The Man In The Seventh Row

by Brian Pendreigh

  Jake's second client is a woman in black who smokes her cigarettes through a long holder. She thinks her husband is having an affair. Jake advises it is better not to know, let sleeping dogs lie. But she wants to know. She says her husband is Hollis Mulwray, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Mulwray is in the news because of his opposition to a new reservoir project. Jake photographs him with another woman and the pictures end up in the paper.

  Jake almost gets into a fight with another customer in a barber's shop over the way he makes his living, but the barber defuses the situation with a joke about a man who is tired screwing his wife. His friend tells him he should do what the Chinese do, screw a little and stop, screw a little and stop. So the man screws his wife and stops to read 'Life' magazine, and he screws a little more and stops for a cigarette, and he screws some more and stops. And his wife tells him he is screwing just like a Chinaman. Jake repeats the joke to the guys in his office just as Faye Dunaway walks in, claiming to be the real Mrs Mulwray. Her husband's body is found drowned in a reservoir. Evelyn Mulwray is the daughter of a man called Noah Cross, Hollis Mulwray's former partner from the time they privately owned the city's water supply and the author of the new dam scheme. Noah was played originally by John Huston, director of The Maltese Falcon and father of Nicholson's one time real-life partner Anjelica Huston.

  But his part has been taken by Roy, who looks older than normal, with lines running out from the corners of his eyes and taller, though Jack Nicholson is pretty short of course. Roy wears black jeans and a black stetson, like the villain in an old western serial, though he still smokes a big cigar like Huston did. He sticks closely to the script; he just says the lines differently, and adds one or two.

  'Water is power, Mr Gittes,' he says in a rich, dry voice. 'The ark was never lost, Mr Gittes. It served its purpose. I dammed the water, I controlled the water, I controlled everything, even the animals. I let them live, you know, Mr Gittes. Two by two, Mr Gittes. And Mulwray? There was no longer room for him on my ark. There were already two of us.'

  And he draws on his big cigar, patriarch, cowboy, capital.

  Chinatown has sucked its director Roman Polanski into the action on screen as well, as a little man with a bow-tie and a knife. Maybe he wasn't happy with some aspect of Jack Nicholson's performance. He sticks his knife up Jake's nose and pulls it straight out again, the quick way, sideways, as a hint that he might be best advised to drop his investigations.

  Anna shudders and turns to Roy and notices for the first time the line of scar tissue on his left nostril, white and untanned against the darker surrounding flesh. Her fingers close around his fingers, which are cold as ice. Their faces are lit by the light from the screen. For film noir Chinatown is very bright, all white suits, and white houses, and desert, no shadows, no hiding places.

  Jake discovers that Noah has been buying up land. He makes love to Evelyn Mulwray, then follows her and discovers that she appears to be keeping prisoner the young woman whom Jake photographed with her husband. Jake accuses Mrs Mulwray of killing her own husband and imprisoning his lover. She says the girl, Katherine, is her sister. Jake doesn't believe her. She says Katherine is her daughter. Jake slaps her. She says Katherine is her sister and her daughter.

  ***

  People are not always what they seem. Jack Nicholson had finished shooting Chinatown when he found out that the woman he thought was his sister in real life was his mother. Time and again life mirrors art. And it's not the drink and drugs that fuck your mind. It's not the films that fuck your mind. It's life that fucks your mind, life and death.

  ***

  Noah is Katherine's father, Evelyn's father, Evelyn's lover, Hollis Mulwray's killer. Jake, Noah and the police are up in Chinatown, where Evelyn and Katherine are hiding. Evelyn shoots and wounds her father and attempts to get away with her daughter. A policeman shoots at the car. It comes to a halt, down the street, its horn blaring. Jake runs over. Evelyn is dead. 'Forget it Jake,' someone says. 'It's Chinatown.'

  It's all there. And every time you look at it you find something new, something you had overlooked before, like a case that goes on and on forever. And there is no happy ending, there never can be a happy ending.

  ***

  'Love never lasts,' says Anna. 'Nothing lasts.'

  'You have to see the sequel to find out what lasts.'

  'The Two Jakes? I never saw it.'

  'No one did,' says Roy. 'But it just confirms what we already know. Katherine is in it, her husband is dead. She asks Jake if she will ever get over the pain, if the past ever goes away. He makes some wise crack and she leaves. But he chases after her and tells her that it never does go away.'

  Roy's voice is breaking and he struggles to get the words out.

  'The past never goes away. You never forget.'

  Anna puts her arm around his shoulder. 'You're still in love with Jo, aren't you?'

  'Jo?' says Roy, looking as if he has not quite understood who Anna is talking about.

  'Jo, your wife.'

  'I'm not sure,' says Roy uncertainly, 'that I was ever really in love with Jo, my wife. I wanted us to be a family, but it all fell apart. I'm still in love with Jo, my daughter. Jo was my wife and Jo was my daughter.'

  21

  Roy could still remember the first time he saw his daughter Jo, a little grey head poking nervously out between her mother's bloody, black legs, with a wrinkled forehead, a worried look in the enormous blue eyes that dominated her face, and the mouth silently opening and closing as if she were talking but someone had turned the sound down. She looked doubtful, as if she might at any moment change her mind and disappear back to where she came from.

  'Come on, baby,' said Roy, 'Just a wee bit farther, my wee lovely.'

  She looked just like ET. Roy called her et but her mother did not approve of the nickname. Jo insisted on calling the baby Josephine. Roy pointed out that calling a baby after her mother would only cause confusion. But Jo explained they were not calling the baby after her mother, they were calling her after her grandmother, who was also called Josephine.

  'But just for birth certificates and passports and things. She'll be called Jo.'

  Roy said he would have to call the baby ET in order to differentiate between mother and child, but it was just the first in a series of nicknames. Roy settled for calling her Rosebud, after the sledge in Citizen Kane. And it even got that Jo called her Rosebud too. It was one of the few things Jo and Roy ever agreed on after he got back from San Carlos.

  He had had no communication with Jo while he was away. At first he missed her but after a month or so the ache and the emptiness he felt at night, alone in bed gradually dissipated. He had mixed feelings about seeing her again after all that time. Eight months. He swithered about phoning first, but all the way back from LA to Heathrow and Kings Cross to Waverley he pictured himself standing in the doorway, and the surprise on her face, and then maybe they would make love with the intensity they had in the early days. Absence makes the loins grow harder. But then what? Half an hour later, when he had poured all his absence into her, then what? He even considered just letting himself in and shouting out from the hall 'Jo, I'm home.' But he decided he had better ring the bell. He wondered if she had grown her hair or put on weight. There was a moment of sweet anticipation as he heard her behind the door.

  'Don't look so flabbergasted,' she said. 'It's your doing.'

  A week later Rosebud was born, prematurely. She was always small for her age. Her grey skin quickly turned coffee-coloured.

  Roy had not known if Jo would want him to move back into the flat. He had not known if he would want to move back. Rosebud changed everything. When she cried in the night it was Roy who got up and fed her, changed her nappies, carried her around the room. It was Roy who rocked her on the couch, singing 'Over the Rainbow' to her, until her eyes flickered and closed and she fell asleep. He eventually dropped off, still sitting on the couch, because he knew that to move
would wake her and start the whole cycle all over again.

  Rosebud did not cry much. Jo cried more. She lay in bed and sobbed and would not be consoled. Roy cooked her boiled eggs and pasta and took them to her in bed, but she ate little. Someone had told her that she should drink stout to regain her strength and she was drinking eight bottles of Guinness a day. Then she would stop sobbing and lie for hours just staring at the portable television in the corner, not even noticing what was on it, and eventually she would fall asleep. Roy was ready to run between the two, with a bottle of milk to quieten one and a bottle of Guinness to quieten the other. Roy slept on the couch in the lounge, aware of every movement in the little cot beside him and in the big double bed next door.

  Jo said she was too tired to even hold the baby. The doctor gave her drugs to help her sleep. She cried less and slept more. As the weeks passed, Roy sang to Rosebud, as quietly as he could. Her big eyes opened wide as she seemed to recognise 'Over the Rainbow' and he made her little brown limbs move in time to 'Singin' in the Rain', pausing after the delivery of each single word in that opening line, to crank up the anticipation, and he jiggled her around the room in his arms to the theme tune from The Magnificent Seven.

  Dee-dee. Dee-dee-dee; Dee-dee. Dee-dee-dee-dee; Dee-dee-dee-dee. Dee, Dee-dee. Dee-dee, Dee-dee-dee.

  'Fuckin' shut up,' yelled Jo from the next room. 'You're driving me fuckin' mental.'

  She appeared in the doorway, her eyes fiery and angry. Rosebud looked at her in silent, open-mouthed surprise. She did not cry, but looked at Roy with a look that said 'What's up with her?' The anger slipped from Jo's face.

  'Can I take her?' she said. 'I want her.'

  The next day Jo got up, dressed and took Rosebud out to visit one of her friends. Roy told her not to overdo it and Jo told him not to mother her. About a week later Jo moved the cot into her room and told Roy she was better. She said Roy had been wonderful and could go on staying at the flat until he found a place of his own.

  'I wondered,' he said, 'if maybe I shouldn't just stay indefinitely.'

  'Don't be silly,' she said. 'I'm better now. It was just baby blues. All mothers get them. I'm better now. And there isn't room here for you and me and the baby.'

  'I suppose not,' said Roy. He got a flat of his own, not far away, still on the Southside. He started work at the university and he looked after Rosebud from Friday night until Monday morning whilst Jo was singing. One Friday Jo was not singing. but Roy went to her flat just the same. Jo made him dinner and they drank a bottle of claret. Rosebud slept whilst they drank another bottle and made love. Afterwards they shared a cigarette but they both knew it was over. Roy got up, got dressed and, without waking Rosebud, he lifted her into her carrycot.

  Roy would gallop along the hall and round the living room with Rosebud bouncing up and down on his shoulders, chuckling to herself and slavering over his head. He played The Magnificent Seven to her on the video.

  'That's Yul Brynner,' he said, 'the one with no hair. And that's Steve McQueen, the one who says he has never ridden shotgun on a hearse before.'

  'Aga banka boo,' she said.

  'Ah, Lakota dialect,' said Roy. 'Like in Dances with Wolves.'

  'Da,' said Rosebud. 'Da. Dada.'

  He taped all the children's films on the television for Rosebud. They watched Disney's Alice in Wonderland together, with its little protagonist thrust into a crazy world of hatters and hares, dormice in teapots and unbirthday parties; a terrifying world with its big nasty queen wanting to cut off everyone's head. Rosebud watched in silence. At the end Roy told her the joke about Bing Crosby and Walt Disney, knowing it would mean nothing to her. But when he laughed she looked at him and laughed, even more heartily.

  'Off with head,' she said. And Roy laughed some more. 'Off with head, Dada.'

  Tears of laughter rolled down Roy's cheeks.

  'Off with head, Dada,' she said, over and over again.

  She watched Alice in Wonderland over and over again. Whenever the Queen of Hearts ordered a decapitation Rosebud would shout 'Off with head, Dada' in the same brisk, regal tone.

  She watched Alice in Wunnerlan. And she watched Disney's Nokey-nokey, the story of the wooden boy, with the big, 'normous nose and the wee friend called Jimmy Cricket.

  'Nokey-nokey goes where the naughty boys go, Mummy. And he almost turns into a donkey ride. And he gets eaten by a big fish. And he lives happily ever after with his dada.' And Rosebud sang: 'Hi, diddy-dee, actor's wife for me.'

  'Children under three not admitted to any performance,' said Roy, reading from the programme as the maroon double-decker bus crawled along Princes Street towards the Filmhouse. The former church had been converted into a twin-cinema to replace the Filmhouse's old basement premises that Roy had gone to as a teenager. 'So if anyone asks you your age you're three, OK?'

  'I'm two and three-quarters,' said Rosebud in a tiny voice that held not a trace of her mother's rasp.

  'Just say you're three.'

  'Three,' said Rosebud, 'quarters.'

  'Just say you're three and I'll buy you a tube of Smarties.'

  'Actually,' said Rosebud. She often began sentences with 'actually', a habit she had picked up from her grandmother. 'I'm three.'

  Nobody asked. They paid their £2, climbed the stairs and sat in two red seats in the middle of the seventh row of Cinema 1. The cinema was less than half full.

  'Lot of people,' said Rosebud. The lights dimmed.

  'Why dey put the lights out?' she asked.

  'Wait and see,' said Roy, wiping her runny nose.

  The curtains drew back. All is darkness, but for the purple writing. Darkness. Stars. An indistinct figure makes it way through a forest.

  'Is that Eaty?' whispers Rosebud.

  'Wait and see,' says her father.

  The figure on screen looks down on a patchwork of lights.

  'I think that's Eaty,' says Rosebud.

  There is a roar like a lion as a vehicle grinds to a halt nearby. Other vehicles appear, all bright light and violent movement, shattering the tranquillity of the misty night. They seem to encircle the figure.

  'It's not too scary, is it?' asked Roy.

  In the reflected light he could see Rosebud shake her head without averting her eyes from the screen. Roy took her little hand in his. The figure screams in alarm and Roy could sense Rosebud jump.

  'Don't worry,' he said. 'It'll be alright.'

  Ferns dance as the figure dashes through them. Torches cut the night air as the men from the cars pursue the little figure. The spaceship takes off and ET is left alone.

  Rosebud screamed with Elliot when he discovers ET. ET's dumpy little body reminded Roy of the little figure in the red raincoat in Don't Look Now. That figure had reminded Donald Sutherland of his dead daughter. He pursued the figure through the walkways of Venice. It was not the ghost of his daughter, but a dwarf, who stabs him to death.

  Rosebud laughed when ET got drunk and Elliott, who feels everything ET feels, drunkenly frees all the frogs from their jars in his biology class. She watched in silence when ET died and when he came back to life. The few snuffles in the cinema sounded like adult snuffles to Roy. Rosebud watched in silence as Elliott and his friends take ET to a rendezvous with his spaceship, with the authorities behind and ahead of them, and their bikes suddenly take off and fly through the air. ET says goodbye to Elliott and his spaceship takes off, leaving a rainbow in its wake.

  ***

  Only later did Rosebud ask how the bikes could fly.

  'ET had special magic powers,' Roy told her.

  'Like the Blue Fairy in Nokey-Nokey?'

  'Yes, just like the Blue Fairy in Nokey-Nokey.'

  'Why did dose men want Eaty?'

  'They had never seen anything like ET before and they wanted to find out what he was.'

  'What were day going to do with him? Why did Elliott let all de frogs out? Was Eaty a sort of frog? Were dey going to cut him up like a frog?'

  It was not a po
int Roy had considered, but he was enormously impressed that his little daughter had seen the link and thought it perfectly valid.

  'Did Eaty really die or was he just pretending?' she asked.

  'I think he was really dead.'

  'Why did he die?'

  'I'm not sure. I think maybe because there was not the right sort of air for him on Earth ... or maybe he was just sad because he missed his friends and family.'

  'How did he be alive again?'

  'Magic. Like the bikes flying.'

  'Will I die?'

  'Not for a very long time. But everybody dies in the end.'

  'Why?'

  Roy thought. 'Well if everybody lived forever there wouldn't be enough room for all the new people.'

  'They could make them smaller,' said Rosebud. 'When will I die?'

  'Not for a long time.'

  'Next year?'

  'No, no, not next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. Not for a very, very long time. There's nothing to worry about.' He was going to say that he and Mummy would die first, but thought better of it.

  'If I die, can I be alive again?' asked Rosebud.

  'No,' said Roy. 'That can only happen in the movies. He said that once people died they were dead forever, but they lived on through their children.'

  'And in the movies,' said Rosebud, 'where was Elliott's dada? Where's ... Mex-ico? Was Eaty going to Mex-ico too? Is Mex-ico where you go when you die? Can we watch Eaty again?

  'Do you get people from other planets? Can I phone home and ask Mummy? Is it a true story?'

  ***

  Breathlessly Rosebud related the story to her mother: 'Eaty's spaceship leaves him behind in a wood. And then Eaty goes to a wee boy's house. And the wee boy is called Elliott. And then Elliott finds Eaty. And they both get a fright.'

  She chuckled to herself.

  'And then Elliott gives Eaty Smarties and they become friends. And then ... And then ... And then Eaty dies ...'