Two Films and an Interlude
Upon a hillsideful of sun, most townsfolk were intent on enjoying a Sunday in the fresh air. Nibbling at neatly manicured sandwiches, playing ball with their spirited children, blotting up the surplus shine, listening to loud music on their trannies and simply enjoying themselves.
The green bank rolled down to the beach, where others doused their steaming bodies in the sea. Little Lucy tugged irritatingly at her kite, which flopped beside her at each attempt to launch it. No wind, darling, signalled her mummy. Lucy still tugged as she stared wonderingly into the deep blue well of the sky. If only I could be up there, she thought, her eyes afire with a child's longings. The kite lay limp. Lucy eventually tilted down beside it.
On the beach, one family in particular were erecting sand-castles - the parents supercilious with their smiles; Dick, the teeenage son, sneering; the two kids, Mary and Carl, having great fun as they allowed the fine sand to trickle through their fingers. The spawndrift of the breaking waves and remnant strands of salt-white meeandered playfully amid their castle world. Look a river! pointed Carl. No, the town's flooded by a storm, argued Mary.
Close by, Thomas Michael splashed capriciously in the sea. He had come here on his own, to feel the virgin thrust of the fresh spume, to bask in the comforting warmth - and vicariously to enjoy others enjoying a skinny dip. He waggled his toes in the soft pulp of the sea-bed and continued swimming, going from exactly nowhere back to nowhere.
Abruptly, all was dead quiet. Such silence suffocated the excited cries of the children ... and all faces turned up to the sky. Nobody stirred. Those in the sea stood and shook the wetness from their limbs like unthinking dogs. The children ignored their sand-castles, Lucy her feeble kite. Walkmans were killed. A tableau of subdued expectation - heads bent back and eyes searching the empty sky. Even the waves seemed mute.
Piecemeal, a gentle hum was heard, almost a buzz. Eventually growing louder and louder, it became deafening - rather like the stuttering roar of throbbing engines. The fun-makers still stared while the crescendo unfurled. From over the brow of the hillside came the low-flying form of a jumbo jet-liner, wings huge and unspeakably wide, almost touching the grass with its white underbelly. The hum had become the intensest of whistles, the scream of an imminent bomb, but much louder. The left side was a cat's cradle of flames, as the sheering monster plunged into the sea with a vast fountain of froth.
The metal mammoth disappeared from view, and the crowd merely stared at the place where its nose-cone had first encountered the silent waves. But, now, those waves were a turmoil of wheeling eddies. The crowd continued to gaze dumbly as the low, insistent moaning of humanity hummed in long drawn-out hints of insidious torture from the depths of the quickly quietening sea.
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Thomas Michael lived in London in 1974, somewhere near Croydon. In those days, home videos were not available and he travelled daily to the West End (where the entertainments were centred) to work as a projectionist in a large Leicester Square cinema. As a child, he had wanted to be a television news cameraman, his ambition to peer through a viewfinder and "steal" the scene for unseen millions. He wielded no lying medium, such as brush or pen. His art was perfection itself. If he did not manage to become such a cameraman, he would have liked to be a professional photographer. Not quite so satisfactory, but the next best thing.
However, he became a cinema projectionist - the third best thing? Dodging the terrorist bombs that were rife those days in that area, he used to arrive at 11 a.m. and left about Midnight to return south. He projected many films in his time, for example "The Sound of Music", "The Horror of the Furniture Removers", "The House of Whipcord", "The Exorcist", "The Hotel of Free Love", "Blotting Up The Dreams" and so on.
The job was so routine, he yearned for some other excitement. But Thomas Michael had a sense of humour - a veritable asset in that day and age. Not only did he have that quirky aspect, he also posessed what was then known as an "avant garde" taste in art. His hero was Warhol.
He decided to play a prank on one night's audience. So, the weekend before, he went into his living-room with his own home-movie camera. He emerged several hours later with an evil grin butterflying over his naughty face. Several days later, the cinema audience having just seen "Horror From The Skies", ending in a mind-blowing B-feature plane crash scene, were now settling in a good mood for the main sex film. The canned music softly hummed behind their costly chitter-chatter. Soon, the vast auditorium dimmed, the huge neo-Victorian chanderlumes faded, the tireless chatter tired and the incessant mealy-mouthed musak gradually sicked up silence. All stared up expectantly.
In the near dark, the towering pleats of the velvetine curtains hummed open on their electric rollers to reveal the empty, but horrifyingly potential, oblong tunnel-end of the silver screen. The MGM lion roared from its plinth and the film began. The quality of the image abruptly deteriorated and, instead of the sharp bright colours of typical scrolling credits and the tortuous electronics of a trendy theme, there appeared, planted in the middle of the most expensive screen in London, the flickering image of a domestic television set. Through the flishflash of the amateur film-maker's carelessness, the astonished audience glimpsed a strange hand reaching out from the foreground to switch on the set. And then, they could just discern the programme on the TV screen - one of those dreadful "soaps" which inundated the public's consciousness at that time. In black and white.
Thomas Michael, up in his little booth, grinned maliciously. Since the audience had already seen this classic of the small screen in better circumstances (i.e. on a colour TV set in the warm comfort of their living-rooms without the "intervention" of a cheap holiday-movie camera) and since they had not come to see it anyway, they began to boo and hiss violently. He continued to grin maliciously, as he heard the increasing riot below. This escapade would cost him his job, but the excitement was worth it.
Soon, he could hear the "Ee-Aw, Ee-Aw, Ee-Aw" of approaching policecars. Then there erupted the shrill whistles as the force broke into the auditorium with the concomitant chaotic yapping of snarling policedogs. Of course, Thomas Michael was not unoccupied during those interminable moments. He had switched on the houselights and was leaning precariously from his booth, as he filmed the mayhem milling amid the plush seats of the upper circle. He recorded, too, with his cheap movie camera, the torn limbs, the rabid dogs plastering distemper all over the velvet fittings, the helmetless policemen and their bleeding truncheons, the frothing faces and blood-balled eyes and, not without a growing sense of humour, he re-recorded the still flickering cinema screen, the TV upon it and the flesh-coloured hand that reached out like God's to switch it off. In due course, they arrested Thomas Michael and threw his unloaded camera into the red rubble that the auditorium had become.
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Lucy, now a parent herself, rose from bed and went down the stairs. She opened the front door of her Croydon semi-detached house, looked to the right up the hill and saw a large furniture removal lorry turn into a side road at the top, about three hundred yards away. Lucy then proceeded back up the stairs, after shutting the front door, settled into bed again and awoke from the dream.
She rubbed her eyes, forgetting all about the furniture lorry and everything else in the dream, and spent that day as she always spent it. But the dream recurred. Every night, Lucy underwent the same experience, or, at least, her mind did, and gradually she became aware of the memory of the dream. She was not disturbed, as the dream was not at all disturbing. Night after night, the large, brown furniture lorry turned into the side road at the top of the hill near her house. Morning after morning, Lucy dismissed the memory from her waking self with an unconcerned shrug.
Then, one day, Lucy saw a replica of the dream lorry turn into the real side road. Inquisitive, but not quite realising why she was, she ran up the hill ... to do she knew not what. As she came to the side road, she saw two overall-clad men lifting items of furniture from the lorry and carrying them into a house. She merely stood and stared, expectantly. That was, until she saw them carry in a large chest of drawers. From one of its half-open drawers was a human arm, dangling as it bled.
"Wait!" she shouted. But they did not hear her or did not want to. Lucy ran up to them, whereupon they hit her on the head and stuffed her unceremoniously into another drawer.
"A lot of bloody dreamers about today, Fred, eh?"
But Lucy was not dreaming this time.
