Swedish season at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, all red velvet and the smell of brewing coffee. Women wearing big beads. She relishes the prospect of a Swedish film – it doesn’t even have to be noir. The Swedes are a nation who appreciate morbidity, unlike the British, who are just as depressed as everyone else but who like to project their darker feelings, saying to people in the street, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ Cat calls like that make her want to take out her Taser.
She parks on a single yellow, less than a yard from the cinema’s broad steps. The cold is bitter and thin and she realises how fed up she is of it, how long it has been going on, tensing her body against it. Her left eye has become re-infected, the grit scratching her eyeball. It had recovered somewhat over Christmas and then, following the use of a particularly unappetising mascara, the soreness returned worse than before, her lashes gummed with a secretion which peeled away in clumps. It’s less painful if she keeps it shut. With the other eye, she sees various trouser legs and shoes on the cinema’s white step as she joins the queue, willing it to be quick so she can get out of the cold.
‘DS Bradshaw?’ says a male voice.
She looks up, still with one eye shut, and sees Alan Prenderghast stooping to search out her face.
‘Hello there,’ she says, her neck cricked – the reluctant mole. She smiles thinly, making a show of trying (but barely trying at all) to hide her disappointment at the prospect of him occupying her mind and preventing her losing herself in the film. And regret that she looks like she’s been punched in the eye.
‘So,’ he says. ‘We’ve had the same idea.’
‘Yes. The only way to spend New Year’s Eve, if you ask me.’ She looks away from him across the street. He strains his neck upwards to look over the heads in front and see how near they are to the kiosk. They shuffle forward slightly.
‘I found that, after yesterday, I didn’t want to be by myself after all. I felt the need to be in the town. Among people. Alive people,’ he says, with a damp sort of laugh.
‘Yes.’
‘We don’t have to sit together,’ he adds. ‘I rather love going to the cinema on my own, so I do understand.’
‘Oh, OK,’ says Manon, relieved and rejected. They shuffle forward and then to the snacks counter where she orders a real lemonade and organic popcorn, and he takes a coffee, which makes her feel like a child for ordering the sweet stuff. Then he asks for a family-sized box of Maltesers.
They walk into the dark plush of the screening room, velvet seats fraying on the arms. He nods, saying, ‘See you later, then,’ and moves down the aisle. They are watching Together by Lukas Moodysson, about a hippy commune in the 1970s and the waifs and strays who come together there.
Alan Prenderghast sits four rows ahead and to her left, so the side of his head is visible, though not his expression. Despite her obscured view, she thinks she can see him laughing when she glances across at him during the film, which she does often, the daylight scenes illuminating his head in flickering blues. She thinks she can see enjoyment written all over his shoulders. He seems to be hugging his family-sized box of Maltesers in delight and hugging his aloneness too, and taking pleasure in a good film with chocolate and a worn, comfortable seat, though who is to say whether it is his enjoyment or her own hopes for it, streaming forward like dancing rays from the projector.
She is ahead of him in the slow shuffling of people exiting the cinema. At the doorway, she smiles.
‘I’m going for a drink upstairs if you fancy joining me,’ he says.
‘Oh yes, that’s a good idea.’
The upstairs bar is art deco with wooden tables and ferny plants in pots. She watches him bring two coffees, squat white cups balanced on saucers, back from the bar to their table and she notices how high-waisted his trousers are. His trainers are terrible too – great white ships, the kind you’re supposed to play tennis in, not wear for leisure. He looks like Fungus the Bogeyman, she thinks, and she, with her half-swollen eye, like Quasimodo.
Sitting in a tree.
K.I.S.S.I.N.G.
‘So, what did you think?’ he says, unlooping a maroon scarf and draping it over the back of his chair.
‘I thought it was fabulous. Funny, moving, great knitwear.’
He laughs. ‘It’s a very touching idea, isn’t it, these misfits coming together and keeping each other company. That it’s better to be together.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But they weren’t idealised. They were a genuinely motley bunch.’
‘It’s not so easy, in real life. To make contact with people.’
‘No, it isn’t. I sometimes think I don’t actually like anyone that much. That all I ever want is to be on my own. And then I can’t cope with it – with myself, just myself all the time, and it’s like I become the worst company of all – and there’s this awful realisation that I need people and it’s almost humiliating,’ she says.
He looks at her and smiles.
‘I don’t know where that came from.’
He shakes his head. ‘I totally get it. I live in that great barn and sometimes on a Sunday morning it’s like heaven, sitting in front of that massive window with my coffee, with the sun coming in, reading. And then by 11 a.m. I’m desperate for someone to call round, but of course they don’t, because I live in the arse end of nowhere.’
She laughs. ‘Except the police, occasionally.’
‘Or a corpse. Well, he didn’t come knocking.’
‘No. Have you recovered?’
‘I don’t think there was anything to recover from, really. I mean, it was shocking and I spent a day thinking about death more than usual – and I’m someone who thinks about death a lot. But it’s not like I knew him or cared for him. It was the fact he was young that bothered me.’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose you can’t talk about the case.’
‘No.’
She rubs her eye, hard, feeling the crystals work into her eyeball.
‘That eye looks sore,’ he says.
‘Yes, I don’t know what it is. Feels like I’ve got something stuck in it which I can’t get out. Been like this on and off for a fortnight.’ And she feels the moment race towards her, unannounced, an awful parody of Brief Encounter, where he will feel invited to come close to her face and look deep into her eyes to see what’s there. She hadn’t intended that at all.
‘Looks like conjunctivitis to me,’ he says.
‘Really?’ she says, disappointed.
‘Yes. You can get antibiotics for it over the counter.’
Out in the street they find their cars are nose to tail. His is an anonymous silver Ford, just the kind she’d expect from a systems analyst wearing tennis shoes. The seats look as if they’ve been recently vacuumed.
‘This is me,’ she says, waiting for him to comment on her Seventies mustard Citroën with the black leather seats. Waiting for him to take in the package.
‘This is your car, is it?’ he says mildly.
‘Yup.’ She pats the roof.
‘Right, then,’ he says. He is digging one hand in his trouser pocket. He brings out a handkerchief and holds it to his nose. It blooms white and big across his face, and he pushes it side to side, bending his nose. She has never seen anyone under seventy use a handkerchief.
‘Do you fancy …’ she begins. ‘We could … go on somewhere?’
He looks at his watch. ‘I think everywhere will be packed with awful drunkards right about now. Sorry,’ he says, stifling a yawn, ‘I’m going to have to call it a night. This is burning the candle for an old fart like me.’
‘Right, yes, of course. I suppose we’re in opposite directions.’
‘I suppose,’ he says. ‘Well, Happy New Year.’
She wonders if he is going to bend to plant a kiss on her cheek but he shifts slightly. He places a hand on her upper arm and she lifts her cheek but he turns away.
She watches him duck into his warm, practical car.