Part Three - Margaret

It was difficult to keep control of herself. The alarm was very loud.
No-one had told her there would be a drill. She hovered, watching the patrons rise from their seats.
‘Not those doors please,’ she said.
She said: ‘Not those doors!’
But it was no use, they either weren’t listening or they couldn’t hear. Dozens of them had walked down and opened the emergency doors.
She couldn’t remember what was supposed to happen. The last drill had been months ago. And to run a drill during business hours? – but perhaps it was children, she realised. Perhaps children had gotten into the fire alarm and set it off.
A patron stumbled into her and said:
Margaret turned to leave.
But the patron, a fat woman, took hold of her arm.
She said:
Margaret said: ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to a manager.’
Impossible to hear anything over the alarm. It was deafening.
And the patrons were everywhere, going where they weren’t supposed to – Margaret had to stifle a scream.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, she knew that. But she didn’t know what to do.

The noise was ringing through the whole complex. Ringing from above, ringing up from below. She looked around for the shift manager, but there were only patrons, milling shapes, dozens of people, hundreds maybe, pouring out of different theatres and rushing to the stairs and the escalators.
Bumping, jostling. ‘Watch where you’re _______ going, ____.’ A man had almost fallen down the escalator shaft.
She spotted uniforms, a couple of the girls hurrying out amongst the customers. Who was the shift manager tonight? She couldn’t even remember that.
Margaret limped into the staff room. The sound had driven all the thoughts from her head. You’d expect to leave it behind you, but you couldn’t get away from it - it was in here too, loud and immediate.
She checked the roster. It was Arthur. That was bad. As a manager Arthur was short tempered even under normal conditions. He’d said to her: ‘Margaret we don’t need to keep you on. We don’t need to pay you if you're not doing your job.’
The floor shook, she almost fell. It shook again, and again.

And the alarm rang and rang and rang and rang.
She'd thought that they'd come find her in the staff room, but when it was clear that they wouldn't, that she'd made another mistake – they were somewhere else, out on the
water
and she would invariably be blamed for not joining them – she pushed the table over to block the door. Then she crouched in a corner with her headphones on.

Finally the alarm stopped. She barely registered this; the sound had blasted itself onto her eardrums as a perpetual ringing, and the howling anxiety it brought with it had pushed her further and further inside herself.
The floor shook and shook. Margaret sat amongst a devastation of fallen paperwork and bulletin boards. She stared across the room at a poster on the far wall, a Coca Cola poster in which grotesque eyeless monsters bared their teeth at her, appeared to scream.
They made her think of the child, Shona's offspring, with its pistol and its evil face. “Blam blam”.
“You're dead you thirsty _____.”

Later the lights went out.
Time passed strangely in the black silence.
Flailing limbs drowned faces pressed up against the glass as the buses sank deeper into the blue black water.

Margaret roused herself, lifted her head.
Listened through the insulation of her headphones.
There was nothing. The panic had stopped.
The shaking had stopped.

She shifted onto her knees, then stood.
Painfully. She'd been sitting on her leg.
She fumbled through the darkness for a moment before she remembered her torch. The staff room was in a terrible state. She'd have to tidy it before she clocked off, but she didn't know where to start.
She shifted the beam across to the barricaded door, watched it with some apprehension.
No-one had told her there'd be a drill.
Pangs in her leg, threats of a cramp, she needed to move it.

Outside the foyer, the snack counter and the escalator shafts were as dark and lifeless as the staff room. She went to the counter and found that the till had fallen over, as had dozens of bags of M&Ms and Maltesers, the pre-filled bags of popcorn, a dirty feast scattered across the linoleum.
She could hear the sound of dripping water from somewhere below.
But something strange was going on, because the films were still running. She could hear the familiar movies sounds, distant through the walls, of shouting and screams and thuds and thumps. Car engines roaring, glass breaking. The anonymous bass grumble of things being destroyed.
Had the patrons come back in?
Were they were running the films from where they'd left off? Surely they'd have done something about the lights. A chill ran across her shoulders, and a voice tried to warn her of something but it was quickly smothered.
She walked to the top of the steps, and of the escalators coming up, which had stopped.
Someone was lying there, on the steps. She lay in such a way that her head was on a lower step than her feet, with her hair spread out and her skirt hiked up immodestly. One of the girls, she realised. The one who'd told Margaret she didn't need to always watch the same movie.
Beyond her, down near the ground floor ticket counter, she again heard the dripping water. She moved the torch beam and it found a man standing there, in front of the big poster display. He had his head tilted down, and two streams of dirty brown water were pouring from his eyes onto the white tiles. Like a funny exaggeration of crying. He just stood there, and the water splashed out for a while longer. Then it slowed to a trickle.
Margaret opened her mouth to say something, but decided against it. She stepped back, a little quickly, and the torch "ting"ed against the metal railing.
The man looked up. His eyes were weeping black cavities. He said: _______ .
He staggered towards the foot of the steps.

Margaret limped past the queuing point and the ticket collection podium, into the corridor which accessed the theatres.
She considered the toilets, and the door to the large cinema, but decided on a cinema further down. Her theatre, the one screening Land's End.
Her shock-clouded mind cautioned her not to run. The man couldn't see. He couldn't catch up, and there was no danger of him finding her. To reassure herself she cast the beam back to the foyer, and while she could certainly hear his slow wet footsteps mounting the steps, the man himself had yet to materialise.
So no cause for alarm.
She swung through the cinema door and felt a cold draft on her cheek. The theatre was filled with faint bluish light, and as Margaret limped further inside it seemed for a moment as if the film had resumed playing, or a different film, a disaster film set on the waterfront at night. The used car lot behind the theatre complex lay in a ruin of upturned cars (although none were burning) and beyond that Te Papa had been gouged, as if a child had taken clumsy handfuls out of an enormous cake.
Margaret felt suddenly exhausted. She took short, shaking steps up into the back of the cinema, the loose end of her headphones cord trailing behind her.
The back rows were fully intact; she gratefully collapsed into a seat there.
Collapsed and waited to see if the man would find his way into the theatre. What was left of the theatre.
But if you let your mind wander, as Margaret did now, you could almost convince yourself that it was a film, that the screen and the cinema's front wall hadn't fallen away, and that what you were watching was part of the show, light dancing onto canvas.
“Only a movie”. A slow, quiet movie where often nothing moved, but elsewhere there was shouting and running, and distant fires which shone their amber light onto the rubble before her, and the smoke from which sometimes drifted into frame, momentarily obscuring the view.
And often nothing moved, but the devil was in the details. If you watched carefully you saw a section of the museum's wall crumble, and all sorts of strange items come tumbling out – mannequins, skeletons, the wing of an old aeroplane. If you looked closer you'd see the shapes of people moving within the innards of the vast museum – struggling, fighting.
And if you looked past that, further out to the harbour itself, you'd see silent masses of stringy matter lifting up from the water and weaving together, weaving themselves into enormously tall, monstrously thin spires. Like antennae. Like great knitting needles pointing up to heaven.