She unbuttoned her coat.īehind the till the half-submerged oranges in the orange juice machine went round and round on their spikes the dregs at the bottom of the tank rose and settled, rose and settled. She took the chair he was holding and put it, still upside down, down on the ground. My mother, still blinking from the dark, picked her way down the scuffed red stairs. The café was empty except for the boy putting chairs on tables. On the screen above them the film was Poor Cow, with Terence Stamp, an actor of such numinousness that my mother, young, chic, slender and imperious, and watching the film for the third time that week, had stood up, letting her seat thud up behind her, pushed past the legs of the people in her row and headed up the grubby aisle to the exit, through the curtain and out into the light. One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back row and picking at the wood of the partition, flicking little splinters of it at the small-town heads in the dark. My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |