Children of Paradise

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

Camilla Grudova

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781838956318
• eBook ISBN: 9781838956332
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise - one of the city's oldest cinemas, squashed into the ground floor of a block of flats - she thinks it will be like any other shift work. She cleans toilets, sweeps popcorn, avoids the belligerent old owner, Iris, and is ignored by her aloof but tight-knit colleagues who seem as much a part of the building as its fraying carpets and endless dirt. Dreadful, lonely weeks pass while she longs for their approval, a silent voyeur. So when she finally gains the trust of this cryptic band of oddballs, Holly transforms from silent drudge to rebellious insider and gradually she too becomes part of the Paradise - unearthing its secrets, learning its history and haunting its corridors after hours with the other ushers. It is no surprise when violence strikes, tempers change and the group, eyes still affixed to the screen, starts to rapidly go awry...

A Matter of Life and Death

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, aka ‘The Archers’

1946

Sally told us that we had been chosen to premiere a new film. It was historical, some sort of thing in the style of Braveheart, about Mary Queen of Scots, but Sally was very excited. She thought it would make us important enough to be part of the film festival again. We were the cinema where the festival had first started but somewhere along the line we stopped being used in favour of other, bigger ones. Iris’s children, Sally said, had been listening to her idea to get a new screen for the cinema, as the one we had was very old – if you jumped up on the stage and looked closely there were scratches and tiny holes all over it.

The film had some big-name actors, none of whom were from this country, but had been trained to do the accent, according to media reports which Cosmo complained about.

‘Plenty of good actors here, like our poor old Flynn.’

Sally ordered us special uniforms: white button-down shirts, black trousers or skirts (she was insistent on all the girls wearing skirts), plaid bowties and waistcoats like high-end hotel staff.

The cinema was still open that morning for a couple of matinee shows before we closed to prepare for the premiere. The cinema was always open – every day, even Christmas, for the lonely people who wanted to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and had nowhere else to go.

I was on a kiosk shift that morning, leaning on the popcorn maker, reading, when Iris came in. She told me to get her an ambulance because she didn’t feel well. I called one just so they’d take her away, but she was off-put that I actually did, all she wanted was attention. She went into the bar and ordered a glass of pineapple juice and a bag of peanuts.

The ambulance came for Iris, but they didn’t take her with them after checking her blood pressure, and the paramedics shrugged, leaving her there for us to deal with, whimpering and trying to look sweet.

After we pulled down the grate, at 3 p.m. more staff members showed up and we had to clean from top to bottom, scrubbing the walls, vacuuming every crevice, dusting light fixtures.

Sally turned up wearing a tartan dress with a fifties prom cut, a black cardigan, and her hair was without her turban. It was shaped like a small beehive and dyed the colour of cherry flavoured candy. She had clearly spent all morning getting ready. To my surprise, she had a cane with her, which Lydia whispered to me was because Sally suffered from gout in one leg, and it flared up when she was under stress. ‘Sally eats many pepperoni sticks and too much pâté.’

After cleaning the nymphs in the screen, standing on a ladder as Paolo held it, I was asked to make the women’s bathroom ‘sparkle’, as Sally put it. She gave me a pair of scissors to cut any ripped ends of toilet paper. I looked at myself in the mirrors as I sprayed them with bright blue glass cleaner. I was puffy-looking, fat, pasty. A life of booze, popcorn, hotdogs, and sitting still in the dark. Cleaning the cinema wasn’t enough to work it all off. I had a big boil on one cheek. My black bob was frizzy – Sally would probably put product in it when I went upstairs. I opened my eyelids of one eye with my fingers like in Un Chien Andalou. I held the scissors against my eyeball, feeling the cold metal, for a moment, before I saw Paolo in the mirror behind me. I dropped the scissors and we went into one of the stalls, taking off each other’s clothes.

We were stopped by a moan that wasn’t ours. There was a puddle of pee on the ground, coming from the next stall. It was dark pee, the colour of tea.

Paolo and I let go of each other and banged on the next stall. The door was locked but the locks were made to be easy for staff to pick with their fingernails. I often just locked the doors from the outside if they had a shitty mess in them, rather than clean it.

Iris was inside, slumped against the toilet, still as a toad. Her shopping cart was beside her. I didn’t know how to check a pulse: something about the neck, the wrist? I touched my own wrist and felt nothing. She moaned more and moved one of her hands. She said something about calling her an ambulance, help. We stared at her. Neither of us touched her, but we watched as her life ended, the credits rolled on her existence, leaving behind her now unseeing eyes, two blue and white blobs of flesh in a mound of hair, fabric and chewed-up cinema food. Paolo fled, running back up the bathroom stairs.

I stood there a while longer, doing nothing – Paolo didn’t return – until I finally reached for my walkie-talkie which hung loosely off my unbuttoned skirt.

‘Ladies’ bathroom to manager,’ I said into my radio, sitting on the bathroom stairs for reception.

Otto came down, whistling.

I pointed dumbly towards the stall.

He crouched down and felt around her neck.

‘Dead,’ he said. ‘But we still need to get an ambulance.’

He didn’t have a phone on him: only Sally was allowed to have a phone on her while on shift, so he called Sally with his own radio.

I had already felt high from all the chemicals and bleach that I had to use, and thought with panic that I might have killed her with the fumes. Sally appeared behind us, gently pushed past me and leaned down and checked Iris too.

She spoke at last. ‘If we call an ambulance and the police, they’ll be here for hours, we’ll have to cancel the premiere.’

She paused. ‘Let’s put her in the boiler room, and call the police when the movie is over, after everyone has left.’

I don’t remember either Otto or I saying yes or no. I shifted around all the premiere standees in the foyer to block us from being seen carrying Iris’s body the six feet between the women’s bathroom and the boiler room steps parallel to them, while Sally told the rest of the staff to go clean the screen though they already had. ‘Give it a second scrub,’ she said. ‘Make her sparkle.’

The only face who saw was the actress on the standee, surrounded by fake red hair.

‘I can handle it,’ said Sally, dragging Iris by the arms.

Otto didn’t listen and took one side of Iris. As they were carrying her, her false teeth fell out. I picked them up; they were wet. They looked like they had never been cleaned. Just as dirty and rotten as real teeth.

I handed them to Sally once they got the body in the boiler room, carefully carrying it down the stairs, Otto holding her arms and walking backwards, Sally her legs. They lay her on the boiler room floor. Following them down, I suddenly thought of the drug bucket, not three feet away from where they put her. Otto gave me a look that said he’d take care of it.

Sally put Iris’s teeth back in. Otto leaned over Iris and closed her eyes with his fingertips.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ said Sally. Otto stood back, as Sally made a fuss over Iris’s face, and her dead eyes were revealed again.

Sally wiped off her dress, put a few stray hairs from her beehive back into place.

They debated whether to lock the boiler room door, and ended up not, because Iris needed a way to have gotten in there, even though there was a risk someone at the premiere would wander in, mistaking it for a bathroom. She told me to go clean the bathroom again.

I was sick in one of the toilets. Iris had had a little bit of dried soup on her face. I cleaned up my own mess. The toilet in the stall Iris had died in was unflushed, full of piss, and I flushed it in a panic, thinking of the police finding her piss and being able to gather all sorts of information from it. I finished scrubbing the rest of the stalls.

Paolo was upstairs, changing all the light bulbs in the bar, even the ones that worked, under Sally’s instructions. He kept dropping them; the floor was covered in broken glass. Dazed, I went to get dressed in one of the white shirts and plaid bowties Sally bought all of us to wear. I was put on the door for the premiere. Paolo was sent home, much to his relief, though I think Sally did it because she thought his Italian accent was too thick to speak to celebrity customers. Sally gathered us all in the foyer and told us how to curtsey and stand, lessons from her beauty queen days. Sally worked with me on the door – I don’t know why she chose me for the door when I was the newest, maybe to keep an eye on me – nodding for me not to check the tickets of celebrities she recognized and I didn’t. It passed in a daze, Sally fluttering between the projection room and the screen, quietly going through the doors to make sure it was running smoothly. Lydia was made to hand out tiny glass bottles of French sparkling water to everyone attending; Flynn, Otto and Cosmo had to hand out popcorn at the kiosk. I kept trying to catch Otto’s eye, but he avoided mine.

I could barely tell who was a celebrity and who wasn’t, but I didn’t care anymore. I recognized the actress from the giant standee we used to cover carrying Iris. She was wearing a pink gown, but her hair was blonde now. She clung to the arm of a friend and was loudly singing a New Kids on the Block song (‘Popsicle’). Lydia, Cosmo and I all stood in the hall, near the men’s bathroom where Sally told us to. Flynn and Patricia were on the bar, which had been turned into a VIP area the rest of us weren’t allowed into. When the film was halfway through, one of the actors – I didn’t know who was who but he made sure to tell us over and over which part of the film he was in – came out, red wine all down his shirt, and tried to chat up Lydia and kept grabbing her elbow. All I could think of was the hideous chore that awaited us.

After we had let everyone out and congregated in the office, Sally said, ‘You can all go home, thank you very much for making it a magical night.’ She smiled.

Otto sat in the chair at the next desk, legs stretched out, chewing on a toothpick.

‘You sure? What—’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Sally said firmly, cutting me off. ‘Otto and I will close up.’

The rest of us went to the stained-glass pub, for whiskey. We all took off our plaid bowties and laid them in a pile on the table.

‘You look like you’ve had the worst night of your life,’ Cosmo said to me. ‘Me fucking too,’ he added, downing his whiskey then getting up to order another. Flynn and Patricia were so drunk they couldn’t even make it to the bar to order anything. They had been drinking throughout his shift on the Paradise bar, I could tell. I wonder if Paolo had told him. We all went to Lydia, Paolo and Otto’s after the bar closed. Paolo was watching a movie by himself in the living room.

I joined him, but didn’t say anything. We clutched each other like orphans. The others poured more drinks. Paolo and I were waiting for Otto to come home. I didn’t see the movie, I don’t remember which one it was, I only saw Otto confronting Paolo and me, projected onto the wall, asking us why we didn’t call an ambulance, or try to save Iris. I could tell Paolo could see what I was watching too.

When Otto did return, long after the movie had finished, he looked tired and sober, hair covered with a black beanie, a striped grey, yellow and blue wool scarf around his neck, one of those scarves from a fancy college. It was from a women’s college in fact. He had found the scarf in the Paradise lost and found box. He told us Iris was dead but didn’t say how or where.

‘Her family doesn’t like the Paradise, thinks it’s like chucking money into a pit, we might all lose our jobs,’ said Lydia, throwing back her drink.

‘For shame,’ Cosmo said in an old-fashioned voice to her, but I knew he was thinking that too, we all were.

We decided to have a wake of sorts, that night. We drank ourselves stupid. Paolo officiously placed and lit candles all over the living room. His hands shook while he did it. We were even joined by Pete who brought an old bottle of whiskey after Flynn called him and told him what happened, everyone except Sally. I had always been a little afraid of Pete – he was like a troll under a bridge when it came to his projection room, but he was fatherly and nostalgic that night, pouring us whiskey and patting us on the back, saying it wasn’t the end of the world. He told us Iris’s favourite film was The Red Shoes – he had packed up his personal projection equipment and brought it to her house to play it for her a few times on her birthday over the years, along with a white bedsheet because the wallpaper and bedspreads in her house were too floral to see a film clearly, though once he had forgotten it and she said go ahead and project it on the wall, and so he did, among the paper cabbage-sized roses and thin, insect-like ferns, stained with damp. Iris had studied ballet too, Pete said, while working at the Regal Cinema.

‘That was my first projectionist’s job, at the Regal. Iris used to take off her cigarette and snack case and do pirouettes down the aisles at the Regal, before she was married. Her husband fell in love with her in the cinema aisles.’

I looked over at Paolo, whose face was twisted in devilish terror, like Conrad Veidt’s.

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Midnight Cowboy
• The Seven Samurai
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
• The Spirit of the Beehive
• Taxi Driver
• Teorema
• The Ghoul
• La Bête Humaine
• A Matter of Life and Death
• Nights of Cabiria
• Return to Oz
• Fanny and Alexander
• Ms. 45
• Popcorn
• Babes in Toyland
• Don’t Look Now
• Phantom of the Paradise
• Heathers
• Rosemary’s Baby
• The Last Picture Show
• The Red Shoes
• Death in Venice
• Acknowledgements