Loop by Brian Caswell Page B

them and looked at the house.
    The Bear’s Lair.
    That was what Sean called it. Sometimes, when I was a bit younger and Mum was working overtime, he’d dragged me to Greg’s house, so that I could watch them sitting down watching TV and not talking – which was about as exciting as a bad movie with the sound turned down and people on both sides of you crunching popcorn.
    I stood in the street and looked at the house. The light was on in the bedroom and I could see the pair of them sitting on the bed laughing. Probably at me. The window was open slightly and the sound of their voices drifted out, but I was too far away to hear what they were saying.
    Then a plan hit me.
    One advantage of watching lots of movies is that any situation you’re likely to find yourself in has probably happened in a movie at some time.
    Problem : The hero needs to get the bad guys out of the house.
    Solution : Get their attention.
    In a movie the good guys would probably blow something up, but I didn’t have any dynamite or a special-effects team with me. So I did the only thing I could. I stood on the bumper-bar of Greg’s mother’s car and bounced it up and down until the alarm went off.
    Then, as they ran out the front door, I ran around the side and climbed in through the open window.
    The phone was on the bed. I grabbed it and slid out through the window before they got back. By the time they found that it was gone, so was I.
    Long gone.
    I eventually raised the nerve to go back to the Majestic, by which time the film was finished and Mr Alston was cleaning the floor.
    I walked down the aisle and he straightened up, watching me.
    I held out the phone.
    â€˜I found this on one of the seats,’ I said. ‘There’s a message on it with a phone number.’
    His face was smiling, but there was something else behind his eyes that looked like pride.
    He shook his head.
    â€˜You finish what you started, Michael,’ he said. ‘I can clean up tonight.’
    I went outside and called the number again.
    This time, a voice answered.
    â€˜Andy?’ I asked.
    It was.
    Sean left home last year to join the army, and he only comes home when he gets leave, so it’s just Mum and me at home. This means I have a room to myself, which is good.
    Mr Alston still lets me watch the movies for free, and I still help him clean up afterwards, but it’s different somehow.
    Now he shows me things, like how the projector works and what the films look like when they arrive in their tin boxes. And how to change the posters in the display frames.
    He says you can never know too much, not about something you love as much as I love movies.
    Besides, he says, he has no children, no one to teach the business to so that they can take over the Majestic when he decides to retire.
    He didn’t say that to me, of course. He was talking to my mother. He’d dropped me home one afternoon and she’d invited him to stay for tea.
    I wasn’t supposed to be listening, but the walls are pretty thin in our house, and the TV was broken again so I was reading a book. About movies.
    I didn’t catch everything he said, but Mum was very quiet during tea, and after he left she smiled and hugged me.
    Movies look different from up in the projection room.
    It’s not the best place to watch from. The machine is noisy and you’re a long way back, but at least there’s no one sitting behind you telling you what’s about to happen. And you can’t hear the popcorn, no matter how loud they might crunch it.

THE CRY OF GULLS
    Things have a terrible permanence when people die.
    Joyce Kilmer
    Cressida’s story
    Corio Bay,
17 January 1854
    Birds. They cry like children and fly up from the saltbush along the edge of the bay. Plovers and seagulls mainly; dark spots, moving in circles across a cloudless blue sky. I envy them their flight.
    Across the bay, a single, thin column of smoke spirals lazily upwards