The Man In The Seventh Row (15 page)

Roy wanted to stop and work out how he had done it, but he had to keep moving, continue the most electrifying ritual ever seen. That was all important. Reach the top. Kill the mountain man. His aching muscles and bleeding fingertips pleaded for respite, but he forced them to go on. Become an Indian chief. Become a man. Easier now. More holds. Hillside turned to rock with many cracks and twists for a warrior's feet and hands. He climbed between two lips of rock onto the grass slope beyond. He'd made it.

He ran up past the deserted, war-time look-out post, past the skeleton of some other small building. He collapsed by the stone that pointed to Edinburgh and Fidra and the Bass, lay on his back, exhausted, looked at the sky and laughed quietly to himself. If this were a film, he thought, the helicopter carrying the cameraman would rise above him, spiralling as it went, to show him lying there, victorious, on his summit, with the world spread around him like a blanket on the ground. He got to his feet. The sun struggled to break the chill of early morning, but Roy took off his shirt, pulled an imaginary arrow from an imaginary quiver, laid it across an imaginary bow and shot the mountain man.

***

He ate a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon and sausages. His father, mother and Stephen were going to Dunbar, but he remained behind. He read on his bed and slept a little. He was awakened by the throbbing in his fingers and lay watching the wispy clouds through the window, moving slowly across the sky. Everything in the house was quiet. At last he rose and crossed the landing to the lounge to see the time on the little clock on the mantelpiece. He did not see Mrs Roberts sitting silently in the alcove, reading. It was her legs he finally noticed, caught in the spotlight of sunshine. Her khaki skirt was pulled up three or four inches above the knee to reveal curvaceous, bronzed and naked limbs.

'Hello,' said Roy.

She turned and smiled.

'Where are you off to today?' she asked.

'My parents have gone to Dunbar.'

'But what are you doing?'

So, he told her about the Law, and climbing the north side, and his bleeding fingers. She asked to see. And she held them firmly and gently, and he thought, crazily, she might be about to kiss them. She did not.

The Roberts family were from Glasgow and Mr Roberts had taken the children to Edinburgh for the day. She was planning to go for a walk and asked if Roy wanted to join her. They took their swimsuits and walked to the open air pool. They changed in the little cubicles around the pool and handed in their baskets of clothes at the counter. Mrs Roberts dived into the water without a moment's hesitation. It was freezing. It was always freezing. As she pulled herself out Roy's eyes clung to the curve of her bottom beneath her black one-piece swimsuit as she sat on the side. Her black one-piece swimsuit followed her body like a second skin. The sun was caught in the droplets of water on her thighs and arms.

The guest house was silent as the grave when they returned. It did only bed, breakfast and evening meal and would remain silent until nearer tea time. The stairs creaked as Roy and Mrs Roberts climbed them. They sat in the lounge with only the sound of twittering birds and the pompous, self-important ticking of the clock. Mrs Roberts said she was going to write postcards. Roy said he should buy some. She said she had some spare, they were in her room.

'Come on,' she said.

There was no reason for him to go to her room with her. She could easily go and fetch the postcards. There was no reason however for him not to go to her room. They went to get the postcards. He had never seen her smoke before, but a packet of cigarettes lay beside her make-up on the dressing table. There was a double bed and single bed and a cot. The beds were all made. Roy sat on the double bed. Mrs Roberts held half a dozen postcards in her hand. She said nothing, but laid them on the dressing table beside the cigarettes and sat beside Roy on the double bed.

Her first name was Dorothy, but Roy always remembered her as Mrs Roberts. Benjamin Braddock had his Mrs Robinson. Roy Batty had his Mrs Roberts.

16

Roy was like the last of the Mohicans. He was the last of a proud race. Once they had ruled this land. They gathered in their thousands on Saturday night, lining up to be bathed in holy light and renewed. Now there were only handfuls of them left to carry the torch for the next generation, more in hope than expectation. Cinema-goers were the Mohicans of the 1970s. They had been all but wiped out by television. There were still 31 cinemas in Edinburgh when Roy was born, though many had already closed. The golden age was already over, cinema's treasures looted by television.

Roy regularly stopped to look at the pictures outside the Tudor cinema, tucked away in a back street in Stockbridge, on the way to his grandfather's house. The Tudor closed in 1966, just before England won the World Cup. Because he had never been inside it, its closure did not bother him. There were plenty of other cinemas. By the time they knocked the Tudor down and built flats, he could appreciate they were knocking down more than a derelict building. He could appreciate how much had been invested in terms of emotions and memories. He bought one of the flats.

Roy watched the last film at the Royal with Sonny Crawford, Duane Jackson and simple-minded Billy, who sat at the back. It was John Wayne in
Red River
and a lot of yee-hahing. On the way out Sonny and Duane spoke to Miss Mosey, who said nobody wanted to go to the picture house and she just could not keep it going anymore. Sonny and Duane had done their courting in the picture house. Life for them revolved around the picture house, the cafe and the pool hall. The pool hall ... Roy had never been inside a pool hall. He did not even know if Edinburgh had a pool hall.

For Roy, back then in '72, Sonny and Duane's scrubby little town in Texas seemed infinitely more romantic and attractive than the dreich, grey Scottish capital. Its wide, dusty streets, were dotted with pick-up trucks, tumbleweed and characters with names like Sam the Lion. There was country music on the radio and motels instead of guest houses. The world of Sonny Crawford, Duane Jackson and Sam the Lion was a world Roy could enter only through the silver screen.

He bought his ticket for
The Last Picture Show
. Timothy Bottoms became Sonny Crawford, Jeff Bridges became Duane Jackson, Ben Johnson was Sam the Lion. Roy sat in the seventh row of the Cameo and was transported to Texas in the Fifties, in glorious black and white.

Sam died, Miss Mosey closed the picture show down, Duane went off to join the army and Roy turned up his collar and headed out into the drizzle of a grey November afternoon.

They closed the Tivoli in '73, just after Roy and his family came back from the last holiday in North Berwick. His father had not been well, but he wanted to go with Roy to the very last picture show at the cinema where they had seen Oliver Reed in
The Devils
, the Collinson sisters as
Twins of Evil
and Paul Newman as the white Apache who gives his life so others can live in
Hombre
. Roy had felt choked up when Newman died and the sad, haunting theme tune played. He felt that way again as he and his father passed the empty double seats, for courting couples, at the back of the cinema and took their familiar places in the seventh row.

The house lights dimmed and the screen burst into life for the last picture show at the Tivoli. Charlton Heston's spaceship crashes into an unknown planet in outer space. Heston and the other survivors make their way through a wasteland to a forest where they spot what seems to be a tribe of Stone Age humans. A horn sounds and the humans scatter. Armed horsemen appear in pursuit. Except they are not men. For this is
Planet of the Apes
. Of course Roy and his father knew the basic outline of the film. There were ape masks and bubble gum cards in the shops when Roy was still at primary school. Roy even knew that the novel written by Pierre Boulle was the inspiration for
Planet of the Apes
and knew Boulle also wrote the book that inspired
The Bridge on the River Kwai
.

Roy did not know the biggest shock of
Planet of the Apes
comes at the end. Heston escapes and stumbles across the desert, wondering how he can get back to Earth only to find, poking out the sand the top of the Statue of Liberty. The realisation dawns that this is Earth, these primitive men are the descendants of humanity, atomic warfare has devastated the planet, man has returned to his original savage state, and the apes have taken over. Of course if Heston had been a bit sharper he might have sussed it was Earth from the fact that the apes spoke English, but he probably put that down to the old cinema convention that in British and American films everyone speaks English. Whether they are from Germany or Jupiter, it makes no difference.

'What did you think?' asked Roy.

'It was a bit far-fetched,' said his father, 'but quite good,' which was the highest compliment he ever paid any film. 'Let's go and get our chips.'

The following summer Roy trekked out to Portobello, where his grandparents had gone on holiday to enjoy the sea air, sit on the beach and walk along the prom. For a long time Portobello tried to ignore the demise of its tourist business and the funfair and cinema continued as normal. Now the George was closing with a double bill of
Shaft in Africa
and the western
Catlow
. Roy had never been to the George before and stood on the pavement across the road and studied it like a painting. He considered it one of the most beautiful cinemas he had ever seen, an elaborate, late Thirties building, like a child's drawing, incorporating towers, sharp angles and semi-circular curves, the odd isolated window here and a whole column of little Rennie Mackintosh-type windows there. The stone work seemed to continue like a chimney beyond any other point on the building simply to accommodate the name 'George'.

Shaft in Africa
was the third film about jazzy, hip black private eye John Shaft, immortalised by Isaac Hayes's jazzy, hip, black theme song.

'Can you dig him? Right on.'

Even the title of this second sequel suggested they were beginning to struggle for inspiration, reminding Roy of the Biggles books on which he had spent his holiday money one summer, but not actually read. 'Biggles in Africa.' 'Biggles in the Orient.' 'Biggles Flies South.' Think of a destination and the story will follow. 'Biggles Crosses the Garden to the Old Wooden Shed in the Corner'.
Shaft Walks North Towards the Shop Where He Buys His Groceries
.
Can you dig him?
Well, let's just say it was easier to dig Shaft in Harlem than in Ethiopia.

Shaft's original appeal was not so different from that of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, decent guys living largely anonymous lives by their own particular moral codes and finding it tough keeping body and soul together. But by the second sequel Shaft seems to have an international reputation. He is kidnapped by an Ethiopian emir who is really a good guy and just wants him to track down the slave-traders who are stealing his people.

In
Catlow
Yul Brynner does not stray too far from his familiar turf, continuing to do what he had done in a string of other films, looking tough, riding about, shooting guns, being bald. Brynner would take this to the absolute limit in
Westworld
when he played a robot version of his character from
The Magnificent Seven
.
Catlow
appeared to be a dry run.

Two weeks later the Astoria, a 1,200-seat brick cinema in leafy Corstorphine, closed with
Magnum Force
, which Roy had originally seen with Alison Westwood. Roy and his father used to go to the Astoria together sometimes.
Magnum Force
was his father's sort of movie, but he was in hospital. Roy went by himself and the next day he told his father the story of the young vigilante policemen thwarted by Clint.

Dirty Heroes
and
The Tenth Victim
were obscure Franco-Italian productions and the latter was already almost ten years old when it arrived as supporting feature on the final programme at the Salon in November 1974.
Dirty Heroes
starred Frederick Stafford from Hitchcock's
Topaz
and Adolfo Celi from
Thunderball
. It was not the most stellar of casts, but Ennio Morricone composed the music. The film was about a group of cons, in the
US
army, during the Second World War, sent on a secret mission behind enemy lines. Although Roy had still never seen
The Dirty Dozen
, he knew enough about it to recognise the story under a slightly different title. There was action and explosions and there was the satisfaction of that holy communion between viewer and screen, in the darkness of the cinema, that is there, for all real cinema fans, no matter what film is playing.

He emerged from the Salon's last picture show and, as he headed up towards the east end of Princes Street, he remembered that last retreating view he had had of Debbie not so long ago. Debbie was gone and now the Salon was gone too. The Astoria, George and Tivoli had all screened their last picture shows. He sighed then smiled at the recollection of
Dirty Heroes
. He would tell his father about it next day.

***

He didn't know his father was already dead. Sonny and Duane had been in Mexico when Sam the Lion died. Roy had been at the Salon watching
Dirty Heroes
when his father succumbed to the cancer that had been eating away at him for the last two years of his life. Roy had known it was coming and Roy's mother assured him his father had had a good life, 60 years of it. They should remember the good times, she said.