'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.'
There were blotches on the girl's pretty legs, which rather spoiled the effect.
'It's because I'm hot and bothered,' she ventured. 'Whenever I get hot and bothered, I get allergic.'
'Oh.'
'Dean's probably run off, you know, when I had my back turned. He'd do that. He doesn't give a f- . He doesn't care.'
Birdy could see she was on her way to tears, which was a drag. She was bad with tears. Shouting matches, even fights, OK. Tears, no go.
'It'll be OK' was all she could find to say to keep the tears from coming.
'No it's not,' said the girl. 'It won't be OK, because he's a bastard. He treats everyone like dirt.' She ground out the half-smoked cigarette with the pointed toe of her cerise shoes, taking particular care to extinguish every glowing fragment of tobacco.
'Men don't care, do they?' she said looking up at Birdy with heart-melting directness. Under the expert make-up, she was perhaps seventeen, certainly not much more. Her mascara was a little smeared, and there were arcs of tiredness under her eyes.
'No,' replied Birdy, speaking from painful experience. 'No they don't.'
Birdy thought ruefully that she'd never looked as attractive as this tired nymphet. Her eyes were too small, and her arms were fat. (Be honest, girl, you're fat all over.) But the arms were her worst feature, she'd convinced herself of that. There were men, a lot of them, who got off on big breasts, on a sizeable ass, but no man she'd ever known liked fat arms. They always wanted to be able to encircle the wrist of their girlfriend between thumb and index finger, it was a primitive way to measure attachment. Her wrists, however, if she was brutal with herself, were practically undiscernible. Her fat hands became her fat fore-arms, which became, after a podgy time, her fat upper arms. Men couldn't encircle her wrists because she had no wrists, and that alienated them. Well, that was one of the reasons anyhow. She was also very bright: and that was always a drawback if you wanted men at your feet. But of the options as to why she'd never been successful in love, she plumped for the fat arms as the likeliest explanation.
Whereas this girl had arms as slender as a Balinese dancer's, her wrists looked thin as glass, and about as fragile.
Sickening, really. She was probably a lousy conversationalist to boot. God, the girl had all the advantages.
'What's your name?' she asked.
'Lindi Lee,' the girl replied.
It would be.
Ricky thought he'd made a mistake. This can't be the toilet, he said to himself.
He was standing in what appeared to be the main street of a frontier town he'd seen in two hundred westerns. A dust storm seemed to be raging, forcing him to narrow his eyes against the stinging sand. Through the swirl of the ochre-grey air he could pick out, he thought, the General Stores, the Sheriffs Office and the Saloon. They stood in lieu of the toilet cubicles. Optional tumble-weed danced by him on the hot desert wind. The ground beneath his feet was impacted sand: no sign of tiles. No sign of anything that was faintly toilet-like.
Ricky looked to his right, down the street. Where the far wall of the John should have been the street receded, in forced perspective, towards a painted distance. It was a lie, of course, the whole thing was a lie. Surely if he concentrated he'd begin to see through the mirage to find out how it had been achieved; the projections, the concealed lighting effects, the backcloths, the miniatures; all the tricks of the trade. But though he concentrated as hard as his slightly spaced-out condition would allow, he just couldn't seem to get his fingers under the edge of the illusion to strip it back.
The wind just went on blowing, the tumble-weed tumbled on. Somewhere in the storm a barn-door was slamming, opening and slamming again in the gusts. He could even smell horse-shit. The effect was so damn perfect, he was breathless with admiration.
But whoever had created this extraordinary set had proved their point. He was impressed: now it was time to stop the game.