The Man In The Seventh Row (9 page)

'I hate this place,' Doreen Batty said. 'Sometimes I just want to ...' She held her head in her hands.

'Kill yourself?' suggested Roy innocently.

'It would be worse if you weren't here, Mummy,' he continued, as the blood dripped from his wound. 'I saw it on television with Grandad and he explained it.'

His mother looked up.

'The man thought he couldn't look after his family and he wanted to kill himself. But the angel showed him how much worse they would be if he wasn't there. The angel showed him that it is a wonderful life.'

Roy's mother pulled him to her and cried even more. Her tears diluted his blood.

He smiled to cheer her up, though, in truth, he had not liked the film much. Neither had his grandfather, who said it was a load of bunk, which sounded like swearing to Roy. He considered it best not to repeat his grandfather's word.

Roy and his grandfather preferred westerns and war films. Or silent comedies, with Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. His grandfather had first seen them when he was Roy's age and now they were repackaged in segments for television, wild, surreal slapstick that ended with the most poignant, haunting music Roy had ever heard, an elegy for a departed era. Departed eras. Departed eras provided films like
The Adventures of Marco Polo
,
The Adventures of Robin Hood
and
The Last of the Mohicans
. Adventures on the high seas with titles like
Captain Blood
and
The Buccaneer
that told you all you needed to know about what you were about to see. Adventures in far-off lands with titles like
Gunga Din
and
Beau Geste
that were full of exotic promise and mystery.

'
Beau Geste
,' his grandfather sighed. 'They don't make them like that any more.'

'Is it a true story?' Roy would always ask. 'Is it a true story?'

And, more often than not, it would be, no matter how incredible it seemed. Robin Hood really did steal from the rich and give to the poor, Marco Polo really did discover China and bring back silk and mints with holes in the middle, and John Wayne really did defeat the Japs at Iwo Jima.

It was his grandmother who had wanted to watch
It's a Wonderful Life
. It did not sound like there would be much adventure in it, little chance of an Indian attack, a fencing duel or a showdown in the main street at high noon. Roy's doubts were well founded. There is no fencing, no shooting, no fighting and hardly anyone dies at all.

'Is it a true story?' asked Roy very doubtfully.

'It is a true story,' his grandmother told him, 'in spirit.'

'I don't believe in angels,' said Roy.

'Oh, but there is such a thing as angels,' said his grandmother. 'Maybe they don't have wings, but that doesn't mean they're not angels. You're my little angel.'

Roy put his arms around his mother.

'I'll be your angel, Mummy,' he said sweetly. She was not entirely certain that he was not poking fun at her. The cut looked more dramatic than it was. It needed only three stitches, though it left a tiny scar. Roy's father reported the matter to the police, but they never caught his assailants.

Roy had bled at the hands of the Brewery Boys, but he had seen enoug
h films, from
Oliver Twist
to
Lady and the Tramp
to know that just because someone (or some dog) was dirty it did not necessarily mean they were dirt. This was before
The Dirty Dozen
of course, when dirt took on the attributes of positive virtue. 'The Clean Dozen', 'The Washed-behind-their-ears Dozen', even 'The Always-wash-their-hands-at-mealtimes Hundred' were never going to strike fear into the hearts of Jerry. It was the dirt that did it, the threat that it might come off on the tablecloth and contaminate polite Aryan society.

After seeing
Dr No
Roy went to look for Connery's house at the other end of the street. Finding James Bond's house was his secret mission. Maybe Roy expected a plaque on the wall, or graffiti to proclaim 'James Bond wiz here', or a little cluster of fans and tourists on the pavement outside. Something. Something to mark it out as James Bond's house. But there was nothing.

He met Alan Robertson, a boy he knew from school, and asked him. He did not know where James Bond lived, but invited Roy to play football with him. Alan was a dirty boy with skinned knees and a hole in the elbow of his jumper, a grey school jumper, despite this being the holidays. They played football on Bruntsfield Links where Tommy Connery played, long before he became Sean, little boys in short grey trousers, with shirt tails flapping, both dreaming of scoring winning goals for Scotland, 30 years apart. Tommy left school at 14 and joined the Navy. He never fulfilled the dream of playing for Scotland, he became James Bond instead. Roy spent a summer in that park and he would follow Tommy's route back to Fountainbridge, wandering downhill from Bruntsfield, allowing himself to be enveloped in the rich, sour smell that permeated the air around the brewery.

***

The local cinema was the
ABC
Regal, just down the road from Roy's flat. It was not really a local, but an enormous city centre establishment, with seating for almost 3,000, the flagship of Associated British Cinemas. It seemed just as likely to Roy that he might see Sean Connery there as it did that he would see him in Fountainbridge. It seemed logical that he would need to check how his films were doing or that he would have some business to transact with the manager, collect his share of the ticket money maybe. Not that Roy can remember a James Bond film ever playing at the Regal. Nor did he remember ever going to the Regal, despite it being the nearest to home. It may or may not have had an
ABC
Minors Club, the legendary Saturday morning programmes of cartoons and serials that introduced many of Roy's generation to cinema, but Roy never went. Roy's formative cinema experiences, and subsequently his formative sexual experiences, took place down the coast, not round the corner.

Roy did go to the pictures sometimes in Edinburgh:
True Grit
at the Ritz,
Thunderbird Six
at the Regent,
Born Free
at the Playhouse, where his grandfather dropped him and Stephen off and had to wait outside for half an hour when he came to collect them because they had stayed to see the beginning of the film again. But Roy could not remember ever going to the Regal. What he could remember were the teenagers who queued outside for a week for tickets. After school he would walk down past the Regal to see if they were still there. Every time he went, there were more of them. He asked his mother which film they were waiting to see. She told him they were not waiting for tickets for a film, but tickets to see a pop group called The Beatles.

Roy started a scrapbook, cutting pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo from his father's newspaper. Pictures of them jumping up and down, having pillow fights, having fun. He saved up his pocket money and his mother took him to buy 'Help!' his first ever record. The family did not have a record player, but he took it with him every time he went to visit his grandparents and played it the whole time he was there, again and again and again. His father told him he should listen to Bing Crosby. His grandfather told him he should listen to Beethoven, though Roy never once heard his grandfather listen to Beethoven. Father and grandfather both agreed the Beatles would be forgotten within a few weeks, ignoring the fact that they had already been around for a couple of years. A fad, his father said. A phase, his grandfather added. A craze, his mother said. John Lennon could have drawn inspiration from the Batty family for his word play.

Roy collected Beatles bubble gum cards, kept the cards, smelled the curious, thin, pink wafer of bubble gum and threw it away. Children would gather in the school playground in twos and threes at playtime, flicking through their decks of cards like Mississippi gamblers, transferring each card from the top to the bottom after a split-second on display.

'Got, got, got. Not got,' said Roy, when the dealer reached an elusive picture of George. Roy had a list of the cards he did not have, which he kept updated in his pocket, though of course he had memorised every one.

'This is really difficult to get,' said the dealer. 'Let's see your doublers. I want three for it. Or four.'

And the deal would move to Roy, quite prepared to give up as many doublers as it took to complete his set. Completion was everything.

He collected other bubble gum cards too.
The Man from
UNCLE
, with Robert Vaughn from
The Magnificent Seven
as Napoleon Solo and David McCallum from Glasgow as Illyia Kuryakin. The Rolling Stones. The American Civil War. World War Two. And of course James Bond. There is material for a thesis in the thinking behind such a selection of subjects for bubble gum cards. Film, pop, television and war: discuss. Roy never did complete his
Thunderball
set. The story was that the manufacturers had withdrawn Card No 24, because it was a picture in which James Bond appeared to hit a lady and they could not allow that, even though it was really a
SPECTRE
agent disguised as a lady. Where would James Bond be if he had shared their scruples? Dead, that's where.

***

'Their hair's a bit long,' his grandfather said when he saw the Beatles cards.

'Do they get paid for that?' his grandfather said when he heard them on the radiogram.

But eventually it was his grandfather who took Roy to see the film
Help!
. Not only did it have really fab songs, but wonderful, dry, surreal, silly humour way ahead of its time and beyond the appreciation of many critics – John, Paul, George and Ringo go through the doors of four neighbouring terraced houses, and it turns out they all lead into one big, long house, and, on the pavement outside, Dandy Nichols declares they haven't changed at all. 'Still the same as they was before they was.'

But people weren't going to the cinema anymore, not to see films, not in the numbers that they used to, before
TV
. Rather than closing the Regal, Associated British Cinemas took the imaginative step of turning it into Britain's first multiplex, or at least Britain's first triple cinema. All the seats in Cinema One were red, those in Two were blue and those in Three were yellow. By this time Doreen Batty had fulfilled her dream of moving away from Fountainbridge and the family were installed in the leafier surroundings of Learmonth, close to Fettes College. James Bond completed his schooling at Fettes after being expelled from Eton and Tommy Connery delivered milk for the Co-op there before he became James Bond. So the Regal, or
ABC
Film Centre as it became, was no longer Roy's local cinema. It was not long after it stopped being his local cinema that he started going to it.

It was round about this time too that he caught up with the early Bond films. He saw
From Russia with Love
and
Goldfinger
among the chattering classes at the Dominion. You might think that there was no such thing as the chattering classes in the Seventies, but the Dominion was long in the grip of the chattering classes. He saw
You Only Live Twice
at the Tivoli, near Hearts' football ground in Gorgie, and
Thunderball
in a double bill with
Dr No
at the Playhouse, though he was familiar with the villains and the gadgets and some of the action sequences from his bubble gum collection and the James Bond annual he got one Christmas. He had a James Bond pistol and a toy Aston Martin with various buttons. One resulted in the appearance of machine guns from the front bumper, another produced a bullet-proof shield at the back, and a third resulted in the operation of the ejector seat and Bond's passenger flew out of the car, off towards the fireplace. Roy kept the car in its box to ensure it remained in mint condition and got into a terrible state once when he found Stephen and his friends playing with it in the back green. There it was in a line of traffic with a taxi and a red double-decker bus, all stopped at little traffic lights. As if James Bond would wait behind a red double-decker bus at traffic lights!

'That's not what it's for,' screamed Roy, snatching it from the queue.

Roy kept his bubble gum cards, his annual, his pistol, his Aston Martin and the record of Shirley Bassey singing 'Gold...finger' on a shelf in the cupboard of their room, which Stephen was unable to reach without the help of a chair. He kept them all in perfect condition, but he gave away his Aston Martin to Alan Robertson when the family moved to Learmonth. All he had left now was the souvenir book he bought for
Diamonds Are Forever
at the Odeon and the poster for
Dr No
and
Thunderball
– 'Double Big! Double Brilliant!! Double Bond' – which he got from one of his Sunday cycles around the cinemas to see if they had any posters they were finished with. The Playhouse almost always had a poster or two for him to tuck into his leather saddle-bag. Sometimes he gave them to friends and once he sold a poster from
Diamonds are Forever
to a shop in London for fifty quid. It had been printed with the certificate '
AA
', prohibiting its exhibition to anyone under 14. At the last minute the film company must have made the cuts required to have it recertified as an 'A' and a small square of white paper had been stuck over one of the As. It would have been worth much more, Roy guessed, but it had been up and down off his wall for over 20 years and somewhere along the line a skylight had leaked and it was badly water stained.