Cinematic inconsequential non-interaction

 You’re in a cinema that you’ve come to alone. On purpose. Deliberately one seat away from the couple (you think) next to you, in C5. You’re supposed to be in C6, but the cinema isn’t busy and there are rows of empty seats behind and in front of you. It makes you wonder why, when the girl you’re sitting nearby but not next to exactly turns around to wave at another couple way back in row J (you estimate), they’re not sat together. 

You’ve left the space in between you and the row C couple because, even though the girl had moved her coat from where it had lain across seat C6, the seat right next to two strangers when you were there on your own felt like you would have been intruding. Even more so if their actual friends were just back there. Although it did seem odd that they wouldn’t sit together, not even compromising by meeting in F or G. 

Still, it was none of your business. And anyway, you could eavesdrop much better from only one seat away. You try to glance around non-obviously to see what the other couple look like at least, but you can’t catch a proper glance without making it look like you’re looking for someone, or having some sort of nervous neck spasm.  

They, the people you’ve come to think of affectionately as your couple, are chatting about Belleville Rendezvous. The name strikes you immediately as you find yourself agreeing with the girl that yes, it is an odd, slightly disturbing animated film. She can’t remember what it’s called in French, it being a french film, and neither can you. It’s only later, when you get home and remember to look it up, that it occurs to you that you’ve never considered that it would have been called something different in French. 

This realisation of your non-realisation makes you think of the first time you watched a Studio Ghibli film with your mates at uni when you were 20, and only then found out that you’d always watched The Cat Returns with English dubbing when you were really little, and you’d never thought to question why everyone in Japan was speaking English. You guess you had supposed that, if cats could speak, then English had seemed sort of feasible, and this had been way before you’d understood the geographical implications of English colonization and hegemonic linguistic domination. 

Pleasingly, their conversation moves on to revolution, as the girl recommends the people’s history museum and how great the exhibition on worker’s union banners is. You’ve seen it and you find that you have to agree, thinking your dad will be glad to hear later, when you ring him to tell him about this inconsequential non-interaction, that you were sat in the vicinity of fellow comrades. As she speaks, you decide that, as well as the fact that she smiled when she moved her coat, and seems to have pretty good politics, this girl seems like she’d probably be really nice if you got to know each other. As you listen, you clock onto the girl’s northern accent, similar yet more pronounced than your own. And this, of course, endears her to you even more. 

Don’t say anything, you have to remind yourself, on account of your homesickness. You catch yourself already imagining a scenario in which you had leant across, non-threateningly, and asked: Hey, are you from Newcastle by any chance? 

She most likely doesn’t care that you might be vaguely from the same area and even if you did say something, what are you going to follow it up with? Regionality doesn’t necessitate geniality and if they don’t even want to sit with their actual friends, why would she want to talk to you? Although she does seem friendly, and she is from Newcastle (probably), so you reckon she’s much more likely to be down for a chat than any of the other dozen or so people in here. Plus she did smile at you when she moved her coat, just in case you had wanted to sit in C6. 

But C5 is just fine, and the film is just about to start. So, instead of senselessly leaning over to initiate conversation, you settle into the comfort of strange familiarity without letting on that what you’re smiling at has nothing to do with the phone screen in your hands. 

About an hour in, as a little girl on the screen spits into her hand to wipe her saliva onto the temporary tattoo of another little girl, the stranger beside you grimaces and you involuntarily laugh at her facial expression. There’s a moment, as she smiles at your escaped chuckle, and meets your eyes across C6 in the darkness, that the mutual moment of disgust for bodily fluids on screen seem like the point of solo trips to the cinema, to revel in reciprocal repulsion before parting and going your separate ways as the credits begin to roll. 

Before you know it, the film is over and the lights turn back on, and you’re standing up and leaning back against the folded seat you’d been occupying so that the girl next to you can slip out of the row and go and say hello to her friends.