So going to the cinema was the only real time she spent amongst the local people, sat in the dark in the Empire, not being able to make them out properly yet hearing their strange but comforting country accents, hearing them laugh and joke amongst themselves in a manner her mother said just wasn’t proper for their family to emulate. So they sat in silence and ate their popcorn. But to compensate there was always the film. It did not matter what she saw – musical, comedy, adventure – she lapped up the sumptuous excitement and escapism they offered her, for a few hours transported to a Technicolor-bright world where women were beautiful and men were handsome and the land about was safe and warm and loving. Where good prevailed and evil was defeated, and cowboys wore either black hats or white hats to help you differentiate between the two. Ironically, in this multi-coloured world everything was black and white, with no grey areas to trouble you, everything being either one thing or another.
When the time came the girls were sent away, one by one, to boarding school,
Devereux
Towers
falling quieter and lonelier with every departure till finally Laura was the sole remaining child, having the place almost entirely to herself. But with her sisters gone her father grew ever more protective of his last little girl. He told her once that she was like a tiny bird he’d hatched from an egg; rearing it, feeding it, showering it with his love, knowing eventually that it must fly away and leave him and dreading the moment it did. She remembered how sad he looked as he told her. How odd, she thought, that love can cause such hurt.
Then one day it was her turn to be sent away to boarding school. She was both excited and nervous at the prospect, but her father could not bear to accompany her so it was left to her mother to drive her to the station, to take the train with her. Laura had never been so far away from home before; had never been without the company of her mother and father.
St Catherine’s School for girls in
Kent
had been solidly recommended to her father for anyone wanting their daughter to be brought up in a manner befitting a man of standing and property. Her mother complained it cost far more than they were spending on the other girls, but her father got his way. Men invariably did.
Laura was taken to see the headmaster, Mr Donahue, a stern-faced, red-cheeked, pale-eyed man who squinted at her as if she were a specimen laid out on some table or other and he was undecided what he should do with it. He introduced her to Miss Franklin, the deputy head, who seemed to Laura to be a version of Mr Donahue in a tweed skirt. Laura cried every night for a week and was teased mercilessly by the other girls. She found she did not know how to make friends, but she was very skilled at making enemies. And so began many years of lonely torture as she strove to become a daughter befitting a man of standing and property, enduring a daily routine of punches, nips and kicks, and whatever other means of physical punishment young girls are capable of dreaming up, accompanied by their verbal and psychological equivalents. She hated St Catherine’s. She hated the loneliness. She felt that she wanted to die so that her spirit could fly back at once to wander the empty corridors of
Devereux
Towers
.
Except that she didn’t die. In the ensuing years everyone else had died. First, her eldest sister, who drowned whilst on holiday in
France
. Then the middle sister was knocked down and killed by a car. Her mother was inconsolable and died soon after, some say of a broken heart. Then finally it was the turn of her father who had died of a heart attack two years ago, back in 1974. She came to
Somerset
to bury him.
Devereux
Towers
was bequeathed to her, along with a small fortune in investments, in shares and dividends and money sitting in the bank. She needn’t ever work again, the solicitor told her, perhaps sounding a little too envious.
Envy? She would gladly trade her lot for his. If only he knew what she had been through. No amount of money could repair the damage done in the name of love. So she scuttled back to Devereux Towers and crept around the many rooms like a lonely little mouse, staring out of its windows at the never-changing view outside; afraid of it, afraid of its people, yet desiring to be part of it, part of them, and yet too fearful to move far from the confines of Devereux Towers.
But she did go to the cinema. To the old Empire. There she felt she could be safe, sat at the back inconsequential and unrecognised, amongst the people but not of them. Here she could transport herself away from this wretched world for a couple of hours. Be taken somewhere wonderful, somewhere truly magical. A place where good prevailed and evil was defeated and the land about was safe and warm and loving.
* * * *
Just now, the Empire was
a dead place. Cold, dark and lifeless.
Early in the morning, regular as clockwork, the cleaners descended on the old cinema like a flock of raucous crows settling on a newly planted field. They rattled around the place with their galvanised buckets, vacuum cleaners, mops, brushes and dirty jokes, congregated in the tiny staff room for a quick cup of tea and a fag or two, then threw on their coats and tramped noisily out again.
From there on in he was left pretty much on his own till mid-afternoon, cocooned in a welcome sepulchral hush. Those few hours, that narrow window of quiet when the building was largely deserted, was when he felt it belonged to him. At those times he liked to think of the place as his little Empire.
Vince Moody avoided the cleaners if he could. There were four of them, all women, and to a woman they didn’t have anything nice to say about men, not a single thing. Their own men belonged to some universal class of men they all appeared to recognise and share; useless good-for-nothings and lazy cider-swillers who frittered away their wives’ hard-won earnings on the horses or down at the local pub. The cleaners swigged their tea or sucked on their fags bemoaning their sorry lot in life and on the lookout for some handsome, rich foreigner who’d come along and whisk them away to better times.
Vince hated having to go into the canteen when they were all together. He’d even avoid them individually if he could, ducking smartly out of their way if it looked likely their paths would cross. But all in one room? It was like being fed to the lions.
Monica was only thirty-years-old but looked ten years older than that. Her middle name, he discovered, was Dorothy, named after Judy Garland’s character in
The Wizard of Oz
. Vince thought she looked more like the scarecrow. She was the group’s unofficial leader. Loud-mouthed, chain-smoking, tending towards the fat, greasy hair. It would have been a desperately sorry rich foreigner who felt impelled to invite Monica along to his chateau. As a kid she must have been the type who pulled the legs off spiders, or who put unwanted kittens into sacks and threw them into rivers. She certainly treated him like he was a legless spider or a helpless kitten. As soon as he appeared within her sights she’d turn her full attention on him.
‘Here he is,’ she’d say. ‘Had a woman yet, Vince? Know what one is, Vince? Bet you wouldn’t know what to do with one if you had one, eh, Vince?’
Always the same little jibe intended to make him blush. To make him squirm in discomfort. And he couldn’t help but feel his cheeks get all stoked up before her nasty button eyes and vindictive yellow-toothed smile.
‘Come on, Vince; show us what you’ve got,’ she’d carry on, if she was in the mood to really get stuck into him, if her daily gripe hadn’t been sufficiently offloaded onto her cronies and she needed a straw dummy to beat till she felt she’d gotten the crap out of her system. ‘How big is it, Vince? A little worm, I’ll bet,’ she’d say, holding up a crooked little finger, causing him to lower his gaze in embarrassment. ‘I’d get more satisfaction from this here broom handle!’ she’d titter, and the other three cleaners would laugh in unison. Invariably one of them would tell her to let him be, and say it in such a pitiful way that it would make him feel even more like a legless spider or bagged-up kitten. Their feigned pity stung as readily as if they flung felt-covered rocks at him.
So unless it was absolutely necessary, Vince would avoid the cleaners. Even Martin Caldwell, the Empire’s manager, steered well clear of them if he could. Mind you, he tended to steer clear of everyone. Vince wasn’t sure exactly what he did as manager. Caldwell had the tiniest of offices located in one of the many back corridors and spent a good deal of his time shut away in there doing whatever he was paid to do and leaving Vince to get on with what they paid him to do. It wasn’t much of an office for a manager, thought Vince – a desk, phone, filing cabinets, and a badly-made reproduction of an Oscar that
Caldwell
had brought along with him, a film-related gift from his wife to help him settle into his new job. Oscar was kept on his desk as a paperweight that never had any paper under it.
Caldwell
didn’t like it but as it was a gift it had to stay there, staring at him and constantly reminding him he didn’t know much about the world of film.
Vince Moody was Chief Projectionist. That sounded rather grand, as he was effectively a chief without any Indians, so to speak. Once upon a time, when Vince first started work at the Empire, there had been three of them sharing the projection booth shifts: the Chief Projectionist, an elderly man called Alan who sported a badly-cut mop of unruly grey hair, thin of frame and slightly stooped, with a habit of looking at you from under his large, furry eyebrows in a most sinister way; there was Michael, the Assistant Chief Projectionist, who was fat, bald, religiously ate a bag of sugared almonds every day, rode a motorbike and lived at home with his parents; then there was Vince, the new kid, the trainee projectionist, who landed the job mainly because he shared a passion for Fritz Lang’s film
Metropolis
with the Chief Projectionist and it just happened to come up in the interview.
Those days were long gone. The Chief retired and died the same year; Michael was promoted, stayed a while and then followed the lure of better money with the Rank chain of cinemas, ominously declaring to Vince that the Empire was dead and finished and that he ought to get out whilst he could. That left Vince, and a local part-timer they wheeled in when Vince was on holiday or they had an extra shift, to pick up the reins in what was proving to be tough economic climes for cinemas. It was tough for everyone these days, he thought.
Everyone was blaming TV. Why pay to sit in an old, draughty cinema when you can sit at home in comfort and watch films – and in colour too? The aged manager of the Empire decided he too had had enough, cashed in his premium bonds and went off to live in
Spain
. So the company brought in a relative youngster, in cinema manager terms, to turn things around. A new broom, they said, and gave him a broom cupboard of an office to work from.
Martin Caldwell was everything Vince wasn’t; nicely spoken, well educated, wore a suit, good-looking like David Essex, had plenty of money, drove an MGB GT and married to a very pretty woman like the kind of models who appeared in him mum’s Littlewoods catalogues. Not long after he’d started,
Caldwell
had sat down with Vince in his broom cupboard of an office one day.
‘The future’s big for cinemas,’ he enthused. ‘How old are you, Vince?’
Vince didn’t see the connection but humoured him anyway. ‘Twenty-six, Mr Caldwell.’
‘And how long have you been here at the Empire?’
‘Ten years, Mr Caldwell.’
He looked surprised. ‘As long as that?’
‘Started straight from school, near enough,’ explained Vince. ‘I like film,’ he added, because
Caldwell
had made it sound like ten years in the Empire was decidedly unnatural.
‘Well, never mind,’ he said. ‘The future is going to be big! We’ve got plans for the Empire,’ he said. ‘Think about it; lots of small screens instead of just the big one. More films, more bums on seats, more X-rated films of an evening, securing your future and mine. What do you think about that, Vince?’
Vince didn’t think much about it if he had to be honest. He liked the Empire with its large auditorium, the massive pleated curtains that hid a tremendously huge white screen, the Art Deco detailing on the ceilings and walls. He knew
2001: a Space Odyssey
would have looked naff on a small screen instead of it being projected in stunning 70mm as it had been when it was first screened at the Empire. That was an event. But it wasn’t his place to say anything so he didn’t. What he did notice was that Martin Caldwell appeared to be trying to convince himself more than anything and was using Vince as a sounding board.
Anyhow, that was two years ago now and recently Mr Caldwell had taken to shutting himself away from the world, every now and again popping out to see Mrs Kimble in her small office. She was an elderly bookkeeper who did bookkeeper things like typing, doing the banking and sorting out the weekly wages. Then he’d duck back inside his own office and close the door on everyone. Whenever Vince saw Mr Caldwell, and that wasn’t often, he looked paler, thinner, increasingly stressed with each passing week, having all the appearance of a man shipped out to the colonies, lost in the far reaches of the Empire, so to speak.