Free First Person and Other Stories by Ali Smith Page B

what? you say.
    What I was wondering, I say, is whether or not, if you were trapped in there, well, not you, I mean one, someone, anyone, if someone was trapped in there and the door had shut and everybody’d gone home, do you think there’d still be any lights on in there?
    Eh, you say.
    Do you think there’s a general lighting panel in that cinema where all the lights, including the ones in the back corridors and stairs, get switched off last thing? I say. I mean, what if someone was trapped in there and nobody knew she or he was there? I mean, would he or she be standing waiting for someone to come and look for him or her, and then suddenly the lights would just flick off and that’d be it, dark in there till someone somewhere came in the next day and switched all the lights in the building on again?
    Yes, but what kind of a fire exit has no way out? you say.
    Or do you think the lights are always on inthere, I say, like emergency lighting, regardless of the cinema being open or closed?
    It sounds illegal to me, you say. Where is this?
    Don’t you remember? I say.
    The thing is, you don’t. You don’t remember anything about it, or about showing me it, or about you folding your magazine to keep the door open. You don’t remember us calling it the fire excite on the way home. You don’t remember anything.
    Go back to bed, you say. Phone me in the morning. Phone me on my lunchbreak. Go to sleep now. It’s the middle of the night. I’ll call you tomorrow. Good night.
    So I do as you say. I go back to bed. But then because you told me to do it and I did it, I get annoyed at myself and throw the duvet off me. It falls on to the floor.
    I sit on the floor wrapped in the duvet in the dark.
    I ask myself why I didn’t go down and help the woman, or at least check that she didn’t need help. I ask myself why I didn’t just mention it to an usher on my way out. Why did I do that, why did I just walk out of the cinema like that, without a word, even though I knew someone might be having a rough time?
    My phone buzzes in my hand. The screen says it’s you.
    Did I wake you? you say.
    Yes, I lie. I was really deeply asleep. You did.
    Sorry, you say.
    Fair enough, I say. That makes us equal now.
    I remembered something I wanted to tell you, you say.
    About the cinema and the exit? I say.
    No, about me walking home from town yesterday, you say.
    You tell me how you were just walking along the road towards your new place and something hit you on the head, bounced off you and hit the road in front of you. You looked down at it on the pavement. It was a tiny McDonalds milk carton, rocking from side to side. A bus had just passed you. On its top deck was a bunch of adolescent girls. They were giving you the finger out of its back window. Then you watched them pass another pedestrian, a woman walking ahead of you. The girls threw a handful of the same small milk cartons out of the top window at her. Some of them hit her. She saw the girls in the bus giving her the finger. She stopped in the street. She bent down and picked up one of the tiny milk cartons and she threw it back at the bus.
    This makes me laugh. You’re laughing too; we’re both laughing into each other’s ears indifferent rooms, in different houses, in different parts of the city, at four a.m. in the morning.
    It’s getting light outside. The birds are waking up. I think about what it would be like to be in the dark and maybe not know what time it is. I tell you about the woman, how she went through the fire doors, and about her stuff left on the seat and under it.
    There’s no way out of there, I say. I’m amazed you don’t remember. There was just a locked door, and another locked door next to it.
    Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, you say. Someone will have found her, you say. They’ve probably sorted it now, you say. Regulations will have made them make it a proper exit by now, you say. She’ll have walked through the wall like that man