In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘Let’s chain ourselves to the seats!’ Dog suggested. ‘That’ll slow them down.’

  ‘Great idea,’ Zoe agreed, and he said he would take care of it. She wondered whether she should tell him she was leaving, but decided not to. He hadn’t asked; and they were seeing less and less of each other.

  On Tuesday morning Dog turned up with hundreds of long, U-shaped graphite bicycle locks.

  ‘Matt at the bike shop said we should have more than one each,’ he declared. ‘See, we’ll clamp our hands and feet to the seats, like electric chairs, I’ve tested it out already. These locks are made of carbon steel. If they try and saw or weld through all of these, it’ll take days.’

  She’d never seen Dog animated like this: the excitement of protest.

  ‘And they won’t know what they’re going to release when they do succeed: like Frankenstein monsters.’

  ‘Damn. Spirit of the Beehive,’ Zoe murmured.

  ‘A beehive?’

  ‘No, nothing. It’s too late.’

  Lewis moved and rewired the speakers from the smaller screen in the large auditorium, and during the afternoon other helpers brought the generator; the projectionist prepared the numerous reels; copious quantities of coffee, popcorn and ice-creams were made ready.

  There were no public showings that day, although people had heard about the occupation and came to ask about tickets for the night’s screenings.

  ‘It’s all sold out,’ Zoe told them. ‘Come along in the morning if you can, though. The more the merrier when they cart us out.’

  Later on, those with tickets arrived: neighbours; Green activists; one Labour councillor; dreadlocked anti-road protestors, young veterans of such dissent; film buffs, looking more mournful than at Agatha’s funeral, more washed-out than ever; Natalie, and Simon. They took their seats. The chair of Gath Against the Ring Road gave a short speech, the lights went down, the screen flickered with life, the first titles for L’Atalante appeared, and they were off.

  It was like a journey, Zoe thought, sitting at the back by the aisle – and later on they’d even be strapping themselves into their seats. A journey through cinema history. She should have chosen a road movie. Alice in the Cities, maybe. She thought about Adamina, and felt ashamed at lumbering the child with her own tears. She thought about James, and tried to remember if she knew whether or not he’d ever seen this strangely beautiful poem in black-and-white celluloid, made by a man who’d lived a life nearly ten years shorter than his. And then she forgot about James, as she was drawn back into the images on the screen before her, in her own and her grandmother’s cinema.

  The night progressed, the films unwound. Helpless laughter at the Marx Brothers’ manic satire; absorption in a French aristocratic society breaking up from within; more sporadic laughter at Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag. People fell asleep, dribbled onto their chests, woke with stiff necks and slipped out to the foyer for coffee. Pills of various kinds were taken. It was clear, though, that the audience as a whole were flagging during Amarcord: snoring could be heard in the few quiet moments and people were wandering out to the loo with the slow, swaying gait of sleepwalkers – or the hypnotized actors in Heart of Glass, Zoe thought. She was worried. Only the film buffs were watching with all their attention glued to the screen, the mad uncle in the olive tree crying: ‘Voglio una donna!’ Peering like captivated vampires who received their sustenance not from blood but images.

  Zoe met Simon at the popcorn counter, and confessed her anxiety.

  ‘They just need a good breakfast,’ he told her.

  ‘Shit! I’m stupid. I completely overlooked that,’ she admitted.

  ‘Is your kitchen still set up upstairs?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Zoe replied. ‘But there’s no food there.’

  ‘Good. Fine. Leave it to me, darling. Just let me out of here, and I’ll be back in an hour.’

  Simon returned from who knows where with boxes of food.

  ‘I’ll provide breakfast,’ he promised, ‘although I’ll need an assistant.’ He found a Donga warrior who’d slipped into the empty smaller auditorium and was sleeping peacefully there, and woke him rudely with his foot.

  ‘Come on, you,’ Simon demanded. ‘Come and make yourself useful.’

  What Simon then achieved, while the audience were immersed in the epic triangle of Days of Heaven, was a miracle. Not a little human miracle, Zoe would later tell Adamina, but a big God one. When the film finished and the house lights came up, Simon’s dreadlocked, dragooned assistant announced that during this interval breakfast would be served in the flat, at which precise moment people became aware of the mouth-watering odour of fried bacon entering their nostrils. They filed and shuffled impatiently into the foyer and upstairs, where Simon and George provided paper platefuls of English breakfast.

  ‘Not one or two or half a dozen,’ Zoe would recall, still incredulous, ‘but all two hundred, Mina. It was tiny, you remember, and people ate off their laps on the stairs and everywhere. But these meals kept coming, half of them for carnivores, eggs and bacon, and alternatives for vegetarians, soya protein sausages with beans on toast. With coffee and fruit juice. I didn’t get a chance to ask him how he did it – in the rush he mumbled something facetious about microwaves and army training and that really it was all due to his young friend George’s improvisational genius – and I never have been able to work it out.’

  Fortified, refreshed, the audience returned to watch Time of the Gypsies, to be transported by that operatic cinema. It would have taken longer than the interval that followed for them to come back to reality if it wasn’t for the fact that those who went out to stretch their legs saw from the foyer the beginnings of activity in the street outside. The first police car was parked, passers-by were pausing, a large yellow van pulled up.

  ‘It’s starting,’ someone returning to the auditorium announced. Before the next film began the bicycle locks were distributed and Dog, a big, shy man, explained to the Campaign chair how they should be attached, and he repeated the instructions at an audible volume: the locks were clamped into place, people imprisoning themselves, after last-minute dashes to the toilets and amid nervous laughter, as each realized that the person sitting next to them would have to click shut the last lock. Simon’s assistant chef, George, came and sat beside him, and sent Natalie to where he’d been sitting.

  ‘WHAT ABOUT THE KEYS?’ someone shouted out.

  ‘What about the keys?’ the chair asked Dog.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’ll go around and collect them and pass them up to the projectionist.’

  ‘HE’LL COME AND COLLECT THEM OFF YOU!’ the chairman announced.

  The operation took longer than planned. People in the middle of rows found themselves surrounded by comrades already locked securely in position while they still had an arm free, so someone else had to climb over seats and bodies to reach and shackle them. Dog began to do it but provoked cries of pain from those his big and clumsy limbs squashed, whereupon Natalie, who’d not yet fettered herself, volunteered.

  As the last people were locked in place (‘ALL ABOARD THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE!’ someone shouted out) Dog realized he wouldn’t be able to lock himself in: the very last person would have to have one arm free.

  ‘Just put it in position, and they won’t notice,’ Zoe advised him.

  ‘An illusion!’ he replied. ‘It might just work. I’m going to get rid of these keys now. Let me lock you in, Zoe. You’re the penultimate one.’ He shackled Zoe in her seat and passed a bucket on string up through the projectionist’s small window.

  ‘Signal to him to start,’ Zoe called to Dog, and he did. The next film began, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, and as the audience gradually forgot themselves, the activity outside the cinema was building up. A besuited bailiff rang the bell and knocked on the glass doors, and when no reply was forthcoming he ordered a workman – with assent from the senior police officer present – to use a sledgehammer.

>   It was 8.30 a.m. and by this time a hundred or more people had already gathered along the street: they were on the opposite pavement, pressed against barriers put up that morning, as if for some royal gala performance, waiting for the glittering stars of a Hollywood première to roll up in limousines; when in fact they were waiting for other, humbler kinds of stars to come out of the cinema.

  Inside, the shattering glass of the front doors could be heard clearly, and although one or two of the incorrigibly imaginative spectators assimilated the noise into the film’s soundtrack, as in a dream, it made most blanch with anxiety. Some at the back heard also the booing from the crowd that greeted it.

  Moments later the bailiff and security guards in yellow jackets entered the back of the auditorium.

  ‘Find the lights,’ the bailiff ordered. ‘Switch them on.’

  When this was done the image on the screen was washed out but still visible; as had been agreed beforehand, the viewers kept their attention on the film, ignoring (or at least pretending to) their evictors. Like two hundred adult Adaminas, Zoe thought.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ the security foreman told the bailiff, ‘they’re locked to the seats.’

  ‘Well, get some saws in here then.’

  ‘They’re graphite locks. It’ll take hours.’ The foreman scanned the cinema for an approximate body count. ‘Days,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘A locksmith, then,’ the bailiff suggested.

  ‘They’re virtually unpickable, these Trelocks. My lad’s got one.’

  ‘I can’t think straight with all this noise, damn it. Go and turn off the projector,’ the bailiff ordered.

  ‘We can’t get into the booth. It’s all boarded up: the projectionist’s barricaded himself in.’

  ‘Well, cut off the power, then. Just shut that bloody film off, and get some torches in here.’

  An electrician found the fuse box and switched off the mains supply. The film wound to a halt; the soundtrack groaned to silence. The audience sat in total darkness. But there were more sounds from the projectionist’s booth up above and those who craned their necks could see light in there. And then the generator came on, humming, and the projector cranked into motion, the screen came alive once more, the soundtrack found voice.

  ‘That’s all we need,’ the bailiff exclaimed. ‘They’ve got a damn generator.’

  ‘We’re back to where we started,’ the foreman pointed out.

  ‘Very perceptive,’ the bailiff told him. ‘Where are those torches?’

  Zoe and Dog, Simon, Natalie, Lewis and the rest of the audience were left in peace for the next few minutes as the managers of their eviction retreated outside to work out what to do. The security men in their yellow jackets stayed inside but, with legal cases for assault pending from previous incidents, had strict orders to avoid physical confrontation, and so instead of adopting intimidating tactics they huddled in the corridor.

  The bailiff conferred in the foyer with the chief police officer, an executive of the demolition company and an official from the Department of Transport, while the crowd outside continued to grow. The road had been blocked off by now, traffic diverted. A crane with a huge ball on the end of a chain arrived and some people jumped the barrier and lay down in the road to block its path: it stood thirty yards from the cinema, while police carried away the floppy bodies of protestors; newspaper photographers and a television crew filmed them and also the crane operator, sat high up in his cab, smoking.

  The bailiff and the other officials re-entered the auditorium with torches – which was where an extra element of farce entered proceedings: since a generator was powering the projector, they might as well have turned the mains power back on and had the house lights up, but it didn’t seem to occur to anyone to do so. Zoe had to bite her lip to stop herself suggesting it. Not that the scene really needed more absurdity, with four men discussing the removal of two hundred immobile people who mutely ignored them, watching a film instead.

  ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ the demolition company executive declared at length. ‘Unbolt the seats. Carry them out in their seats.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ the Ministry official opined.

  ‘We’ll have to sort out what to do when we get them outside,’ the police officer said.

  ‘We’ve got spanners and mole-grips,’ said the foreman.

  Outside, rumours of people being beaten up in there swirled through the crowd: now that the bailiffs had forced entry, why were they keeping the protestors inside? Why didn’t they let them out?

  Inside, men unbolted seats from their fastenings, having to squirm around the feet of the seats’ occupants, while their colleagues shone torches.

  The first of the cinema occupiers emerged, to the relief and consternation of the tense crowd, and that person was, fittingly, Zoe herself, who’d sat at the back beside the aisle. Strapped to her seat, she was borne aloft on the shoulders of four security guards in yellow jackets. The crowd pressed against the barriers and noisily clapped and cheered her, photographers clicked their cameras, news crews filmed her, as she left her cinema for the last time, carried out as if in tribute. Zoe felt disappointment that she couldn’t wave back. She wasn’t smiling: clamped in position, overcome suddenly by the bright daylight, lack of sleep, the large crowd and her imminent departure, tears spilled down her cheeks. She was unable to restrain or hide them, and they were caught in close-up by a battery of cameras.

  * * *

  Zoe was followed, in surprisingly quick succession, by the rest of the audience, similarly carried out: militant protestors shouting, ‘NO MORE ROADS! NO MORE ROADS!’; film buffs with their nocturnal eyes tight shut; Simon, beaming, carried by six huffing and puffing men terrified of dropping him; Lewis, his long legs dangling before him; local residents, bemused at finding themselves the centre of attention; and Natalie, with a look of a warrior’s readiness on her face that made those who knew her glad she’d been rendered immobile.

  None of them could salute the applauding crowd. Except, that is, for Dog, who perhaps recognized that at this moment he bore a certain responsibility. He slipped his free arm out from under the bicycle lock that had been merely resting on his wrist, and waved; but then, feeling rather foolish, he shyly lowered his head, balled his hand into a fist and held it high above him.

  Once the yellow-jacketed security guards had carried the protestors out of the cinema they gladly passed them over to the reluctant custody of the police, who in the absence of a better plan had them carried around the corner into Branagh Street and set down on the pavement.

  A couple of hastily hired locksmiths began the laborious process of unpicking them. Back inside, though, the projection booth was broken into, and the projectionist came out with the box of keys: by now the locks had served their purpose.

  Even before she had been released Zoe was pounced upon by the press, and interviewed on the pavement, still strapped to her seat. Besieged by jostling men and women with notebooks and microphones before she’d recovered her equilibrium, she gave an incoherent interview, before being freed and willingly making way for more practised spokesmen.

  As people were unlocked from their seats, so they joined friends on the other side of the barriers. Some of the hard-core protestors, though, doubled back and lay in the path of the crane as others had earlier – to Zoe’s surprise Simon was among them, joining his assistant chef, George, on the tarmac – at which point the police lost their patience and began making arrests, showing less restraint than before as they manhandled them into waiting vans; reinforcements arrived to hold back the growing crowd.

  A banner was draped from the windows of the flat above the launderette opposite that said: SAVE OUR CINEMA.

  A bit late for that, Zoe thought. She mixed in the crowd. People patted her on the shoulder, said things like ‘Well done’, and ‘It’s a crying shame.’ She saw that all around her strangers were talking to each other and offering cigarettes; pensioners were joining in the chant that yo
uths had started: NO MORE ROADS! NO MORE ROADS!; a couple of waiters from the Indian restaurant next to the launderette had come out and were contributing to the chorus of boos for the workmen disconnecting the mains supplies of electricity, water and gas.

  This is what they mean by community, Zoe thought, surprised. Not that it makes any difference now. I am a traveller.

  Shortly before midday the crane finally got into position, and the operator started up his machine. The massive, heavy ball began to swing, very slowly at first, only gradually gathering momentum: swinging out into the yawning space above the street, then back towards the façade of the Electra Cinema, a little closer each time; and suddenly Zoe had a flash of memory, something she’d long since forgotten. It must have happened when she was incredibly young. She’d been sitting on her father’s shoulders when she saw it: in a church, no, surely a cathedral, filled with people; a censer was being swung on a chain through the nave, trailing smoke of burning incense and making a great whooshing noise as it swung. She could sense again the pungent smell of the incense in her nostrils.

  The huge demolition ball made first contact with the front of the cinema with no more than a kiss, like some ritual pugilistic greeting before destruction. It swung away and returned with a sluggish thud that made little impact: a few flakes of paint and plaster fluttered down as the ball swung out. The third strike made another dull thud and still did no more than superficial damage. For an illogical moment Zoe wondered whether this might really be a kind of combat, an assault the cinema might actually withstand and the crane retire, defeated. But the next blow put paid to such fancy, sending cracks shooting out across the façade like embodied shrieks of pain; and the one after brought bricks loose and falling.

  Each impact was greeted with tumultuous boos from the crowd, that swelled into an eerie accompaniment. The crane operator, Zoe noticed, had on a pair of earmuffs: he couldn’t hear the disapproval of his actions. Maybe he was even connected to a Walkman; maybe he was listening to music while he demolished the cinema. She felt a tap on her shoulder, and a voice in her ear.