You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ I really don’t know what to say. So, I was not only the cause of one affair, but the catalyst for dozens of others? That’s a very big burden for someone to carry. It’s hard to get my head around, but I’m not saying ‘sorry’ again; I can’t. And if Mac was searching for another me, why didn’t he just come looking for me? I know the answer to this question. Mac had chosen Helen over me; he’d let me go to have a ‘bigger love’, and the ‘best life’. He wouldn’t have felt he had the right to play a part in that. Not after everything.

  ‘I’d say you were the love of his life.’

  ‘What? Is that what you think?’

  ‘That’s what he told me, in the attic. I was too mad to say anything about it to you yesterday, but now I think you might be all right, really, so I’m putting it out there.’ He flashes me another Mac smile, which I fear may disarm me just as I’m thinking how rude he is. Perhaps the way he expresses himself is just Aussie-style bluntness. Perhaps I am simply shocked. I was the love of Mac’s life? Well, I have always suspected he was mine, particularly as I can’t see anyone else showing up to supersede him, not now … There are no Bigger Loves, before or after.

  ‘That’s what he told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This is huge, I think, if it’s true. Colossal. I will Lloyd to fetch his damn coffee but he just stands looking at me. I was the love of Mac’s life and he was mine. It should make me feel great, considering all I said to Julian, about stopping the movie before the end, not playing things out to the final scene, remembering things in a nostalgic vacuum, but I realize that sometimes you can’t deny how things turned out, how things went on to be. And how much hurt surrounds something that had once felt so wonderful.

  Our affair came at a price. Mac was a charismatic adulterer; I was a spoilt brat who casually betrayed another woman. He went on to repeat offend, over and over again – because of me – and because of him, I went in search of men opposite to Mac and found, first, ineffectual Felix and then horrible, horrible Christian who nearly destroyed my life. Discovering you are the love of someone’s life doesn’t quite bring the thrill it should when it’s shaded by betrayal and selfishness and consequences. You can’t always focus on the ‘before’ when the ‘after’ is smacking you in the face with a sledgehammer.

  ‘Cheer up,’ says Lloyd, but it’s too late. I feel sadness creep into my heart on soft slippers and take up residence, a crouching shrouded figure. ‘What does it all matter, anyway? We’ve all moved on.’ Well, you didn’t, I think. You moved away; as far as you could get. And you’ve hardly kept quiet about my involvement in your father’s life since your return.

  Lloyd finally takes his coffee and sniffs at the plastic cup. He ordered coffee; surely it will smell like coffee? ‘I reckon I can have a relationship with the old fella again. Seeing him like this, in hospital, has made me realize Dad should still have a place in my life. I wouldn’t actually want to lose him.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I say, but I have a sudden and very naughty urge to tell him to ‘piss off’, as the old Arden would have. Or she would have given him a look of utter disdain and then flounced off. I wish she was here – the best, most triumphant part of her, of course; the selfish and callous Arden can stay there, in the past – but I sense she might be lurking somewhere, just out of reach. She’s certainly the closest she’s been for a very long time.

  We leave Mac at eight, now actually doing that queuing up to shake his hand or kiss his cheek. Well, it’s only me that does that. I do it to annoy Lloyd.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Dad,’ says Lloyd.

  ‘See you, mate,’ says James. ‘I’ll pop in and pick up your post when I get home.’

  ‘Bye, Mac,’ says Julian. I’m going to take him to the café now, for his dinner.

  Mac nods and half-smiles. He looks tired after all the excitement. As I reach him in the queue, I notice a stray eyelash on his cheek and wipe it away with my thumb. Then I smooth back his hair from his face. As I kiss him, I want to say the line of a movie, but I don’t know which one. I can’t think of anything perfect enough, the perfect line to say now in case I forget to say it later, but I can feel his love, from the past, and I can see the ghost of it, in the present. It surrounds me like a velvet cloak. It helps me to remember. How can I possibly sum up how I feel? So I simply look at him and we hold each other’s gaze for a few seconds and I say, ‘See you tomorrow, Mac.’

  Then, on impulse I kiss him again.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ says Fran chirpily as we walk out of the door. I look back and there he is, for better or worse – the love of my life.

  THEN

  Chapter 25

  My third year at Warwick was pretty wild. If Mac wanted me to have the best time I decided I would have the best time. I drank from both barrels, burned all the ends of all the candles I could lay my greedy, drunken hands on. I embraced student friendship, finally. I extended my circle of trust from just Becky to the other three girls I had lived with for the last year. We were all together again, for the third year, in halls across the road from main campus. I bothered to get to know them, enjoyed wild nights out with them. I even went on holiday with one of girls, Ruth, in the Easter holidays, Interrailing across France and Germany. I became what I considered to be a proper student, not one whose main module was shagging a lecturer and turning up for a few seminars on the side. It was a convincingly good pretence.

  I also went for fun, uncomplicated boys, mainly for drunken snogs and some light playing around. There was a succession of boys, banned from having actual intercourse with me, in my bed, and bicycles parked outside my halls; once, a motorbike, after I met a biker accountant in a pub in Coventry. I got through it, that year. The year without Mac. And I left Warwick University with a 2:2, which I thought was pretty good going, considering.

  The moment I found out he had gone was pretty awful. I hadn’t spoken to Mac since the night the affair ended, but I thought about him every day and I missed him every minute of the eternally long and miserable summer holidays. The first night back on campus, I broke off from a giggling gang walking back from the Westwood Bop – including a very pissed Becky, and a newly made friend, Dominic the Roadie – to give crouching attention to a fake undone DM lace and, making sure the gang had disappeared round a corner, skittered up Mac’s stairs to peer into what had been his window. He had gone. The blinds had been replaced by thick curtains. His door had a silly mat saying ‘Welcome’ in bristles outside it. When I caught up with the giggling gang, I wondered aloud, with a weak attempt at a tragic chuckle layered under my sing-song voice, if the legendary Mac Bartley-Thomas would be holding any of his legendary parties this term, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Oh, he’s left,’ said some bastard. ‘Gone to Sheffield to lecture there, apparently. Media Studies. His wife’s having a baby.’

  I smiled above a severed and bleeding heart, uttered some kind of squeaky exclamation usually reserved for dyspeptic Labradors, and snarled inside at the thought of Mac treating his lucky, lucky students at Sheffield to The List – our list – which at least diverted me from black, black thoughts about Helen and the baby and the three of them together in a cosy house in Sheffield, and the knowledge I had lost Mac for ever.

  ‘Lucky them,’ I said, in an attempt to be something other than devastated, and I ignored Becky’s drunken look of concern but instead nicked a bottle of beer from Dominic’s jacket pocket and started necking it down like I was having the best night of my life.

  Another awful moment was when I bumped into the Dean, sometime in the spring term. It was the first time I’d ever come face to face with him and it was on the little set of stairs that led to the Cholo Bar. He looked at me and I could see his eyebrows rise ever so slightly behind his glasses. He gave me a polite, acknowledging nod, which I was perplexed and mortified by. What did that mean? I scuttled away from him, red-cheeked and desperate for a cider and black.

  The only time I ov
erindulged in thoughts of Mac was when I sat in my room and watched the video of Imitation of Life I’d pretend-casually picked up from a local charity shop. The other girls were out, at Super Bowl night or something. I locked my door, opened a packet of M&M’s and prepared to weep buckets, as Mac said I would. But nothing happened. Yes, it was a sweeping lachrymose melodrama but, as I’d decided high emotion was not for me – not any more – I remained unmoved. When Sarah Jane rejects her mother I just stared blankly at the screen; when she runs up to the coffin at Annie’s funeral, distraught and sobbing, I rolled a melting M&M around my mouth with my tongue. Without Mac to watch with, to love with, I was left cold.

  I somehow made it to the end of the year, although it was a stagger rather than a glide. On the very last morning all my possessions were in boxes at the side of my stripped bed and Dad came to pick me up at ten o’clock sharp. I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to stay here for ever. Do it all again, especially my affair with Mac – God, I missed him! Sometimes it was almost unbearable. When I thought of him in Sheffield with Helen and the baby I almost had to stuff my own fist into my mouth to stop myself screaming – but Dad knocked on the door and I had to go home.

  I saw Mac, just once more, and it was when I was in London with Felix sometime in the mid nineties. I’d been dating him for a while and he was taking me to some flash lunch at some flash restaurant off Cavendish Square – showing off; that was his thing. We were holding hands, crossing the street, and I saw Mac and that man again, Stewart Whittaker, coming out of a hotel. Stewart was chatting to the red-coated doorman; Mac was carrying that same brown battered bag and looking up the street. My heart gave a massive, high-voltage jolt when I saw his face and almost immediately Mac saw me too. He attempted a half smile; I gave a half wave I didn’t want Felix to clock.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he demanded. I thrust my hand back in my coat pocket.

  ‘Nobody. Just an old lecturer from university.’

  ‘Ugh. Academia.’ Felix shuddered. He was a City boy; he dealt with money and commodities, stocks and shares. He wouldn’t know a Cukor or a Minnelli if they came up and slapped him in the face. ‘Why’s he smiling at you like that?’

  Mac wasn’t smiling at me now. Stewart, who I was sure hadn’t seen me, had turned to him and they were both laughing about something with the doorman. A black cab pulled up and they clambered in, but Mac went to the near-side window and just for a brief second he looked at me as the cab pulled away.

  ‘Tossers,’ muttered Felix. ‘I prefer the University of Life. I’ve got a degree in that. Not you, of course,’ he said, squeezing my hand. ‘You’re all right.’

  We went for lunch but I didn’t eat all that much. I drank too much white wine and had to be put into my own black cab, at three o’clock. I remember how I leant my face against the cool glass of the window, how I stared at every single person I saw on the pavement, all the way home, in case one of them was Mac. That day was the last time I saw his face. I missed it. I missed all of him. He was now just a face in a distant crowd, a man I had once loved.

  NOW

  Chapter 26

  Monday turns up mild again – another lucky dip in the typical yoyo-ing English weather. The pavements are slick and unimpressed, the drizzle half-hearted; it’s an uninspiring something-and-nothing day, just like the day I first saw Mac again, at St Katherine’s. There is still a long, long way to go until spring.

  When I get to work Charlie is at my desk. He’s twanging at a paperclip, hopping from one big shiny black foot to another. He’s clearly up to something, as he often is.

  ‘Nice outfit,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks. I’m channelling Hedy Lamarr today – off-duty look, of course.’

  ‘I have no idea what you just said.’ Charlie twangs the paperclip again. ‘Hey, there’s a job going in the script department, a script reader, with a chance to progress to script editor,’ he says. ‘Didn’t you do something English-related at uni, back in the days of the dinosaurs?’ He raises his arms at the side, like he is attempting an impression of a pterodactyl. He is closer to resembling a zombie in the Thriller video.

  ‘Oi, cheeky!’ I tap him lightly on the leg with a handy ruler. ‘But, yes, I did English Lit.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought so. You should apply. You must be bored of phoning up grumpy old gits about their lock-ups.’

  I tuck my bag under my chair and make a well in the middle of a pile of papers on my desk I might be able to work from. ‘Well, of course I am. But I wouldn’t get it.’

  ‘Why not?’ He flicks the paperclip and it flies through the air and on to the carpet. He bends to pick it up.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know until you try,’ he says. ‘It’s on the intranet whatsit. You should take a look. Promise me you will, Hall?’

  ‘OK, I’ll take a look.’ Maybe I will. Maybe it’s time to fulfil some of those promises Mac made for me. Stop being scared; try something new. If he’s come back into my life perhaps there’s a reason for it, perhaps I’m supposed to do something, as a result. Why else has he made me remember? Why else has he come back to me? ‘I’ll take a look,’ I repeat, to no one in particular, because Charlie has already gone.

  I get to the hospital at half seven, via the Stop ’n’ Shop where I’ve picked up a tube of sour cream and onion Pringles as James has mentioned he likes them, and a bottle of Lucozade as a joke present for Mac. As I walk to the main entrance, I spot Fran lolling against the wall outside it, wearing a red padded jacket over her uniform and drawing on an alarmingly long, virgin-fresh cigarette, under artificial light. I’ve never seen her out of the ward before; she looks different out of context, and it makes me smile. If you have to be in hospital you should have a nurse like Fran.

  As I get nearer, I see she looks preoccupied, unaware of the bustle of people going in and out around her, like she has the cares of the world on her shoulders, which she actually does, to be fair. All those people; all those lives. When she spots me amongst a slow-moving trail of people heading into the hospital – coats and scarves, bags and boots – her face suddenly looks really odd. She gives me a weird turned-down smile, with her lips closed, and immediately drops her barely dragged-on cigarette, driving it into the ground with a soft white heel. Then she steps slowly towards me. Why is she doing this? Why is she doing this unnatural, slow-motion walk? She looks weird.

  ‘What’s up?’ I say, walking towards her. But even as I am asking the question I think I know the answer. Tears spring to her eyes, making them red. The down-turned smile stretches down to her chin. She shakes her head and I begin to shake mine back at her, a mirror image. Faster. But not as fast as my heart, which is lurching from side to side like a lettuce in a spinner.

  Oh God. No, no, no. ‘Please don’t say the words, don’t say those words to me,’ I beg her. I can feel my legs going. I’m not sure I can reach her …

  ‘Oh love, love, no, no, it’s not that,’ breathes Fran. She has clutched me in a padded embrace. I have my face in her neck and she smells of cigarettes and cough sweets. Eventually she takes me by the shoulders and lifts me away from her. ‘But Mac’s in theatre again. I’m so sorry. He’s had a haemorrhage – right hemisphere. Caused by a sudden brain abscess, the consultant said. It’s not looking too great, lovely, but they’re doing the best they can for him. I promise you they are.’

  I am relieved – so relieved – Mac is not dead when I was so, so convinced of it, but I am utterly terrified he is in theatre, fighting for his life. I semi-collapse on to Fran’s neck again, the zip of her padded jacket a train track in my cheek.

  ‘How long has he been in theatre?’ I whisper, my voice a terrified croak.

  ‘A couple of hours, and it could be a couple more. I’m not really sure, my love.’ Fran pats my shoulder, like she is burping a baby. ‘His son’s here, somewhere. We called him in the night.’ They don’t have my number, I think. Only family.

  ‘What should I do?’ I ask her. I don’t know
what to do now. Do I go in? Do I just go home? I can’t just turn around and walk back home, can I? How can I do that?

  ‘All you can do now is wait,’ says Fran. ‘Do you knit?’

  Random, and the second person to ask me this. Do I look like a knitter? ‘Er … no.’

  ‘Shame, it’s a great soul-soother. Why don’t you come in, go to the hospital chapel?’

  ‘That awful place?’ She is stroking my arm under the wing of my wool wrap.

  ‘It’s not so bad. It’s a quiet place, a place where you can think. It might help … maybe.’

  ‘OK.’ I nod. I’ll go where anyone tells me at this point. At least I can go inside, where it’s warm and it’s light. Closer to him. I have become institutionalized, too. My social life – give or take a night in an awkward bar and a bizarre road trip – is St Katherine’s. My life is Mac at the moment. I don’t want to return to my soaps and my shortbread – to the cold grey life I have made for myself since I kicked Christian out of it. I feel panicked, flighty, my heart is racing – perhaps the hospital chapel is a good idea. Perhaps internally tutting at the plastic décor of the Chapel of Rest will calm me down.

  Fran is studying me closely, with a nurse’s concern. I probably look unhinged.

  ‘Will you come and find me if there’s any news?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course I will. And give me your mobile number, too. I’ll call you if you’ve already left.’

  ‘I won’t leave.’

  ‘Well, if you do. It could be a long time, Arden.’

  Fran pulls her phone from her coat pocket – it has a blinged-up cover, pink sequins – and hands it to me with Contacts open so I can key in my number. As she stuffs it back in her pocket she looks at me intently.

  ‘Are you really just a former student of his?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ I say, and tears leap to my eyes. ‘I was much, much more than that. I loved him and he loved me. It was a long, long time ago but it was a massive, massive love affair, me and Mac.’