In The Shadows
Mar. 22nd, 2009 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purple_penAnna smiled politely at a couple not much older than her she took their tickets and directed them to the back row. The man took the woman’s hand, leading her up the aisle.
The woman turned her head slightly as they passed by, to smile at Anna, catching her eye, and Anna forced herself not to reach out and take her arm. Deep behind her eyes, Anna saw fear, and a premonition of horrors still to come.
‘Enjoy the picture,’ she said softly.
The cinema was busy, the picture a new and popular one, which Anna had seen twice already, People gradually settled into their seats, the trio’s music audible in snatches between the conversations. In the foyer outside, the house manager called for the last members of the audience to make their way to their seats, starting a small but rapid flow of people past Anna. She smiled at them all, took their tickets and took care not to meet their eyes or see what was coming for them.
‘Is everything all right in here?’ The house manager slipped into the cinema, twice as smart as any of the patrons in his dinner jacket. Anna smoothed her own white blouse and nodded.
A moment later, the lights dimmed and the screen curtains rattled open. Up above them, the projector whirred into life, throwing a beam of light across the crowded theatre, which gradually turned into a crackly Pathe News symbol.
Anna took her place on the fold-down seat as pictures of post-war recovery flickered across the screen. She couldn’t get used to looking at those pictures, people dancing, shopping at bustling market or just going about their lives in such carefree attitudes. It was as far away from her as the Hollywood films they showed every ay, though she’d seen them filming one of the news broadcasts on her way to work the day before.
When the main feature started, Anna leant further back against the wall, letting her gaze wander round the cinema, She’d been told it used to be a music hall, back at the turn of the century, then stood empty through most of the way, until Mr Fredericks bought it and turned it into a picture house.
Funny thing was, she’d always thought, that the cinema looked like a music hall, but the fixtures had been put back in by Mr Fredericks, to create the right atmosphere, to make people feel like they were having a proper night out.
It was pretend, a performance just like the images flickering on the screen before them, an illusion of shadows and lights. Anna had lived her whole life in the shadows, in the flickering spaces between light and dark – it seemed entirely fitting that she’d ended up working there.
Entirely fitting that she was hiding in the dark of one of the most public places in the city, and testament to years of training that she’d been doing it so well for over six months.
‘Night, Anna.’ A hand ghosted over her shoulder with the whispered greeting, and she jumped. ‘Every time,’ muttered the band leader, tapped her arm and led the trio out into the front foyer.
He was right – as many times as the trio slipped out past her once the audience were deep in the film, she was still startled, still thrown momentarily back to a dark corner and a frantic dash through the streets of Krakow.
On the screen, three women were sitting together in a café, heads close, laughing over a pot of tea. The film was supposed to be about one of them’s search for true love, and how the man she’d known her hole life turned out to be it, but after seeing it three times, Anna was convinced it was just like every other picture she’d seen working there – it was about belonging, to someone or something.
All pictures were basically the same, in Anna’s experience, whatever the story. Even the endless patriotic war films she’d see working at the cinema, they were full of soldiers and nurses and airmen who wanted to be part of something bigger than they were, to feel the sense of belonging.
It was something that Anna knew all about, something that she thought was maybe why she’d stayed so long at the cinema. She’d told herself it was just temporary, just until she got her identification sorted out, just until she got word from home, just until she decided where to go next, just until… And some of those had happened, and some of them had not, and just until had become six months.
Six months of looking over her shoulder, and jumping in the dark. Six months of waiting for some, and, kind of contact from Krakow. Six months of watching people belong on the cinema screen because it was the closest she was going to get to belonging for a long time. Possibly the closest she’d ever got.
The audience was quiet, involved in the action on screen, the story unfolding for them. Anna watched them, not interested in seeing the picture again. In the last row, if she squinted, she could make out the couple she’d let in, the man with his possessive touch and the girl with the hidden darkness in her eyes. They had their arms round each other, leaning close together, the man whispering something to her that made her smile. It was almost enough to make Anna believe she’d imagined the look she’d seen in the girl’s eyes, but she’d seen it in enough people since she’d come to Britain to know she hadn’t.
Strange that it had never happened to her in Poland: not before the war when they’d had to be careful, not during it either, in the months of running and hiding and fear. Nothing, no hint of anything but what everyone saw, until she’d come to London, where every face held premonitions of darkness and death, every smile at her was laced with something to come until she couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes when she went out.
If her life was a film, Anna thought sometimes, she’d have some sort of mystical sight, something that she could use to save people, to help them. But her life was real, for all that she sometimes felt like an actress, playing a part, and she knew what she saw was a reflection of her own darkness, her own fear. And maybe some of them were in danger, or suffering, but no-one ever reached out to her, and she didn’t know if it was because they didn’t see or because they saw and didn’t want to. Most days she clung to the hope that they just didn’t see, that if they did, they’d try to help her, because she’d fled everything and everyone she knew with nothing but the clothes she was wearing and one small satchel, for the promise of a better life, and she was living it out in darkness and shadows, where most people wouldn’t even remember that they’d seen her.
But there she was anyway, she thought as the film drew to a close and the lights came back up, and it could be a lot worse.
*
Anna walked home along the river, watching the reflections of the lights flicker across the water. It was getting late, the couples she knew would have been there earlier in the evening gone, replaced by groups leaving the pubs. It had surprised her at first, how few people there were once the pubs closed – more influence from the pictures, she supposed, painting the cities as vibrant at all hours of the day and night – but she’d gradually got used to it.
She wasn’t keen on the after-pub crowds, the way they watched her and called after her, but she’d learned to ignore them. It was no different from Poland, other than the language, and it was better than some of the things they’d used to say when she was with Anja.
The one thing she did like about the walk home, besides the calm of the water, was the number of people like her, making their way home from work. After six months, she recognised some of them, smiled at them as they passed each other. Some nights, she walked with someone - there was a chef, and a bar-tender, and two girls who danced at a club. The girls has invited her to go along one night, but she’d had to say no – she’d tried being friends before, and it was too hard to remember what she couldn’t say. Too hard to hide her accent when she got excited or upset.
Anna turned off the river-side onto the road that would take her back to the tiny flat she was spending most of her pay on. Cheaper to get a room, but she’d done that before, and her landlady had probably known more about her than Anja had in the end. Probably known more about Anja as well, she thought darkly; someone had to have said something.
She was already fumbling in her bag for her keys, the block of flats a few yards away, when she heard it.
There was someone behind her.
Not just behind her, following her.
Whoever it was, they’d stopped at the end of the street, not coming any closer. She cast a glance over her shoulder as she opened the front door, but she couldn’t see anyone. Just a shadow, darker against the dark, and the feeling that she was being watched.
In the flat, she paced in circles, the window to the door to the kitchen and back again. Checking the locks, checking the street outside, checking the clock.
It was coming light outside when the feeling finally faded away, and she hadn’t seen anyone. She was almost ready to believe she’d imagined it by the time she left for work again.
*
The next day, she changed out of her uniform before leaving, and walked back through the main streets, avoiding the river. It wasn’t dark yet, she’d finished work early, but she couldn’t stop herself looking over her shoulder, even though she *knew* there was no-one there.
She was reaching out to turn the toast on the grill when she felt it. Looking out at the street, she couldn’t see anyone, but the feeling wouldn’t go away. She’d felt it before, though back then she hadn’t known what it was. Back then, she’d realised far too late and now she was masking her accent and dying her hair and taking three buses across the city every week to check a post office box that never had anything in it.
She was dreaming of words whispered in a language she was starting to forget, and avoiding looking in mirrors because she couldn’t stand to look at the face transposed over hers and see the life gone out of it.
That night, followed round the tiny flat by the unshakeable sense of being watched, Anna packed up the leather satchel she’d carried across more countries than she cared to count. She left it by the front door and spent the night tossing and turning, finally falling asleep after hearing the couple in the next flat leave for work.
*
The bag sat by her front door for a week. She went to work, went shopping and went about her life, such as it was, and felt eyes on her the whole time. She wondered, once or twice, if she was imagining it, until she saw caught movement outside the window late one night, movement that sent her huddling into the corner of the bedroom, shaking, as she recognised the way he stood, even if she couldn’t see his face, and that night, as she slept fitfully, Anja ran through her dreams, battered and bruised and broken.
The next day, she covered the bruises of a sleepless night with makeup and took her satchel with her when she left for work. She slipped the key back through the letter box after she locked the door and didn’t leave a note. She hadn’t paid the last week’s rent, but she knew the owner of the flat wouldn’t be able to find her. She was counting on that, that and being able to slip aboard a boat for the continent some time during the night.
She considered cancelling her post office box – she knew there wouldn’t be any post coming to it – but she’d relied on hope for a long time and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep running without it. She told herself she was running towards life in the sun, somewhere she could be herself with Anja, and not away from men in long dark coats with bumps in the pockets. Most of the time she admitted it wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter any longer.
The house manager chided her for being late when she walked into the cinema, but he still put her into the main screen. Anna locked her bag away in her locker, along with the two spare uniforms she’d been given, carefully washed and neatly pressed. There was nothing she could do about the uniform she was wearing, but she’d leave it behind at the end of her shift.
She watched the faces filing past her more closely than she ever had before, trying to ignore the things she saw in their eyes as she smiled and clipped tickets and directed people to their seats. She knew there wouldn’t be anyone in there – they’d never followed her into the cinema, no reason for them to start that night, unless they’d seen her bag and guessed. She pushed that thought firmly aside, telling herself she was being paranoid.
‘Everything all right in here?’ the house manager asked. Anna nodded and waited for the lights to dim.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness faster than usual, the picture lighter than normal. She took her fold down seat by the door and scanned the audience. It was unusually full for so early in the evening, even though the picture was a new release, but the nights were starting to draw in and people liked to be home before full dark if they could.
‘Night Anna.’ A hand ghosted over her shoulder and she just managed to still her instinctive flinch. The band leader laughed anyway and tapped her affectionately on the shoulder as the trio slipped out.
‘Bye,’ Anna whispered after them. She looked round the cinema again, at the ornate fittings and furnishings that had gradually become home, saying goodbye silently. This time tomorrow, she’d be on a boat heading towards another new country, another new city, new name, new hair colour… another new life, and she clasped her hands tight, wanting to pray for it to work this time.
A hand ghosted over her shoulder, a gesture so familiar that Anna was already turning to smile before she remembered the band had already left. The hand tightened on her shoulder, warning, and she sank back into the chair.
‘Good girl,’ whispered an accented voice, then a second hand joined the first, tightening round her throat.
Anna knew she could struggle or cry out, but she did neither. The hand tightened again, stars bursting against the dark of the cinema. In her ears, the sound of the projector running seemed unnaturally loud, and before her eyes, between the stars, Anja’s face danced, smiling, her eyes flashing with invitation.
Anna’s hands twitched once as the hands tightened again. She felt her body begin to slide to the floor, then she was free, reaching for Anja’s beckoning hands and letting herself be swept away to somewhere golden.
*
The house manager found Anna’s strangled body at the end of the picture, after the audience had left, none of them seeing her in her dark corner.
He searched her locker and found two passports, one British, one American, and a Polish ID card. None of the names matched Anna’s, but two of the photos were clearly her.
He considered handing them over to the police, but he remembered the man who’d come in asking when Anna would be working, and threw them in the river on his way home. He called a doctor who didn’t ask questions, and didn’t ask any of his own when the man arrived with his van.
The next day, a French girl took Anna’s place.
No one spoke of the girl she’d replaced.
The woman turned her head slightly as they passed by, to smile at Anna, catching her eye, and Anna forced herself not to reach out and take her arm. Deep behind her eyes, Anna saw fear, and a premonition of horrors still to come.
‘Enjoy the picture,’ she said softly.
The cinema was busy, the picture a new and popular one, which Anna had seen twice already, People gradually settled into their seats, the trio’s music audible in snatches between the conversations. In the foyer outside, the house manager called for the last members of the audience to make their way to their seats, starting a small but rapid flow of people past Anna. She smiled at them all, took their tickets and took care not to meet their eyes or see what was coming for them.
‘Is everything all right in here?’ The house manager slipped into the cinema, twice as smart as any of the patrons in his dinner jacket. Anna smoothed her own white blouse and nodded.
A moment later, the lights dimmed and the screen curtains rattled open. Up above them, the projector whirred into life, throwing a beam of light across the crowded theatre, which gradually turned into a crackly Pathe News symbol.
Anna took her place on the fold-down seat as pictures of post-war recovery flickered across the screen. She couldn’t get used to looking at those pictures, people dancing, shopping at bustling market or just going about their lives in such carefree attitudes. It was as far away from her as the Hollywood films they showed every ay, though she’d seen them filming one of the news broadcasts on her way to work the day before.
When the main feature started, Anna leant further back against the wall, letting her gaze wander round the cinema, She’d been told it used to be a music hall, back at the turn of the century, then stood empty through most of the way, until Mr Fredericks bought it and turned it into a picture house.
Funny thing was, she’d always thought, that the cinema looked like a music hall, but the fixtures had been put back in by Mr Fredericks, to create the right atmosphere, to make people feel like they were having a proper night out.
It was pretend, a performance just like the images flickering on the screen before them, an illusion of shadows and lights. Anna had lived her whole life in the shadows, in the flickering spaces between light and dark – it seemed entirely fitting that she’d ended up working there.
Entirely fitting that she was hiding in the dark of one of the most public places in the city, and testament to years of training that she’d been doing it so well for over six months.
‘Night, Anna.’ A hand ghosted over her shoulder with the whispered greeting, and she jumped. ‘Every time,’ muttered the band leader, tapped her arm and led the trio out into the front foyer.
He was right – as many times as the trio slipped out past her once the audience were deep in the film, she was still startled, still thrown momentarily back to a dark corner and a frantic dash through the streets of Krakow.
On the screen, three women were sitting together in a café, heads close, laughing over a pot of tea. The film was supposed to be about one of them’s search for true love, and how the man she’d known her hole life turned out to be it, but after seeing it three times, Anna was convinced it was just like every other picture she’d seen working there – it was about belonging, to someone or something.
All pictures were basically the same, in Anna’s experience, whatever the story. Even the endless patriotic war films she’d see working at the cinema, they were full of soldiers and nurses and airmen who wanted to be part of something bigger than they were, to feel the sense of belonging.
It was something that Anna knew all about, something that she thought was maybe why she’d stayed so long at the cinema. She’d told herself it was just temporary, just until she got her identification sorted out, just until she got word from home, just until she decided where to go next, just until… And some of those had happened, and some of them had not, and just until had become six months.
Six months of looking over her shoulder, and jumping in the dark. Six months of waiting for some, and, kind of contact from Krakow. Six months of watching people belong on the cinema screen because it was the closest she was going to get to belonging for a long time. Possibly the closest she’d ever got.
The audience was quiet, involved in the action on screen, the story unfolding for them. Anna watched them, not interested in seeing the picture again. In the last row, if she squinted, she could make out the couple she’d let in, the man with his possessive touch and the girl with the hidden darkness in her eyes. They had their arms round each other, leaning close together, the man whispering something to her that made her smile. It was almost enough to make Anna believe she’d imagined the look she’d seen in the girl’s eyes, but she’d seen it in enough people since she’d come to Britain to know she hadn’t.
Strange that it had never happened to her in Poland: not before the war when they’d had to be careful, not during it either, in the months of running and hiding and fear. Nothing, no hint of anything but what everyone saw, until she’d come to London, where every face held premonitions of darkness and death, every smile at her was laced with something to come until she couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes when she went out.
If her life was a film, Anna thought sometimes, she’d have some sort of mystical sight, something that she could use to save people, to help them. But her life was real, for all that she sometimes felt like an actress, playing a part, and she knew what she saw was a reflection of her own darkness, her own fear. And maybe some of them were in danger, or suffering, but no-one ever reached out to her, and she didn’t know if it was because they didn’t see or because they saw and didn’t want to. Most days she clung to the hope that they just didn’t see, that if they did, they’d try to help her, because she’d fled everything and everyone she knew with nothing but the clothes she was wearing and one small satchel, for the promise of a better life, and she was living it out in darkness and shadows, where most people wouldn’t even remember that they’d seen her.
But there she was anyway, she thought as the film drew to a close and the lights came back up, and it could be a lot worse.
*
Anna walked home along the river, watching the reflections of the lights flicker across the water. It was getting late, the couples she knew would have been there earlier in the evening gone, replaced by groups leaving the pubs. It had surprised her at first, how few people there were once the pubs closed – more influence from the pictures, she supposed, painting the cities as vibrant at all hours of the day and night – but she’d gradually got used to it.
She wasn’t keen on the after-pub crowds, the way they watched her and called after her, but she’d learned to ignore them. It was no different from Poland, other than the language, and it was better than some of the things they’d used to say when she was with Anja.
The one thing she did like about the walk home, besides the calm of the water, was the number of people like her, making their way home from work. After six months, she recognised some of them, smiled at them as they passed each other. Some nights, she walked with someone - there was a chef, and a bar-tender, and two girls who danced at a club. The girls has invited her to go along one night, but she’d had to say no – she’d tried being friends before, and it was too hard to remember what she couldn’t say. Too hard to hide her accent when she got excited or upset.
Anna turned off the river-side onto the road that would take her back to the tiny flat she was spending most of her pay on. Cheaper to get a room, but she’d done that before, and her landlady had probably known more about her than Anja had in the end. Probably known more about Anja as well, she thought darkly; someone had to have said something.
She was already fumbling in her bag for her keys, the block of flats a few yards away, when she heard it.
There was someone behind her.
Not just behind her, following her.
Whoever it was, they’d stopped at the end of the street, not coming any closer. She cast a glance over her shoulder as she opened the front door, but she couldn’t see anyone. Just a shadow, darker against the dark, and the feeling that she was being watched.
In the flat, she paced in circles, the window to the door to the kitchen and back again. Checking the locks, checking the street outside, checking the clock.
It was coming light outside when the feeling finally faded away, and she hadn’t seen anyone. She was almost ready to believe she’d imagined it by the time she left for work again.
*
The next day, she changed out of her uniform before leaving, and walked back through the main streets, avoiding the river. It wasn’t dark yet, she’d finished work early, but she couldn’t stop herself looking over her shoulder, even though she *knew* there was no-one there.
She was reaching out to turn the toast on the grill when she felt it. Looking out at the street, she couldn’t see anyone, but the feeling wouldn’t go away. She’d felt it before, though back then she hadn’t known what it was. Back then, she’d realised far too late and now she was masking her accent and dying her hair and taking three buses across the city every week to check a post office box that never had anything in it.
She was dreaming of words whispered in a language she was starting to forget, and avoiding looking in mirrors because she couldn’t stand to look at the face transposed over hers and see the life gone out of it.
That night, followed round the tiny flat by the unshakeable sense of being watched, Anna packed up the leather satchel she’d carried across more countries than she cared to count. She left it by the front door and spent the night tossing and turning, finally falling asleep after hearing the couple in the next flat leave for work.
*
The bag sat by her front door for a week. She went to work, went shopping and went about her life, such as it was, and felt eyes on her the whole time. She wondered, once or twice, if she was imagining it, until she saw caught movement outside the window late one night, movement that sent her huddling into the corner of the bedroom, shaking, as she recognised the way he stood, even if she couldn’t see his face, and that night, as she slept fitfully, Anja ran through her dreams, battered and bruised and broken.
The next day, she covered the bruises of a sleepless night with makeup and took her satchel with her when she left for work. She slipped the key back through the letter box after she locked the door and didn’t leave a note. She hadn’t paid the last week’s rent, but she knew the owner of the flat wouldn’t be able to find her. She was counting on that, that and being able to slip aboard a boat for the continent some time during the night.
She considered cancelling her post office box – she knew there wouldn’t be any post coming to it – but she’d relied on hope for a long time and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep running without it. She told herself she was running towards life in the sun, somewhere she could be herself with Anja, and not away from men in long dark coats with bumps in the pockets. Most of the time she admitted it wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter any longer.
The house manager chided her for being late when she walked into the cinema, but he still put her into the main screen. Anna locked her bag away in her locker, along with the two spare uniforms she’d been given, carefully washed and neatly pressed. There was nothing she could do about the uniform she was wearing, but she’d leave it behind at the end of her shift.
She watched the faces filing past her more closely than she ever had before, trying to ignore the things she saw in their eyes as she smiled and clipped tickets and directed people to their seats. She knew there wouldn’t be anyone in there – they’d never followed her into the cinema, no reason for them to start that night, unless they’d seen her bag and guessed. She pushed that thought firmly aside, telling herself she was being paranoid.
‘Everything all right in here?’ the house manager asked. Anna nodded and waited for the lights to dim.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness faster than usual, the picture lighter than normal. She took her fold down seat by the door and scanned the audience. It was unusually full for so early in the evening, even though the picture was a new release, but the nights were starting to draw in and people liked to be home before full dark if they could.
‘Night Anna.’ A hand ghosted over her shoulder and she just managed to still her instinctive flinch. The band leader laughed anyway and tapped her affectionately on the shoulder as the trio slipped out.
‘Bye,’ Anna whispered after them. She looked round the cinema again, at the ornate fittings and furnishings that had gradually become home, saying goodbye silently. This time tomorrow, she’d be on a boat heading towards another new country, another new city, new name, new hair colour… another new life, and she clasped her hands tight, wanting to pray for it to work this time.
A hand ghosted over her shoulder, a gesture so familiar that Anna was already turning to smile before she remembered the band had already left. The hand tightened on her shoulder, warning, and she sank back into the chair.
‘Good girl,’ whispered an accented voice, then a second hand joined the first, tightening round her throat.
Anna knew she could struggle or cry out, but she did neither. The hand tightened again, stars bursting against the dark of the cinema. In her ears, the sound of the projector running seemed unnaturally loud, and before her eyes, between the stars, Anja’s face danced, smiling, her eyes flashing with invitation.
Anna’s hands twitched once as the hands tightened again. She felt her body begin to slide to the floor, then she was free, reaching for Anja’s beckoning hands and letting herself be swept away to somewhere golden.
*
The house manager found Anna’s strangled body at the end of the picture, after the audience had left, none of them seeing her in her dark corner.
He searched her locker and found two passports, one British, one American, and a Polish ID card. None of the names matched Anna’s, but two of the photos were clearly her.
He considered handing them over to the police, but he remembered the man who’d come in asking when Anna would be working, and threw them in the river on his way home. He called a doctor who didn’t ask questions, and didn’t ask any of his own when the man arrived with his van.
The next day, a French girl took Anna’s place.
No one spoke of the girl she’d replaced.
