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The theatre is pitch-black and so shadowed by its own gray-shimmering obscurity as they creep in through the slither between the linoleum doors that if not for the tug of Rita’s fingers against the shy warmth of her palm she would lose track of where they are altogether. They slip between the rows of red, rough-surfaced velvet as scattered paper-bags and lost trinkets graze against her ankles, her naked toes. Rita’s laughter is ghostly, reaching down the aisle like a slither of perfume lingering at the counter of an old, half-abandoned bar that beckons her forward. They nearly trip over the old lady who sits at the end of the aisle with the knitting needles and handful of threads, the thin young man hunched in the front seat. Some of them turn their heads. Their garish faces jump out at her like flitting surrealist masks from a Francis Bacon painting – grotesque noses, pointed chins, eyes lined with drooling black paint.
She stops to stare and Rita stumbles, the touch of her giggle shivering against Betty’s skin, and drags Betty down with her by the other girl’s arm, the two of them landing in a lithe, graceless heap together plush seats that smell of burnt caramel and dust. How did they get here, Betty wonders. Tangled bedding, silver sheets, midnights sleepwalking down Allington lane, down Belfast Avenue. Coco had aired out the rooms and the curtains bellowed until she was all but enveloped in flowing, flapping white lace as she stretched across the bed.
“What have we come to see?” she whispers, and there’s the Rita she’s come to know again, Rita with her silken purple bathrobe and the perfume in the dark, lush curls of hair, fragile like a paper-made flower that blooms only in the night-time dark. “Do you remember the name?”
Betty scrabbles in her mind for a memory, like rummaging her bag for a lipstick blindfolded – gaping frames, open doors of glass, no poster.
“There is no name,” she says, in the end.
Rita tilts her head. “Isn’t there?”
The screen is shimmering silver, figures drifting in and out of an immobile camera’s view, a darkened arena. She’s watching a bacchanal, a recreation of ancient festivities, a garden full of naked limbs and bare backs and fountains sprouting dark-purple wine, take place on sparkling, pixilated filaments of black and white, and Rita’s fingers wrap around Betty’s in the dark, sliding gently up Betty’s forearm, tracing the tiny blue rivers of her veins. The tips of her fingers, soft, dancing up, up.
“Rita?” Almost a question, almost imploring.
The film continues to play. No speech, no sound, no sense of direction. They are beckoned into ballrooms, nightclubs, balconies, towers, clifftops, coliseums. Every once in a while, on the screen in front of her, the camera’s view judders.
“I used to come here,” Rita whispers, filled with small, wary hope – her breath hitches in Betty’s ear.
“Did you?” she says, because the next words nearly scare her. “Do you remember?”
(She remembers: the smell of gin in her hair, a sore throat, late nights curled up on red velvet dotted with patches of vomit.)
“Yes ma’am, Ellery Queen,” Rita whispers back, and there’s a smile in her voice, cool as the touch of a silver trinket – a metallic key – pressed to the back of her neck. Startling, inviting, making her flinch and writhe. Betty is tipsy, drunk on the smell of Rita’s hair, Rita’s skin.
The camera’s shot bobs, like a canoe bobbing across an ocean. The images seem to multiply, until it surrounds her from all sides, splitting the seams of where the velvet seats end and the projection begins.
On the stage, glowing like a lighthouse, is a girl. The lonesome shadow dancing across wooden floorboards, a bellowing white skirt, dainty and perfect as a droplet of dew in the moonlight. This is better, grander: better than when Billy Wilder cast the spotlight against Norma Desmond’s head and illuminated it like an angel’s halo, better than Stanley Kubrick’s chorus of naked, masked figures and their bacchanal. It's The Sylvia North Story off-kilter, stilted, colored through a different filter. She feels a longing so raw and powerful in the concave hollow of her breast that it seems to empty her very stomach like pouring a glass of wine down the kitchen drain, and she thinks, that could be, that could be, that could be me.
Somewhere in the city, a piano plays.
It’s me, Rita, that’s me, she wants to say, but in that moment the screen seems to reach out and reach right through her and burst through the ceiling and all the lights of the city flame into life and Betty is everywhere.
Everywhere. She is the landlady and the hobbling prophetess, she is the cop and the pathetically trained murderer, she is the wrinkled, blackened hag crouched behind the rundown Winkie’s withering like a festered wart, she is the burn-out director with no backbone. She is all of them at once. She’s the lead and the understudy, the heroine and the outcast, and she plays them all like she’s standing onstage and holding the audience’s hearts in her hand. She could make them laugh with a gesture, cry with a smile. Betty has their very souls clasped in her hands, like ceramic figurines, like clay that could crumble through her fingers. They are her creations. She is the star and the playwright both.
(Diane is hiding backstage. Feeble, immobile. She is the puppet dancing to mere whims and fancies, dancing until the string snaps and has the ground whooshed away like a carpet yanked out from beneath her feet, dangling into nothingness, a crooked hangman’s noose.)
The melody on the piano builds as notes become tumbling stones and chords clash together, slamming into collision, fading. She doesn’t know who it is: a lonely jazz-player, a fruitless composer, a forgotten blues musician. The tune manifests and runs wild and erupts into chaotic, violent exultation, building towards its climax as buildings shoot up into the sky like seeds sprouting roots, as glimmering streets expand like flooding Venetian canals, marking the cityscape.
She feels.
She feels a deep, powerful pulsing, thick, plump and sturdy as a beating heart. It shakes through the ground, shuddering through all strands of reality tethering her to its roots. Because beneath this city, one single heart beats for all.
Whump… whump.
Whump.
She wants to stand on top of the crimson, neon-glowing billboards and buildings and scream, my name, my name is Betty Elms. Betty is so filled with hope it spills out of her, like foam-topped champagne sizzling to spill over the rim of a glass, trailing golden innards and shy laughter at the beginning of the night when all is possible.
(Diane is so filled with rue it runs out of her, like wax melting inexorably from a fat, disintegrating candle at the first light of the dawn.)
She sinks into her red-velvet seat and Rita turns to her, lips parted, wide-eyed, luminous, a thousand pixels and dots of light illuminated in the two watery gemstones of her rapt dark pools. Slow, drunken eyelids closing and lifting, slow, seductive, the very air sharpened with a moment of pure, electrified longing. She is flickering, sputtering like an old camera, flitting between two different shapes like a malfunctioning reel of film stuttering on a whirring projector and Betty cannot tell the difference between them anymore, the radiant Rita, the fragile night’s flower, a slither of perfume, the cruel Rita with her tousled dark hair and the pearl-white carelessness of her smile. Rita reaches out and touches two fingers across Betty’s cheek in the darkness, the rippling darkness of the cinema as if reality itself is being pulled apart at its seams like a cocktail dress ripped down its zip, and she tilts forward with a shaky, ravenous hunger and her thighs slide around Rita's hips like silken spider’s web and teeth bite her lips open like biting open a ripe, red fruit and all the lights of Hollywood twinkle like stars because this, this is the girl – this is the girl and the only girl there ever could be. She’s the ghost, the shy beautiful creature who stumbled onto her bathroom tiles like a wet dream, trailing water and droplets of loneliness. She is the incandescent specter who gouges her way into Betty’s chest, the only phantasm who has the nerve to rip her apart.
Can’t you be tame, she sobs. Can’t you be tame like the rest of them.
The piano strikes its final, lonely chords, and the world falls silent in her grasp, in the ragged, broken spaces between her breathing.
She wakes up alone with her temple resting against the side of the seat, curled up, a slither of drool drying on the corner of her mouth like a dried, shiny trail of a snail, the janitor’s lights beaming into her eyes as she lifts her head away from the soft, sticky velvet.