Thicker Than Water

It was like a ventriloquist’s doll talking, the lower jaw bobbing straight up and down to convey by clumsy shorthand the full range of hontll ranguman articulation. His complexion was appalling, the skin piebald with blotches and roughly pitted.

The man on the lower walkway turned to face the newcomer as he approached, and a jolt of surprise went through me when I saw his face, even though I’d subliminally made the connection already. It was Father Gwillam, of the Anathemata Curialis.

Gwillam pointed up towards one of the higher walkways diagonally across from us. Flat-face spoke again, and Gwillam sketched something with his fingertip in the air in front of his face. It looked like brackets.

Flat-face left, at a fast trot. At the other end of the walkway he was joined by a woman - tall, somewhat heavy-set, with long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She seemed to have bandages tied around her hands, like the ones that the boy Bic had had. They headed off together towards the south end of the estate.

Time for me to book, too. I knew enough about the good father to make that particular encounter a must to avoid. But I wasn’t quite quick enough. He turned and looked up, directly towards me, as though he’d known that I was there all along.

The sun was hanging over my shoulder, directly in his face. From that distance and at that angle I’d probably just be a silhouette.

Probably.

I didn’t stay to find out.

5

Harrison Ford went first, sidling out onto the landing from the barely opened door of his apartment and checking out the lie of the land before he allowed Sean Young to join him. Her immaculate hair and high-gloss lips suggested the unearthly perfection of CGI, but in 1982 that wasn’t even a twinkle in George Lucas’s eye. She just happened to be perfect.

‘You’re talking through your arse,’ Nicky informed me curtly, wrenching my attention away from the on-screen action. He flicked a couple of switches on the projector, unnecessarily, just to remind me who was in charge. ‘There’s no way Deckard is a replicant.’

Suppressing a shiver that was purely physiological - the projection booth was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator - I tapped the glass that separated us from the auditorium below. ‘Just keep watching,’ I instructed Nicky.

On the screen, Ford looked down. The heel of Sean Young’s shoe had kicked against some small object on the floor, making it move and catch the light. He bent down and picked it up, but the focus stayed on his face for a moment or two before pulling to the thing in his hand: a tiny unicorn made out of the silvered paper and card from a cigarette packet.

After the briefest of pauses, Ford nodded - one of the most eloquent and compelling gestures in the whole of cinema, in my lowbrow opinion. He followed Young into the elevator, the door sliding closed behind him with a terminal, echoing THOOM."

"I whistled and examined my fingernails through the final bit of tacked-on action, with its tacked-on voice-over, waiting until Vangelis faded up and the credits rolled. Irritably, Nicky unlocked the spool from the projector mouth and fast-forwarded it into the can. Down below us, the auditorium went from black-shot-with-silver to pure, midnight black.

‘It just means the other detective - Eddie Olmos - has been inside his place,’ Nicky said, shrugging in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to build a whole thing on top of that?’

‘Because it’s the turning point of the movie,’ I explained patiently. ‘It throws everything up into the air - Batty’s death speech, “It’s a pity she won’t live”, the whole works - and then makes it come down again in a new pattern.’

‘Yeah, well, Rutger Hauer says you’re full of shit,’ Nicky pointed out, fitting the lid onto the can and carefully detaching it from the projector’s housing.

‘Fine actor - not the sharpest tool in the box,’ I summarised.

‘It’s left ambiguous.’

‘In this version it’s left ambiguous. In the director’s cut, the sequence where Deckard dreams about the unicorn nails it down tight.’

Nicky put the film canister into the steel cabinet at one end of the projection booth, closed the doors and double-locked them with painstaking care. ‘I prefer Deckard to be human,’ he said, tugging on the handles to make sure the doors were secure. There was a slight tension, both in his voice and in the set of his shoulders.

I let it go at that point. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing, because Nicky used to be human once too. That was before he had a heart attack in his late thirties and joined the ranks of the existentially challenged. Some people come back in the spirit - as ghosts - and have an uneventful afterlife hanging around the places they remember from back when they had a pulse.