The Cutting-Room

The cutting-room is a tiny cramped space between four grey walls. The air tastes of dust, of the scent of other people’s skin. He takes the number 28 home and shuts himself in, barricading himself from the world behind the dry-hinged blackout door. Every day he does this, sitting in a blank stupor with his hand welded to the controls, glutted on images of happiness which do not belong to him.
He’s lost his way; and he is only eighteen. But his eighteen-year-old-ness exists only in his shell- the soft skin, the trusting eyes, the ready smile. Inside he has ceased to be, is just a gaping void, consuming the pictures as fast as it can to feed a ravenous soul.
He’s young but also broken. This is all that holds him together, his sticky-tape façade, all that keeps the shattered parts of him from breaking, breaking, breaking again.
Sometimes he remembers himself as was- is reminded of his innocence in the footage of a laughing child, running through leaves until they crackle like wildfire. Look what I can do! But then he catches sight of his reflection in one of the screens radiating false heat and turns away in sorrow.
He doesn’t know how to function outside the cutting-room; he’s lost all that made him unique, all that made him real. After the tragedies which rent his family into jagged pieces and scattered them to the four winds he needed relief, needed release. Sometimes he found it in rock concerts. Sensory overload. The lights blinding, the bass pounding in the pit of his stomach, someone else’s blood on his lips and no voice left to scream euphoria with. Sometimes he pretended he felt it with the people who gave him sympathy, trying not to crease their lilac cushions and nodding into the weak tea. Occasionally he found it in lighting, the place between horror and wonder where the earth seemed to split into two-but only for an instant. The gaps between got larger and emptier, the numbness became unbearable.
So the cutting-room became his. It is at the back left corner of the abandoned theatre in the part of town nobody goes to without reason. Nobody notices him enter through the fire escape, patrol the silent corridors with their dog-eared, faded posters. See the ---n-e f-- --l! and ‘Th- -rea Arro- ---? One N-h- ---y!’ Crushed into the weave of the cheap carpet, crystallised pink sugar. He stoops to examine it. It smells of cough syrup, of sour cherries.
Now he knows how to project the images on the torn screen in the empty auditorium. Ghosts jerk back and forth, screaming silently, bleeding into the moth-eaten velvet. He goes down as though walking in a mausoleum and fingers the material. It crumbles into criss-crossed threads like very fine hessian, catastrophe of red dust.
One day he brought a girl to the cutting-room, enticed her with a gilt-and-plaster cherub from the curled stage embellishments. She was a little like him- a little lost, a little scared, a little unruly. Little little little. Too little for anyone to realise there was anything wrong. And she was little too, in the operative sense of the word. When he led her through the swinging door she barely reached the blacked-out pane. She looked around her with wide eyes, clutching her fragile angel. He took her hand as the combined voices of generations and generations whispered secrets, cried out in death agonies, murmured sweet sentiments, and held her to him. When the strip-light suddenly cut out and the white flickering faces gave out a dim light she was shuddering like a dying animal and she said: “This is too creepy.”
His cold lips brushed her jaw, stroked a line down the warm skin of her throat, pausing on the frantic fluttering of the pulse. A bird’s wings. Birds are easily broken. “What did you say?”
She didn’t answer him then; he felt her mute sob in the semi-darkness and reached out. His forefinger alighting on a certain button, and the sudden winking of a demon red eye at the same moment a hot tear fell from hers.
The half-lit figures on the great screen were all too familiar this time. He took out all the injustices of his short life on her sweet body until the clear features were unrecognisable, because he couldn’t bear to see his own despair in her. Sometimes he’d jerk up from her for a moment and watch his magnified double, her tear-streaked face. She couldn’t fly away fast enough.
He spent twenty-nine hours rewinding and replaying the sixteen-minute sequence, cutting out her screaming when it became too repetitive, fading each motion into the next sleek as a cat leaps. This is the video he watches now, over and over and over, with her blood still on his hands and her body limp as a doll on the cutting-room floor. She looks used up now, discardable. She has served her purpose. Occasionally he stretches, remembers with pleasure the sensation of the bones of her neck breaking beneath his fingers, the feeling of her soft hair in his mouth. Her plaster angel’s vapid eyes peer out between her reed-like fingers. He takes one cracked wing and clenches it in his fist until his knuckles turn white. Still he does not feel.....
They are coming for him; the grave white men who mutter and judge and shake their heads are real, and they are coming for him. The cleaner of a nearby office heard terrified screams coming from the abandoned theatre. The police are apathetic- there are so many riots and shoot-outs here anyway; what difference does this one make? But the scene which meets them when they charge through the swing-door is one unlike any they have seen before. A chemical stench claws at their throats, burns their eyes. A teenage boy sits cross-legged with a girl’s body in his arms. His face is entirely blank, devoid of emotion. Everything is wet; the girl’s dangling hair darkened and dripping with mingled blood and liquid, reels of film shiny with its translucent haze. In one hand the boy holds a lighter. One movement from him-
They are burning, the children are burning, the sky is all rancid blinding smoke. The policemen run- what else can they do? They run and watch from the safety of the back street where the firemen train powerful jets of water over the roaring, all-consuming blaze.
They are loath to re-enter the building when the smoke has cleared, but they have to do their job. He squares his shoulders. I’m a real man, nothing can faze me. Picking through the ruined rooms, the air still heavy with floating scraps of detritus.
“Shush a second, you guys.....”
What does he hear? A tiny mechanical bleep, bleep, bleep. He follows the sound.
In a corner of the nightmare room where the charred remains of the boy and the girl still lie entwined, a tiny handheld video camera is recording in a nest of curled burned celluloid. He chokes on the stench of burned flesh, of metal, blood and plastic.
There is a wild shout from below. “Oi, mate! Y-you oughta see this-”
He only has to avert his gaze to see it- a giant version of himself, gawping, incredulous, on the flimsy screen down in the gutted auditorium.
They’ve closed the theatre for good now, closed and demolished it, razed it to the ground. It never brought anything but ill, they say defiantly, conveniently forgetting the good times they had there, and their parents, and their parents before them. They’re superstitious in that town, they are, and don’t like to pass by the place at all. It’s a closed case now, closed in a panic and hidden in the backmost file in the darkest locker, they are all so desperate to forget it; every officer who entered that building in the aftermath died within a year- the officer who found the camera in a house fire.
Sometimes, though, a drunkard does wander past the remains, and through the drug-induced haze he fancies he can hear a voice on the chill night air, sometimes two. One voice is a long, distended scream, high-pitched, like a young girl. It makes his heart uneasy and he hurries on clumsily, but not before he hears the other voice. “So cinematic,” it whispers. “So cinematic.”