The Man In The Seventh Row (5 page)

'What does X mean, Dad?'

'You have to be sixteen to see it,' said his father.

'How do you mean you have to be sixteen, Dad? 16 what?'

'Years old. You have to be sixteen years old to get in.'

'Why?'

'I don't know. Maybe they think there's too much fighting in it for children.'

'But there was lots of fighting in
The Magnificent Seven
and I got to see that.'

'Maybe there's too much blood in this.'

'But I see loads of blood every day. You're a butcher. I really want to see it. It's the film that I most want to see ever.'

'But they won't let you in.'

'Who won't let me in?'

'It's the law.'

'You could tell them I'm sixteen, but I'm very small for my age because I'm a dwarf.'

'No. You can see it when you are sixteen.'

'It won't be on then.'

'It'll come back.'

'
OK
,' said Roy, but he sounded most uncertain. He reckoned no one ever stopped Lee Marvin going to see a film he wanted to see. That was why he was leader of the Dirty Dozen.

Roy's father went off one night with another man from the guest house, without saying where he was going, but Roy knew. Neither Roy nor his father made any mention of dirty soldiers at breakfast next morning. Roy's father neither damned nor praised them. The family crunched their toast and said nothing. Roy looked at his lap and did not see the other guest approach their table until it was too late.

'Me and your dad saw a great film last night, Roy. You would have loved it.'

Roy could feel the tears well up in his eyes, but he did not cry, because men don't cry.

It was the next day, when they were on the beach, that Roy finally asked his father to tell him the story of
The Dirty Dozen
, deciding that hearing the plot second-hand was better than nothing. His father told him how Lee Marvin was an army officer who recruits twelve desperate criminals from a military prison for a secret mission behind enemy lines. The mission is a success, though nearly all the men are killed.

'Was Lee Marvin killed?' asked Roy.

His father assured him that Lee Marvin survived.

'Was Charles Bronson killed?' And over the next few days he renewed the conversation to clarify various details until he could recount the story better than many people who had seen the film.

Roy's father was of an age to have served in the Second World War, but the Army turned him down because he was asthmatic. Listening to his father tell the story of
The Dirty Dozen
Roy imagined he was recounting his own war experiences.

'He doesn't like to talk about it much,' he told his friend Jumbo at school as they exchanged Commando comics, 'but my father was in the war. He dropped into France and had to kill some top Jerries. Most of his men were killed, but he got back alright.'

'You're dad's a butcher with asthma,' said Jumbo. 'And your story's mince. The only thing your dad ever dropped was sausages.'

Roy was hurt.

Because he didn't get to see
The Dirty Dozen
, his mother took him and Stephen to the pictures the following week in Edinburgh. They went to see
The Wizard of Oz
. Judy Garland was not Lee Marvin, and the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow presented little threat to the Third Reich. No self-respecting 11-year-old could admit to liking the Munchkins, with their silly squeaky voices and songs about yellow brick roads. But Roy did like them and for years to come, whenever he saw a rainbow in the sky, he would think of Dorothy and the place she dreamed of and wonder what the end of a rainbow was like.

It all seemed so innocent then, a little girl and her dream, before he found out about Judy Garland's drug dependency, her nervous breadkdowns and her suicide attempts, before he read reports of orgies and rowdiness among the midgets who played the Munchkins, and before he found out what did lie at the end of a rainbow. How different it might have been if he had seen
The Dirty Dozen
, his mother had never taken him to
The Wizard of Oz
and he had never developed a fascination for chasing rainbows.

6

Los Angeles, March 1996

An indistinct figure makes its way through a misty pine forest and looks down upon a patchwork of lights. Go back, go back, the man in the seventh row shouts silently. The little figure seems to purr in wonder, but still we do not see him. There is a roar like a lion as a vehicle grinds to a halt. Other vehicles appear all bright light and violent movement, shattering the tranquillity of the misty night. They seem to encircle the figure.

The man in the seventh row remembers how Rosebud shook her head, eyes never leaving the screen when he asked her if it was too scary. He would hold her hand and assure her everything would be alright.

On screen the little figure screams, like a cat, in alarm. The ferns dance wildly as the figure dashes through them. It seems to give off a light as it goes. Torches cut the night air like light-sabres. The men from the cars pursue the half-seen figure as it dashes towards the point where it knows its friends are waiting. Almost there.

'Quick, hurry,' Rosebud would entreat, having watched the film numerous times. She knew the figure was hurrying back to the spaceship, but she refused to accept that it would never make it. Maybe this time. Maybe this time it would get there in time. Oval like an Easter egg, lit like a Christmas tree, the craft rises above the pine trees.

And E.T. is left behind. Alone.

'Don't worry. Everything will be alright,' the man in the seventh row would assure Rosebud.

The man in the seventh row sits alone now. And he sobs too. Great, heaving, silent sobs that shake his shoulders and grip his whole body. Tears stream down his face. He rises and makes his way to the exit. He can watch no more. He can take no more.

The man from the seventh row stumbles out into the day, momentarily blinded by his tears and the shock of bright sunshine after the darkness of the cinema. He was alone in the cinema with his thoughts. Now he is a figure in a busy urban landscape. He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. Two young men watch him with little curiosity. Tiredness shows in his face and sunshine glints on three-day-old stubble, black in stark contrast to the hair on his head. He pulls mirrored sunglasses from the inside pocket of his crumpled black linen suit. One youth says something to the other. The man starts to make his way along the sidewalk and the youths follow him with their gaze.

He walks unevenly, as if slightly drunk or shell-shocked. Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, an old man silently proffers a brown paper bag to the passing stranger, who ignores or does not see the outstretched arm. He keeps walking as if in a daze, leaving it for others to get out of his way, until he reaches a newspaper dispenser at the side of the road. Through the window of the contraption he stares at the headline in the Los Angeles Times – 'City gripped by new terror' – but it is unclear whether the words register. He puts several quarters into the slot, hesitates and walks on without taking his paper. A blue Ford pick-up blares its horn when he steps out onto the road, the sound quickly lost in the din of men drilling and traffic moving. The aroma of bacon and coffee drifts out into the sunshine from a diner. He climbs the steps of an old stone building and enters beneath the sign 'Police'.

His stride seems surer now. He walks with a new determination, along a white-walled corridor towards an inquiry desk. Just short of the desk he stops and asks a uniformed officer a question. The policeman glances at the newcomer and resuming his previous conversation gestures with a thumb over his right shoulder. The man follows the direction indicated, down another long corridor, at the end of which is a door marked 'Homicide Division'. He enters.

Plain-clothes officers are sitting around desks. The man asks to see someone in charge. He is shown into a room, where a middle-aged officer in a suit is sitting behind a desk considering some papers.

'I want to report a murder,' says the visitor.

'Sit down,' says the man behind the desk. There is a hard edge in his voice. He is a man who says no more than is necessary, sometimes not even that much.

'Who was murdered?' he asks.

He looks at the newcomer and the visitor pauses, like a professional actor attempting to crank up the tension and heighten the sense of expectation. The man behind the desk looks at him impassively, and waits for him to speak. Murders in Los Angeles are about as remarkable as tulips in Amsterdam. The man behind the desk has heard it all before, and seen it too.

His visitor takes a deep breath, considers the question 'Who was murdered?', and weighs up his response.

'I was,' he says.

The policeman's face shows not a flicker of reaction. He picks up another piece of paper and begins to read it, as if the topic of discussion has turned out to be too trivial to warrant any further attention.

'Do you want to hear my story or not?' asks the visitor. 'I don't have much time left. A day, two days, a week at the most. And then I will be gone.'

'Where?' asks the policeman.

'The movies,' says the man.

The policeman raises a quizzical eyebrow. Now it is his turn to pause. 'You're going to the movies?' he says, his voice rising only very slightly at the end.

'I'm disappearing into the second dimension,' says the man. Quickly reconsidering the melodrama inherent in his comment, he feels he must elaborate. 'The movies are taking me over,' he says. 'Taking over my thoughts. Taking over my body. I can walk and talk but I have no life of my own anymore, no life outside the movies.'

The policeman frowns and raises a hand to his chin; as if he does not know whether to laugh or cry for assistance. The policeman is not someone to whom laughter comes easily. And he never cries.

'Name?' says the policeman.

The visitor appears to be considering whether he should tell him. They sit looking at each other, the impassive grey-suited policeman sees his own image looking back at him from across the desk, reflected in the sunglasses the stranger is still wearing. Instinctively, the stranger reaches up to the glasses and takes them off. For the first time the policeman looks into the tired blue eyes of the other man and is struck by the beauty of the face. He reckons the man is in his mid- to late-thirties, but there are still signs of youth in the delicately chiselled features, an angelic, innocent quality in a city that was named after angels, but long ago lost the last traces of whatever innocence it may once have possessed. The policeman can appreciate beauty in a painting, in a passage of music, in a woman, in another man's face, even. He appreciates them in secret. In the eyes of this man who thinks he is being taken over by the movies the policeman sees a child.

Most people in this city are taken over by the movies. That is why they are here. Serving beers. Waiting tables. Just waiting. Waiting for the big break that will turn them into the next Tom Cruise, or the next Julia Roberts. But more likely the only movies they will ever make will involve sex with strangers filmed by other strangers. They are no more than children when they come to
LA
. They quickly grow old, lose their looks and mislay their innocence. Every day the policeman sees people who have been taken over by the movies. They live in trailer parks and dirty, cramped apartments, and they turn tricks on Sunset Boulevard until their own suns set. He has looked on their corpses, abused by drugs and sexual perversion and sees a dream that turned into a nightmare. They were dead long before they were taken to the morgue.

He looks into the blue eyes of this stranger. And he sees something entirely different. The policeman used to go to the movies, quality films, arthouse films, that his buddies on the force would never have heard of. He went in secret. The visitor is British and he reminds the policeman of a young Terence Stamp as Billy Budd, when he has killed the dreadful Claggart. The policeman looks into the blue eyes of this stranger and says nothing.

The man from the seventh row looks at the policeman.

'The name's Batty,' he says at last. 'Roy Batty.'

The policeman turns away.

'I can't help you,' he says, shaking his head. 'There's nothing I can do.'

His voice suddenly hardens again. 'Go on, get going.'

The man turns and the policeman watches him leave.

7

On Hollywood Boulevard, among the fast-food joints and souvenir shops, stands an ancient temple with a green sloping pagoda roof like a fancy, exotic hat, and bright red pillars and canopy. Stone dogs or lions or some hybrid of the two bare their teeth at the pilgrims who come here with bowed heads to pay homage to their gods. The pilgrims gather in small groups and pose, smiling, to record the moment for friends back home in Japan or Germany or Italy. They press their hands into marks made by Bogart in the cement before they were born. Though he is dead now he has left his gospel on celluloid and his handprints in concrete, just like Christ left his gospel in a book and his image in a shroud. But there is a lot more certainty about Bogart. He said he stuck his neck out for no one, but he always did in the end. The tourists climb back onto their bus.