A Soul Caught in the Blast (extract)
The screen flickers, the pictures fragmented, incomprehensible. Colours, rich and bright, flash and change before Polly’s wide-open eyes. There’s a jarring noise – voices, crashing, tearing. She sits frozen in her seat, hands locked to the armrests, feet jerking convulsively as her toes scrabble for ground that seems no longer to exist.
Her breath comes in sharp little pants. She cranes her neck. The cinema is packed, the seats filled with men and women, staring vacantly at the screen, their faces blank with shock or rigid with fear. Smoke curls fuggily around their heads. There’s a smell of—what? A sharp, bitter stench, acrid and metallic, fills her nostrils. She wants to cough but there is no air in her lungs. She wants to vomit, but her body won’t obey. The diaphragm won’t contract; the tripe and onions sit like lead inside her.
The film reel seems to be stuck. It flicks over and over –wind, rain, people, water, Dorothy Lamour shouting one word over and over, her pretty face bulging out towards Polly’s as if she wants to push her enormous head into the stalls. The screen seems to be ripping, and its edges billow as in a high wind.
Polly is bewildered and terrified. She cannot understand what is happening. Where is her body? She can no longer feel her legs, her arms. She looks at her limbs. One of her legs is missing, or is it one of her arms? She can’t tell anymore. Her eyes roll wildly, hunting for meaning, for memory, for escape. She can’t remember anything. Wasn’t she going to the movies? Some film about a girl and a chimpanzee on a desert island? No, that must be wrong. It sounds ridiculous. Where is she? What is happening?
Suddenly the lights fail. The screen tears apart and falls. There’s a groan, a smash—as the ceiling joists give way—and Polly is wrenched into a vortex of blackness.
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