Did Cubbins wonder if this was aimed at him? He gave David a suspicious look before leaving the shop. "You need to decide which job you're doing while you're here, David," Andrea warned him.
"Didn't you hear what I said? I'm no writer and I don't intend to be. What have I got to write about? Can you imagine anybody wanting to read about someone like me and my life? I've got no story to tell. If everybody has a book in them, some of them ought to stay there. Mine certainly should, except there's no book. I'm just what everyone sees, and who's going to be interested in that? If my friends and the people I'm closer to are interested that's enough for me, more than enough."
"Sounds like you've quite a lot to say for yourself." As David pressed his lips together so as not to say any more Andrea said "I hope that's the end of your visitors."
When the door opened he was afraid Cubbins had returned, but the newcomer was a woman. She turned to the racks of brochures, and David went over to her. "Can I help you with anything?" He was doing his best to feel relieved, because surely Cubbins had let him. If the title he'd given away at All Write was online, that was one more reason never to let out the thoughts that were better kept to himself—best never thought at all.
EIGHT
Just a solitary member of the staff is dealing with the public while her colleagues find the bags of sweets that occupy the counter worthier of their attention. You'd hardly know you were in a cinema except for how you have to queue, back and forth along a rope on stilts as if they don't want you to reach the pay desk until you're hungry for popcorn, not to mention hot dogs dripping so red and yellow you might think they'd caught a cartoon disease. At last the girl summons the raw-necked resolutely bald fellow who's been jiggling the front post of the rope to annoy the staff, and he stumps to the counter. "What's The Braining?" he brays loud enough for everyone in the lobby to hear.
"It's a horror."
"I know that." He should, since he has titles tattooed on either side of his neck—Human Centepide and Serbain Film, presumably favourites of his, though not so dear to him that he can spell them right. "What's in it?" he persists. "Can't be much when it's a fifteen."
"It's about a monster that steals brains. We've had people walk out because it was too much."
"Still only got a fifteen." His morose braying reminds me of Eeyore—no, make that Eegore, given his craving for horror. "Go on," he says like someone performing a charitable act for all the onlookers to remark. "Nothing else I want to see."
He doesn't notice that he's being followed upstairs to his screen of choice. The entrance is at the back of the auditorium, and I don't give him any reason to look over his shoulder. For the moment I stay several rows behind him, and he won't have realised he isn't alone in the cinema. Soon the lights go down, but not too far, and Eegore twists around to stare towards the projection booth. He doesn't see me crouched in the seat, or if he does my grin in the dimness means nothing to him, and he faces the screen when it lights up.
It's showing adverts full of perfect people even more manufactured than the wares they're touting. The people are so interchangeable that the adverts might just as well be merged into a single one, where the lovely youngsters use their latest phones to change their banks and get a loan to buy a car built by robots brainier than them and drive it with a glass that they never quite drink from in one hand, because the advert's telling them they have to be responsible with alcohol. All this rot brings in the flies—more of an audience, bumbling along the rows of seats or buzzing with phones in their hands—and I could think I've missed my chance, except that any one of them could be another.
There's a pair of girls who look like overgrown children, their tubs of popcorn are so gigantic. Scent mixed with the oily sweetish stench suggest that they've been playing with perfume and didn't know when to stop. More than one newcomer is so busy texting that he blunders to his seat as if he doesn't know where he is, except somewhere on the communications network. One cinema enthusiast demonstrates how he can take bites of a hot dog as an aid to spitting and swearing at the phone in his other hand. A rat is foraging in garbage behind me—no, somebody's rummaging in a bag of sweets, if there's any difference. As the cinema trailers go off like a series of bombs, each one louder and more blinding, a man wide enough to use an extra ticket arrives at my row and squeezes into the end seat with a loud moist wheeze. He's still wheezing when the film comes on.
Once the credits have finished twitching and jittering around the screen—names nobody except their families and friends are likely to have heard of—a girl starts cunting about while she waits for the story, such as it is, to finish her off. Cunting about is how only women behave, not like wanking about or cuntishness, which anyone can get up to and usually does. Women like to call it multitasking, but cuntery's a better word. As a shambling creature that reminds me of some of the audience pulls off the top of the girl's head and grabs her brain, which at least proves she's supposed to have one despite the lack of any other evidence, a latecomer thunders down the aisle, spilling popcorn from a tub to squeak beneath his boots, and drops himself on a seat along from Eegore's. "What's happened?" he wants to be told.
"He scrunched her head," Eegore brays, "and he squoze her brains out and I expect he et them."
"Right." More forcefully the newcomer demands "What're they saying?" He's asking about the dialogue he and Eegore just blotted out by talking. When Eegore sticks his hands up and wriggles his limp fingers to indicate how little use he is, Deafskull raises his droning voice. "What'd they say?"
"Try shutting the fuck up," a girl advises him, "and maybe we'd all hear." Her protest might mean more if she weren't waving her illuminated phone, and now she returns to texting or playing a game or maybe even reading about the film she paid to watch. That's how it goes for the rest of the show. Deafskull keeps asking what someone on the screen said and then what they were saying while he was, and Ratbag carries on scrabbling for sweets, and the girls dig in their tubs for popcorn that squeaks like polystyrene; maybe that's how it feels between their teeth. Quite a few people seem to prefer their personal screens to the one that's showing the film. As for Bladderblob—he's the fellow in my row, who puts me in mind of a balloon full of water—he makes a trip that must be to the Gents at least four times an hour. He comes back every time up the other aisle and sidles past me as if he's being dragged along the row. "What's that?" he complains when he almost stumbles over my feet, and "What the hell's that?" the next time. It wouldn't take much to trip him—just lifting my leg. Once he sprawls in the dark I could trample on his head and crush his face into the carpet. The only trouble is that someone might notice before I could finish.
The creature on the screen turns out to be collecting brains so that it can benefit from all their wisdom and become more human. I laugh at that and some of the audience do, though it doesn't prove they've any brains themselves—none worth a monster's effort to get to know them. The monster hunters are unimpressed too, and they blow it to bits. As the credits bring the lights on I linger in the darkest corner of the cinema to watch the audience. They've hardly started to straggle out of the screen, leaving sweet papers and bags and plastic tubs and trails of popcorn, when I make my choice.
There's an extra scene after the credits. A chunk of blown-up brain comes back to life and sets about growing into a monster. Eegore and Deafskull might appreciate this in their own morose ways, but they've gone. Just Bladderblob is left, waiting to be certain he doesn't miss even a scrap of what he's paid for, unless he's having to gather himself to heave his bulk out of the seat. The screen turns blank, and he lurches so abruptly into the aisle that his innards must be urging him.
The corridor outside the screens is deserted, but someone's in the Gents. He's touching the front of a hand dryer on the wall and then fingering its underside in case this sets it off. That doesn't work, and holding his prayerful hands underneath the white box is no help, any more than moving them away and bringing them back or skimming them beneath the
length of it, first slowly and then slower before he wafts them so fast that drips spatter the tiled wall. None of his overtures persuade the dryer to stop imitating a lump of marble, but as he takes his hands away it teases him with a metallic sigh. He spends some time trying to identify exactly where his hands were when they triggered it, and when the effect proves to be unrepeatable he lets them drop, which earns him a hot breath from the dryer—just enough to tempt his hands back in time to miss it. He jerks them up below it and snatches them away, which isn't the trick, however fast or slowly he performs it As the dryer celebrates his failure with another terse exhalation he waves his hands so wildly that he looks as if he's trying to rid himself of them. I'd be amused to do him the favour, but he stalks into the corridor.
He's driven Bladderblob into a cubicle, but from the sound of it or rather from the absence of any he's too shy to use the toilet while anyone's within earshot. Maybe that's why he had to visit it so often. "Hello in there," I call. "What did you think of the film?"
The silence means I've bothered him, but that's nowhere near enough. "You in the cubicle, I'm talking to you. Don't be bashful. Don't be a bashful Bladderblob. Let's hear your thoughts if there's nothing else to hear."
That brings a grunt and an even more thwarted version, more like a squeak. "That's a start," I encourage him. "Carry on, make yourself heard. You still haven't said if you enjoyed the film."
"Which film?" he growls, and I hear that he's facing away from the door. "What's it got to do with you?"
"Don't you even know which film you saw? The one with all the brains in. Did you like the bits of it you stayed for?"
"Why's that any of your business?" he snarls, and through the gap beneath the door I see his feet shuffling in worse than frustration. "Leave me alone, will you. I didn't come in here to talk."
"It sounds as if that's all you can do, Mr Bladderblob. Just tell me what you thought was in the bits you didn't see."
"What are you calling me?" he whinnies and lifts one foot after the other in something like a rain dance. "What are you up to, you—"
Whatever he might have said is cut short by a high-pitched grunt that falls short of producing a result. He won't be seeing any while I've more to say to him. "How about the bits you didn't care if anybody else saw?"
"Will you shut up," he squeals and stamps a foot as if this may jerk his bladder into action. "You think you're hiding out there but I bet I know who you are."
"You will. What do you think you know?"
"Aren't you the idiot that kept asking everyone about the film?"
"I'm no idiot of any kind. I'm the watcher you couldn't be bothered to notice. Lucky, that's me. Mr Lucky on another mission," I say and fling open the cubicle door. "Let me put you out of your misery, Mr Bladderblob."
I could think I already have. He lurches forward, and his forehead meets a tile with such a spectacular crack that you might think at least one of them has splintered. As he staggers backwards I hardly need to trip him. He falls face down in the toilet with his neck on the porcelain edge, and the impact drops the seat together with its lid on the back of his head. He has just begun struggling to raise himself when I sit on the seat, pinning his shoulders with my legs and digging my heels into the small of his back. "Sorry, what was that again?" I enquire. "You need to speak up."
He doesn't seem to have much time for words any more. I can't hear any among the hollow muffled noises he's managing to make. He's putting most of his energy into his hands, which claw at the air and punch as well as slap the metal walls on either side and grope extravagantly in my direction without finding me. It looks as if he's reaching for the flush, and I guide his right hand to the handle and help him yank it down. His choked sounds turn into gurgles, and his vague enthusiastic gestures grow even more vigorous, but I have to capture his wrist again and use his hand to clutch at the flush a second time before he tires of his antics. He's succeeded in achieving what he came for, though on the floor instead of in the toilet. Still, most men do both. Once I'm sure he has come to an end I leave him kneeling like a penitent so ashamed that he's hiding his head. That's how he should have felt, but it's too late for him to know. As I reach the exit I see the inspection sheet on the door to the corridor. The next inspection of the Gents is due in less than five minutes. "They'll need a bigger bag for you," I tell Mr Bladderblob as I step into the empty corridor.
NINE
"Help the homeless."
The woman outside Central Station was selling the Big Issue as so many of the homeless did. Regardless of her smile the middle-aged couple carried on their conversation as if they hadn't noticed her, although they'd only begun it when they had. "Help the homeless," and a businessman flourished his briefcase at her, though David suspected it contained no copy of the magazine. "Help the homeless," and a man and woman who'd tried to hurry past on either side glanced up in unison at the station sign as if this might persuade her that they needed to establish where they were. David couldn't do that, since he was climbing the ramp out of the station, and he didn't have a case, let alone anyone to talk to. He'd just reached the cold sunless March street when the woman smiled at him. "Help—"
He remembered the behaviour that he'd been too ashamed to admit to Len Kinnear, not merely dodging one of her fellow sellers but grimacing at the man. Before she could utter the rest of her plea David dug out more coins than the price of the item and pressed them into her hand. "Keep it," he mumbled, "sell it to someone else," and hurried uphill towards the roofless church.
He hadn't bought a magazine for years, from Slocombe's or anywhere else. If he needed the news it was on his phone or his computer. All the same, he regretted not having the magazine to show another seller halfway up the hill. No doubt she thought he was as uncharitable as he'd tried not to be. Was he feeling guilty because he couldn't help them all? He felt guilty enough for two people, he thought, or at least that was how a writer might think. Just now he was most concerned to help Stephanie find another job.
He was twenty minutes early for work. He took out his mobile as he came abreast of the travel agency, and was ready to go online when the door swung open, wagging its CLOSED sign. "You aren't busy, are you, David?" Andrea said.
"I could be for a few minutes."
He was thrown by her disappointed look. "I assumed you were here for us."
"Andy..." He felt as if he was pocketing the phone to make sure they weren't overheard. "I didn't know you still felt that way," he said and did his best to appear sympathetic.
"Just come inside."
She turned away before he could see her reaction, but once the door was shut she swung around to face him. "You know perfectly well that's all over. I very much hope you do."
"Well, I do now. I thought I did already." This didn't alter her expression, which was blank yet expectant without offering any hint of why, and so he tried adding "Only I thought you—"
"You're well aware I'm with someone else, David, and you seem to be."
"I don't just seem. Steph's been good for me. I hope what's his name is good for you."
"Rex. He is, and I don't care to discuss it with you any further."
David knew that tone from their months together. "We wouldn't be talking like this at all," he couldn't help pointing out, "except for what you said."
"I hardly think you can blame me, David. Exactly what are you accusing me of?"
"I thought you thought I was here for us."
"Yes." When her stare failed to convey the meaning she apparently believed it should, Andrea gestured at the racks of brochures, the dormant computers squatting on the counter. "Us," she said.
"I think I'm a bit early. I was just going to—"
"The brochures we wanted are in." She pointed to a heap of parcels with a Stanley knife on top. "We need them in the racks before we open."
"That shouldn't take long. I'll only be a little while and then—"
"May I remind you who's in charge here, David."
&nbs
p; "You aren't in charge of me. I know you liked to think you were." He might have left that unsaid, but now he had to say "You can't be in charge when it isn't time yet. I want to do something for Steph."
"If you let her take precedence over your work I won't answer for the consequences. And may I just—"
"Come off it, Andy. No need to talk to me like that. There's nobody else to hear."
Andrea let out a long slow breath before she said "I won't have anybody undermining my authority. I think you'd better take time to consider what behaviour is appropriate in the workplace, David."
"All right, I'll go and do that now."
He was feeling stupidly triumphant when she said "For a start, don't call me Andy here. In fact, nowhere at all."
"Is Ms Randall all right?" David retorted, but only once he'd shut the staffroom door.
A faint smell of coffee lingered in the windowless room, where the walls were covered with posters ousted from the shop. Five straight not unduly padded armchairs kept their distance from a set of thinner seats resting their brows against a bare table marked with coffee rings. David laid his phone on the table and saw his fingerprint fade from the screen as the Frugonet icon brought him online. Very soon it was plain that he'd had less of an inspiration than he'd hoped. No local jobs for chefs were to be seen—not even any within an hour's drive or further away either. By now browsing had taken hold of his brain, one site leading him to another that tempted him to several more, besides which he found himself following random notions that seemed to belong less to his own mind than to the electronic medium. No wonder they called it the net or the web; he could have imagined that thoughts he hardly knew he had were being trawled for, if not drawn in by an insubstantial trap. He'd regained enough of himself to resist when it occurred to him to make one more search while he was online. He felt absurd for doing so, but he typed Better Out Than In, and in a moment was rewarded with a site.
It was an anonymous blog that seemed determined to live up to its title. While it took the form of stories told by a narrator as if they'd happened to him, presumably they were meant to be satirical; they were certainly outrageous enough, not least in the ways the blogger brought them to an end. At first David had to laugh at the exaggeration of it all, but what kind of mind could produce such material? He blamed the internet for letting loose the contents of the depths of people's minds, those aspects of themselves they might never have admitted before it existed. If he were a writer, perhaps he might have said the dark matter that had been released was forming a new species of monster. He was reading a rant about the patrons of a cinema when Emily came into the staffroom. "What have you done to our Andrea?" she murmured, having shut the door.
Think Yourself Lucky Page 4