Popcorn

Snuff had searched Bob’s apartment, his car, his clothes. Where on earth could the missing drugs be?

‘Could a person get a kilo of heroin up their ass?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ said Mr Snuff. ‘People get all sorts of things up their asses.’

A pair of plastic gloves lay on the table next to a set of scales. Errol had been wearing them earlier on when weighing out the heroin. He picked up one glove, shook Toni’s blood from it and put it on.

‘I don’t have no heroin up my ass, man’ said Bob, hoping, perhaps, to save Errol the trouble of further investigation.

‘Well, I wish I could trust you, Bob,’ said Errol. ‘To tell you the truth, I am not relishing the prospect of probing your butt with my finger any more than I imagine you relish the prospect of having your butt probed. But I cannot trust you, Bob, which is what all of this unpleasantness is about.’

Errol stuck his hand down the back of Bob’s jockey shorts and executed his investigation. ‘No drugs up here,’ he said.

‘Maybe she’s got them,’ said Mr Snuff, peering up between Toni’s legs. ‘No drugs here, I think,’ he said from beneath her skirt, ‘but a very nice-’

Then suddenly a voice from nowhere said, ‘Thank you. Stop right there.’

And they stopped.

Errol froze. Mr Snuff froze. They all froze. There was not the slightest movement. Mr Snuff’s head remained under Toni’s skirt, Errol’s expression remained one of bored indifference, Bob’s grimace of pain seemed to have been painted on. Everything had stopped – not just stopped but really stopped. Nobody was doing anything. Toni was not bleeding any more. Nobody was even breathing.

Chapter Five

The voice spoke again. ‘Go back, but slowly, nice and slowly.’

Mr Snuff removed his head from under Toni’s skirt and Errol put his finger back up Bob’s backside.

Toni’s body began to suck back into itself the blood it had lost. The red stain shrank across the table. She even appeared to revive slightly.

Errol removed his finger from Bob again and returned to sit by the table. He seemed to be in pain: he made sad, guttural noises. He took off the glove, got up again and, backing away from the table, addressed Bob in the same strange, incomprehensible sounds. He drew his gun and pointed it at Toni.

A miracle was affecting Toni. Her wound was healing. Almost all the blood she had lost was back in her body, and all that was left of the gaping blast was the bullet.

Then Toni shot Errol.

Or at least shot at him. A bullet emerged from her body and hurtled towards the gangster. Fortunately for Errol his gun was in the way, and the bullet Toni’s body hurled at him disappeared straight up the barrel.

The disembodied voice spoke again.

‘All right. Thank you. Let’s leave it there for a moment.’

And suddenly there was darkness. Bob, Toni, Errol and Mr Snuff all disappeared. It was if they had never been there at all. For the moment at least, they had ceased to exist.

*

‘I just wanted you to see that last sequence backwards,’ said Bruce Delamitri, ‘because I think it’s easier to deconstruct the shots when you’re not being distracted by the narrative flow. Remember that trick when you’re checking your edits.’

What a sentence! Calm, commanding, allknowing. Bruce could feel the sap rising – deep within his Calvin Kleins. The good feeling he had got earlier that morning from obliterating Oliver and Dale on Coffee Time USA was as nothing to the buzz that now surged through him as two hundred freshfaced, puppylike college kids hung on his every word. They were sitting there, awestruck, scarcely able to believe that the main man, the mainest man, the mainest, mainiest, most main mongous man of them all was really there, talking to them!

Bruce loved showing off in front of students. Especially the girls. Punky ones with great big Doc Marten boots on the end of slim, delicate legs. Preppy ones in smart little jumpers and cute John Lennon glasses. Goth types swathed in black, with pale skin and purple nail varnish. Tough, vampy ones with pierced bellybuttons and who knew what else. It wasn’t that Bruce was a dirty old director. In fact women liked working with him: he was a recognized nonpredator. But this was different. This was a treat. When Bruce had attended college he had been something of a dork and had had to work extremely hard to get anywhere at all with girls. Oh, they certainly liked him. They all found him funny, with his perfect impression of the sound effects in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and his plastic spacegun, stolen when he was an extra on Star Wars. His contagious enthusiasm for absolutely anything and everything to do with movies had always been attractive. But being funny and enthusiastic does not get you laid. Nor does it get you respected by the other guys – who had all been into Kurosawa while he was into James Bond.

‘Of course The Magnificent Seven is a better movie than The Seven Samurai,’ he used to say. ‘For one thing it doesn’t have subtitles.’

Bruce had been popular at college but no kid had ever stared at him the way these kids were staring at him now.

He was home. The film studies course of the University of Southern California where he had spent three happy but sexually frustrated years. He had returned at last to the one place in the world where he really wanted to show off. This was why he had agreed, on Oscars day of all days, to drive clear across LA from the Coffee Time studios to address his Alma Mater. To spend three precious hours viewing and discussing clips from his movies. To show off. What other reason would anyone have for going back and addressing their old college? When the heads of student committees write and ask famous old boys or girls to return and speak, they imagine they are asking an enormous favour. They themselves think the place is crap and can’t wait to get out of it. But for the old boy or girl, that invitation represents acceptance at last, an opportunity to finally come to terms with the gawky nerdiness of their late adolescence. A rare chance to reach back across the years and – in thought at least – consummate all those glorious student flings that had never been.

So there Bruce sat, a king on his podium, puffed up with pride and eagerly anticipating a splendid hour or so humbly making it clear to these fine young people exactly how brilliant he was.

Opposite Bruce sat Professor Chambers, a sadlooking, dusty old Mr Chips whom the students had asked to chair the occasion. A teacher in the chair! In Bruce’s day it would have been an ace king of teenage cool doing the job, but times had changed. The twodecade sixties hangover, when youth still seemed full of infinite promise, had finally evaporated. A colder wind blew now, and students had become much more timid, more conservative. Hence their decision to invite a professor to chair this major event: they felt safer with an authority figure around.

‘So,’ said Bruce, ‘any questions or observations about the clip we just saw? Let’s hear what the future’s got to say.’

This was, of course, greeted by silence. Fear of looking stupid or uncool is a powerful censor, particularly if you’ve just been referred to as the future.

‘I would like to ask something if I may,’ said Professor Chambers. ‘

Bruce cursed inwardly. Surely this old turd was not going to have so little style as to try and grab some reflected glory for himself? Bruce had not given up three hours of Oscars day to discuss the finer points of postmodern film noir bullshit with an anal academic. He had done it in order to strut about in front of nymphs.

‘Go right ahead, professor,’ he said, throwing a half-smile at the kids in the audience as if to say, ‘Let’s humour the sad old goat.’

‘Do you feel that the same effect could perhaps have been achieved in your scene without delving into the