You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  Mac laughed. He wanted to dance but was reluctant, I could tell. I knew he wouldn’t want to choose a ‘favourite’ amongst all his adoring minions. I gyrated a little, anyway. The music was now the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ – it was one my dad liked and played on hot summer days in the car, with the windows down, to show the neighbourhood he was not really a too-gentle middle-aged cuckold, but rather cool.

  Mac offended me by moving away a little – there was a shifting circle around us, mostly girls, others to catch his eye – a small step back, a turned head. I wasn’t having that, so I put on a show. He was the real deal to me – older, fiercely intelligent, the king of Film Studies, with everything to teach me. And sexy as fuck. Mac laughed again, handing his bottle of tequila to a girl next to him, who took a glug from it, but he was watching me dance. I could tell he wanted to put his hands on my waist, to get closer, now. And I was ripe. I was ready.

  ‘Dance!’ I commanded again and I wondered if I could get him into bed by the end of the night.

  The party went on until very late. It was a Friday night. No lectures or seminars the next day – only single beds to be lain in until half three or hungover trips to McDonald’s to slouch off to. We could stay up all night if we wanted.

  Becky had long since disappeared with Two As and a B Boy.

  ‘You coming?’ she had asked, her fingers entwined in the belt loops of the boy’s jeans while he nuzzled like an eager spaniel into her neck.

  ‘No,’ I’d said. ‘I’ll be all right here for a bit.’

  ‘Sure? It’s quite a way back.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back with BJ.’ BJ was Boring Jason, a Physics student on my floor – we had all sorts of nicknames for people we hoped they would never find out. ‘Don’t forget I’m helping you with that Othello essay tomorrow afternoon? After three, maybe?’

  There was no way I was leaving yet. I still hadn’t had a proper conversation with Mac. My attempt to dance with him had largely failed – I had been swallowed up by a load of drunks pogoing to the Buzzcocks and he had become out of my reach.

  Mac was over by the CD player, fiddling with something. A girl in a short black dress was talking to him. For the past few hours I had not been able to get close. Too many people dancing, the music too loud, too many others jostling for his attention. Why was he having this party in the first place? I wondered. But I knew the answer. To get close to students. To bask in their admiration. He was a very willing magnet, I thought, a man like Mac.

  And then I thought, Sod it. I’m making my move.

  I strode over and stood right next to him, blocking the girl in the black dress. ‘I tried to get on the Film Studies course but they wouldn’t have me,’ I shouted over the music.

  ‘Oh.’ Mac smiled, glancing up from the CD player and looking amused. ‘And why was that?’

  ‘I’m too much of a handful,’ I shouted, pleased with myself. It sounded great, didn’t it? Being too much of a handful? It implied so many, many things, most of them quite naughty. I reckoned it was the perfect thing to say in the pursuit of a seduction.

  ‘Or did you not get the grades?’ suggested the girl in the black dress. Damn, she was still here. She’d sidled back to Mac’s side. I smiled brightly at her.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ I said, brittle, and I turned exclusively to Mac. ‘But I would have loved to have done it. I’m especially interested in the History of Cinema. You’re doing that this term, aren’t you? Birth of a Nation? Battleship Potemkin, all that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mac, still looking amused.

  ‘I would have had a lot to offer.’

  ‘Really?’ He was laughing at me but in a really pleasing way. The smile he was bestowing on me lit me up inside, like the fairy on top of that pathetic Christmas tree. God, he was sexy. He was sort of leaning against the wall now, his feet crossed at the ankles. He was just so casual, so effortless, so everything.

  ‘Yeah.’ I swayed a little. I had to steady myself on his arm. It was warm. He had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up. His arm was excitingly hairy. ‘I’m really interested in mise en scène.’

  Mac laughed out loud. It was like a cannon going off and I was thrilled to have lit the fuse. ‘Are you now?’ God, that accent …

  ‘Yeah. I could probably do it on this room. Your venetian blinds – they’re very noir, aren’t they? I bet you peer from them at night, looking all furtive, with shadows on your face. You’ve got that framed quote by Truffaut – I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself – to show how arty you are, but on the opposite wall you have a Ghostbusters poster, to show you’re accessible and down with the kids.’ Mac is laughing, looking entranced, I hope; I am on fire. ‘But, pray tell, sir, what is the significance of that lame wind chime thingy hanging by the door? Does anyone actually care you’ve been to Goa? Why do you have a yucca plant next to your stereo? Are you showing off that you can keep things alive? Everything means something, Mac.’ And I actually winked. I was brazen; I was absolutely full of it. Mac laughed again. The girl in the black dress had given up and melted over to a ball of dancing drunks. Good.

  ‘Well, you know your stuff,’ he said, and I knew he was teasing me and I loved it. ‘You’re right; everything means something. Although the blinds are nothing to do with me – they were already here when I moved in. The lame wind chime was a present from a mature student last year – I hung it there because I didn’t know what else to do with it. The plant, well, it’s just a plant. But, yeah, you got me on the Truffaut and the Ghostbusters. I’m a pretentious Peter Pan just trying to be down with the kids.’

  It was my turn to laugh. This was delicious. ‘A plant is never just a plant,’ I said solemnly, looking Mac right in the eye and revelling in just how enraptured he looked.

  ‘So, what course are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘English Literature.’ I scowled.

  ‘That’s a good course.’

  ‘Not as good as yours,’ I said.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked suddenly, like he really wanted to know.

  ‘Arden,’ I said. ‘I’m named after a Marilyn Monroe character. My mother is … a little challenging.’

  ‘It’s a lovely name,’ he said, concentrating. ‘Don’t tell me? Ellen Wagstaff Arden from Something’s Got to Give?’

  ‘The very same,’ I said, impressed, although I knew he’d know it. ‘It would have been “Ellen”, but a neighbour when my mother was growing up had a yappy Jack Russell called that, and she said she couldn’t shake the association.’ The cannonball went off again. ‘Marilyn Monroe died during the making of that movie. You could say my mother inflicted me with sadness from the moment I was born,’ I said melodramatically.

  ‘You don’t look sad,’ Mac replied. ‘You look,’ he stared at me, his eyes full of curiosity, probing, ‘full of beans.’

  ‘Full of beer,’ I corrected. I knew, then, that he liked me. I knew I was safe to proceed.

  ‘Shall we dance?’ I suggested again, with a mock-shyness that was fooling no one, least of all Mac. He raised an eyebrow at me, like the lifting of a portcullis.

  ‘OK,’ he said. And surprising me, he grabbed my hand and pulled me to the middle of the drunken throng.

  At 4 a.m. there was just me, BJ and a couple of female Politics students in Mac’s flat. Mac and I had been talking – or more like sparring – for the past two hours, drinking and flirting, and I’d been pulling out all my wit and charm, so he could examine it in the half-light of the pathetic Christmas tree. He had just been bloody captivating. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, although I pretended to. I knew every single one of his eyelashes by around two fifteen.

  We were squished on a kind of beanbag thing, my legs under me, Mac’s long legs splayed out to the side. The warmth of his body was like balm to me; I just wanted to get closer.

  ‘Do you like thrillers?’ Mac asked suddenly. We were ignoring the looks of the other students, the whispers. Actu
ally, I wasn’t, I was enjoying every single barbed glance.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I liked pretty much everything. I’d not met many movies I didn’t like. Even if they were bad I enjoyed their badness. There was always something to appreciate.

  ‘I’m planning a new course, for the year after next. “Women in Hollywood”. Ten films. Fatal Attraction is the first one. Have you seen it?’

  ‘Everyone’s seen it,’ I replied.

  ‘Would you like to see it again?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. When?’ I looked around me, as though it were about to appear from somewhere. The TV was now showing Scarface: Michelle Pfeiffer was throwing a drink at Al Pacino in a restaurant.

  ‘Now. I received the print of it today. I was going to go to one of the screening rooms – earlier than this, I didn’t realize the party would go on for so long. I want to start making some notes. Do you want to come with me?’ He stood up and from a cupboard behind him, with three open shelves at its base, he slid out a stack of three large, shallow blue cardboard boxes.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, like a fool.

  ‘Fatal Attraction,’ said Mac. ‘Three reels.’

  Movies came to me through the television or on video tapes, or appeared at the cinema from mysterious projection rooms I sometimes turned round to look at, intrigued, from the stalls: a letterbox of golden light, way up high; a glimpse of a shadowy figure moving around; the dust-particled cone of a magic beam, beaconing into the darkness. I had never seen an actual film reel before and I was strangely excited.

  Mac placed the stack of boxes on the floor and removed the lid of the top one. Inside was a dull grey metal canister, circular, and inside that – as Mac showed me – was the wheel of a film reel, the tightly packed brown tape wedged and grooved between the radial arms. On the central axis was a white circular sticker on which was handwritten, Fatal Attraction.

  Mac looked as excited as I did. Did it still thrill him, to open a film canister and see the reel inside?

  ‘Wow,’ I said. Yes, I wanted to watch Fatal Attraction again. To be honest I would do anything this man suggested. I would even watch Neighbours while drinking Bovril with the guy.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Mac, pulling me up from the beanbag by the hand. ‘Let’s go.’

  Leaving BJ and the others to it (they looked like they were never going to go home, quite frankly), Mac grabbed his keys and we walked out of his door and down his wooden steps, then along the pathway back to main campus. I was in a state of excitement, I was desperate to hold his hand, but I knew he was already playing with fire, walking around campus with me at four in the morning like this. I had to make do with walking close to his side. Basking in his light, in the dark. It was December – freezing – but neither of us had coats; I couldn’t imagine Mac in one, to be honest. He looked just perfect in the tweedy blazer he’d grabbed.

  ‘What texts are you studying?’ he asked me.

  ‘The usual. Beowulf, Paradise Lost, Chaucer, Shakespeare …’

  ‘Northanger Abbey and Middlemarch next year?’

  ‘Yep.’

  He nodded. ‘All the good stuff.’

  ‘Yeah.’ There were approximately three working streetlights between Westwood and the main campus. We were walking under one now. I studied Mac’s face in profile. It was a good profile. Strong. ‘How did you become a Film Studies lecturer?’ I asked.

  ‘BA in English at Cambridge. PhD in Film at Birmingham. And a spell in New York at the Film Academy.’

  ‘Cambridge in the seventies …’ I mused.

  ‘Yes, the seventies.’

  ‘Did you wear flares and ride a bike?’

  ‘Yes, at the same time. Thank God for cycle clips.’ His long, slow smile melted me inside. Every word he said tantalized me. I was totally bewitched. ‘I also had a beard,’ he said, ‘if you’re interested.’

  ‘I’m very interested,’ I said and he looked at me and I raised my eyebrows at him, high. Then I laughed.

  ‘Why do you like films so much?’ he asked me.

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve seen a lot of them. I’ve had a home life I needed lots of diversion from.’

  ‘The challenging mother?’

  ‘Yes. And a very lovely but pretty useless father. So I’m always at the cinema; I watch everything that comes on TV. I rent a lot of videos. I have a player in my room, at home.’

  ‘What’s your favourite movie?’

  ‘Don’t ask me that!’ And I swiped him quickly on his tweedy arm. ‘Don’t ever ask anyone that! I simply couldn’t tell you, it changes day to day, hour to hour.’

  ‘Me too.’ Mac nodded. ‘Me too.’

  We were at the Humanities Building. Mac opened the door with one of the keys from a giant, jangling bunch he pulled from his jacket pocket. We walked down a darkened corridor to the screening room, which he opened with another key.

  ‘Soundproofed,’ he said. He flicked one light on, at the front of the room, illuminating several low, dark material chairs – some sort of velour; squishy, with high backs and no armrests – and a large Formica table at the back.

  Mac took three steps up to the rear, which was behind glass, and switched the lights on in there. I followed him. It was a projection room. There were two massive and complicated-looking metal film projectors side by side. A pile of blue film boxes. Messy shelves with gadgets and empty film reels and topples of small cardboard boxes.

  ‘I’ve caught many a student asleep on a denim jacket on that table at the end of a screening,’ said Mac, gesturing to the table through the glass before carefully taking the first reel from its box. He attached it to a wheel on the projector on the right and fed the end of the brown film, with those familiar perforated edges, through a succession of rollers and cogs and into the workings of the grey metal beast, where it was held by a kind of metal gate. ‘Hangovers. A student’s occupational hazard.’

  ‘Really?’ I was amazed, not at the hangovers but at the sleeping – how could anyone sleep during one of Mac’s films?

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t seen Tokyo Story,’ Mac said, ‘although I love it.’

  I smiled as if I agreed with him, although I had never heard of it.

  Mac went to the projector on the left and threaded in the second reel. The remainder of the reels were put to wait on the floor.

  ‘Reel to reel,’ he said, walking back to the first projector. ‘You normally have two people. We train the Film Studies students to project the films on their course, on a rota. Some are better at it than others.’ He laughed. ‘Last week a couple of lads thought they’d done brilliantly but when they looked down an entire reel was spooled on the floor, like spaghetti. We start one projector, then when the reel is finished, we change over to the second. You know, when you see the dots in the right-hand corner of the screen? You have eight seconds from that point. It’s fraught with jeopardy.’ And he winked at me.

  ‘How do you do it?’ I asked, enjoying his enthusiasm and trying not to stare at his magnificent forearms. ‘Change over?’

  ‘This pedal,’ said Mac. ‘Here. And a few switches. Then you load up the third reel on the original projector, so it’s ready, and so on.’

  I wasn’t paying attention any more. All I could see was Mac, and I was looking at his hands, the tips of his fingers, imagining them on me. Mac started the motor of the first projector. It shuddered into life with a surprisingly loud and rather frantic tick-tick-tick. I watched, through the glass, as scratchy images appeared on the screen before us in quick succession: random words and symbols that made no sense. Then that familiar countdown from eight, with an accompanying beep per number and a line sweeping round a circle, filling it in with grey. A zero, a final beep, and then slightly wobbly, slightly juddering, the movie started. The snow-capped mountain, the circle of stars. Paramount Pictures.

  Mac adjusted the focus and, his arm at my back, just above the waistband of my shorts, directed me down the three steps and to the screening room, where he hauled two of the armless cha
irs together so they formed a makeshift sofa.

  ‘Enjoy, mademoiselle!’ he said, with a sweep of his arm, and I sat down. He took a notepad and pen from his bag and sat down next to me, not close enough. There was a hand’s span between our two thighs and I didn’t like it. He liked me, didn’t he? He must do, to want to do this with me. I needed to get closer. I could smell him, all warm and beery and with some delicious aftershave I was now picking up, but I wanted to get closer.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  Things moved fast. As Dan and Alex flirted in the restaurant I was aware of Mac’s leg, closer to mine. I could feel the heat of it. By the time Dan and Alex were in the lift, it was touching the side of my thigh – deliciously – so I placed my hand on Mac’s and looked across at him, in the dark. He was smiling, facing forward, so I left my hand there, feeling sparks of fizzing electricity I prayed he could feel too. By the time Alex cooked pasta for Dan, Mac turned to me in the dark, placed a hand on the side of my face and kissed me softly. By the time Alex was flicking the light switch on and off, I was practically on Mac’s lap and we were snogging each other’s faces off. We were still snogging when Mac missed the dots and the first reel came to a spluttering end, as the film tape whipped angrily from the spool.

  ‘Oops,’ said Mac to a blank screen, in his beautiful northern accent, and all I could hear was the tick-tick of a disgruntled motor and the beating of my heart.

  I returned to Mac’s lap after he had fired up the second projector and snuggled into his neck for the rest of the film while he tried to take notes.

  ‘So, what did you think this time around?’ asked Mac, finally, the third reel having been successfully launched and the film having reached its dramatic conclusion. We stopped kissing for the rabbit in the saucepan and the bathroom and the blood.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I fully appreciated the bunny soup on this second viewing.’