I SLAMMED the boot lid, hard, and the car rocked.
Then I noticed something – a head, nodding rhythmically in the back seat.
A wig... my mind imagined... was that a wig? The hair was ash blonde and coarse.
There was something slightly unnatural about it. And I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be with us.
My eyes moved from the wig to Olly’s face.
Standing by the driver’s door, with the keys in her right hand, she watched me with bemused eyes; smile lines were forming, delicately, at the corners of her eyes.
Her mouth parted and she laughed softly, looked down, and I heard a soft blip as she disabled the central locking system. There was a scrunch of chippings as she got in. Walking towards the passenger side, I glanced sideways at the person sitting in the back of the car.
Then I eased myself into my seat and belted myself in.
The interior of the car was cold and impassive: left to stand alone in an unpeopled landscape, I imagined it would guard itself, defend its own squat metal kennel for a thousand years. I sensed a foreboding – this box, trimmed in factory grey, had something about it that day which hinted at a cold, robotic future.
Her body was suddenly next to me, close. My stomach muscles tensed slightly as she swished her belt across her midriff. This accentuated her breasts, and I averted my eyes courteously. I was aware of small currents of air, sent by her movements, brushing coolly against my skin. As she leant towards me, head down, looking for the belt-snap, a swathe of hair fell from behind her right ear and curtained her face; it swayed in a graceful curve and my biology admired its rich cascade. There was a slight hint of shampoo; I thought of the shoulder underneath her hair, white, unclothed.
‘Ready?’
I nodded, and our eyes locked momentarily. I had to look up slightly – she was higher in her seat than I expected. Then she started the car and we began our long journey north, the roads salty and white. Indicating, she steered us towards the expressway’s churning, dyspeptic canal. My mind flitted from subject to subject.
Why was I needed now, yet again? Just when I was getting some peace and quiet – at last. I was so fed up with being needed all the time. People are so needy. Can’t they ever sort out their own problems? Their voices gnaw at me: on my mobile, through the letterbox. Pleading. And I’m not getting any younger. Sometimes I feel as if I’m walking in a glass corridor, a circular tube of memories, walking round and round, getting tired...
‘You’re very quiet today,’ she said.
‘Just thinking.’
She was a fast driver, I noticed. But good. An easy, experienced competence. For a while, as we overtook in the fast lane, we were level with a car full of youngish men, uber-chavs in baseball caps. They studied her, dispassionately: an ordnance party, measuring her topography in trigs and chains. One of them said something and they all laughed. She was unaware of their interest; I shifted my eyes away from them.
‘Something bothering you?’ she asked.
‘Oh, not really.’
Small clouds, greyed by the windscreen, travelled in a ghost-train of reflections across her face. The sky was a Brillo factory, puffing out small neat cloud-parcels on the horizon’s conveyor belt. Above us, on the pockmarked cheek of the hill, gorse erupted in zit clusters.
‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ she asked in a carefully controlled voice.
‘For God’s sake yes, absolutely. I really want to – I promise.’
‘I just thought then, for a moment, you were having second thoughts.’
‘No, absolutely not. I’m looking forward to it, really. Life was getting far too boring. I need a new challenge.’
Liar. New challenge? Christ, hadn’t I dealt with enough challenges – solved enough problems?
I snuggled into my seat and closed my eyes. The soporific hum of the engine eased me towards sleep. I needed to recharge, to recover. My toast had landed butter-side up whenever I’d tripped up in life, mostly. But I was getting older, I needed more rest. Stupefied, my body lay on a coned-off stretch of the human highway – like so many fortysomething people – recovering after my first big collision with mortality. I was time-fodder like everyone else; I was aware of death, in the corner of my eye, sitting in his dodgem, tattooed and fresh from the pub, singling me out and laughing a little too loudly as he prepared to ram me again, from behind. Someone famous said that middle age is when you stop running away from your past. Correction. Middle age is when you stop running away from your past and start running away from your future. But before I run I want to rest awhile, on the hard shoulder... waiting for my future.
I decided, after a while, to tell her. I wanted to begin with a clean slate – with nothing to hide. And I thought we could trade secrets, perhaps. If I told her a little about my inner life then she might tell me more about the demons running around inside her. It was worth a try.
‘I’m trying to write about it... to tell the whole story – everything that’s happened,’ I said after a while.
‘Really!’ She was excited. ‘That’s incredible! I’m really glad.’
I knew she meant it.
She flicked us back into the slow lane.
‘It’s a great story... your fans’ll be well happy!’
She was young enough to say well happy.
That word – well. There it was again. Perhaps our jaunt to Ffynnon Fair had triggered a recurring association. Everywhere I turned there seemed to be wells. I had even encountered a well in my front room while I stood waiting for Olly to pick me up. Standing in the bay window, listening for her car, I’d grabbed the nearest book on the top shelf of an old oak bookcase close to hand. My fingers had alighted on a dog-eared, cloth-covered ex libris edition of Knud Holmboe’s Desert Encounter – and I’d thumbed through it, looking for a passage which had made a big impression on me many years previously. Holmboe, a Dane born in the early 1900s, had converted to Islam and had gone on a dangerous adventure in North Africa. It cost him his life – at the age of just 29 he was murdered by Arab brigands a few miles south of Akaba, but not before recording his fascinating story: a journey through the desert... and there I found it, the passage I’d wanted to read again. Travelling by car through the sands, with a leaky radiator, he had come across an old marabout – a sorcerer prophet as Holmboe describes him – who had refused a lift, despite being literally in the middle of nowhere. Having no urgent business elsewhere, or perhaps no business at all, anywhere in the world, he was content to walk all day, alone, in the searing heat. And then, after breaking down, Holmboe and his party had been saved by desert cave-dwellers, who gave them water and gypsum with which to repair their radiator. It had been a close run thing. My heart had been wrenched by a passage describing how the Italians had blocked up the Bedouin wells with concrete, condemning them to a slow death, in retribution for a Bedouin rebellion against the European occupation of their homeland.
‘I’ve made a tentative start,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’ll have to change it all later on. But you have to start somewhere... ’
She glanced at me.
‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to guess where you’ll start the story.’
I was almost asleep by the time she came up with anything. When I heard her voice I dipped out of the fog seeping around my brain.
‘It’s a place. I’m fairly sure it’s a place, not a person, at the start of your story,’ she said. ‘The Millennium Stadium perhaps, after the final whistle... ’
‘Wrong,’ I replied, laughing lightly. ‘It’s a place, sure, but there are people too. It’s certainly not the Millennium Stadium. It’s a place where nothing ever moves, nothing ever happens.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m having to work from photos. That’s all I have to go on.’
‘You’re writing about old photos?’
‘Yes, in a way. It’s a part of my life which I can’t remember anything about, so I’m trying to work out what happened.’
‘So there’s no one in the photos?’
‘There are people, yes.’
She waited for me to continue.
‘But the people never move,’ I added lamely. ‘They’re frozen – I can’t remember them ever moving, or laughing, or saying anything. They’re like cardboard cut-outs.’
‘Nothing strange about that,’ she said. ‘Same with all pictures from the past – those people have gone... they might as well have been dead for a thousand years, in a way.’
I murmured something, purposefully indistinct, to fill in some time. I closed my eyes again. I was weary: after all, the whole country was a vast winter dormitory; millions of animals were snoozing contentedly while humanity ranged the land, a crazed squirrel looking for its nuts.
‘You can’t leave it at that,’ she said, prodding me on again. She couldn’t leave me alone, like the rest of them.
I told her: ‘Nothing at all happens – there’s a big gap in my memory. For ten years of my life, nothing at all happened. I can’t remember a single thing. There’s no footage – no film clips, no video to run. Blank. Just one big empty black hole.’
She looked towards me, through that smoky curl sweeping across her face.
‘When was this?’
‘Up to the age of ten. Absolutely nothing. And whenever I try to remember, a feeling comes over me... ’
I hesitated, again.
‘Go on... ’
‘It’s like a numb feeling, but there’s another feeling as well... a sort of prickly pre-excitement; the sort you get before doing a bungee jump.’
‘Never done one.’
‘Neither have I, actually. You know what I mean, though... ’
‘Butterflies, you mean?’
‘Yeah, something like butterflies, but not quite – the dream equivalent of butterflies. The sort you get in your sleep and you wake up feeling edgy, wound up. As if someone had been chasing you, and you were glad to be awake... ’
‘How often do you go to this nothing place of yours?’
‘Oh, every now and again. I don’t go there often because I’ve a feeling it’s too dangerous... that there’s something in that hole which I don’t want to know about, yet I’m drawn towards it, like a kid near a pond. I get a sort of vertigo, if you know what I mean... ’
I relaxed against the head-rest and closed my eyes. Could shards of memory rise slowly to the surface – was it possible? When I was young I’d been too busy running around; now, perhaps, I had time to kneel and comb the soil with my fingers, gather all the pieces and reconstruct a vessel to hold my past.
I left her alone, to think for a while. I hoped there would be a trade-off – that she would reveal something about her problems. I wanted her to tell me why she was hurting inside – why she cried suddenly in unexpected places. It became a wink-joke between us: she would start to cry, silently, and I would hand her a sweet. Almost Pavlovian – but it was the only response I could come up with, except for hugging her, which wasn’t always appropriate. Not when she was driving, anyway. Today she stayed silent, flicking the sweet I’d given her from cheek to cheek. I could hear it rolling against her teeth occasionally and I thought of river boulders clunking downstream in a storm. I tried something new every day almost, but she liked the fruit gums best. Hated Liquorice Allsorts, spat them out. Slowly, I got to know her likes and dislikes. Her mannerisms too: the way she twanged her bra straps when she was bored, and blew out her fringe, her lips sounding like a muffled road drill, when she was exasperated. Strange quirks, too: she had a thing about the moon, knew all its phases; she liked French cinema but listened to country and western. Christ.
Then we needed petrol, she noticed, and we started looking for stations. We were running on empty, and a niggling worry entered the car space.
‘You’re going to tell everything then,’ she said. ‘Is it going to be kiss and tell or cry and tell, if you know what I mean?’
‘Haven’t decided yet.’
I was getting concerned.
‘Have you got any petrol in a can?’ I asked.
‘No.’
I mulled, fatalistically, as we motored on.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘how are you getting on at the moment? Are you still behind with your course work?’
‘Yes, still trying to catch up.’
‘What’s the problem?’
She gathered a strand of hair curling across her eyes and tucked it behind her left ear. I admired its flow, the dynamic of its sidewinder snake-life. Also her nose, her mouth – everything about her was in the right quantity and proportion.
‘I’m having trouble with history.’
‘History?’
‘Yep. I can’t finish one of my essays.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘John Dee.’
‘I had trouble with him too. Very peculiar man.’
‘Powerful, strange.’
‘Yes, very. What’s the problem – all that Harry Potter stuff, his dark arts?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘All that cabala and alchemy getting to you?’
‘No, I’m fine with all that.’
‘Well, what is it then?’
The strand of hair loosened and she tucked it back into place again; she rubbed her nose with her sleeve, sniffed, looked at me and smiled.
That was a lovely smile.
‘You won’t believe me, anyway.’
‘Try me.’
‘Do you believe in angels?’
‘And fairies too, and Father Christmas... ’
‘Don’t be nasty to me.’
I made sooth-a-baby noises.
‘All right then – do you believe in the opposite of angels? Whatever the opposite of an angel is called. Incubus, is that right?’
‘Something like that.’
‘I think so. Incubus is male isn’t it? A nasty man who comes to you in the night. Something like that, anyway.’
‘Succubus.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Succubus is the female equivalent.’
‘Oh.’
And I thought of Meridiana the Succubus – a beautiful tenth century demon who helped the first French Pope, Sylvester II, to gain power and riches – or so the story goes. A fabled scholar with an incredible knowledge of many subjects including Arab astronomy, Sylvester also studied magic and astrology. A myth arose that he was a sorcerer, in league with the Devil. He was forced to flee after ‘stealing’ a book of spells from an Arab philosopher who pursued him, tracing him by the stars. Sylvester hid by hanging from a wooden bridge, where, suspended between heaven and earth, he was invisible to the magician. Some say that Sylvester fashioned a bronze head which answered yes or no to his questions.
My mind returned to the present, and the reason for our journey. There was something the matter with Olly. She was out of sorts. She was caught in a fast spin cycle.
‘I’ve been howling at the moon again,’ she said as we drove through one of the tunnels.
‘Pardon?’
‘Howling at the moon.’
‘You mean howling, literally?’
‘No. Phoning my friends late at night when I’m drunk.’
She still had a sense of humour. That was a good sign. I liked the way she lobbed her mind at me like a grenade then watched, bemused, as I scanned it desperately to see if she’d removed the pin.
Out of the tunnel, a few miles further on, I said: ‘Sleeping OK?’
She rubbed her nose with her sleeve again.
‘No, not really... I’ve been having lots of bad dreams. Every night – feels like that, anyway.’
I wondered what she was dreaming about.
A half-sucked sweet peeped out between her lips, sickly-green, and she wiggled it about for a while with her tongue.
‘For ages now... mostly about a war. It starts with a statue coming down, and I’m underneath it, trying to get out of the way.’
I gave her time to follow this up, but she was silent for a mile or so. I thought perhaps she wanted to shrug it off.
She told me eventually. The statue toppled down on her every night. Then she was on the run, in derelict buildings or in lonely places. She was always in a war, and it was really frightening. She told me about the jets screaming down on her.
‘How could I imagine it? I’ve never seen anything like that – but it’s so realistic,’ she said. ‘As if I’m there when it’s happening.’
I was really fascinated now. Involved. I wanted to know what was going on.
An Orwellian nightmare was taking place in Iraq, but the British public had gone back to sleep, engorged on fantasy. I started to rant about it, one of those middle-aged loop tapes you slot in and then off you go, knowing that everyone else has a vast collection of their own too, gathering dust, re-played on long walks or during sleepless nights. The very last station on the line for an old British freight train called free speech; where lost commuters rant to antique gods on darkened platforms in the middle of nowhere, somewhere like Cilmeri or Adlestrop. Perhaps I ranted too long, too hard, because at some stage I stopped suddenly, as if a fox had heard a twig snap.
She turned and tried to give me an encouraging smile, but it wasn’t the right sort of smile: it turned down at the edges, into a snarl almost. Again, I sensed that vulnerability in her, the whiteness of her neck under the sidewinder curl.
Then her shoulders sagged a bit, and I knew I’d hurt her. Reminded her of something, or someone. Ranting. The last thing she wanted was a fool like me talking shit. She’d made a simple child-like sign, a gesture of futility... I shut up straight away. I sensed she was on the edge. Maybe her mind was bending with fatigue, or worse – about to wander off the edge of reason.
I adjusted my position in the seat, lifting the seat belt off my chest with my left thumb so that I could stretch and squirm, faff about until I was comfortable again.
She detected my thoughts, and in a second she flared up.
‘Don’t bother your little brain with it,’ she said hotly. ‘I don’t need any Ladybird Book of Psychology stuff from you, OK? And for the record I’m completely sane – a whole lot saner than you’ll ever be.’
I didn’t even try to rescue the situation. I just sat still and waited. This made matters worse.
‘You think I’m cracking up or something?’
‘No,’ I whimpered.
Worse again. She hit me, quite hard, across my chest, with her left arm. And again. The car wobbled twice as she did so.
‘No?’ she said, and again: ‘Don’t believe me? No?’
She shoved the side of my head, roughly – on the wrong side of playful. I was really surprised; I just sat there, feeling shocked.
‘Think I’m making this up?’ she said, but less aggressively this time. There was a wobble in her voice. Bloody hell. What had I let myself in for? A loony female, a loony mission. I was tangled up in a web already, ready for the white coats to come for us both.
‘Well you are acting a bit strange,’ I said as reasonably as possible. ‘And you are battering me. You’re not exactly behaving normally, are you?’
She let that rest for a while.
‘These dreams,’ she said. ‘Please try to understand. They won’t go away. And now they’ve moved into my life.’
I know how creatures of the mind take on a life of their own. It’s the dream-work. Your subconscious and all that.
A few miles later she said: ‘Sorry about hitting you... really. I’m sorry.’
She sounded a bit emotional.
‘I’ve got some anger in there.’
‘A helluva lot of anger if you ask me.’
‘Yeah, well.’
I tell her more about my story. This story I’m about to write: I’ve decided to start it at the edge of the world, on the seashore. I don’t feel as if I’m on dry land – but I’m not on water either. An in-between place. That’s how I feel at the moment. Between one life and another: I feel as though I have to decide, soon, whether to head inland or whether to get in a boat and head off to another existence, completely different. Meanwhile, I’m walking along the shore, beachcombing my life for clues. Which way will I go? I simply don’t know yet. Living on the edge of a country you get waves from both directions.
Olly was quiet for a long time; I left her alone with her thoughts... big grey thoughts which evaded me, made me think of a family of elephants retiring grumpily into their enclosure at the zoo and brooding heavily just out of sight, in the corner of their concrete bunker – everyone knew they were there but no one could see anything. Maddening.
After a while, she said:
‘Where’s it going, this story of ours – where will you take it?’
Suddenly the story was ours.
‘Is this story ours?’ I asked her.
She turned to look at me, for a little too long: I began to drive for her, staring at the road ahead in a meaningful way.
Then it happened. The car began to stutter and lose power. I realised what was happening and a wave of irritation – mixed with some anger – washed over me.
‘You better get over onto the hard shoulder,’ I said.
She looked taut, guilty, suddenly tired.
‘Bugger. Why am I so stupid... ’
I merely said: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve all done it.’ As it happens, I never have.
So we rested there, on the hard shoulder, and passing cars took on a strange aggression. Not until you stop do you realise how really aggressive motorway traffic is – unforgiving, hostile even.
‘I wonder what the police’ll make of her if they come along,’ I said.
She raised her eyebrows, quizzically.
I gestured behind me.
‘Oh, the mannequin.’
She laughed, but her body was braced and her hands still grasped the steering wheel firmly.
‘My mother,’ she began, then she wafted air onto her face, using her hand as a fan: the gesture was girlish and appealing. Now I noticed, she was quite flushed.
‘My mother’s making me a wedding dress.’ Pointing backwards over her shoulder, she added: ‘That thing is supposed to be exactly the same size as me – that’s what they said at college, anyway. It means mum can make the dress in her own time, when I’m not there.’
‘You got it at college?’
‘Yes – fashion department. Going spare. I’ve got to return it sometime.’
I turned and stared at the inanimate in the back seat. It looked straight ahead, lifeless. Mannequins I find spooky. They freak me a bit. Also those life-sized cartoon characters you get, like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, at Disneyland. I can’t stand too close to them.
This mannequin was dressed in a simple floral dress made of a light, almost diaphanous material, and she was wearing an ash blonde wig and shades. She had regulation cone-shaped breasts swelling sexlessly under large print marigolds. Her legs were pressed neatly together and her hands were clasped in front of her virginally; she could have been an unmarried aunt being driven to church.
I looked at my watch: it was nine o’clock.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nine.’
She fiddled with the radio, and the news filtered in. I took little notice. News is seldom fresh: it’s a soup made from very old bones. As I began a sentence she said shush! and turned up the volume.
The first item was freaky. Identical twin sisters in their seventies had walked into the sea near Porthcawl... suicide pact.
The next item was also strange: a small girl had fallen down a well... emergency services massing... four fire engines... old, disused... narrow, crumbling... child still alive... faint sounds from below...
Olly stooped down suddenly, turned it off. Perhaps I imagined it, but a shiver seemed to run through her body.
In the distance I could see an emergency telephone point.
‘Are you in the AA? RAC?’
‘No.’
‘This is going to be fun, isn’t it,’ I said as I opened the door.
I sat for a while, one foot out of the car, working up some energy.
As I waited for impetus a rainbow formed, indistinctly, arching high over the emergency telephone but framing it perfectly, as though giving me a sign. We looked at it, emboldening now, its colours clarifying against the grey of the cloud-mass behind it. Something occurred to me. When we’re children we’re all told about the crock of gold but no one ever tells us how to find it. Isn’t that life though?
‘A rainbow,’ she said, smiling. ‘That means we’re going to be all right – safe.’
I turned to look at her, quizzically.
‘Arc of the covenant,’ she said. ‘No more floods. God says so. A promise.’
‘Everything’s going to be all right then,’ I said, cynically.
‘I promise,’ she said. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’
And she smiled that sweet smile of hers.
As I’m about to get out she lays her left hand on my sleeve and says:
‘Listen.’
I sit quietly, but the only sounds I hear are traffic noises.
Then there’s a lull, a brief respite in the cacophony, and I listen astutely.
She points to her left ear and waggles a finger in the direction of the sea, which gleams and sparkles through the trees alongside us.
She smiles.
‘Can you hear the waves?’
And yes, I can hear the sound of the waves, coming to us somehow through the febrile air, sent to this strip of madness from the old world.
I nod, and then I start walking towards the telephone.
Other people’s dreams are usually boring, aren’t they? People say I had this dream last night and you switch off almost straight away. But dreams are central to our story, so I’ve got to include them. The truth is that I started remembering my dreams too, as if Olly’s revelations had set off a recording device in my brain. They were bad dreams, nasty dreams. Dreams from long ago, from somewhere deep inside me. Our night lives had similar threads; my own dreams seemed to shadow Olly’s dreams sympathetically – as if we were dreaming in syncopation. Maybe we were dreaming about the same things: the same old monsters in different clothing. Those dreams of mine came from a seemingly bottomless well within me, a ceaseless subconscious spring not unlike the bubbling outflow we’d visited at Ffynnon Fair. Dreams as stories... I wonder if there are seven basic dreams, as there are seven basic human stories. In Italo Calvino’s masterpiece If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller there is a fable about
an old Indian known as the Father of Stories, a man of immemorial age, blind and illiterate, who uninterruptedly tells stories that take place in countries and in times completely unknown to him. The phenomenon has brought expeditions of anthropologists and para-psychologists; it has been determined that many novels published by famous authors had been recited word for word by the wheezing voice of the Father of Stories several years before their appearance. The old Indian, according to some, is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develop; according to others, a seer who, thanks to his consumption of hallucinatory mushrooms, manages to establish communication with the inner world of the strongest visionary temperaments and pick up their psychic waves; according to still others he is the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, of the author of the Popol Vuh, as well as of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce...
I will tell you about the man in my dreams, the man who rubs his hands and smiles.
He has become real to me, as real as Olly’s parallel creation is to her. You might accuse me of using all the tired tricks of the symbolist, but I refute the charge: this is how it was, and I am telling you what happened as truthfully as I can. As she said – sad, lovely Olly – there’s something deep inside all of us, firing away all the time, something like an old boiler-house in a museum cellar, heating up all the rooms inside our heads, the rooms of the past, so that we can walk through them now and again on rainy days. Olly’s dream-rooms were a bit scary. Haunted, you might say.
When I think of antique gods I imagine large men, but not massive, well-muscled but beyond the first bloom, gold-skinned, with violet eyes I can barely look into. My antique god is sinuous, spare, silent, wise, and simply robed in blue, the rarest colour in nature: the blue worn by villains, supernatural creatures, ghosts and friends in Japanese theatre. I fear this antique god of mine. We create, we imagine our own gods and monsters. The Ancients believed in two-headed monsters, and during the Middle Ages monsters were seen as forebodings or agents of wrath – half-human creatures spawned by bestiality. They ate and drank with both their mouths simultaneously – malefic signs of God’s anger, symbols of nature’s raw power.
Renaissance man also described prodigies, such as the monstrous head ‘discovered’ in an egg in 1569, with the face of a man and a beard and hair made of small living serpents... monstrosities such as this were portrayed on public display boards, or broadsides, around which crowds gathered to view fantastical illustrations and to hear the monster’s story told aloud. And what of Frankenstein’s creator Mary Shelley – wasn’t she responding to all those nineteenth-century attempts to engineer monstrous deformities in living organisms, in the name of science?
Olly’s monster was a dream monster. Mine, too, rose sympathetically from an ancient bed to trouble my sleeping hours. I will tell you about my first dream. I will tell you about Mr Cassini and his friend the policeman.
Sometimes truth doesn’t tell the truth as well as fiction does. Sometimes the truth needs telling in diverse ways. Butterflies taste with their feet. Did you know that? Sometimes we must use our senses in unexpected ways.
Flip the switch, douse the light. We’re in our own cinema of the night. Some of the film is in colour, some in black and white.