‘Keys?’
She wanted to slap him now, but his face was already bloody and it seemed sadistic.
‘On the floor,’ he said after a time.
‘In the John? On the floor in the John?’
Ricky nodded. The movement of his head seemed to dislodge some terrible thoughts: suddenly he looked as though he was going to cry.
‘It’s all going to be all right,’ said Birdy.
Ricky’s hands had found his face, and he was feeling his features, a ritual of reassurance.
‘Am I here?’ he inquired quietly. Birdy didn’t hear him, she was steeling herself for the John. She had to go in there, no doubt about that, body or no body. Get in, fetch the keys, get out again. Do it now.
She stepped through the door. It occurred to her as she did so that she’d never been in a men’s toilet before, and she sincerely hoped this would be the first and only occasion.
The toilet was almost in darkness. The light was flickering in the same fitful way as the lights in the cinema, but at a lower level. She stood at the door, letting her eyes accommodate the gloom, and scanned the place.
The toilet was empty. There was no boy on the floor, dead or alive.
The keys were there though. Ricky’s belt was lying in the gutter of the urinal. She fished it out, the oppressive smell of the disinfectant block making her sinuses ache. Disengaging the keys from their ring she stepped out of the toilet into the comparative freshness of the cinema. And it was all over, simple as that.
Ricky had hoisted himself on to one of the seats, and was slumped in it, looking sicker and sorrier for himself than ever. He looked up as he heard Birdy emerge.
‘I’ve got the keys,’ she said.
He grunted: God, he looked ill, she thought. Some of her sympathy had evaporated however. He was obviously having hallucinations, and they probably had chemical ‘origins. It was his own damn fault.
‘There’s no boy in there, Ricky.’
‘What?’
There’s no body in the John; nobody at all. What are you on anyhow?’
Ricky looked down at his shaking hands.
‘I’m not on anything. Honestly.’
‘Damn stupid,’ she said. She half-suspected that he’d set her up for this somehow, except that practical jokes weren’t his style. Ricky was quite a puritan in his way: that had been one of his attractions.
‘Do you need a doctor?’
He shook his head sulkily.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I said no,’ he snapped.
‘OK, I offered.’ She was already marching up the rake of the aisle, muttering something under her breath. At the foyer door she stopped and called across to him.
‘I think we’ve got an intruder. There was somebody on the extension line. Do you want to stand watch by the front door while I fetch a cop?’
‘In a minute.’
Ricky sat in the flickering light and examined his sanity. If Birdy said the boy wasn’t in there, then presumably she was telling the truth. The best way to verify that was to see for himself. Then he’d be certain he’d suffered a minor reality crisis brought on by some bad dope, and he’d go home, lay his head down to sleep and wake tomorrow afternoon healed. Except that he didn’t want to put his head in that evil-smelling room. Suppose she was wrong, and she was the one having the crisis? Weren’t there such things as hallucinations of normality?
Shakily, he hauled himself up, crossed the aisle and pushed open the door. It was murky inside, but he could see enough to know that there were no sand-storms, or dead boys, no gun-toting cowboys, nor even a solitary rumble-weed. It’s quite a thing, he thought, this mind of mine. To have created an
alternative world so eerily well. It was a wonderful trick. Pity it couldn’t be turned to better use than scaring him shitless. You win some, you lose some.
And then he saw the blood. On the tiles. A smear of blood that hadn’t come from his nicked ear, there was too much of it. Ha! He didn’t imagine it at all. There was blood, heel marks, every sign that what he thought he’d seen, he’d seen. But Jesus in Heaven, which was worse? To see, or not to see? Wouldn’t it have been better to be wrong, and just a little spaced-out tonight, than right, and in the hands of a power that could literally change the world?