Alan McMonagle

Saturday Night At The Movies
Alan McMonagle

On screen the shadow of a gunman. Tentative along a sweating wall. A shot rings out, suspending the silent black ballet. Another shot. Quickly then a third, fourth and fifth. A body slumps to the ground.

The camera changes course. Angles down. Closes in. Inexorably, as though inviting the audience to complete the bloody ordeal, it recovers the merest essentials of the gunman's gruesome fate - a redundant weapon, a dark-stain wrist, a limping pulse. An eerie violin darkens the slate a little more. Paving the way for the cause of it all.

Enter a pouting killer.

Shimmering through her smoking gun a payback glare. Ransom lips. And blackwater eyes that reveal what she truly is. Beauty to die for.

She leans close to her victim, enticing him with the ponderous scent of her tainted perfume. Forgiving to a fault, his valediction craves one last dance. But it is the death of him and, ridding the scene of painstakingly acquired dignity, the killer's lips lapse into an imperceptible smile.

The camera backs away. The orchestra flees. The silver screen shudders through a chilling finale. And to the gallery bequeaths a warm corpse and a frozen heart.

Elsewhere a quickly developing consequence. Paddywagon siren. The rap of a condemning gavel. A gallows plinth and a twisting rope. The hangman's knell.

And everyone has seen enough. The movie theatre brightens. The curtain skiffs across the film's climactic score. The projector begins to run out of time.

In the front row the old movie buff is already fumbling with another ending. Like many before him, he has fallen for these unlovable charms. He sees beyond her brutish urge and callous whims; clings to her language of deceit; longs for an instant of her time.

Briefly entering an epilogue, he conjures a passing dialogue. Reconstructs the crime. Engages an imagination run amok to deter the god-awful end decided for her. Tweaking a blurb he knows by heart, he defends with desperation this misunderstood girl.

Let's face it your honour, the guy had it coming. He was bad news, a vile thing, the lowest of the low.

Distractions garble his favourable reckonings. Rustlings of the quickly departing; gatherings of the no-nonsense usher; splutterings of the spent film reel.

By and by, the swirling dust settles. Keys jangle. The exit door beckons.

But his face remains an unresolved outcome. Awkward thinking knots his brow. Remaining in the dream a moment, he relocates to a distant lot; traces long forgotten lines, absurd twists in the plot. Face to face with pretend-exits from which he is forced to choose, nagging doubts try to splice the real and the impossible. Returning to the picturehouse, a question lingers. Is there another way out?

He's held up in the foyer. To a captive audience, a talking superhero heralds groundbreaking virtues of a future presentation. Fluttering overhead, larger-than-life banners issue ultimatums to the world. Eventually the superhero becomes aware of the threat and, for a moment, he attends to a clunky red gadget belt strapped around the waistline of his emerald body suit. Then he stands to attention, reaches out his right arm and points to the portentous hazards. ‘Call me Fearless,' he declaims in a rousing voice and, clicking the heels of his ruby booster-boots, Fearless Man takes flight, achieves an orbit of sorts, whips a phaser from his belt and zaps the catastrophic forebodings into a blizzard of useless confetti. A round of applause greets his safe return to earth.

‘They don't make them like they used to,' an onlooker proclaims to no one in particular and, to the front, a little boy clutches his father's hand, shakes his head like a wet dog and squeals: ‘Jesus, I never saw anything like that in all my life.'

Looking on, the old movie buff nods in agreement with this youthful pronouncement and, along with a cavalry of askance boys, wonders there and then what it's like to fly.

Tut tut, chides a distant voice, take a walk down memory lane, cross the bridge between now and then, look to the harbour waters.

And, as though taking his cue, he draws the collars of his coat, spins on his heels and strides into the night.

A captive image stays with him. I could spring her from her cell, he thinks. We could grab a souped-up car, tackle the hairpin roads, flirt dangerously together. I could even skip the small talk, he tells himself, cut to the chase.

You're a swell dish. I could go for you. Wanna see my go-fast stripes?

Through this swell of infatuation appear the hard chaws.

‘Go away from me now boyos,' he tells them, ‘I'm having a romantic night.'

‘Pssshaw. Now we have to annoy you.'

‘Three spindly stents prop the arteries to my heart. I promise you.'

‘Pull the other one, granddad. It plays jingle bells.'

‘Last chance, tough guys. I'll become the King of Blood.'

One of them slaps his knee. ‘Do you hear that men,' he says. ‘It might be a good idea to allow this one find his girl.'

Approvingly, the others yahoo and gesticulate and, like members of an abhorrent tribe, they scatter their menacing performance into the draughty throes of the drinking street. Soon after he follows.

I'll find a way to her alright, he says. To her hidden places and faraway look. I'll discover the source of those diamond lights she craves; then watch for her among the stars.

She wasn't left any choice judge, he argues. It was him or her.

Along the drinking street, smokers hover outside the bars. Loose topics drift skywards, half-muttered secrecies that leak through tall angular pavilions, into the black spaces thereafter where they ribbon in torrents of no consequence. Along with the unspoken wishes of the already departed. And pledges ventured to limbo, which restlessly sweep the purgatorial halls forever destined to them. Each call, rally and utterance scarcely aware of the tiny eternities they witness each night. The ghost of a long dead actress, for instance, come to haunt the personalities she could never achieve. Or the unheeded ideas, now returned to plague those long after they have dismissed any use for them. Greatness the world will never see.

By way of consolation, a lunatic street poet stands on a crate and unleashes his loathsome verse. A busker sings the voodoo blues. A girl argues her case with a forbidding boy. And in front of the long abandoned drapery a black-shawl harridan jabs at a blanket of epic bracelets with a blackthorn wand and pats her mongrel dogs.

Amidst it all, he pauses at the movie shop window. The counter-girl spots him, shakes her head, waves him inside. A screen by the entrance previews coming attractions. He passes through an ominous tone. This is the true story of a woman and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the woman. The car might have been yours.

‘So tell me,' the counter-girl asks him, ‘did you save her tonight?'

‘Some people just don't want to be saved,' he replies.

‘You should stay awake for the end some time. You might be pleasantly surprised.'

‘A pleasant surprise belongs to fairyland.'

‘I think I might just have the very thing,' she says reaching for a title.

‘This picture is as old as I am,' he says when she hands it to him. ‘I bet you didn't know that.'

‘No I didn't,' she says back to him, ‘but I would guess that once upon a time you took every bit of it to heart.'

‘I think that's part of my problem,' he says with a smile.

‘You're in need of the wizard,' she replies.

‘Probably, but tonight I'm happy with a stroll down to the sanctuary.'

He salutes gently and walks off.

‘I hear the swans are in,' she calls after him but he doesn't hear.

He knows she's been set up by this celluloid conspiracy. Manipulated through and through by the barb-soul hoodlum and the powdered judge. Grinning either side of the only coin she has to spend.

Old man, don't waste my time, the judge booms . Save your anxious breath. Simply put, she must and will be taken off the streets.

The forsaken girl finally staggers away. There goes my beautiful lush booms the poet and the boy stands watching guilty happy, each of her haggard high heel steps scraping the walls of his wanderlust heart. Not once does she look back and, from his mobile perch, the poet's unpitying interpretation wields through the air like an axe.

Waving her own wicked stick, the attention-seeking harridan casts herself centre stage. As though she has a future to tell. Or somebody's life to unravel. A crowd gathers round, each man, Jack and woman offering silent vespers that his number isn't up. ‘I can tell what's in store by the tea-leaves,' the harridan rasps, ‘in a set of cryptic cards or through the dragon's fearsome breath.' Squinting her withy eyes, she devotes herself to a cherub-faced boy, rubs her hands with glee and knowingly confides: ‘Then again I could simply gaze into my crystal ball.'

And suddenly the poet comes bounding through her patch and delivers his damning verdict. Humbug. Humbug. Life is a death trap. Whereupon the harridan points to his hastily retreating steps and retorts, ‘and as for you sir, your future is behind you.' The gathered crowd laughs and, encouraged now, the harridan offers her stick-like arms, leans back and, for all she is worth, decants an incommunicable blather into the fetching void.

He can almost taste her pleading lips. And his own last-chance gasps. Your honour, for the love of God, she wouldn't harm a fly.

Five more words , the judge thunders. Tomorrow, first thing, she swings .

On the bridge, night has smuggled in a steely fog out of which looms a waterside scaffolding like a gallows. The river passes swiftly underneath, and, further on, the vast iron tower of a powerlift bows in deference towards this thrust of precious estate and patiently awaits its morning command. Somewhere inside the skeletal construction a loose chain clashes with a scaffold pole and makes a hollow sound that carries through the mist out into the harbour waters and the blurry reaches of the Long Walk.

He can hear it as he crosses for the pier, where the boats are roped and repose in their calm lagoon. Lithe lines keep them, anxious ties, fearful, as though these resting vessels may take sudden flight into this alien night; and there, among them, a lone swan sits and watches still.

‘Fly now,' he says, ‘it's your only chance.'

And he can hear it by the water, from beyond the steaming bridge, the metal tube clanking in the night like a forlorn rapping on some primitive door, like a futile appeal, like a final say. He hears it fade and come again, and fade again once more, each distant chime tingling just inside him as are the whorling dewy specks.

And through this hollow clanking and gathering mist, among the lonely boats and misshapen souls gathered near, the hungry swans call. Call from their sanctuary at the water's edge where they pursue midnight congregations and wrangle with each other for a small piece of heaven.

The estuary waters surge now, black and noisy, towards the Long Walk's bleary lamps. Their consoling reflections warp in the offing and seem like a friendly visitation of some stellar league docked in this channel of foggy night. Beyond, a beacon weakly flickers.

Fly swan, he implores again. Swing for another shore. Spread your span of unflappable innocence and fade into a little piece of inextinguishable time. Join the purely proceeding. Glide with the wattled crane. Soar through the ranks of the black stork. Until you reach the places where the true emperors huddle, endlessly announcing in their icy jargons: there's no place like home; there's no place like home; there's no place like home…

At which point he knows she's free at last.

Alan McMonagle lives in Galway. To date his work has appeared in Crannog, West47online and Galway Now. His story The Girl who liked Words was short-listed for the 2006 Fish Story award.