He Worries About His Kids

George doesn’t gamble anymore, but he’s standing in the betting shop and his two kids, Jason –twelve- and Samuel –six- are waiting for him outside. They’re waiting to see the new Star Wars film, and Sam is dressed up as Darth Vader in a plastic mask and carrying one of those battery powered lightsabres, the ones where the blade’s made up out of smaller and smaller interlinking tubes of plastic, like a Russian doll. Except half the time when you flick your wrist, to make the sabre ‘ignite’ and fly out of the hollow handle, one of the linked bits of plastic comes loose and all the pieces end up flying separate across the room. Sam is waving the sabre outside the shop at the passing cars, he’s shouting “Yoda, Yoda” because Yoda is his favourite character. Jay, who is deeply embarrassed, that not only is his little brother dressed up like this in public, but that he’s shouting the name of the wrong character, says “Shut up Sam.”

Whilst inside the shop, George umms and ahhs, and bites a little bit of skin between his finger and his nail. The place is full of Chinese guys in plastic jackets, cigarette smoke and scrunched up slips. The Chinese guys all look pretty happy, he thinks, as they watch the horses on the screen and talk to eachother in their own language. No-one looks like they’ve just lost their shirt, he thinks. He purses his lips, and looking out the window, can see the tip of Sam’s lightsaber waving, can hear the hushed voices of his kids quarrelling. He’s a crap dad. He thinks. Leaving them outside where anyone, some strange man with a silver BMW and hair gel, could pull up and snatch them. Or some guy on a Kawasaki, looking too good and driving too fast, could lose it and swerve onto the pavement and, and, and. He has to get out of here fast, so he slaps five hundred quid down on the four fifteen at Aintree that day, and when he walks outside, eyes a little red from second hand smoke, and stuffing a betting slip into his jacket pocket, they are both still there.

They go George’s special route to bypass the traffic, parking on the other side of the bridge, down one of the side roads spattered with shade. They’re already late now, and Jay is complaining about having to walk across the bridge.
“Dad…” he keeps saying, leaving the end of the word hanging. “Daaaad. Why do we have to walk it?”
As they hastily cross, the Thames crosses underneath them, and the afternoon sun comes down over the other sight, low and orange and into their eyes. The cinema, which is in a listed building, and still displays the names of the current screenings over the doors in that, kind of stick on typeface you only see in films about cinemas like The Last Picture Show, looms up. And because his legs are half as long, Sam is forced to run to keep pace, up the gentle curve of a bridge with his Darth Vader mask pulled up onto the top of his head like an old coal miner.

The commercials are already playing as they get inside the foyer at ten past three, and Jay pulls at George’s leg as the credit card machine whirrs and spits out his tickets.
“C’mon” he says
“I don’t want to miss the trailers”
“Yoda” says Sam.

He lets them both stuff Pic ‘N’ Mix into pink bags, trying to direct them like a coach on a football pitch.
“No, No. Not that one. Yes. Not too many Jay. Don’t use the same scoop… there’s lots of different scoops… No I don’t know why you have to… you just do.”
He gets a few of those super-sour cola bottles that make your mouth ache after a while, and rescues the bag of sweets that Sam drops on the floor.
Some guy in a cap, chewing bubblegum and stinking of Marlboros puts the two bags on some scales and presses a button. As he chews, and waits for the machine, he looks to George, like the Chinese guys in the betting shop, second hand smoke and nonchalance. George stands in front of his kids because he doesn’t want this bored man, this worthless cigarette smoking man breathing his carcinogens and cancer at them. He doesn’t want this guys aimless attitude to fucking up getting anywhere near them.
“Nine pound eighty” says the guy to George.
Ten quid? Fucking hell, he thinks, for two half bags of crap sweets? George doesn’t even know if he has that much left in his wallet.
“C’mon dad” says Jay, as George is scrabbling, excavating his jean pockets, too tight and slightly damp with sweat from their brisk run earlier.
”Alright Jason, have some patience” he says, accentuating the end of his son’s name in a kind of, haha, you’re acting like a parent now, I’m so carefree and worth your time.

He can’t believe the sweets are ten quid, but he hands over the note, and takes the change, - four five pence coins. Arsehole, he thinks- They had called him irresponsible with money. She had. And here’s this cinema, charging a tenner for two bags of sweets, three four quid for a gallon sized coke, it’s where they make the money, he supposes, rather than in actually selling tickets.

They get into the cinema half way through the trailers, and some blonde girl in an Odeon uniform leads them past all the already seated, organised families. She shines her torch onto their seats, stuck out to the side, where people’s heads seem distorted and swapped. As he says “Thanks” and she tears little marks into his three ticket stubs, he gets a look at her face, bored, with lots of eye make up and a little pony tail sticking out of her company baseball cap. She’s fantastic, thinks George, but she’s ten years younger than him, and she’s got no idea. She looks like his ex wife when she was at university, when after they had sex she would sit up, and flushed and hot, pull her hair into a pony tail, and turn on her desk fan.

Settling down in front of the film, George has to show Sam how to hold down the spring loaded seat so he can actually sit on it. But soon Jay shows him how to sit on the seat when it’s vertical to gain valuable inches and a better vantage point to watch the film. So they’re both sitting like perched birds, kicking their legs, and excited, and occasionally pretending to fall, and it’s quarter to four before the film even starts. The house lights go up and then down again whilst the guy in the both changes the reel, and George looks up at his little screen where the projector sits, and sees if he can see him in there. He wonders how many times he’s seen this film, that both his sons are excited about, how many times this projector guy has seen it before already.

The film starts and quickly George has to take Jay’s light sabre off him, as he insists on waving it whenever a Jedi comes on the screen. Then some guy in the row in front of them, some black guy with a perfect daughter who’s sitting quite perfectly on her seat, turns round to Jay and says “Could you please stop kicking my chair” and George says he’s very sorry, and gets them both to sit properly and still. Whilst the guy turns round, tutting the air, and George is glad it’s dark, as he sinks back into his seat.

It’s ten past four, and he’s tapping the edge of the seat, checking his watch, and wondering if there’s anyway he can sneak out somehow, and find the results of the horses in the next twenty minutes. Yoda is talking on the screen, and Jay is leaning forward, grinning widely at the screen.
“Yoda” he whispers to himself.
George looks at the heads of the guy in front and his daughter. His neatly cropped hair, and her curls. The two blonde mop heads of his two sons, then all the other haircuts of the strangers stretching along past him.
All the people sit and watch the film, like mass hypnosis, stoned and quiet. George tries to concentrate, on the flickering sheen of the computer generated special affects, on John Williams’ music –nothing good since Indiana jones, he thinks to himself-, or even Ewan McGregor’s accent, which is to him, the best bit of the film, as it reminds him of The Man In The White Suit., and when his father used to show him Ealing comedies.
Sam chuckles at something, at George looks at his two kids, the glow of the screen playing on their faces, both turned to unconscious smiles. George checks his watch again, half past four.
So, he thinks, it’s over now, but instead of a result he’s left gently touching the plasticky paper of the betting slip, nestling dirtily in his pocket, looking at the glow-in-the-dark hands on his Lorus watch.

He looks back at the stream of light from the projection booth, and wonders if they still keep films nowadays in those iconic silver canisters. He tries to hear the noise of the projector, the train-track noise of hundreds of feet of transluscent tape rushing over sprockets like water over rocks. All he hears is the too loud soundtrack of the film, over amplified sound effects, every footstep echoes perfectly, each punch connects with a meaty squish that’s probably a watermelon being dropped off a roof, each laser bolt hisses like a neon rattlesnake.

George moves uncomfortably in his chair and takes his hand out of his pocket, he reaches into the paper bag of pic ‘n’ mix, searching for the right sweet.

The bag rustles, George makes too much noise.“Dad!” says Sam, the word emerging like a misfired whistle, air through the gap between Sam’s two front teeth. George sinks back, cuckolded, and puts a fizzy cola bottle into his mouth. Settling in front of the screen for the inevitable, he sucks off the sour sugar granules from the cola bottle, giving a flicker of an involuntary frown at the taste; a reflex, before biting down hard and feeling the juices and saliva turn sweet, waiting for it to end.