Radiance

It was a suit fit for a job interview, though I hadn’t let one of those get near me in years. I didn’t think I could manage a conversation longer than How much? anyway. I can’t stomach a man telling me what to do and when to do it. That cog got banged up good in me. The one that lets normal folks say, Yes, sir; right away, sir, and mean it. And then get the business done for the sirs of the world, right away, on the double-quick.

And yet. I wasn’t on Caroline Street to scare up a woman or to sell my cufflinks for a lump of af-yun or put the last of my emergency protein fund on the ammonite races. I was calling on a million quid. A job. Gainful employment. A gig particularly suited to my extremely specific talents and Historia Calamitatum. If you lined up all the soul-choking jobs a body ever dreamed up, neat as a chorus line and twice as hungry, this’d be about the last dame I’d wanna take round the floor. And yet.

Being on time is a filthy habit practiced only by roosters and retirees. Frankly, the roosters can’t even get their heads on straight round here. The sun, such as it is, comes up every seventeen hours on Uranus. It’s hard on the poultry. Still, I probably woulda made it, despite all my efforts to black out before the hour struck Cinderella, if the Astor hadn’t put up a midnight show. One of those weird, off-putting studio talkies from back in the bad old days when Edison ruled the nickelodeon universe with a celluloid fist. We get a lot of that stuff out here. This is the end of the line for movie prints. It takes ten years to get them out to Uranus and once they make landfall they tend to stick. Just kind of swirl around the theatres like water down a drain till the reels break or someone steals them. If you’re looking for a flick that no one’s seen hide of for a good long howl, there’s probably one kicking round some freezer case in a Uranian cellar. Who knows where they dug this one up?

The Astor marquee came ghosting up out of the blue brume, sickly topaz pop-bulbs and black block letters bearded with ice.

Self-Portrait with Saturn.

Well, fuck me sideways.

I didn’t wanna buy a ticket. For one thing, I’ve seen it. Boy howdy, have I seen it. For another, my petty cash was feeling particularly petty that night. There’s probably a third thing. I didn’t want a ticket. I sure as hell didn’t want the booth jockey to smell my breath and wrinkle her pretty little pierced nose like her opinion kept the lights on. I didn’t wanna sit fifth row centre in a chair whose springs would leave red half-moons on my arse by the end of that self-indulgently long barely-a-movie. I did want the cheap pus-yellow port wine they make up on Miranda out of callowmilk, freeze-dried coca, grapes that once sneezed in the general direction of France, and whatever else is lying around the floor for flavour. Popcorn alone won’t pay the rent on Caroline Street. I did want to sit in the clammy warmth of that god-awful cathedral-arched candy-cane decoglass theatre, under the headless, broken saltrock cherubs and breadcoral mermaids holding up the sconces on the wall, the threadbare peacock curtain, the greened brass EXIT sign.

And I did want to see her.

I didn’t want to watch her. But I wanted to see her. The way you want to see an old friend, or an ex-lover you hope is miserable without you. Fix her coffee and listen to her troubles, make concerned faces and sympathetic mooing noises in all the right places while she gets bitter and hot as the coffee. But all the while you’re sizzling with excitement; your heart’s a champagne burn. Her sorrow tastes fantastic. It’s a sorrow for savouring, and when she wants to spend her despair in your bed, you’ll say no, and that’ll taste fantastic, too.

That’s why I slunk into my seat instead of showing up where I shoulda been. Rigorously ignoring the five or ten other sets of eyeballs in that dank cave of a theatre. Barely able to get my yammering heart or my pickled gut under control. Leaning forward like she’d notice me if I got far enough in her face. Like she was a schoolteacher who’d choose somebody out of the shiny row of brats spelling furiously for her pleasure and love the kid who had the right answer best of all. Except, I didn’t have it. Nobody did. But nobody felt bad about that the way I did.

Nobody was supposed to know how to spell “Venus” but me.

I stopped breathing when the lights went down. Gripping the arms of my seat like the paws on a claw-foot tub, my nails going right down into the damp wood. The breadcoral broads up on the wall leered down, acting out the birth of the Titans, I think, their rough carrot-coloured arms full of lights and tiny monsters with tails and feathers and snouts. Two rows up a fella took off his hat. A head already moved rhythmically up and down in his lap. Before the credits! Have a little class!