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you've quite a lot to say for yourself." As David pressed his lips together so as not to say any more Andrea said "I hope that's the end of your visitors."
    When the door opened he was afraid Cubbins had returned, but the newcomer was a woman. She turned to the racks of brochures, and David went over to her. "Can I help you with anything?" He was doing his best to feel relieved, because surely Cubbins had let him. If the title he'd given away at All Write was online, that was one more reason never to let out the thoughts that were better kept to himself—best never thought at all.

EIGHT
    Just a solitary member of the staff is dealing with the public while her colleagues find the bags of sweets that occupy the counter worthier of their attention. You'd hardly know you were in a cinema except for how you have to queue, back and forth along a rope on stilts as if they don't want you to reach the pay desk until you're hungry for popcorn, not to mention hot dogs dripping so red and yellow you might think they'd caught a cartoon disease. At last the girl summons the raw-necked resolutely bald fellow who's been jiggling the front post of the rope to annoy the staff, and he stumps to the counter. "What's The Braining ?" he brays loud enough for everyone in the lobby to hear.
    "It's a horror."
    "I know that." He should, since he has titles tattooed on either side of his neck— Human Centepide and Serbain Film , presumably favourites of his, though not so dear to him that he can spell them right. "What's in it?" he persists. "Can't be much when it's a fifteen."
    "It's about a monster that steals brains. We've had people walk out because it was too much."
    "Still only got a fifteen." His morose braying reminds me of Eeyore—no, make that Eegore, given his craving for horror. "Go on," he says like someone performing a charitable act for all the onlookers to remark. "Nothing else I want to see."
    He doesn't notice that he's being followed upstairs to his screen of choice. The entrance is at the back of the auditorium, and I don't give him any reason to look over his shoulder. For the moment I stay several rows behind him, and he won't have realised he isn't alone in the cinema. Soon the lights go down, but not too far, and Eegore twists around to stare towards the projection booth. He doesn't see me crouched in the seat, or if he does my grin in the dimness means nothing to him, and he faces the screen when it lights up.
    It's showing adverts full of perfect people even more manufactured than the wares they're touting. The people are so interchangeable that the adverts might just as well be merged into a single one, where the lovely youngsters use their latest phones to change their banks and get a loan to buy a car built by robots brainier than them and drive it with a glass that they never quite drink from in one hand, because the advert's telling them they have to be responsible with alcohol. All this rot brings in the flies—more of an audience, bumbling along the rows of seats or buzzing with phones in their hands—and I could think I've missed my chance, except that any one of them could be another.
    There's a pair of girls who look like overgrown children, their tubs of popcorn are so gigantic. Scent mixed with the oily sweetish stench suggest that they've been playing with perfume and didn't know when to stop. More than one newcomer is so busy texting that he blunders to his seat as if he doesn't know where he is, except somewhere on the communications network. One cinema enthusiast demonstrates how he can take bites of a hot dog as an aid to spitting and swearing at the phone in his other hand. A rat is foraging in garbage behind me—no, somebody's rummaging in a bag of sweets, if there's any difference. As the cinema trailers go off like a series of bombs, each one louder and more blinding, a man wide enough to use an extra ticket arrives at my row and squeezes into the end seat with a loud moist wheeze. He's still