Late Show

I came to London over three months ago from Seaford, the seaside town where I grew up, and to be honest I still don't feel at home here. The traffic, the lights not the neons, they don't bother me, but the 24-hour banality of the lit shop-fronts where I live - and no sea to contain any of it; I feel claustrophobic, not just in my body but in my mind. The crowdedness doesn't help. So many people, around me but not with me, so that I feel both hemmed-in and spectral - not quite there enough to be visible even to my work colleagues unless I go out of my way to talk to them (and even then I'm never sure I've made a lasting impression). Back home I was known as a loner but I never felt like a spectre; if anything I had a definite, even vivid presence because I didn't have to go around in a group like others did in order to feel comfortable in public. People my friends, family and many acquaintances - seemed to respect me all the more because I was independent. I left Melissa behind me too when I came here. Melissa of the honey name and the honey-coloured hair who is no doubt the real reason I can't settle here. Actually, she was a big if undisclosed factor in my decision to look for a job here rather than one in Sussex; I wanted to get away from all the places that reminded me of her. I haven't seen her in six months and you'd think her image would have faded from my mind through lack of threedimensional reinforcement but if anything it has flourished and evolved into new and seductive forms on the carbon dioxide of memory and imagination. My longing for her, my preoccupation with her draws my attention seawards; no wonder I feel as if a piece of me is still in my home town instead of here. Last Saturday was the two-year anniversary of the night I first saw her. I was at a loose end and decided to go to a late show at my local cinema, the Rio in Dalston, one of the few cinemas left in London that do late shows. The Rio is an old-fashioned monoplex with red velvet curtains and red plush seats and a cafe/bar serving carrot cake and beer in plastic cups. If there's one place in London where I feel at home it's in the Rio, a place of dreams and fantasies of no interest to the crowds of jarringly-tangible couples that gather in multiplexes on Saturday nights. I got there about half an hour before the film began. It was a European 1970's 'psychosexual' horror called Daughters Of Darkness and though I had no doubt of its entertainment value I'd slept badly the night before and didn't trust myself to be able to stay awake through it without caffeine, so I got myself an espresso and took a stool at the counter where the programs and flyers for local events are displayed. I was reading the program for the next month when a woman put down her plastic cup of double brandy and climbed onto the stool nearest me. How to describe her? Well, to start with she looked nothing like Melissa. She was dark with strong eyebrows and shadowed eyes where Melissa reigns over the golden and rose end of the beauty spectrum; slim too, but her body waved and dipped whereas the bodies of most slim Anglo-Saxon-type girls I know are more linear. She looked Greek or Italian and she looked all of a piece with the antique cinema too, with velvet curtains and film noir mystery, but there was something familiar about her something Seaford - and after I'd processed the images that her withdrawn but sultry profile projected onto my mind I ran through the people I'd left behind there. There was the Greek family on my parents' street perhaps I'd seen her at one of their barbecues. Or at Brighton University where I'd studied. Either of those explanations seemed probable.

She saw me watching her and smiled. 'Hey,' she said and started reading a magazine someone had left on the counter, as nonchalant as if she were in her own sitting room. I did something I haven't done much in London: I talked to her. 'Excuse me sorry to bother you. It's just - this isn't a line, I swear, but I think we've met before.' 'Really?' One of her eyebrows did a playful flick. 'Where do you think we've met?' 'By the sea.' 'That sounds suitably cinematic,' she said. 'In Seaford, to be precise. Does that sound slightly less cinematic?' She grinned; she seemed to think it did. 'Are you from Seaford?' I asked her, and when she seemed to say she was, though with nothing more definite than another flick of the eyebrow - 'I knew you were. You've got the look of someone who -' 'Who what?' 'Who's lived a long time by the sea,' I blurted out and finished my coffee to give myself time to figure out where I was going with this. 'Wavy.' I took care not to look lower than her chin when I said that. I don't know if she knew what I was talking about that I was referring to the lines of her body. Anyway she looked as if it didn't matter to her what I said she was there for the ride. 'So - have we met before?' I asked her. 'Maybe.' But she wouldn't say where. 'How else do I look?' she asked me. I began to get into the swing of the conversation. It was the first one I'd enjoyed since coming to London actually. 'Like you're claustrophobic,' I said. 'Like your mind's become too small for you and you want a way out of it, but into something beautiful rather than something dull and limiting.' 'Like I've come to London from Seaford but I've brought Seaford with me, like that?' she asked me but this wasn't the answer I'd been hoping for. It seems silly now, thinking back, but I'd thought that if she were really from Seaford and I was sure she was she'd miss it miss it just like I did, not see it as something limited and limiting that she had to shed in order to pass as cosmopolitan to Londoners. Seaford may not have the most glamourous-sounding name, I remember thinking, it may not be a world harbour like Sydney or New York, but it beats this grey inland sprawl any day. 'No no no,' I said and stopped. I'd heard a note in my voice that disturbed me I sounded crazy. She was looking at me. 'I'm going to get a beer,' I said, 'do you want one? No of course you don't.' When I came back with the beer she was deep in her magazine. 'I'm not really from Seaford, you know,' she said without looking up from the page she was reading. 'O.' I was crushed. 'My parents are from Cyprus but I grew up in north London.' 'Why did you say you were from Seaford if you aren't?' I asked her. 'I never said I was from Seaford. You said I was.' I couldn't deny the truth of this statement. But I felt deceived all the same cheated. 'The truth is, you do know me from somewhere,' she said. 'I work in the big bookshop on Gower street. You come in there a lot during your lunch breaks.' (She spoke as if I might not know I did). 'You bought a book from me today on crystals.' 'Crystal Structure Determination.'

'That's it. I smiled at you but you didn't notice, you were too busy looking at the book.' 'I'm sorry.' She started asking me questions are you a mathematician? Do you work at UCL? - also telling me about herself. In the middle of describing her big thing in life which was her video art she stopped, looked long at me. She'd seen that I was miles away, missing Melissa. 'What is it with late shows?' she said sadly. 'Whenever guys see a woman on her own in a cinema late at night they imagine all these things about her. Then when they find out she's nothing like their fantasy of her it's like like they've been lost in a film and suddenly caught sight of the camera crew in a shot.' I denied that this was so. 'I find you much more interesting now I know you're a video artist living in Dalston than I did when I thought you were just a girl from the sea shore.' 'Prove it,' she said with a delicate smile, 'take me out for a coffee some time.' 'Give me your number then.' 'You don't need it. You know where I work.' 'O yes.' The usherette opened the doors to the auditorium. 'Let's go in,' she said. 'I'm just going to the loo, I'll find you in there. You don't mind if I sit near you?' 'Not at all.' She smiled at me over her shoulder and went inside. As for me, when I came out of the loo I had one of my attacks of claustrophobia and knew that I couldn't watch the film after all. My claustrophobia is always taking on new and bizarre forms; that night I remember being afraid that if I went into the auditorium the ceiling would fall on me during the film, the entire cinema would collapse on me in rubble and velvet. And this time the attack has lasted, has grown to include any place that holds dreams all cinemas and galleries but also book shops, I'm afraid. It's being away from the sea that has made me so claustrophobic, because everyone knows that the sea is the best antidote to claustrophobia there is.