Arrests

15/12/2025

Fiction    Download PDF  
1
Some said he was the cinema’s most regular customer, and there was nobody I felt the need to avoid more often when I visited the place. I was a regular myself, often seeing two or three films a week during a four-year period when I was living in the city. I was writing a PhD on a Brazilian filmmaker and tried to convince myself that spending so much time in the cinema was augmenting the doctorate rather than proving an escape from it. Jim, shuffling yet assertive, was almost always there, coming out of a film or going into one, in the bar, drinking a pint or ordering food. He didn’t only contribute by seeing many films; he also frequently consumed on the premises. He was a customer I didn’t doubt the cinema wouldn’t have wanted to lose, even if he was one I suspected many weren’t always keen to meet.
I may not have liked myself for thinking such thoughts, but on the dozen occasions when we had stopped to chat, it felt as though my feet had been glued to the carpet. Every time I tried to extricate myself from the conversation, I couldn’t quite walk away. He would keep talking as I tried to do so, and it seemed almost an act of violence to disappear when he was in mid-sentence. So there I stood for many more minutes than I would have liked, and often it took an outside force to allow me to leave. The barman would say his burger was ready, an usher would come up, saying the film was about to start. The barman or the usher would look at me sympathetically, yet at the same time with a facial expression that promised they had it a lot worse.
2
He was about sixty. I assumed he had taken early retirement and decided to devote his remaining years to watching films. He appeared to have no wife or partner, and I wondered if he was divorced and his children grown up, or had always been single and had no offspring. These seemed the only two options I could imagine for him. I saw nothing in the man that indicated an adventurous life, with lovers from different countries, and travel experiences from all over the world. I would have guessed he was an accountant who still wore his work clothes into retirement. He always wore a beige or air force blue suit, a beige and royal blue tie, and his shoes were always shiny, as though polished each morning. If he rarely seemed lonely, I supposed this was because he was gregarious, and there were always people he could share a few words with, even if I might have assumed they would have preferred to be left alone. It was true from a certain perspective that he didn’t lack social skills. There were others I would sometimes see who couldn’t look you in the eye, mumbled and rustled their carrier bags in the cinema, but they would never engage you in conversation, and so they never became boring. That is a strong word in some ways and colloquially inconsequential in others, but as far as I know, there is no medical condition boredom falls under; it is a state that can leave people struggling in friendship, and leaves others determined to avoid their company. There are many people who are shy, and they might not have the friends they deserve. They may have interesting minds and a great capacity to listen, but can’t quite find the social wherewithal to engage. That was not Jim’s problem. Shyness wasn’t Jim’s problem at all – or so it seemed.
This awareness that Jim always had someone to talk to made me feel far less obliged to involve him in any discussions I would be having with friends when we came out of a film or were having a drink before going in to see one. Jim occasionally idled over when he couldn’t find anyone else to engage, and said a few words, but he knew he only had half our attention, saw that we didn’t get up to speak to him, or propose he sit down, and before long someone would pass and he would hook them into chat with a flimsy premise about the film they had just seen or were soon to watch. He may or may not have known these people before, but it didn’t really matter. What counted was that Jim wasn’t alone – yet this never seemed couched by him in an escape from loneliness, only in a desire to share his thoughts and opinions with others.
There were several regulars at the cinema that I did feel guilty about not incorporating into our group; the diffident ones who often stood at the bar alone, or found a corner to disappear into and sup a half pint. I believe if a scenario had presented itself where they could have joined in the discussion, I would have accepted it. But it seemed gratuitous to propose they join our group, and I would sometimes wonder if doing so, while it might have alleviated their loneliness, would have undeniably announced it.
3
However, was Jim lonelier than I realised, shyer than I might have thought? It would have been around eighteen months after finishing my doctorate. I was doing postgraduate work in Newcastle when I came back to visit a couple of friends, and where I attended a party with someone I recognised from the cinema – the duty manager. We would often say hello, but I’d never conversed with him, and for about an hour at this party, with around thirty people, most getting pleasantly drunk, only one or two unpleasantly inebriated, we fell into conversation, mainly taking about the cinema, events they had put on, celebrities who showed up, and mishaps behind the scenes.
He told me I was one of the most regular people for several years, and I interjected, saying nowhere near as frequent a visitor as Jim. That was true, he said. But no longer. Merely to pay one visit while I was back in Edinburgh would have made me a more common customer than this man who had racked up over thirty years thousands of tickets, and probably close to the same number of pints at the bar, meals at the restaurant. I assumed immediately that he had passed away and offered my condolences. Mark wondered whether he had killed him.
Mark said he didn’t want to seem needlessly mysterious, but he did wonder whether he should be more circumspect. He added that what he wished to offer wasn’t simply gossip; more a moral conundrum he had been musing over occasionally since an incident some time ago.
4
Mark’s job was duty manager. He covered any problems and inquiries at the front desk, while the bar manager was responsible for any issues in the bar. Hierarchically, he was superior to the bar manager, and there were people senior to him in the top-floor office. But this was a Sunday evening, and he was the most superior member of staff in the place. If something happened in the bar that wasn’t simply about a food, drink or price issue, he would be called upon. His biggest fear was that he would be asked to administer first aid. Though he did a mandatory course that qualified him to do so, he didn’t know how he would act when a proper crisis presented itself. He thought he would find out when he was sitting in his office upstairs behind Cinema 1, and he got a call from the bar asking him to come down; someone had collapsed on the floor, and the bar manager was attending to the customer.
When he arrived, she was offering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and pressing her hands firmly against his chest, and, as he was about to take over, the person came spluttering back to life. It was Jim. They phoned 999, and in the rush to get him to the hospital as quickly as possible, they forgot to pop his jacket in the ambulance. The jacket contained his wallet. The assistant bar manager was also on duty, and so Samantha suggested that she and Mark take a taxi to the hospital, bring the jacket and find out how he was. In the taxi, Samantha discovered that with his wallet was what seemed like a letter, and when they arrived at the hospital, she removed the envelope and handed in the jacket. The reason she kept the envelope was because of the addressee: a colleague at work. Mark was dubious regarding this confiscation, though he had more reason to be interested in what was in the letter. It was to his girlfriend at the time. As they sat in the hospital canteen waiting to hear news of Jim, she said they should open it. Mark supposed that if anybody should be opening it, it should be Jenny, while adding that all they had to go on was a first name. Perhaps it could be another Jenny; maybe it was a letter that had been in his pocket for years, and he wanted to keep it close to his heart. Samantha said this heart which it had been close to, had just given out, and maybe the only reason he was still alive was that she had pushed against it forcefully enough to bring him back to consciousness. She felt she had a right to open it, and perhaps more so than Mark’s own girlfriend. Imagine, Samantha said, if it was another Jenny. They would have given his letter to someone with no authority to read it. She believed she had that authority, and Mark said, finally, it was her decision to make. She had saved his life; now she could rob him of his privacy. He said it more jokingly than he ought, and now sometimes wondered if he had offered it in a different tone, whether she would have resisted opening it, and handed it over to a nurse, claiming it had fallen out of the pocket.
5
So she opened the letter, read the two pages over several minutes, and then handed it to Mark. It was clear that it was the Jenny Samantha believed it to be, and so he found himself reading a letter this man had addressed to his present partner, though he did wonder if Jim would have ever delivered it to her. In it, Jim said that he found her beautiful the first time he saw her at the box office, and found her even more so as he would often chat with her, no matter if it seemed to be for a matter of seconds. He said he saw so many films because he wanted to escape from his own life, but he wished he could escape with her as he often fantasised about them running away together, buying a house in the countryside, or constantly travelling, He wasn’t short of money as she well knew, and he wouldn’t be mean and tight and controlling like her boyfriend. He would let her have other lovers if she wished, as long as he was special. There wouldn’t be a day that went by that he wouldn’t buy her something, however small, to remind her how important she was. He mentioned her boyfriend again, though never by name, and said she was right: he lacked refinement. It was only at the end of the letter that it became sexual, as he admitted that many times he had imagined her without her clothes on, and yes, sometimes became excited thinking about it.
It was chiefly due to this last remark that Samantha insisted they couldn’t merely ignore the letter. Sure, it was possible Jim would wonder what happened to it, but it would be easy for them to say they had no idea, and suspected Jim wouldn’t bring it up at all. He would be too embarrassed. Mark may have been thinking chiefly how he had been depicted in the letter, and might have wished for a little retributive justice after being so traduced, but he said the letter wasn’t their business. He could perhaps say a few words to Jenny, saying he was under the impression Jim had feelings for her, and she should be careful to avoid being too familiar with him. And to leave it at that. They could bin the letter, and Jim would assume it was somehow lost in the chaos of his collapse.
6
Samantha insisted no, this needed to go further. When Jim recovered, he would have to face the consequences. She would keep the letter, pass it on to senior management, and didn’t doubt they would see in her gesture someone whose first priority was to look after fellow members of staff. As she said this, Mark saw someone who was always on the side of the system over the indvidual, someone he had noticed in various moments over the previous two years she had been managing the bar, had almost no interest in customer satisfaction if it meant risking profits. She turned the lighting up, saying that people were less likely to linger in brightness, and this would leave space for more consumers. She was going to put a sign up that was more shaming than humorous: one that said they didn’t offer extra hot water. If people wanted it for their tea, they should buy themselves another pot. This is a business, not a charity the sign said. Mark pointed out they were a charity, and so instead she wondered if she could get rid of teapots and replace them with cups. She would have done so, but only a year earlier, they had bought a hundred new teapots. Instead of simply changing the price of the wine, she altered the prices on the quantity of wine: a small glass became the price of a medium one, and a medium the price of a large, and the large was given a new price altogether.
When Mark and others proposed that the cafe should have occasional music events at the bar, Samantha refused. She was sure people would sit and listen to the music and buy fewer drinks than people who would come in, drink up quickly, go to a film, and then be replaced by others drinking quickly, before seeing the next film. Rapid turnover would be replaced by turgid profits, even if the bar would be full for several hours and possess an atmosphere. He was well aware that the bar helped support the cinema, but nothing supported it more than the grants they received from local and national government, and profit was never supposed to be their purpose.
But Samantha often talked about her business background, her work in the private sector and the MBA she acquired stateside, and Mark admitted he always felt sloppy and slobbish around her. It wasn’t only that he would usually turn up for work wearing T-shirts that were tired with washing and wear, often grey or faded black, along with jeans the same colour. It was in contrast to the colours and cuts Samantha would don. She wore bold red or green dresses, sometimes a royal blue or mustard coloured jumper, and yet though the colours were striking, they were never garish, and while few would have found her beautiful (her features were too sharp for that), she was well aware that she could turn a head and return the look with flattering acknowledgement or withering dismissal.
He said to me that he overheard her say that a man who looked like he could hardly afford a coffee looked her up and down as though she were on the market. Mark wasn’t quite so specific about her clothes. He didn’t need to be; I remembered them well. And everything he said about her seemed consistent with the impression she had made on me. She managed to give the bar both a sense of colour and a diminution of atmosphere, and I assumed it was because she sucked up all the focus and attention, giving it an energy more suited to a business environment than an art scene.
7
Mark said if she was given to authority, he supposed he was more inclined to focus on the individual, and so while she saw abstract wrong-doing with little interest in Jim as a person, no matter if she probably saved his life, all he could think of, when she said she was going to report Jim and pass the letter along to the heads of the film centre, was instead centres of intimacy. The inner circle was Jim’s, the second circle was Jenny’s, and the outer circle concerned him. These were three worlds of privacy Samantha was willing to violate so that, as she said, justice would be done. Women had a right to be protected in the workplace, she said, putting the letter in her emerald green bag. Mark wouldn’t have disagreed, and on several occasions when it looked like male customers were making women seem uncomfortable, he would intervene. One of these moments was when,after a sexually explicit film, a man followed a woman out of a screening and asked her what she thought of it. As Mark stood at the box office, he could hear the man insinuating that she attended the screening out of sexual frustration and implied he was the man to alleviate it. The woman looked uncomfortable with the exchange, and Mark and his colleague at the box office, who had both seen the film the previous day, said they had seen it too and asked what the woman and the man had made of it. The woman seemed relieved to see the focus leave her and return to the film, and the four of them discussed it for a few minutes before the man left, aware that his assignation attempt had failed, and the woman thanked Mark and his colleague, a young woman who knew the director’s work more than Mark or the other two. The woman said it would be too strong to imply the man was harassing her, but somehow, as he talked, it felt more about her than the film. They made it more about the film than her. Mark supposed he might not always succeed, but he reckoned life was made up of constant human interactions that were about understandings and misunderstandings, and our purpose was to navigate people’s insecurities and misapprehensions to allow for the most meaningful and purposeful of encounters. He supposed Samantha saw life as hierarchical, and if people got hurt, damaged or destroyed in the process of various implementations, then that was how it had to be. Nothing exemplified this more than the treatment of Jim.
8
A couple of days later, he heard Jim was recovering. Mark asked Samantha how she planned to proceed. She said she had already been in contact with senior management, and when they asked what her recommendation would be, Samantha proposed a life-ban. On hearing this, Mark thought that Samantha had saved his life, only to then remove from it, its dignity and purpose. He almost wished that Jim would relapse, die and never realise that his resurrection was going to be at the same time a humiliation. He wondered also whether, in his small way, he had added to Jim’s shame by reading the letter, even if he had to admit any shame Jim would soon feel would be based on any number of people reading it, and his doing so wouldn’t make much difference. He was perhaps more concerned over Jenny believing he had read it, and when he told her what had happened, which was the same day Samantha took it further, he didn’t mention that he had read it, and she didn’t ask. He only said that it was addressed to her. He didn’t know if this was because of the way he phrased it, proposing that Samantha had done so without indicating either way whether he’d read it too, or if she just hoped he hadn’t and didn’t want to risk asking him, aware that she had said things about Mark that could potentially have ended up in the letter. He didn’t suggest they break up, as the only premise he would have for doing so was the letter, and he wondered if it was possible that Jim had projected onto Jenny notions he would have liked to assume. Jenny did say she was angry that Samantha hadn’t come to her first, instead of passing it on to higher management, but now that they had, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to read it at all.
9
Over the next fortnight, Jim fully recovered and was released from the hospital. Discovering Samantha had saved him, and that Samantha and Mark had visited him there, he sent the film centre  a card of thanks, which did nothing for Mark’s conscience but didn’t seem to affect Samantha’s, or her denial mechanisms were much stronger than his. When Mark asked if she felt bad receiving a card from a man she wanted to ban, she said not at all. She had done her duty to him and saved his life; now she was doing her duty to her colleagues by reporting his actions. Mark said there weren’t any actions, only a few words in a letter they shouldn’t have opened. She said: Imagine, if they hadn’t opened it, he might have taken things further. Mark said this would have been a cause and consequence they would have known nothing about, because they wouldn’t have known that the letter expressed an interest in Jenny. He knew this was only half true; merely noticing what was in his pockets had revealed the letter was addressed to a Jenny, and Mark was in as little doubt as Samantha was that this was likely to be the Jenny who worked in the film centre, since this was where he would spend so much of his time.
It was as if, since Jim’s cardiac arrest, Mark had been in a state of arrested action after it. He should have insisted on giving the letter to Jenny as soon as he saw it, saying it was none of Samantha’s business, and if it had turned out to be none of Jenny’s business after all (that it was for another Jenny), he could have taken responsibility for violating Jim’s privacy. He believed he didn’t, because by then it was too late. Had he been the first on hand, if his palms had been pressed down firmly on Jim’s cavity, if his lips had pushed against Jim’s, then yes – he would perhaps have dictated various events thereafter. But instead, he arrived after the tragedy had been averted, and the potential mild humiliation involved in the bar manager doing what he hadn’t done, was exacerbated by a letter she opened that made him seem a useless boyfriend, and then a case that would leave him looking like he wanted Jim no longer on the premises after the man sent him a thank you card.
10
Three months after Jim collapsed in the bar, his guardian angel had turned into an avenging angel, and while Samantha didn’t write the letter that Jim would have received, telling him he had been banned from the cinema, it detailed why he was no longer welcome after a letter had been found addressed to a member of staff. Of course, Jim might have assumed the person responsible for opening the letter and calling it to the film centre’s attention would have been him rather than Samantha. After all, she saved his life; why would she then wish to destroy it? Mark, on the other hand, was mentioned in the letter. He hadn’t saved Jim’s life and did have a reason to seek revenge.
By the time of Jim’s dismissal, Jenny had left the centre, and they had split up. He didn’t know if the letter had anything to do with it; what he did know was that he was feeling increasingly despondent about his life ever since he’d been the person who hadn’t saved Jim’s. But he also believed that the letter created a subtext between Jenny and himself, and the odd situation where he knew what was in a letter addressed to her, and she didn’t. As far as he knew, she never did find out that he had read it, but it was possible that Samantha had told her Mark had, and that she, in turn, kept this knowledge from Mark. He was relieved when Jenny left the cinema a week after they agreed to part, though he did find it ironic that just as Jim was being banned to protect the staff, the one member who might have needed protection from Jim was leaving. He hoped Jim would find another cinema he could make his regular, just as Mark hoped in time he would find another girlfriend, and one with whom a strange set of circumstances wouldn’t be inclined to ruin. But if Jim’s claims in the letter were accurate, then maybe it was for the best that it revealed to Mark that he and Jenny should part.
11
As we continued chatting in the kitchen while most were next door in the sitting room, where the music had been turned up, and no doubt dancing had commenced, I asked Mark if he’d seen Jenny or Jim since. He said that the city was a strange place for a while. He had always previously occupied it with no fear or fret, no sense that there were people to avoid, and yet for about six months, and until very recently, he would turn corners with ever so slight a hint of apprehension. Yet not anymore. Jenny had moved to Bristol, working at the art cinema down there, and Jim had passed away after another heart attack. There was talk that the cinema should honour his presence. They worked out that he had indeed been their most frequent customer ever, and at a meeting, he expected Samantha to at least question this honour, as people also proposed that a seat on the front row of the cinema should carry his name. But no, Samantha didn’t protest at all – within a year, she had saved his life, ruined his reputation, and now was willing to support a seat in his memory. Maybe this wasn’t hypocrisy, but perspective. Jim was no longer a threat to anybody, and he could be given a safe seat, so to speak.
12
Throughout the story Mark told, I had vividly in mind Jim, and far less so Jenny. I remembered her from the box office, recalled once passing Jim and Jenny on the street and saying hi, and noticed too that they were holding hands. I remember being surprised because I felt sure I’d seen her the previous weekend in a bar with another person. While I couldn’t say for certain it was Jenny, the man certainly wasn’t Mark – and some might have seen a passing resemblance to me. What I also recalled was a moment of kindness Jenny showed towards Jim, and that may have set in motion his infatuation with her. It wouldn’t have been long after Jenny had started working in the film centre, and Jim asked her whether she could help find something in the screening room. You could take a seat a few minutes before the lights went down and the ads and trailers started, and I would often do so, all the better to take my seat of choice before anybody else had the chance to commandeer it. The pair of them came in and, with the torch, Jenny scrutinised each and every chair in the front three rows since Jim couldn’t remember exactly where he had been sitting. She pulled down each chair and, after doing so about twenty times, she found nestled between the chair’s fold what Jim had lost.
It was a St Christopher pendant but without the chain. He explained to Jenny that this was a gift his aunt had given him when he was twenty-one. He no longer had the chain but kept the pendant always in his pocket. He supposed this was fate telling him to get another chain. She said he should, and would make sure the next time she saw him, to ask, and to cajole him into doing so if he hadn’t bought a new one. It was as if in that moment she had perhaps become his aunt, and he admitted sometimes he needed a good scolding. She smiled and promised him a reprimand if she saw that he hadn’t replaced it. I wondered how she would know because he usually wore a shirt and tie, and I could never recall him wearing his shirt open-necked. I certainly never discovered whether he did or did not get another one, but then it occurred to me to ask Mark if Jim was wearing a pendant around his neck when Samantha applied CPT.
He looked at me oddly and said that yes, he was, and that Samantha announced it had broken while she was applying pressure to his chest. Afterwards, she slipped it into his jacket pocket, and Mark would probably have known nothing about it at the time if she hadn’t said at the hospital that she couldn’t find the pendant. Mark asked how she knew he had a pendant in his pocket, and she explained why. She supposed it must have slipped out in the taxi.
13
He asked me how I knew about the pendant, aware as I was that Jim wasn’t a man who would flaunt his chest, even if nobody’s chest was more exposed than that day when he was lying on the floor at the film centre bar, and a woman half his age was trying to get him to live at least a little longer.
I said that one of the few clear memories of Jenny was when she helped Jim find the pendant and diligently searched until she found it. He looked at me even more oddly than he had before. He said Jenny asked him a couple of weeks after the incident, after the letter had been discovered and was reported to higher management, whether he was wearing the pendant. Mark supposed it was one of the many things Jim had chosen to divulge to Jenny as he was, after all, besotted by her. But he was surprised at the look of sadness on her face when he explained what had happened to it. In that moment, it was as if Mark and Jenny had lost all complicity between them, and yet he didn’t for a minute think this was because of any great feeling she must have had for Jim. As he knew and I knew – this was a man most avoided, and few could tolerate for any longer than it took to say hello and goodbye.
I thought for a second before saying maybe I knew why she may have been so saddened by the absence of the pendant and what I’d witnessed one early evening in the cinema. I expected Mark to respond to my revelation with pleasant surprise, amazed that a mild mystery that he couldn’t earlier comprehend had now become clear. Instead, I realised that odd look he had given me a couple of moments earlier had become one of suspicion.
14
He suspected that I hadn’t witnessed Jenny looking for the pendant, but that she had told me about it personally and that I may have known her more than I was willing to admit. He mentioned an evening not long before they were gong out together when he passed a bar and glancing inside, he saw Jenny sitting with a man who looked at least a little like me. Of course, I found myself wondering if this was the same evening I had seen Jenny sitting with a man who bore a passing resemblance to me, but only really recalled it because I saw Jenny and Mark a few days after, holding hands. I knew no more about this young man than Mark, but there I was so resembling him that in Mark’s mind I was him. Mark then laughed and said of course it couldn’t have been me, and that as such a cinema regular, it wasn’t unlikely that I’d have seen Jenny trying to help Jim out. Yet as he said this, it was as if he wasn’t convinced, but felt the need to convince me he wasn’t paranoid. What had started out as a terrible story of a lonely older man’s demise had somehow morphed into one about a young man’s story of feeling that he couldn’t trust the world. He felt that as duty manager, he should have been the person to resuscitate Jim, and as duty manager again, he should have protected Jim from Samantha’s invasive need to open the letter. He should probably have also insisted that, if on allowing Samantha to open it,  this wasn’t any of the film centre’s business and, if anybody’s, Jenny’s. Instead, he seemed passively to accept various events. It was though now he was willing to allow an overactive imagination to replace the actions he had earlier eschewed.
15
Over the following few days, I caught up with a couple of friends, wandered around various districts of the city I knew well, and yet avoided visiting the film centre I probably spent more time in when staying in Edinburgh than anywhere except my own flat. It may never have been a dream factory, as the films it showed were so often about bleak lives and uncertain futures, procrastinators and characters who made a mess of their existence. But I would hardly have been inclined to call it a nightmare factory, and yet I didn’t doubt it had become so for Jim, and perhaps now too for Mark. I didn’t doubt one of the reasons I hadn’t visited was that doing so, I might have come across Mark. As we parted, he proposed that if I popped in, I should ask for him and, if he was there, we could sit in the bar and get a drink. This seemed a polite way to wrap up what had become an intricately engaged conversation, and had nothing of the intent the earlier chat possessed. I imagined us sitting in the bar with few words left to say to each other, and both of us looking at the floor – at the floor Jim had collapsed on and which, in some way, had created at least a minor collapse in Mark as a consequence of it.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Arrests

1
Some said he was the cinema’s most regular customer, and there was nobody I felt the need to avoid more often when I visited the place. I was a regular myself, often seeing two or three films a week during a four-year period when I was living in the city. I was writing a PhD on a Brazilian filmmaker and tried to convince myself that spending so much time in the cinema was augmenting the doctorate rather than proving an escape from it. Jim, shuffling yet assertive, was almost always there, coming out of a film or going into one, in the bar, drinking a pint or ordering food. He didn’t only contribute by seeing many films; he also frequently consumed on the premises. He was a customer I didn’t doubt the cinema wouldn’t have wanted to lose, even if he was one I suspected many weren’t always keen to meet.
I may not have liked myself for thinking such thoughts, but on the dozen occasions when we had stopped to chat, it felt as though my feet had been glued to the carpet. Every time I tried to extricate myself from the conversation, I couldn’t quite walk away. He would keep talking as I tried to do so, and it seemed almost an act of violence to disappear when he was in mid-sentence. So there I stood for many more minutes than I would have liked, and often it took an outside force to allow me to leave. The barman would say his burger was ready, an usher would come up, saying the film was about to start. The barman or the usher would look at me sympathetically, yet at the same time with a facial expression that promised they had it a lot worse.
2
He was about sixty. I assumed he had taken early retirement and decided to devote his remaining years to watching films. He appeared to have no wife or partner, and I wondered if he was divorced and his children grown up, or had always been single and had no offspring. These seemed the only two options I could imagine for him. I saw nothing in the man that indicated an adventurous life, with lovers from different countries, and travel experiences from all over the world. I would have guessed he was an accountant who still wore his work clothes into retirement. He always wore a beige or air force blue suit, a beige and royal blue tie, and his shoes were always shiny, as though polished each morning. If he rarely seemed lonely, I supposed this was because he was gregarious, and there were always people he could share a few words with, even if I might have assumed they would have preferred to be left alone. It was true from a certain perspective that he didn’t lack social skills. There were others I would sometimes see who couldn’t look you in the eye, mumbled and rustled their carrier bags in the cinema, but they would never engage you in conversation, and so they never became boring. That is a strong word in some ways and colloquially inconsequential in others, but as far as I know, there is no medical condition boredom falls under; it is a state that can leave people struggling in friendship, and leaves others determined to avoid their company. There are many people who are shy, and they might not have the friends they deserve. They may have interesting minds and a great capacity to listen, but can’t quite find the social wherewithal to engage. That was not Jim’s problem. Shyness wasn’t Jim’s problem at all – or so it seemed.
This awareness that Jim always had someone to talk to made me feel far less obliged to involve him in any discussions I would be having with friends when we came out of a film or were having a drink before going in to see one. Jim occasionally idled over when he couldn’t find anyone else to engage, and said a few words, but he knew he only had half our attention, saw that we didn’t get up to speak to him, or propose he sit down, and before long someone would pass and he would hook them into chat with a flimsy premise about the film they had just seen or were soon to watch. He may or may not have known these people before, but it didn’t really matter. What counted was that Jim wasn’t alone – yet this never seemed couched by him in an escape from loneliness, only in a desire to share his thoughts and opinions with others.
There were several regulars at the cinema that I did feel guilty about not incorporating into our group; the diffident ones who often stood at the bar alone, or found a corner to disappear into and sup a half pint. I believe if a scenario had presented itself where they could have joined in the discussion, I would have accepted it. But it seemed gratuitous to propose they join our group, and I would sometimes wonder if doing so, while it might have alleviated their loneliness, would have undeniably announced it.
3
However, was Jim lonelier than I realised, shyer than I might have thought? It would have been around eighteen months after finishing my doctorate. I was doing postgraduate work in Newcastle when I came back to visit a couple of friends, and where I attended a party with someone I recognised from the cinema – the duty manager. We would often say hello, but I’d never conversed with him, and for about an hour at this party, with around thirty people, most getting pleasantly drunk, only one or two unpleasantly inebriated, we fell into conversation, mainly taking about the cinema, events they had put on, celebrities who showed up, and mishaps behind the scenes.
He told me I was one of the most regular people for several years, and I interjected, saying nowhere near as frequent a visitor as Jim. That was true, he said. But no longer. Merely to pay one visit while I was back in Edinburgh would have made me a more common customer than this man who had racked up over thirty years thousands of tickets, and probably close to the same number of pints at the bar, meals at the restaurant. I assumed immediately that he had passed away and offered my condolences. Mark wondered whether he had killed him.
Mark said he didn’t want to seem needlessly mysterious, but he did wonder whether he should be more circumspect. He added that what he wished to offer wasn’t simply gossip; more a moral conundrum he had been musing over occasionally since an incident some time ago.
4
Mark’s job was duty manager. He covered any problems and inquiries at the front desk, while the bar manager was responsible for any issues in the bar. Hierarchically, he was superior to the bar manager, and there were people senior to him in the top-floor office. But this was a Sunday evening, and he was the most superior member of staff in the place. If something happened in the bar that wasn’t simply about a food, drink or price issue, he would be called upon. His biggest fear was that he would be asked to administer first aid. Though he did a mandatory course that qualified him to do so, he didn’t know how he would act when a proper crisis presented itself. He thought he would find out when he was sitting in his office upstairs behind Cinema 1, and he got a call from the bar asking him to come down; someone had collapsed on the floor, and the bar manager was attending to the customer.
When he arrived, she was offering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and pressing her hands firmly against his chest, and, as he was about to take over, the person came spluttering back to life. It was Jim. They phoned 999, and in the rush to get him to the hospital as quickly as possible, they forgot to pop his jacket in the ambulance. The jacket contained his wallet. The assistant bar manager was also on duty, and so Samantha suggested that she and Mark take a taxi to the hospital, bring the jacket and find out how he was. In the taxi, Samantha discovered that with his wallet was what seemed like a letter, and when they arrived at the hospital, she removed the envelope and handed in the jacket. The reason she kept the envelope was because of the addressee: a colleague at work. Mark was dubious regarding this confiscation, though he had more reason to be interested in what was in the letter. It was to his girlfriend at the time. As they sat in the hospital canteen waiting to hear news of Jim, she said they should open it. Mark supposed that if anybody should be opening it, it should be Jenny, while adding that all they had to go on was a first name. Perhaps it could be another Jenny; maybe it was a letter that had been in his pocket for years, and he wanted to keep it close to his heart. Samantha said this heart which it had been close to, had just given out, and maybe the only reason he was still alive was that she had pushed against it forcefully enough to bring him back to consciousness. She felt she had a right to open it, and perhaps more so than Mark’s own girlfriend. Imagine, Samantha said, if it was another Jenny. They would have given his letter to someone with no authority to read it. She believed she had that authority, and Mark said, finally, it was her decision to make. She had saved his life; now she could rob him of his privacy. He said it more jokingly than he ought, and now sometimes wondered if he had offered it in a different tone, whether she would have resisted opening it, and handed it over to a nurse, claiming it had fallen out of the pocket.
5
So she opened the letter, read the two pages over several minutes, and then handed it to Mark. It was clear that it was the Jenny Samantha believed it to be, and so he found himself reading a letter this man had addressed to his present partner, though he did wonder if Jim would have ever delivered it to her. In it, Jim said that he found her beautiful the first time he saw her at the box office, and found her even more so as he would often chat with her, no matter if it seemed to be for a matter of seconds. He said he saw so many films because he wanted to escape from his own life, but he wished he could escape with her as he often fantasised about them running away together, buying a house in the countryside, or constantly travelling, He wasn’t short of money as she well knew, and he wouldn’t be mean and tight and controlling like her boyfriend. He would let her have other lovers if she wished, as long as he was special. There wouldn’t be a day that went by that he wouldn’t buy her something, however small, to remind her how important she was. He mentioned her boyfriend again, though never by name, and said she was right: he lacked refinement. It was only at the end of the letter that it became sexual, as he admitted that many times he had imagined her without her clothes on, and yes, sometimes became excited thinking about it.
It was chiefly due to this last remark that Samantha insisted they couldn’t merely ignore the letter. Sure, it was possible Jim would wonder what happened to it, but it would be easy for them to say they had no idea, and suspected Jim wouldn’t bring it up at all. He would be too embarrassed. Mark may have been thinking chiefly how he had been depicted in the letter, and might have wished for a little retributive justice after being so traduced, but he said the letter wasn’t their business. He could perhaps say a few words to Jenny, saying he was under the impression Jim had feelings for her, and she should be careful to avoid being too familiar with him. And to leave it at that. They could bin the letter, and Jim would assume it was somehow lost in the chaos of his collapse.
6
Samantha insisted no, this needed to go further. When Jim recovered, he would have to face the consequences. She would keep the letter, pass it on to senior management, and didn’t doubt they would see in her gesture someone whose first priority was to look after fellow members of staff. As she said this, Mark saw someone who was always on the side of the system over the indvidual, someone he had noticed in various moments over the previous two years she had been managing the bar, had almost no interest in customer satisfaction if it meant risking profits. She turned the lighting up, saying that people were less likely to linger in brightness, and this would leave space for more consumers. She was going to put a sign up that was more shaming than humorous: one that said they didn’t offer extra hot water. If people wanted it for their tea, they should buy themselves another pot. This is a business, not a charity the sign said. Mark pointed out they were a charity, and so instead she wondered if she could get rid of teapots and replace them with cups. She would have done so, but only a year earlier, they had bought a hundred new teapots. Instead of simply changing the price of the wine, she altered the prices on the quantity of wine: a small glass became the price of a medium one, and a medium the price of a large, and the large was given a new price altogether.
When Mark and others proposed that the cafe should have occasional music events at the bar, Samantha refused. She was sure people would sit and listen to the music and buy fewer drinks than people who would come in, drink up quickly, go to a film, and then be replaced by others drinking quickly, before seeing the next film. Rapid turnover would be replaced by turgid profits, even if the bar would be full for several hours and possess an atmosphere. He was well aware that the bar helped support the cinema, but nothing supported it more than the grants they received from local and national government, and profit was never supposed to be their purpose.
But Samantha often talked about her business background, her work in the private sector and the MBA she acquired stateside, and Mark admitted he always felt sloppy and slobbish around her. It wasn’t only that he would usually turn up for work wearing T-shirts that were tired with washing and wear, often grey or faded black, along with jeans the same colour. It was in contrast to the colours and cuts Samantha would don. She wore bold red or green dresses, sometimes a royal blue or mustard coloured jumper, and yet though the colours were striking, they were never garish, and while few would have found her beautiful (her features were too sharp for that), she was well aware that she could turn a head and return the look with flattering acknowledgement or withering dismissal.
He said to me that he overheard her say that a man who looked like he could hardly afford a coffee looked her up and down as though she were on the market. Mark wasn’t quite so specific about her clothes. He didn’t need to be; I remembered them well. And everything he said about her seemed consistent with the impression she had made on me. She managed to give the bar both a sense of colour and a diminution of atmosphere, and I assumed it was because she sucked up all the focus and attention, giving it an energy more suited to a business environment than an art scene.
7
Mark said if she was given to authority, he supposed he was more inclined to focus on the individual, and so while she saw abstract wrong-doing with little interest in Jim as a person, no matter if she probably saved his life, all he could think of, when she said she was going to report Jim and pass the letter along to the heads of the film centre, was instead centres of intimacy. The inner circle was Jim’s, the second circle was Jenny’s, and the outer circle concerned him. These were three worlds of privacy Samantha was willing to violate so that, as she said, justice would be done. Women had a right to be protected in the workplace, she said, putting the letter in her emerald green bag. Mark wouldn’t have disagreed, and on several occasions when it looked like male customers were making women seem uncomfortable, he would intervene. One of these moments was when,after a sexually explicit film, a man followed a woman out of a screening and asked her what she thought of it. As Mark stood at the box office, he could hear the man insinuating that she attended the screening out of sexual frustration and implied he was the man to alleviate it. The woman looked uncomfortable with the exchange, and Mark and his colleague at the box office, who had both seen the film the previous day, said they had seen it too and asked what the woman and the man had made of it. The woman seemed relieved to see the focus leave her and return to the film, and the four of them discussed it for a few minutes before the man left, aware that his assignation attempt had failed, and the woman thanked Mark and his colleague, a young woman who knew the director’s work more than Mark or the other two. The woman said it would be too strong to imply the man was harassing her, but somehow, as he talked, it felt more about her than the film. They made it more about the film than her. Mark supposed he might not always succeed, but he reckoned life was made up of constant human interactions that were about understandings and misunderstandings, and our purpose was to navigate people’s insecurities and misapprehensions to allow for the most meaningful and purposeful of encounters. He supposed Samantha saw life as hierarchical, and if people got hurt, damaged or destroyed in the process of various implementations, then that was how it had to be. Nothing exemplified this more than the treatment of Jim.
8
A couple of days later, he heard Jim was recovering. Mark asked Samantha how she planned to proceed. She said she had already been in contact with senior management, and when they asked what her recommendation would be, Samantha proposed a life-ban. On hearing this, Mark thought that Samantha had saved his life, only to then remove from it, its dignity and purpose. He almost wished that Jim would relapse, die and never realise that his resurrection was going to be at the same time a humiliation. He wondered also whether, in his small way, he had added to Jim’s shame by reading the letter, even if he had to admit any shame Jim would soon feel would be based on any number of people reading it, and his doing so wouldn’t make much difference. He was perhaps more concerned over Jenny believing he had read it, and when he told her what had happened, which was the same day Samantha took it further, he didn’t mention that he had read it, and she didn’t ask. He only said that it was addressed to her. He didn’t know if this was because of the way he phrased it, proposing that Samantha had done so without indicating either way whether he’d read it too, or if she just hoped he hadn’t and didn’t want to risk asking him, aware that she had said things about Mark that could potentially have ended up in the letter. He didn’t suggest they break up, as the only premise he would have for doing so was the letter, and he wondered if it was possible that Jim had projected onto Jenny notions he would have liked to assume. Jenny did say she was angry that Samantha hadn’t come to her first, instead of passing it on to higher management, but now that they had, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to read it at all.
9
Over the next fortnight, Jim fully recovered and was released from the hospital. Discovering Samantha had saved him, and that Samantha and Mark had visited him there, he sent the film centre  a card of thanks, which did nothing for Mark’s conscience but didn’t seem to affect Samantha’s, or her denial mechanisms were much stronger than his. When Mark asked if she felt bad receiving a card from a man she wanted to ban, she said not at all. She had done her duty to him and saved his life; now she was doing her duty to her colleagues by reporting his actions. Mark said there weren’t any actions, only a few words in a letter they shouldn’t have opened. She said: Imagine, if they hadn’t opened it, he might have taken things further. Mark said this would have been a cause and consequence they would have known nothing about, because they wouldn’t have known that the letter expressed an interest in Jenny. He knew this was only half true; merely noticing what was in his pockets had revealed the letter was addressed to a Jenny, and Mark was in as little doubt as Samantha was that this was likely to be the Jenny who worked in the film centre, since this was where he would spend so much of his time.
It was as if, since Jim’s cardiac arrest, Mark had been in a state of arrested action after it. He should have insisted on giving the letter to Jenny as soon as he saw it, saying it was none of Samantha’s business, and if it had turned out to be none of Jenny’s business after all (that it was for another Jenny), he could have taken responsibility for violating Jim’s privacy. He believed he didn’t, because by then it was too late. Had he been the first on hand, if his palms had been pressed down firmly on Jim’s cavity, if his lips had pushed against Jim’s, then yes – he would perhaps have dictated various events thereafter. But instead, he arrived after the tragedy had been averted, and the potential mild humiliation involved in the bar manager doing what he hadn’t done, was exacerbated by a letter she opened that made him seem a useless boyfriend, and then a case that would leave him looking like he wanted Jim no longer on the premises after the man sent him a thank you card.
10
Three months after Jim collapsed in the bar, his guardian angel had turned into an avenging angel, and while Samantha didn’t write the letter that Jim would have received, telling him he had been banned from the cinema, it detailed why he was no longer welcome after a letter had been found addressed to a member of staff. Of course, Jim might have assumed the person responsible for opening the letter and calling it to the film centre’s attention would have been him rather than Samantha. After all, she saved his life; why would she then wish to destroy it? Mark, on the other hand, was mentioned in the letter. He hadn’t saved Jim’s life and did have a reason to seek revenge.
By the time of Jim’s dismissal, Jenny had left the centre, and they had split up. He didn’t know if the letter had anything to do with it; what he did know was that he was feeling increasingly despondent about his life ever since he’d been the person who hadn’t saved Jim’s. But he also believed that the letter created a subtext between Jenny and himself, and the odd situation where he knew what was in a letter addressed to her, and she didn’t. As far as he knew, she never did find out that he had read it, but it was possible that Samantha had told her Mark had, and that she, in turn, kept this knowledge from Mark. He was relieved when Jenny left the cinema a week after they agreed to part, though he did find it ironic that just as Jim was being banned to protect the staff, the one member who might have needed protection from Jim was leaving. He hoped Jim would find another cinema he could make his regular, just as Mark hoped in time he would find another girlfriend, and one with whom a strange set of circumstances wouldn’t be inclined to ruin. But if Jim’s claims in the letter were accurate, then maybe it was for the best that it revealed to Mark that he and Jenny should part.
11
As we continued chatting in the kitchen while most were next door in the sitting room, where the music had been turned up, and no doubt dancing had commenced, I asked Mark if he’d seen Jenny or Jim since. He said that the city was a strange place for a while. He had always previously occupied it with no fear or fret, no sense that there were people to avoid, and yet for about six months, and until very recently, he would turn corners with ever so slight a hint of apprehension. Yet not anymore. Jenny had moved to Bristol, working at the art cinema down there, and Jim had passed away after another heart attack. There was talk that the cinema should honour his presence. They worked out that he had indeed been their most frequent customer ever, and at a meeting, he expected Samantha to at least question this honour, as people also proposed that a seat on the front row of the cinema should carry his name. But no, Samantha didn’t protest at all – within a year, she had saved his life, ruined his reputation, and now was willing to support a seat in his memory. Maybe this wasn’t hypocrisy, but perspective. Jim was no longer a threat to anybody, and he could be given a safe seat, so to speak.
12
Throughout the story Mark told, I had vividly in mind Jim, and far less so Jenny. I remembered her from the box office, recalled once passing Jim and Jenny on the street and saying hi, and noticed too that they were holding hands. I remember being surprised because I felt sure I’d seen her the previous weekend in a bar with another person. While I couldn’t say for certain it was Jenny, the man certainly wasn’t Mark – and some might have seen a passing resemblance to me. What I also recalled was a moment of kindness Jenny showed towards Jim, and that may have set in motion his infatuation with her. It wouldn’t have been long after Jenny had started working in the film centre, and Jim asked her whether she could help find something in the screening room. You could take a seat a few minutes before the lights went down and the ads and trailers started, and I would often do so, all the better to take my seat of choice before anybody else had the chance to commandeer it. The pair of them came in and, with the torch, Jenny scrutinised each and every chair in the front three rows since Jim couldn’t remember exactly where he had been sitting. She pulled down each chair and, after doing so about twenty times, she found nestled between the chair’s fold what Jim had lost.
It was a St Christopher pendant but without the chain. He explained to Jenny that this was a gift his aunt had given him when he was twenty-one. He no longer had the chain but kept the pendant always in his pocket. He supposed this was fate telling him to get another chain. She said he should, and would make sure the next time she saw him, to ask, and to cajole him into doing so if he hadn’t bought a new one. It was as if in that moment she had perhaps become his aunt, and he admitted sometimes he needed a good scolding. She smiled and promised him a reprimand if she saw that he hadn’t replaced it. I wondered how she would know because he usually wore a shirt and tie, and I could never recall him wearing his shirt open-necked. I certainly never discovered whether he did or did not get another one, but then it occurred to me to ask Mark if Jim was wearing a pendant around his neck when Samantha applied CPT.
He looked at me oddly and said that yes, he was, and that Samantha announced it had broken while she was applying pressure to his chest. Afterwards, she slipped it into his jacket pocket, and Mark would probably have known nothing about it at the time if she hadn’t said at the hospital that she couldn’t find the pendant. Mark asked how she knew he had a pendant in his pocket, and she explained why. She supposed it must have slipped out in the taxi.
13
He asked me how I knew about the pendant, aware as I was that Jim wasn’t a man who would flaunt his chest, even if nobody’s chest was more exposed than that day when he was lying on the floor at the film centre bar, and a woman half his age was trying to get him to live at least a little longer.
I said that one of the few clear memories of Jenny was when she helped Jim find the pendant and diligently searched until she found it. He looked at me even more oddly than he had before. He said Jenny asked him a couple of weeks after the incident, after the letter had been discovered and was reported to higher management, whether he was wearing the pendant. Mark supposed it was one of the many things Jim had chosen to divulge to Jenny as he was, after all, besotted by her. But he was surprised at the look of sadness on her face when he explained what had happened to it. In that moment, it was as if Mark and Jenny had lost all complicity between them, and yet he didn’t for a minute think this was because of any great feeling she must have had for Jim. As he knew and I knew – this was a man most avoided, and few could tolerate for any longer than it took to say hello and goodbye.
I thought for a second before saying maybe I knew why she may have been so saddened by the absence of the pendant and what I’d witnessed one early evening in the cinema. I expected Mark to respond to my revelation with pleasant surprise, amazed that a mild mystery that he couldn’t earlier comprehend had now become clear. Instead, I realised that odd look he had given me a couple of moments earlier had become one of suspicion.
14
He suspected that I hadn’t witnessed Jenny looking for the pendant, but that she had told me about it personally and that I may have known her more than I was willing to admit. He mentioned an evening not long before they were gong out together when he passed a bar and glancing inside, he saw Jenny sitting with a man who looked at least a little like me. Of course, I found myself wondering if this was the same evening I had seen Jenny sitting with a man who bore a passing resemblance to me, but only really recalled it because I saw Jenny and Mark a few days after, holding hands. I knew no more about this young man than Mark, but there I was so resembling him that in Mark’s mind I was him. Mark then laughed and said of course it couldn’t have been me, and that as such a cinema regular, it wasn’t unlikely that I’d have seen Jenny trying to help Jim out. Yet as he said this, it was as if he wasn’t convinced, but felt the need to convince me he wasn’t paranoid. What had started out as a terrible story of a lonely older man’s demise had somehow morphed into one about a young man’s story of feeling that he couldn’t trust the world. He felt that as duty manager, he should have been the person to resuscitate Jim, and as duty manager again, he should have protected Jim from Samantha’s invasive need to open the letter. He should probably have also insisted that, if on allowing Samantha to open it,  this wasn’t any of the film centre’s business and, if anybody’s, Jenny’s. Instead, he seemed passively to accept various events. It was though now he was willing to allow an overactive imagination to replace the actions he had earlier eschewed.
15
Over the following few days, I caught up with a couple of friends, wandered around various districts of the city I knew well, and yet avoided visiting the film centre I probably spent more time in when staying in Edinburgh than anywhere except my own flat. It may never have been a dream factory, as the films it showed were so often about bleak lives and uncertain futures, procrastinators and characters who made a mess of their existence. But I would hardly have been inclined to call it a nightmare factory, and yet I didn’t doubt it had become so for Jim, and perhaps now too for Mark. I didn’t doubt one of the reasons I hadn’t visited was that doing so, I might have come across Mark. As we parted, he proposed that if I popped in, I should ask for him and, if he was there, we could sit in the bar and get a drink. This seemed a polite way to wrap up what had become an intricately engaged conversation, and had nothing of the intent the earlier chat possessed. I imagined us sitting in the bar with few words left to say to each other, and both of us looking at the floor – at the floor Jim had collapsed on and which, in some way, had created at least a minor collapse in Mark as a consequence of it.

© Tony McKibbin