It was only after I posted that last short story, ‘Rasp’, that I decided to write a post about the true story behind it. Shall I just tell you how I remember it? Everything you are about to read is true:In August 1994, we celebrated our wedding anniversary by having a little dinner and then going to the movies in Richmond, Surrey, which was close to where we lived.
There wasn’t much on but I’d heard that ‘The Mask’ with Jim Carey was at least a little bit funny and had some good special effects so we settled for that.
The cinema was pretty full for a midweek show. We ended up sitting beside a couple who were about the same age as us. The girl was sitting to my right and her guy, who I hadn’t seen much of, was in the next seat over to her right.
The main feature hadn’t long started when this girl produced a sealed cellophane bag of sweets. My purgatory was about to begin.
Over the next few minutes, she proceeded to drill a tiny hole in the bag with her fingernail. She then set about trying to extract one of the sweets out through this tiny hole using only one finger. This keyhole-candy-surgery produced the most tooth-grinding of noises – a gentle crinkling and crackling which went on and on and on… and still the damned sweet would not come out.
And all the while, this girl was keeping up an unceasing commentary on the film with her invisible boyfriend on her other side.
Trish took to squeezing my hand. She knew how I got. I tried to silently reassure her that I would not start anything but the finger - in the hole - in the bag - kept on crinkling and crackling and ‘rasping’ and something… had to give.
A voice in my head – a voice which often appears dressed up in a rational suit but is, in fact, anything but – this voice suggested to me that I should simply have a quiet word with this girl about this noise. In the words of some great man, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I leaned over a little and said to the girl in my most kindly voice.
“Wouldn’t it be much easier if you just tore the top of the bag open?”
The girl did something I didn’t expect then. She started to cry. I could see huge wet tears roll down her cheek as she let out a big heartfelt sob.
I felt like a complete bully.
I sat for a few minutes silently cursing myself for making this poor girl feel so bad. I couldn’t leave it at that, I had to apologise to her.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, looking at the screen, “I really didn’t mean to upset you,”
The girl tuned to me angrily and, in a very loud voice, said, “Shut up, just shut up, you’ve been annoying me all evening. Just shut up!”
The entire cinema was suddenly aware of us.
One of my many failings, arguably my greatest one, is that I never know when I am at the end of my tether. I am given no warning. One second I am, to my mind, the epitome of sweetness and light, the next moment I can be gone, real real gone. This happens less now as I get older but it can still happen. I have to tread carefully.
When this noisy girl told me to shut up, I immediately fell far beyond the end of my tether and my base instincts marched in took over.
“Well that’s just fucking rich,” I roared at her, “You sit there all night, blabbing, and… fingering your little crinkley bag and then you have the gall to tell me to shut up?”
The girl started to cry. No liddle bitty tear this time, we were talking floods.
A huge shadow fell over me. Her boyfriend was ready to enter the fray. He stood up and inched past her. I’m sorry to swear again so soon but he was fucking enormous, he really was.
“You,” he boomed, “stand up.”
“You,” a disgruntled punter from the back muttered, “sit down.”
At this point his poor upset girlfriend pulled on the big guy’s sleeve and said, “let’s go, I want to go.”
“No way, I’m gonna tear_”
“Let’s just go… please.”
So they gathered up their stuff and they left. But, as he was going, the big guy calmly said the following words to me, “I will be waiting outside for you and when you come out I am going to kill you.”
Okaaaayyy.
I felt just awful, like a criminal. That always happens when I lose my cool.
Trish and I left shortly afterward, at Trish’s request although I wasn’t sorry to go. We left through a fire exit at the rear, walked to a nearby bus stop and got a bus home.
The bus went past the front of the cinema. The big guy and his girlfriend were sitting on the steps outside. I swear to God they were.
I’ve never watched ‘The Mask’. Is it any good?
FOOTNOTE
Interestingly, when I went and researched the writing of the story, I found my memory to be suspect and my perceived truth to be actually completely false.
The above story is true but the timeline is all wrong.
The above ‘cinema argument’ did not inspire me to write ‘Rasp’. In fact, the story had been written a full year earlier. I had completely forgotten this fact and, over the years, had totally come to associate the events described above with the writing of this story.
This means that, when the above fight was unfolding, my story was already written. Did it occur to me at the time that this was life-imitating-fiction quite scarily? I don’t recall that it did.
The facts are irrefutable. We always went to see movies when they first came out and ‘The Mask’ did not come out until 1994. My story ‘Rasp’ was fully complete in 1993. As soon as I realised this was true, I immediately recalled the actual events behind the story and they are as simple as they are unexciting.
The facts (as they say on ‘Pushing Daisies’) are these:
One Saturday night in 1993, Trish and I went to see ‘Indecent Proposal’ in the West End. (Don’t judge us on these movies, we saw everything back then). The guy in the seat behind me talked non-stop all the way through the film. He drove me completely mad but I said nothing. Instead I went home and sat up half the night writing the story that’s in my previous post.
That’s really all there was to it.
Yet I had forgotten this truth completely and convinced myself that an entirely different version of reality was true. Isn’t memory a funny thing?
Or perhaps it’s just mine…
