wytchcroft

We are filming, they are making a film of a film of me, my life… it’s a film already, as the light flickers, the days are chopped together frames of celluloid – it makes my ears ring, the clatter of the projector as the calendar spools past.

We are here in the café, entering together, myself and two men; a husband and a lover or perhaps two suitors… I shall nod to each of them in turn, across the glaring white of the table, like an auctioneer whilst they bid for me; my price as yet no higher than anyone else’s, anyone whose face has beauty impressed upon it.

Well, let them bid; I am an attractive woman in a café full of men, I can catch a hundred eyes here, I am under light but away from the tables the shadows are as thick as oil and there are so many beckoning recesses, like hungry mouths, so many men with hands already fumbling in anticipation. They have no notion, how nervous they seem, how monstrously unthreatening, as they fidget in their seats like boys, as their hands clumsily roll cigarettes, toy with glasses, wipe imaginary dust from tuxedos or military uniforms. They do not know. They are strangers here.

And I am not. The pretty chanteuse who dances around the tables, who sings so gaily and whose playful attentions are utterly lost upon the crowd, she knows me. Inside and out, she knows. She sees me as her own kind; we have grown together since school, since the days of watching the hard-bodied workmen strutting in and out of the steel plant, since forever, locked in place together here.

The city.

There is only one way out and one way in, this is a city underground, a city under the waves. There is only the tunnel.

Beyond the café, to the world at large, I am anonymous enough - I am as yet unknown, personal details secret, my name so far unrecorded will not be blazed to the public, not here and now where true success must be invisible.

The tunnel.

And I am in the resistance. We are here to destroy it. And only after, only perhaps with hindsight will my achievement, my existence, be recognised, another unknown crowd catching my eye as it winks at them from the footage, from our film, today. It is the film that will make me.

HE laughs, waggling the newspaper nonchalantly as he reads, “I’m afraid, Karin,” he trills, “the notices are really quite bad.” I lower my eyes.

But of course the condemnation of the film, the public, the critics, none of that reflects badly on me, not to him, in fact it has nothing to do with me whatsoever. He smiles warmly and I sit there with no feelings because he owns them. “Don’t worry darling,” his most reassuring tone, “it’s just as I said. From now on you must be only in the films I make. These hacks you’ve been performing for, they don’t deserve you.”

He looks up from the paper to gaze through the gap in the window condensation, out- out- to a horizon awaiting his triumphant footprint. “These fools, they don’t even see you,” he says.