Firebug
Before the fire my one act of rebellion was to ignore a ringing telephone. Pathetically minor, but enough for me to enjoy the heady guilt that came with it. A small victory over Swirmley, who had eyes all over his body and thought he could see through walls.
I had worked for him for seventeen years. Since leaving school. He had snapped me up with my one O level and kept me to him ever since. The Picture Box had been shaky even then, forever on the brink of closure as its public moved away to feed off free images in their front rooms. We relied on pensioners, children, and the occasional groping couple. These, and Swirmley’s extreme care with money.
I was paid a thin wage which never took on much weight but I stayed at the Box, for the films. They were all I had ever been interested in. I inhabited the old classics and drew comfort from their safe, unreal worlds.
At the Box I was projectionist, handyman, cleaner, and film collector. There was just myself and Maude, the cashier-cum-usherette. But in the projection booth I was alone, and in control. The equipment was old and needed constant watching over, but the old man before me had been patient in his tuition and I knew every vicious whim of the reels.
Swirmley seemed ageless. There was an air of withering about him, but it never got worse. He had been bald when I first met him, with a few silver wisps which used to gleam when his pate was caught in the projection beam. His suit was always the same. A blue pin- stripe shiny with wear. A hearing aid cord dangled from his left ear, and trailed to his waistcoat pocket where the power pack was. Like everything else in the Box it was decrepit, prone to letting out errant shrieks. There were more modern and less obtrusive devices available but Swirmley would not countenance the expense.
The Picture Box tottered from crisis to crisis. Things got so bad we might have gone under, but Swirmley came up with an idea. We specialised in showing films a few months after the main circuit, padded out with ‘festivals’ of old ones acquired on the cheap. These were my films, the stuff of my dreams. Of everyone’s dreams, once.
Maude told how the Box would be packed to the gunnels with expectant people, and more waiting outside. They came for the outsized images and outsized lives on the screen, the colourful, wealthy dreams. Everything their own lives could not provide. Everything my life did not give me now. But that was before television, herald of a softer age I somehow felt was a harder age.
‘Sex, Eric, it’s our only hope’, Swirmley said.
He had called me into his office on a Friday afternoon. It was high summer and the Box had settled into emptiness.
‘Sex, Mr Swirmley?’, I asked.
‘Aye, films full of it. This is the seventies, Eric. We’ve had the swinging sixties, now we need something to follow it up. Some of these films are cheap to hire. Foreign mind, but folks won’t care about that, not when they know what’s in ’em’.
I adjusted my glasses and flicked back a stray strand of hair. I always did this in times of stress. Swirmley circled his desk, like a self-satisfied bear with a salmon in its mouth. I dwindled in my chair, my skinny frame awkward, my game leg flopping like a clown’s, and my glasses steaming up.
‘Do you think that’s wise, Mr Swirmley?’, I managed to say.
‘We don’t have much choice, if we want to stay open’. He placed a bear’s claw on my shoulder and dug hard. ‘Of course it’s wise. You’ll see’.
I left the office in a daze and took refuge in my booth, where I fingered the last reel of Gone With The Wind. We showed it every August.
It took Swirmley a month to realise his plans. He disappeared for several days, and returned with a van full of stock.
‘Soft porn, they call this lot’, he said. ‘German stuff mostly, but they have subtitles’.
‘Won’t we be showing anything else?’
‘What’s the point? You want to keep your job, don’t you?’
Swirmley started the sex on August Bank Holiday. He gambled on a half-page spread in the local paper, prompting an excited call from the editor. Swirmley was nothing if not a showman. He knew there would be a sanctimonious leader in next week’s edition.
A rainy Saturday ensured we were full. Back were the rowdy youths and old men, and other old men we had not seen in years. And couples, giggling and self-conscious. Solitary figures slipped in modestly, to secrete themselves on the ends of rows. Swirmley adorned the foyer, fat fingers in his waistcoat, eyes aglow with the head count. His glee, my shame.
Swirmley knew his town. There were complaints but when local dignitaries threatened a ban more people came. At first I tried not to look at the films, focussing mechanically and concentrating on the machines. But gradually, inexorably, I watched. As if the celluloid pulled my eyes onto it. They were the first naked women I had seen. Large-breasted, with china doll hair. As I passed people on my way home I tried to melt into shop doorways, but at least it was dark. No matter what time of year it was always dark. I entered our house quietly, knowing that Mother would have retired. God knows what she was thinking.
By the middle of September, when the novelty of Swirmley’s idea was waning, he deposited two canisters of film on my table.
‘These will keep things cooking nicely’, he said. ‘We don’t want the punters slacking off. They’re calling this place the Sex Box now’.
I looked at the canisters timidly. One said, ‘A Study of Sex, The Danish Way’.
‘Right steamy stuff this is’, Swirmley said. ‘Shows the lot, and we’ll get away with it because it’s supposed to be educational’.
‘Is it very - strong?’
‘I just said. And if the council pokes its snout in, we’ll give ’em a private showing. They’ll lap that up’.
It was the last straw. I went home that night with resolute tread, my legs pumping out an uneven rhythm on the pavement. But I walked tall. For the first time in my life.
After a council debate, when the Box featured on local television, the film was passed. On the first night there were queues around the block. This film was better quality stock and I was able to focus it pin-sharp on the contours of writhing bodies. I saw the acts never mentioned in my family and watched like a child, ashamed but trapped.
I waited until late Saturday night, but drunks still swirled around the town centre. It was past midnight when I was sure I could enter unobserved. I unlocked the side door and used the back stairs, the can of petrol heavy in my hand. The booth was the best place for the fire to start. It was the heart of my contaminated world, and the seat of my connivance.
I sloshed the petrol around, sickened by the smell. A trail of fuel led down to the first seats. I put the empty can in a film bag and added the two canisters of Danish film, without knowing why. Standing well back I threw a lighted rag into the booth. Flames immediately leapt up, hungry in this flammable world. I ran back to the side entrance, feeling like I was enacting a scene witnessed in many films. When the fire had reached the seats I went out and re-locked the door. No one must detect the hand of arson here.
By the time I had climbed the hill to our house flames were shooting up high over the Box. I heard shouting, and the siren of fire engines. They would not save it. The Picture Box was too ripe to be saved.
Swirmley phoned me at three in the morning.
‘It’s gone, Eric, all bloody gone’.
‘What is, Mr Swirmley? I don’t understand’.
‘The Box. Burned to the bloody ground. And the cafe next door’.
I regretted the loss of Salvatore’s, but I knew Eddy and his family lived elsewhere. My ease of acting surprised me.
‘But how’, I asked, ‘how could it happen?’
‘Electrical fault, probably, you know the state the place was in. Look, I’ve got to prepare the insurance stuff. Thank God we were doing so well, or they’d say I’d burned the place down’.
‘Yes, Mr Swirmley’
He softened his tone.
‘Look Eric, you been with me a long time, but you know what this means, don’t you? Your job’s gone for a Burton. Maude’s too’.
‘I see’.
‘When the insurance is sorted I’ll sort out a month’s wages for you. They might want a projectionist somewhere else’.
‘Yes, Mr Swirmley. Thank you’.
I hummed a tune from one of the shows as I prepared Mother’s tea. As I took it up each creak of the stairs was welcome. I put the tray down by the bed and gently tapped her shoulder. In my own room early morning light streamed through the blinds, carving the room with light. I stood at the window and looked down on the blackened shell of the Picture Box. Behind me, sex lay in canisters under the floorboards, and pride was all around me.
Page(s) 24-27
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