The First Person by Ali Smith

Author:Ali Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780143173625
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

I know a story about that fire exit down there, you’d told me once in the cinema.

It was back before we knew each other very well, one of the first times we went to that cinema. The film we’d come to see had ended. The credits were rolling, huge above our heads. We stood up. You stretched and pointed and as you yawned I saw the clean wet insides of your mouth, and your tongue unfurling.

It’s really illegal, you said through the yawn. It shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t know how they got away with it with the fire regulations people.

The cinema had been converted into a new cinema from an old cinema. Its downstairs was now a pub which claimed to sell the cheapest beer in Britain; there were often people throwing up outside this pub. Above it was the new cinema, three screens tucked into the skeleton of the upper half of the old cinema, which meant that the new cinema always smelt of fried food and sometimes the noise from the pub would shimmer through the soundtrack of whatever film you were watching. That night we had seen a film with Ralph Fiennes in it, something vaguely Russian. Eugene Onegin maybe. Was Liv Tyler in it? There were balalaikas on the soundtrack, or maybe I’m mixing that up with Dr Zhivago. I lie in bed now and try to remember. I can’t really recall anything that happened in it, other than that there were love letters and a lot of fur and snow.

Come on, you’d said. I’ll show you.

Nobody even noticed what we were doing. The doors were heavy, sheets of red painted metal. You leaned on the bar to open one side, then knelt down, took your newspaper out of your bag, chose one of its thinnest sections, folded it in two and shoved it under the near-closed door. This jammed it open just a crack – not quite open, not quite closed.

There beyond the fire door the plushness of the cinema simply stopped. The stairs were concrete. They smelt of disinfectant. The bulbs in the staircase ceiling were bare. We went down two flights of stairs and came to a door. It was locked. It looked like it hadn’t been used for a very long time. There was another door just along from it. It had no outside handle. I pushed against it. It wouldn’t give.

You told me how you’d been given a tour of the cinema when it first opened by a friend of yours who was the manager of the cinema bar. This, he’d told you, was where he’d come with one of the young girl ushers, looking for three crates of bottled fruit juice which had been delivered via a back door, at least that’s what he’d told her, as the fire exit door had swung closed on its own weight behind them and they went down the stairs and backed each other up against the walls. They’d had sex a few times.

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