‘Can I help you?’ Birdy asked.
The girl looked nervously at Birdy.
‘I’m waiting for my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘Dean.’
‘Have you lost him?’
‘He went to the rest-room at the end of the movie and he hasn’t come out yet.’
‘Was he feeling . . . er . . . ill?’
‘Oh no,’ said the girl quickly, protecting her date from this slight on his sobriety.
I’ll get someone to go and look for him,’ said Birdy. It was late, she was tired, and the speed was wearing off. The idea of spending any more time than she strictly needed to in this fleapit was not particularly appealing. She wanted home; bed and sleep. Just sleep. At thirty-four, she’d decided she’d grown out of sex. Bed was for sleep, especially for fat girls.
She pushed the swing door, and poked her head into the cinema. A ripe smell of cigarettes, popcorn and people enveloped her; it was a few degrees hotter in here than in the foyer.
‘Ricky?’
Ricky was locking up the back exit, at the far end of the cinema.
‘That smell’s completely gone,’ he called to her.
‘Good.’ A few months back there’d been a hell of a stench at the screen-end of the cinema.
‘Something dead in the lot next door,’ he said.
‘Can you help me a minute?’ she called back.
‘What’d you want?’
He sauntered up the red-carpeted aisle towards her, keys jangling at his belt. His tee-shirt proclaimed ‘Only the Young Die Good’.
‘Problem?’ he said, blowing his nose.
‘There’s a girl out here. She says she lost her boyfriend in the John.’
Ricky looked pained.
‘In the John?’
‘Right. Will you take a look? You don’t mind, do you?’
And she could cut out the wisecracks for a start, he thought, giving her a sickly smile. They were hardly on speaking terms these days. Too many high times together: it always dealt a crippling blow to a friendship in the long run. Besides, Birdy’d made some very uncharitable (accurate) remarks about his associates and he’d returned the salvo with all guns blazing. They hadn’t spoken for three and a half weeks after that. Now there was an uncomfortable truce, more for sanity’s sake than anything. It was not meticulously observed.
He about turned, wandered back down the aisle, and took row E across the cinema to the John, pushing up seats as he went. They’d seen better days, those seats: sometime around ‘Now Voyager’. Now they looked thoroughly shot at: in need of refurbishing, or replacing altogether. In row E alone four of the seats had been slashed beyond repair, now he counted a fifth mutilation which was new tonight. Some mindless kid bored with the movie and/or his girlfriend, and too stoned to leave. Time was he’d done that kind of thing himself: and counted it a blow for freedom against the capitalists who ran these joints. Time was he’d done a lot of damn-fool things.
Birdy watched him duck into the Men’s Room. He’ll get a kick out of that, she thought with a sly smile, just his sort of occupation. And to think, she’d once had the hots for him, back in the old days (six months ago) when razor-thin men with noses like Durante and an encyclopaedic knowledge of de Niro movies had really been her style. Now she saw him for what he was, flotsam from a lost ship of hope. Still a pill-freak, still a theoretical bisexual, still devoted to early Polanski movies and symbolic pacifism. What kind of dope did he have between his ears anyhow? The same as she’d had, she chided herself, thinking there was something sexy about the bum.
She waited for a few seconds, watching the door. When he failed to re-emerge she went back into the foyer for a moment, to see how the girl was going on. She was smoking a cigarette like an amateur actress who’s failed to get the knack of it, leaning against the rail, her skirt hitched up as she scratched her leg.
‘Tights,’ she explained.
The Manager’s gone to find Dean.’
‘Thanks,’ she scratched on. ‘They bring me out in a rash, I’m allergic to them.’