You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A student. Jonathan Flemmings.’

  ‘Who the hell’s that?’

  ‘Philosophy student. Third year. That’s all I know.’

  It dawns on me like a forbidding early dusk. The boy in the Smiths T-shirt. I bet it was that weasel. He’d seen us, hadn’t he, at the pool? Fuck. How empty would his sad, student life have to be to tell someone about us?

  ‘Well, the Dean can’t do anything. It’s not against the law! It’s not even against university rules!’ I cried, but I was already anticipating a sea of faces, lining up against the sides of the Arts Centre, or somewhere equally exposing – the local press having been alerted – to stare at me, heads shaking in slow, repulsed motion … I was furious some little rat had snitched on us. This, and the pregnant Helen had conspired to doom Mac and me – I knew the two truths combined were enough to bring us down and destroy everything.

  ‘I’m staying with Helen,’ said Mac, still holding me at the waist. ‘I need you to understand that. She’s pregnant and I have to stay with her.’ The word ‘pregnant’ was so soul-rippingly gutting it made me attempt a short derisive laugh, but I thought I might be sick. ‘I’m so sorry, Arden, but I’m afraid this brings things to a natural end for us.’

  A natural end? There was nothing natural about us ending. It was highly unnatural. Jarring, man-made; like a jagged snag of metal scraping against glass. Mac and I weren’t something to just peter out, like the end of a frayed piece of string, or a scene in a movie fading to black … We were strong, we were everything, there could be no end.

  ‘We can’t end,’ I said, and I knew I sounded absolutely pitiful, but I didn’t care. I was full of pity, for myself and for us. This was it – this was the greatest love I would ever know and he didn’t want it any more. ‘I love you.’

  ‘And I love you. But it has to, Ardie. We have to finish this now.’

  I was being locked out. Ejected. Exiled. I had become Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, the movie that had started all this. My calls would be unanswered, my pleading ignored; I would be forced to metaphorically wait in office receptions – for ever – in a long leather coat.

  Like Alex, I erupted. ‘This is not a “this”! This is us! I hate you for doing this! You were supposed to want me over everything, but you’re as boring as everyone else. You’re choosing conformity. I never thought you would do that! The safe option, respectability … family. Ugh!’ Family sickened me. It always had. I was different, or I was supposed to have been. I didn’t want to tie Mac down, have his babies. I just wanted to be with him. If there was a wall near enough I would have punched it. I was so frustrated, my blood was boiling like sticky hot tar, about to spill over and make a hot mess everywhere. I knew Mac was willing me to keep my voice down again.

  ‘I have to,’ was all he said. That was all he’d got. So much for my charismatic hero. When push came to shove he would give up love for life.

  ‘You’re doing a Casablanca!’ I cried quietly. ‘You’re giving me up for the greater good.’ And I laughed, then, a little hysterically, because it just sounded so ridiculous. ‘And how can we stop the feelings we have? We can’t just stop.’

  Mac sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Do you think no one else has felt what we’re feeling right now, that no one else has had to put an end to a love affair? Thousands, millions of people have, and we have to, too. Ardie … I—’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ I wrenched myself free of his consoling grip and lurched away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, one final, bloody time.

  ‘Goodbye, Mac!’

  I was dramatic, I was pathetic; I was a performer playing a part, but I knew I would never know this again. This love. I ran back to the hitching point as I had run home to Whitefields so many nights in the first year, but this time I was sobbing my heart out and my legs were not those of a giddy lover, tumbling home after hours of passion and illicit excitement, but those of a wretch who had come undone. I slumped in the back of some unknown girl’s 2CV and was transported back to Leamington. I staggered in and ignored the line-up of people on the sofa, now eating limp fried egg sandwiches – one of whom was Becky, who asked me what on earth the matter was. She followed me upstairs but I simply told her it was over, it was over, and I shut my door and got into my bed and pulled the duvet high up over my head.

  NOW

  Chapter 24

  We don’t exactly have to queue up, but there’s quite a merry band of us round Mac’s bed tonight – the atmosphere is almost festive, despite the fact it’s a rainy Sunday in mid-January and people are not feeling festive at all but cold, miserable, fat and totally fed up at all that winter still to be trudged through.

  There’s me, of course – where else would I be? James, for once not in suit and tie but a pair of dark blue jeans and a teal lambswool jumper – he does smart casual pretty well. He brings me a gift tonight – a packet of Polos and a Bella magazine – which finds me surprised and quite touched. Lloyd, on his second visit, seems to have been to the shops and bought more clothes: he is wearing a brand-new bright red sweatshirt and a pair of cargo trousers with a thousand pockets on them. He still hasn’t managed socks. Fran is sitting with us, too; she’s come in for the last ten minutes of her break and is showing everyone a complicated card trick that looks unlikely to succeed. Hooting with laughter and slapping her own thigh, she has already dropped three cards on the floor.

  Mac is sitting up, bolstered on pillows. The doctors have reported that the opposing, positive fifty per cent is taking charge today and he’s having what is known in medical terms as a ‘very good day’. He is smiling; his left hand managed to form itself into a surprising, half thumbs-up when I came into the ward, and his eyes are bright. ‘His lordship’s behaving himself,’ says Fran, and his bloods are equally well behaved this evening, apparently; I imagine them giving each other a thumbs-up, too. The ward feels … happy. It’s like it’s New Year’s Eve again; I feel everyone should have party hats on. The nurses are upbeat; the tea trolley rattles gleefully like it’s on a victory tour; cheeks are pink and eyes bright; even the coughs sound pretty merry tonight. Ward 10 is bright and light, free of gloom and foreboding, sickness and dread. With almost Dickensian cheer, there is a roar of laughter from somewhere behind us; next someone will be bringing out a giant roasted goose on a silver platter … This is how I’m choosing to see it, anyway; if I want to shine a bright convivial light on Ward 10 then I will.

  Julian is also here. My boy. He turned up at home about five o’clock – Sam’s on a girls’ cinema night out – and I know he was on a Sunday roast dinner-beg but I told him I was coming to St Katherine’s and he said he’d come with me, if there was a café. Food overrides everything for him, even the universal dislike of hospitals. He asked who ‘this Mac’ was, as we walked; I gave him a sunny-as-I-could potted history of the story of Mac and me, aware of a bad light painting us black, up to me yelling drunkenly at Mac outside his flat, that summer’s evening, a pregnant Helen inside. I tried to give it a comic spin, that final scene, for Julian’s benefit, said I had screeched like a banshee, almost had a bucket of water chucked on me from an upstairs window and had fallen head first into a flower bed. Inside, I was dying all over again.

  ‘Wow,’ Julian said. ‘So he lied to you, carried on seeing you even though his wife was pregnant … must be some bloke! I’m definitely coming to the hospital, out of curiosity! Why on earth are you visiting him?’

  I laughed and then frowned. It’s a question I have asked myself many times since my first visit. Why come and visit a man who once betrayed me?

  ‘I admit Mac doesn’t come across particularly well in this story,’ I said.

  ‘Er, understatement!’

  I laughed again, although I felt a little sick as I added, ‘Nor me.’

  ‘You weren’t married! Why are you visiting him?’ he asked again.

  ‘I’m visiting him because I remember what came
before the end of our affair,’ I said, ‘or I choose to. How good it was, the year and a half I was with him, how enveloped it all is in memories of my youth, in the magic of movies, in the promise of myself. You don’t have to play the film until the final scene, if you don’t want to.’ Yes, that’s it, I think – stop the movie while things are still amazing. ‘He gave me so much – believed in me – so I don’t like to think about the end, but what came before. I try to do the same with Grandad.’ This is true – I’ve always tried to imagine my dad pottering in the shed at the bottom of the garden, arranging his ice-cream tubs of nuts and bolts, smoking his roll-up cigarettes, using his set of hand weights to do his bicep curls with; not what he did there at the end. I’ve failed at this; I have remained haunted. But now Marilyn is gone from my life I will try harder to remember my father as he was and keep him in my memory in relation to me and not to her. He deserves it.

  His name was William Richard Hall and he was my dad.

  ‘I know you do,’ said Julian, sadness glazing his eyes. He was ten years old and bewildered when Dad died, but we got through it. The shock, the emptiness, the swiping away of everything we held certain about life and ourselves – which Christian had already carved a deep and dangerous gorge into. Julian and I can get through anything. I hope he can understand about Mac.

  ‘Mac loved me. And, oh God, you’re probably going to be embarrassed by this – sorry! – but I’d forgotten how that feels and what it means. It’s been so lovely to be reminded.’

  ‘That is cringe,’ said Julian with a wide smile, slipping his arm through mine. ‘How embarrassing.’ He winked at me and then nodded. ‘But I understand. I was there, Mum,’ he said, looking at me with serious eyes. ‘I was there all those years with Christian.’

  ‘I know you were. It’s something I think about every single day. What he put you through. What I put you through. I’m sorry.’ I have said ‘sorry’ to my boy for Christian so many times.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said, and it is not the first time he’s said it, my forgiving, wonderful, generous boy. ‘With that kind of man you don’t realize they’re that kind of man until it’s too late. That’s sort of the point.’

  ‘I’m still sorry,’ I said. I’ll always be sorry.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you OK now, Julian?’ I asked, searching his face for an answer. ‘Are you really OK?’ It’s one thing to survive, I think, another not to be haunted.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, Mum. I really am fine.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure. I bumped into him, you know, Christian. The other day. In a pub in the City. Lunchtime.’

  I froze. This has been a recurring nightmare of mine: Julian running into Christian. Felix, he wouldn’t recognize, hopefully. ‘What? Oh God. What happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened. I saw him. I’m sure he didn’t know who I was. I looked at him, looked away and that was that.’

  ‘Were you OK?’ I was shaking, a little. ‘God, Julian, how did you feel?’

  ‘I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. The man means absolutely nothing to me. Don’t look so worried. I’m telling you to prove a point. You don’t have to worry about me, Mum. I really am fine.’ He smiled at me. ‘We’re natural born survivors, Mum. You and me against the world, right?’

  ‘Right.’ I smiled uncertainly back at him, my heart flooding with love and that measure of regret that will always be there, whatever points are proved and however many times I’m told not to worry. ‘You and me against the world.’

  ‘Anyway, look, be reminded,’ he said, ‘with this Mac person. Be more than reminded, if it makes you feel wonderful. Perhaps you’ll feel so wonderful one day you’ll go out there and look for love again.’

  I laughed, disbelieving. I also have an image of Christian in a City pub I need to shake from my mind. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘No, I know you don’t,’ Julian said, ‘but you can think about it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I replied. My son saw Christian in a pub and he is unscathed. I can’t think about much else.

  ‘Hmm,’ Julian echoed, gently mocking me. ‘Well, I love you, anyway, Mum, which is possibly even more cringe.’ Yes, he does. His love has been a constant, through everything. It has been my oxygen. I’d like to think my love has been enough to sustain him, to arm him for those nightmare moments in life, in the City and elsewhere, but maybe he has armed himself, all on his own.

  ‘There’s no need to creep,’ I replied, mocking him back. I shook the image of Christian. Lightened up. ‘I promise I’ll be buying you dinner anyway. But, thank you,’ I said, squeezing his arm. ‘About Mac.’ He understands, I thought. He may understand everything. ‘Thank you, Julian.’

  The tea trolley rattles past the end of Mac’s bed. Julian looks at the plate of digestive biscuits longingly as they sail by. When he came in Julian nodded at Mac as I stood by and proudly announced him as my son. Mac smiled at Julian and smiled at me. He understands, too, I hope. Julian has been staring at him curiously ever since, though it might just be hunger and boredom. We’ll go to the café once we’ve finished our visit; not for a while yet.

  We all laugh at the bodged flourished finale of Fran’s card trick and she felts back to the nurses’ station in soft shoes, then Lloyd shows Mac more photos of his grandchildren, on his phone. This is a good, good day. Everyone is basking in Mac’s light. Even though he is silent and has no words with which to embroider them, his magnetism and presence are here; he’s just making people feel good, somehow, like he used to. Perhaps that’s another reason I have kept on coming.

  ‘Mac looks happy,’ James remarks to me. Due to there being so many of us, his chair is quite close to mine; our legs are almost touching. I have red woolly tights on, a tartan skirt – yes, Ali MacGraw again. James’s legs are crossed at the ankle, his socks yellow with ladybirds on.

  ‘He does, doesn’t he?’ I reply, smiling at the ladybirds. ‘What a difference a Lloyd makes, eh? How did you get on with Dachshund Woman?’

  ‘Offer made and accepted,’ he says. ‘With the aid of some puppy chocolate drops I picked up from a corner shop en route.’

  ‘Bribe the dog, always works.’

  He grins a boyish grin and I grin back. I catch Julian throwing me a curious glance as a result and I pretend I haven’t seen it. ‘Have you relented?’ James asks.

  ‘Relented?’

  ‘Your mother?’

  We are talking quietly – I don’t think anyone can hear us – but I sneak another look at Julian, on the other side of the bed. He hasn’t seen Marilyn for years; after Christian I didn’t want him damaged any more so I stopped taking him to The Cedars, where she still sung that man’s praises and tutted over the fact we’d left him. I don’t want Julian to hear me talking about her now. I don’t want him tainted by her, although having seen how strong he is today, maybe her name would just bounce off him like a penny from armour plate.

  ‘No, I haven’t relented.’ It’s a fait accompli as far as I am concerned. Job done, no going back. I’ve felt so free since I made my decision, like Marilyn was hanging off me, her scrawny arms grasping round my neck, and now I have prised them off and stepped away into the light and fresh air. She is not my problem now. She is being looked after, but not by me. I have also let go of the notion she might ever love me. It’s about time.

  ‘Good,’ says James and I detect a slight wink, just a small one, then reckon I have imagined it.

  We sit, we chat, we laugh – all Mac’s visitors. After a while, Lloyd announces he’s going to the coffee machine and asks if I’ll give him a hand. I say, ‘Yes,’ but he marches off ahead of me, leaving me to trail behind like I’m a puppy hoping for chocolate drops.

  ‘You’re still here, then, after I told you about all Dad’s affairs. I thought it might put you off coming,’ he says, irritated, pressing at random buttons until his cup drops down and waits for hot liquid to cascade into it. I stand next to him, feeling like a told-off child,
suddenly, in my tartan skirt and red tights. ‘I’m impressed by your loyalty.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ I reply. ‘I’ve got nothing better to do.’ He doesn’t laugh or smile. His ‘you’re still here, then?’ isn’t very nice and the ‘I’m impressed by your loyalty’ makes him sound like a not-very-good Bond villain.

  ‘You obviously felt a great deal for him.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I suppose that never goes away.’

  ‘No, not really.’ I watch as black liquid whooshes into the cup, which is vibrating a little. Lloyd is staring at me. I want to look away but instead I stare back at him, until it eventually becomes a challenge: one of those childhood stare-outs where you mustn’t blink.

  ‘There’s something else,’ he says. His coffee is waiting for him but he is not reaching for it.

  ‘Something else?’ That’s exactly what Mac once said. About the beetle-ish Dean and his discovery of us.

  ‘I have a theory, on seeing that photo – you know: the two of you in bed …’

  ‘Yes …?’ OK, does he have to keep bringing that up?

  ‘And how Dad’s face lit up when he was looking at you, talking about you.’ He pauses, pulls quickly at his Father Christmas beard, his coffee still sitting waiting. ‘I think he was continually searching for another you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. What else can I say? I wish I was wearing something other than my cutesy Ali MacGraw get-up, like an eighties power suit with shoulder pads, from Working Girl, or something. I feel I need to be stronger for this.

  ‘I saw one of his women once,’ he continues, watching milk tumble into his cup. ‘Blonde curly hair, petite, getting into his car outside the library – he didn’t know I was there, of course – and when I saw your photo I thought, Ah yes, that library woman looked just like this girl. I think he was looking for you in every one of his affairs.’

  ‘But you don’t know what any of the others looked like, do you?’

  He shrugs. ‘It’s just a theory.’