I said nothing.
“Which will have to be linked to a bank account, which means you’ll have to register a company name with the bank, which means you’re going to need a company name. Don’t worry, I expect you can apply for all that stuff online.”
I swallowed the nasty taste building in my throat.
“I already have a company name.”
“Well, that’s one less thing to worry about. Where was I? That’s right, the projection room needs to be checked. At least the projector’s still there; you got lucky. God knows if it works, though, so you’re going to have to get a film and test it. Do you know how to work a projector?”
“I’ve seen . . . something on TV.”
“Great! You know what? I’m starting to get a good feeling about this.”
It was nice to see him motivated, to see him doing something other than working on the butt-print he’d put in that TV chair.
“So, what do you figure . . . how long?”
“A couple of months, give or take.”
“Give or take what?”
“If you plan to open it by December 1, you should be fine. That’ll give you . . . lots of time.”
I flipped the pages on my small diary. My earlier calculation was spot on.
“Eleven weeks.”
He nodded. “That seems reasonable.”
I grinned. Eleven weeks was surely enough time for destiny to work its magic.
JUST AS WE WERE wrapping things up in the auditorium an hour later, I heard a voice from the side door.
“Hello, anybody here?”
“Yes, here, who is it?” I yelled back.
I walked briskly toward the side door but had only gotten halfway there when I saw the face that went with the voice.
Sara. Only this time she wasn’t wearing a beret, and there was no purse on her shoulder. She was wearing an all-blue uniform, and her shoulder-length blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. There was a pistol on her hip. She looked serious.
This was a Sara I’d never seen. Work Sara.
“What’s going on here?” she asked, no glimmer of mischief in her eyes.
“Um, Sara . . . ? What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“I’m a police officer. I saw an open door at what I thought was a deserted building, and thought I should investigate. You’d be surprised what we find in places like this.”
I held my hands up.
“Okay, Officer. You’ve caught us red-handed, planning how to restore this place.”
Looking puzzled, Sara followed me down toward the front of the auditorium.
“Watch your step there. The carpet’s a trip hazard. Sara, this is Dad. Dad, Sara. We’re renting this place, fixing it up.”
Sara laughed. “Well, now I’ve seen everything.”
“Have you ever seen a movie from the Atlas balcony? It’s where the cool kids sit.”
“Funnily enough, I have. I did grow up here, you know.” She let her gaze wander around the theatre, its seats, the curtain. “You’ve certainly got your work cut out,” she said.
“We know. Come on, Dad. We should be getting to the hardware store.”
“Right you are.”
We began walking back toward the lobby.
“Ask her about the licence,” Dad whispered. “She’s a cop, she’ll know.”
But I didn’t want to bother her with that while she was working. Her job was busting bad guys, not stamping forms.
When we got to the side door, she smiled and asked me when we were planning to open.
“Not sure yet. We’re thinking early December. As soon as we get everything fixed here and I have some movies to show.”
I wanted to keep it vague. I had been burned in the past when I told people too early about great projects that had ended up failing . . . and this one definitely had several sensitive parts to it.
“Do you even know anything about how to run a movie theatre?”
I rolled my eyes and gave the standard response. “How hard can it be? Just turn out the lights and press Play, right?”
She chuckled.
“What are you going to open with? Is there a big blockbuster coming up that you’ve got your eye on? I know you’ve always loved movies.”
“Back to the Future,” I said. “I’ll open with Back to the Future.”
“Good call,” she said. “An oldie. I like that one.”
“Would you like to come?” asked Dad. “We could give you a couple of tickets. Like to look after our boys and girls in blue,” he added with a theatrical wink.
I blushed and stepped in front of him.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Eksell,” she said patiently.
“And you, Officer.”
I was just about to tell Sara she didn’t have to call me Mr. Eksell—as a joke, obviously—but she was gone.
When we heard the side door close, Dad shook his head at me.
“You should have asked her about the licence.”
“There’s time.”
WHEN WE WALKED into the hardware store, I asked Dad to be vague about the Atlas project, as I didn’t want anyone making a fuss. But Dad was a straight shooter.
“Hey, how you doing?”
“Great! My son’s taken over the Atlas.” Dad slapped me on the back. “We’re restoring it, and then there’s gonna be a big gala opening. You should come!”
“That’s great, man,” said the guy behind the counter. “You know how to run a movie theatre?”
Every single person, the first thing they asked was whether I knew how to run a movie theatre. Except for Sara. It had been her second question.
WE PICKED UP paint, brushes, and masking tape, plus a bunch of electrical stuff, and then we swung by home to collect dust sheets and overalls from the storeroom. I stood back while Dad rummaged through boxes and crates. At one point he pulled out a camping stove. He popped out the cartridge, gave it a shake, and seemed to be pleased with what he heard. He passed it to me to stick in the car.
“Why do we need a camping stove?”
“In case we need to cook our lunch,” he said, as if I were the simplest pupil in the class.
As we were heading back to the Atlas, I brought up my uncertainty with Dad.
“I know you keep telling people that I’m going to open up the movie theatre, but do you really think I can do it? I mean, if I’m honest, I don’t know anything about it, and even now, I realize there are so many things I just hadn’t even thought that I’d have to think about.”
“Peter, you’ve always been great at whatever you’ve tried to do. Computers and . . . uh, computer things. If opening the Atlas is what you want to do, of course you can do it,” he said. “Besides, word’s out now. So you’re going to have to do it.”
I bit my lip.
Dad was humming Sinatra’s “You Make Me Feel So Young,” but apart from that the journey passed in silence.
“Listen,” he said eventually, “a buddy of mine used to run the Atlas. I’ll call him when we get home. He’ll know what you have to do.”
“Wow, Dad. Thanks. Why didn’t you say?”
“I did. You know, the brother of the girl I was at university with used to run Video 2000, and the other brother ran the Atlas. I told you. Keep up, Peter.”
I laughed, and tried to shake off the doubts. Things were good. If nothing else, I’d gotten Dad out of his TV chair.
“DAD,” I SAID, once we were back home.
“Mhm?” He was rummaging in the fridge for a beer.
“Want to play some chess?”
“Only if I get to be Garry Kasparov,” he said with a smile.
“Fine. I’ll be Anatoly Karpov,” I said, and ran upstairs to get my chessboard.
When I got back downstairs, Dad was sitting by the kitchen table, waiting for me. We set up the board and the pieces. Dad was white, so he got to open the game, and he took his time choosing his move.
“There,” he said, at least a minute later. “Kasparov has made his
first move.”
“Oh, the Arabian opening,” I said, as if I knew something about chess. “But you know Karpov’s the true champ, right?” I added, and moved a pawn.
The game was cagey at first, neither of us wanting to commit.
He brought both knights out, and I opened up to let out a bishop and a rook. We traded a few mid-range blows, but then, about twenty minutes later, after he’d come back from getting another beer, he needlessly moved his queen’s pawn forward, leaving her open to attack from my bishop. I feared a trick. I feared a trap. He poured beer into his glass, allowing a good head to form.
“Sorry, do you want one?”
“Nah.”
“I don’t want to offer every time I get one. Help yourself, yeah?”
“Of course,” I mumbled, staring at the board, wondering what he was up to.
He set down his glass on a coaster, looked back at the board, saw me reach for my bishop.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh shit.”
The trouble with beating your dad at chess is that no matter how old you are, you never know if he’s losing just to make you feel better. Still, he seemed genuinely annoyed, so it did feel good.
Chapter 27
House of Fun
THE NEXT MORNING, work began. Dad was in charge.
“You start with the painting. I’ll get on with the electrical stuff. Put masking tape around the edges; we don’t want paint on the carpets.”
I picked a wall, the one in the corridor between the foyer and the auditorium. It was quite big, but even so I figured it couldn’t take that long.
Three days later, I finished the corridor and moved into the auditorium. I looked at the size of the room with renewed awe. By a quick calculation, if I kept going at the same rate, I’d finish around February. It wasn’t the painting that took so long; it was crawling around with masking tape, trying to get the edges straight. Tomorrow, I thought, as I soaked in the bath that night, I would have to take a ladder. And a bigger roller. And some cod liver oil, to deal with the aches in my joints.
As I was combing my hair, the phone rang. I ran to answer. It was Tina, a whole day ahead of schedule.
“Listen, Mr. Time Traveller. I need a huge favour. Tim’s on a business trip and I’ve accidentally booked a full class of yoga beginners for Sunday. Can I send Sofie to spend some time with her uncle?”
It sounded like a question, but it wasn’t, so I gave Tina the answer she was after.
“Of course.”
“Great. You can pick her up at the train station tomorrow. She’ll be on the 11:07.”
I RODE MY bike to the Atlas, and then took the ten-minute walk to the train station. Kumpunotko wasn’t the final stop, and I hoped Sofie hadn’t fallen asleep or gotten so into a game that she’d miss the stop. That had happened to me a few times in my first year of college, when I still regularly made the two-hour trek from Helsinki.
I looked at the half-dozen people standing outside, waiting for their friends and family, everybody with their eyes glued to a small gadget in their hand. One man put it away, looked at me, nodded, and then, thirty seconds later, was back to staring at the phone.
And then there was Sofie, in light-blue jeans that she (or Tina) had rolled up, a Ghostbusters T-shirt I’d bought her, sneakers, and a backpack that seemed to be bigger than she was and that bounced from side to side as she ran toward me, her frizzy hair glowing in the sun like a halo.
She gave me a hug. She was nothing like the rest of my family.
We walked back, talking about her trip and how we’d get strawberries from the market—and I couldn’t help noticing that she checked in on Facebook as we stopped to wait to cross the street.
“Can I tag you?” she asked me.
I pretended I didn’t understand what she meant; I tapped her on the shoulder and yelled, “Not if I tag you first! You’re it!” I ran backwards across the street, shooting at her with my fingers.
She sprinted after me, her backpack once again bouncing from side to side behind her.
As we turned the corner toward the Atlas, she asked, “And why do you live here now?”
“I wanted to make a change. I was a bit tired of my life. So I’m going to open a movie theatre here. This one, right here. Do you know how movie theatres work?”
“No. Do you?”
“Sure!” I said. “Of course!”
She raised an eyebrow and gave me a look so piercing she may actually have been channelling my big sister. Obviously, I’d been the subject of several conversations at home.
Dad was busy at work when we got back, and after a quick hello and a hug—even Dad hugged Sofie—he got back to it, and I felt that I had to do the same. Sofie sat on the stage in front of the big screen, her legs hanging over the edge. She held her phone in her outstretched arm and smiled for a selfie. Click. Then she turned around so that Dad and I were in the background.
“Smile!” she told us. Dad obliged. I may have been frowning but, as she couldn’t tag me, I would never find out.
“Hey, Sofie, I’ve got a great new game. All the cool kids are playing it. It’s called ‘painting a wall.’”
I handed her a brush and took her to the front of the stage. Then I got on my knees—she did the same—and we started to paint the wood panelling, a task that suited both our abilities.
I wanted to stay close to Dad and keep an eye on him. I was afraid he’d set the bar too high and that instead of giving the Atlas a simple polish, we’d find ourselves standing in the middle of a pile of rubble, like the couple in The Money Pit.
“Hey, Pete,” yelled Dad, after about half an hour.
I put down my brush and stood up, my knees creaking, back aching.
I walked over to where he was, on his hands and knees, tracing electrical lines running behind the wallpaper. A bead of sweat was running down the side of his head.
“What’s up?”
“I forgot, I’ve got news for you,” he said.
“Bad news or good news?”
“That guy I know—the movie man—he’ll be here today. I bumped into him and asked if he’d be able to have a look at the projection room.”
“Okay, and who was he again?”
“He used to be the manager.”
“Of what?”
Dad spread his arms wide, a gesture that encompassed the entire theatre. “So he might know a thing or two. His name’s Rexi. We made their ads for the paper, and I helped him out a couple of times, so he owes me a favour. Or two.”
“When is he coming?”
“Sometime today. Listen, do you think Sofie would like to go home? Mom can look after her?”
“Are you kidding me? She loves to hang out with her Uncle Pete, right?”
Sofie nodded, her thumbs tapping the gadget in her hand.
“Except, we have one rule here,” I went on.
“What’s that?”
I grabbed the phone from her hand and put it in an empty bucket next to me.
“That.”
“Awwww.”
“You can play with this instead,” I said, and took my yo-yo dog for a walk.
“What is that?”
“This? Only the coolest toy ever. It’s so cool that just one ‘yo’ wouldn’t do it justice,” I said. She stared at me like I was talking gibberish. “It’s a yo-yo. That’s what it’s called.”
“What does it do?”
“Nothing. It’s what you do with it. Put your finger like this,” I said, and pointed at her with my index finger. Then I hung the yo-yo off her small finger and gave her instructions. The yo-yo fell down the string, and stayed down.
“You just have to practise,” I said.
Dad moved over to the other wall, where he continued his little project with the electrical cable and the machine that went beeeeeeep.
It was so silent in the theatre that I could hear Dad humming the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” in the corner, which meant only one thing: it was time to turn the tape.
Dad had brought his old transistor radio to the theatre on the first few days so he could get his news fix. Originally, I just took a break every hour on the hour and got myself a cup of coffee from the gas station, but with the summer days turning into early fall, I’d gotten tired of going outside to wait for the news to end. Also, seven cups of coffee a day made me jumpy.
We agreed on a compromise. I brought in my old ghetto blaster and we took turns choosing tapes. It meant that every even-numbered hour, the Atlas echoed with the voices of the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Sinatra, Paul Anka, and Dad, and every odd-numbered hour, the stage was set for Bryan Adams, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Wham!, the Police, Cyndi Lauper, Hanoi Rocks, and all the other eighties greats.
Unlike Dad, who could have had a karaoke sing-off with the best of them, I had trouble carrying a tune, so I just worked and listened. Especially with other people around—the friends of Dad’s who kept turning up out of nowhere to return favours granted in the dim and distant past.
There was an admirable pile of tapes standing next to the boom box, and I let my index finger slide down the plastic cases, stopping at a couple that had nice mix-tape names: “Ride On,” “Daley Thompson’s Decadence,” or “Black Magic.”
“What are those?” Sofie asked, as if she were the time traveller, not me.
“These, my dear, are tapes.”
She looked at me blankly.
“They’re like playlists,” said Dad, helpfully, “but in physical form.”
“Wow,” breathed Sofie, picking up a cassette case and giving it a little rattle before peering in through the clear plastic. “It’s like a cave painting, but in music form.”
“And on them,” I continued, “I have stored some of the best music ever made.”
Dad coughed from the corner, demonstratively. I laughed.
I pressed Eject, returned Dad’s Elvis tape to its case, and slid my “Beat Box” mix into the player.
I’d been listening to my old tapes so much since I’d been back that I knew them all by heart. I knew what the opening song was going to be from the first scratchy sound of the needle hitting the vinyl: Eurythmics’ “Would I Lie to You?”
Sofie laughed at that, I think, or maybe it was my dancing, but she joined me and we danced up and down the aisle until the song faded away.
Someday Jennifer Page 17