengers are sullen under headphones or chatting to each other, laughing. I see a girl pull something from a Topshop bag and show it to her friend.

  ‘I broached it in the café and I’ll broach it again now. You don’t have to go again, you know. Why do you?’

  ‘The honest answer is I don’t know,’ I say, as the bus pulls away with a wheeze. ‘Duty. That someone will tell me off if I don’t.’

  ‘Who’s going to tell you off?’ James brakes suddenly, for a wobbling pizza delivery bike. ‘All right, mate, take it easy, there you go … You’re not a child, Arden.’

  ‘I know. And I don’t know.’ My jolly mood has collapsed; I don’t want to talk about her any more today. I have moved on. I have had carrot cake and butterflies.

  There’s a kid and a dog in the back seat of the black cab in front of us. Both are waving at us – well, there’s a paw and a hand at the back window, anyway. Perhaps they’re playing rock, paper, scissors.

  ‘You feel a duty between daughter and mother,’ continues James. ‘But there doesn’t need to be one. You could simply cut and run.’

  ‘Cut and run?’ Cut the choking apron strings and run for my life? I think. Where would I go, to escape her? She’s always back there, to be drawn to, like a flame to a dull, brown moth, which is what I am. Or at least what I was until Mac came back into my life. I’d like to think at least one of my wings is tipped with a little colour now.

  ‘Yeah. You don’t have to see her any more if you don’t want to.’ The traffic is moving so slowly James is literally holding the steering wheel with one thumb.

  ‘Don’t I?’

  The kid waggles a lolly at us; the dog, a tongue.

  ‘Do you owe her anything?’

  ‘She’s all alone.’

  ‘I suspect that’s her choice. Or rather, the consequence of all her choices. Whatever they are.’ He beeps and gestures goodnaturedly at a professional cyclist weaving too close to the car on a spindly road bike. ‘You now have a choice. Mac is lonely – you want to sit with him. You feel something for him. You have a history you feel fondness towards. It warms your heart.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your mother is also lonely, I’m guessing. But you have an awful history with her, don’t you? Well, you haven’t told me much about it – almost nothing – but she’s been cold to you, and you now feel cold towards her. That’s evident. If you don’t want to see her any more then choose not to.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say. The more I’m with him the more he surprises me. He is so very black and white – none of this analysing things for a hundred years like I do. ‘You make it sound so simple.’

  ‘It is simple, Arden.’ And I like the way my name sounds in his accent. He overtakes a white van. ‘Am I right or am I right?’

  ‘Groundhog Day.’ I smile.

  ‘I am
right,’ he says, and he is smiling. ‘Don’t continue to be a supporting artist to all her drama. Sorry, I’m guessing that too. That there’s drama.’

  ‘There’s always drama,’ I agree.

  ‘She made a mistake. Being a bad mother to you. Don’t make a bigger mistake by letting yourself suffer for it for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Colossal,’ I mutter, looking out of the window as I remember the last film on Mac’s list. A car streaks past us in the other direction, windows down despite the dark and cold, Drake or some other rapper Julian is into blaring. ‘Do you really think I can never see her again? That I can get away with it?’ It would be like a crime, I think. Like Bonnie and Clyde in their getaway car, on a killing spree.

  ‘Your choice,’ he says, ‘but it’s within your own power to make it. Do what’s right for you. My mother did. She did the right thing for us and for her. You can do the right thing.’

  I think of Vicki Lester, all the strong women in the movies. I wonder how I would have been discussed in a ‘Portrayal of Women’ seminar, if I was in the movie of my own life. At one time strong, unapologetic and fearless, if rather cold and more than a little sinful. Now? Pathetic?

  ‘Do you need her in your life? That’s what you need to ask yourself.’

  I heard the same question, many moons ago, from Mac, not long after Marilyn’s terrible gatecrashing visit to Warwick. The answer had clearly been an echoing ‘yes’ as I have kept her in it for a long, long time – if only in the shadows, like a dark spectre. A bird, waiting high on a telephone wire, to come and rip at my hair. A woman with a knife, glinting in sunlight. Someone with more power than me because I had let her have it.

  Nobody has ever said to me before that I can just not see her again. It seems so simple. Is it something I’ve been waiting for permission for? I don’t want her to wield any power over me. Not any more. My real mother is never coming back.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what happens after the end of the movie?’ I say. ‘After all the decisions have been made, all the kissing has been done, the baddies have been banged up, the goodies have found the treasure? Do you wonder what comes next?’