The Man In The Seventh Row

by Brian Pendreigh

  'I don't think that was a very suitable film to take a two-year-old to,' rasped Jo. 'All that stuff about dying.'

  'I'm three,' said Rosebud.

  'No, you're not,' said her mother.

  'Dada told me to tell people I'm three.'

  Jo gave Roy a silent, withering look.

  ***

  When Roy picked Rosebud up the following Friday, she was accompanied by a large cuddly toy ET which her mother had bought her and with which she slept every night. Roy smiled at Jo and kissed her on the cheek, but she turned away.

  Roy and Rosebud went back to the Filmhouse to see the cartoon The Land Before Time about Littlefoot, the orphaned brontosaurus; Cera, the young triceratops; and their little dinosaur friends following the bright circle to the great valley.

  'Why did Littlefoot's Mummy die?' asked Rosebud.

  'She had an accident.'

  'Will I have an accident?'

  'No,' said Roy, 'and it's probably best that we don't mention Littlefoot's mummy dying to your mummy.'

  Trips to the pictures became a regular Saturday afternoon outing. Often they would go to the special children's matinee at the Filmhouse. They saw Mij die horribly in Ring of Bright Water and Basil Rathbone die deservedly in The Adventures of Robin Hood, dispatched for his villainy by the dashing Errol Flynn. Rosebud dressed in green tights and green tee-shirt, and Roy's mother made her a little green triangle of a hat from felt. She looked more like a leprechaun than Robin Hood, thought Roy, but she was happy. Father and daughter replayed the fencing duel between Flynn and Rathbone with sticks from the park, Roy careful not to catch Rosebud's knuckles and Rosebud swinging so wildly that Roy was forced to employ all the dexterity shown by Errol Flynn to survive unscathed.

  During the summer Roy and Rosebud were walking along the path beside the River Almond at Cramond when she dropped her ET doll into the water. It was a drop of about ten or 12 feet. There was a wall, but no steps nearby. ET lay there at the edge of the water looking up for help. Rosebud burst into tears.

  'Don't worry,' said Roy. 'It'll be alright.'

  'She's dropped her teddy bear into the river,' one passing woman said to another.

  'Oh, what a shame,' said the other.

  Roy took off his Kickers and his socks, grabbed the rope that tied a small boat to the shore and abseiled down the wall to ET, like Jon Voight had done in Deliverance after he killed the mountain man on top of the cliff. The water was shallow, but the mud looked deep. Without taking his feet from the wall, he stretched one arm over to grab ET, held him up to show Rosebud he was safe and clamped him between his teeth. Rosebud, the two passing women, an old man with a stick and four young boys with bikes were standing looking down at him. With ET in his mouth, he started to work his way back upwards. Hand over hand on the rope, he felt the strain on his arms as he walked up the wall. He got to the top to hear Rosebud telling the boys that he was her father and he was just like Robin Hood. Rosebud hugged ET. Roy laced up his Kickers.

  'You missed it,' the old man with the stick said to another old man, who had just arrived. 'The little black girl dropped her toy monkey over the wall and the young man went down the rope and rescued it.'

  'Did he?' said the second man.

  'Actually, my dada can do anything,' said Rosebud proudly.

  ***

  Sometimes they went to the ABC or the Odeon or headed away from the city centre altogether on the 14 bus, towards the city boundary and the UCI multiplex. One death that had been widely forecast was that of cinema itself, but here was Roy making his way to an entertainment centre that housed 12 cinemas in one, making his way to a new generation of cinema with a new generation of cinema-goer. She would get a selection of loose sweets, the like of which Roy remembered constituted the contents of the penny tray at the local sweetie shop when he was a boy.

  Rosebud would sit with the bag on her lap as she watched the film, dipping into it only very occasionally. She could even turn her head and drink Coke through the straw in the disposable cup that was wedged in the hole in the armrest, without ever looking away from the screen. No matter what she saw, whether it be Disney's beautiful love story Beauty and the Beast; a cartoon frog as a secret agent in Freddie as FRO7; or a big St Bernard's dog called Chris as a big St Bernard's dog called Beethoven in a film called Beethoven, Rosebud would inevitably ask if it was a true story and declare it her favourite film.

  Roy began buying up just about everything they had seen together at the cinema when it came out on video, and Rosebud would sit for hours watching ET, The Land Before Time and Beauty and the Beast. If Roy sat with her, she might ask him to fast-forward through a dull section of the film or replay a particular scene, especially if it was a song. If she had to go back to her mother's flat in the middle of a film, she would just pick up from where she left off the following weekend. Invariably, when she had watched the second half she would watch the first half again, in a personalised, video-age variation of the Batty family's approach to watching films in North Berwick quarter of a century earlier.

  He bought other videos too, old and new films that Rosebud had never seen before. When Roy took her to the cinema, she rarely, if ever, spoke, but in the privacy of their home she would comment on the film as it went along and urge Roy to tell her what was going to happen next.

  They watched Singin' in the Rain on video and Rosebud delighted in singing a version of the theme song as she splished and splashed through the puddles.

  'I walk down the lane.' Splish. 'To the happy drain.' Splash. 'Dance, Dada.'

  And Dada would dance and spin with Rosebud and his big green and white Hibernian Football Club umbrella. He bought her a little plain wooden music box, no bigger than a matchbox. Rosebud would wind the little key and it would start off its twangy rendition of the tune in double quick time, only to fall away at the end when each new note became a struggle. 'I'm ... sing ... in' ... and ...' and finally it would expire on the note that signalled the first half of the word 'dancin'.

  The only time Rosebud ever cried at any movie was at the end of Citizen Kane, when they burned the sledge that bore her name.

  'He had lots of grown-up things,' she said, cuddling ET. 'But I think what he really wanted was his sledge.'

  'Yes,' said Roy. His own Rosebud was still very small, but he realised then that she was getting older, not growing up exactly, but just that she was no longer his baby, but rather his little precocious girl.

  'Is it a true story, Dada?'

  'Eh,' said Roy, 'well, sort of. Citizen Kane is based on a real man called William Randolph Hearst, and he was very rich and lived in a magnificent castle. It was near where I was working before you were born. One day, I'll take you there, Rosebud.'

  Jo could say 'Rose ... bud', just like Orson Welles does when he dies at the beginning of the film and drops the little glass ball with the snow scene in it. Only Jo could manage that same harsh raspy sound. 'Again, Mummy, again,' demanded her daughter.

  Jo painted the word 'Rosebud' on the sledge Roy bought as a Christmas present, and they went sledging together in the snow in Queen's Park, all three of them on the sledge at once. At least there were three of them on the sledge when they started. Only Rosebud was still on it when it reached the bottom of the slope. Roy and Jo lay laughing in the snow.

  'Very good,' shouted a blond man who was watching them. Roy stopped laughing and brushed the dry snow off his jeans and jacket. They walked along, with Rosebud holding her mother's hand on one side, and her father's on the other. David, the blond bodybuilder who was Jo's new husband, walked beside them, carrying the sledge.

  ***

  Roy liked the films at the Filmhouse best, the films that he had seen as a boy, Thunderbird 6, Dr Who and the Daleks, Born Free, and The Wizard of Oz. On the way home they saw a rainbow.

  'If we follow it,' said Rosebud, 'we might find Dorothy on the other side.'

  So they went to look for the end of the rainbow. It seemed to come down in Princes Street Gar
dens. But they never found it.

  'Actually, it doesn't matter,' said Rosebud.

  It began to rain again.

  'Come on,' said Rosebud and her voice became musical as she sang the word 'We're', holding the note for what seemed like an eternity, 'singin' in the rain ...' And off she splashed through the puddles.

  22

  Anna had seen the film before, both the original version and the director's cut, and she shared Roy's passion for the decaying futuristic vision, for the deadpan poetry of the voiceover narrative and for the film's courage to face up to the fundamental questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, what it means to be real.

  Blade Runner was a thriller like the Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade thrillers that Bogart used to make. At the same time it was nothing less than a quest for the meaning of life, or at least the meaning of one man's life. Or maybe two. She knew both endings, and everything that came before, but that was not the point. Not this time. There was a clue to what it all meant in there somewhere, and she had missed it.

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; and God created Man. And the Word filled the cinema screen and updated audiences. God created Man, and Man, or rather the Tyrell Corporation, created replicants, advanced robots that looked like humans. They were stronger and at least as intelligent as the genetic engineers who made them. After a replicant uprising on an off-world colony, where they were used as slaves, they were declared illegal on Earth. Special police squads were ordered to forcibly 'retire' any replicants that returned to Earth. Policemen were called blade runners.

  The screen filled with the lights of a sprawling cityscape, in which towers belched fire into the night sky. Los Angeles, 2019. Fire reflected in a blue eye, perhaps human, perhaps not. A strange little aircraft flitted, like an outsize bug, towards a gigantic pyramid. Rows of tiny, illuminated windows indicated the pyramid's multiple storeys, nevertheless its essence seemed to link this future world with the ancient Mayan civilisation of Central America. Roy remembered the first time he had seen Blade Runner at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1982, exactly one week after the premiere of ET and several years before his first sight of the ancient, stepped pyramids at the end of a long, hot walk in a jungle clearing in Belize. Strange, he thought, how so much in life connects, so many disparate elements come together, and make some sort of sense in the end.

  Inside one of the Tyrell pyramids one man is testing the emotional responses of another in various given situations. He suggests that the latter, Leon Kowalski, finds a tortoise in the desert, turns him on his back and leaves him to bake in the sun. Leon gets upset. The interrogator mentions Leon's mother. Leon gets even more upset. He shoots the questionmaster.

  Deckard reads a newspaper at a steamy Chinese fast-food stall on a dark, crowded, rainy street. People walk by with umbrellas raised, some of which have lights built into their shafts – pathetic, half-hearted shafts of light in the vast darkness. Deckard looks tired, washed out by the rain or the strain. He says he is an ex-cop, an ex-blade runner, but he talks to the cinema audience like a private detective, in a slow, deadpan monologue.

  A policeman called Gaff takes Deckard to see his old boss Bryant. Bryant needs Deckard. Six replicants have jumped a shuttle, killed the crew and passengers and landed on Earth. One replicant is dead and Bryant needs Deckard to track down the four who are still on the streets. Maybe Bryant just isn't very good at arithmetic, but he seems to have lost a replicant somewhere in his thinking. Deckard doesn't ask where.

  In the distant future, long after Harrison Ford finished work on Blade Runner, there will be a communication network called the Internet, too hard to explain, but it will buzz with speculation as one computer tells another that the missing replicant is Deckard. But Roy knows there was meant to be a female replicant in the film called Mary, and that she was still in the script when the original dialogue was recorded, but subsequently dropped to save money. So much for metaphysics and the meaning of life.

  One of the returning replicants was electrocuted trying to break into the Tryell Corporation. Bryant thought they might try to infiltrate the place by taking jobs there and had a blade runner check new employees. Leon was a new employee.

  As Deckard asked Bryant what the replicants wanted from the Tyrell Corporation, Roy asked Anna if she wanted a Coke, which surprised her, because even though she had known Roy for only a matter of hours, already she knew him well enough to know that nothing was ever allowed to interrupt his viewing. Instinctively she said she would get them. She got up from her seat in the seventh row and made her way to the foyer of Mann's Chinese Theatre. There was no one else at the counter and she was gone from the auditorium for only a couple of minutes but she missed the clue. When she came back Harrison Ford was talking to Sean Young in a peaceful, spacious room at the Tyrell Corporation.

  Sean Young is the epitome of femme fatale cool, with her dark sculpted suit and her dark sculpted hair and her dark sculpted looks, the sort of woman who promised paradise, but meant trouble, for someone. She said her name was Rachael.

  Anna hardly heard. Something was gnawing away at her subconscious. There was something important there that she could not quite remember. But it would come to her. In the end it would come to her. What had been in the scene she had missed while going for drinks? She knew the film well. She remembered some of it: Bryant telling Deckard that the latest replicants were almost human, that all they lacked were emotions. The designers thought they might develop their own emotions in time, but they were not sure what those emotions would be. They did not want replicants taking over the world, so they gave them a built-in termination date. Four years. That was all they had. Four years.

  Deckard gives Rachael an empathy test, measuring fluctuation of the pupil and capillary dilation in a blush. He asks her questions about dead butterflies and nude pin-ups. He needs to ask more than 100 questions, a lot more than usual, before he concludes she is a replicant. He realises that she proved so difficult to pin down for the simple reason that she genuinely believes she is human. Tyrell says that they have created whole pasts for the latest replicants.

  'Memories,' says Deckard. 'You're talking about memories.'

  Anna had memories. She had seen this film before with Brad, who fell asleep somewhere near the beginning, and with Jon, her ex-husband, who didn't. It was really John, but he decided to drop the 'H'.

  'Great movie,' she said at the end. She said it to annoy him because she knew that he had hated it. She could tell he was above it by the way he fidgeted in his seat and went for popcorn in the middle, which he would never have done if it had been in French or Russian. He told her it was crap.

  'That's your opinion,' she said.

  'No,' he said, 'that's a fact. Where is the missing replicant? They don't explain because they don't care about the audience or respect their intelligence, because the film is aimed at innumerate morons.'

  'And,' she said, 'what is Last Year at Marienbad about? A man who had an affair at Marienbad or Frederiksbad or nowhere? Manicured lawns and manicured people, standing around, casting shadows and posing.'

  She liked Last Year at Marienbad, but that was not the point.

  'L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad pushed back the frontiers of cinema,' said Jon. His French pronunciation was perfect, as one would expect from someone who studied Literature at the Sorbonne.

  'L'Annee Derniere is a metaphysical mystery. Did they have an affair in the past? Is it a memory? Is it a fantasy? Is it a prophecy?'

  'Are they replicants?' added Anna.

  'You're not going to compare this junk with L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad,' said Jon, his voice, rising in indignation, as he looked through his wire-rimmed glasses down his long nose at her. It was the way he usually looked at her and the tone he usually adopted.

  'You're right,' Anna said, 'I'm not going to compare them. Just fuck off out of my life.' And she walked away towards the subway. He called after her but did
not follow.

  'You're ridiculous,' were the last words she heard as she left him. She never saw her husband ever again, but he did phone her sister's apartment a couple of nights later to tell her he would take her back if she saw a psychiatrist about her personality problems and her drinking, and to stress how stupid she was for leaving him ... where would she find someone else like him, a professor of film studies with a good salary? She did not know or care where Jon was now.

  Leon sticks his hand into an icy cold tank in the laboratory where they make replicants' eyes. He is with the replicant leader, a powerfully built man – robot – with strong Germanic features, very light blond hair and blue eyes. The replicant leader is played by the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. Never again would Hauer have such a memorable part, except maybe the Guinness adverts.

  'Fiery the angels fell,' he says. 'Deep thunder rode around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc.'

  Jon had quoted poetry at Anna all the time, but when Hauer quotes poetry it has a quite different effect, creating an atmosphere not of intellectual snobbery, but of threat and dread, of imminent apocalypse. Anna hears Roy say the words, under his breath, along with Hauer.

  'Who is it?' she whispers.

  'Blake,' he replies.

  Rachael goes to Deckard's apartment. She has a photograph of herself with her mother to prove she is not a replicant. But Deckard knows her most secret memories, except they are not her memories, they are Tyrell's niece's memories. Deckard shoots one replicant, Zhora, in the back and has to be rescued from Leon by Rachael. She shoots Leon.

  Anna imagines the replicant leader is played by Roy. Earlier she had felt she could imagine him in Harrison Ford's role, but this is different. She feels he is much better suited to Rutger Hauer's role somehow. She can see Roy up there on the screen, slightly smaller than Rutger Hauer, but not dissimilar. The only great role Hauer ever had and Roy is taking it away from him. They have the same blue eyes. They have similar blond hair. They have the same lines of dialogue. To begin with.