Ricky stared at the trail of blood, and followed it across the floor of the toilet to the cubicle on the left of his vision. Its door was closed: it had been open before. The murderer, whoever he was, had put the boy in there, Ricky knew it without looking.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘now I’ve got you.’
He pushed on the door. It swung open and there was the boy, propped up on the toilet seat, legs spread, arms hanging.
His eyes had been scooped out of his head. Not neatly: no surgeon’s job. They’d been wrenched out, leaving a trail of mechanics down his cheek.
Ricky put his hand over his mouth and told himself he wasn’t going to throw up. His stomach churned, but obeyed, and he ran to the toilet door as though any moment the body was going to get up and demand its ticket-money back.
‘Birdy . . . Birdy
The fat bitch had been wrong, all wrong. There was death here, and worse.
Ricky flung himself out of the John into the body of the cinema.
The wall-lights were fairly dancing behind their Deco shades, guttering like candles on the verge of extinction. Darkness would be too much; he’d lose his mind.
There was, it occurred to him, something familiar about the way the lights flickered, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He stood in the aisle for a moment, hopelessly lost.
Then the voice came; and though he guessed it was death this time, he looked up.
‘Hello Ricky,’ she was saying as she came along Row E towards him. Not Birdy. No, Birdy never wore a white gossamer dress, never had bruise-full lips, or hair so fine, or eyes so sweetly
promising. It was Monroe who was walking towards him, the blasted rose of America. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’ she gently chided.
‘ . . . er . . .’
‘Ricky. Ricky. Ricky. After all this time.’
All this time? What did she mean: all this time?
‘Who are you?’
She smiled radiantly at him.
‘As if you didn’t know.’
‘You’re not Marilyn. Marilyn’s dead.’
‘Nobody dies in the movies, Ricky. You know that as well as I do. You can always thread the celluloid up again – ‘
– that was what the flickering reminded him of, the flicker of celluloid through the gate of a projector, one image hot on the next, the illusion of life created from a perfect sequence of little deaths.
‘ – and we’re there again, all-talking, all-singing.’ She laughed: ice-in-a-glass laughter, ‘We never fluff our lines, never age, never lose our timing – ‘
‘You’re not real,’ said Ricky.
She looked faintly bored by the observation, as if he was being pedantic.
By now she’d come to the end of the row and was standing no more than three feet away from him. At this distance the illusion was as ravishing and as complete as ever. He suddenly wanted to take her, there, in the aisle. What the hell if she was just a fiction: fictions are fuckable if you don’t want marriage.
‘I want you,’ he said, surprised by his own bluntness.
‘I want you,’ she replied, which surprised him even more. ‘In fact I need you. I’m very weak.’
‘Weak?’
‘It’s not easy, being the centre of attraction, you know. You find you need it, more and more. Need people to look at you. All the night, all the day.’
‘I’m looking.’
‘Am I beautiful?’
‘You’re a goddess: whoever you are.’
‘I’m yours: that’s who I am.’
It was a perfect answer. She was defining herself through him. I am a function of you; made for you out of you. The perfect fantasy.
‘Keep looking at me; looking forever, Ricky. I need your loving looks. I can’t live without them.’
The more he stared at her the stronger her image seemed to become. The flickering had almost stopped; a calm had settled over the place.
‘Do you want to touch me?’
He thought she’d never ask.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Good.’ She smiled coaxingly at him, and he reached to make contact. She elegantly avoided his fingertips at the last possible moment, and ran, laughing, down the aisle towards the screen. He followed, eager. She wanted a game: that was fine by him.