You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  ‘Yeah, all the time,’ says James, and I smile to myself – so different to Mac, who saw everything as self-contained and every film as its own entity. ‘That’s a funny question, though. I thought we were talking about your mother.’

  ‘I still am,’ I say. ‘It’s kind of like the story of me and her finished years ago, with my dad dying, her moving away then going into that home, but I’ve hung around to see if anything else is going to happen, if she’s going to change … Of course, she hasn’t – the movie’s just gone on and on and on – no editing, no closing scenes, endless rushes of just the same – and I’ve realized nothing else does happen. That was it.’

  ‘So why hang around any more?’

  Yes, why am I still hanging around? Taking the abuse from her? Haven’t I taken enough? I can stop the movie right here, right now, and move on with my life, free of her. I would like to give a different answer to the question.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, I don’t need her in my life.’ And, as we pull up at another red light, I do what I should have done a long, long time ago. I decide to cut her from my life – for me, for Dad and every sad, terrible moment she gave him – and it’s already done before I’ve even properly thought it. There is no process, no soul searching, no long-drawn-out debating with myself. I decide – right here and right now – and Marilyn is gone, severed from me, like snapping a carrot in half, the rotten end falling and gone. As base and as un-Hollywood and as simple as that. ‘OK,’ I say breezily, glancing my hands off each other like I am dusting off flour, ‘I’ve done it. She’s gone.’

  ‘Just like that?’ He smiles.

  ‘Just like that,’ I say. I know I’m probably being far too flippant. Is it really done? Am I really free of her just like that? I stare out of the window as the lights turn orange and another black cab nudges its way forward to our left. Yes, it can be that simple. It could be. If I want to be free of her, then I am. The decision is under my own control. I am free. I haven’t been free for a long, long time.

  ‘I’ve done it,’ I say. I’ve done it, Dad. I’ve done it for me and I’ve done it for you. Now we are both free. ‘Thank you, James.’

  ‘I haven’t done that much,’ he says.

  ‘You have,’ I say. ‘You’ve taken me up there today and more importantly, you’ve brought me back.’ Despite my flippancy, my free, lightened spirit, I suddenly feel I could cry. That something feral and primeval and totally, bloody embarrassing could burst out of me in this car and take me over. That I could lay my head against the glass of the window next to me and let everything out in giant, heaving sobs of regret and misery and relief. For a few seconds I am on the brink of it, but then the feeling just stops.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asks James.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and I take a deep breath. ‘Yes. I’m OK.’

  My phone chimes in my bag, with the signal that I’ve got an email. I suspect it’s The Cedars detailing a list of complaints about my visit my mother ‘forgot’ to mention while I was there. I usually get one. Last time I visited there were ten bullet points, ranging from I moved the pot plant on the windowsill, to she didn’t like my perfume and it had given her a sinus reaction. The emails were always signed ‘Iris’; I suspected Iris had far too much time on her hands, or Marilyn had been bribing her. If it is from The Cedars it’s nothing to do with me now. I won’t reply to it. I will delete it. I can delete any others that come. I can stop answering the phone from them, too, at work. I won’t be stepping foot in The Cedars again and the shiny bright new knowledge of this makes me want to leap from the car and out into the traffic, to dance in the dark drizzle light of foot and free of heart, like an outdoor Riverdancer.

  ‘Do you need to check your phone?’ asks James.

  ‘No.’ In fact, I decide, ignoring my bag as it squats in the footwell, I’m not even going to look at the email; that’s how much I have moved on. It can sit benign in my inbox, as I am totally indifferent to it, and I will delete it later.

  I’m surprised James wants to go and visit Mac after such a long drive, but he says we should pop in, if just for a little while.

  ‘To see the old boy,’ he says. ‘He might miss us otherwise.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to,’ I say. ‘If you’re sure you want to.’

  ‘Of course.’

  James stretches his legs in the hospital car park, literally. He touches his toes and does some gym-like limb flexing. A passing elderly couple nudge each other and stare. While I watch and wait, thinking again what a strange one he is, the email notification on my phone chimes again. I’ll check it, I think. If it’s from The Cedars I’ll not only delete it but also strike their address from my contacts.

  The top email is from Dorothy Perkins. They have a sale on: 25 per cent off all shoes. The one below it is from Perrie Turque and it is short and very sweet.

  I’ve found him, it says.

  THEN

  Chapter 21: Pretty Woman

  The last film on Mac’s list was a biggie. A popular favourite. A colossal hit. I had already seen it when Mac and I settled down to watch it in the screening room; I think half the world had, since its release a few weeks before. Most of them had bought the soundtrack, too. Lots of luckless lovers had left the twelve-inch of ‘The King of Wishful Thinking’ outside their intended’s front doors, well, Becky had. Hers was Dhruv Henderson, a history student in Top End Leamington she’d sat next to on the coach back from a trip to the Birmingham Hippodrome. ‘Wishful Thinking’ hadn’t worked; she’d discovered the slightly soggy record still there when skulking past his house two days later. Maybe he wasn’t a Go West fan, I had suggested, giving her a consolatory hug when she arrived back at the Slug House, the offending article back in her bag, and we commiserated with Asti Spumante and breaded chicken, as we often did.

  ‘Richard Gere again?’ I remarked to Mac, stretching my legs over his in the screening room, one hot afternoon. I was in short shorts and a cropped white T-shirt; I was tanned from topless sunbathing in the tiny back yard of the Slug House, on a beach towel. There was only a week until the end of term and I was soaking up everything, while I could.

  ‘Richard Gere again,’ he replied.

  ‘The eternal rescuer of impoverished women …’ I mused, heeling off my plimsolls with the opposite foot and letting them drop to the thin carpet.

  Mac laughed. I was really interested in hearing his take on Pretty Woman. Would he see it as damning of feminism or all for it? Vivian as a passive rescuee saved only by a man’s wealth, or an independent, feisty heroine who knows exactly what she wants?

  I hadn’t made my mind up, myself, although I’d already seen Pretty Woman three times at the cinema with Becky. We loved it. We constantly quoted from and exaggerated the script. Julia Roberts’ scathing ‘huge!’ to the Rodeo Drive shop assistants became ‘colossal!’ in our re-enactments in the clothes shops of Coventry; her proposition to rescue Richard Gere ‘right back’ pompously became ‘the reciprocation of liberation’ in our hammy spoofs. We sometimes, for a laugh, even pretended to students who didn’t know us that Becky’s name was Kit and my name was Vivian. The first time we watched it, I’d been semi-outraged at the ending and had scoffed at it as a Cinderella-load of hokum. The second time I thought Julia Roberts had kicked arse; she had said how she wanted her fairy-tale ending to be and that’s what she’d got. The third time I’d just enjoyed it.

  Mac placed a warm hand on my left thigh and the credits rolled. I decided I could watch the opening of this movie every year for the rest of my life and still be excited by it. I wondered if it would still be a favourite in twenty or thirty years’ time. I was also apprehensive that our analytical discussion on this movie would be our last. As film number ten on The List, and, as things currently stood in our relationship, it could be the last film we ever saw together.

  We were acting as though everything was the same – larking around, having sex, sprawling on Mac’s bed, eating grapes a
nd cheese and biscuits – but things hadn’t been right since the BFI trip. I was struggling with trying to adjust to my new version of Mac – a romantic hero tarnished, to me, around the edges. Charismatic, fabulous, sexy as hell, yes, but also a man with anxieties: twitchy when not in his safe kingdom of campus; haunted by a dead brother he did not save; afraid of discovery; fallible. He was not the undented knight in shining armour I had imagined him to be and I didn’t know if I could adjust to the new image in my viewfinder. I kept wanting to wipe the lens with a soft cloth, to clear all the fog that had clouded it, or to give it a shake, like a snow globe, and restore him.

  I looked at him, and I shunted up the sofa of two chairs pushed together and flanked the side of my body to his. I wedged my chin in the soft cotton where his armpit met his chest and stretched my arm across him. I realized, as Richard Gere pulled up to the kerb in Stuckey’s sports car, I was gripping Mac’s biceps on the other side.

  I ungripped my hand and sat up. I really needed to loosen up, I thought, so I giggled at all the funny bits, shouted, ‘Yes!’ at Julia’s rebuff to the snooty shop assistants, sang along badly to ‘It Must Have Been Love’ (trying to ignore the bit about it being ‘over now’, in the context of Mac and me) and shed a secret tear at that disgustingly satisfying fairy-tale ending, which I disguised by rubbing at my face and pretending I had an itch.

  ‘What do you think?’ Mac asked me, at the end. He hadn’t been fooled by the itch; he had just pulled me in closer to him, until the beating of his heart was louder than my own silly romantic notions and the feeling he wasn’t quite the man I thought he was.

  I think we’re on shaky ground, is what I wanted to answer. I think we’re in trouble. But what I said, into his chest, was, ‘Well, there are two sides to it.’ My voice was all muffled so I shifted upright again. ‘On the one hand, it’s a conventional Hollywood story of a tart with a heart rescued by a rich man. On the other, Vivian completely calls the shots. She’s feisty, she’s independent, she dictates the conditions of her rescue and it has to be on her terms. And the whole “she says which men and how much she charges” business. All that.’

  ‘Yes, I agree,’ said Mac. His legs were still stretched out in front of him, in chinos. ‘There are totally two sides to it. So, do you think Richard Gere was a worthy partner for her? Did he deserve the spirited and beautiful Vivian?’ He looked at me. ‘It got to you, didn’t it? The fairy-tale ending? It gets to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Bloody Richard Gere, again! What a sucker I am! Ugh! I kind of hate myself for it!’

  ‘That’s Hollywood for you!’ laughed Mac and, despite myself, I realized how much I still wanted that laugh in my life. How much I still wanted Mac.

  ‘Well, I do hate myself.’ But I couldn’t help it, could I? Not now I had watched this movie with Mac. ‘And in answer to your question, yes, he does deserve her and I think it’s because he’s flawed … The flawed hero. Discuss …’ Now I understood. I paused for an instant, thought about it. ‘His insecurities, the whole father thing … Isn’t everyone flawed?’ I asked, looking carefully at those pale eyes with the pistachio flecks, under rimless glasses. Of course we were. Mac was flawed and I was too. I was selfish, a brat, unapologetic, unfeeling, expecting everything to be picture-perfect when there was no way it could be … Nobody was perfect, least of all me, but Mac loved me. What was the difficulty in loving him back if he was a dented knight, a tarnished hero? As Vivian – and Becky and I – said, he could rescue me and I could reciprocate.

  ‘You’re not,’ he said, ‘you’re just perfect.’

  He was wrong, but that he believed so was good enough. I didn’t need to shake the snow globe or wipe the lens to get a better picture. Weren’t the flawed heroes always the best?

  ‘What’s so funny?’ asked Mac softly. I realized I had a huge grin on my face, that I was giggling a little to myself.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Richard Gere, that’s all.’

  We could do this. We had the dreadful summer holidays to get through, then I would be back in halls on campus for the third year and everything would be OK. We wouldn’t go to London; I wouldn’t make him take me to restaurants or to that stupid pool. We could stay in our bubble on campus for another whole year, and after that, who knew? But I knew for certain my future would have Mac in it. I simply couldn’t visualize it without him.

  ‘I wonder what happened afterwards,’ I said, happily stroking Mac’s knee through his creased chinos. ‘After Edward rescued Vivian and she rescued him. Did they live happily ever after or did her past come back and haunt her? I wonder what Vivian’s life was like after the film ended.’

  ‘Not again.’ Mac smiled. ‘You always want to know what happens after the happy ever after!’

  I did, and I had more people on my list to wonder about now: Mayo and Paula, Ilsa and Laszlo, Ben and Elaine, Vicki Lester … Jack Lemmon and his beau at the end of Some Like It Hot … ‘And I think Vivian’s life turned out to be just brilliant,’ said Mac. ‘As will yours. You’re going to have the best life.’ He pulled me back down to his chest; stroked the curls at the back of my hair as I buried my face in the cotton of his shirt. ‘The best and most brilliant life. Make sure you do, Ardie. Make sure you go out there and have the best time, the best career, the best of everything. Be the best friend. The best lover. The best mother. The best of everything.’ Go out there? Make sure you do, Ardie? He didn’t see himself in that life, then? I’d be on my own? ‘I don’t believe in a whole lot in this world, but I believe in you. Life can be harsh. It doesn’t always have a happy ending, but go out and be brilliant.’

  I thought Mac believed in the magic of the movies, the finite Hollywood ending. But I also knew what he was saying was true – there were some things that weren’t magical, or turned out the way you wanted. Sometimes a pond in the milky light of the moon was just a pond, and a deadly one, too, in the shade of a summer’s day. Sometimes a cherry was just a cherry. And sometimes the hero does not swoop into the factory at the end and carry you away to a better life. Sometimes he’s not even quite the hero you want him to be …

  ‘Do you really believe in me?’ I asked, raising my head a little. ‘Do you really believe I’m going to have the best life?’

  ‘Yes I do, I really believe that. You’ve got it all, Ardie. You’ve got everything you’ll ever need.’

  ‘You sound like you won’t be there. In this best life. Please don’t tell me I’ll have a bigger love than you, again.’

  ‘You will.’

  And he said it so gently I was filled with sorrow. I lay in his arms, my head on his shoulder, and curled my legs up on to his lap like a child.

  The next morning I crept out of Mac’s flat early. After the screening we’d had a restorative night, fuelled by my own purpose, that was, to restore our relationship to what it had been: lots of wine, lots of sex, lots of laughing until our faces ached, some chocolate cake, and at one point, naked, me putting on Mac’s cowboy boots, just because it was funny. At 5 a.m. we’d lain in bed entwined like tree roots, listening to the birds chirping outside Mac’s window as they alighted on the branch, tapped giddily on the glass then skittered off again.

  I’d decided with relief to simply love Mac again in the here and now, to not worry about my future as he clearly wasn’t; to put aside fears of what would happen to us after our shifting, gossamer-thin but sheeny bubble of a happy-ever-after. I was happy just to love him again, be in his company, learn from him and embrace all that he was. Everything felt wonderful.

  Mac said he’d be busy for the rest of the day: he had back-to-back seminars, an appraisal with the faculty head and tonight he had to mark a million essays on Avant Garde Cinema. He was dusting his living room as I left; I laughed at him being all domesticated, said it made him look sexy and I would love to see him doing it naked, under a frilly apron. I almost didn’t leave, but Mac shooed me away, laughing, with his duster.

  I would spend the rest of my day productively, too. Go b
ack to the Slug House, wash my sheets at the local launderette, tidy my hideously messy room, finish my George Eliot essay, make a start on the better, more shiny person Mac said I was going to turn out to be. Although I was already pretty perfect, as he had said that too.

  First I had to walk to the centre of campus to get some money out and I was actually whistling – something by Kylie Minogue – as I headed to the courtyard with the little cluster of banks and cash machines, the campus launderette I had used in the first year and the tiny supermarket visited for exam-writing munchies and extortionate back-up supplies when a trek to Sainsbury’s was too much for hungover bones. I got out ten pounds from the NatWest cashpoint and decided to nip into the supermarket for a packet of chocolate digestives. I held open the door for the person coming out. She took her time coming through, encumbered as she was by a straining carrier bag dangling from each hand, a bunch of flowers shoved under one arm and a very noticeable pregnancy.

  I stopped. I stared. A pregnant woman was a rarity on campus; this was my first ever sighting of one. The woman had long straight blonde hair in an Alice band. She was wearing a pale denim shirt dress, loose over her bump, and under it her legs were pale and laced up to the calves with Roman-style sandals. She had a tight smile, wide-set blue or possibly green eyes, and an aquiline nose with the shadow of a line across it, like Adam Ant’s make-up or the marking of a tiger.

  It was Helen.

  NOW

  Chapter 22

  It’s really hot on the ward this evening; someone must have turned up the radiators. I immediately shrug off my charity-shop Burberry, flop it over my arm and push up the sleeves of my cream Diane-Keaton-in-Something’s-Gotta-Give roll neck. A man at the nurses’ station standing in front of James and me drags his long black Puffa coat further round him as he loiters at the visitors’ book. He rakes a finger through shaggy, curly hair, then tugs on the front of it as though trying to straighten it out.