All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  He was alone again, like when Lizzie left.

  HE AND LIZZIE STAYED TOGETHER on and off for four years. It was marriage that undid them. Something had sparked between them the second time he saw her, at Allan’s funeral.

  After he’d seen her at the Newtown flat, staring at a wall with her made-up eyes and blank white face, the memory of her had remained compelling. He learned from Allan that her name was Lizzie. He found himself dreaming of her. In his dreams she was a wraith-like figure on the outside of something he couldn’t see, looking in, holding out her hand, not motionless, as she’d been that night.

  He’d gone to live in a student flat in Holloway Road the year after Allan’s death, not that he intended to live in a flat forever. He enrolled at university, opting for law. The idea of striding around a courtroom had appealed to him then. His would be the voice of justice, the kind of person who got people like Allan off the hook, proved what a terrible mistake it had all been.

  Perhaps even the screws thought Allan wasn’t that bad. He was released early for good behaviour. Grant wasn’t there to meet him when he got out of jail. That was something he would go on and on regretting.

  Lizzie found Grant the day after Allan died. Nobody else was in the house. She stood at the door of the flat and said, ‘Let me in.’

  She was shaking, a slip of a woman with mascara running down her face. Grant had to force her hands down from her mouth to understand her, because she kept covering it as if she couldn’t believe what was coming out. ‘I found him,’ she said. ‘It was me that found him. In the woodshed. He stood on a piece of firewood, that’s all it took for him to swing. He didn’t need to do that. He didn’t need to be dead.’

  They arranged to meet at the crematorium where Allan would be disposed of, in a cheap wooden casket that slid through the doorway of the furnace, into the roar of flames. Lizzie had bought some flowers at a dairy, red carnations wrapped in plastic. ‘He was all right,’ she said. ‘He was a pretty gentle sort of a guy.’ She put them on the casket at the very last moment, because they nearly missed the cremation. There’d been a gap in the schedule and he was sent in early.

  ‘How come they had a gap?’ Lizzie asked. ‘Did somebody not die after all?’ She was wearing a black beret, and a long black dress with a pattern of gold flowers splattered over it, hooped gold earrings.

  ‘Have we got time for a prayer?’ Grant asked the funeral director. They couldn’t let Allan go without saying something for him. ‘Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?’ he asked Lizzie.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What do you think I am?’

  So they said it as one, then Lizzie stood up straight and began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’, her high notes sure and true, and Grant began to weep.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he said, after they had been shown out, with more haste than ceremony.

  ‘Go for a drink, perhaps.’ Her kohl-rimmed eyes looked at him. ‘Go on, I know you’re not old enough to go in a pub. I’ll buy us some booze if you like and we can take it back to your place.’

  This way he learned she was older than him by some years. Old enough to go into the boozer and buy a bottle of wine. She had money, she said, waving away his offer.

  Lizzie took her shoes off and lay on his bed. The bottle of Cold Duck was nearly finished, drunk mostly by her. ‘Do you want to do it now?’ she said. Her face had settled into something of the same expression he’d seen at the flat with the men.

  Grant said that no, not now, that wasn’t what he wanted, and he didn’t.

  ‘You don’t fancy me?’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right today.’ He wouldn’t ask her if she’d been with Allan; he preferred not to know. Besides, he’d never been with a woman, and he’d rather she didn’t discover that either.

  ‘Could I just sleep here a while?’ she asked him, seeming to relax again, as if pleased by this response.

  Grant sat watching her until around midnight. He saw the contours of her cheekbones, the tiny lines that had begun to form at the corners of her eyes, the small snorting intakes of her breath in the wake of the wine she had drunk.

  Towards midnight she stirred. Her gaze was fresh and clear, her eyes grey pools, lit from within. ‘I need to go now,’ she said. ‘The boys will wonder where I’ve got to.’

  ‘Do you have to go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m here if you need me,’ he said. It felt an absurdly grown-up thing to say. He was nineteen, living in a run-down house on the edge of town. In the sitting room there were sounds of revelry, a Friday night student gathering, or a bit of a piss-up. There was nothing he could offer her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ And kissed him lightly on the forehead. The room felt empty when she was gone.

  A year would rush by without him seeing her, although she still came to him in dreams. At nights he worked as a security guard, and in the weekends he took on an extra job in a warehouse sorting deliveries ready for Monday morning. Some days he was so tired the words in his textbooks blurred before him. None of this stopped him from passing exams; the answers appeared before him as if his mind were a magnet that had drawn every word he had ever read into perfect patterns in his brain.

  At the end of the long summer vacation he’d accumulated enough money to rent a room with a kitchenette and a shower, in an apartment block just off The Terrace. His own place. No need to pretend he was a regular guy, drinking beer and watching rugby on a scratchy television screen with the volume turned up loud. The building was old, but the floorboards were polished and there was a stained-glass window high up on one wall where sunlight shimmered through, creating patterns of colour. A memory returned to him, of his mother telling him about light that shone through windows of the house where she grew up, an old fragment of story that made the place feel like home.

  This was where Lizzie found him a second time. He supposed it wasn’t so hard to find people in Wellington, a small city where most people knew each other, meeting regularly on Lambton Quay. Both her eyes were blackened when he let her in. She was carrying a suitcase that turned out to hold all her clothes, and a duffel bag containing her make-up and a few books, mostly poetry.

  ‘What is it you want?’ Grant asked her. They’d eaten a packet of fish and chips that he’d hurried out to buy, half afraid she’d be gone when he got back, and half hoping she would, because he’d no idea what to do with his unexpected guest.

  She scanned the room and picked up one of the books she’d unpacked, opening it, riffling through the pages until she came to something that caught her eye, and began to recite: ‘Given here in this room the quiet / tilting of light through glass panes, / the tenuous skin of day / stretched out, nothing becoming something. You see, it’s perfect. Poetry makes everything whole.’

  James K. Baxter, the vagabond poet, had died but his poetry still spoke to her, Lizzie told Grant, made sense of things. She’d lived with a poet for a time, when she was younger, before all this shit happened to her.

  What sort of shit? What had taken her to the house in Newtown?

  This was hard for her to explain. Some months elapsed before he extracted a story that he thought close to the truth. It had to do with a breakdown she’d had at school, cramming for her exams, a studious girl from a family up north who didn’t value education. They expected her to leave school and earn her keep as soon as she turned fifteen, she explained. It was a constant battle just to go to class every day. By the time she was sixteen she was a nervous wreck.

  ‘I ran away after I left hospital,’ she said simply, one night, when she was sitting on the bed with her arms around her knees. ‘And there was nowhere to go, and no turning back.’

  Grant understood this. He’d done something similar and, on the whole, things had turned out better for him than they had for Lizzie. So far.

  There had been more breakdowns, some men along the way and the poet was one of them, although, as the shit had been happening since Lizzie’s school days, he w
asn’t sure where he fitted in.

  ‘Things are going to be different from now on,’ she said. ‘I’ll cut out the booze, no more bad blokes. Just you and me.’

  The two of them together.

  ‘Why me?’ he said.

  ‘Why not? I like you, just a steady life, that’s what I want.’

  His life took a different turn now. Lizzie got a job in a bakery, while he dropped night work. Between them they had enough to get by. She liked country and western music. Her favourite song was ‘You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille’, which she often hummed as she cleaned the apartment and cooked for them, something she did very well. She liked the movies, too. On days when they both had time off, they would go to the Penthouse in Brooklyn and watch two or three movies in a row. He held her hand in the dark, consumed with love for the pale intent woman seated beside him. His favourite movie was The Day of the Jackal, hers was Badlands.

  Still, there was something missing. At first it was all right, but then it wasn’t. They still hadn’t had sex together. They didn’t talk about it.

  Lizzie began to bring home a bottle of wine most nights. It would be gone by the time they went to bed. She knew writers and artists who met at the pubs, usually at the Abel Tasman, with its turquoise carpet and faded orange-and-red chairs. She started catching up with her old friends, as she described them. Poets who had known her from earlier days dropped into the Tas. They quoted poetry and told yarns and shouted at each other until the pub closed at ten, when they lurched into the night, arms around one another, calling each other ‘my dear boy’ or ‘my good fellow’. The women wore floating scarves and peaked caps. A youth with skin the colour of milk was cutting his teeth on his first acceptance from a literary magazine. It seemed to Grant that they had some kind of Jesus complex. They looked prayerful when they recited their poems; at other times they merely looked drunk. One man had a place in the country where they all gathered some weekends and lit giant fires in a paddock and anything could happen.

  One night Lizzie climbed a tree and Grant had to coax her down as if she were a cat. The crowd joined in, calling ‘Pussy, pussy’, and Grant’s cheeks blazed with shame. People had sex behind the hedges, and once Lizzie did so with an older poet, a man with a thick thatch of hair who, in his day-to-day life, was the managing director of an importing company. She was whinnying with pleasure when Grant found them. He stood very still until the act was finished, so that it wasn’t until she was pulling on her panties that she saw him. ‘It was nothing,’ she said. ‘Just a bit of fun.’ Later, Lizzie said she was sorry, it had been a mistake. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said.

  Grant knew this. His grades had slipped. It was hard to hold onto the weekend job because Lizzie wanted to go to parties and he was taking time off because he didn’t want her to go alone. A small treacherous voice in his head was reminding him of the way Charm had slid down the slope and fallen off at the end. He’d despised his stepmother, but he didn’t despise Lizzie. He needed to hold onto her.

  If she went to the parties alone, she might never come back. She’d slipped into his life. It would be just as easy for her to leave.

  He woke earlier than she did every morning. She would be lying there asleep and he would watch her, her face on the pillow, a porcelain doll in repose. It came to him now and then that if he killed her he could keep her exactly like that forever.

  He wanted to make love to her, but he couldn’t.

  It wasn’t that he’d never experienced sexual desire, but when he lay beside her, images flashed before him — Lizzie in other lives — and passion died. It was as if, in this way, there were some honour between them. This was a secret notion he held close to himself, even when she suggested that he see a doctor, or a psychiatrist, or both. She had seen a few shrinks in her time and look at her, she was all right, wasn’t she? It might work for him. But he wasn’t ready to open all that strange secret part of his life to anyone else.

  ‘Things’ll be all right when we get married,’ Lizzie said one day, as though the idea of marriage was always on the cards. This solution hadn’t occurred to him, but it was something he was willing to go along with anyway. This way he would keep her.

  ‘I’d like to meet your family,’ Grant said. ‘We should ask them to the wedding.’

  ‘Just forget it,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t get it.’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘I don’t see your family guest list,’ she said, silencing him.

  They got married in a registry office with two court clerks as witnesses. Afterwards they went to a Mexican café and ate a meal laced with chilli. Later that night, and much to his own surprise, things did improve. He was no longer a virgin. But in the days that followed, when he was not with her, he sat staring at walls wondering if she was at that very moment comparing him with others. One night she had cried out a name that wasn’t his.

  She said to him, one morning at breakfast, ‘Do you think it was true, Grant, what the boys said? That night I first saw you.’

  ‘What was that? I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘I don’t think you have.’

  He knew exactly what she was talking about. ‘I’m not gay,’ he said.

  ‘I think you were in love with Allan.’

  He banged his fist down on his toast, scattering the coffee. ‘Is that all you think about?’ he said. ‘Sex. Who screws who. I’ve never asked you, have I?’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d had sex with Allan. That’s not what I said.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, his voice dull, ‘Allan was my first friend. And you’re my second one.’

  She left straight after he finished his final exam. At least she had waited for that. There was a picture of them standing together, him in his cap and gown, holding the rolled-up scroll in his hand. They looked like the perfect young couple. He was twenty-three, Lizzie close to thirty. The day he found her gone, it was pouring, the Wellington wind lashing the streets, rain blowing in his face as he made his way up The Terrace. The emptiness struck him as soon as he entered the apartment. On the pillow where her dear head had rested beside his, lay a slim blue book of poems by Louise Bogan, an American poet whose work Lizzie liked. It was opened at a page with a marked line about never having a male friend who failed to see that love had to end.

  Why not just say, a fine time to leave him? Never mind the cleverness.

  A fine time, yes.

  HER FACE WOULD APPEAR to Grant every moment that he wasn’t busy in some way or another. Like his sister, she was gone without trace. Perhaps there were people who knew where she was, but, in his searches for her, he never came across anyone. He tracked down her family. The father worked in a Taranaki dairy factory, the mother was blowsy and careless. They hadn’t heard from her in a long time. At first they didn’t believe she was married. To prove it, he had to show them a copy of the marriage certificate he obtained, because Lizzie had taken the original with her, as if in doing so she could cancel out the truth of what had taken place.

  He went to the house where he thought she had lived with Allan and the other men, although it was hard to be sure that it was the right one in the jumble of buildings so close to one another. A woman came to the door and said she had never heard of Willie and Snort and Ripper, and what sort of names were those anyway. She moved away from the door fearfully, looking about to call the police.

  Grant stayed on in the apartment. The warmth of the sunlight streaming through his colourful little window cheered him, as if it might beam her through to him. He figured that, if he stayed here, Lizzie would know where to find him.

  She appeared to him on street corners, and in pubs where he sometimes dropped in, just in case she might have joined the old crowd. For an instant, he would think he had seen her, but in reality, she was never there; her friends hadn’t seen her there either. In time they would move on: poets had other lives and careers to pursue like everyone else, children to mind at home, or the old ones got sick and died. There was one
who used a stick when he walked. One afternoon when Grant came in, he was sitting by himself, taking snuff.

  ‘Hello, young fellow,’ he said. ‘You’re Lizzie’s boyfriend, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m her husband. We got married.’

  ‘Oh, dear boy, that was a mistake, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No. We were happy.’

  ‘And now she’s gone. Well, that’s women for you.’

  Grant hesitated for an instant. He might hear something he would rather not, but the opportunity seemed too good pass. ‘I wonder if you knew who Lizzie lived with a few years ago? A poet.’

  Grant wasn’t sure whether the man had heard him or not.

  ‘A vodka, dear boy. If you’d be so kind.’

  Grant bought the vodka and a beer for himself. He was prepared to wait. The poet began a rambling story about his sailing days.

  ‘Lizzie?’ Grant said, when he’d heard it through.

  ‘Oh, my good chap, I don’t pry into people’s private lives.’ The old poet seemed about to fall asleep, a line of damp snuff trickling into his beard.

  ‘I just thought you might know. I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Quem dues vult perdere, dementat prius. You wouldn’t know what that means, I suppose. The young are an uneducated bunch these days.’

  ‘It means,’ Grant said, ‘“whom the gods would destroy, they first make insane”. I learned Latin. But lots of kids could tell you that: it was in a comic book.’

  ‘Really? Well, I didn’t know that. You’re an interesting young chap after all. Another vodka, perhaps?’

  ‘About Lizzie?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no idea about that, dear boy. No idea at all. You sure she didn’t make that up? About the poet.’

  He didn’t know whether Lizzie was even alive. But somewhere, some day, he thought he would see her, that she couldn’t just vanish. His rational self told him that she’d probably left the country. At other times, he wondered whether she was a mirage, had never existed at all.