by Bella Pollen
The first drop landed on my cheek, a splash of coolness, a single tear. I rubbed my eyes and looked up. Rain was falling in slim hyphens that quickly turned heavier, blunter, drumming against the ground, soaking my face. Thunder ripped through the sky and rolled through my body. Lightning flashed, again and again. I counted the strikes. One for Gerry, one for Giacomo, one for everyone in my company who had worked so hard for me.
“I never seen this.” Winston held out his hand, and I knew it would sound silly if I told him the rain was for me.
When it was over I took a final drag of my cigarette and blew smoke into the warm, clear air of tomorrow. Winston and Oba stood up. “Time to go,” they said.
My mouth felt smoky and peppery. I will kiss a man I like with this mouth, I thought—not today, not next week, but at some point in the future. I will kiss a man and it will feel good.
GHOST OF MY FUTURE
The film was playing at the best kind of theatre—one not so run-down that the decay distracts, but one whose quirks had kept it from falling into the homogenizing grasp of Cineworld or Odeon. This art deco building was a faded star, a Norma Desmond of cinemas. Black stains ran down her pale breeze-block like streaks of a diva’s mascara. But if her once-smooth facade was now riven by cracks and flaws, inside she was still a beauty.
There are so few of these independents left in London, idiosyncratic, stubbornly holding on to their old-fashioned formalities. Under the painted dome of the box office, tickets are issued on stiff white paper. The popcorn is hot and spitting, and the minute you step into the darkness of the auditorium an usherette is on hand to look after you—that day, a Hungarian lady, “Goscia,” I read on her enamelled badge. She led me down the aisle, the look from her to me confirming what I already knew—that the two of us were in collusion, that she was to be my ally in this temporary escape. Then she noticed my stomach and the way I paused as a spasm broke over it like a hairline fracture across an eggshell.
“You OK?” She caught her lip between strong white teeth. I was in labour, and in her voice there was such kindness that I nearly invoked stranger privilege and confided in her. I have a new love, a new job, and very soon a new baby. I should be OK. I should be terrific, but I’m not. I’m here because I’ve done something very peculiar. Only in this velvet womb, with its soundproof walls and dimmed lights, might it have felt safe to confess such heresy, but how could this nice lady with her red papery jacket and carefully applied lipstick begin to understand what I myself was having trouble rationalizing?
“Here you are.” Goscia stopped at a brass plaque nailed to the floor and flicked her torch across the crimson upholstery of row F. Her spotlight found and held on my number. The seat yawned tiredly as I pulled it down. I was early, and the cinema was empty. This is the best way to see a movie, sneakily, in the afternoon, while outside real life marches on, governed by the hours and minutes of the day. Time, though, is not as inflexible as we are led to believe. It moves more slowly down in the dark than it does up in the light. In the space between there is a temporal swag to be had, and where better to spend it than alone in the cinema?
Except that I wasn’t alone. As my eyes adjusted I noticed a solitary man, already parked, front row centre. Suddenly he leaned forwards, light catching on a hawkish profile, and before I could stop myself I thought, Dad! Hey, Dad! before laughing at my idiocy. Dad, my ass. More likely a pervert, shrugged into his grubby raincoat, too cold and demoralised to roam the streets looking for women to flash. I glared at the back of his head, though God knows I shouldn’t have been so ungenerous. To walk out of your own story and into someone else’s has got to be the answer to everything life throws at you. The cinema is the first place I go when I can’t figure out what to do. I went to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II the day Gerry died, Mrs. Doubtfire the day my company closed; and after Mac, AK’s ex-boyfriend, proposed, I checked into a late-night showing of True Lies. Daytime cinema, especially in theatres as gloomily lit as this, has long been a haven for a certain kind of refugee. Right on cue, front-row man shifted in his seat and stretched out his legs. Great, I thought, here we go.
Every country has its nationalistic brand of dirty old cinema guy. Once, while working in Paris, I snuck into a matinee of Betty Blue. That time too the theatre had appeared deserted, until I heard a soft groan and noticed a Frenchman a couple of rows behind me, slumped low in his chair and vigorously masturbating under a copy of La République. For a while it was just the two of us, accompanied by his elevated breathing, until another man edged in and, with well over a hundred and fifty seats to choose from, levered himself into the one directly in front of me. He ripped the staples out of a bag of hot, greasy fries and began noisily troughing on them. Under normal circumstances I might have moved, but the labours of La République man had reached feverish levels by then, and some innate Englishness made me feel it would be impolite to do so until he had finished. A few minutes passed before there was a long, heartfelt sigh, then the sound of a chair flipping up as he made his way, somewhat unsteadily, towards the exit. God knows I understand the need for a shadowy place to lose yourself, but I remember being shocked that he hadn’t wanted to stay for the rest of the film. After all, Betty Blue is a classic.
Cinema saved me that year. Paris was a city gridlocked by strikes. Farmers blocked motorways, air-traffic controllers grounded planes. In Charles de Gaulle Airport, where more than once I found myself sleeping the night, I fell in with an actual refugee, Mehram Nasseri, an Iranian with an epically mournful face and a thick moustache daubed under his nose like a brushstroke of tar. Mehram, whose plight was later re-imagined by Steven Spielberg, was bound to limbo by some Kafkaesque bureaucracy to do with his entry visa and lived a stateless existence in Terminal One. After spotting him in the same corner seat in Burger King for a number of weeks, I finally twigged he was homeless and began buying him food. What with his poor English and my nonexistent Farsi, our relationship never developed much beyond grimacing at each other over flame-grilled Whoppers while he scribbled in his notepad and I kept my eyes trained on the departure board for further flight cancellations. Mute was fine by me. I was consumed by such glittering anger during that period of my life it was safer not to speak to anyone.
I risked another look at front-row guy, but he was up to nothing worse than tackling his popcorn. My stomach twisted, as though a series of internal bolts was being tightened. Labour had come on suddenly while the boys were dive-bombing banana splits in their favourite restaurant. After they were done, I’d taken them home with every intention of packing a hospital bag, but when it came to shutting the case, I saw to my horror that instead of a nursing bra and baby clothes, I’d thrown together boots and jeans and tossed my passport on top. I was so freaked out that I backed into a corner and held on to the windowsill for support. The contractions were regular. I knew I ought to call someone. Mac, for example, the man I was in love with and had recently married under the cedar tree at my parents’ house. Mac, who ran baths for me and left small posies of freesias by my bed. Instead, wondering what kind of monster I was, I had kicked the suitcase into the cupboard, taken a cab to the cinema, and bought a ticket to the first movie showing.
I let out my own long, heartfelt sigh. As if responding to a service bell, Goscia appeared, tendering a small cushion, then waited, quivering with maternal righteousness, while I positioned it behind my back. I summoned my cheeriest smile to dismiss her. This was the best place for me to be, and I didn’t need anyone telling me otherwise.
I was six when my father bunked off work and took me to my first movie. One afternoon in New York, he came bursting through the door on Ninety-Second Street and ordered my sister and me to put on shoes and coats. “And be quick about it, too,” he said. We did what we were told. My father coming home in the afternoon was no ordinary event. Dad was busy. He was taking bids at auction. He was visiting a collector in Santa Barbara or serving time in a Chilean prison for a crime nobody has ever quite got to the bott
om of. My father got around a lot, but where he rarely managed to get was home.
Outside on the street dozens of off-duty cabs streamed by. “Run for it!” he shouted. “Head for the park!” He didn’t wait for our stumpy legs. No matter, we followed his long tweed coat like two choirboys at the hem of the Pope. Central Park in May and the clusters of cherry blossoms looked like the floral bathing hat Great-Aunt Kay liked to wear in her Long Island pool. Frisbees floated through the air. Students kissed under the shimmering contrails of a jet plane. No one in a hurry except us. We darted across the path of a roller skater, who avoided a collision with a leisurely figure of eight. He mock saluted as my father shouted his British apology. On to Central Park West, where my sister stopped, mutinous and out of breath. Dad grabbed her hand, zigzagged us another few blocks, until finally we were there, outside an art deco building, staring up at the name “Metro” spelled out in cursive neon inside a strip of blinking bulbs.
“Fantasia,” my father said at the box office. “Three please.”
After Fantasia, it was Modern Times. The Gold Rush. Later, Dad and I graduated to Airport, The Towering Inferno, The Sting. Double bills leading to treble. Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Woody Allen. Entire oeuvres consumed across a single weekend. Together we’ve been to a thousand movies. It doesn’t matter how overblown the acting, how hackneyed the plot or laughable the script. I’ve walked out of more relationships than I have feature films and, it has to be said, so has my father.
We don’t share as much of each other’s lives as we’d like. There is never enough overlap, but Dad and I share cinema. Perfect father-daughter date.
The lights dimmed, the screen widened, front-row perv blew his nose. I caught the edge of heavy black-rimmed glasses, and again there was the Dad thought. It happens a lot, these fake glimpses of my father. Sometimes it’s his heavy black glasses, sometimes a flash of grey hair through a cab window. Hey! I think, before I catch myself. Dad!
Life has turned the hair grey on many of London’s twelve million inhabitants. A significant number also wear heavy black glasses, but whenever it isn’t him, I suffer a jolt. Why do I keep conjuring up my father in total strangers? No doubt there’s a syndrome with a Greek name and a pill to cure it, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with death. Regret for time not spent together. We all find ways of keeping the people we love close to us. I’m guessing these sightings are mine.
Except that my father is no ghost. My parents are alive and well and living a hundred miles outside London. If there’s anything to say, I can pick up the phone. If I want to see them, I can be at their kitchen table within two hours, pouring us all vodka shots from the greasy Smirnoff bottle they keep on the drinks trolley.
Not that this changes anything. I’ll be driving through the city, minding my own business, when I see something—a tweed coat, those damn glasses. Hey Dad! Pavlovian to the end. Why so sentimental? So mawkish? And how long before I begin to see my mother, too?
But every once in a while, a comic double take, because this time it will be not Ghost Father but the real one, emerging from a fishmonger or ambling along the street with a paperback copy of some out-of-print detective novel under his arm. In a city of twelve million this has happened more times than seems statistically feasible and I wind down the car window, excited, bemused, and frankly more than a little put out that my father has made the long journey up to the city, my city, without making me the absolute focus of his day.
“Dad!” I shout.
He will turn, somewhat quizzically, to find me bearing down on him, waving like a loon. “Oh, hello, Dau,” he says casually, as though this was a pre-arranged meeting for which, as usual, I’m the tiniest bit late.
“Dad, for goodness sake!” I will try but fail to keep the pique from my voice. “What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” Through his glasses, his eyes are mocking, something pithy lurking in the wings. “What an extraordinarily impertinent question! But since you ask, I’m off to see Angie, my hairdresser.” Or it will be his bank in Pall Mall or an appointment with a doctor whose name he can’t recall for a test about which he will be maddeningly vague.
No matter. We fall into our established routine.
“Stay,” I tell him. “We’ll catch a movie.”
“Ah.” He shakes his head.
“But, Dad, I’ve not seen you for ages!”
“That’s because I’m astonishingly busy and important.” This reply despite the fact that my father passes the day as though time is something he never spends but instead assiduously recycles. When I persist, he lays his hand on mine to shut me up. We will then express mutual delight at such a chance encounter, before I drive on slowly, the child in me not understanding. Does he not love me? Want to hang out with me? Enter a new world with me?
Sometimes my mother calls to tell me Dad is coming to town.
“Great!” I’ll say and offer to collect him off the train. Dad will refuse. I will insist. He will eventually agree but on condition I wait for him in the car. I’m not to waste money on a meter. I’m not to waste time when I should be improving my grammar, composing better English.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a writer these days?” he likes to say.
“Your father will meet you on the street next to the taxi rank,” my mother confirms. Sure, Mum, whatever Dad wants. But I couldn’t care less what Dad wants. I park on a meter and then wait at the platform barrier, checking movie listings on my phone. I love train stations as much as I love cinemas. The miracle of lost and found. The word departure, and all the mystery and romance it promises. There’s nothing lonely about train stations, with their perpetual business of coming and going.
When the train shunts in, passengers stream out under Brunel’s wrought iron arches like workers of the Industrial Revolution. So much purpose, everyone to some preordained destination.
Everyone except Dad.
He pauses at the carriage door, an orange-brown stick in a sea of grey steel posts. He looks around, as though preparing for whatever fresh amusement the day might bring, then he steps down and strolls along the platform, his overnight luggage—a plastic bag with a rolled-up copy of the Telegraph inside—hooked to one finger. Sometimes I wonder how people view him. W hat’s with the ancient coat? The manky toothbrush sticking out of his breast pocket? Is he a hobo, a museum curator, or a forensic etymologist? Of course no one pays him any attention at all. He doesn’t walk through their dreams, only mine.
After he’s passed through the ticket barrier and into the main hub of the station, I scoot back to the car and drive to our appointed rendezvous, where he will be waiting, a faintly sardonic smile on his lips. “Late again,” he will say.
I can’t tell you how much he hates it when I’m on time.
Ads were running on the screen. The budget all-you-can-eat graphics of the local tandoori restaurant gave way to forthcoming attractions. A sugar-sprinkled American Pie into which Jason Biggs was inserting his penis led synergistically to American Beauty and Kevin Spacey beating off in the shower. And still the theatre was deserted except for front-row perv and me. But even as I was looking forward to calling Dad later, expressly to tell him I had mistaken him for a flasher, I was thinking how very familiar the shape of the man’s head was. Something to do with the way that grey hair sat over his coat collar, and then—suddenly illuminated in the terrestrial glare of the newest Star Wars trailer—there was the coat itself. Orange-brown herringbone. That oh-so-particular 1940s raglan sleeve. My grandfather’s coat that Dad has worn for as long as I can remember. His way, I guess, of keeping his own father close to him.
“Well, good Lord,” he said, with the grace to look mildly surprised as I joined him. But he soon recovered and raised both fists in a sign of triumph, as though this rendezvous had been his idea all along. As though Fate had been sweating over the calendar for chance encounters in order to accommodate him and him alone.
“So.” He flipped down the seat next to him. “What
’s up?”
“Oh, not much.” I matched my tone to his. “I mean, since you ask . . . I’m in labour.”
“In labour!” He dragged his eyes from the screen. “In labour—are you really?” He stared at the general area of my stomach as though the fact that I was nine months pregnant with his third grandchild had come as an enormous surprise. “Well, good for you!”
“Um, thanks, Dad.”
He watched as I manoeuvered the vast pod of my stomach and eased into the seat, then he gripped my shoulder and peered closely into my face. “You OK?” he asked.
Under his scrutiny I nearly lost it. Here’s the thing. The half of me whose heart was vested in roots and relationships was OK. I knew that what I was carrying inside me—the fusion of atoms and stardust soon to become a tiny person—would change my life irrevocably. I will take you as you are. To have and to hold, from this day forward till death us do part. A vow that can only have been written for our children and no one else. But my other half, my restless self, the one on standby, ready to hoover up even the smallest crumbs of adventure? Well, she was cutting up rough. When the boys were babies I made a deal with myself. Be smart, be patient. Give up whatever you have to, because your time will come. But at nine and six years old, my boys were babies no longer. Love is hard. Giving your life to just one person is hard. Make someone happy, make a whole family happy—these were the woods I’d just stumbled out of, and if I was dragging my feet about going back in, it’s because I got so lost first time round. Then I could never shake the feeling that there was a shadow of something moving ahead of me that I needed to catch and sew myself into before I would find out who I was. Going backwards, starting over, was to open up a greater distance between me and whatever it was I was looking for, and I was scared.
Dad took my hand in his.
I looked down at our long pianist’s fingers, intertwined.
There is an inheritance of behaviour, a genetic disorder that marks you out as distinctively as a crooked pinky or a rogue fleck in the eye. I watched how my Dad went through life and I always knew. Like him, I was predetermined to drift. I’d seen the pain this caused and so, consciously or not, I tethered myself to responsibility: work, babies, marriage to the trickiest of men. But the tighter the ropes, the greater the struggle to break free. How could I admit this to Mac, who had given me so much of his heart? Mac, who was funny and clever and a little bit fucked himself. To have a baby with someone you love is the most powerful statement of hope there is, and I wasn’t about to let my fear of the past dim the bright picture he had of our future.
