Roy did go to the pictures sometimes in Edinburgh: True Grit at the Ritz, Thunderbird Six at the Regent, Born Free at the Playhouse, where his grandfather dropped him and Stephen off and had to wait outside for half an hour when he came to collect them because they had stayed to see the beginning of the film again. But Roy could not remember ever going to the Regal. What he could remember were the teenagers who queued outside for a week for tickets. After school he would walk down past the Regal to see if they were still there. Every time he went, there were more of them. He asked his mother which film they were waiting to see. She told him they were not waiting for tickets for a film, but tickets to see a pop group called The Beatles.
Roy started a scrapbook, cutting pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo from his father's newspaper. Pictures of them jumping up and down, having pillow fights, having fun. He saved up his pocket money and his mother took him to buy 'Help!' his first ever record. The family did not have a record player, but he took it with him every time he went to visit his grandparents and played it the whole time he was there, again and again and again. His father told him he should listen to Bing Crosby. His grandfather told him he should listen to Beethoven, though Roy never once heard his grandfather listen to Beethoven. Father and grandfather both agreed the Beatles would be forgotten within a few weeks, ignoring the fact that they had already been around for a couple of years. A fad, his father said. A phase, his grandfather added. A craze, his mother said. John Lennon could have drawn inspiration from the Batty family for his word play.
Roy collected Beatles bubble gum cards, kept the cards, smelled the curious, thin, pink wafer of bubble gum and threw it away. Children would gather in the school playground in twos and threes at playtime, flicking through their decks of cards like Mississippi gamblers, transferring each card from the top to the bottom after a split-second on display.
'Got, got, got. Not got,' said Roy, when the dealer reached an elusive picture of George. Roy had a list of the cards he did not have, which he kept updated in his pocket, though of course he had memorised every one.
'This is really difficult to get,' said the dealer. 'Let's see your doublers. I want three for it. Or four.'
And the deal would move to Roy, quite prepared to give up as many doublers as it took to complete his set. Completion was everything.
He collected other bubble gum cards too. The Man from UNCLE, with Robert Vaughn from The Magnificent Seven as Napoleon Solo and David McCallum from Glasgow as Illyia Kuryakin. The Rolling Stones. The American Civil War. World War Two. And of course James Bond. There is material for a thesis in the thinking behind such a selection of subjects for bubble gum cards. Film, pop, television and war: discuss. Roy never did complete his Thunderball set. The story was that the manufacturers had withdrawn Card No 24, because it was a picture in which James Bond appeared to hit a lady and they could not allow that, even though it was really a SPECTRE agent disguised as a lady. Where would James Bond be if he had shared their scruples? Dead, that's where.
***
'Their hair's a bit long,' his grandfather said when he saw the Beatles cards.
'Do they get paid for that?' his grandfather said when he heard them on the radiogram.
But eventually it was his grandfather who took Roy to see the film Help!. Not only did it have really fab songs, but wonderful, dry, surreal, silly humour way ahead of its time and beyond the appreciation of many critics – John, Paul, George and Ringo go through the doors of four neighbouring terraced houses, and it turns out they all lead into one big, long house, and, on the pavement outside, Dandy Nichols declares they haven't changed at all. 'Still the same as they was before they was.'
But people weren't going to the cinema anymore, not to see films, not in the numbers that they used to, before TV. Rather than closing the Regal, Associated British Cinemas took the imaginative step of turning it into Britain's first multiplex, or at least Britain's first triple cinema. All the seats in Cinema One were red, those in Two were blue and those in Three were yellow. By this time Doreen Batty had fulfilled her dream of moving away from Fountainbridge and the family were installed in the leafier surroundings of Learmonth, close to Fettes College. James Bond completed his schooling at Fettes after being expelled from Eton and Tommy Connery delivered milk for the Co-op there before he became James Bond. So the Regal, or ABC Film Centre as it became, was no longer Roy's local cinema. It was not long after it stopped being his local cinema that he started going to it.
It was round about this time too that he caught up with the early Bond films. He saw From Russia with Love and Goldfinger among the chattering classes at the Dominion. You might think that there was no such thing as the chattering classes in the Seventies, but the Dominion was long in the grip of the chattering classes. He saw You Only Live Twice at the Tivoli, near Hearts' football ground in Gorgie, and Thunderball in a double bill with Dr No at the Playhouse, though he was familiar with the villains and the gadgets and some of the action sequences from his bubble gum collection and the James Bond annual he got one Christmas. He had a James Bond pistol and a toy Aston Martin with various buttons. One resulted in the appearance of machine guns from the front bumper, another produced a bullet-proof shield at the back, and a third resulted in the operation of the ejector seat and Bond's passenger flew out of the car, off towards the fireplace. Roy kept the car in its box to ensure it remained in mint condition and got into a terrible state once when he found Stephen and his friends playing with it in the back green. There it was in a line of traffic with a taxi and a red double-decker bus, all stopped at little traffic lights. As if James Bond would wait behind a red double-decker bus at traffic lights!
'That's not what it's for,' screamed Roy, snatching it from the queue.
Roy kept his bubble gum cards, his annual, his pistol, his Aston Martin and the record of Shirley Bassey singing 'Gold...finger' on a shelf in the cupboard of their room, which Stephen was unable to reach without the help of a chair. He kept them all in perfect condition, but he gave away his Aston Martin to Alan Robertson when the family moved to Learmonth. All he had left now was the souvenir book he bought for Diamonds Are Forever at the Odeon and the poster for Dr No and Thunderball – 'Double Big! Double Brilliant!! Double Bond' – which he got from one of his Sunday cycles around the cinemas to see if they had any posters they were finished with. The Playhouse almost always had a poster or two for him to tuck into his leather saddle-bag. Sometimes he gave them to friends and once he sold a poster from Diamonds are Forever to a shop in London for fifty quid. It had been printed with the certificate 'AA', prohibiting its exhibition to anyone under 14. At the last minute the film company must have made the cuts required to have it recertified as an 'A' and a small square of white paper had been stuck over one of the As. It would have been worth much more, Roy guessed, but it had been up and down off his wall for over 20 years and somewhere along the line a skylight had leaked and it was badly water stained.
Roy finally found out that it was No 176 Fountainbridge where Connery had lived. He went to look for it again. But it was no longer there. There was a small section of distinctive old stone tenements near to where it must have stood, but No 176 had been swallowed up by the brewery or something like that. It was gone, just like Roy's Aston Martin and his bubble gum cards. There was nothing there to prove that No 176 Fountainbridge ever existed or that Sean Connery had once lived there, a little boy who went off to play football in the park like all the other kids. There was no evidence to suggest that Sean Connery was anything more than a character in the movies.
11
'Why?' asks Anna.
'Because,' says Roy, 'of the way they looked. Because of the way they spoke, the poetry of a mythical west. Because of Elmer Bernstein's music that made you think you were up there riding over the Mexican border with them. Because it was my first time ... And because of Yul Brynner's hair.'
'He didn't have any hair,' says Anna.
'I know,' says Roy. 'What's your fav
ourite?'
'I don't like lists. It's so artificial choosing one movie over another. And I always feel my favourite movie will be the next one I see. I haven't seen enough movies.'
'I told you mine, now you have to tell me yours,' says Roy.
Without further hesitation Anna nominates Brief Encounter.
'Why?'
'Because you forced me to choose one and it came into my head ... And because I like old black and white movies. And I like English movies. And I like Celia Johnson's hat. It reminds me of England.'
Roy says nothing, his silence itself a question.
'I did a year at university there. A long time ago ... I like Ealing comedies and costume dramas and stiff upper lips and Beatles movies and James Bond.'
'What were you studying?'
'History. I teach European history at UCLA. What do you do?'
'These days I'm in the movies.'
'What ...'
'Do you like The Third Man?' interrupted Roy. 'It's my favourite British movie, even if it is set in Austria and has American stars.'
'Yes, yes,' she says. 'It would be near the top of my list.'
'I thought you didn't make lists.'
'I said would. If I had a list, it would be near the top.'
'It has my single most favourite scene in any movie,' says Roy. 'Remember Joseph Cotten goes to Vienna and discovers his old friend, Harry Lime, is dead – the Orson Welles character. He visits his bereaved girlfriend. Her cat runs away from him and she explains it only liked Harry. The camera follows the cat into the street, where it rubs against the legs of a man in a darkened doorway. A light goes on. And Harry Lime smiles, and then he disappears in a burst of zither music. Well, he would smile, he's supposed to be dead.'
'It wouldn't have worked with my cat. She won't go near any men. Tiffany. Her name is Tiffany.'
'After Breakfast?'
'After breakfast, before breakfast, all the time ... Yeah, she's named after the film.'
'And your favourite scene is the one where Audrey Hepburn has rejected George Peppard's declaration of love, thrown her cat out of the cab, but they all end up reunited in the rain together, having a three-way cuddle, 'Moon River' playing on the soundtrack?'
Anna seems to be considering whether it is her favourite scene.
'It always makes me cry,' she says. 'Doesn't it make you cry?'
'No.'
'Do you never cry at movies?'
'No.'
'Not when Bogart says goodbye to Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca?'
'He still has Captain Renault.'
'Not when Anthony Hopkins finally works up the courage to tell Emma Thompson how he feels about her in The Remains of the Day, and it's too late, she loved him, but now she has married someone else?'
'That's the English for you. Why didn't he tell her he loved her earlier? And on the subject of English country houses, why didn't Joan Fontaine just give Mrs Danvers the sack in Rebecca instead of moping around thinking about killing herself?'
'Don't you cry when Ali MacGraw dies in Love Story?'
'I never could empathise with someone whose taste was so catholic that it could include the Beatles, Beethoven and Ryan O'Neal.'
'Not when Winona Ryder asks Johnny Depp to hold her in Edward Scissorhands and he can't because he has no hands? Or are you like the guys in Sleepless in Seattle who cry only at men's movies, like when whoever it was got killed in The Dirty Dozen?'
'I've never seen The Dirty Dozen.'
'Didn't you cry when the black soldiers marched into battle at the end of Glory, with their heads held high, knowing they are going to die, but that they will die free men?'
'Nope,' says Roy, 'not even when the priests of Sikandergul kill Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King and he sings "The minstrel boy to the war has gone" as his executioners hack at the ropes that support the bridge on which he is standing, and his buddy Michael Caine is left to finish the verse alone. Not even when Tom Berenger shoots Willem Dafoe in Platoon and the helicopter takes off without him, and the troops on the chopper see Dafoe running out into the clearing, with the Vietcong closing in around him, and there is nothing they can do. And Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' plays as Dafoe falls to his knees, his arms outstretched in a crucifix for a moment, before he falls forward, dead. Mind you someone once said 'Adagio for Strings' could make changing a light bulb seem meaningful ... How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb?'
'Or,' says Anna, ignoring the question of light bulbs, 'when Schindler's Jews gather at his graveside and you know that they are the real people who would have died in the concentration camps without him?'
'One to change the bulb,' says Roy, 'and all their friends to share the experience.'
'Or when Kevin Costner's dead father comes back in Field of Dreams to play the game of ball he never played with his son when he was alive?' says Anna. 'Or even when ET comes back to life? ET, the child in all of us?'
Roy stops smiling. He's silent for a moment, before he begins again.
'That's a hell of a list for someone who doesn't make lists,' he says. 'Do they all make you cry?'
'Some of them. I don't mind admitting it. I get caught up in good movies. It's a way to escape.'
'From what?'
'History.'
'Your history?'
'I mean History. History the subject. The Cold War. The Second World War.'
'Are you married?' asks Roy.
Anna averts her eyes at the directness of the question.
'Divorced.' She looks at him again. He has not taken his eyes off her. 'You?'
'I used to be married,' he says. 'Not anymore.'
'Divorced?' He nods. 'Oh right, I thought for a minute, maybe she died, like in Love Story and you found the film so false that you couldn't cry at it.'
'No,' laughs Roy, 'nothing like that. Nothing so dramatic. Jo and I just grew apart and went our separate ways. Actually I quite like the film, Love Story. Or I did when I saw it. It was a long time ago.'
'It makes me cry.'
'And did you cry at the end of Braveheart when ...'
'No, no, don't go on,' she says. 'I haven't seen it yet.'
'But you teach European history. You must know the story. It's up for an Oscar. Everyone knows the story.'
'Not me. It's modern European history I teach.'
'How come you haven't seen it?'
'I don't know. I want to see it. I just never have.' She had been planning to see it with Brad, but they chose that night to split up instead. 'I don't know if it's on anywhere now.'
'It's on at the Fairfax on Beverly Boulevard in 20 minutes. Two dollars any seat.'
'I have a car.'
'And I have four dollars.'
'You look like a blond Mel Gibson, you know,' she says, as they rise.
'Really? I always wanted to look like Kirk Douglas. Look at the dimple in my chin.'
12
It is the beginning. Everything is misty as Roy and Anna take their seats. And out of the mist comes the title. Braveheart. Across a loch the audience fly, and up over mountains that still harbour spring pockets of snow.
'I never made it to Scotland,' says Anna. 'I wish I had.'
The audience is deposited in a glen where Scottish nobles are strung out like Apache warriors on their ponies. Roy can taste the slightly sweet smell of Anna's breath as she leans towards him and asks if he has been there.
'Yes,' he says, 'I was there.'
The narrator tells of death and civil war in Scotland and war with King Edward of England. Edward invites the Scots nobles to peace talks. William Wallace is a boy of seven or eight, with a face full of sweet mischief. His father and elder brother go to the talks, but arrive too late. All they find is a place full of treachery and hanged countrymen. They are alarmed when they hear someone else arrive. It is William. He has followed them. He looks on, wide-eyed in horror.
Roy grew up with stories of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Ro
b Roy, tales from his grandfather, whom he once imagined as a near-contemporary of these ancient Scottish heroes. When Disney filmed the story of Rob Roy, Roy thought he might call himself Rob Roy Batty, rather than just Roy Batty. He wondered why Disney never filmed the story of Wallace and Bruce and drew imaginary lobby stills illustrating the great Scottish victories at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn. The story goes that in his darkest hour Bruce watched a spider trying to pull itself up on a thread and falling back down and starting all over again, never giving up. Disney could have made that spider a star. But it was Mel Gibson, not Walt Disney, who lifted the Scottish standard and held it triumphantly over Hollywood.
Anna knew nothing of Wallace or Bruce or Rob Roy or any spiders. Her parents told her stories of Abraham Lincoln and General Grant, and JFK and Martin Luther King. Her history was a different history, and although she was fascinated by England and Europe, Scotland was little more than a mountainous blur on the edge of her perceptions. For her William Wallace and Scotland and Roy Batty truly do emerge out of the mist, a land and people as exotic as the Apache had been to Roy as a child.
Roy lays his jacket next to him and puts his arm on the rest between the seats, where it touches Anna's bare flesh, cool after the heat of the Hollywood afternoon. Instinctively he pulls away.
'It's OK, we can share it,' she whispers, without looking away from the scene in which Wallace's father and brother are returned from the wars, dead. His uncle takes him away from the violence and unrest to Europe. He grows up to become Mel Gibson, insisting he wants no part of the hostilities with England. He is more interested in wooing Murron, the girl who gave him a flower at his father's graveside when he was a boy. They marry in secret to avoid the local English nobleman coming to claim his right of deflowering new brides. When a soldier tries to rape Murron, Wallace helps her escape and they arrange to meet. She never gets there. She is captured and the local magistrate determines to make an example of her. She is tied to a stake and, with hardly a glance in her direction, he cuts her throat. Wallace exacts a terrible revenge and only then does he become a focus of resistance against the English.
The Man In The Seventh Row Page 7
