No one really knows what it's like to be me. I think that every time I finish a shift. I step out into the night air, smell the exhaust and the wet pavement and the damp, whistling wind. Whenever I feel a spell coming on I try to focus on the small pleasures of life. In the book they gave me, it says that if you're feeling overwhelmed, just try and concentrate on something small and positive in front of you—a flower, a letter, a photograph of someone you love. It's a good strategy. Or at least, I'd say it keeps me sane.
When I work there I usually only talk to Katharine. I'm in love with her; I've been in love with her for a year. I know she knows—I can sense it—but I also sense what she'd say, so I'll never approach the topic with her. I don't think I could bear to hear those words from her. Better to leave things where they are right now. When I'm down she cheers me up, tells me how intellectual I am, how the store doesn't deserve someone like me. When she calls me a 'thinker' or a 'poet' I feel like I can fly home.
She started working there a year ago, and we clicked from the very first moment we met. I was the veteran who first showed her all the ropes and all the tricks: which suppliers not to trust, which shifts are the best, how to quickly find out what customers want. She's really tall—as tall as me—so we have that in common. We're both Geminis, too. I don't want to speak on her behalf, but I'm pretty sure she only really confides in me. If I ever have kids and one of them is a girl, I'll call her Katharine. Unless she expressly forbids it, of course.
Katharine isn't always there, though, and then the place is really awful. It's usually Dylan or Alexandria who run the till, and they send me around to do the most menial tasks. The worst is when they order me about loudly in front of everyone, customers and staff. I hate people humiliating me. It takes all my strength to control myself when people do that.
When I go home, it is one straight long walk down the town's main street, twenty-two minutes from door to door. It was the reason my parents told me to take the job, when they were alive. They said it was fate that I got it. My mother often ascribed dramatic meanings to fairly ordinary things. Since none of the other jobs had worked out, I agreed to give it a go. It was Dylan who interviewed me, and in the beginning he seemed fine. He said he was impressed that I knew who Stefan Zweig was. But that seems so long ago now.
Sometimes, to dilute the routine, I take parallel streets. Sometimes—when I'm really tired of things—I take a route out past the roundabout on Friargate, which is ten minutes longer. I do that once a week—usually a Thursday—and to treat myself, I buy a Bounty bar from the Tesco's there, to give me something to look forward to. Now that my parents are no longer alive home is a bit of a sad place to come back to. The silence when you open the door; no one to ask how your day was, or if you want a cup of tea. Sometimes I leave the TV on when I go out, just to have some noise to come back to when I return.
For a while, I had a problem with a man who was always following me. A smiling man. There was a period last year—probably a month—when he appeared every day. I always saw him uptown, both going there and coming back. He walked at the same pace as I did, but always about a hundred yards behind, so I never got a close look at his face, though from a distance I could always recognize the cheap, brown dufflecoat he wore. All I could tell was that he was smiling. Even when I changed routes he used to be there behind me. I told Katharine about him and she asked me to point him out, but every time I took her out onto the street he was nowhere to be seen. She said I shouldn't worry about it—that sometimes we think we see the same faces in people, but they're not really, it's just our imagination. I had to admit what she said made sense; I'd wondered myself whether my mind was playing tricks on me. Seeing me with Katharine must have had an effect, though, since after that he stopped following me—or at least, I stopped seeing him on my walk.
The old ABC cinema was on my route. I must have walked past it a thousand times before it ever occurred to me to break inside. It had been closed for years—a huge, ruined shell of a building, its posterboards blank, the white tracks of its sign outside free of any letters. The glass doors at the front were smeared with white paint so you couldn't see inside, and the alcove on its front steps stank of piss and old blankets. I was ten when I watched the very last film there—Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds. My mother took me to see it because it was my birthday, and she couldn't think of what to get me. I got nervous when Burt Reynolds drove his car underneath a collapsing chimney, and was so happy when he made it out the other side. My mother told me to close my eyes during all the bedroom scenes. We never got a chance to go to the ABC again.
One morning, as I was walking to work, I saw a cat shoot into the alleyway, chased by three huge dogs. They'd trapped the poor thing in a corner, by a fire-exit door, before I got to them and shooed them away. That was how I found the way into the cinema. There were two plain green doors with a rubbish bin in front of them, and what looked like a long, black line between them. When I stepped closer, I saw that it wasn't a line, but a crack. I pulled one door open, glimpsed through the space, and saw an entire restaurant—The Wagon Wheel—in the dark. Three oblongs of dull grey light from the street revealed the shapes inside: cushioned seats, tables, and an empty bar. The whole place smelled of urine and rotting carpet. On the far end was a door which, I found out, led up into the closed, silent darkness of the old cinema.
When I passed by the next day, I had a torch with me. I took a knife as well, wrapped in a hand towel, just for peace of mind. I felt scared the first time I entered. Seeing the restaurant in the darkness, with my flashlight moving over the tables and chairs, was like travelling back in time. When I got to the inside door, a flight of steps led up into a corridor. I had the torch in one hand and the knife in the other. If someone had met me, they'd have had the fright of their life. At the top of the stairs I started to hear echoes, and I realized that I was in the actual theatre itself. There wasn't a single seat in the place—just a whole set of staggered slopes, where all the fittings had been ripped out. When I clicked my torch off, there was complete darkness. It was calming to sit there in the cinema, in the silence, all on my own.
After that, I would go back once a week. I checked out every corner of the place with the torch, in the darkness. There was a projector room with two rusting iron stands. There was a foyer, which smelled of burnt rubber, with two empty fridges and a broken cash till. If you stood close, you could still see out of the smeared glass doors in front. Sometimes I saw people waiting on the other side of it for buses or parents or friends, or sometimes there were couples kissing. The second or third time I started to realize someone had been there before me, because there were half a dozen old candles around the place. I also found a notebook in the projectionist's booth, but with nothing written inside. Whoever it was, they never came back. I made sure I didn't tell anyone about the place—not even Katharine, although I had considered telling her at first, as I usually told her most things. In the end I decided against it, because she might think I was a bit strange in the head.
My neighbor guessed I was up to something. Once I took a reel of film that I'd found in the projectionist's room back to the house. Ganesh, who lives next door, saw it straightaway. He's an odd type—always in the front garden, even though we live on a four-lane bypass, with traffic roaring by in both directions. "What you got there, Patrick? You showing films in your house?" I told him it was a gift from the store, but he still looked at me suspiciously.
A gang of kids who live in the bottom house on the row also saw it. The oldest of them is barely twelve, but I try to avoid them, as the things they call me stay in my head. The oldest—I think his name is Jamie—usually has his eye out for me. I always see him straightaway, because he has a sort of hunch when he stands. He sees me coming as soon as I'm past the bridge. When I get close he sings a song from children's TV. Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat. When I tell him to go away, he just sings it louder, or in a different accent. Even when I get inside and close the door, he'll sing it outside sometimes for half an hour, knowing I can hear him.
About two months passed like this, with me going to work, and then passing by the old ABC either on the walk there, or on my way back. After a while I got to know the place quite well. It was a change from just sitting at home, watching TV. I didn't only take things from the cinema, like posters and old reels of film. I also brought things to it: a foldable chair, a portable lamp, a transistor radio. Fruit, pieces of meat, and a bowl to burn them in. The place was built to seat around four hundred people. I always sat in the same place, smack in the middle, where I remembered sitting as a kid. At the bottom of the auditorium, in front of the first row, was a huge pit that I remembered as a child. There must have been a band there at the very beginning, but by the time my mum took me there it was just a big drop in front of the screen. At the bottom you used to be able to see popcorn and toffee wrappers that people had thrown into it. Sometimes they even threw change—maybe they wanted a bit of luck.
When I was feeling down, I would go to the cinema and pray in the darkness. Most of the time I prayed that Katharine would love me—properly love me, not just friend-love or brotherly love but real love, like a girl loves a boy. Whenever I did that, I would switch off the torch and sometimes even pray aloud—it felt funny to hear my voice in the darkness, bouncing off the walls. I would pray not just to Jesus or Mary, but to all kinds of gods. My father had a stack of books piled up on the shelf by the phone—library books he'd taken out from another city years ago and never given back. A book on healthy eating—Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Gayelord Hauser; Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. There were half a dozen books on myth—which I never understood, because Dad was not even remotely religious: Greek Myths and Legends, Myth and Society in the Aztec World, Sumerian Gods and Goddesses. I'd never been interested in them before but now I read them from cover to cover, to see if there was anything in them that might help me out.
I started sleeping over in the cinema about a month after I discovered the place. I'd had a bad day at work. There'd been a shipment I'd filled in for Friday, but instead of '052' I wrote '0512' in the supplier box, so everything that arrived was wrong. Dylan was so angry he shouted at me in front of a queue of people and called me a 'retard.' I told him he didn't know the definition of the word and Alexandria laughed, but she still took his side, as she always does. Later on Katharine tried to make me feel better by bringing me a cinnamon coffee from Brucciani's, but all I wanted to do was go home. I even thought of quitting.
That night there was nothing on TV. I went into the cupboard to look for my dad's old camera and photo album to cheer myself up, and suddenly came across an old inflatable campbed we had bought for a caravan we booked one summer but ended up cancelling. I'd already been spending an hour or two at the cinema once a week, sitting there in the darkness, eating something and listening to Radio Two. I thought maybe I could spend the night there for a change. The following day was a Saturday so I wouldn't have to go to work. I could wait until it was dark and then take everything with me in a sports bag. The knife as well, just for peace of mind. I'd always had problems sleeping in the summer. I was sensitive to light, so I always woke up with the dawn. Maybe sleeping in the cinema would help me relax. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
That was how it started. Once I began, I didn't regret it. I'd never slept so soundly before. I always took a thermos of coffee with me, and a spare pack of batteries. And a cigarette lighter, in case those failed. That was my only fear, really—if something happened and I couldn't find my way out in the darkness. The first time I slept there I woke up at midday. When I looked at my watch I couldn't believe it. After that I always took an alarm with me and set it for eight forty-five, just before the shops opened. I enjoyed stepping out into the daylight the next day. I liked the difference of it. The air smelled fresher than usual, and it took me a minute or two to adjust my eyes to the blinding light. It was painful but it made me happy, somehow.
Coming home, I sometimes got egged on by the kids. If they saw me coming, they'd wait in a pack for me by the gate. "Where you been, Paddy?" "Who you been fucking, Paddy?" Paddy cake, Paddy cake, baker's man, bake me a cake as fast as you can. I ran after them, but they were always quicker than me.
One day, Katharine came to work in tears. I noticed it first in the warehouse at the back. She has this soft, yellow hair which always falls across her shoulder when she pushes it away. She doesn't wear much make-up (it's another thing I like about her), but that day, even the little mascara she wore was smeared. I asked her what was wrong but she said nothing was wrong, everything was fine. When I asked her again, she repeated it was nothing; she'd just been let down by someone she really trusted, that was all. I wanted to ask more, but I could tell she wasn't in the mood to tell anyone about it. That night, though, after we closed up, I walked her to her bus stop and listened as she told me all about it.
What she said affected me a great deal. She kept looking up at me, and into my eyes as she talked. I got so confused, sometimes I missed what she was saying. But as I walked home, I realized I hadn't felt so happy in a long, long time.
When I woke up in my bed the next morning I had a bit of a shock. One corner of my bedroom—where a pile of my LPs were stacked—was flashing on and off in a blue light. It took me a second to figure out what it was. Outside the house, parked all along the street, were three police cars, with officers milling around them, nodding their heads and talking to people. Although it was early, a lot of people were up. I had some Weetabix and a coffee, and then stepped outside to find out what was going on. I didn't have to work until two. Ganesh was there, and also the woman from the corner shop who always talks to other people while she's serving me.
"One of the brats has gone missing" said Ganesh. "They've been up all night looking for him."
I asked which one it was, but no one knew anything. The woman from the corner shop seemed really upset. She said it was a sign of how bad things were, when no one trusted anyone else in the community anymore. I didn't know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut. I'd never trusted anyone in our street to begin with.
At work I did something which made Dylan shout at me again, but I didn't care, because Katharine kept wanting to talk to me throughout the day. "So there's three sheets" Dylan told me that afternoon. It was a new system that he said I didn't understand. "You take the yellow one and you put it here," he pointed to a box beneath the till, "and you take the other two and put them back in the book. If you don't put the yellow sheet here," he pointed again to the box beneath the till, "how do I know what you've ordered? Unless I'm psychic?" Alexandria told him—right in front of my face—not to bother since I wouldn't ever understand. That got me angry so I shouted that I had understood, and both of them went quiet. But even after all that, it was still a good day. Even Dylan shouting at me couldn't take away from the fact that Katharine kept coming over to me, again and again, to ask me about one thing or another. I started to think my prayers and all the efforts I'd made were finally being answered.
Only one thing soured the day. At seven o'clock, just before closing, the Smiling Man came in. There was a queue of four or five people stretching out from the till. He stepped inside through the front doors and joined them, like it was the most natural thing in the world. As soon as I saw him, I broke out in a sweat. I could feel my face and neck get hot, and my concentration start to come and go in spells. Alexandria was next to me at the other till. With each customer done, he came a step closer. I tried not to look at his face, but he kept grinning and nodding towards me, like there was some private joke between us. Thank God I got the customer right in front of him, so he stepped across to Alexandria's till. I was so confused I couldn't even see what he was buying. I heard him talk to her as he paid his money. He had a disgusting, high-pitched, falsetto voice that made me sick as soon as I heard it.
Just as I thought he was turning to go, he looked across at me and said, "We're all waiting for you, you know! Me and Jeannie and Keith and the kids. We can't wait to see you!"
I watched his brown, duffle-coated back move away through the shop to the doors. My heartbeat was going so hard it was making the base of my throat vibrate. "What the 'ell's wrong with you now?" Alexandria asked. I told her I had no idea, although when I thought about it later on, I remembered my father might have had an Auntie Jean and an Uncle Keith on his mother's side. Maybe Keith or Kenneth—it's hard to remember, since it was so many years ago. Dad never talked much about his side of the family, apart from saying they were all a bit odd.
About a week ago, Katharine and I worked the same shift again. It wasn't by chance—I had seen her name on the rota and had swapped my Wednesday shift with somebody else. That day we chatted and she talked about a television series she really liked—but it was nothing as personal as the previous week. I thought of asking her what had happened with her friend, but it didn't feel like the right time, so I stayed quiet. When the shop closed up she seemed to disappear. I waited for her by the front doors while Alexandria locked them, but I couldn't see her anywhere. After ten minutes or so of waiting, I walked across the square to the bus stop where we both had waited, and where she had told me all those things about what she had hoped and dreamed about in her life. It had made me so happy to glimpse them. I felt so privileged to be let in on her thoughts like that. But there was no one at the bus stop except an old man in a yellow mackintosh reading a paper in the streetlight.
It seemed ridiculous to stand there and wait for a bus I wasn't going to board, so I turned to walk home. As I started walking, a car swept past me down on to Fishergate. It wasn't going too fast, so I could clearly see inside, and at the bottom of the lane it had to wait for a light. Katharine was in the passenger seat, laughing and joking, with Dylan at the wheel. He was saying something in a serious, deadpan way, but whatever it was, she seemed to find it hilarious. I watched them as they talked—I'm sure they didn't see me—before the light changed and they both drove off. I wanted to see Katharine, but it wasn't the sight of Katharine I'd been hoping for. Seeing her so happy there with Dylan made me feel sad, so I tried not to think about it for the rest of the evening.
I was having the strangest dreams in the cinema. At home I hardly ever dreamed at all, even as a kid, but there, in the old ABC, I had dreams so vivid they woke me up. In one, I dreamed I woke up in the cinema and a black and white film was playing—a silent one, with exaggerated acting and captions instead of speech. All the scenes in the film were from my life, and I saw myself in them, but always with a comedian in the background; one of those old variety show names—Arthur Askey or Eric Morecambe—grinning and winking at the camera. There was one where I was unwrapping some presents beneath a Christmas tree as a child, and one where I was helping Mum wash up on a Saturday night, and another where I was walking home from school and getting chased by a gang of lads. I looked around behind me and I saw I was not alone. A group of figures was standing up by the exit, watching the film with me, but their faces were shrouded in darkness. Up in the projectionist's booth, someone was working the film. When I got up and ran over to the exit, there was no one there. And that was when I realized I didn't have any torch or matches on me, and everything fell into darkness.
Another dream was just as strange. In it I was there on the front steps, and the whole place was brand new, like it had only been open a week. There were posters for old films outside—Norman Wisdom, Jack Hawkins, Kenneth More, names like that. I stepped into the foyer, and everything was red and gold and sparkling new. Only there were no people whatsoever, no staff or public. So I went behind the counter, pulled myself a ticket off the reel, filled up a box of popcorn and went inside. The theatre was brightly lit—everywhere was sand-yellow and beige, and the rows of seats were in plush, blue fabric. I was the only person there. There was a smell of fresh furniture inside, like the smell of a new car. Even though the lights weren't down, a film had already started, showing a woman whose face I couldn't see sitting on a chair in a room, sewing something in her lap. For some reason it scared me, so I didn't look directly at it. Instead, I walked down to the screen and stared into the orchestra pit. The floor seemed to move, and for a moment I thought there was water in it—until I realized it was full of snakes. Then, as in the first dream, everything fell into darkness and I woke up.
For the rest of the week I slept in the cinema every night. I don't know why—it comforted me to wake up there, in the darkness, with no one around. If it had been haunted I wouldn't have cared, as long as there were no living human beings around. I didn't even mind the smell, although I did wonder if it was getting stronger over time. I dreaded going to work because I dreaded the thought of seeing Katharine and Dylan laughing and joking together, so I rearranged my schedules as best I could. One odd thing was that Dylan started to treat me a lot nicer. I wasn't sure why. Even Alexandria noticed it. He stopped calling me 'retard,' and when he explained the yellow sheet thing to me again, he used a soft voice I hardly ever heard him use except with the Regional Manager.
On Thursday afternoon, as I was coming off the early shift and getting ready to go home, Dylan asked if he could speak to me for a moment. I wondered what was wrong. He was using the new voice with me, which unnerved me even more than if he just spoke to me the usual way. He took me into the little alcove behind the two cash tills and asked me if I'd seen Katharine at all that week. She'd missed her shift on Wednesday, and although he had her number he couldn't get hold of her. I was surprised to hear this—but I also felt happy that he was having to ask me about her whereabouts. He asked me to tell him if I got any news from her at all. I said I'd let him know if I heard anything.
I left the job about a week ago. I didn't see any point in working there if Katharine wasn't going to be there anymore. Everyone was surprised when I quit; nine years is a long time. Because I gave my notice in for no reason, I won't get any dole for six weeks, but I'll manage. I'll soon find something else. The day I quit I went to Halfords, bought a motorcycle lock, wrapped it round and through the handles of the back door to the cinema, and dropped the key in a gutter on Bow Lane. I've had enough of the movies. As my mum used to say, I've got enough films playing in my own head; I don't need to go out and see any others.
But I'll miss seeing Katharine. There was something really special about her—a kindness, a sort of wisdom. She wasn't like anybody else I'd ever met. I'm trying not to think about her, so I can focus and get my life back in order. That's all I need, really, a focus. But of course, there's always something that distracts you. For the past two nights, who should come knocking at the front door but the Smiling Man. Always the same knock—a hard rap, three times, and then a softer, fourth one—and always at the same time, just after ten. I don't open the door, of course, but when I peer through the glass, he's there, standing outside in the night, smiling his smile. A good fifty feet behind him, waiting, are always two shapes—one taller than the other, one slightly stooping. If they come tomorrow I'll probably have to call the police.
