The projection room

Lewis had never been above the cinema's balcony. His grandmother had worked in the projection room for thirty years, but by the time he was old enough to ask about it, the building had become a carpet warehouse. Now the carpets had gone too. A developer was converting the place into flats, and the manager had given Lewis half an hour to look for anything his grandmother might recognise. He followed a narrow staircase behind the old ticket counter. The manager stayed below, answering his phone in a voice that echoed through the empty foyer.

The projection room crouched beneath the sloping roof. Two machines faced the blank rectangle of the viewing window, their lenses dull and unblinking. Coils of cable slept in a corner. On the wall, a fan wore a thick fur of dust, and the air tasted of warm pennies. Lewis brushed his sleeve against a shelf; a pale cloud rose reluctantly, then settled on the black tins below. The room seemed packed with unfinished movements: a switch waiting to be pressed, a reel waiting to turn, a beam of light waiting for darkness.

He opened one tin. It contained a short strip of film and a folded sheet of paper. The figures on the film were too small to identify, but he could make out a hand near a face. On the paper, in his grandmother's neat capitals, were the times of four screenings and a reminder to call the electrician. He had expected posters or photographs of famous actors. Instead he found the ordinary work of keeping a room running. Beside the reminder she had added a shopping list: rice, soap, batteries.

When he held the film towards the window, light passed through the tiny frames. The hand belonged to a woman pulling a curtain aside. In the next image her face had turned slightly. He moved the strip through his fingers, making the gesture happen once, slowly. Below him, the manager called that the builders needed to lock up. Lewis put the paper in his pocket and returned the film to its tin. He did not know whether his grandmother had ever noticed that particular movement. She must have watched thousands of people open curtains, leave rooms and return to them.

At home, she recognised the paper before he finished explaining. She read the screening times aloud, corrected one of them and laughed at the shopping list. The electrician, she said, had taken three visits to repair the fan. Lewis asked about the films. She remembered some, but what she wanted to know was whether the narrow stairs were still as steep. He described how he had climbed them sideways with his shoulder against the wall. She nodded with immediate satisfaction. For the first time, he understood that the place he had imagined as a room of stories had also been somebody's daily climb to work.

Read the second paragraph, from ‘The projection room’ to ‘waiting for darkness’. How does the writer use language to present the disused projection room? Support your analysis with evidence from this paragraph. You may consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.