Children of Paradise E-Book

Camilla Grudova

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 211

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise - one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats - she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur. So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise - unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers. It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry...

Leseprobe

Children of Paradise

Also by Camilla Grudova

The Doll’s Alphabet

Children of Paradise

Camilla Grudova

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by

Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Camilla Grudova, 2022

The moral right of Camilla Grudova to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the

author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 631 8

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 632 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 633 2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Helen and Laurence

‘So I went from dark to darkness’

La Chinoise

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

1967

‘Hope you don’t want no popcorn cause there ain’t none’

The Last Picture Show

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

1971

Midnight Cowboy

Directed by John Schlesinger

1969

The Paradise cinema had a gaudy interior and a pervasive smell of sweet popcorn and mildew. It was built on the ground floor of a block of flats around the time of the outbreak of the First World War, its entrance like the building’s gaping mouth, a sparkling marquee teeth grin with the word PARADISE written in pale yellow neon. They tore down some of the flats to put the cinema in. I imagined someone with a giant cake knife cutting out whole living rooms and bedrooms with people in them, and throwing them away, replacing regular, mundane lives with glamorous Hollywood ones.

I would’ve passed the Paradise without looking if it weren’t for the handwritten ‘We’re Hiring’ sign on its big dusty glass doors. I had just arrived in the city, and in the country, by train, and needed a job.

I’ll call myself Holly, like the girl from Badlands.

The current head manager of the Paradise was named Sally. She looked like she was in her late thirties, but later someone told me she was almost fifty. She wore rockabilly clothes: a vintage dress and a white fur coat with a Betty Boop badge on it. She told me that she had put herself through college by winning beauty contests. She had freckles all over her face, barely discernible under a layer of makeup. She wore a fifties style turban – the only part of her hair that I could see was her red bangs, but I could still tell underneath that she had a face like Judy Garland’s. She was a foreigner too, she had a midwestern American accent, she said she was from the same state Wizard of Oz was set in. Why she moved here didn’t make sense to me. It only seemed natural that someone like her would’ve made her way to Hollywood with a suitcase full of vintage dresses and the last of her beauty queen money rather than a country like this one that seemed to have more graveyards than anything else. Perhaps she wondered why I moved here too.

During my interview with Sally, when she asked my favourite film genre, I said the first thing that popped into my head, as she was sat in front of me in her pale blue fifties taffeta dress. ‘Clowns, anything with clowns,’ I said. ‘And Charlie Chaplin.’ We were sitting at the one table in the tiny bar, attached to the cinema lobby, her coat thrown over the one empty chair. The white fur had yellowish tinges in it, the way popcorn does.

The bar was where customers could get drinks to take into films or drink at the one table or two rickety bar stools by the zinc countertop. Whenever I touched the table or moved my feet the entire bar seemed to rattle, the shelves of oddly shaped glasses for obscure cocktails, the dim-coloured liquors, the jar of pickled eggs, olives with tiny red tongues, cornichons and jalapeños floating in foggy water like dead slugs, Luxardo maraschino cherries and dusty peanuts. There was an Oscar statue standing guard between the jars. I wonder who he had belonged to. There were photographs of famous directors and actors, in gold frames covering the walls – Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, Errol Flynn, Uma Thurman, Anna May Wong, Clark Gable – and posters of films like Pink Flamingos,The Breakfast Club, Reservoir Dogs and Heathers. The bartender, a tall blond man with closely cropped hair, was playing Talking Heads, which he turned down when he saw that Sally was giving an interview. It was obvious that he was trying to listen. The Paradise barely got any sun, but the bartender was very tanned and well built like a soldier in a Technicolor film.

Sally told me that the bar had been put in in the late forties and hadn’t been done up since, except for the addition of more posters, headshots and movie stills, which cluttered the walls. Looking at them all crowded there, they seemed ready to suddenly spring into action, hundreds of voices and movements.

‘What do you know about the Paradise?’ was one of her questions.

‘It’s really old,’ I said, which I haphazardly and rightly guessed by quickly looking around me before drinking from the large glass of tepid Pepsi Sally had given me. She had one herself too, with a green and white straw, sipping carefully so as not to mess up her red lipstick.

‘That’s right,’ she replied. ‘The oldest running cinema here. The film festival was founded by one of our former owners. All the movies were shown here. We aren’t currently one of the cinemas used by the city film festival, but I hope that will change soon. You can see he is a little worn.’ It took me a moment to realize the ‘he’ was the Paradise.

The apartment building I had grown up in had old, half-rotting numbered cinema seats in the yard that had been found in a dump. Children liked to play on them, pretending they were at the movies. I told Sally this, trying to impress her, but she just smiled sadly. She got up and told me to leave my drink at the table, saying that Otto – I assumed he was the bartender – would clean it up.

‘The Paradise shows the latest films, the money makers, but also classic Hollywood ones like It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wild Bunch, The Great Escape, African Queen or Wizard of Oz,’ Sally said.

The kind of films in my mind you’d see snippets of as a kid when visiting your grandparents, the wood panelled television set tuned all day to a golden oldies rerun channel, the kind of films synonymous with shag carpets, porcelain figurines, stale indoor cigarette smoke and lukewarm cups of soda pop. I noticed that when Sally had mentioned The African Queen, her eyes lit up. She added that it was her favourite film.

‘When the Paradise first opened, it showed silent films with Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney.’ She went on to tell me about the elderly ladies who didn’t know how to read, and how they would bring bags of sweets and feed them to children they asked to sit beside them, whispering the titles into their ears.

She gave me a tour of the whole building, which I guessed meant that I had the job. I don’t know why she hired me, but I later learned that Sally had mysterious ways of doing things. The Paradise was a Frankenstein’s monster of a place. Over the years, rooms were added and rearranged but with all the same old rotting pieces, the same red, white and gold paint retouched, another layer put on.

There was a chandelier in the lobby, red carpeted floors, gold trim on the white walls, wide and narrow mirrors which gave it the feeling of a funhouse though they distracted from the oppression of the flats above – layer upon layer of furniture, crockery and lives. There was a ticket kiosk – a cavern built into the wall which also sold popcorn, sweets, and Pepsi on draught. The kiosk housed the big old-fashioned popcorn maker, like a glass cage, which staff had to heat up and fill with kernels every morning. It was very important it was done before the first film of the day, said Sally, because the sound of the kernels popping was like many miniature explosions. There were grand, dusty parlour palms in golden pots, living off the weak light of the chandelier, copper racks holding Paradise programmes which were made with a black and white photocopier.

The cash tills were so old they looked like Victorian churches perched on the countertops, and the tickets were small ‘admit one’ types, pale pink with black lettering like tiny, tattooed fingers, without the name of the movie on them. The usher had to rip them when a customer went in so that they couldn’t be used again for a different movie. Sally showed me how, ripping one almost in half before throwing it into a nearby bin. ‘Never rip it into tiny pieces,’ she told me. ‘Customers often like to keep them, as a memento.’

I noticed a framed newspaper article on the wall about Orson Welles attending a film festival at the Paradise which read: ‘Orson Welles limped into Festival cinema yesterday and said, “The film industry is dying-dying-dying.”’

A set of doors past the ticket kiosk led to the auditorium, an electric sign which said ‘CINEMA THIS WAY’ above the doors. Sally took me into the screen as it was between shows.

Sally continued her monologue. ‘You’ve seen that famous French animation about the Paradise?’ I nodded, hoping she wouldn’t pick up on my ignorance. It didn’t matter, she told me the story anyway. ‘In it, a man comically runs into the cinema then out again when a Jacques Tati film is playing. Fans of the animation will sometimes come in and try to do the same. Though I don’t think we ever showed a Jacques Tati film during my time here. Perhaps I ought to.’

She paused. ‘Unlike chain cinemas, we only have the one screen. Imagine having several screens, it would be like having several brains,’ she said with distaste.

The auditorium had Grecian columns with plaster torsos of beautiful nymph-like men with curly hair holding them up, their arms lifted. A young man with dark hair, dressed in black who looked exactly like the nymphs, was hurriedly sweeping the auditorium. He looked so tiny against the vast, temporarily empty room. His skin was whitish grey like he had just walked out of a silent film. Sally didn’t say anything about him.

A mustard yellow curtain hid the screen until show time. The ceiling was curved and covered in cracks: water stains and plaster mouldings of couples kissing, perhaps not quite human, with long pointed ears and horns, along the edges. There must have been a dead crawl space, to fit the hump of the ceiling’s curve, between it and the flat above. Part of the ceiling, near the front row seats, was patched up with what looked like tape and plastic bags. ‘That will be fixed very soon, don’t worry about it falling,’ said Sally, noticing me gawking at it.

‘Now look at this, stay here,’ she said, disappearing. A moment later, all the lights were turned off. She came back in and said, ‘Look at the ceiling.’

It was covered in faint twinkling stars – tiny lights, in astrological-looking positions but not ones I recognized. It took me a moment to realize it was because half the lights were broken.

‘Hardly anybody looks up at the ceiling during a movie, but when they do, there is a surprise.’ Sally’s teeth and eyes glowed white in the dark.

When she turned the lights back on the young man who had been sweeping had gone.

Hidden under the carpet of the screen were a few trap doors leading directly to a sewer tunnel. Sally lifted one up, showing a dark, fast flowing and smelly river. There was a metal ladder leading down into it. ‘Never let customers see this,’ she warned. The smell wafted upwards, and the dirty water looked like it was about to seep through.

Sally sprayed some fluorescent pink air freshener from a bottle she produced from the pocket of her dress and the smell of it made me choke. It was about as effective as applying more lead paint to the face of Queen Elizabeth I. I could still smell something decayed and musty under the air freshener but I didn’t mind it.

The screen sat six hundred people, each seat with a metal plaque with a number on it, each row named after a letter of the alphabet, twenty-six rows in total. I followed Sally back out into the lobby. There were customers standing everywhere, between the parlour palms and mirrors, waiting for the next show, eating popcorn and sipping drinks, blinking, dumb as fish bubbling on the surface of a pond, before returning to the dark depths where only a little amount of light trickled in.

There were a lot of secret doors in the Paradise hidden behind poster frames in the foyer that led to projection, storage, marketing and the office.

The projectionist, a man with long grey hair, grumbled as we went into the projection room, which was up a narrow staircase covered in metal film reel cases.

‘Normally front of house staff are not allowed in here,’ said Sally. The ancient film projector looked like a cross between a train and Mickey Mouse. There were other giant, puzzling machines that hummed, like Cold War computers or fridges, and emitted whispers of people speaking: the audio for the film currently playing. The room was extraordinarily hot.

Besides all the projection reels and suitcases full of more, there was a poster of Disney’s Pinocchio dancing while his father, Geppetto, played accordion, and one of Groucho Marx that said, ‘I’ve had a wonderful evening. This wasn’t it.’ The projectionist, Pete, wore jeans and a faded grey sweatshirt with Donald Duck on it. There were lots of empty Coca-Cola cans, though Pepsi was the soda served on draught at the Paradise. Pete had his own kettle, snacks, and a stool by a desk covered in tools for fixing reels. Or so he told me when he saw me staring at the collection of misshapen pliers, and metal clips. There was a tiny glass window looking out onto the auditorium.

Sally took me to the boiler and storage rooms underneath the foyer, which gave me a bad feeling – there were a lot of mirrors down there too, but they were too grimy to see in, and crusty cleaning supplies that looked like they would make whatever they touched dirtier, but it was where I would have to go to get soap for the bathrooms, and the mop, said Sally. In the storeroom, there was a box crusher and Sally taught me to use it right then and there. The box crusher was an ugly box made from dull metal and covered in pictures of horror film stars roughly cut from magazines: Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Pennywise, Freddy Kruger and Nosferatu. I wondered if anyone had crushed a finger or a whole hand inside.

The rest of the storeroom was full of soda cans and beer, sweeties shaped like tiny fried eggs and crocodiles, the popcorn kernels like jars of yellow teeth. ‘We don’t make any money from movie tickets – that goes to the studios; we only make money from sweets and things,’ said Sally.

We went back upstairs. Sally’s tiny office was covered in posters, pictures of Patrick Swayze (one had the phrase ‘Be nice until it’s time not to be nice’ written over him) and film schedules criss-crossed with red pen. In the office, there was a girl wearing a beret over short brown hair, eating pot noodles and reading Godard on Godard. She didn’t look up from her book. Her nails were long and red, carefully done, and she had a mole on her jawline with enough dark blonde hairs sticking out of it to make it look like a paintbrush. Her hands were speckled with a bad fake tan and tobacco stains. She had large plastic glasses with greasy popcorn fingerprints on them, and behind them, eyes heavily lined with kohl. She wore a dirty black jumper and a short houndstooth pencil skirt. Her tights were full of runs.

‘That’s Patricia,’ said Sally. Patricia didn’t reply, just kept reading her book, clearing her throat as she turned a page, and putting more noodles into her mouth with a fork.

‘This is where I do all the background work to keep everything running,’ said Sally, ‘making film schedules and the rotas, ordering candy, things like that.’ There was a meaty smell in the office, like dried sausage.

My favourite room that Sally showed me was a big closet really, stuffed with fraying swathes of glittery fabric, masks, bags of limp plastic balloons with carousels on them, expired candy, hand puppets with cracked heads, plastic skulls, signs advertising extinct chocolate bars, peanuts and servings of Jell-O in cups with whipped cream on top, Hawaiian shirts, wigs, standees of long expired movie stars. Sally saw me eyeing a dented trombone, and told me that before the cinema had sound, there was a band called Madame Egger’s Ladies Costume Orchestra instead. One of them was so angry when they were let go, she threw her instrument at the screen, but it only hit the stage and had lived in the cupboard ever since.

Just as we finished our tour, a young man wearing a brown leather jacket and a cumbersome fur hat, with flaps over his ears, came in.

‘Flynn, once you’ve signed in, can you show her the ropes?’ Sally asked, jerking her head at me. I was surprised my shift was starting right away. Perhaps they were that desperate for people. She gave me a brokenlooking walkie-talkie and told me to use it if there were any problems.

Flynn didn’t say anything. Underneath the hat, he was quite handsome, with brown hair down to his neck, a wide-set face, and a little earring shaped like a Celtic cross in one ear. We checked tickets at the door and cleaned the screen between viewings.

The carpet of the screen after a show was dirtier than any restaurant floor. There was so much broken glass that everything looked covered in a fine layer of frost. I guess people found an animalistic pleasure in eating and drinking in the dark, in making a mess, leaving bags, boxes and cans behind. Spilled popcorn, contraband glass bottles of wine, champagne and beer that people snuck in, candy bar wrappings, banana peels, strangely heavy Pepsi cups which turned out to be filled with vomit or shit, sunglasses, umbrellas and, occasionally, toenails and semen, feathers even, as if someone had brought a dead chicken to pluck. The floor sloped downwards towards the screen, and in front of it there was a flotsam of Maltesers, mints and gumballs that had rolled down out of people’s hands during every screening.

Occasionally, Flynn would disappear for a while into the screen when a film was playing, leaving me standing awkwardly in the lobby. I thought he was watching the movies, but later learned it was one of our tasks to go in and make sure no one was secretly recording the films or causing trouble.

He shrugged and made a bored-looking face whenever I asked him anything. I didn’t know what to do; he didn’t show me. I picked up individual pieces of popcorn off the ground whenever I saw them and smiled at customers.

When my shift was almost over, a young woman came in from off the street with blonde hair and a bloody wound on her face and a torn-up Bride of Frankenstein t-shirt. I unconsciously reached for my walkie-talkie – but it wasn’t working. The girl laughed at me and peeled the wound off her face – it was fake, made out of plastic. She walked into the staff room and came out wearing a staff badge. She had changed into pinstripe trousers and a faded black jumper.

I saw her whispering to Flynn and Patricia, perhaps about me, before disappearing into the bar.

By the time Sally said I could go home my nice interview outfit was covered in Pepsi, popcorn dust, hair, candy wrappers, and my feet, stuffed into a pair of black velvet court shoes, stung. Sally told me to come back the next morning.

The Seven Samurai

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

1954

The rest of the staff – who I would meet gradually over my first week there – looked like they were in their twenties or maybe even thirties. When I applied for the job I was nervous everyone else there would be a pimply teenager, but I was desperate for work. There is truth to it, though: you don’t see anyone over their thirties working in a cinema. Like starlets, they have to be young, or the movies will lose their glamour.

There was Patricia, who never took off her beret and didn’t do any work from what I could see. She only read and filed her nails behind the ticket kiosk, ignoring customers as the day went on and never cleaning her glasses, which became increasingly dirty. I didn’t understand how she could even watch a movie wearing them. She was often joined by Flynn, who left me to check tickets and stood behind the kiosk with her. His voice became normal and friendly when talking to customers but he never smiled at them. He only grunted at me. At various intervals, I heard the projectionist swear loudly from the projection room. Pete, I learned at lunchtime, was Flynn’s dad. They went on their break together, Coca-Cola and egg salad sandwiches that Flynn went out to buy, eating in the projection room, where I could hear them laughing, the smell of boiled eggs wafting out.

The uniform was whatever black clothes we had. A few stripes or polka dots were fine. Sally gave me a little white badge with PARADISE written on it in red art deco letters to pin to my shirt. I scoured second-hand shops and cheap department stores, and bought black pencil skirts, stockings, jumpers, faded Fruit of the Loom sweatshirts, turtlenecks and boots.

The staff while working, all in black, looked like ants crawling over an abandoned wedding cake.

Those first few weeks, none of the staff members besides Sally spoke to me.

The assistant manager, Otto, who had been bartending on the day of my interview, didn’t teach me anything either. He was aloof, walking around with his arms swinging at his sides, or carrying a clipboard, a pen behind one ear. He didn’t talk to me but bowed whenever he saw me like a Hussar at a ball. He either wore faded button-up black oxford shirts or wool sweaters full of tiny moth holes, but he looked well put together compared to most of the others. He slicked his short hair back and folded the hem of his trousers over his boots. He always had immaculate white socks that made his ankles glow in the screen, though he didn’t realize it. For lunch he liked to eat sweetcorn straight out of the can with a fork, the same with pineapple rings. He also ate bags and bags of pink and white gummies that looked like teeth still attached to gums. He’d smoke hand-rolled cigarettes under the canopy, as would Sally. I smoked too, but I didn’t want Sally to know because I was still too new there. I only smoked on my lunch break, several cigarettes at once, and I must have smelled terribly like smoke. It didn’t leave me much time to buy food; I consumed odd assemblages bought from the grocery store in a hurry: discounted ham sandwiches, bananas, crackers, packages of hotdogs which I liked cold, mint chocolate bars to hide the cigarette smell. I ate in a quick furtive way like a mouse.

Most of the others ate their lunch in the stuffy office, chatting with Sally. Sally got endless bags of hamburgers from a nearby fast-food place and snacked on pepperoni sticks, which gave the office its meaty smell.

*