“Were you fancying a bit of fun? You should play seriously even if you think it’s just a game.” To Edgeworth’s disbelief, this sounded like a rebuke. “I expect your friend has something to say about it,” the man said.
“She’s not my friend and none of you are.” Edgeworth confined himself to mouthing this, if only to hear what comment she would have to manufacture. He heard her draw an unsteady breath and say “Thanks for coming on, Eric. I wish—”
“No point in wishing here. You know that isn’t how we play. Thank you for entering into the spirit, Eric,” the man said and, along with Mary and the girl who’d called, was gone.
Surely his last words contradicted his rebuke, which had to mean he couldn’t even keep the hoax up. Of course the number he’d called from had been withheld. It was too late for Edgeworth to go back to the commentary on the disc, and he returned the film to the shelf before tramping to the bathroom and then to bed.
With all his films he didn’t need to dream. In the morning he ate off a tray in front of Third Time Sucky, a Stooges short just the right length for breakfast. “I wish I knew what to wish for.” “I wish I had one of your wishes.” “I wish you two would shut up,” Moe retorted, the effects of which made Edgeworth splutter a mouthful of Sticky Rotters over his dressing-gown. He showered and donned his uniform, which said Frugotomovies on the sweater, and headed for the Frugoplex.
The cinema was an extensive concrete block that resembled the one where he lived. The February sky was just as flat and white. He’d chosen the apartment because he could walk to the cinema, but there were increasingly fewer new films that he wanted to watch; he hardly used his free pass any more. At least he didn’t have to enthuse about them to the public. He was gazing with disfavour at the titles outside when the manager let him in. “Any problem?” Mr Gittins said, and his plump smooth face displayed a smile too swift and sketchy to be identified as such. “I hope you can leave it at home.”
Rather than retort that some of his workmates were to blame, Edgeworth made for the anonymous concrete staffroom. Soon the rest of the staff began to show up, some of them not far from late. Without exception they were decades younger than he was. As he took his place behind a ticket desk Larry Rivers came over. “What were you watching last night, Eric?” Larry said with a grin as scrawny as his face.
Had he called himself Terry Rice last night? His name was similar, and he liked quizzing Edgeworth, who said “I was listening.”
“What were you listening to, Eric?”
He was using the name like a quizmaster. Edgeworth was tempted to confront him, but perhaps that was exactly what he and the rest of them wanted. “The man who wrote North by Northwest,” Edgeworth said.
“Don’t know it. Is it a film?”
Edgeworth suspected this wasn’t even meant as a joke. “Cary Grant,” he said. “James Mason.”
“Don’t know them either.”
“Hitch, for heaven’s sake.”
“Is that the film with Will Smith?” one of the girls seemed to feel it would be helpful to suggest.
“Hitchcock, love.”
“Sounds a bit mucky to me.”
“Sounds a bit like sexual harassment,” another girl warned Edgeworth.
“Alfred Hitchcock,” he said in desperation. “Psycho.”
“Was that the one with Vince Vaughn?” Larry said.
Did they all think the past—anything older than them—was a joke? No wonder Timeless Video had failed when there were so many people like them. Edgeworth had lost all the money he’d sunk in the video library, which was why he’d been glad of the job at the Frugoplex. Some old things wouldn’t go away, not least him. He was about to say at least some of this when Mr Gittins opened the door once again. “Only just in time,” he said like a head teacher at a school gate.
Mary Barton ducked as if her apologetic smile had dragged her head down. Did she glance at Edgeworth or just towards all the staff around the ticket counter? She seemed wary of being seen to look. She hurried to the staffroom and scampered back to the lobby as Mr Gittins addressed the staff. “Let’s keep the public happy and coming back for more.”
Edgeworth might have wished to be a projectionist if the job wouldn’t have involved watching too many films that bored him if not worse. He was reduced to noticing which film attracted the most customers, a dispiriting observation. Today it was the latest 3-D film, Get Outta My Face. Whenever there was a lull he watched Mary Barton at the refreshments counter opposite. Had her left little finger been bandaged yesterday? It looked significantly bigger than its twin. Her smile was if possible braver than ever, especially if she caught him watching, though then he stared at her until her eyes flinched aside. At times he thought her thin prematurely lined face was trying to look even older than it was, almost as old as him. He wasn’t going to accuse her and give everyone a chance to scoff at him; he wouldn’t put it past them to accuse him of harassing her. Instead he made sure she never had an opportunity to speak to him away from the public—she clearly didn’t have the courage or the gall to approach him in front of anyone who wasn’t privy to last night’s witless joke.
When he left for home she was besieged by a queue, but as she filled a popcorn tub that she was holding gingerly with her left hand she sent him an apologetic look. If they’d been alone it might well have goaded him to respond. He had to be content with stalking next door to Pieca Pizza, where he bought a Massive Mighty Meat that would do for tomorrow’s dinner as well.
He downed two slices in the kitchen and took another three into the main room, one for each version of Touch of Evil. He was halfway through Orson Welles’ preferred cut when the phone rang. He paused the manic gangling hotel clerk and prepared to say a very few short words to the uninvited caller. “It’s that time again, Eric,” said a voice he could hardly believe he was hearing.
“My God, you’re worse than a joke.” Edgeworth almost cut him off, but he wanted to learn how long they could keep up the pretence. “Can’t you even get your own rules right?” he jeered.
“Which rules are those, Eric?”
“Three mistakes and I was supposed to be out of your game.”
“You haven’t quite got it, my friend. Last night was just one question you couldn’t answer.”
“Trust me, I could. I was having a laugh just like you.”
“Please don’t, Eric.”
Mary Barton sounded so apologetic it was painful, which he hoped it was for her. He could almost have thought she’d been forced against her will to participate in the hoax, but any sympathy he might have felt she lost by adding “Don’t make any more mistakes. It’s serious.”
“He sounds it.”
“We get this problem sometimes.” The man’s amusement was still plain. “Listen to your friend,” he said. “See how she sounds.”
“I’m truly sorry to be pestering you again, Eric. Hand on heart, you’re my only hope.”
Edgeworth didn’t know which of them angered him more. Her pathetic attempt to convince him she was desperate made her sound as though she was trying to suppress the emotion, and he was provoked to demand “Where are you on the television? I want to watch.”
“We’re on the radio.” With a giggle all the more unpleasant because it had to be affected the man said “You wouldn’t want to, trust me.”
Edgeworth agreed, having left out the comma. What radio show would have inflicted this kind of conversation on its audience? All that interested him now, though not much, was learning what question they’d come up with this time. They must have been reading a film guide to have thought of last night’s. “Go on then, Mr Terry Rice,” he said, baring his teeth in a substitute for a grin. “Terrorise me again.”
“Do your best, Mary.”
“What’s the Alfred Hitchcock film where you see him miss a bus?”
Someone stupider than Edgeworth might have imagined she was pleading with him. Did they genuinely expect him not to realise they were mocking wha
t he’d said today to Larry Rivers? “Strangers on a Train,” he said at once.
“Have a closer look.”
He didn’t know if this was meant for him or the Barton woman, but her voice grew shrill and not entirely firm. “Not that one, Eric.”
“Must have been The Birds, then.”
“Closer.”
“Please, Eric,” Mary Barton blurted, and he was disgusted to hear her attempting to sound close to tears. “You must know. It’s your kind of thing.”
“I know,” Edgeworth said with a vicious grin. “I’ll give it to you. Rope.”
“Not close enough yet.”
“Please!”
Edgeworth jerked the receiver away from his aching ear. “What are you supposed to be doing?”
“It’s my eye.”
Was he also meant to hear a stifled sob? “That’s what my grandma used to say,” he retorted. “She’d say it to anyone talking rubbish.” Nevertheless he wasn’t going to seem ignorant. “Here’s your answer since you’re making such a fuss about it, as if you didn’t know. It’s—”
“Too late, Eric,” the man said without concealing his delight. “You’ve had your second chance.”
“Please…”
Edgeworth could only just hear Mary Barton’s voice, as if it was no longer directed at him. He was right to hold the phone at arm’s length to protect his eardrum from any surprises they had in mind, because he heard a shrill metallic sound before the line went dead. It was ridiculous even to think of searching the airwaves for Night Owl. He did his best to pick up the Welles film where he’d left off, but the twitching maniac in charge of the motel disturbed him more than he liked. He put the film back in its place among the dozens of Ts before tramping angrily to bed.
He lurched awake so often, imagining he’d heard the phone, that not just his eyes were prickly with irritation by the time he had to get up for work. He was going to let Mary Barton know he’d had more than enough, and he wouldn’t give the rest of them the chance to enjoy the show. “Eager to get going?” the manager said by way of greeting.
“I’m eager all right,” Eric said and grinned as well.
He clocked on and hurried to the ticket counter, hoping Mary Barton would be first to arrive so that he could follow her to the staffroom. She’d been warned yesterday about timekeeping, after all. He watched the manager let in their workmates and grew more frustrated every time the newcomer wasn’t her. Larry Rivers was among the last to join Edgeworth at the counter. “What were you up to last night, Eric?” he said.
Edgeworth almost turned on him, but he could play too. “Nothing you’ve ever seemed interested in.”
Somebody more gullible than Edgeworth might have thought the fellow felt rebuffed. No doubt he was disappointed that Edgeworth hadn’t taken the bait, and some of their audience looked as if they were. There was still no sign of Mary Barton by opening time. “Meet the public with a smile,” Mr Gittins said.
Perhaps the woman had stayed home because she was too embarrassed to face Edgeworth, unless it was her day off. “Isn’t Mary Barton coming in?” he said before he knew he meant to.
“She’s called in sick.” Mr Gittins seemed surprised if not disapproving that Edgeworth felt entitled to ask. As he made for the doors he added “Some trouble with her eye.”
Edgeworth struggled to think of a question. “She’ll have had it for a while, won’t she?”
“She’s never said so.” Mr Gittins stopped short of the doors to say “Her mother hasn’t either.”
“What’s she got to do with anything?”
“She’s looking after Mary’s children while Mary’s at the hospital. Happy now, Eric? Then I hope we can crack on with the job.”
As Mr Gittins let the public in, one of the girls alongside Edgeworth murmured “You’ll have to send her a Valentine, Eric. She isn’t married any longer.”
“Keep your gossiping tongues to yourselves.” He glared at her and her friends who’d giggled, and then past them at Rivers. “I’m putting you on your honour,” he said as his grandmother often had. “You and your friends have been ringing me up at night, haven’t you?”
“What?” Once Rivers finished the laugh that underlined the word he said “We get more of you here than we want as it is, Eric.”
After that nobody except the public spoke to Edgeworth, and he couldn’t even interest himself in which films they were unwise enough to pay for. Of course there was no reason to believe Rivers was as ignorant as he’d pretended—not about the late-night calls, at any rate. Edgeworth felt as if the long slow uneventful day were a curtain that would soon be raised on a performance he had no appetite for. At last he was able to leave behind everyone’s contemptuous amusement, which felt like a threat of worse to come. When he shut himself in his apartment he found that he hoped he was waiting for nothing at all.
The pizza tasted stale and stodgy, an unsuccessful attempt to live up to itself. He tried watching classic comedies, but even his favourites seemed unbearably forced, like jokes cracked in the midst of a disaster or anticipating one. They hardly even passed the time, never mind distracting him from it. He was gazing in undefined dismay at the collapse of a dinosaur skeleton under Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn when the phone went off like an alarm.
He killed the film and stared at the blank screen while the phone rang and rang again. He left it unanswered until a surge of irrational guilt made him grab it. “What is it now?” he demanded.
“Someone was scared you weren’t playing any more, Eric.”
“I thought your friend was meant to be in hospital,” Edgeworth said in triumph.
“She’s your friend, Eric, only yours. You’re the only one she can turn to about films.”
“Can’t she even speak for herself now?”
“I’m here, Eric.” Mary Barton’s voice had lost some strength or was designed to sound as feeble as the prank. “They’ve fixed me up for now,” she said. “I had to come back tonight or I’d have lost everything.”
“Trying to make a bit extra for your children, are you?”
“I’m trying to win as much as we need.”
Was she too preoccupied to notice his sarcasm, or wouldn’t that fit in with her game? Could she really be so heartless that she would use her children to prolong a spiteful joke? His grandmother never would have—not even his mother, though she’d had plenty to say about any of Edgeworth’s shortcomings that reminded her of his unidentified father. “Ready to help?” the man with Mary Barton said.
“What will you do if I don’t?”
Edgeworth heard a suppressed moan that must be meant to sound as terrified as pained. “Up to you if you want to find out,” the man said.
“Go on then, do your worst.” At once Edgeworth was overtaken by more panic than he understood. “I mean,” he said hastily, “ask me about films.”
“Be careful, Mary. See he understands.”
The man seemed more amused than ever. Did he plan to ask about some detail in the kind of recent film they knew Edgeworth never watched? Edgeworth was ready with a furious rejoinder by the time Mary Barton faltered “Which was the film where Elisha Cook played a gangster?”
There were three possibilities; that was the trick. If she and Rivers hoped to make Edgeworth nervous of giving the wrong answer, they had no chance. “The Maltese Falcon,” he said.
“Wider, Mary.”
“That’s not right, Eric.”
Her voice had grown shriller and shakier too, and Edgeworth was enraged to find this disturbed him. “He was a gangster in that,” he objected.
“It isn’t what they want.”
“Then I expect they’re thinking of The Killing.”
“Wider again,” the man said as if he could hardly bear to put off the end of the joke.
“No, Eric, no.”
It occurred to Edgeworth that the actor had played a criminal rather than a gangster in the Kubrick film. The piercing harshness of the woman’s ragged voic
e made it hard for him to think. “Just one left, eh?” he said.
“Please, Eric. Please be right this time.”
She might almost have been praying. Far from winning Edgeworth over, it embarrassed him, but he wasn’t going to give a wrong answer. “No question,” he said. “It’s Baby Face Nelson.”
“Wider still.”
“What are you playing at?” Edgeworth protested. “He was a gangster in that.”
“No, it was his son,” the man said. “It was Elisha Cook Junior.”
“That’s what you’ve been working up to all along, is it?” Edgeworth wiped his mouth, having inadvertently spat with rage. “What a stupid trick,” he said, “even for you.” He would have added a great deal if Mary Barton hadn’t cried “No.”
It was scarcely a word. It went on for some time with interruptions and rose considerably higher. Before it had to pause for breath Edgeworth shouted “What are you doing?”
“It’s a good thing we aren’t on television.” By the sound of it, the man had moved the phone away from her. “We couldn’t show it,” he said gleefully, “and I don’t think you’d want to see.”
“Stop it,” Edgeworth yelled but failed to drown out the cry.
“Relax, Eric. That’s all for you for now,” Terry Rice said and left silence aching in Edgeworth’s ear.
The number was withheld again. Edgeworth thought of calling the police, but what could that achieve? Perhaps it would just prove he’d fallen for a joke after all. Perhaps everything had been recorded for his workmates to hear. He grabbed the remote control and set about searching the audio channels on the television. He thought he’d scanned through every available radio station, since the identifications on the screen had run out, when a voice he very much wished he couldn’t recognise came out of the blank monitor. “This is Night Owl signing off,” Terry Rice said, and Edgeworth thought he heard a muffled sobbing. “Another night, another game.”
Edgeworth gazed at the silent screen until he seemed to glimpse a vague pale movement like a frantic attempt to escape. He turned off the set, nearly breaking the switch in his haste, and sought refuge in bed. Very occasionally his thoughts grew so exhausted that they almost let him doze. He did without breakfast—he couldn’t have borne to watch a film. Once the shower had made him as clean as he had any chance of feeling he dressed and hurried to work.
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