'Anna?' chirrups the voice of a tall, slim, middle-aged woman with a golden tan and jewellery to match. 'Anna Fisher?'
Anna forces the key into Roy's palm.
'I haven't seen you for an age.'
Roy slips the key into his pocket.
'Are you still teaching at UCLA? And who is this? I'm Jessica. Introduce me, Anna.'
Anna introduces Roy, while replacing her jacket on the back of the chair and wishing Jessica would drop dead. No, she doesn't mean that. But she wishes she would simply disappear as quickly and suddenly as she arrived.
'Oh, I just love an Irish accent, Roy. Scottish. I should have known. And is Braveheart going to win the Oscar for best picture? I do hope so. I cried at the end when the English killed Mel. But I think maybe Apollo 13 will win. It's the patriotic American choice, and I don't think there are too many Scotch in the Academy. Have you seen it, Anna? Wonderful film. Really we should go to the movies together sometime. I would really like to see that other film ... Oh, what's it called, you know the one with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, where she's a nun and he's going to die? Yes, I remember, Dead Man Walking. A cappuccino for me, please, waiter. Anyone else? Dead Man Walking? Oh, must you go, Roy?'
'Yes, I'm afraid I must,' he says. 'I have a long way to go and not much time.'
Anna moves as if she is about to rise, but Roy puts a hand firmly on her shoulder.
'Look after yourself, Anna.'
Her mouth is dry. Her fingers dart to the crucifix that hangs around her neck. Something from her childhood stirs within her and she feels a sudden desire to tell Roy that she will pray for him – or maybe it was just Jessica's mention of Susan Sarandon playing a nun. Anna says nothing. One moment Roy's hand is on her shoulder, the next the pressure is gone. She does not turn round, but watches Jessica's eyes as they follow Roy out of the lobby. When they return to Anna's face she knows Roy has gone.
'Was that a key I saw changing hands there?' Jessica asks, leaning forward conspiratorially. She does not wait for an answer, because she knows that it was.
'I'm having an Oscar night party, Anna. You really must come and bring Braveheart with you. Ha-ha. Everyone must come as a character from one of the nominated films, a spaceman or a nun or a Scotchman. That will be easy for Roy. He can just be himself. Ha-ha-ha. I love the Scotch ... especially on the rocks.' She laughs at her own wit. Anna smiles indulgently.
'I've already promised to watch the Oscars at my sister's,' she says, trying desperately to keep her composure. 'And I don't think Roy will be in LA then.'
***
On the day of the Oscars Anna does not go to her sister's. She follows Pacific Highway Route One up the coast to Santa Barbara, taking a room at the Motel 6. She walks along the beach, not sure what she might find. In the distance she can see a man and a small child playing with an American football. She feels her stride quicken as she hurries along the otherwise deserted beach towards them.
'This is going to be a high one, Jack,' shouts the man.
Anna slows down again as the boy backs towards her, squinting against the late afternoon sun to follow the ball's flight. Ball, boy and Anna come together in a heap on the sand. The father, a young man in wire-rimmed glasses and grey jogging suit, helps Anna to her feet with a smile and apologies.
'It's alright,' she says, brushing the sand from her jeans. 'No harm done.'
She walks back towards the wharf, taking one final look at the beach before leaving. The father and child are still playing ball in the hazy distance. And for a moment she thinks maybe she sees another man and another child just beyond them, skipping along at the water's edge, the child no more than a red blur. But Anna is looking into the sun, as it dances on the water, creating strange, fleeting patterns. She rubs her eyes and looks again. There is only one man, only one child.
In the solitude of her motel room she watches the Oscar ceremony, her heart leaping when a clip is shown of the English knights charging across the plain towards the Scottish army. Mel Gibson, his hair braided, his face painted blue, urges his men to 'hold ... hold ... hold ...' until the English cavalry are upon them and they lift their staves. As the cavalry are skewered like kebabs, Anna catches just a fleeting glimpse of a man with blue lightning painted on his face, the man she knew as Roy Batty, the man in the seventh row. Anna finds herself holding her breath as Sidney Poitier opens the final envelope of the night.
'Let it be Braveheart,' she prays. 'God, please, let it be Braveheart.'
***
She walks down State Street to Stearns Wharf, past the ice cream stands and onto the beach, which is now deserted. At the water's edge she sits on the sand and looks out to the point where the blue of the sky merges with the blue of the ocean. She sits, just staring into nothingness as the day fades. Out on the water a light blinks at her from a passing ship. It is dark when she gets back to the motel and switches on the television set. Mel Gibson is seen arriving at the Paramount party. She wonders if she might see Roy in the crowd scene there, or maybe alongside his Braveheart co-star as he enters Chasen's, but she does not.
Next morning Anna telephones all the hotels and motels in the Santa Barbara area to ask if they have a guest called Batty. They all say the same thing – none of them has a guest called Batty. Until the last one.
'We did have a Mr Batty,' says the voice, 'a Mr Roy Batty, but he checked out a week ago.'
But that is the Roosevelt Hotel, back in LA, just confirming what Anna already knew.
Every day for a week she walks down State Street and along the beach, she watches the lights on the ocean at dusk, and she returns to the emptiness of her motel room and lies awake in bed for hours, thinking. She feels close to Roy here, somehow, or at least comforted by her own anonymity and isolation in an unfamiliar setting, a setting as unfamiliar as Roy Batty.
In Los Angeles Anna telephones police stations and hospitals, asking if they know anything of a Roy Batty. Most quickly confirm they have no record of a Roy Batty, but one hospital administrator comes back on the line to ask if Anna is a relative.
'Yes,' says Anna, hopefully. 'I'm ... I'm his wife.'
'Just a minute ...' Anna can feel her heart thumping against her chest.
'No,' says the voice, 'There's been no admission under that name.'
She telephones the LAPD public relations office, claiming to be a reporter, just wanting to check if ever anyone reported their own murder or disappearance to the police.
'How could they do that?'
'Well,' says Anna, 'I don't know. My editor just asked me to check. You know what they're like.'
'Assholes,' says the police spokesperson. 'I've been there too.'
'You said it. But I suppose someone might know they were being murdered if they were being poisoned.'
'Why would they take the poison if they knew it was poison?'
'I don't know, but they might know they were about to be killed or abducted. They had seen the signs – strange people following them, strange things happening. They were powerless to stop it, but they were able to tell the police what was about to happen.' Anna feels she is not explaining this very well.
'No,' says the voice, 'that could only ever happen in the movies.'
29
Los Angeles, March 1997
One year later, Anna scans the showbiz section of the LA Times. It seems The English Patient, the tale of doomed wartime romance, is going to win the best picture Oscar over Shine, the Australian pianist movie, and Fargo, the quirky Coen Brothers' thriller with Frances McDormand as a pregnant policewoman. Fargo seems to have been around for a very long time. Anna and Roy almost went to see it together, so it must have been in the cinemas before the last Oscars. They went to Blade Runner instead. What would have happened if they had gone to a film about a pregnant policewoman instead of one about a dying robot who shared Roy's name? Which part would Roy have played? The pregnant policewoman? A smile forms on Anna's lips.
Anna never did see Fargo. She had not been to t
he cinema since Brief Encounter. It was not a conscious decision. It is true that she did mope around for a while after Roy went away, that she felt disorientated, even bereaved, but lately she had been far too busy to mope.
She sips from the thin elegant glass of Rioja and tucks her legs beneath her, facing the newspaper spread out beside her on the couch. She turns the pages without really registering the contents. These last few months she has felt a new contentment with her life. Her eye is caught by a short item reporting that several cinemas will again be staging a festival of classic movies ahead of the Oscars, following the success of last year's event. She scans the cinema chains' adverts, United Artists, Laemmle, instinctively looking for Mann's Theatres. She has a funny feeling that Mann's Chinese Theatre will be showing Blade Runner and Brief Encounter, not that she has any intention of going to see them. Her eye runs down a list of films – The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde, Out of Africa, no mention of Blade Runner or Brief Encounter. But a little shiver runs down her spine as she reaches the film at the end of the list.
She sighs and takes another sip of wine, no longer looking at the paper, staring towards a poster of Braveheart on the opposite wall, but not seeing it, staring into space, enjoying the moment of respite and the unfamiliar peace. She swirls the wine around in her mouth, enjoying its flavour, before swallowing.
Should she go? It is not her type of film – as if that had anything to do with her considerations. She has never seen it, and yet the idea of it has come to haunt her, because it meant so much to Roy. Of course Jon would have preferred the Japanese original. She can reel off the cast like a contender in a trivia quiz and had read on the Internet that director John Sturges claimed he could turn any film into a western, including My Fair Lady, which would revolve around a bet that any loser could be turned into a master gunfighter with the right training. She had read too that the two leading men almost came to blows for real. The young second lead kept on trying to upstage the established star. He had grown up on a farm in Indiana and prided himself on his ease with firearms, while the latter was a Russian of Swiss-Mongolian parentage, had read philosophy at the Sorbonne and came to cinema via the circus. There was an existential quality about his life to which Jon might have warmed, and he would certainly have been impressed by the Sorbonne connection and would have felt it worth reminding everyone that he went there too.
Anna's favourite story about the movie was not something she had read in an article or seen on the Internet, but one Roy had told her, about a little boy and his first visit to the cinema. She must go to the film if only to check if it could be true, if Yul Brynner really does keep his hat on until half-way through The Magnificent Seven.
***
In Britain wealth and privilege have evolved over centuries into the class system. In Britain wealth is a birthright, in America it is more a question of how much you have in the bank. In Britain the rich, the poor, the upper class, the middle classes, the working class and the workless live in their own clearly defined communities. America is not so organised. In America wealth and poverty co-exist cheek by jowl. One second you can be on Sunset Boulevard with its hookers and billboards and bustle, and the next you turn a corner and you are in a quiet residential street where big houses nestle in the foothills and you can look out from the patio windows over the lights of the plain below, like ET at the beginning of his film.
Up past the Chateau Marmont, the hotel where Clark Gable and Jean Harlow conducted a torrid affair and John Belushi overdosed, stands a whitewashed villa, where a woman who looks a little like a slightly younger, long-haired version of Anna Fisher is sitting at a computer terminal. Music plays loudly in the background, so at first she does not hear the telephone ringing. She turns the volume down and cradles a mobile phone between her shoulder and cheek, while continuing to read the computer screen.
'Oh Anna, hi,' she says, with a note of some surprise in her voice, turning away from the screen. 'Yeah, I'm great. How's my reclusive sister?'
There is a moment of silence as the caller answers.
'Really? Who with? Oh. Well what are you going to see? Why don't you go see The English Patient? Well, at least you're getting out at last. Of course I will. Just drop him off on your way. It doesn't matter how late it finishes, because you can leave him overnight and pick him up in the morning, and that way you'll get a decent night's sleep ... You could stay here too. OK, but I insist that Roy stays overnight.'
Jenni had been worried about her sister, but less so since the arrival of the baby. She had been desperate to see what the baby looked like. She had only recently married and she and Dave had no children yet. The truth was she had never had anything to do with babies at all, knew nothing about them, except that they were fragile, small and smelly. This would be her first niece, or nephew, the first time she would have a chance to see a baby close up, over an extended period, an opportunity for a test-drive. She was interested in the baby because it was just that, a baby; she was interested because she might, just might, want to get one of her own; she was interested in it specifically because it was her sister's baby; but she was also interested because it might offer some slight clue as to the mysterious father. What colour would it be? Not just its skin. What colour would its eyes be? And its hair? What would it look like? What would it be like?
It? 'It' turned out to be a 'he', with a tiny penis and enormous balls, which Anna assured her was normal. The first time Jenni saw Roy she readied herself to disguise her disgust at the sight of the semi-solid substances that she had been warned issue continually from a baby's every orifice. She would ignore the puke and the smell and the screaming and the green shit and pretend that he was beautiful. But there was no puke or smell or screaming or shit of any colour, just at that particular moment. And the baby was beautiful.
He was three months old now, but already Jenni had been pestering Anna for an opportunity to look after him.
'You need to get out. Just leave the baby with us for a night.'
She had been reading about babies.
'I've been reading about babies,' she told Anna. 'Ask me something.' And she thought she could even stand the puke and the smell and the screaming ... and ... and the shit. 'Go on, ask me something.'
Roy is awake when Anna arrives to turn him over to her sister's care for the night. He lies silently in his carrycot examining Jenni, with his piercing blue eyes and he coos contentedly.
'Like a pigeon,' says Jenni, running her fingers through his blond curly hair.
'He's so gorgeous,' says Jenni. 'Does he look like his daddy?'
Anna smiles.
'Yes, he does.'
This is a breakthrough, but Jenni knows not to push too much.
30
Greasy-haired and unshaven, Eli Wallach leads a small army of mounted bandits into a little Mexican farming village, swept along by the grandeur of Elmer Bernstein's music. Not handsome enough to be a goodie, he struts around in his scarlet shirt and stripy trousers, gesticulating with his arms and bemoaning change in society, shameless women's fashions and the decline of religion. The bandits wear sombreros, the peasants wear pristine white pyjamas. Wallach and his men help themselves to chickens, skins, grain and cigars, and he assures the villagers he will be back for the rest, prompting one of them to run at him with a machete, never a good idea when you are ten or twenty yards away and your opponent has a gun.
A small deputation of villagers, including one who looks curiously like a young Mexican Oliver Hardy, ride over the border to buy guns. They arrive just in time to witness an argument over whether an Indian can be buried on Boot Hill. The undertaker's driver has quit. Prejudiced? The undertaker says that when it comes to getting shot the man is downright bigoted, and there is no one else to drive the hearse.
'Oh, hell,' says a voice off-screen.
The camera switches to a man with strong, handsome features, a little menacing and almost slightly oriental. He is dressed in a black shirt and stetson and is leaning on a fence. He
will drive the hearse, he says. To the sound of slow, threatening drums, he walks purposefully over to the rig. Another man borrows the stagecoach driver's scatter gun and joins him. He is younger, fairer, dressed in light, faded colours, with his off-white hat pushed back on his head. He says he has never ridden shotgun on a hearse before.
Brynner and McQueen. They died years ago, long before Anna went to see the film. But on the screen they live on. They live on, larger than life. The man with the shotgun and the easy charm and the man with the cigar and the suit of black. In The Magnificent Seven Brynner and McQueen achieved immortality. They are Akira Kurosawa's samurai knights relocated in the American West, with guns and horses and wistful talk of Dodge and Tombstone in the days before they became civilised. They are the embodiment of the legend, the myth, of the Wild West in corporeal form – not the way it was, but the way it should have been. Gunfighters who fight for the thrill of the fight, for the adventure, but who manage to make sure they are fighting on the right side nonetheless. Most of all they are a couple of boys playing at cowboys and Indians. The only difference between them and Roy and a million other kids around the world is that Brynner and McQueen had the right clothes, the guns, the horses, the landscape and they had the demeanour to become the legend.
But at the end of the day they are still just a couple of boys playing cowboys, thinks Anna. They are gone now, but their ghosts illuminate the Chinese Theatre. Cinema is the gateway to immortality, the door to another dimension, to another state of being, another plane, life after death. Brynner and McQueen are dead, but every night, somewhere in the world, they still ride the range with the others in the Magnificent Seven.
Senor Oliver Hardy and his friends approach Brynner, who keeps his hat on even in his hotel room, and they offer him the vacant post of village saviour. They promise to sell everything they own to pay him. Brynner observes dryly that he has been offered a lot for his work, but never before has he been offered everything.
The Man In The Seventh Row Page 19