The Man In The Seventh Row (3 page)

'He was too romantic about North Berwick,' says the voice-over.

A small white motor boat carries visitors towards a gigantic plug of rock that rises sheer from the sea. Sunshine dances on the ruins of an ancient castle. Children build castles in the sand and watch the sea come in and knock them down, pulling away just a little more of the foundations with every incoming wave, until at last they collapse and are lost forever. Like tears in the rain.

'He thrived on the holiday crowds. To him North Berwick meant ice-cream cones and beach huts, games of putting on the sea-front, staying up late to go to the cinema, and pokes of chips afterwards.'

Rows of villas stare across the road at a long stretch of beach, empty but for one distant figure.

'Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the town he loved. Behind his blue eyes was the steely sharp edge of an easterly wind blowing in from the North Sea and sweeping down the High Street. North Berwick was his town. It was a metaphor. A metaphor for the way we were. North Berwick was his town. And it always would be ...'

The narrator pauses. 'Well, either North Berwick or Los Angeles.'

Los Angeles. Los Angeles was bigger. Los Angeles, the city where the man in the seventh row
now sat
. He had once calculated that Los Angeles was 1,500 times bigger than North Berwick, in population terms. Los Angeles, City of Angels, city of lights, city of dreams, city of nightmares. He felt a lump in his throat.

5

Los Angeles, March 1996

In the lobby of the Chinese Theatre, Roy pauses at the display of stills from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. In his mind it takes him back to…

Scotland, some time in the 1960s

Eight or maybe nine years old, Roy stood on the pavement outside the Playhouse in North Berwick, considering the large colour photographs depicting scenes from the film. Seven little men, with big noses, big eyes, big white beards and big, floppy colourful caps. Not at all like the Magnificent Seven, Roy thought. He preferred westerns to cartoons. At least he liked to pretend that he did. But
Snow White
looked funny and he had heard it was a bit scary. It was from Walt Disney, who made
Greyfriars Bobby
, which was a true story that happened in Edinburgh in the old days, and
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
, with the spidery Cruella De Vil, who wanted to skin the little puppies for a fur coat, but who wasn't real, just a made-up character for the film. Disney also made
Lady and the Tramp
, with the fight between Tramp and the fiery-eyed rat to save the baby, and the injustice when Aunt Sara thinks Tramp is trying to harm the child. The dog-catcher takes him off to the pound, which has already provided the film's most poignant moment when one stray is led off on 'the long walk', wagging his tail, not knowing he will never come back. All these moments imprinted themselves on Roy's young memory. What his parents remember most about
Lady and the Tramp
is having to move seats three times – once because a big man with a pipe sat right in front of Roy, then because his mother's seat seemed damp, and finally because Stephen's third seat seemed sticky. Stephen was much smaller than Roy and had difficulty in positioning himself to stop the seats tipping up with him in them. He said his seat was sticking to his legs. His mother could not feel anything sticky, but they moved again, with Roy complaining that he was missing the film.

And they remembered Roy asking if it was a true story, was it really all made up, how did they know it was all made up, and did people really take dogs away to be killed? His mother told him that they would never take a dog away to be killed unless it was a nasty, vicious brute that bit people or had those mysterious, menacing, invisible little beasties called fleas. Later, when his parents thought Roy was asleep in bed, Roy heard his father say to his mother that he couldn't understand why they had to pretend that innocent animals never got killed.

'After all,' he said, 'I'm a butcher.'

'Well,' said his mother, 'that's nothing to be proud of.'

Roy definitely wanted to see
Snow White
. It was different from other Disney films Roy had seen, which were all about dogs. This one was about human beings. In one still outside the cinema Snow White was considering the red apple given to her by the evil witch. Roy knew she was an evil witch, because he had seen excerpts on television. Even so, he would have recognised her as a witch from the wart on her long nose. She looked a wee bit scary, with bony fingers and a black hood. Snow White on the other hand looked disappointingly dull and sappy. Maybe it was because she was a girl and she was wearing the weirdest dress with puffy shoulders and a white collar that stood up by itself.

'Next week,' said the sign, a special sign for this unusual week-long run. Roy would have to wait until the second half of the holidays to see
Snow White
. But his parents had promised to take him to
Batman
tonight. It had the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler and Catwoman, all together in the one film. Of course Roy had a particular affinity with Batman. He was Batman. That was his nickname. Batty, hence Batman.

He quite liked being called Batman. As nicknames went, it was one of the better ones. 'Come on Batman.'

'Just coming.'

'Fats?'

'What about you, Minger?' And Minger would reply with the sound of a deflating balloon. 'Are you coming Spit?'

Spit was a very fast runner and 'Spit' was short for 'Spitfire'. When Miss Donaldson, their teacher, asked why Spit was called Spit, Fat Bob told her it was because he spat all the time and she gave Spit a stern lecture about what a disgusting habit it was. Years later there was a boy at Roy's secondary school nicknamed 'One Per Cent', not because he did badly in exams, but because Domestos, at the time, claimed to kill 99 per cent of all known germs.

Roy's nickname entitled him to the principal role when they played at Batman in the back green on a summer's day, with Roy in swimming trunks and a towel around his neck, held by a safety-pin and flapping behind him as he ran, going 'Dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee; dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee, Bat-man!'. Batman was a great influence for good on their lives. Not only did he represent law and order and justice, frequently summarised in brief on-the-job tutorials for Robin the Boy Wonder, but it was difficult for the game to get out of hand if you had to stop to say 'Pow' and 'Ker-unch' between each pretend blow.

Roy preferred the nickname Batman to his surname – a word he knew could be used to mean 'not quite right in the head'. When his family moved to Learmonth the local kids experimented with 'Nutty', but Roy told them he already had a nickname and that it was Batman and they stuck to it after that.

'What's the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney?' asked a little, ginger-haired girl, who had appeared at Roy's side, gazing at the
Snow White
pictures too. She was slightly younger than Roy and spoke with the harsh, intimidating Glasgow accent common to many of the children on holiday in North Berwick.

Roy knew about Bing Crosby. Crosby was his father's favourite singer. His father had a 78 of 'White Christmas', which Roy played over and over again on the old gramophone at his grandfather's house. Roy could hear Crosby's voice pouring over the words like honey. His grandparents had a television too and it was there that he had seen Bing Crosby in some funny films that always had the word '
road' in the title. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope did a little routine, like a child's game, where they clapped their hands against each other and said 'Patty-cake, patty-cake' and then the last move was punching the baddies. Roy's grandfather sat in the grandest armchair chuckling and puffing on his pipe. In future years whenever Roy saw mention of the Road movies he would smell the rich aroma of tobacco that lingered in the house long after his grandfather.

'Walt Disney is the man who makes the cartoons,' Roy explained knowledgably to the little girl. 'And Bing Crosby is in films that aren't cartoons, and he sings songs.'

'Bing sings,' chirped the little girl, in apparent confirmation. She paused instinctively for dramatic effect. 'And Walt disnae.'

Roy looked at her blankly. She looked at him and smiled one of those big warm Glasgow smiles that can send a shiver down a middle-class Edinburgh spine.

'Bing sings and Walt disnae,' she repeated, sensing perhaps that he was a little slow on the uptake. Only then did he realise that it was a joke.

'My name is Roy Batty,' he said.

The little girl did not say her name. She turned and walked away. Roy watched the little figure in the yellow summer dress hurry to catch the grown-ups who were ahead of her. Roy looked for her at the Playhouse the following week, when his parents took him to see
Snow White
. But she was not there. Maybe it was too scary for her. Roy didn't find it scary, but he could see how littler children might be frightened. Some things in the film worried him.

'Is it a true story?' he asked.

His father assured him it was not.

'How would I know if someone had poisoned my apple, Dad?'

'No one will poison your apple, Roy.'

'But what if a witch got it?'

'There's no such thing as witches,' he said. 'Witches are just an old wives' tale.' And he laughed at his own wit.

Roy was far from reassured. 'But they burned witches down beside the swimming pool, Dad. They do exist. Definitely. There's a sign down at the swimming pool.'

'That was in the old days, Roy,' said his father impatiently.

'Do you believe in magic, Dad? Do you believe in ghosts? What's the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney?'

Roy remembered the little girl and looked for her the following summer. And the summer after that. But he never saw her again. Sometimes he imagined that she had died after eating a poisoned apple. He saw her only once, but he often thought of her and her joke about Bing Crosby and Walt Disney.

He spent a long time just standing looking at the pictures in the display cases outside the Playhouse. Every time the family went along the High Street he would stop and admire the pictures, like an art aficionado reconsidering a favourite Van Gogh or Monet in the National Gallery.

Only occasionally did his parents take him to the pictures in Edinburgh – it was usually 'going to the pictures', rarely 'going to see a fill-um' and certainly never 'going to a movie,' which was an American term Roy started using only as an adult. On holiday in North Berwick, however, they would go two or three times in the fortnight. North Berwick is only 20 miles from Edinburgh, but the train took forever as it strained to pull itself free of the city's stony grip, across the green countryside and past the old villages with lazy green squares, tall-spired churches and Belfry Cottages taken over by lawyers and surveyors from the city. East Lothian is as close as Scotland comes to the Home Counties. There is something safe, permanent and reassuring about streets called Windygates Road, Station Hill and Quality Street.

Roy looked out of the window and ticked off different kinds of cows in the 'I Spy the Countryside' book that his father bought him every year at Waverley Station before they set off. His little brother Stephen looked at the pictures in his comic and told everyone he was going to be sick. He always was, somewhere near Drem.

North Berwick became a second part-time home, for two weeks every year. The family was not adventurous, though they were more adventurous than the previous generation. Roy's grandparents had holidayed at Portobello, not Morgan the pirate's haven in Central America, but a seaside resort just three miles and a half-hour bus ride from Edinburgh city centre. Roy's father asserted his independence when he got married and turned his back on Portobello in favour of North Berwick. He liked North Berwick and they went back every year for ten years. Ordinary, lower middle-class families did not go abroad in the Sixties. There was something safe and certain about North Berwick's red and white and grey stone houses and its gardens of green and red, pink and yellow.

'North Berwick suits me,' Roy's mother would say, as if the resort somehow complemented the blue of her eyes and she did not want to risk the colour clash that another resort might present.

Dave and Doreen Batty would have disputed any accusation that they went to the same place every year. Although they went to North Berwick every year, they always went to a different guest house, sometimes on the east bay, sometimes on the west and sometimes in one of the newer streets up behind the town centre, staying with landladies called Mrs Brown, Mrs Hood and Mrs McGregor, middle-class, middle-aged women, whose sacred mission was to provide accommodation for paying guests and ensure no one ever learned their Christian names. Perhaps they did not have Christian names. Even their husbands would refer to them as Mrs Brown, Mrs Hood and Mrs McGregor.

'Did Mrs McGregor mention that tea is served in the television lounge, so Sarah can lay out the tables for breakfast?' Mr McGregor inquired. 'No? Ah well then. I'm sure she'll be doing just that.'

A
TV
lounge seemed an appropriate setting for tea. It should have been served with something beginning with V ... tea and vegetables. But it was served with biscuits so perhaps they should have called it the
TB
lounge. They were always Rich Tea biscuits.