by Tim Pears
‘I’m going to get the old man an anorak for his birthday. He’s becoming a train-spotter,’ said Simon one evening.
‘What have trains got to do with anything?’ Harry demanded.
‘You explain, Alice,’ Simon gave up. ‘He’s your husband.’
Harry woke up the next morning first, as usual. He performed his ablutions in the en suite bathroom, poured tea from the Teasmade for Alice as he woke her, and set off to make some phone calls before breakfast. Alice stirred behind him.
‘Don’t let it get cold,’ Harry advised as he opened their bedroom door, stepped forward, turning, towards the stairs, and found himself about to tread on a jumbled heap before him. He jerked his leg up again over the obstacle and kicked off with the other foot in order to clear it. His forward foot, though, also cleared the landing: Harry projected himself down the stairs, and such was the momentum created by his instinctive evasive action that there was nothing he could do about it. He tumbled head over heels down the eight steps to the next landing, where the stairs turned, and lay in a stunned pile-up of limbs, groaning.
Alice rushed to the bedroom doorway. Harry was untangling himself gingerly.
‘I could have broken a bone,’ he moaned, rubbing his elbow. As it became clear that he hadn’t, Alice let go of the laughter she’d been suppressing.
‘I saw you leap down the stairs, you dotty loon,’ she said.
‘Some bloody idiot left that duvet lying there,’ Harry complained. ‘I don’t regard that as a joke.’
‘Well, it was very considerate of you not to step on it,’ Alice said. ‘Come here, boo-boo, let me rub it better.’
Harry looked up, his wounded expression fading. ‘There was no direct hit, actually, but you could rub it better anyway,’ he suggested, limping up the stairs.
‘I wonder what to use,’ Alice smirked. ‘Vaseline? Or a ginger and turmeric compress?’
‘Honey from the honey pot,’ Harry growled, stepping onto the top stair but one. At that moment the duvet on the landing between them shifted and rustled. As if there were some nocturnal animal – a hedgehog, perhaps – hidden beneath it. Alice took a step back into the doorway, Harry took a step back into space: he clutched the banister rail and just saved himself from tumbling, backwards this time for variation, down the stairs again.
The duvet shuffled once more, and Adamina’s sleepy head emerged. Before Harry could speak Alice said: ‘Don’t say anything, Harry,’ and he frowned, shook his head, turned on his heel and clumped down the stairs. Alice knelt down. ‘What’s the matter, Mina, did you have a bad dream?’
Adamina looked confused. She shook her head.
‘Do you not like your room?’ Alice asked. ‘Or the things I put in it?’
Adamina didn’t respond, only looked around, unsure of herself.
‘I remember your Mummy used to tell me you slept on the landing sometimes. Maybe that’s it,’ Alice concluded. She helped Adamina up. ‘Time for breakfast in a minute. Let’s get this bedding back to your room and get dressed, eh?’
For the next few mornings Harry opened the bedroom door cautiously checking that Adamina hadn’t rolled herself into a landmine to throw him up in the air and down the stairs again. But there was no sign of her, and he looked in her room and there she was still sleeping in bed. A few such reassuring mornings later Harry went straight downstairs. The others had joined him for breakfast and started without Adamina – Shobana had knocked on her door – when Simon walked into the kitchen from his part of the house bearing Adamina’s duvet with the child still asleep wrapped up inside it.
‘Look what I found outside my room,’ Simon explained. As the family gazed, Adamina stirred, and looked around from Simon’s arms like a newborn animal.
‘I’ll take her upstairs,’ Simon suggested, and as he left the room he added: ‘You never told me she was a sleepwalker, Alice. Must have inherited it from our mother.’
But that she was. Every few days they’d find her bed empty – of Adamina and her duvet – and Shobana and the children would search everywhere before breakfast. She made nests for herself all over the house, but always in a hallway or on a landing, never inside another room, so that it wasn’t hard to find her, in her linen chrysalis, her soft down shell.
Zoe had hired a new solicitor – an Irishman whose tongue worked faster than other people’s brains – and instructed him to fight the sale of the cinema with every possible legal means. In the end, they came to nothing beyond a succession of brief postponements of the date by which she had to vacate the premises; eventually there came a final deadline beyond which there was no legal appeal, but by that time Zoe had helped to found Gath Against the Ring Road, and they were prepared to employ other means.
The proposed inner ring road came north from the bus and coach station, along Lambert Street the half mile to the cinema, and a further two hundred yards or so before turning right up Barnfield Road to join Stratford Road, the main artery north out of town. According to the proposal, the stretch of road-widening that necessitated demolishing buildings began just short of the cinema and extended along Lambert Street. Most of the street, and Barnfield Road, were already wide enough for the simple expedient of double yellow lines to be sufficient.
The buildings to be demolished included the pub next door to the cinema, a piano shop, a Chinese takeaway, a small grocer, a burger joint and about thirty houses, some of which were by this time already boarded up and empty. Most of the other owners or tenants had employed the same stalling tactics as Zoe, pooling their legal advice, but all now had similar final notices to quit.
The rumour was that by agreement between the owners – Harry Singh Developments – the road-building contractors and the Department of Transport, the cinema was to be made an example of: on the due day of eviction, demolition would commence. The cinema was the most prominent building, both physically and symbolically, in the way.
The campaign group was composed of inhabitants of buildings due to come down, other local residents, some of the film buffs of old and environmentalists against the building of the road on principle. The cinema, they agreed, was to be their battleground.
Not all local residents joined in the campaign. Some had willingly sold their houses or shop premises for hefty sums and moved elsewhere. Others lived in side streets and were glad of a road that would deter drivers from nippy short cuts down their narrow streets. Still others professed a certain sympathy for the campaign in general but less for the cinema in particular: they remembered those shiftless hippies Zoe had once sheltered (many of these current protestors, come from God knows where, resembled them) and anyway they never went to the cinema these days, it’s all sex and violence and bad language nowadays, isn’t it, who’d want to go?
* * *
The day approached, Wednesday, 15 September 1993. Zoe knew that on that day she would be forcibly evicted, the cinema taken over, demolition begun. All that was left was a final protest, and it was agreed that they would occupy the cinema the night before.
‘We’ll have an all-night screening,’ Zoe had suggested at a campaign meeting in Gath Community Centre. ‘They’ll have to drag us out of the auditorium.’
Zoe cleared the things out of her flat, but she hadn’t found a place to move to: she sold or gave away her possessions – her Makonde carving, voodoo mask from Haiti, Tibetan bells, even her books, which Simon helped her transport to the Oxfam shop on the High Street.
‘Why don’t you move into the cottage?’ Alice suggested on Saturday morning. ‘Just until you’ve made fresh plans. I can’t stand it empty and I can’t stand the thought of someone else living there. But if it was you, Zoe, it’d be different. It would lay the ghost somehow.’
‘You know I couldn’t,’ Zoe told her. She wasn’t able to even look at Harry without a rage swelling inside her, and she arranged her visits to pick up Adamina so that she wouldn’t have to meet him.
‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I do have fresh plans. I just haven’t to
ld anyone yet.’
That wasn’t quite true: Zoe had told someone; she’d told Adamina the week before.
Adamina had become so reluctant to go back to the big house on Saturday evenings that Zoe let her stay at the cinema all weekend. She slept in Zoe’s bed, helped her make breakfast, did drawings while Zoe read the Sunday papers, a silent, undemanding companion. And then when it was time to go back she sneaked into the cinema and hid between large spectators, so that Zoe had to wait for her eyes to become accustomed to the dark before hauling Adamina out.
The previous Sunday, after having her help sell tickets for the afternoon performances, Zoe had taken Adamina upstairs. The girl sipped her Coke, apparently not listening to what Zoe had to tell her – deaf as well as mute – but Zoe had learned to identify evidence of her attention, even though it was hard to pin down: something in the tension of her shoulders, the odd flicker of her eyes, revealed she heard and responded to what Zoe said.
‘I’m going to tell you something,’ Zoe began, ‘I haven’t told anyone else. And I don’t want you to tell them either; don’t be a blabbermouth, Mina,’ she joked, and wondered if that was a smile suppressed she saw.
‘I’m going away,’ Zoe continued quietly. ‘You see, there’s nothing left for me here – apart from you, sweetheart. My cinema’s going; my home, too.’ Adamina’s face betrayed nothing. Zoe reached a hand to her shoulder but Adamina twitched away and Zoe withdrew it.
‘You’re very precious, Mina, and I want to see you again. I’m going to travel a while, and when I settle down somewhere I’m hoping you might come and visit me. Come and stay. You’ll be welcome, you know, any time and … You’ll be OK, sweetheart, I know you will. Alice will be a great … aunt for you, and you’ve got brothers and sisters all ready-made. There’s just nothing left for me here, I’m forty years old, that may not mean much to you and maybe it’s not that old but I never meant to stay, that’s the weird thing, I was just going to help my father through college and I just kept staying on and …’
She broke off. I shouldn’t be telling her, she admonished herself: a seven-year-old child; you self-indulgent egotist. But Adamina’s silent, solemn presence brought forth more than she deserved to hear.
‘You know, another thing I never told anyone else: I loved James very much. Even he didn’t know. He didn’t think anyone could love him. That’s why your mother and him – it was a miracle. Not a big God miracle, I don’t mean, but a little human miracle. I wasn’t jealous of Laura, that was strange. I was happy for them.’
Adamina sat, hunched, listening and pretending not to, looking away. Zoe blew her nose, and felt Adamina press against her side. This time she didn’t flinch as Zoe cupped her arm around her and hugged her tight.
‘Come here,’ she said. ‘We’re a pair of orphans, aren’t we? I haven’t cried in years. Not outside the cinema, anyway; not in daylight. You’ll be OK, I know you will. You’ll survive. You must do.’
Although Zoe couldn’t separate Harry’s actions as a businessman from her own loss – indeed was glad she couldn’t; she had no wish to – she didn’t want to cause a rift in the family, or the household in general: she didn’t ask anyone to join in the protest. But Natalie found out about it and told Zoe she wouldn’t miss it for anything. And when she popped in on Sunday afternoon, Simon was with her.
‘Nat’s told me all about it, darling,’ Simon explained. ‘You can keep a seat for me. In fact, if you’re overbooked already, you can give me her seat. My bulk will come in handy in a situation like this, Zoe. She’s too skinny, they’ll carry her out by the scruff of the neck.’
‘You can piss off,’ Natalie bristled. ‘If anyone tries to move me, I’ll deck them,’ she claimed, and had to be reminded that this was supposed to be a non-violent demonstration.
‘What about Harry?’ Zoe asked Simon. ‘You’re friends as well as brothers-in-law; won’t he be upset if he finds out about your participation?’
‘He already knows I’m offering my services,’ Simon declared. ‘He said—’
‘Yes, I know,’ Zoe interrupted. ‘It’s only business.’
‘No,’ Simon corrected her. ‘He said he’d join in too, except it might be legally ambiguous.’
‘Plus I wouldn’t let him through the bloody door!’ Zoe exploded.
‘Well, he doesn’t own it now, he’s sold it, it’s Department of Transport property. Also,’ Simon continued, ‘Father wanted you to know that if you’re short of numbers, he’d like to lend his support.’
‘What? Are you serious?’
‘He’s lost weight, he’s not as heavy as he was, but he’s still a big man.’
Zoe looked at Natalie appealingly: ‘Am I crazy or are they?’ She turned to Simon. ‘Tell him thanks, but, you know, Charles is not the most popular man in this town. I don’t think his presence would help the campaign.’
There was someone else who would, though: Lewis had heard about the occupation and offered to improve Zoe’s sound system. Since she was only using one auditorium, he said he’d wire up the speakers from the smaller screen to provide quadrophonic sound for the occasion.
‘Also, with my long legs, they might find it difficult to get me out of one of your seats in the morning,’ he told her. ‘I find it hard enough myself. They’re squashed too close together, you know.’
Zoe’s other concern was deciding on the films to show at that valedictory screening. She thought protest films of one kind or another would best fit the mood of the event, except that it might not be such a good idea to inflame the audience’s emotions; they should be resolute, but peaceful. And so she settled on a self-indulgent, severely edited version of what would have been the following year’s programme of a hundred classics from a hundred years of cinema. Or, to put it another way, Zoe was going to bow out with half a dozen of her own personal favourites.
‘I’m going to be on the road,’ she told herself. ‘I may not see the inside of a cinema again for years. I need a strong fix to see me through.’
The evening would commence at ten p.m. on Tuesday with L’Atalante, to be followed (with fifteen-minute intervals for caffeine and nicotine fixes in the foyer) by Duck Soup, La Règle du Jeu, Some Like It Hot (for more laughter in the dead of night). They weren’t, in the end, her very favourite films, but there were other considerations, namely the need to keep people awake; there would only be a few film buffs like herself, who’d trained themselves to watch gloomy masterpieces without falling asleep.
Amarcord would carry them through to dawn and then, she figured, they could enjoy something heavier, although she refrained from inserting her very favourite, Mirror, made by the man who’d opened her eyes twenty years earlier. This audience would be in no fit state for that one. Instead she selected another made in the same year, Days of Heaven, shot mostly in the magic hour and appropriate for the dawn they wouldn’t see.
Zoe also decided against Tokyo Story, in case it should make the audience too sad and render them unfit even for passive resistance: Time of the Gypsies would be next, then Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, and by then the bailiffs would be knocking on – battering down? smashing through? – the glass doors at the front of the cinema.
How long, though, would it take them to carry the occupying audience, the protesting viewers, outside? Perhaps another hour or more, in which case – provided they could keep the projection booth battened up and powered by the generator they planned to install – they should have more to watch. Zoe wanted The Piano, which she had just seen an advance print of, in London, but she feared that if she were torn away in the middle she’d turn violent. So she plumped for Koyaanasquatsi, with M. Hulot’s Holiday a first reserve, glorious laughter for the last vulnerable stragglers. She realized that she was back to a collection without women directors, but decided Natalie would have to make do with the extraordinary women up there on the screen: Dita Parlo, Margaret Dumont, Marilyn Monroe, Linda Manz, the grandmother in Time of the Gypsies.
Sam, the e
lder Singh boy, was Harry’s favourite. He was the only one allowed to interrupt Harry at his desk in his study at home. Harry would pick him up and sit him on the desk.
‘How are you today, Samuel? You’re looking moony. Are you in love?’
‘Yes,’ Sam unwisely admitted.
‘Really? Who with, I wonder? One of the girls in Susan’s class?’
‘I’m in love with Shobana. I’m going to marry her.’
‘You can’t possibly marry her,’ Harry told him. ‘Don’t you understand? She’s a country cousin, a village girl, she’s practically illiterate.’
‘She said I could marry her. I watch her doing her dancing practice.’
‘Well, maybe I should watch this dance too,’ Harry suggested slyly.
‘No! You’re not allowed to,’ his son told him.
At supper Harry teased Shobana by asking whether she was prepared for the devotion of her charges, and was she aware how she inflamed their desires further with her dancing? Shobana blushed, Sam stared furiously at the tablecloth, the other children crowed. Only Adamina ignored the proceedings.
Harry bent down to Sam beside him and whispered something in his ear. Sam looked at Adamina across the table, turned back to his father, and said: ‘She’s dumb.’
Adamina picked up her dessert spoon, leaned over and whacked Sam on the forehead: it sounded like hard wood. Sam’s face went rigid with surprise – as if he’d witnessed something astonishing but not yet recognized it’d been done to him – and then his face shattered and he howled. Bedlam erupted. Shobana leaned across the table to grab Adamina but she’d already jumped back.
‘Go to your room this minute, girl!’ Harry yelled.
She scooted past Alice, who was making her way from the end of the table to comfort Sam: he was bawling, and a small round bump was already preparing to protrude from his skull.
It was Dog’s idea to use locks. It came to him while helping Zoe clear out old posters and finding one for the bicycle films screening.