The Man In The Seventh Row (10 page)

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 favourite?'

'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 Costn
er'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 Rob 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.

Roy and Anna do not talk. She is enthralled by the film. He watches familiar scene follow familiar scene, each line of dialogue suggesting itself to him before it is delivered by the actor on screen. More and more men join Wallace as he makes his way to Stirling and a rendezvous with history. No bridge in the film. Just Stirling. Audiences in Beverly Boulevard care nothing for an absent bridge. What they will remember is the scale of the thing, the thousands of men, the horses, the colour, the spectacle, the passion, and Wallace's men with their staves, twice the length of a man, with sharpened points, laid out in front of them. The English knights charge, their horses thundering across the plain, towards the line of Scottish infantry.

Wallace urges his men to wait. His hair is braided, his face masked by blue woad right down one side, like a Swedish football fan. The horses speed towards the Scots.

'Hold ...' cries Wallace.

The faces of the men around him are set with determination beneath their war paint.

'Hold ...'

The horses get nearer and nearer, bringing with them the prospect of death. At the last minute the Scots grab the staves to form a lethal barricade over which English knights and horses are fatally thrown by their own momentum.