say. I’m amazed you don’t remember. There was just a locked door, and another locked door next to it.
Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, you say. Someone will have found her, you say. They’ve probably sorted it now, you say. Regulations will have made them make it a proper exit by now, you say. She’ll have walked through the wall like that man you once told me about, you say.
Like what man? I say.
The man who fell down between the wall and the soundproofing, you say. In the cinema, in your home town, when you were small. You told me that story. It was definitely you who told me. Remember?
No, I say.
Remember, you say. I’d had a really horrible day at work. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, because of the loans. I felt terrible, remember?
I remember you feeling terrible a lot, I say.
Don’t be horrible, you say. I was feeling really bad and you put me to bed and you curled up behind me very close, I was under the covers and you were on top of them, and you told me the story. You said your father had come home from work one day and told it at the dinner table and you’d never forgotten it. You said this man had come into the job centre and told him the story over the counter. And after you told me it I fell asleep, and in the morning I went to work and that was the day I handed in my notice.
I remember you handing in your notice, I say, but I don’t remember any story about any, what was it, soundproofing?
I’ll tell you again, you say. And then, with any luck, you’ll go back to bed and you’ll fall asleep. And so will I.
Yes, but I can’t now, I say. Now that you’ve told me to it’ll make me stay awake all the harder.
We both laugh again. It fills me with hope and sadness both at the same time.
And in the morning, you say, if you’re still worried, you can call the cinema and ask them if anyone claimed the sweater and the bag, and if they say they’ve still got them in Lost Property you can tell them about the woman.
Then you tell me the following story. After you do we hang up and I go back to bed. I rearrange the duvet round me. I put myself inside it. I tell myself as I fall asleep that when I wake up I’m going to call that cinema and threaten to report them if they haven’t made that fire exit a real exit with a proper, easy, simple, push-bar-down way out.
A man is working in a cinema. It’s the 1960s and all the local cinemas are under pressure to adapt to changes. It’s widescreen or nothing. It’s soundproofing and quadrophonic sound or bingo hall.
The man is helping to construct an internal wall parallel to the main wall of the building. The new wall is for soundproofing. It’s made of plasterboard. Because the cinema is a large one, one with a balcony, the new wall is more than seventy feet high and the man is working at the very top of it, screwing it together. In a few more panels’ time it will touch the ceiling.
He leans over the top ridge of it. The wall bends. He loses his footing on the scaffolding and he falls down between the two walls.
Because the walls are only a metre apart he hits and braces himself against one or the other as he falls, which lessens the momentum. He hits the ground with only a few scuffs and bruises and, he finds out later, a broken wrist. He’s not sure whether he broke it in the fall or in the act of making his exit, because as he stands up and dusts himself down, miraculously almost unscathed, he realizes he is trapped between the two walls.
He stands there, sandwiched between them in the dark, for less than a minute. Then he turns to the new wall and kicks it. It doesn’t give. He kicks it again. He kicks and punches and throws himself against it until he makes a hole in the plasterboard. Then he rips his way out. He never knew he was so strong. His workmates, who’ve been running around in front of the internal wall like scared cats, clap him on the back.
But the firm who are converting the cinema sacks him for ‘timewasting’