The Man In The Seventh Row (23 page)

Roy looks away from Deckard. There is a far, faraway look in Roy's eyes.

'I've seen the fiery angels fall, heard the thunder ride around the shores.' He sighs as if about to expire and talks again, very slowly. 'When I die those memories will all be lost ...'

Anna knows what comes next, or what should come next. It is etched in her memory from the time she sobbed as she was swept away by the pathos of the replicant's plight and Jon sighed in exasperation at the ridiculousness of a robot's death scene. Roy sits next to her in silence, not moving at all, as if only his shell is there, but the real Roy is somewhere else. She looks at the ghostly face beside her in the eerie twilight that bounces back from the screen.

'Like tears in rain,' she whispers, and she raises a finger to wipe her eye.

'Like tears in rain,' the Roy in the film repeats, gently; and he looks away from Deckard, looks straight at Anna in the seventh row.

What was it Tyrell had said? 'The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.' And then? 'And you have burned so very, very brightly ... Roy'. He said that when she saw the film with Roy. He said that when she saw the film with Brad. He said that when she saw the film with Jon. She did not imagine it. Tyrell called the character Roy.

She remembers the detail of the scene she missed when she went for Coca-Cola, the scene when Bryant produces the records of the other replicants who escaped with Leon. She remembers all the details. Zhora, a member of an off-world kick-murder squad. Pris, a pleasure model. And their leader. Rutger Hauer's character isn't just called Roy. She remembers now, clear as day. His name is Roy Batty and it always was. But if he is Roy Batty, who is the man in the seventh row who claims the identity of a character in a film, not even a human character, but a robot who cannot even be sure that his memories are his own?

Harrison Ford is readying himself for the voice-over in which he says that he does not know why Roy saved his life, maybe he just fell in love with life, the idea of life; and Deckard will suggest that all Roy wanted were answers to the fundamental questions about where he had come from, where he was going and how long he might have.

'I've looked into the face of fear,' says Roy. 'And I've looked into the face of love.' He says a name. Not Deckard's name, but Anna's name.

Anna gasps. She wants to break away from this game, this fantasy. She wants to return to reality, return to the familiar film with Harrison Ford as Deckard and Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty. She wants to stop imagining Roy Batty being played by the man beside her. But she can't.

'Time to die,' Roy tells Deckard and he frees the white dove, which soars up into the perpetually wet grey sky, the wet grey sky so like an Edinburgh autumn afternoon. He looks again at Deckard, as if summoning his final strength to pull him onto the roof and save his life. He releases his grip. Deckard falls backwards. He plunges towards the ground, getting smaller and smaller as he falls.

Roy turns round and Sean Young is waiting for him, wearing a fur coat that she might have borrowed from Lauren Bacall or Mary Astor.

'Tyrell lied to me,' says Roy's voice on the soundtrack, 'when he said I had only four years to live. The virus he talked about, the seizure in my hands ... in laymen's terms that really was just a form of arthritis, or rust, take your pick. I was a new type of replicant with no termination date. Rachael and I were the only two.'

Roy shivers in the cold rain and Rachael wraps her coat around his shoulders as they walk away across the rooftop puddles.

'I don't know how long we will have together. But then again who does?'

Roy and Anna stay there, in the cinema, until the credits are finished and the lights go up. 'What does it mean?' asks Anna in a small, shaky voice.

'It's about loneliness,' says Roy, 'The only characters that feel real emotion and affection ... and love are the replicants. I think that's why Roy saved Deckard's life.'

'But, he didn't,' says Anna, quietly.

The colour drains from Roy's face. He is not quite sure what she means. Surely she cannot have seen what he saw.

'Roy didn't save his life. Roy let him fall ... You let him fall.' She looks into his blue eyes. They have the same faraway look she had seen in the film when Roy Batty talked about what he had seen.

'I think I'm going mad. I meet a man from nowhere, I take him home, I sleep with him ... I ... I fall in love with him, damn it. And suddenly I realise he is masquerading as a robot from a fucking science-fiction film, because he can't actually be a character out of a film. Can he?'

Roy shakes his head. Her voice is rising now.

'Who are you? Who are you next? James Bond? Harry Lime? Mel Gibson? Who are you?'

In response to the question the man from the seventh row does something very strange. He unzips his fly.

25

Anna waits with the same confused uncertainty with which she had watched the end of the film. She frowns. There have been some crazy things going on, but ...

Roy pulls out a brown linen money belt that he has been wearing around his waist. From the pocket of it he produces a little pink booklet, which he hands to Anna. Above a golden lion and unicorn it says 'European Community, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. Below the beasts it says 'Passport'.

The passport automatically opens at a page that carries a United States visa. American visas are not like other visas. A rubber-stamp will not suffice for the
US
of A. No, the United States has embossed, coloured paper visas with all the grandeur and technology of a bank note, over-stamped with an eagle and partially covered in cellophane that is transparent, but if you hold it up to the light you can see golden eagles on the cellophane.
US
visas take up a whole page to reflect the importance of the country.

Anna is not interested in the visa. She knows he is in America and she fumbles impatiently with the little book. You would think that they would put the passport holder's details at the front. But no, that would be too simple for the British.

They used to put them at the front in the old days when Britons had big black hardback passports that reflected the importance of the British Empire. But now Britain puts the passport holder details at the back to reflect the post-empire backwardness of the country. On the inside back page. And they do not even put the details the right way up.

Anna turns the passport sideways and looks into the clear blue pools of eyes that had mesmerised her in the movie that had just played in her mind, the movie she thought she saw on the screen of Mann's Chinese Theatre, or rather the latter part of the movie she thought she saw there. The picture in the passport is certainly not Rutger Hauer or the Roy Batty that Hauer created, as familiar from posters, video covers, album covers, photographs, the Roy Batty who was an established part of post-modernist culture. The blue eyes that stare out at her are the eyes of the man beside her now.

She glances at the man and then back at the passport, as if checking details like a border guard before permitting entry to her country. There is a pronounced dimple in his chin.

'Batty,' it says under 'Surname/Nom (1)'. And below that 'Roy'. Roy Batty. Like he said. British citizen. Male. Born in Edinburgh in 1957. Of course it gives an exact date, but the exact date comes no closer to registering on Anna's consciousness than the passport number in the corner. Batty. Roy. British. Edinburgh. What else? Children. Enfants. The figure 1. She wants to see the child. She wants to see a picture of the child. But there is no picture.

Roy seems to read her thoughts. He is taking something from a battered black leather wallet, which she can see at once is a small photograph. But before she can take it her eye is caught by another detail in the passport. This time on a page at the front. A heading that runs sideways across the pink page, a page of swirls that looks like the creation of a bored child with a spirograph.

'Children/Enfants' it says. Why do they put the passport holder at the back and his children at the front. There is only one child, one enfant, one single line of black print to say Batty, Josephine R, 1/3/89, F. One child. Not even one child. For the page is stamped 'United Kingdom Passport Agency ... Deceased'.

A thought crosses Rachel's mind.

'What does the R stand for?' she asks, limply. It could be Rachael.

'Rose,' says Roy. 'As in Rosebud.'

Anna thirstily drinks in the air, fills her lungs, and lets out a long, terrible, sad sigh. Without saying anything, she takes the photograph from Roy, takes the photograph from Roy Batty, the Roy beside her in the lobby of the cinema. She looks at Roy's beautiful deep blue eyes but not on Roy, not on a cinema screen, but in the face of a smiling, coffee-coloured little girl in a red duffle coat, laughing as her swing swings towards the camera, kicking up her little blue wellingtons. She was full of life and laughter and love. You could see it in her eyes and her smile and the way she was. Anna looks again at Roy and realises that they are not, after all, the same eyes. For Roy's eyes are no longer the clear blue of carefree sunny days. They are clouded with the sadness of knowing that he will never again push this little brown girl on her swing, never again see her loving smile.

Anna looks deep, deep, into Roy's eyes and sees the pain. She does not know what to say. She wants to say sorry, but it seems so hopelessly, pathetically inadequate. Her expression remains one of confusion. Her expression says nothing, but asks a question

'How?' Asks it again and again.

Somehow they have made their way from the lobby to the entrance, where she recognises the man in the yellow shirt and shorts and baseball cap.

'Actress Norma Talmadge visited the construction site and accidentally trod in the wet cement,' he says.

'Your name really is Roy Batty,' says Anna.

'Yes, it really is Roy Batty,' says Roy.

'Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Senior followed her example at the premiere of
King of Kings
,' says the man in yellow.

'So the
Blade Runner
thing is ... just coincidence?'

'I think so,' says Roy. 'More or less. I think it was just coincidence ... at first.'

'And the greatest stars still come here to record their footprints and handprints in the sidewalk ... for your enjoyment.'

'And your daughter . . ?' says Anna, and her voice trails away into silence.

26

Silhouettes of buildings. A bell rings. The first words appear
: '
GCF
presents', whatever
GCF
is. Another logo, Eagle-Lion Distributors, imposed upon a circle, the Stars and Stripes within the upper semi-circle, the Union Jack the lower, and an eagle and a lion on top of their respective flags. Obviously some sort of transatlantic alliance, thinks Anna, significantly, not quite sure if it is real, not quite sure what to expect from this classic movie, this hitherto classic movie.

The roar of a train is heard as the logo fades, and a monochrome picture of a station appears. A locomotive thunders through the station without stopping, leaving a cloud of thick grey smoke in its wake. Milford Junction. The first thumping notes of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto are heard on the soundtrack as the white lettering of the title fills the screen –

'Sam Peckinpah's
Brief Encounter
'.

Roy and Anna look at each other. A trip to the cinema was never this interesting with Jon.

Jon had declared
Brief Encounter
was very French and compared it with a bunch of French movies Anna had never heard of. What would he have made of Sam Peckinpah's
Brief Encounter
? Anna has a feeling that it is not really going to be Sam Peckinpah's
Brief Encounter
so much as Roy Batty's.

Another train draws to a halt. A single figure steps down from it. A man dressed all in black, from his stetson to his riding boots. Around his waist a gunbelt and a Colt 45. On his shoulder he carries a saddle. He looks around the empty platform as the train slowly pulls away behind him. The next credit appears.

'Starring Celia Johnson and Roy Batty'.

Both Roy and Anna see Roy Batty as the man in black. She wonders if others in the cinema see him too, and looks around to find out if anyone seems surprised. The cinema is still and faces stare intently at the screen, betraying no sign of anything untoward. Roy does not need to look. He knows that the rest of the audience is watching some dull romance with Trevor Howard.

The man in black crosses the railwayline to the saloon, where a grey-haired woman with a prominent chin is tending bar. With her hair up and her lacy dress, she looks more like a school teacher than a barmaid. Roy's character recognises the big wall clock with the Roman numerals. He has seen it before, in a little town called Hadleyville, watched it tick around to noon, signalling the arrival of another train in another station in another world.

He strides over to the bar, which is cluttered with cups and small jugs and what look like pastries. He lays his saddle down at his feet.

'Whisky,' he says, in a brisk, no-nonsense tone, looking the woman straight in the eye.