The aisle carpet has flattened along its centre into a darker red, and your shoes make almost no sound as you step down into it. A single houselight burns above the back doors, throwing a low amber wash across the rows. The screen is dark, only a faint sheen left on its surface, the way water looks when a pond has just gone still. Somewhere behind the proscenium, the heating ticks once and settles. You stop halfway down the slope and let your hand rest on the curved end of a seat back, the velvet warm where the last person leaned, cooler where it has not been touched in years.
The seats are old. The cast iron of their frames was forged when the building was new, and the small brass numbers screwed into the aisle ends have been polished thin by the brush of coat hems passing. You step into row G and lower yourself into the third seat in, the flip cushion taking your weight with a soft mechanical sigh. The springs underneath give in stages, the way a wooden bridge gives under a slow cart. The armrests are walnut, varnished and re-varnished, the grain showing through in long pale lines where forearms have lain across them through countless winter afternoons. You set your palms there. The wood is the temperature of the room, which is the temperature of a stone cellar in spring.
Above you, the proscenium arch carries its faded gilt around a plaster garland of grapes and laurel. Where the gold has worn away, the under-paint shows in a soft mineral red, the colour of brick dust. A small spotlight at the back of the balcony sends its narrow cone toward the curtain pelmet, catching the edge of a tassel and making a long oval of light on the velvet swag. The curtain itself is the colour of stewed plums. It hangs in heavy folds, each fold deeper than a forearm, and along the bottom the pile has dulled where the hem has dragged across the boards for decades of openings and closings. The hem moves slightly. There is a draught somewhere, perhaps from the fire door at the side, perhaps from the small gap below the screen.
In the far row, an attendant is moving. You can hear before you can see — the soft thump of a flip-seat going up, then the pause, then another. He works without hurry, bending into each row, lifting the cushion, glancing, letting it close. The seats answer him one by one in their old voices, some bright, some muffled, each with the particular pitch of its own hinge. A scarf, perhaps, goes over his arm. A glove. He moves on. The thumps come at irregular intervals, four close together, then a longer pause while he steps across an aisle, then another series. It is the kind of sound a slow rain makes on a tin roof when the wind cannot decide.
The air carries the smell of old popcorn, sweet and faintly burnt, mixed with the powdery scent of plaster dust and the cooler smell of the carpet underneath, which is wool and lanolin and something like winter coats kept too long in a cupboard. Below that, fainter, the smell of the projector — warm metal, hot dust, a trace of oil. The projection booth window is a dark square high on the back wall, the small round porthole beside it just visible as a paler disc. The lamp up there has been off for some minutes now, but the booth still holds its heat, and a slow column of warmer air drifts down the back wall and along the ceiling, stirring nothing visible, only carrying these smells forward into the auditorium where they settle in the velvet.
Beyond the walls, the street is doing its late business. A car passes on the wet road outside with the long hush of tyres through standing water. Then nothing for a while. Then a single pair of footsteps on the pavement, unhurried, the heels striking and lifting evenly, fading toward the corner. The cinema door is heavy, lined with leather and brass studs, and these sounds reach you softened, as if heard through a folded blanket. A pipe in the wall behind the rear stalls makes a small knock, then a longer one, then settles. The radiators at the side aisles tick along their lengths, each cast-iron rib cooling at its own rate. The attendant's thumps continue, further away now, near the front. He is working his way across toward the side exit, where a green sign throws a thin chemical glow onto the panelling.
You shift in the seat, and the cushion takes the new shape of you without protest. The fabric of the armrest under your right hand has a small worn patch where the nap has gone bare, soft and slightly cool, almost like suede. You let your fingers find it and rest there. The velvet on the seat back in front of you is deeper, plusher, still holding its pile where the rows have been less full, and where you touch it lightly with your fingertips the threads bend and lift again, each one separate, each one returning. The wooden seat back beneath the velvet is curved to fit the spine. Generations of upholsterers have stretched new cloth over the same shape, and the shape itself remembers nothing and everything at once. You lift your hand and place it instead on your knee.
The houselight dims a notch. Somewhere a switch has been turned, or a timer has reached its mark. The amber wash deepens into something closer to the colour of weak tea, and the gilt on the proscenium retreats, becoming only a suggestion of a curve above the curtain. The spotlight on the tassel softens too. In the new lower light, the screen seems to come a step forward, its surface no longer reflective but matte, a pale grey rectangle with the faintest pearl in it, the way a window looks in the hour before dawn. The seats in front of you fall into silhouette, a long shoaling of round shoulders descending toward the stage. The smell of the popcorn thins. The smell of the wool deepens. The cooler air from the fire door has reached your ankles and moves on past, toward the back, where it climbs the slope and finds the doors.
The attendant has reached the front row. You hear him cross in front of the screen, his footsteps muted on the stage carpet, and then the click of a small torch being switched on. The torch beam moves along the front row at knee height, sweeping under the seats, catching once on something — a paper cup, perhaps — and pausing while he stoops. Then the beam swings up and away, and he is climbing the side steps to the stage, and the soft thump of the seats has stopped altogether. In its place there is the older sound of the building itself: the slow tick of cooling iron, the breath of a draught in the curtain pelmet, the high faint hum of the green exit sign, the hush of the rain that has started again outside on the pavement. The pipes knock once, very softly, the way a knuckle taps a door across two rooms.
The houselight dims again, by the smallest increment. The amber goes to the colour of honey held against a dark cloth, and the proscenium garland disappears entirely into the upper dark, leaving only the lower curve of the arch, only the suggestion of the plum-coloured curtain, only the pale grey of the screen still holding its faint pearl. The wool smell and the plaster smell mix and settle. Somewhere above, in the projection booth, the cooling lamp gives a last small tick. The radiator at your right hand exhales a slow warmth that rises along the wall and lifts the edge of the curtain a finger's width and lets it fall. The rain on the pavement outside is steady now, and very far away, and the seat beneath you holds its shape, and the velvet under your fingers lifts and lifts and lifts, each thread returning, and the light goes down by another quiet step, and another, the honey thinning toward something darker, the screen paling, the room going on with its slow