Why is he not saying anything?
‘He can’t speak,’ says a nurse, pausing at the foot of the bed. It’s the nurse I saw last night, the one with the spiky hair dip-dyed blonde at the ends, although the blonde bits look more orange tonight. Her badge says ‘Fran’. ‘He damaged his left hemisphere in the car accident.’ I nod, needing to give the impression I already know some of what she’s saying. Like the fact he’s been in a car accident. Poor Mac. How awful. ‘We don’t know if his speech will come back or not,’ says Fran. ‘The doctors say we can’t be certain of anything at this stage.’
I nod again. I look at Mac; he smiles as though he is sorry. I am flooded with feeling and memory. I’m almost in tears at the thought that he can’t speak to me. I have so much I want to say and so much I want to hear.
‘Would you like some water?’ I say to him.
I look to his bedside table but Fran is already standing at it and pouring water from a clear plastic jug with a blue lid, into a beaker with a straw in it.
‘I’m Fran,’ she says, as she passes me the beaker, ‘and you’re his first visitor. Friend or relative?’ She makes it sound like Friend or Foe and I almost laugh.
‘Friend,’ I say. ‘Though it’s been years.’ I go to pass Mac the beaker, but I don’t think he can lift up his arm so I place it under his chin and, with what a hopeful person might construe as a slight wink, he sips from the straw.
‘Good you’re here,’ says Fran and she moves silently off to the next bed. I wonder why I am Mac’s first visitor. Where is his family? His friends? I put the beaker back on the cabinet. We look at each other. I long to hear his voice. Still, if he can’t talk to me, I can talk to him. He looks at me – those crinkly eyes – and I almost blush, remembering all that we did and all that we had. ‘I have no idea what you’re doing in London,’ I say. It’s hot – I take off my coat and slip it over the shoulders of the plastic chair. ‘Do you live here?’
He nods, almost imperceptibly.
‘Do you work here?’
He nods, then tips his head to the side as if to say ‘kind of’. I regret asking him – he looks so tired – but I thought he’d still be working. I can’t see Mac ever giving up work altogether; he lived for it.
I have no further questions. Well I do, Your Honour, I have a million of them, but I don’t want to exhaust Mac further and this has felt like dreadful small talk. Mac and I never did that. Everything we did was big. I decide to be as silent as him. Companionable silence, that’s what they call it. It was something Christian and I never went for. We could be silent but even that felt like a war, with him watching my every move, my every expression, challenging me to do something he wouldn’t approve of. But Mac and I sit for a while, in silence, and I search his face for all the parts of it I loved.
Fran bustles back past. I stand up and go over to her, feeling guilty for stopping her in her important tracks. ‘Excuse me, Fran? Sorry. What’s Mac’s prognosis? How long has he been here?’
‘Just over a week. He came in five days before Christmas. Two days in intensive care before coming to the ward.’ Poor Mac – Christmas in this place. Mine hadn’t been the most exciting, but at least I had spent it in my own house, with Julian. ‘And the doctors don’t know at the moment. On their last round they said fifty per cent chance of a full recovery.’
‘And the other fifty per cent?’ I ask.
Fran smiles a smile I know she has given a million times before. ‘Uncertain’ – she shrugs – ‘as I said before. But we hope for the best.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Fran.’
‘You’re very welcome. He’s a nice man,’ she says. ‘We can tell. And I get the feeling he may have had quite a twinkle, once upon a time.’
There’s a sudden strange noise from behind us, like the clearing of a throat. Fran and I both turn round and look at Mac. There’s the glimmer of a twinkle going on right now; his eyes are glinting and his lips slowly part.
‘Bunny,’ says Mac, or at least it sounds like it. His voice is low and rumbly, like cracked pepper.
I look at Fran and we step towards him. ‘Mac? Did you say something? What are you trying to say?’ I ask.
Mac’s lips move again. His eyes flash and he looks directly at me. ‘B-bunny soup,’ he says.
‘What did he say?’ asks Fran. ‘Something soup?’ but I am staring at Mac and laughing out loud, delighted at hearing his voice again and knowing exactly what he said, although it is unbelievable, after all these years.
Bunny soup.
I sit down and retake Mac’s hand. A full grin is lighting up his face. He grins till his eyes crinkle to almost nothing. We beam like idiots at each other, the background murmur and clunk of the ward an applause.
‘It really sounded like “bunny soup”,’ says Fran, at the end of the bed, ‘how odd,’ but she is obviously as delighted as me, as she adds, ‘But he said something! Well, I never! Well done, Mac,’ she says to him, as though speaking to a child. She comes to the side of the bed and pats his other hand. ‘Why is he talking about soup?’ she asks me.
I laugh again. I laugh far too loudly for a hospital ward and receive several looks. Anyone would think I was once bubbly. ‘He’s talking about a film,’ I say. ‘Mac and I watched a lot of films together, back in the day, when I was a student. He’s referencing one of our favourites.’ Actually, it was the first film we watched, Mac and I. And I would never forget a second of it.
‘Oh, right,’ says Fran, stroking Mac’s knuckles gently and looking thoughtful. ‘How odd. You know, it might be possible Mac has a form of aphasia. I used to work on the Stroke Ward and some of the patients there have something called non-fluent aphasia – they can’t manage normal speech, but they can call up expressions or memorized phrases from the long-term memory. It’s all in the right hemisphere, you see,’ she says, tapping the side of her head. ‘Quite amazing, really. Some of them can’t utter a word but can sing whole verses of “Love Me Tender”. Which film is it?’ she asks.
‘Fatal Attraction,’ I say. I’m gazing at Mac.
‘Ah, yes.’ She nods. ‘I get it … bunny soup, the whole “bunny boiler” thing … Glenn Close in a white nightdress, Madame Butterfly … Great movie.’
‘Yes, great movie,’ I say. I smile at Mac and he smiles back.
I remember, his eyes say; and I remember too.
THEN
Chapter 3: Fatal Attraction
I didn’t get good enough grades to study Film Studies at university so I did the next best thing: I had an affair with a Film Studies lecturer.
In 1988, the year in which Margaret Thatcher became the longest serving prime minister of the twentieth century, Kylie Minogue became a pop star and Phil Collins became a movie star, I made my own news by scraping into Warwick University. I’d known I’d been optimistic, filling in my UCCA form with ‘Film Studies’ at Warwick as first choice; I was optimistic putting any course down for that university, as it was one of the best in the country. But I was a chancer, and a grafter when I wanted to be, and although I’d had torpid results in my mocks, I managed to pull something out of the bag for the real things and achieved the required grades for my second choice at Warwick: English Literature. I liked literature, it was all perfectly OK. But I loved film.
I met Mac at the end of the autumn term – after I had already studied Tennyson and Milton and Joyce, and danced at the discos and drank at the bars, and made friends with Becky, a very funny girl on my course with a severe, bright pink bob and a propensity to not stop talking. But the Film Studies lecturer’s reputation preceded him, like an invisible trophy held aloft by a trail of adoring students with blinding all-white T-shirts bearing his name. Everyone knew who Mac Bartley-Thomas was; he was one of those lecturers who was just a phenomenon.
‘Mac Bartley-Thomas? Oh, he’s brilliant,’ they would whisper, in lectures. ‘Mac the Film Studies lecturer? He’s a legend!’ they would say, in the students’ union. ‘That Film guy?’ they wou
ld utter, queuing for the bus into Coventry. ‘Yeah, he’s fit!’
As I learnt from word of excited mouth, he was highly charismatic, a genius, a beacon, a luminary and a superstar – and ‘only thirty-one’, the youngest lecturer at the university, although to be honest that sounded ancient to me. Hearing how great he was only made me feel more piqued that I hadn’t got on to his course. I had not yet clapped eyes on him – this academic giant of a man, this hot shot, this campus celebrity – but I was jealous of students who got to devour his words of cinematic wisdom in lectures and pick his infinite brains in intimate seminars. He had all the knowledge I ever wanted; he knew everything I needed to know. It should have been me, I protested to myself and, sometimes, to anyone willing to listen to me harping on like a glowering ex-girlfriend of the groom at a wedding. If I was in the students’ union and had a cider and black in my hand, I could be quite effusive on the subject, though I tried to make it comical.
‘Never mind,’ I’d say faux-dramatically, ‘I’ll just weep in a corner for three years over my bloody Byron and my sodding Shelley.’ (I was definitely being over-dramatic; I had a tiny soft spot for both.) ‘I’ll just sob over what could have been.’
‘But you’re here!’ said one random, earnest lad, a Philosophy student in a Smiths T-shirt, in the third week of term, who I had just batted away when he attempted to drunkenly snog me while I’d been queuing at the bar. ‘You made it to university! Thousands didn’t. Be happy about it!’
I tried to be happy. I got on with my studies, attended my lectures, enjoyed my new friends – the best and brightest and most hilarious being Becky, who halfway through the term had her hair cut into a choppy Mohican with shaved sides dyed purple. I was walking with her to the loos in the Humanities Building one afternoon when I first saw Mac Bartley-Thomas. He was walking down the corridor holding a stack of books against his chest. And he was whistling. I was pretty sure it was the theme to Love Story but that could have been projection on my part.
Becky raised her pierced eyebrows and whispered, ‘That’s the famous Mac Bartley-T.’
‘Right,’ I whispered back, taking him all in. ‘So the rumours are true. He is fit.’
I never knew he was exactly my type until I laid eyes on him. He was ridiculously tall, broad, loping, cute, a little shabby, but that was OK as so was I. He wore clear-rimmed glasses and slightly too baggy cords. Plum-coloured desert boots and a grandad cardigan with those buttons that look like tortoises. A white twill cotton shirt undone one button too far. His hair was floppy and he was very, very sexy.
As he passed me he raised his eyebrows ever so slightly, so slightly it was almost imperceptible. I don’t think Becky noticed, but I did. As I was having a day when I was feeling pretty confident and was in one of my favourite outfits – black dungarees, stripy top, scuffed DMs, denim jacket and my hair bouncy as Shirley Temple’s – I raised my eyebrows ever so slightly back at him, bold and fearless.
‘He drives an MG and he lives on campus,’ Becky said, after we had passed him. I resisted the temptation to look back. ‘Sometimes he has parties.’
‘I bet he does,’ I replied.
A week later the Film Studies common room was closed for emergency repairs – a leak in the café or something – and for a few days its students shared ours. One morning, in late November, I found myself standing behind Mac Bartley-Thomas in the queue, anticipating a cup of tea and a piece, or maybe two, of shortbread. He was laughing with a man almost half his height who had a bald head and was holding a book in his stubby hand called What is Cinema?, I realized the queue in front of them had moved forward but they had not.
‘Sorry, we’re yakking for England,’ Mac Bartley-Thomas said suddenly, turning round. His eyebrows lifted a tiny fraction again when he saw me. ‘Do you want to go ahead of us?’
‘Oh right, yes, thanks.’ We looked at each other for just a second too long. His eyes were crinkling at me, behind his clear-rimmed glasses, but they also looked curious. I was looking at him because he was beautiful. A surprising kind of dazzling. I was really susceptible, though, to this kind of moment; after all, it was one of the ones I had lined up for myself to have at university. Being dazzled by someone. Except I thought it might be a boy in an Aran sweater with an interesting postcode I could visit in the holidays, not one of the staff. Not a lecturer. I blushed a little and hated myself for it. Marilyn always said to never give yourself away by blushing, unless you wanted the other person to see you had come undone.
Eventually, Mac turned back and carried on chatting to the man. They were talking about Sigourney Weaver. The man with the bald head was making a point about the actress’s hair in Alien, how it not only emphasized her vulnerability but masculinized her, as they wanted to make her as tough as a man. Mac Bartley-Thomas said he disagreed, that their intention was to make her as tough as a woman, and the other man looked thoughtful. Mac had a strong northern accent, which, combined with how he looked, thrilled me. I was from Essex and the North was a country I had not yet visited – it was so exciting to me: dark, visceral, gloomy skies and factory gates and spires, whippets and flat caps and pale ale … I’d only made it as far as the Midlands, here at university, but even the Midlands was exotic as far as I was concerned. Coventry, the campus’s nearest city: grey and municipal and concrete and sullen, was also ‘other’ and rather exciting – it had been sung about in a Specials song. I was a million miles from Essex and its flat boringness and its try-hard green spaces. The promise of further north, as spoken in accents like Mac’s, was even more thrilling.
‘A survivor and a heroine as opposed to a victim,’ I said, out of nowhere, and I was suddenly terrified I had said it. What was I doing?
‘Quite right,’ said Mac, turning round and looking at me again, more than curious now. ‘Some theorists would argue that Ripley was Hollywood cinema’s first action heroine.’ He looked at me a little longer, and I looked at him, then he turned back and he and his companion moved forward in the queue.
The next time I saw Mac was at a Christmas party he held in his flat on campus. Becky and I were drunk at the end of an unfathomable Robert Plant gig we had pretended to enjoy, and someone in a Ramones T-shirt said they were going on to a party, so we just sort of followed along behind and before we knew it we were on the walk to Westwood, the other side of campus, and heading to Mac’s staff accommodation. A bloke in a denim jacket we were walking with said Mac had a real house in Sheffield but he always lived at Westwood during term time, that there was a whole block for staff and lecturers and wardens; some even had their families living with them. I’d been to Westwood only the week before, with Becky. There was a weekly disco there called The Westwood Bop. The queue to get our hands stamped had been so long we’d climbed in through the window and waited behind the long curtain until we could make a run for the dance floor.
Mac’s little flat was very warm. Lots of people were smoking – the smoke was circling round a terrible shiny bell-shaped garland of red and green that had been Sellotaped to the middle of the ceiling. There was a straggly Christmas tree – an artificial one – which stood on a table in the corner of the room, already decorated with empty wine and beer bottles. The windows had venetian blinds, which were closed. In another corner of the room a telly, no sound, was showing – randomly – Bugsy Malone: there was some joyous custard pie slinging going on.
Mac was holding court in the centre, the garland wilting above his head, and Becky and I drifted towards him – the party’s nucleus; I had the feeling he would be, wherever he went. I experienced a frisson – a chill – as I got near him, like something portentous was going to happen, which was undoubtedly stupid. Why should it just because I wanted it to? But I felt powerful tonight – a feeling that had been simmering since the beginning of term, fuelled by freedom and escape, and it bubbled up inside me as soon as I walked into this party. I knew from just looking at him – white shirt, blue jeans, floppy hair, clear-rimmed glasses, crinkly eyes and a bottle o
f tequila, held insouciantly in his right hand – that my simmering feeling of power was going to rise to the top of me, spill over into the world and claim something amazing.
‘Hello again,’ he said. Oh, he remembered me. That made me feel ridiculously good. Despite being drunk, all my nerve endings were scrabbling upright to attention, like tin soldiers. ‘Have you got a drink?’
‘No,’ I said, and he turned to somewhere behind him and shoved a bottle of Budweiser in my hand. I swayed to the music – Grace Jones? Something sophisticated – but Becky annoyed me by grabbing my hand and pulling me into the kitchen. A boy she liked was in there; she started a stilted conversation with him about what grades they got at A level and which subjects, although this topic really should have been exhausted by the end of Freshers’ Week. The man I liked was in the living room. I left the kitchen, happy to be drunk and with only a few inhibitions still standing. It was a heady feeling. I marched back up to Mac, daring. I put myself right in front of him, confident. His hair was flopping into his eyes and he was laughing.
‘Hello, again,’ I said, ‘hello,’ wondering if he would get my little reference to Neil Diamond’s emotive song from The Jazz Singer. ‘Dance with me.’
It was a command not a question. I was full of this new heady power, despite my ridiculous outfit. Becky and I had decided to wear Santa hats, with tinsel round our necks like a tie. I was wearing this over an unseasonal lilac T-shirt with a rainbow on it and a pair of teeny-tiny jeans shorts over woolly tights. Plus my obligatory DMs. Actually, maybe I felt that heightened rush of delicious power because of my crazy outfit – I looked pretty cute and like no one else in the room, seeing as Becky was in the kitchen. All the other students were in dreary student garb – greys and blacks and long cardigans and, yes, Aran sweaters.
I was primed and I was ready. I knew he would be here; my Big Love. I had yet to experience one in my life and I was ripe for it, receptive, ready to yield and to feel and experience it all. Again, I had been imagining an earnest, curly-haired Heathcliff type in a fisherman’s jumper as the receptacle for this, a boy who would enjoy poetry and cider and black with me; not Mac Bartley-Thomas. But here he was.
You, Me and The Movies Page 3
