I honestly didn’t think Meg would come, so I was as shocked as she looked to see her standing by the Kingswood at ten to ten on Tuesday. Her hair was wet; I could tell even from a distance because of the damp patch darkening the back of the dress she’d changed into. She had her glasses on a ribbon around her neck and her purse in a plastic bag, and of course she was wearing her woolly hat. You never saw her in town without it, hand-knitted in random stripes of pink, green, and brown. It looked like a tea-cosy. (It might have been a tea-cosy.)

‘You’ve got to feel sorry for her,’ Eddie said, standing beside me at the window, and I did, a bit. Sorry for her sadness and her loneliness, but sorry too that I hadn’t thought to think of her before.

The Galaxy was only a small cinema. They might have one of those big multiplexes in Winifred now, but they didn’t back then. There weren’t enough people to have kept it open.

I’d seen pictures of Audrey Hepburn, but I’d never actually seen her move and talk, so I’d been looking forward to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Not that it really mattered. I’d have gone on a Tuesday morning whatever was showing. Mr Breadsell could have stood up on a chair and called out his shopping list and I’d still have gone.

Mr Breadsell had owned and run the Galaxy since time began. Mum and Dad went when they were courting. They went to see A Fistful of Dollars and somehow fell in love over a couple of choc tops and a tub of popcorn, and Mr Breadsell was there then, like he was there every Tuesday morning in a spotty bow tie with his half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose like a Disney grandpa. He sold us our tickets, and then he tore them in half, and he stood by the bins as the credits rolled and thanked everyone for coming, addressing most of us by name, as we filed past on our way out.

He knew his cheapskate Tuesday die-hards, and he knew that if he showed the same film two weeks in a row he’d be screening to an empty auditorium, so he gave us Film Club. Sometimes it was a new release and sometimes it was a ‘modern classic’. It was rarely anything very old, though The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music were dragged out from time to time. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a proper treat.

‘Welcome …’ he said to Meg that morning. The end of his sentence hung like Barney’s in Pretty Woman. ‘And you are his …?’ I knew it would be like pulling teeth if he waited for her to offer him more than the corner of a smile, so I just went ahead and introduced her as well as I could without actually knowing her name.

‘This is Meg.’

‘Of course it is,’ Mr Breadsell said. ‘It’s so nice to see you, Mrs Cooper.’

I heard her gasp ever so slightly, as if he’d shown her something she hadn’t seen for a long time. So she must have been to the cinema before she went mad. Before she became mad.

It was a nice movie, and it funnelled me far away, so when the lights came up it was almost a shock to see her sitting in the next seat, blinking at the credits and then at me.

‘What did you think?’ I asked her, but all she did was nod a couple of times and fiddle with her plastic bag.

She only said one thing to me all morning, but she said it twice. We were back at Maggie Beach and she’d just climbed out of the car.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

I took her with me again the following Tuesday. She was kneeling on a muddy sack, patting the soil flat around the stalk of something when I found her in the morning. ‘It’s a comedy,’ I said. ‘It’s supposed to be pretty funny.’ And there she was by the car at ten to ten.

If she laughed it was on the inside, but her smile was a little wider when the lights came up.

I took her again the next week.

I didn’t mind her company. To be honest, being with her was a lot like being by myself, but I’d never minded that either. She didn’t fidget or give dramatic sighs to question a twist in a plot. She didn’t chatter through the movie like the old couple I took great care to sit away from. The husband was hard of hearing, so I suppose he needed his wife to repeat certain things, but he struggled to understand the simplest storylines.

‘What did she say?’

‘You’re a liar.’

‘What?’

‘SHE SAID: YOU’RE A LIAR!’

‘Why?’

There were two sisters who gossiped through the previews, and I tried to sit as far away from them as I could too, because I liked to see what was Coming Soon, even if it never did come all that soon to Winifred.

By the fourth week, I didn’t think I had to call for Meg, but I waited five minutes and she didn’t come.

‘I said you’d have to go and get her,’ Eddie called out from his shed.

She was sitting in her kitchen with the door wide open. She had her hat on, and her plastic bag on the table in front of her, so I knew she was ready to go even before the smile burst on her face.

‘I’ll expect you every week unless I’ve something else on,’ I told her as we jogged towards the car. I never did have anything else on, and after that she was there every Tuesday morning without fail, with her cardigan or without it, but always in her woolly hat with her purse in that same plastic bag. If it was raining, she’d stand under the tiniest bit of Eddie’s shed. Just enough of the roof for her to stay dry, but not so much of it that you could say she was actually inside. She never had to wait for long. As soon as I saw her, we were off.

As the weeks passed, I came to genuinely enjoy Meg’s company. She began to loosen up and show some measure of emotion in the dark. She laughed quietly but with delight at any slapstick gags, and everyone jumps when a killer sits up in the back seat.

It was nice to catch someone’s eye now and then, share a packet of tissues or a box of popcorn. It was nice to be able to pick apart a story on the way home in the car, to say I couldn’t believe he died or Wasn’t she brilliant or That was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, even if Meg didn’t really give much back (well, not to start with, anyway).

Eddie wasn’t someone worth bringing your opinions home to. He just didn’t care whether it was a good movie, or a plot was predictable, or an actor deserved his Oscar. He’d say, ‘Hmm,’ or, ‘Wow,’ but he didn’t mean it. He couldn’t mean it without having seen the film. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Well, don’t spoil the ending!’ as if he was going to see it himself before it came out on TV, heavily edited and with holes torn by commercial breaks. Eddie hadn’t been to the cinema since we were dating, and what did we see then? Comedies, mostly. Even in the beginning, Eddie only did what Eddie wanted to do, and by extension that’s what we did together. That’s all we ever did together.